Do these pictures reveal the locations of Brady and Hindley’s Scottish murders?
PREVIOUSLY unseen photographs of Glasgow-born serial killer Ian Brady and accomplice Myra Hindley on holiday in Scotland could be “grave markers”.
The Moors Murderer told police who interrogated him in the 1980s that “something had happened” north of the Border and he was “puzzled” as to why he “had never heard more about it”.
Photographs taken by Brady, who died this week aged 79, were used by officers to find the bodies of his victims on Saddleworth Moor. Some of the Saddleworth Moor images showed Hindley posing near grave sites of victims.
Duncan Staff, the writer of the definitive account of Hindley’s involvement in the brutal murders of five children in the 1960s, was left a series of photographs and her unpublished autobiography when she died in 2002 aged 60.
Now the Sunday Herald can publish for the first time Brady and Hindley’s holiday snaps at popular tourist spots Stirling Castle and Loch Long, as well as pictures taken by Brady of his first home in Glasgow’s Gorbals. Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart in the Gorbals in 1938, the illegitimate son of tearoom waitress Margaret “Peggy” Stewart.
The identity of his father is unknown but he is believed to have been a newspaper reporter who died three months before Brady was born.
His impoverished mother “put him up for adoption in a shop window”, according to Staff, and he was brought up by the Sloan family.
Brady went to Camden Street primary school and later Shawlands Academy before landing a job as a butcher’s assistant.
When he was caught stealing from his employer the magistrate gave 17-year-old Brady the choice of prison or moving to Manchester where his mother had settled after marrying Irish fruit merchant Pat Brady. The young Ian Stewart not only moved but also took his stepfather’s name and was given a job as a fruit porter.
Staff said: “What we do know from Hindley’s unpublished autobiography, which I’ve got, and from her letters, is that Scotland remained really, really important to him.
“The landscape – the beautiful out- doors, the rawness of it – is something that mattered to him. That’s something that he found echoes of on Saddleworth Moor and that’s why it became an important location to him.”
In the 1980s, Sir Peter Topping, former head of CID at Greater Manchester Police, led the hunt for two of Brady’s victims – Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.
He recalled in his memoirs, published in 1989, that Brady asked him “a strange question” about his jurisdiction when the then detective chief superintendent interviewed him.
Topping said: “He particularly wanted to know if I had jurisdiction over the Border in Scotland and I replied that if he wanted to talk to me about things that happened there I felt sure the Scottish authorities would leave the interviewing to me. He said that something had happened, and he was puzzled why he had never heard more about it.”
Hindley told Topping she and Brady had been on holiday in Scotland “five or six times, maybe seven or eight, travelling sometimes on the motorcycle and sometimes by car.”
She said she did not think Brady had murdered anyone in Scotland and used the story of a Loch Lomond trip they took after they had already killed to make her point.
Topping said: “When she saw a child walking past and asked him, ‘Don’t you want to do another one?’ he retorted that he could not kill one of his own – meaning anyone Scottish.”
However, Topping’s memoirs suggest Brady’s victim in Scotland may have been English.
Topping said: “He asked once more
BRADY was forced by the courts to leave Scotland for Manchester as a 17-year-old but the twisted serial killer always spoke about his love for his homeland. He died of chronic lung disease as a patient at Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside, but begged to be moved to a Scottish prison to live out his final days.
Scots author Jean Rafferty wrote to Brady for many years as part of research for her book Myra, Beyond Saddleworth.
“He has enormous affection for the Glasgow of the past and wanted me to send him photographs of certain places from his childhood,” Rafferty recalled in 2012.
Brady railed against the regime at Ashworth and world leaders in his letters to Rafferty.
She said: “His writing swarmed across the page, fluent despite its minute size. And angry. There was a huge feeling of rage from Brady’s words, mostly about the regime at Ashworth, which he hates with a passion, and about politicians. People like Tony Blair and George Bush, he declared, had as much blood on their hands through their imperialistic wars as he ever did.”
Rafferty also regularly exchanged gifts with Brady, including postcards of his home town.
She said: “I have sent him many postcards of old Glasgow, of the steamie at Partick, one of a drinking cup at Glasgow Green which set him off about drinking cups in general.
“They often triggered off memories and small details which I would use in my novel.”
Among the chilling gifts Brady sent to Rafferty were “a reproduction of an 18th-century etching of skeletons fighting”, “a DVD of a children’s film, The Amazing Mr Blunden”, and “a compilation of film music, most notably the soundtrack to Natural Born Killers”.
Rafferty added: “Afterwards I wrote to him and said he had a very black sense of humour. I never knew whether that amused him or not.
“As with everything he doesn’t want to answer, including details of the murders, he simply ignored the remark.”