by Ian Brady
Winnie Johnson, then 74, in December 2008, on Brady’s complaints against Ashworth’s decision to ban smoking amongst its patients:
“I am disgusted by this man. One of my only pleasures—my little treasure Keith—was taken from me 44 years ago by that monster but I have had to battle on through life.
“How can he talk about cigarettes and luxuries like that while the families of his poor victims suffer?
“Christmas has always been the worst time because you start to think about loved ones and who you miss. Then Brady starts moaning about not being able to smoke. His antics make me despair with human life. He likes causing pain to people and that is why he is where he is.
“I don’t want him to die. I want him to continue to live and to suffer in agony for what he did.”5
A cynical take would be that these family voices are needed to deflect complaints of tacky or rotten, maybe just unethical, journalism practices. Never forget what the real case is about for the plebs. And. Letting Brady and Hindley talk about what they want without then talking to those they took from would be impossible. Just as well. Slow news days, stretching what you’d rather read on than think about.
Not surprisingly, Brady seems to side with the derisive view, complaining in letters to his fan base about the parasites and scavengers in the media. What might be surprising, however, is that it’s Brady who seems to try harder than most to keep the news—or the non-news—away from the families. Or at least away from where they might read what may bother them. More. To a point. Gates of Janus being the biggest example. His public concern changes when he’s arguing against his treatment or sharing his writ-large cell thoughts on fair and unfair play in the treatment, nature, care of the working classes. Their degrading taste for, say, celebrity culture or trivia. He sweeps moral issues into pecuniary counts, debates as demands, and is embarrassingly tied to the public domain he judges sensational and prurient. But. He’s been telling the families that they’re being used for a while now. Some of his letters to his pen pals make it to the larger media outlets, many are shared online in personal blogs and serial killer forums. He most often sounds more like the tabloid format has taken too strong a hold, like someone who needs to give you some information you don’t already have on something you don’t care about. Likes to hear himself talk.
Excerpts from letters compiled by The Sun in 2014:
“The Bulger fiasco? Indicates the prehistoric mentality of the UK rabble re two ten-year-olds being freed after eight years. In Europe they would not have been locked up at all. The UK is the arsehole of Europe.”
“The lynch mob after the Bulger Two. Conditioned, sanctimonious morons, acting from guilt complex from what they themselves committed when they were ten years old. There are more killers and thieves running society than you’ll find in all prisons combined.”
“This filthy little country hasn’t even been attacked yet—but I sincerely hope it now is.”
“The bigger the attack the better, with Whitehall the main target.
“A plague is about the only way to clean out the parasitic collection of political and bureaucratic filth. Or a nuclear device.”
“I’m glad I’ve lived to see an enemy prepared to die for something other than their bank balance and pensions.”
“I’m waiting for the retaliation strikes against the West and hope England is included.”
“There are whole armies of suicide bombers eager to strike at the West after centuries of exploitation.”
“The UK has always been a backward shithole of over-taxed serfs.”
“Fifty-two dead in London, as a result of the belated and justified retaliation for Iraq, is described as a barbaric atrocity. While 125,000 slaughtered by hi-tech equipment in the ruins of Iraq is presented as ‘liberation.’6
I’ve written far more about him than he has about me. Makes sense that I’d be another, even lowlier, parasite. Makes sense to both of us. We disagree on who we’re exploiting. What exploitation is. Pick specific instead of broad. Think smaller. Less than yourself. Don’t lose yourself in thinking we’re not exploiting the exact same person. Would-be person.
Not sure that we see it as pejorative a word either. And not sure it’s possible to not be exactly that grubbing existence when I read, reread, remember the solicitous words that fill this afterword more than the ones I write egotistically. More than his. I’ve been watching for a long time. The quotes that are repetitive are a fault found by those thinking exploitation comes from making money off it.
In a 2011 letter to a correspondent who sent him a review of Face to Face With Evil (Conversations With Ian Brady) by Dr. Chris Cowley, Brady replied with his own review:
In his “book” he grotesquely poses as a veteran prison researcher, having in fact only entered this penal dump to exploit me for money—a 73-year-old skeleton in the 11th year of a force-fed by nasal tube hunger strike and almost 50 years captivity. All such parasitic scavengers follow the same vile pattern. Self-aggrandizement and residual guilt increases in proportion to their parasitic pretensions. They then self-compensate by more savagely denigrating, discrediting and deploring the person they are greedily exploiting, justifying their personal mendacity, duplicity and treachery by projecting their own character and moral defects onto the victim. All this while pretending their greed is selfless and sacrificial!
