The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  The little smiling boy with his cheeky grin pasted over a fresh hard-on sold as an ostensive sex manual. The best caring intentions seen clearly as thin lies to avoid tasteless questions, brutal answers and unending searches. A repeated image on a TV screen recorded over and over again so as to not wear down the much prized and coveted videotape. An excuse for knowledge and plight empathy, of greater and more human understanding, seen as empty and ironic as the desire to actually just fucking figure it out and be fucking done with it.

  Inside the pages of the big black book:

  “But I’ve got a penis and you don’t.”

  “So what? I’ve got a vagina instead.”

  A full-on close-up of the little girl — about seven, one would be forced to guess — with her legs in the air and her slit crotch looking as much like a fatty white pig’s hoof as a sex organ. Blonde bob cuts and pageboys and a slight discussion about circumcision to accompany the numerous little penis black-and-whites.

  “When my penis is stiff, it feels great.”

  There is a much more precise level than this.

  Pauline Reade. Sixteen.

  From the Manchester Evening News, April 12, 1988, under the front-page headline “THROAT-CUT HORROR OF MOORS GIRL”:

  Mr Topping said the body was very well preserved and was dressed in a woolen coat. Pauline’s dress was pulled up above the waist, exposing the buttocks and her stockings and suspenders were visible. Her knickers were missing.

  The Daily Mirror of August 8, 1987 gave its first three pages to Pauline Reade’s funeral, held just after the sixteen-year-old’s body had finally been found:

  Patrick Kilbride, father of twelve-year-old victim John Kilbride sat in the back of the black limousine, shook her hand and said: “I’m sorry you have had such a hard time, Joan.”

  Joan had been allowed out from her psychiatric ward on the understanding that three nurses did not leave her side throughout yesterday’s ordeal.

  Keith Bennett. Twelve.

  From Topping:

  When (Myra) asked him how he had killed the boy, he said he had strangled him with a piece of string. He never volunteered any information, she said, never bragged about what he had done. Brady told her he had taken a photograph and that he had sexually assaulted the boy, but added “Why, does it matter?”

  I asked her about the photograph. She said there was blood on the boy’s body, and because of that she had not looked at it closely. But she had seen that the boy was lying on his back with his trousers down; she could not tell whether he was alive or dead.

  From The Manchester Evening News, April 12, 1988:

  Mrs. Johnson (Keith’s mother), a kitchen porter at Christie Hospital, still has the wire-framed spectacles with pebble lenses that Keith used to wear. Now, all she longs for is to bury his body in Southern Cemetery near her home. She lives in a world of her own, hardly able to sleep and praying daily that the police will get new information to resume the dig.

  ‘I live for the day I can visit his grave. Please God, don’t let them give up the search for good,’ she said.

  John Kilbride. Twelve.

  From Topping:

  I asked her if Brady talked about the killing. He told her he had taken out a small knife about six inches long with a serrated blade, and said it was so blunt that he had been unable to use it, so he had strangled the boy with a thin piece of string.”

  And

  Brady told her that he had pulled the boy’s trousers and underpants down and given him a slap on the bottom before covering him over in the grave. She asked him what else he had done and he told her: “It doesn’t matter.”

  From Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess by Jean Ritchie, Angus & Robertson, 1988, UK:

  Mrs. Kilbride’s ordeal was not over. She, a quiet, shy woman, would be forced to give evidence twice against her son’s killers: at their committal and again at their trial. Hers was some of the most touching evidence in the case.

  John’s body was unidentifiable. But his clothes were intact enough for her to recognise. There was a grey check jacket, given to John’s grandmother by a friend whose son had outgrown it, and carefully hemmed to make it shorter by Sheila Kilbride. She’d also sewn on new buttons, plastic ones in the shape of footballs. She had one left over, which she’d given to the police, to match with the ones on the jacket.

  Edward Evans. Seventeen.

