The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  My inexcusable rambling docks in Cooke being a procurer, initiating others he can smell the likes of, an easy countenance to murder after rape. Plus time with your choice. Your opportunity after you made your choice. Time indulging, finally, your plans. Brady, like the de Beauvoirs, may not have known how to read Sade by the time he was repeating it to those who hadn’t read Justine or Juliette or 120 Days yet. The philosophies Brady was putting forth were culled from arguments among the characters Sade had created. What Brady took as ontology were interlocutions. Might not have had the sections where Sade enjoyed the writing as sexual, genuinely sex, the words that needed to become written, to look back and forth from where the writer was finding himself between. Where real wasn’t in Rose Keller. Arguments that Sade was having with himself to see himself opposed to his times and the demands of his contradictions. But Brady’s grasp or furtherance of Sade is only voiced through those with severe limitations on their accused defenses. Brady wasn’t talking with someone who knew the same material or could provide opinion. Slum life dealing with drunks and looking for jobs and money and tits and boyfriends and dances and drink. Myra and Smith were young and forming, previously uninterested. For all of Brady’s respect for selfish acts and venal associates, maybe he never figured his partners were open to conversation over conversion. Then possibly, he only needed to talk at the uninformed. Could have been resentful of what was happening and unable to demand something of himself if only to see it reflected in the youth that he sickeningly assumed had more in common with him, if he were as good as the people who everyone worked for. Maybe the fat cunts that owned the pubs where more went on than the typical alcoholism.

  The books he read back then, before his misery started, say formative, are the same sort of goth he’s quoting throughout Gates of Janus. The Sade quotes are particularly inconsonant. Used as a noted reference to impress, stop, rather than expand upon. The murder books he read for the analysis of others seemingly like him were few before he entered jail. Hard to avoid now. And the scant personal interactions with prison subjects read as if they were still clipped from true crime books. His extra reading time and the joy it may bring and the support in and away from anything else exciting or hurtful, like writing possibly, isn’t for me to know or guess.

  I had a happy childhood and loved the family. The dichotomy in parents was not pivotal—I was aware of it from an early age.

  Searching for the fashionable stereotypical excuses and scapegoats in childhood would be fruitless in my case.

  Having no present or future, I enjoy remembering aspects of the past.60

  There’s evidence he knew what to do, where to go. Knew. I prefer to offer the gay bars and tearooms in Manchester. And the camera. Some of the repeats. From his crimes on record, there’s more evidence of evidence being withheld. It’s hardly correct of someone to pronounce that since you saw the pictures of the kid, that there must be photos of you inside the kid. Who took those and where are they. What else did you fuck up.

  Any middling man in a bar. Loud or not. The type rattling that his ideas haven’t changed. Most at the same bar would prefer another seat. Unless he had something to sell. That I wanted. Until he started slurring to himself. Mostly about sex. As usual. Poor old fuck. Child-raping animal.

  I know what I’m talking about.

  It wasn’t an insult.

  You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t understand.

  How the fuck would you know what it’s like.

  You don’t have a clue what I’ve seen. What I’ve done. Watched others do.

  I’m not wrong.

  Since he’s not. That. In a bar. There’s yet another problem. Devastating failure to reach anyone who will help him. Someone who cares for the reasons he says, suspects, don’t exist. Sad but true. We don’t know if his trash at Ashworth are lying about his mental degeneration. And try as he might to convince everyone listening. And his paltry insulting disloyal or favor-counting pals. No one is helping him get what may well be his honest side out. Of him. Maybe the lawyers and health watchers who are forced to deal with him don’t care. About the principles, even. Maybe they fill their lives being cruel to him for the very reasons he says exist in everybody else unacknowledged. Maybe he doesn’t care about missing the extra bit where someone says, genuinely, enough. I’d like to do something for him.

  Still talks to Myra.

