‘I’m even more dangerous now . . . I’d commit mass murder if they let me out’
‘When will my turn come for a knighthood?’
BRADY and his fellow Moors murderer Myra Hindley adopted entirely different attitudes to life in prison after their conviction in 1966. She had a long series of passionate lesbian affairs that relieved the boredom inside, and a network of friends outside.
By contrast, Brady had no kind of sexual life in prison and very few friends, if any.
He said to me: ‘The real indignity of captivity is having to endure anthropoid screws [warders], and Pavlovian psychology that — in their hands — wouldn’t fool a dog! Capital punishment would be blissful release.’
Only at one of the many prisons he was held in did he feel any sense of community — Wormwood Scrubs. He had a job as a barber after being taught by an inmate who had once worked for Vidal Sassoon.
He even cut the prison officers’ hair. ‘Imagine that!’ he told me. ‘Ian Brady behind you with a pair of scissors!’
But he could never stop himself from behaving badly if the opportunity arose. When prisoners in for burglary were due for release he used to give them a sheet of cellophane with his fingerprints on, ‘to be left behind at the scene of the first job they did. I loved the prospect of detectives scratching their heads about how Ian Brady could have been there when he had been locked up for years’.
And then there were his frequent hunger strikes, which he seemed to enjoy. ‘When I was starving myself, I experienced an inner serenity and freedom which mocked my surroundings. Spiritually, I was transcending my confinement. To the outward observer, I was losing and dying. In reality, I was winning and pulsating with life.’
He recalled that gangster Ronnie Kray, a fellow inmate, ‘looked like a corpse if he went without food for three days. I could go for a fortnight without it and no discomfort’.
This was typically Brady. He had to see himself as harder and smarter than everyone else.
He told me he woke every morning with the thought that he was the Moors Murderer. Here was a constant dilemma for him. One moment he would tell me he craved ‘anonymity in life and oblivion in death’ — but he also revelled in his own notoriety.
When the actor Anthony Hopkins, famous for his role as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs, was awarded a knighthood, Brady wrote to me: ‘I wonder when my turn will come — for my contribution to the entertainment industry over the past 30 years?! Not to mention my services as national folk-devil and scapegoat.’
The last decades of his life were spent at Ashworth Hospital just outside Liverpool. He had long been suffering from hallucinations and delusions and had been ‘certified’ five times in prison for attacking fellow prisoners. Doctors concluded he was suffering from acute paranoia and a type of schizophrenia.
He was sent to Ashworth in 1985, and medication helped him recover. He was given various strong drugs from morning till night, but principally the knock-out drug, chloral hydrate.
He was still on the drug when I began visiting him in 1994. I grew to know when the calming effects were wearing off and he needed another dose. Sometimes I would tell him I had heard the bell for ‘meds’ even though I hadn’t, and he would go and have his medication.
Five minutes after taking it, he was relaxed, in control of himself again after being in a rage about something — usually the Home Office, Myra or the prison system — and calm enough to indulge in his own brand of irony: ‘I am fully rehabilitated. I’m a hundred times more dangerous. I would commit mass murder now.’ He often spoke about suicide. Two years after arriving at Ashworth he was interviewed by Manchester police about two more murders that had come to light.
He told me he offered a full confession if he was given ‘a last week of pleasure’ — in which he could watch videos, eat meals and drink alcohol, all of his own choosing, and then be given the means to kill himself.
‘Ideally, I’d prefer a bullet through the head seconds after swallowing potassium cyanide. I wouldn’t want to bungle the suicide and survive it to be an invalid, at the mercy of these b ***** d screws.’
He sometimes made veiled requests for me to smuggle potassium cyanide in to him. In one letter he wrote: ‘Here’s a thought — photographers use cyanide.’
He told me he totally sympathised with the families of his victims who wanted revenge. In their position, he would have wanted him dead.
He was wary of his fellow inmates. ‘You have to watch your back with psychopaths,’ he told me. ‘They may kill you to have something momentarily exciting to do, merely to break the boredom.’
When he was on hunger strike he would be force-fed. One Ashworth official said to me: ‘Some of us wonder why we go to such lengths to keep him alive when he wants so badly to die.’
He once told me: ‘I think of death on a daily basis. Whether I die tomorrow or the next day means nothing to me. What remains of so-called life bores me.’