The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  Black was jailed for life in 1994, but detectives were determined to put him on trial for other killings, and two years ago he was charged with murdering Jennifer. Her body was found six days later 15 miles away at Hillsborough, Co. Down.

  Black has never spoken about the killings, but immediately after his arrest in 1990 he opened up about his depravity, telling police: ‘I’ve always liked young girls since I was a young kid.’

  When interviewed 15 years later by detectives investigating Jennifer Cardy’s murder, Black admitted seeing and being attracted by her outfit of short socks, shorts and a T-shirt.49

  Choices of Cooke and Black are unfair and my guilty bad judgment. My insistence, my wishful reflections of Brady aren’t his. Placed opposite his higher interests and credentials. I made sure the transcript of Lesley was included in the afterword. Seeing that the victims are represented in a book where they are hardly ever absent is another gratuitous pig choice. During the years that Ian and Myra were considering what they did against what they wanted to do, it is compelling to note that Ian hasn’t picked many of his serial-killing body-counting gangsters either. When explaining the public’s obsession with the case, he often refers to the gothic presentation of the time and cites the Rolling Stones’ sixties as more suitably evocative of the culture that he lived free amongst. But. David Smith recalls that Brady was no fan of the Stones or any of the pop songs that younger Myra and her sister preferred then. And. Keith Richards and Pete Townshend both start their recent biographies with the same gothic English grey of rough disinterest, poor social struggle and common drunkenness. These men looked around themselves and their lot and chose different expressive modes of frustration to create jobbing pop songs before they discovered leaning on art as some form of violent or voiced sexual acceptance. Brady isn’t talking about the times he was part of. Instead takes credit for living at the same time, as if he were a part of cultural shift. Artists recognizing the bright not bloody colors in heady upheaval and the shit that stayed the same. Brady bought a camera. And hid. Deeply. Contextualized against the parents and their sprogs. Robert Black, working stiff, kept an incredible collection of photographs of the sex he needed to witness privately by purchasing what others were doing for his kind. Now serves both high and low culture swings well enough to explode the separation if released as part of the tortured explanations of what the desperate pedophile archetype created by mistake in hated hating interiority. Brady and Black and Cooke were living different lives. Well outside of the times. And Brady and his photographic oeuvre wasn’t a conversation or a demand or a way to make money or get laid or review modes. He didn’t see cheating as intrinsically unfair. Against the zeitgeist, took the wrong old side until just the fresh filthy air became a fond memory of what he could have done. Had. The shortcut to seeing Brady receding into the past while the future ran past him is the critical appropriation that wants explication from current trends. Brady’s photographs were taken to be seen by an audience. The experience was documented so that it was better than an experience. The experience didn’t exist without the artist knowing that this is more than just.

  Jean Rafferty wrote a novel on what might have happened if Myra Hindley hadn’t died when she did. Rafferty wrote to Brady for help with her book idea and became friends with him, later arguing her case on that front in blog posts and interviews. From her blog posted on 3/5/12 and then an interview with Deborah Orr from The Guardian on 6/19/12:

  And yet when Brady said Bush and Blair bore the responsibility for more deaths than he did, I had to agree. When he said that powerful people were rarely held accountable as he had been, I had to agree. The fact that he had killed those children and left their bodies on the moors did not alter the fact that he was right, that he was a thinking person with a moral perspective, even if few people would agree with him on the subject of murder.

  Even there he did have his own morality. He wasn’t some animal, blindly driven by his urges. He was a man enthralled by ideas, by the thought that in a godless world man has to make his own laws, his own decisions, has to have the courage to follow where his desires lead him. In one of his letters he said to me of the novel, “You’ll never get the zeitgeist right.”