  From a letter written by Myra to the Home Secretary in 1987:

  “Ian Brady was quoted as allegedly saying he’ll confess if he is given the means to kill himself afterwards. He no doubt now regrets his ambition from as long ago as 1970, to get out of Home Office clutches as he put it, and into a mental hospital. Had he not hoisted himself with his own petard, he’d be able to commit suicide in prison. I’m allowed no such luxury.

  “I believe suicide to be a mortal sin and one that cannot be forgiven, unlike the mortal sins I recently confessed to and received absolution from.”61

  A letter from Myra to a newspaper in 1995:

  “I am not seeking to blame Ian Brady for what I am personally responsible for, or even to apportion blame. And whatever mitigating factors there were, my own conscience and acute awareness of my own culpability tell me the unpalatable truth that—excepting God’s mercy—I have no excuses or explanations to absolve me for my behaviour after the first offence.”62

  Brady, from Gates of Janus:

  The plain and perhaps regrettable fact is that it is part of the eternal human psyche and cycle for the normal individual to derive cathartic satisfaction and enjoyment from savouring the crimes of others, and from luxuriously dreaming of personally committing them. Similar cathartic satisfaction is afforded by contemplating the punishment of those who are caught. Nobody likes a loser and therefore we believe they get what they deserve.

  What do you believe you deserve for the undetected crimes and secret moral outrages you have committed in thought or action? Absolution?63

  Brady told his world that he had written his autobiography and had made plans for it to be published after his death. Various friends and confidants have publicly laid claim to possession of the book, originally reported to have been delivered to his lawyer, and a publishing deal had already been finalized as the book sat in a safe. An interview with Alan Keightley cast some question as to the work existing in finished form or even being completely written by Brady’s hand.

  In 2013, opining on the public tribunal to judge Brady’s current level of sanity and care, Duncan Staff reported:

  In another attempt to display his dominance, Brady has been collaborating on a book to be released on his death. According to co-author Alan Keightley, it will claim that there are nine victims of the Moors murders—and reveal where Keith Bennett is buried. I have seen sections of the book and it contains deeply disturbing graphic detail of the killings, along with directly implicating Hindley in the sexual abuse of victims. It has been reported that the police have questioned Keightley and say the information he provided was “unsubstantiated.”64

  In an interview/profile of Keightley, published by The Daily Mail concurrent with the start of the tribunal media barrage, Keightley discussed his relationship to Brady and, in particular, the book they were working on together:

  Since that first visit in 1988, Keightley has amassed thousands of hours of taped conversations and, with Brady’s consent and co-operation, these prison recordings have been turned into the Moors Murderer’s autobiography.

  The 100,000-word manuscript, a sensational account of Brady’s depraved crimes, now sits in the loft above his £150,000 terrace house in the village of Cradely, near Dudley.

  Keightley has promised that he will not publish until after Brady’s death, but the manuscript, he reveals, will claim that his killings went beyond the five innocent children murdered on Saddleworth Moor, and that with Hindley he killed nine people in all.

  It will “answer” the questions that have haunted his victims’ families and taunted police for more
than half a century.

  It will, he claims, pinpoint the spot where Keith Bennett is buried, and it will outline in graphic detail the role that Hindley played in the sexual acts inflicted upon their victims.

  “The book has all the secrets,” explains Keightley. “It shows without a doubt that Myra Hindley was no bystander bullied into the killings by what she always claimed was Brady’s Svengali-like hold over her.” Hindley died in 2002.

  “It will reveal Brady’s childhood, how he grew up and the influences that led him to the path that he chose.

  “The manuscript is upstairs in the attic, although I’ve already agreed a deal with a publisher. It’s an amazing story and one that should be told, not just because of the secrets it reveals, but because it gives insight into the life and mind of Ian Brady.”

  And:

  An eccentric academic, Keightley has spent 25 years cultivating Brady. No one knows him better. The 69-year-old, a former head of religious studies at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge, first came into contact with Brady at the behest of Ann West, the mother of Lesley Ann Downey, one of the victims of the Moors Murders, as they soon became known.

