The Column with Canon Rev Dr Rod Garner Brady’s crimes will live on long after his death
THE aftermath of the death of the Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, concerns me for a number of reasons. The first is personal. I knew Keith Bennett, one of Brady’s victims, whose body was never found. I was a bit older than Keith but we were members of the same church choir in Manchester when he went missing. The news of Brady’s death was not unexpected given his age and refusal to eat, but it still brought the tragic events of those lost days back to me in a compelling way. I recall with clarity the police conducting house-to-house investigations down my street, the pervasive unease and the sense that something awful had happened. All of this was a long time ago but it serves as a reminder that the past is always with us.
We talk too easily of closure or moving on from situations or relationships that we would like to forget or bury but the reality is different.
They remain under the radar, silently woven into our lives, an inescapable part of our present and capable of being resurrected when we least expect it.
The dilemma now facing Brady’s executor is that several local authorities have refused to bury his client’s ashes in their designated grounds.
The magnitude of his crimes, in their view, are such that even in death he should be denied the final rite of passage and there remains the possibility that public knowledge of his resting place could lead to protests or worse.
Brady’s solicitor of more than 25 years is still pondering the next step.
Mildly spoken and wary of the media, he has repeatedly declined to say whether he believes Brady was crazy or perversely cruel. I have two thoughts on this. The knee-jerk classification that from the beginning designated Brady as either mad or bad to the bone does not help in this instance.
I’m reminded of another British serial killer, Donald Neilson.
After being arrested in 1975 and asked by the police why he had carried out his awful crimes he replied: “I’d rather hoped you would be able to tell me.”
As the poet WH Auden once observed: “The motives of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.”
It is sometimes just the case that we find we are strangers to ourselves, fundamentally unable to account for what we have done or why.
From a Christian perspective the final verdict on Brady and his deeds rests with a God who is both merciful and just.
Acts of evil form part of the human stain but they can be overcome by divine and sometimes even human love.
Last Sunday morning, a visiting bishop from Rwanda told my congregation of families who had taken into their homes as adopted sons, young men who had murdered their children during the genocide in 1994 when more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered between April and July of that murderous year.
Concerning the unfinished business of Brady’s mortal remains: they should be buried privately without publicity, plaque or stone to mark his life.
A necessary anonymity is required to prevent further anguish or unrest and to consign this particular manifestation of evil to the earth.
His deeds live on, etched in the nation’s memory as an enduring testimony to the nature and mysterious sources of human wickedness.
The past, far from being “a foreign country”, still resides on our doorstep – a truth to which the families of Brady’s victims can testify, even after all these years.