  But I understood the zeitgeist very well. In 1967, only a year after he was jailed for life for the Moors Murders, I was a university student, entranced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, convinced that Nietszche’s path of Dionysus would bring me to an understanding of life far deeper than any offered by following the path of convention. These were not contemporary texts, but they spoke to something in the times, provided ready-made formulas for the restless, iconoclastic spirit that was swelling like a tide in the young.50

  Rafferty does admit that it is Brady, not Hindley, who bears primary responsibility for the pair’s crimes. But I find her attitude to him shockingly protective. Does he talk to her about his hunger strike?

  “No, not much about that. What he really likes to talk about is Scotland of the past. I’ll send him postcards of the Clyde steamers, I’ve got some to send him now.”

  “So, you’re kind to him, really?”

  “Oh yes, that man’s been in prison … that man could have … I think he had gifts which have been distorted and perverted … I’m kind to him because I hate the thought of anyone being in prison, whatever they’ve done. I’m not suggesting that either of them should have been let out, just that I would hate to be in their situation and wouldn’t make that worse for anyone.”51

  The parents from different lives tend to say the same things, perhaps identifying rather than adopting a single voice. Brady doesn’t consider the victims in his praise of the revolutionary criminal individual. Other than to say that we are all chiefly concerned with protecting our loved ones over our community.

  Speaking from his home in Manchester, Mr. Tate, 72, who is battling cancer, diabetic and is in a wheelchair: “I am not 100 per cent Black is responsible. I have a little bit of doubt.

  “I think about her every day. It is a nightmare that never goes away. Despite what other people say, we will never get closure.

  “It is so difficult because we will never know the answers to our questions. We don’t know if she was buried in some isolated spot or whether she was left wandering around somewhere.

  “I would love to be able to find out where he is and finally be able to lay her to rest after nearly 40 years of this living hell.”

  A senior police source said that if the attempt to use bad character evidence was unsuccessful, detectives may once again interview Black in prison.

  But the officer said it was “a long shot” as Black has previously refused to co-operate when officers had been to Wakefield jail to see him.

  One former detective said previously: “Black played a game. He wanted to barter. He wanted a move to a Scottish jail and would not talk until he got his way.”

  He also refused to meet Genette’s father John who wrote to him and asked him for a face-to-face meeting.52

  When 71-year-old Joan Reade, mother of Pauline, died in 2000, her 28-year-old granddaughter provided The Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail with details of what life was like after Pauline’s body was finally discovered in 1987:

  “It was a great comfort to her that she got to bury Pauline and she went every weekend to put fresh flowers on her grave.

  “But my gran was devastated by recent coverage which brought it all back again and she had not been well since.

  “She never really recovered from the loss of her daughter.

  “It haunted her for the rest of her days. She could never forgive Hindley and Brady for what they did to Pauline.

  “Every time she picked up a newspaper or switched on the TV it seemed Hindley was there, trying to win her freedom. But gran was determined that Hindley will never be free.

  “And even now she is dead, her soul will be fighting to keep Hindley in prison until she rots.”53

  No photos of naked or sexually compromised John K
ilbride have been found. His pants around his ankles when discovered in his grave. Stories of blood on his body, a knife that was too blunt to cut his skinny throat and a shoe that came off as he fought. From prison, Myra corresponded with John’s mother and repeated her composite of Ian’s provocative understanding of Sade:

  “Not only did I help procure the victims for him, I knew it was wrong, to put it mildly, that what we were doing was evil and depraved, whereas he subscribed to de Sade’s philosophy, that murder was for pleasure.

  “To him it had become a hobby, something one did to get absorbed into, interested and often fascinated with, and it had become literally a deadly obsession. And I knew that I was a part of his hobby and obsession.”54

  A small one would do. One that wouldn’t fight as it became extinguished. Or if it did, wouldn’t be too difficult to detract from the larger pleasure served. Rape, what was performed or squeezed or taken, the struggle that increased response in a way beyond a vicarious loss with instinct and whatever watching sun or moon is supposed to look down on getting challenged and invalidated. The boy is assumed to have been taken directly to the moors so that disposal and cleanup were less difficult than in a comfortable prideful home. Where another crime before murder could have been indulged at greater length. Drawn out, indulged and watched cry and suffer. Gag it and we have time. The evidence for most of the Brady/Hindley murders suggests less time spent on the violation of the body and the cruelty of torture and more with an obsession of evidence, a fear of discovery, of jail, of capture.

