The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  “The only evidence of the letter’s existence was in comments given by Ms. Powell to an interviewer and she stated only that she believed it may contain information about Keith Bennett.

  “Even if it could be proved that this letter existed, there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Powell ever knew the nature of its contents and there is insufficient evidence to prove that she genuinely believed it contained the information in question.

  “As such, it could not be established in court that Ms. Powell either prevented Keith Bennett’s burial or intended to do so.

  “We understand that this is still a very sensitive matter for the relatives of Keith Bennett.

  “We have written to Keith Bennett’s brother to explain our decision and have offered a meeting to discuss this matter.”34

  To this, the Huffington Post on 2/1/14:

  Ms. Powell, who has visited Brady regularly since 1999, told the Daily Mirror that during a recent meeting with him she saw signs of dementia, and believed he was nearing the end of his life.

  But she said that Brady wouldn’t accept that there was anything wrong and refused to undergo tests that could confirm whether he has Alzheimer’s disease.

  She told the newspaper: “Brady has to be in control and getting dementia is his worst nightmare.

  “No one who meets him could ever deny that he had a very sharp mind. He is highly intelligent and insists on dealing with things on his own terms. He never wants to expose his feelings so he is terrified of losing his self-control.

  “Everything he does has always been very calculated and he could not imagine anything worse than his own mind slipping away from him. He’d never admit it, but I believe he is frightened about what is happening to him.”

  Ms. Powell said that Brady had withdrawn into himself, and that he now seems to be “waiting to die.”

  She also said she believed it highly unlikely he would ever reveal where Keith Bennett is buried, saying that he refuses to even discuss it.

  Last night a solicitor for the Bennett family, who have campaigned for years for Brady to reveal where he buried the 12-year-old, appealed for him to give up his secret while he can.

  John Ainley told the Mirror: “If he deteriorates and is not able to impart this information then it may be that Keith is never found.”35

  During the original search for bodies, the police on the moors used long sticks to push into the earth. They’d hold the dirt end of the sticks to their noses for any possible decomposition within the soil. These men were searching for bodies that they could attach facts to, pry details from. They were dealing with the corpses before they could turn heartbreaking anecdotes out in bars and across dinner tables. Before later granting interviews for books and anniversaries. They needed proof to hand over to the lawyers; there, that is the crime that happened. And we know the law and the lists of rules that were broken and this is a fact that we can prove by evidence in the form of sludge and bone and what’s left of its clothes. The emotionalized content attached to where his underwear was wrenched or how her face was halved is not part of real business. Personalized draws of how many similarly aged kids you have are going to fuck up the rigid details later, not now. No one believed the words from the mouths of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley until they had proof that the couple were with the victims. Smith’s words were originally disbelieved. Myra wasn’t sentenced with Kilbride’s murder. There was a tape recording of her yelling at Lesley. Lesley had been in the home, Myra’s home, the morning after Edward Evans was found dead there. Her fingerprints were on Lesley’s nude photographs. The pair of them only finally confessed in 1985 to the press initially and then officially when police asked them for follow-up on the public and sold interviews. The history of the case from the exact time questions started being asked to just-arrested liars made the facts more important and the truth impossible. The people, the journalists and the cops, were going to create a truth as they guessed it, never approaching facts that people could get the fuck out of the way from.

  The cops stuck their sticks into the ground looking to smell rot. Ever since. The long story of short-lived Keith Bennett has been the bereft and would-be bereft sticking their kid sticks into the ground to find more dirt. To bring it home. And then put that dirt back into the dirt, having said that the words in between those acts will mean something else. As they say it. Something other than this. First. Some prayer, actually. Being hope, actually. Fucking exactly like Brady who has written an entire book talking about the nonexistence of God while shaking his fist at where he thinks a God should be since God doesn’t answer and he can prove that. And these good God-fearing people who aren’t thinking right at all, keep looking to the same bad God-fearing person to ask him—politely to him while angrily to the villagers—to help them. Restore hope over experience. When that fails. Again. They look to the creep and seek to understand him. So they can ignore everything he says so they don’t feel hopeless. Maybe.

