‘Rejection threw them together’
about my jurisdiction in Scotland but this time he wanted to know if it made any difference if the victim was English.”
The cryptic conversation saw police go through files to find out if anyone went missing in Scotland at the time of Brady’s trips north.
Staff said: “They went through records and didn’t find anyone who disappeared at the time. The bottom line is Brady said it but no-one knows for sure. There is no evidence. The thing about Brady is he left a deliberately confusing trail. The photos he took, some are grave markers and some are taken to be deliberately confusing. Sorting your way through it is a nightmare. For the police to search through and investigate every item is a massive task. That’s the problem. And Brady knew that. He created a deliberate pattern of confusion.”
Hindley wrote a series of letters to Staff which he used to make a documentary which concluded that she was not forced into becoming Brady’s accomplice. When she died Staff was given her personal paperwork by her estate which included all of Brady’s photographs, Hindley’s unpublished autobiography and correspondence with her mother.
Using this archive, Staff wrote the book The Lost Boy, first published in 2007, which cast new light on the crimes and Hindley’s relationship with Brady. Her unpublished autobiography revealed that it was while they were in Scotland that Brady spoke to her for the first time about how he would attempt to get away with murder. Staff said: “The discussions about carrying out the perfect murder, those discussions took place while driving around Scotland.”
Hindley’s autobiography recalls a trip to Glasgow when she and Brady slept in a car outside the Sloan family’s house in Pollok. Staff wrote in his book: “The trip to Scotland helped Myra to understand Ian’s hunger to ‘rise above’ the ‘confines’ of the working class. Committing the perfect murder was a way of asserting his superiority.”
Staff also said rejection by his birth mother may have contributed to his psychotic state which led to the deaths of Pauline Reade, 16, who disappeared on her way to a disco on July 12, 1963; John Kilbride, 12, who was snatched in November the same year; Lesley Ann Downey, 10, who was lured away from a funfair on Boxing Day 1964; Edward Evans, 17, who was axed to death in October 1965; and Keith Bennett, 12, who was abducted and murdered in 1964, and is the only one of Brady’s five young victims whose body has never been traced.
Staff said: “In some ways what happened with his upbringing was what threw him together with Myra Hindley. While Brady was put up for adoption, Hindley had a very difficult relationship with her father and was sent to live with her grandmother.
“So that sense of rejection threw them together and they then constructed what they described as their ‘world above’ – they viewed themselves as separate to and above everyone else. That sense of separation is really what bound them together and she goes into that in her autobiography. Unfortunately, that’s what made the Moors murders possible. She helped him to act it out but without the shaping of him in his childhood the Moors murders may not have taken place.”
Many people wrote to Brady while he was imprisoned but Staff insists everything he ever said must be taken “with a pinch of salt”. He added: “You can’t take anything that Brady writes at face value. It was part of Brady’s game-playing. So, he came up with this idea in Scotland of the perfect murder. That was the first time he introduced Hindley to the idea. “From that point onwards there was a recurring theme of control. So, hiding the bodies was for control. Never, ever letting on where the final body is. In the words of his psychiatrist, Brady thought: ‘I know. You don’t know. You want to know, and I’m not going to tell you’.
“I think the letters and what he wrote was part of enjoying that. He wrote letters to [Keith Bennett’s brother] Alan Bennett and you read those letters where Bennett asks: ‘Where is my brother?’.
“Brady replies: ‘It’s like describing colours to a blind man’. It’s just playing with people. Brady’s mind was a dark place.”