  During the trial of Leslie Bailey, a cohort or boss of Sidney Cooke, some 15 years after Brady’s interests came to light, the prosecution described seven-year-old Mark Tildesley:

  “On June 30, 1984, he had asked his father for permission to visit the fair. That day Bailey and his lover, Lennie Smith, had driven from London to Wokingham to visit a friend who had a caravan parked close to the fairground. The journey was a prelude to Bailey’s induction to the paedophile ring, Mr. Nutting said. Once at the fairground, Smith left Bailey to find his friend, Sidney Cooke. Some minutes later he returned with Cooke, who was holding a small boy by the hand. The child appeared to be dragging back and unwilling to be led, Mr. Nutting said. The men took Mark to Cooke’s caravan where the child was forced to drink drugged milk and then subjected to multiple rape.

  Smith and Bailey held Mark as each assaulted him. Bailey began to panic when the boy showed no sign of life but Cooke reassured the men by saying he would take him home.’55

  From The Manchester Evening News, 11/21/13:

  This Saturday, John’s surviving siblings, Patrick, Terry, Sheila and Maria, will be visiting his grave at Hurst cemetery in Ashton and remembering their eldest brother whose life was cut short.

  Terry, now 58, said: “We always wonder what he’d be like now.

  “He’d be getting on for 63—what would he have been like, the man he was never allowed to become?

  “We like people to remember him and lots of people do, especially people who went to school with him.”

  And.

  It was another two years before his family found out what happened to him, after the police found his body on Saddleworth Moor. Terry said: “We always knew not to talk to strange men, but we were never warned in that way about women.

  “When we found out there was a woman involved it was a big shock.

  “I was nearly nine when it happened and I remember it all—him not coming home, my mum searching, the police searching everyone’s homes and coal sheds.

  “So many people came out to help with the search, to help the police.

  “I want to thank the police and people of Ashton and the surrounding area for everything they’ve done for us.

  “I don’t think you’d get that response and that help now.”

  And.

  Terry said: “I’m not a well person, and when I went to that tribunal, he looked really well, a lot better than me and he’s 75. He’s a very clever and manipulative person, but he’s mad.”56

  Ian Gabb, a prison informant who shared cells with three of the Cooke “gang,” wrote a letter to officials on the kind of person who might be unable to control himself, reliving and planning the attacks that excite in memory, fantasy, detail and the presumable need to hear themselves. Cooke and most of his associates in crime were fixated on boys. It is another glance downward that Brady’s interests did not choose an exclusive gender. Black, girls, small. Cooke, boys, preteen plus. However, the only ones Brady photographed his way were Lesley and Myra. For whom, possibly, there was a bigger market. Or rather, an easier, less contentious market. The photo of Keith isn’t assumed to be more than a souvenir and an insult. The market for child pornography in the early unsophisticated years hadn’t been parentally conflated with murder yet but the commercial viability for such rape shots would have, even if Brady had the dubious network, been very difficult to maintain shortly after sale.

  “Dear Richard, I moved in with Sidney Cooke yesterday afternoon. Please God, don’t ever let this man walk our street again. He continually talks about sex with children. It’s really sickening. I can tell you that there are probably 25 to 30 dead children buried out there. Cooke has already admitted to me that he’s seen about 15 killed. He boasts of this figure. All that I write is the truth. The only part that is missing is the creeping feeling of evil I get while listening to Cooke tell me of these events. I cannot relate the fear I feel for children everywhere. That I feel that while this man Cooke laughs and squeals in delight as he tells me of the things he has done and the things he intends to do in the future.”57

  From a site tracing the history of gay life in Manchester written in 2008 and updated in 2012 and 2013:

  I first heard this story from an elderly gay friend in the 1980s. He claimed that Ian Brady was a regular in the Rembrandt.