  Carol Ann Lee’s books are important. And as entertaining as intended.

  Her work appears exhaustive. Her research, which included carefully poring through Emlyn Williams’ tremendous original research from the very beginning of the case, detailing and contextualizing Myra’s many letters from many different sources, interviewing nearly everyone she could when their names were raised, is as close to definitive as check-list possible. She, for just one example, comes off as a more reliable source in reading through Myra’s own jail-written biography than the author Duncan Staff to whom it was entrusted—Staff being the author of the 2007 book The Lost Boy (the definitive study of the Moors Murders and the search for the final victim). Carol points out some small mistakes in Staff’s book, thanks him for the archives and help and quotes conveniently from his work. Writes:

  In the absence of a fluent explanation behind the crimes from the protagonists themselves and ‘in keeping with our culture’s Freudian cast of mind,’ Staff’s book is one of many which tries to stitch the fabric of the past into a satisfactory psychological pattern from which the murders then emerge. The credibility of such theories is somewhat undermined by the unfortunate commonness of Myra’s childhood experiences.36

  The David Smith “auto” biography chiefly and sympathetically charts the brutal hidebound Manchester sixties to oughts alcohol reality that Smith faced before and after grassing on Brady and Hindley. The book couldn’t help but side with Smith and his hideous stories of public, private, parochial hatred and attack when recalled from his view. Smith was set up for a miserable life outside of jail; filled instead with the local maniacs, lousy gene pools and jobs and drunker and drunker street to council walks to bar fights. Different in those days. Different in that town, in that poverty, in that group of religious drinkers and petty criminals and loud inept yearning pricks and selfish dumb cheap made-up cunts. Unlike her Myra biography, Smith’s book isn’t footnoted. Carol’s phenomenal research for textual proof isn’t required beyond the memoir that Smith writes as Carol challenges, fact-checks and outlines as narrative.

  Read carefully as the second in her series on the case, however, Smith’s book exposes Carol’s blinkered prejudice on the distance between proper and told. Carol’s structure, to provide a reliable but essentially readable account of the events that led up to and followed down the crimes of Ian and Myra, bowdlerized the problem that Gates of Janus solved. While consistently dismissing Brady’s accounts of what happened and why and thus being pushed to look toward his antipathetic firm for the apparently ruthless truths, Carol still brings a good many quotes from Gates of Janus into the text as a source for events that happened long before Ian entered jail for the rest of his life.

  He refined his plans to masterminding bank robberies and payroll snatches, and noted the names of two fellow inmates, Gil Deares and Dougie Woods, as prospective thieves. ‘Gradually I began to adopt a more studious, professional attitude towards crime,’ he recalls, adding with characteristic grandiosity, ‘My instinctive form of relativism developed into
a pragmatic philosophy. I began to choose my followers.’37

  Carol repeats Ian’s nostalgic wants as his considered past, Brady novelizing his life like any old man taken at his attritional word. Understanding what happened through contemporary readings of sympathy as motivation, pragmatics as agenda, now keeps the hated blur these family landowners need to use against Brady. Miserable now, Brady was miserable then. So many quotes come from Gates of Janus, purposively and injudiciously relegated to those relative to Brady’s views on what led him to crime, not pedophilia, the unclean reader starts to question if David Smith didn’t find his way to finally tell his own story by having read Gates of Janus first. The stories of Smith’s failed “indoctrination” by Brady sound suspiciously familiar. The statements hurled at Smith during drunken or companionship evenings mirror those offered during part one of Janus. Perhaps, frozen in jail, one can’t expect much more from Brady, stuck there all these years hence. But. At least. The reasons for Ian wanting Smith to read the same authors that Brady found interesting then and seem comprehensive now; the attributes that Smith recognizes as his reactions as recalled in his biography as dangerous and thin were explained directly inside Janus. Seeming only thin to those who looked to Ian’s old book collection as perverse and destructive then, and as lies masked as excuses by the police and journalists now. The new information echoes a composite of Gates of Janus and the original police confessions as published in John Goodman’s trial transcripts. Brady’s story has remained more irritating than dishonest, it would seem. Recursively, the immense press, documentary and book industries that the case has provided for, for decades, may have had all particulars challenging each other by picking and choosing more skeeves than improvisation can keep from psychology. And Brady, like Smith, like Myra, could well have been refashioning their lies upon lies since day one.