And:
The resentful and infantile pettiness of Cowley’s crude smears psychologically reveal a paradoxical envy! Further, the fact that he recommended my book The Gates of Janus to his students at Bournemouth as “worth ten books by ex-FBI profilers merely seeking a media career” (prophetically like he himself!) perhaps exemplifies why his book is described as “an inferior copy of Brady’s book,” padded out with a few Cowley banalities. Subtract quotations from my book, letters, previous books, the trial transcript (50p HMSO!) etc. And Cowley’s unoriginal contribution becomes a mere leaflet! Presumably satirically, he dedicates the leaflet to his father, instead of mine!”7
In his book, Cowley explains that he “was researching material for a postgraduate course for law enforcement operatives” and approached Brady after reading Gates of Janus:
I focused on Brady’s writing on the analysis of serial killing as a way of touching base. I was looking for an opportunity to research not only the dynamics and psychology of serial killing, but also the consequences for the killer, which I felt had never been thoroughly investigated in the forensics literature. I sent him a letter to enquire whether he was working on any other writing projects.
Cowley includes an early 2003 reply from Brady:
Many academics and students have requested expansion on certain points, but I decline on the grounds that I wrote my book years ago under a progressive ‘Ashwitz’ [sic] regime, not the present fin de siècle penal retards, now passing through the suffocating 1950s in their regression to the 19th century. All mail now being censored.
And eventually Cowley moves to seeing Brady’s book from Brady’s life:
I recently asked him why he had not included any case studies of female serial killers in his analysis of serial killing in his book, The Gates of Janus, and he said that he had not done so because he did not want the reader to think he might really be talking about Hindley. So maybe it is not the case that Brady is unable to explain why their murders occurred. Perhaps he had never really been given an opportunity to explain. Brady conceived and conducted most of the murders on his own, but not all of them. He formed a partnership with someone he could trust to explore possibilities and who in some ways was even more murderously adventurous than he was.
Wherever the weary incredulity and professional mien, the two men with different plots and bumbling reason push hearsay to facts. Cowley’s book is a review of Gates of Janus, not an inferior version of the book, as he takes issue with what Brady wrote as theory and asked Brady to clarify and respond. But Cowley is more than suspect. Often sounds exactly as Brady would have him: a profiteering journalist,
more interested in selling his access to Brady than discussing Brady with Brady. Cowley’s integrity is nonexistent, his motivation decidedly specious.
Basically, he admits he’s a creep:
I realized that I could not just turn up at the hospital to visit him as a total stranger and expect him to talk to me, so I fired off a few letters and sent him a few news stories about various things that might interest him. I told him about my work and that I had recommended his book on serial-killing analysis to my students, although I knew better than to try to appeal to his intellectual vanity. Basically, I just wanted to see if he wished to correspond. By my actions—or (more importantly) omission of actions—he could judge my integrity and motivation for himself.
Cowley uses Gates of Janus as any reader does, to jab at Brady. Test him with the past. Brady used Gates of Janus to jab at his treatment. And people like Cowley already received their jabs from the writing Brady completed, albeit couched in theoretical if bitter asides. Brady sounds as Cowley would have him: someone who wanted to have a book with his name on it. Makes more sense that Brady would argue that his book was never intended to carry any name at all than it would to say academics and professionals in the research of murder would read it as new and startling personal insight. The book had to exist, the book was the argument as required.
Both writers offered insight to each other but never intended to observe without insidiously recrafting mere salesmanship. Brady was never going to enjoy, respect, the book that Cowley would write whenever. Was never going to find it wholly about his thoughts on murder and forensic philosophizing and review of the research. The facts could be discussed and new, previously inaccessible information shared between them. Forgotten details and bright hints from old lessons shaken loose by chance suggestion amid intriguing arcane points, equations and chemistries. Were not the brands of insight either expert hung their professionalisms on.
Brady explained to Cowley:
(My) tutors were adult professional criminals to whom I owe my eventual missions to Europe and America—as opposed to the dead-end labouring jobs shuffled to me by the Probation Service on release, posing a positive hindrance to two years of captive planning and organizing/recruiting. As I couldn’t even leave the country without the permission of the state parrots, my false travel documents had to be supplied by a contact running a travel agency. The same scrutiny of finances prevented proper investment and other enterprises, except by proxy (2004).
Cowley added:
Personally, I do not believe a word of this. I think it is nostalgic dreaming. Stock clerks from Manchester council estates did not make exciting international transatlantic journeys in the 1960s. But I did not want to derail his fantasies, so I just nodded politely whenever these kinds of grandiose embellishments came up in my interviews. Delusions of grandeur are not exactly rare with serial killers.8
Brady’s later letter to his blogging friend was publicly shared with Brady’s approval:
Next Cowley introduces snobbery, claiming that people from “the slums” didn’t go abroad in 1950/’60s UK. And, as I proudly come from the slums of The Gorbals, Glasgow, he doubted my trips to Europe and two to America—my signature in each! Again, had Cowley researched, he would’ve known that even coachloads went to west and east Europe back then!9
Brady and Cowley, sat over Gates of Janus, bitch corruption. Interviewer and interviewee intending to tell their sides of the argument later. Alone. Not listening to each other from the off; trust would ultimately be explained by suspicion and connivance. When Brady gives facts to support or refute accusations, he can’t consider that both sad fucks were only ever talking about withholding facts. Fantasies over facts, the petty holes that sell like facts, come naturally into play when each one gets their chance at gossip.
You’d not find it convincing.
