Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
BRADY CONFESSED TO ME
IT was the scoop of a lifetime, but Ian Brady had his price.
Meeting the Moors Murderer face-toface in 1985 was the closest anyone could get to sparring with the Devil. I knew it would be a drawn-out mind game, the day I walked into top security Gartree Prison. Prisoners’ rights campaigner Lord Longford had opened the door to Brady’s cell for me by introducing us. He believed Myra Hindley was an innocent victim of the evil Brady, and he wanted her to be released on parole. Little did Longford realise that introducing me to Brady would be the start of my campaign to prove that Hindley was a willing accomplice in a series of brutal child killings. And that she should never walk free again. But to get the evidence, I had to joust with the psychopath who had created a killing cult. To get Brady’s admission that more children were buried on Saddleworth Moor, I would have to befriend a man who stole children from the streets, in broad daylight. Tortured them. I wanted to know about the fate of 12-year-old Keith Bennett and 16-year-old Pauline Reade, but Brady made it clear that there were more victims. “People don’t know the real story,” he said. “Of course there were many more deaths.” I sat through eight meetings – a total of 16 hours – as I wrestled with Brady’s tortured mind. We had to meet in private, so the first meetings were in the dentist’s surgery. I sat in the patients’ chair. Brady would amble in and squat on a stool. Did Brady and Hindley kidnap and kill Keith and Pauline? We skirted the painful facts while Brady slowly disclosed the price he wanted me to pay for his co-operation. Revenge. He wanted Longford’s campaign to fail. Hindley, once she had made new friends in Holloway Prison, had abandoned Brady. They were no longer lovers sharing sinful secrets in the coded messages they had swapped in the early years of incarceration. So now he wanted her to die in prison. That meant he had to implicate Myra in the murders. And so began my sparring match. Brady was a psychopath who had not received psychiatric treatment. The 5st he had lost in weight reflected his haunted state of mind. He was kept under control with doses of mind-numbing tablets. That made conversation difficult. At times, his words came out as highpitched whispers. I had to put my face close to his to make out what he was saying. Slowly, the truth emerged. Brady struggled as he leaked the facts, dredging up the words which he had suppressed for two decades. Of how he and Hindley had terrorised the people of Manchester as they lured away children who had left their homes to play with their friends. He was not bragging. It was painful for him to reveal his terrible deeds. He comforted himself by holding a hot water bottle to his stomach. Brady was most relaxed when recalling life in Wormwood Scrubs where he worked in the hospital wing. “I was in a community for the first time in 12 years,” he told me. A community of IRA bombers and London gangsters. The breakthrough came at the sixth meeting. By now, we had swapped the dentist’s surgery for Cell 4, in which Brady expected to spend the rest of his life. Tears coursed through the stubble and into the hollows of his cheeks. He was trying to describe one of his homicidal attacks. His eyes were two slits squinting into the dark recesses of his mind. He was peering at a scene so vivid that it was a struggle to expel the words through his pursed lips. That gaunt figure, silhouetted against the fast fading autumn light, was a spectacle that haunts me to this day. I had the evidence I needed. Brady admitted that he had lied in the witness box when he claimed Hindley was not involved in the killings. And two other children had been buried on the moors. It was time to break the story. The evil deeds that had haunted a nation for two decades would change from a historical crime into a new hunt for graves on Saddleworth Moor. So when I visited Brady for the eighth time, I knew we would never meet again. The Home Office would refuse to let me back into Gartree once my story appeared in the Sunday People. Brady sat in his armchair at the bottom of his bed, holding his hot water bottle to his stomach. After I revealed that I would be publishing his confession, we sat quietly in Cell 4. I passed him a packet of Gauloises, his favourite French cigarette made with dark tobacco. He knew he was about to stitch up Myra Hindley. And I was about to force the Manchester police to start digging on the moor. It was two years later they found Pauline’s body. Keith’s last resting place is a mystery to this day.