  In Gates of Janus, Brady needed an alterity, a narrator to slip up when passion overrode character. His dreaming needed a physical conduit. An anonymous author performing his book. His existential experience continues apace. Speeds every thought to jealousy. You’ve got your answers. This is fucking exactly how it sounds.

  The above extract from Gates of Janus in Carol’s book is especially telling. In that, just before the youthfully formative “grandiosity,” the closest one gets to an apology from Ian is issued. More than close, in fact.

  In childhood years I was not the stereotypical ‘loner’ so beloved by the popular media. Friends formed round me eagerly in the school playground, listening to me talk, and I took it as natural. Apparently I had a descriptive talent and contagious enthusiasm. All harmless, adventurous stuff, no devious intent. No sense of superiority.

  Later, in my early teens at senior school, matters changed imperceptibly. Gangs formed round me. Similarly I had no conscious sense as to why, only that again I took it as a natural process. I was not consciously aware of being out to gain followers but follow they did, obviously predisposed to go where I led.

  That our activities became criminal was also accepted as natural. The more money we stole the more fun we had. Only when we were caught by the police did a minority drift away, mainly at the behest of their restrictive parents. I hardly noticed, nor did the remaining others; replacements joined us, and we continued to enjoy the fruits of our activities.

  Gradually I began to adopt a more studious, professional attitude towards crime. My instinctive form of relativism developed into a pragmatic philosophy. I began to choose my followers. This book is not an autobiography, but these passages form a brief personal introduction before tackling the main subject.

  The purpose was to explain why, on those occasions when I returned to childhood haunts as an adult, I couldn’t get enough of people, roaming the old bars and cafés, soaking up the atmosphere and delighting in overheard conversations.38

  But it isn’t what the public wants from him. How could they and how dare he? Yet the new public sympathy that David Smith—seen as the one who turned in Hindley and Brady and stopped the crimes that wouldn’t have stopped otherwise—barely saw when alive though abundant to unctuous in the book written by the very same author and partner of brother of former Keith Bennett. Smith’s story of deep misery and white ghetto scapegoat slog isn’t given to Brady, a little to Myra with feminist caveat; all took the wrong things seriously, took them too far, were perhaps too intelligent in a sea of stupid and thus desperate and infected by anything that didn’t sound like cloying instinctual unity. Commonness. Becomes vain and ugly and, frankly, a fucking big mistake when asking the last living poor fucker for favors. Beyond that, negligible worth of varying degrees of talk-show sympathy aside, all those suggesting a truth is the reason behind their need to know—something—sounds deceptive. Supports another sort of moral relativism that doesn’t simply come from seeing the four walls around you as a Sartre cage insomuch as a cheap way of demanding maps comes from demanding simple.

  Smith:

  I’d like to know what you think you saw in me, Ian, and, even more than that, I’d like to know what made you think you had the right to kill? I’ve got no time for medical and psychiatric explanations. All that blaming your illegitimacy and misspent youth is bullshit, pure and simple. Take it from someone who knows. Each person, as they grow up, is responsible for their own deeds, and no amount of Freudian analysis should be allowed to diminish that. You love the old ego massage and mind games, though, don’t you, Ian? But you’re nothing special and you never were, regardless of how the doctors fuss over finding the correct label for your ‘personality disorder.’ You are a man who got his kicks from raping and murdering children. I still can’t understand why anyone would want to make excuses for you.

  I know you’ve spent countless hours wondering why you ended up in prison when you and she were so careful, so meticulous in planning your crimes and covering them up afterwards. But maybe I can help you with that, at least.

  You’re where you are now because you misjudged me. You got it wrong, right from the very start. Whatever you thought you saw in me wasn’t there. When you told me you’d killed before, we were both drunk beyond belief—did you really think I took you seriously?