  From On Iniquity, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Macmillan, 1967, UK:

  When he went in, he found, in Hindley’s upstairs bedroom, the body of Edward Evans, aged seventeen, bundled up and packaged in a dark-coloured blanket. He had been battered to death by fourteen blows with an axe. To make assurance doubly sure, Brady had put an electric-light cable round his neck and pulled it tight.

  And

  The Attorney General (to Brady): “What were your feelings when striking the boy with this axe? What were your emotions?”

  Answer: “I didn’t have any. I can’t remember what my emotions were. I was just hitting him.”

  It was David Smith, Myra Hindley’s brother-in-law, who had called the police after seeing Brady kill Edward. His testimony at Ian and Myra’s trial is considered by many to be highly suspect. But. From The Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley:

  ‘We have seen how eventually the body was found with the knees up and head down, almost done up into a ball. Who worked out the method of tying him up?’

  Smith: ‘Brady.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about Edward Evans’s clothing?’

  Smith: ‘Yes, sir. His jeans’ zip was down.’

  ‘Was it partly down or fully down?’

  Smith: ‘It was all the way down.’

  And there are higher levels of honesty.

  Lesley Ann Downey. Ten.

  In For the Love of Lesley, mother Ann remembers having to identify Lesley in only two of the pornographic photographs of her daughter taken by Brady:

  Lesley was the shyest and most modest girl alive. PE at school was a nightmare to her. She hated to do handstands, in case her knickers showed. At bathtime the bathroom door was firmly locked; her innate modesty would not allow her to be seen undressing or in the bath by her brothers. They would tease her about her shyness, and especially about a photograph of her taken at the seaside when she was a toddler. It showed her standing at the edge of the sea with bucket and spade in hand, her dress tucked into her knickers. The innocence of that scene and the cruel attempt at pornographic humiliation I had just witnessed were in stark and terrible contrast. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Lesley having to undress while two weird strangers stood by sneering and laughing. It is impossible to imagine. In twenty-five years I have never been able to feel what she must have felt. Maybe my inability is a protection from the madness that would surely follow if I were to have to undergo, even mentally, what she had to.

  She suffers through having to listen to the tape recording of her daughter being — tortured. She suffers again to tell her readers:

  There was bewilderment and terror in her voice.

  ‘What is your name?’

  This time the question was shouted. It was the bullying shout of an interrogator.

  ‘Lesley Ann Weston.’

  The voice was small and desperate.

  ‘Please don’t make me get undressed again. Let me go home to mummy.’

  ‘Shut your mouth! If you don’t shut your mouth and stop crying I’ll give you another good hiding.’

  The voice, low and venomous, was that of a woman. It was obscene.

  ‘I won’t tell nobody what you’ve done to me. Just let me go home to mummy. She’ll be so angry with me for not going right home. Let me go. I won’t tell anyone, honest.’

  Ann gets the details wrong like a mother should. Lesley’s mother could not be expected to check the transcripts for her already painful enough book. For her painful enough life. Plus, it was long ago and she was fed massive amounts of painkillers. If anything, her personalizing and
paraphrasing only increases her veracity.

  Seventeen minutes of tape and I had heard only a minute or less. What unimaginable monstrosities remain hidden from me? They do not remain unimagined. Through the sleeping tablets and the tranquillisers the images insist on smearing themselves across my brain. Maybe the imagined horrors are worse than Lesley had to suffer . . . but what if they are not? What if Brady and Hindley’s sick imaginations dreamed up more than I could to fuel their foul, deadly games?

  It’s only wrong around the edges and her disgust is sympathetically understood. Her pain must be incomprehensible. She convinces her audience by standing as straight as only can be expected, slightly teetering as is human, but determined to face the hideous truth as is extraordinary. One short minute sunk beneath emotional shale as hard as red raw cancer. For the rest of her life.

  Ann confesses and evinces a serious drug problem. Or reliance — if you will. Addiction — if you must. In her painful book, she all but vomits onto herself:

  I thrashed around in the confines of the bed and prayed for the pills to take me away from such grotesque reality. When I slipped for brief periods into unconsciousness the photographs came alive. Lesley was abused, humiliated and degraded before my eyes and I screamed helplessly while it went on and on.

