‘Beyond redemption’ – child killer Brady’s last words to me

“YOU have more chance of contacting the dead than you have of getting in to speak with me.”

This was Ian Brady’s response to my request for a face-to-face interview and to this day I do not know whether he was employing black humour or whether the irony escaped him.

I was working as a freelance with a small independent TV company who were planning a documentary to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Moors Murders centring on the location of the remains of Keith Bennett, 12-year-old victim of Brady and Myra Hindley.

I had applied for a face-to-face meeting with Brady, but was turned down both by the authorities and by the killer himself who only agreed to correspond at all after assurances that we would speak about serial killing in general rather than specifics.

It soon became clear that what he really wanted to talk about was his treatment at Ashworth Hospital, which he referred to as “Ashwitz”, described by him as a “Centre of Excrement” whose staff were “infestation of vermin”.

There followed claims of staff brutality, a concerted campaign of mental and physical abuse on inmates – particularly him – and how the hospital was nothing more than a “mausoleum” where “more than 2,000 staff were exploiting a living out of 300 drug-embalmed prisoners”.

I began to wonder if he really believed, having been out of circulation for so long, that anyone would perceive him as a victim. Was his own legendary lack of remorse so all-consuming that he had fooled even himself into believing he was worthy of clemency? an

At the height of Brady and Hindley’s activities I was 12 – the same age as Keith Bennett and John Kilbride, another lad snatched off the streets of Manchester and murdered. It changed everything for my generation.

It caused mothers to hug their children that bit tighter and for curfews and other restrictions being placed on our play.

In that era, long before mobile phones, being out meant being out of touch; and so new rules, strictly enforced, allowed play only within earshot of home, reporting back at regular intervals and being suspicious of every stranger. There were lessons from fathers on where to kick a man so that it really hurt; we were taught it was OK to bite, scream and swear at top volume – and we were brought to the realisation that despite what our parents had told us when we were very small, there really were monsters; they crept through dark streets in sinister cars and did unspeakable things to children for reasons we couldn’t even begin to understand. By the time of my encounters with Brady I had become a father myself, including a 16-year-old daughter, the same age as Brady and Hindley’s first victim, Pauline Reade. In researching the murders I had read the reports of the Manchester police officer in charge at the time, chief superintendent Peter Topping, and had poured over each gut-wrenching detail of the five known victims’ ordeals.

Like all who became familiar with the events I was most moved by the fate of little Leslie Ann Downey, just 10, whose terrified and vain cries for mercy had been recorded by Brady and which horrified all who heard them. I remember calling the producer and telling him if I ever met Brady I doubted my ability to remain professional.

For page after page of his letters Brady droned on about his treatment and how his wishes were being disregarded.

He refused my request for a phone conversation, stating, “I halted all calls in 1998 after they began tapping my calls and taping them.” He went on to warn me that my own calls were now probably being tapped by MI5.

He had plenty to say about the state of the nation, calling Britain a country where the “most common ubiquitous question has become ‘Am I allowed to say that?,’” adding that the UK was now a “servile society full of middle-class politically-correct freeloaders and simian tabloid hacks”.

He said he “never imagined he would die in (such) a country”.

He criticised phone-ins, reality TV and talkshows as “infested with incestuous ‘celebs’” and added “the only good development – because it is intrinsically beyond political control – is the internet”.

He, however, never had access to the internet and complained that “although terrorist prisons such as Belmarsh allow prisoners to have laptop computers, this place won’t even allow its patients word processors and other technological communication”.

In one letter, written during the time of the Blair government, he questioned: “Has the UK body politic ever been so comprehensively lice-ridden and devoid of effective opposition – apart from the BBC and other quality media?”

Once, in a lighter mood, he praised Cardiff City’s Scottish goalkeeper, Neil Alexander and suggested we “wouldn’t hang on to Earnshaw for much longer”, before reverting to the usual vitriol about the people who shared his cloistered world and how he hated being denied an internet presence and a blog of his own.

It was two years before he wrote again, enclosing a copy of his book, The Gates of Janus, in which he analysed the motives and methods of serial killers including John Christie and Ted Bundy.

The letter stated he was tired of people exploiting “a 73-year-old skeleton who has been locked up for 50 years” calling such people “parasitic scavengers”.

A further letter followed, days later, furious this time about a TV drama in which actor Andy Serkis had portrayed him as “nothing more than a pantomime villain” and claiming he had been misquoted throughout Lord Longford’s book about Hindley.

He called it a “Silence of the Lambs rip-off” which “spiced up a pedestrian rehash of ancient tabloid stew”.

But mostly it centred around his desire to be allowed to starve himself to death.

It was cancer and not starvation that finally killed Brady.

He spent his last few weeks in palliative care being fed ever greater doses of pain relief.

The last words of the last letter he sent to me were “beyond redemption”.

In keeping with Brady’s skewed view of the world he was referring not to himself, but to those who were treating him.