  You did. But you took it to the point of obsession. From the moment we started drinking that night in September, you couldn’t stop yourself: robbing banks, guns, photographic proof… It was just white noise to me. I didn’t know then what Myra knew—that you were losing it.39

  Brady:

  Even as you read this, one may be travelling through the night toward you, maybe trying your doors and windows at this very moment. If so, too late to repent or recant. You have created the enemy within, and within he will come. Ready to stare you out of countenance. Mark his eyes. The indifference reflecting your own of some minutes ago. You belatedly understand. That sinking feeling. He has no more mercy for you than you had for him. You are staring at your alter ego for the first, and perhaps final, time. You are thinking of all the things you will probably never see again, just as he did in prison. You begin to feel sorry. Mainly for yourself, but also perhaps just a bit for him. He may recognise it. See you as a human being rather than an object of abstract revenge in solitary prison dreams.

  Did you ever share the same innocent obsession that I have? Forever being drawn back compulsively to places of childhood. Localities of spiritual renewal. Touchstones to recharge the flagging batteries. Places where the feet itched to make contact with the soil of your roots, hands ached to caress the texture of old buildings and trees you once knew well but had almost forgotten? They look much older and smaller than you remembered them, of course, more vulnerable, in need of tactile comfort. It is mutual. A touch of sympathetic energy spans the lapsed years. For that moment you forget your quarrels with the world.

  You are innocent again.

  And so is mankind.40

  And since looking for an apology is ridiculous. And never matters anyway, idiot. You’ve got your revenge there as well.

  Here’s where the ugliest part
of an apology comes forward. The ones asking for it, as simply as the attempt to understand it, to place what happened, what actually happened, that which can’t be taken back, this obscene comfort that can seep into a word game like closure or forgiveness or settled and carried away as if it’s possible not to forget but just not think about it all the fucking time. Missing these children and the cancerous hope you had for them and yourself and the public pure image since you were unfairly, brutally, permanently robbed. Of your hope. And your chances. Your excuses.

  The monster who destroyed everything, the one that doesn’t deserve redemption as if he can fucking try all he wants to, fucking animal. Since he won’t tell you what he wanted to fuck and how. And it’s true that Brady has continued to talk. Unlike Sidney Cooke. A child murderer and rapist that would have won parole if the angry superstitious and hate justified, fear unjustified, villagers hadn’t forced the government into keeping him locked away, veritably safe, in the way that not even David Smith and Myra’s mother and father and sister ever were. Sidney Cooke and his pedophile gang are noticeably absent from Brady’s review of serial killing analysis. Since he researched murder over raped child disposal. Sidney actually received parole. Only to require a protection that demanded he remain in hiding. Shortly thereafter, additional charges from old but newly interviewed victims resulted in new life sentences.

  Also speaks to the impossibility of any definitive account of the crimes from those other than police, read salesmen to middlemen to the great unwashed, seeking to see it as a novel over discourse. Arguing for a more reliable account of motivation over confession. The long slog of the case mirrors distinct shifts in public policy and correctness. Now being the time to see Smith as wronged by enraged and desperate pre-chav lumps, casts more suspicion than exoneration on David Smith. Making suspect any choice to humanize Smith, which is to say redeeming him against his bad luck in age and town, instead of making him accountable for exactly the same. And guilty in ways that others shouldn’t have dismissed quite as readily as court documents and charge compliance demanded. He was needed to turn evidence. The scrub started with the prosecutors, not the interviews. Delivered to the people lined up outside the court, discussing how well they knew each other else only. Age and town, the sort of ghetto mentality that is formed by ghetto mentality rather than forgiven for it. I wouldn’t want to suggest that David Smith was more than merely compliant in his past with Brady, his battles with angry police or his degeneration at the hands of his poor Manchester roots and peers. Because I don’t know. His vicarious or bitter excitement. Ask him to write a book on fucking serial killers. His obsessions with Elvis and Dylan didn’t turn him into Mick Farren either. Then interview the essentially well-meaning townsfolk who scrawled “child killers live here” on his council walls and beat up his father or attacked his wife and baby.