  Ann West, interviewed by the BBC, sniffs and breaks down her slow slur into tears:

  I’m on eleven tablets a day. Sleeping tablets. And I’ve been on them for thirty-odd years. And I can’t go to sleep without them. She’s always in my mind and in my thoughts.

  And

  I think everybody loved Lesley. She never gave cheek. I never had to smack her. She always done as she’s told. She came in from school every night. She’d go up. Change out of her uniform. Make her bed. Come down. Do her homework. She’s . . . well, every mother says she’s perfect. But she was perfect.

  In an article about claims compensation titled THE FINAL ANGUISH — MOORS FAMILIES TO LOSE OUT? from the January 29, 1988 Manchester Metro news, Ann West was interviewed:

  Sitting in her Whalley Range home below a portrait of Lesley Ann, she said ‘No one has suffered more than I have. It’s not the dying. I’d have sooner have seen her run under a bus. It was the torture, the screams on that tape. No one really knows what she went through. I still hear her now. She could have married and had children. That’s a whole generation lost.’

  Brady steers almost clear of the relation of criminal to victim:

  Other authors most often do use such victim biographical material, but in many instances simply as humanistic or artistic padding. In this particular case it would only serve to distract from the prime purpose.

  And

  It is human nature to derive comfort from the misery of others, and it is the nature of those in the media to derive maximum profit from it. Some serial killers are obviously intent upon a more equal distribution of misery.

  This, then, can’t be a book on serial killing.

  Kenneth V. Lanning defines the difference between child pornography (‘More simply stated, child pornography is photographs or films of children being sexually molested.’) and child erotica in his chapter on collectors in Child Pornography and Sex Rings (edited by Ann Wolbert Burgess, D.C. Heath & Company, 1985, USA):

  CHILD EROTICA, on the other hand, is a broader and more encompassing term. It can be defined as any material, relating to children, that is sexually arousing to a given individual. It is in a sense a subjective term, as almost anything potentially could be sexually arousing. However, some of the more common types of child erotica include photographs that are not sexually explicit, drawings, sketches, fantasy writings, diaries, and sexual aids.

  And, again, in Child Pornography: An Investigation, lazy investigative journalist Tim Tate works a little harder:

  Child erotica is not illegal — how could it be? It is only the association in the pedophile’s mind that invests it with a sexual content.

  This, then, is child pornography.

  NEW MATERIAL FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  by Colin Wilson

  The story begins soon after Easter 1990, when a girl arrived at our house late one night. I was in bed, but she explained to my wife that she knew Ian Brady, and wanted to quote his letters to her in a book.

  The next day I went to meet her at her hotel, and she came and stayed at our house. It seemed that her childhood had been traumatic because she had been brought up in an orphanage, and had a difficult relation with foster parents. She was seething with resentment against the world, and decided that she was a typical Colin Wilson ‘Outsider.’ And when she read about the Moors murder case, she decided that Brady was another Outsider, and that his crimes were the outcome of his rebellion against our hypocritical society.

  I encouraged her to write the book, feeling strongly that the best way to get rid of negative feelings is to write them out of your system. And about a year later, I received a letter from Brady’s solicitor asking me if it was true that I was helping her write a book about Brady. I said no, it was a book about her own life.

  In November 1991 Brady wrote to me in his neat, Scottish Board School handwriting, and I replied. He seemed intelligent and well-read, and we were soon exchanging letters about twice a month.

  I recalled that Nietzsche defended the French murderer Prado, on the grounds that he was obviously more intelligent than his judges. Was Brady, I wondered, another example of the killer of high dominance and high intelligence?

  The exchange of a few letters left me in no doubt that he was highly intelligent and well-read. And it was this that led me to reach a conclusion that I can now see was entirely erroneous. I assumed that, because Brady had a good mind, we were communicating in the same language, and therefore understood one another. This proved to be totally untrue.