  “Knowing Brady’s interest in religion she thought that if I wrote to him and befriended him he might reveal information,” Keightley explains. “He and I corresponded a lot before he finally invited me to visit him in Ashworth.”65

  The Daily Mail did not ask Keightley, or at least didn’t report, what information Ann West hoped Brady would reveal to him for her. The consensus had started to look toward finding the body of Keith Bennett after the success on Pauline wasn’t duplicated. Possible that additional confessions were needed from Brady to bring closer the chosen form of closure as needed by Winnie and the others denied. Proof, relief and more details to keep Myra in jail. Reassurance, then.

  The tribunal of 2013 has rarely if ever been positioned as anything but an attempt by Brady to be taken off his feeding tube. His hunger strike figures in almost every article written since he started his protest over his living conditions, described variously as a protest against Ashworth as well as his worthless lifelong stretch of incarceration.

  On December 6, 2012 The Liverpool Echo reported:

  Moors murderer Ian Brady’s mental health tribunal has been rescheduled for June. The 74-year-old killer has applied to be transferred from Maghull’s high-security Ashworth psychiatric hospital to a Scottish prison and be allowed to die. The scheduled hearing was postponed after Brady was admitted to hospital after falling “extremely unwell” after suffering a suspected seizure at Ashworth, where he has been held since 1985.

  Glasgow-born Brady and his partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for the murders of five youngsters in the 1960s. They lured children and teenagers to their deaths, with victims sexually tortured before being buried on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester.

  Brady, housed in the Personality Disorder Unit at Ashworth, has been force-fed after going on hunger strike 12 years ago. He wants to be moved to a Scottish prison where there is no precedent for a prisoner being force-fed. A tribunal must find that he is not mentally ill.66

  He had fought to be transferred to a mental hospital after his dissatisfaction with jail. Publicly expressed his wish to never seek parole, unlike Myra. Especially when Myra was doing her best public faces and regrets. Finally asked to be put back into prison when the hospital proved more dissatisfactory. Ashworth had changed its original offers.

  Brady’s complaints against his life at Ashworth some nearly 15 years after the Fallon Inquiry resulted in a 116-page judgment on Brady’s hopes, care, situation and misunderstandings and are more his biography than any author’s attempt at definitive. Here was a legal document that pitted Brady against the lies he’s made himself to further himself. The hospital’s possible desire to further torture him being better understood as them being forced to take him at his word, making him if not accountable for his lies, then attempting to explain the severe problems they’d have convincing others what lies they’re supposed to fall back on as interested compassionate providers.

  See it as defense.

  From “IN THE FIRST-TIER TRIBUNAL (HEALTH, EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CARE) (MENTAL HEALTH) AND IN THE MATTER OF AN APPLICATION OF IAN STUART [SIC] BRADY. THE REASONS FOR THE TRIBUNAL’S DECISION”67:

  Mr. Brady disputes that he has or has ever had a mental disorder and claims that he feigned symptoms of schizophrenia in order to obtain a transfer from prison to hospital. None of the medical witnesses accepts that claim.

  There is also an issue about the nature of treatment. The hospital contends for a wide interpretation of the word “treatment.” They assert that he is receiving appropriate treatment in hospital and it is necessary for him to remain there for that purpose. The contrary view is that the “treatment” being offered by the hospital is not appropriate treatment and that such treatment as is necessary could be provided in prison.

