Be like me, children, and seize the day
DERANGED Brady believed he and Hindley’s crimes could inspire young people to “seize the day”.
He wrote: “I still advise the young to move at 10 times the speed they at present think is more than sufficient to achieve their aims and ambitions.
“Just because we failed doesn’t change the validity of that advice.”
He goes on: “Only a small percentage have the ability to act while they still can. The rest sink into lost dreams.”
Brady admitted that the young “tend to ignore elderly experience and advice”.
But he added: “I watch people rationalising their inactions, forever putting off decisive moves to some future date, and I can see them fast approaching realisation that they’ve left it too late and have missed the bus.”
In the letter, Brady blamed his arrest, which he called his “downfall”, on Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith.
He forced Smith to watch him murder his last victim, 17-year-old Edward Evans, then help to hide the body. Terrified, Smith alerted police and Brady and Hindley were arrested.
Brady wrote that he wanted to recruit Smith to take part in armed robberies with him and Hindley, acting as a “mule” while he and his lover handled the guns. He added: “We disastrously chose Smith to fulfil this elementary role, relying on his marriage to M’s sister as insurance, as well as guaranteeing his constant availability.
“Risks are unavoidable if you wish to make progress; ours turned out to be a calculated one that failed.”
He said he and Hindley took “every prior precaution” before trusting Smith, and described the attempt to involve him in Edward’s murder as “the necessary final test that caused our downfall”.
Brady wrote that he would have preferred dying in a shootout with police to being arrested and spending the rest of his life behind bars.
But he said he had no chance to get to his guns when officers arrived at the home he shared with Hindley.
He wrote the letter in 2007, and told his correspondent not to apologise for a delay in replying. He said: “Those outside should be more preoccupied with living their life to the full – as I would be if free – than with correspondence to depressing isolated planets such as this.”
The letter was acquired by best-selling Scots crime novelist Craig Robertson, who used it as the basis for research on his latest novel, Murderabilia.