The last thing I want to do is not include the quotes; the fake facts, the faux psychologies. I don’t think updates by date would work. Who gives a fuck how this works down a straight line. The ones crooking and hiding for more facts.
There’s a way to read Gates of Janus. And it has very little to do with believing the author knows his subject from discussing his subject with those who’d call it a subject. It has a name. A beautiful name. Lies. Not Lesley. Most of all, not Brady. Jealousy. The book that someone peeling himself away from the very ideas he’d like to peel away from the present. There’s a bliss to the reading when one gets used to the continuing history of pornography. The court arguments and the long personal cognitive dissonance that either helps or distorts what happened and what God explained. You watch these sorry cunts move away desperately, squirm and create enough to change what you liked about squirming. See that as impossible. And return. It’s not hard to figure out Brady’s machinations. He never misses a chance to remind anyone where he is. And what he is selling. That he is allowed, and encouraged in fact, to do it on the back of what’s always missed is galling.
The script for the public changed dramatically when Myra died in 2002. Before the open demand for any chance at any information that might help the Bennett family in their search for a body, the families of the victims had done their passionate best to shut down the public forum that had engaged with the previous episodes about keeping Myra in jail.
Separate guile from promotion, locate integrity.
From 2000, as reported by the BBC before they aired a new documentary on Hindley:
Alan West, father of Lesley Ann Downey, the ten-year-old murdered by Hindley and Brady, condemned the programme after watching it at his home in Fallowfield, Manchester. “I have had 37 years of a life sentence and will never be allowed remission,” he said.
“Why can’t Hindley and Brady and their supporters allow me and the other families who have been left behind, alone.”
He called the programme a complete waste of taxpayers’ money that could have gone on a documentary to help people who are left behind after murder. “However, when it comes to shocking the public and making money, the victims are always forgotten,” Mr. West said.10
In September of 2001, just as Gates of Janus was being released to bookshops in the UK, an injunction by Brady’s caretakers blocked distribution. Ashworth Hospital had expressed concern that their responsibility to the health of Brady extended to a publication that might breach patient confidentiality rights and stopped the shipment of 3500 copies of the book to the UK by court order.
Adam Parfrey and Colin Wilson explained in various and separate interviews with the UK press that the book had nothing to do with Ashworth and Brady’s patient care. The injunction lasted just long enough for Ashworth to read the book and come to a quick agreement with Feral House over small matters of clarification regarding the mentions of Ashworth—not in Brady’s writing, but in Colin Wilson’s introduction.
While the book was being reviewed by the court and hospital, the press sought the opinions of the victim’s families. The Victims Trust Charity (no longer a charity as their license was revoked in 2010), speaking “on behalf of the families” also called for a boycott if an outright ban couldn’t be won in the courts. Danny Kilbride, brother of John, asked readers and their bookshops to boycott the book entirely and thought:
‘It’s wrong. Anyone who has committed such crimes as he has committed should not be allowed to do this in the first place.
‘To write a book about inside the mind of a murderer—he knows what he’s done, and he knows how he felt, but he doesn’t know about what anyone else was thinking, the other murderers he is writing about.’11
Winnie Johnson had a different view. Hopeful, as always, that something would help her find her child’s ignored or forgotten grave. Told what Gates of Janus was about, she preferred to see the book as directly related and discernible to her focus:
“I am convinced he will have put something in this book about it. They say it is not about the killings he did, but I think he will try to hide something in it. That is how his mind works. He likes to pl
ay games because he thinks he is cleverer than everyone else. But he won’t pull the wool over my eyes.”12
Alan Bennett runs a website and public forum dedicated to seeking information that will help in the search for the return of Keith. The only ones that can know, feel, how monstrous the truth of what Ian Brady did. They know what is missing. What is not here. And those who start to think that Brady represents anything other than the realist form of grief and inaction that caused unending filthy responsibilities and grotesque excuses need to be educated about what we’re all talking about. All this noise, all this garbage and no way to stop it save a mission to refocus assholes and offer chances of divinity to the bereft.
Just a photo of Winnie Johnson taken just before she dies. In her hospital bed with all but tubes up her nose. Published by The Sun.13
Just a few anticipatory months earlier, from an interview with The Guardian:
You wonder if she can bear to be asked yet again about her missing murdered child. Does she mind being asked about Keith? With her characteristic, surprising flashes of good humour, she replies, “No! Do I heck! I’d rather people talked to me about Keith than look at me and stare at me—I can’t stand that. It makes me feel better talking about him.”14
And that’s the afterword to the afterword. There’s the dispassionate updates and smarmy lack of self-control. Just the old very sad woman in care, dying. And, like the author Carol Ann Lee, who sought to get the facts right finally after all these decades of books and articles and scrolls and stares on Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; I can leave it up to the reader. Without saying where it all laid in morals and ethics and want and taste and tragedy. Just facts, displayed, in color, as the truth. The poor woman photographed in her final bed that not all couldn’t fucking read as hideous. Proof that Brady’s inadequacy extends decades where this wretched dreary woman allowed herself to be photographed expiring for the world to watch and gray. Just so it got back to Brady.