  On the other hand, Mr. Brady has refused to discuss his case with the medical team at Ashworth for many years. He enjoys a good relationship with his primary nurse. Their frequent discussions are on a social level rather than a patient-nurse basis. That relationship is welcomed by Mr. Brady and is beneficial. It is one matter that he identified that he would miss if he moved to a prison. It is accepted that this refusal and a general lack of openness does cause difficulties for the medical team in defining his diagnosis, its nature and degree and in determining the appropriate treatment and its effectiveness. Dr. Collins demonstrated in his evidence both the advantage of interviews and its danger. It is difficult to make a diagnosis if the patient is uncooperative in interview. A patient may appear to be distracted but unless he or she explains the reason for their apparent distraction you do not know. On the other hand where a patient is anti-authoritarian or duplicitous and manipulative, little weight can be placed on the interview without it being confirmed by an independent source such as the patient’s history. Furthermore, his lack of accuracy, whether deliberate or not, also complicates the issues.

  Myra died on November 15, 2002 from respiratory failure after a chest infection sent her to hospital. She had signed a non-resuscitation order in case of heart attack and “had requested not to be treated in intensive care.” While in hospital, Myra is said to have “repeatedly tried to tear off her oxygen mask.”68 On the day after her death, the tabloids ran with headlines stating her last words were calling for her mum. Then tied to Lesley Ann’s last words as captured on the audiotape.

  Just before the tribunal hearings were to start, Ian Brady suffered a seizure during an interview with a psychiatrist in preparation for the public appeal. Brady was said to have been resuscitated against his wishes. In an interview with the Mirror on 10/7/12, Jackie Powell explained:

  “At first, they thought it was hiccups. Quickly, they grew more severe. Suddenly, he collapsed and went into a full seizure. He lost consciousness for several minutes. Help was called and several doctors and nurses rushed in. His heart stopped. He was dead. That should have been that. He had told the hospital years earlier he did not wish ever to be resuscitated. He put it in writing. They knew that, but still used a defibrillator.

  “I had to see him in an interview room with an observation window. He was in extreme pain. He told me he had fractured his T6 and T10 vertebrae. Doctors told him the fractures had been caused by the violence of the seizure. He does not recall the seizure and was furious that he had been resuscitated. This is the one thing he has always said he does not want.

  “Much of his behaviour stems from his legal battles with Ashworth Hospital. He is adamant that he is not mentally ill. He says he committed the murders at a time when, if he had been distracted by something else, they might not have happened. He talks about understanding the effects the killings had on the families of his victims. He does speak of remorse. He acknowledges he has taken from these families and knows what he did was heinous and wrong, but says, ‘If you ask me to say ‘sorry’ that is a word I cannot use becaus
e it is meaningless.”69

  Brady sees the decision to publish Gates of Janus with his name a mistake, done under duress from his forced feeding schedule. His author’s note explains that it was his decision but this is no longer to be trusted. He now contends that his name made the book impossible to read as he had intended. No readers, no reviewers or reporters who wanted to discuss the material vainly or objectively could now due to his infamy.

  Whereas I see the book as Brady’s only argument against the dull simplicity of life as simple crimes, it is true that few of the reading public have approached the book willing to be won over by his dispassionate perspicacity. In fact, when favor and consideration for the work in review was given, it was almost always apologized for, some for their own guilt, others deigning to include sample information of the crimes Brady committed—as if to inform the unfamiliar. Rather than remind everyone else of the important and ultimately considerate impartiality of the investigative press.

  The book is now his. And, like everything that happened in front of the Ashworth decision makers, especially their overriding his decision to not resuscitate him again and again, as Brady is considered mentally ill and the hospital’s duty is to ignore the rational decisions that he contends are his, this book is less. The fact that I have an afterword in the book shouldn’t change what he wrote and it doesn’t. That I’ve attached myself to his work tells him I’m a parasite working like the others to sell my own slimy interests. I’ve certainly not created an unaffected jolly to recreate his biography or a shortcut story to tell Alan West who the fuck he’s talking to when he’s looking to talk to Brady or offered an introduction that would follow yet another devotional to see the shambles. Parasites and hosts taking as many filthy shots as they can to illustrate and seek and seep their own interests and attachments. At once. I’m a parasite when I read every quote. Or scavenger, absolutely. No matter how easy it is to get or should be to avoid.