  The Rembrandt is one of Manchester’s oldest gay bars and used to be called the Ogden Arms. It stands on the corner of Canal Street and Sackville Street in what is now the ‘gay village.’

  The official version is that on the night Edward Evans was murdered Brady met him at Manchester Central Station (now G-Mex) and some accounts suggest that the pair didn’t know each other previously.

  In the book 50 True Tales of Terror, edited by John Canning and published in 1972, one chapter is ‘The Moors Murder Horror.’ In it C.E. Maine writes:

  “…Brady decided to pick up some beer in the Central Station buffet. When he arrived he found it closed and he had also found young Edward Evans standing by a milk vending machine. Evans was dark and slim, wearing a suede jacket, suede shoes and tight jeans. He looked as if he might be homosexual; whatever the truth, Evans accepted Brady’s invitation to go back to his home for a drink.”

  However, according to The Times of April 30, 1966, in court “Brady described how he met Evans whom he said he knew as a homosexual, at Central Station, Manchester.” Which suggests that Brady already knew Edward Evans.

  Did Brady know him from his visits to the Rembrandt? Is it possible they met at the Rembrandt on the night of the murder?

  Could Brady have lied about where he met Evans that night, rather than have it come out that he was a regular at the Rembrandt? Could Brady and Hindley have come up with that story before their arrest, perhaps to tell David Smith? Were there any witnesses to the meeting at Central Station? I don’t know…

  In those days Manchester’s gay bars were forced to make payments to corrupt police officers in return for a quiet life. Could the police have had a hand in changing details of the Brady/Evans meeting place in the statements, rather than have it become public knowledge that a pub near the canal was a hotbed of homosexuality (which in the early 1960s was still illegal)? Probably not, because Cheshire Police handled the investigation.

  And:

  But while gay bars were hardly ‘mixed’ (gay/straight) at all in those days, the fact that Brady went to the Rembrandt doesn’t mean he was gay.

  Gay men were an ideal
target for criminals (blackmailers for example) as they were far less likely to go to the police. Indeed, it was reporting a burglary that landed Alan Turing in trouble in 1952.

  And when a group is criminalised, it tends to drift towards hanging out with other “outlaws.” Even when I moved to Manchester and first went on the “gay scene” in 1982 there was that same feeling. It was then 16 years since the law had changed regarding male homosexuality, but the authorities—including Manchester chief constable James Anderton—continued to persecute the LGBT community.

  So, although the scene felt welcoming and safe in many respects, there were still lots of dodgy characters around and sometimes an air of criminality. There were crooks (which Brady certainly was), gangsters, ‘gay-for-pay’ rent boys and others who were on the fringes of society.

  Would any regular at the Rembrandt in the early 1960s have helped the police, even on this terrible case? It’s unlikely. Within the gay community there was a deep distrust of the police until well into the 1990s.58

  And one reply from many to the blog post, this from 2011:

  I stayed at The Rembrandt in the early ’80s too, and I remember one of the barmen telling me roughly the same story. He was strangely “proud” of the connection, which made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. Especially as I was going to be sleeping upstairs!!! I think the Eddie Evans story should be re-investigated through modern eyes, because I am certain that his memory is tainted by the prejudices of the day, and he has become almost an invisible victim of some of the worst murders of the 20th century. The police would not have been sympathetic, neither would the local (or national) press, and it must have broken his family’s hearts if they were told the same story. I noticed on another website that he had been cremated and his ashes scattered, and wonder if this was the reason. This was pre-Wolfenden, remember, and if he had allowed himself to be picked up by Brady for sex he would have been committing a criminal offense. Homosexuality was totally black & white then, you either were or you weren’t, most people couldn’t comprehend the “blurred edges” we see today. I have always thought that it has clouded the story, particularly as the only other person (Brady) who knew what happened that night was never going to be truthful about what happened. He was still a tragically young victim of brutal sadists for whom justice has not been done.59