  Now I look back on our correspondence, I can see precisely where I went wrong. I knew that Brady was a sex killer, and that his chosen victims were children. What I failed to grasp is that this involved an incredibly high degree of self-centredness.

  Most of us recognise that, where sex is concerned, we are all capable of being self-centred. In the sixties there used to be a joke about an Australian walking on a deserted beach with his girlfriend and asking her if she would mind having sex. When she said No, he said: ‘Well, would you mind lying down while I do?’ All males recognise this attitude. But for the most part, they accept that sex should be a matter of mutual pleasure, and do their best to make sure the partner enjoys it.

  The rapist accepts that he is only concerned with his own satisfaction. Yet, as any rape counsellor can testify, many of them feel guilty about this, and force the victim to counterfeit moans of pleasure.

  This is obviously not true of the paedophile rapist. He knows that his victim is not enjoying it, and he accepts this. He is, in effect, paying a price of guilt for his pleasure in the same way that a prostitute’s client hands over money.

  When Myra Hindley was interviewed by Chief Superintendent Topping about the Moors murders in the 1980s, she told him that Brady’s favourite form of sex was to get her to masturbate him while she inserted a candle into his rectum. This is typical of the attitude of the true sex criminal, who cares about nothing but his own pleasure. The sexual circuit begins and ends in himself, and the partner’s satisfaction is irrelevant.

  Now according to the Marquis de Sade, this is normal sex — what sex is supposed to be. But anyone who has ever had a sexual relationship based on love knows this is untrue. Real sexual pleasure is mutual.

  This desire for interaction is programmed into human nature, and defines what we mean by crime. We all feel instinctively that crime is doing to someone else what we would object to if they did it to us. Which means that to speak of a ‘philosophy of crime’ is a contradiction in terms. Philosophy — meaning ‘love of wisdom’ — means mutual agreement, an intellectual common ground, while crime is based on non-agreement, i.e., betrayal.

  What does a criminal do if caught out in an act o
f betrayal? He usually shrugs and admits that ‘it’s a fair cop’ — that is, he acknowledges that he has gambled and lost.

  But what soon became clear to me was that Brady had decided from an early stage that he would never acknowledge his guilt, that he would always find somewhere else to put the blame. He began committing burglaries at the age of nine, and when he was seventeen, a Scottish judge agreed to place him on probation if he was sent to Manchester to live with his mother and her new husband. What then happened, he told me, was that he helped a friend load stolen lead onto a lorry. The driver was caught and gave them away, and since Brady was on probation, he was sentenced to two years in a borstal institution. His response was of furious indignation, and he decided that, when he was finally released, he would ‘teach society a lesson.’

  Brady’s response was the same as that of the mass murderer Carl Panzram, who is described in a chapter of this book: he would make society ‘pay’. That, of course, is logically impossible, since society is a collection of individuals, and there is no way of making them all ‘pay.’ Impervious to this logic, Brady emerged from jail and went into business with a few old prison acquaintances in a car-stealing racket. And he might have remained a fairly unambitious criminal if Myra Hindley had not walked into the office where he worked, and succumbed to violent infatuation.

  For Brady, being adored was what he had always wanted. For the next year, he enjoyed ‘playing’ with the love-struck girl as an angler might play a fish, encouraging her then treating her with coldness. But finally he invited her out to the cinema, then took her virginity on her gran’s settee.

  Six months after this, Myra helped him to commit his first rape-murder by persuading a sixteen-year-old-girl, Pauline Reade, to go with her onto the Moor to search for a lost glove. Pauline was strangled and raped — according to Brady, with Myra’s participation.

  Although Brady continues to insist that there was a ‘hidden agenda’ behind the murders, it is virtually impossible to imagine what it might be. The simple truth is that the Moors murders were committed for sex. Brady wanted to treat John Kilbride. Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey as he had treated Myra Hindley — as sex objects whose only purpose was to give him pleasure. There could be no question of ‘justification,’ of getting his own back on society, and certainly not of proving some kind of philosophical point.