Killing five children ‘existential experience’
After 47 years, infamous killer asks mental health tribunal to move him into regular prison
In a hearing that has turned both bizarre and repugnant, one of Britain’s most notorious killers, Moors murderer Ian Brady, wants to be declared “bad not mad” so he can starve himself to death.
For almost 30 years, Brady has been labelled a psychopath and locked up at a maximum security hospital.
But Brady — who with his partner Myra Hindley abused and killed five children — says it was all an act. He wants a mental health tribunal to order him back to the normal prison population so he can kill himself.
However, some have speculated that Brady just wants to be in the spotlight and that the hearing is his “last dance on the stage.”
Brady and Hindley attracted the revulsion of a nation when they were arrested for abusing and killing five children in the 1960s. The children’s bodies were buried on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester, northern england, and one has never been found despite repeated searches of the moor.
In the very week Brady and Hindley were arrested in 1965, the British Parliament abolished the death penalty. There was a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign by the families to have the pair exempted from that ban.
Instead they were jailed for life. Brady served 19 years in the normal prison population before being declared a psychopath in 1985 and transferred to Ashworth, a secure hospital. Hindley died in 2002.
Over the past week, the mental health hearing has heard doctors describe Brady’s “severe narcissistic personality order.” Others have labelled him psychotic, paranoid and hallucinatory.
On Tuesday, Brady, 75, gave his first public explanation for why he murdered the five children.
He did it, he said, for an “existential experience” and indicated he did not regret the “recreational killings.”
He also described himself as a “comparatively petty criminal” alongside “global serial killers and thieves” like former British prime minister Tony Blair or former u.S. president George W. Bush.
Complaining that he was being kept in Ashworth for “political reasons,” he told the tribunal: “After half a century you would think at least there would be some amelioration, but they’re obsessed with the case. The media particularly, and the public. I can go into the reasons, they’re somewhat theatrical, why they’re still talking about it. Jack the Ripper, after a century, it fascinates them because of the dramatic background; capes, cobbled streets — the moors is the same thing. Wuthering Heights and all that, The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
dr. Cameron Boyd, a member of the three-man panel hearing his case, asked Brady if he believed his crimes proved that he had a mental illness.
Brady said he had never been mentally ill, and that unlike soldiers who killed people simply because they were following orders, “a criminal … at least he is going to gain from the crime he is going to commit. He has given a value to the person he is going to kill.”
dr. Boyd asked: “What value did you get from the acts you did?” Brady replied: “existential experience.”
Brady, who at one point referred to his crimes as “recreational killings,” said: “I’m as pragmatic as a soldier or a politician — you never see any regret from Tony Blair, in fact he is minting a fortune from his war crimes.”
dressed in a suit and tie and with his hair cut for the occasion, he said he also spent 20 years of his prison term transcribing books into braille for children at schools in Newcastle and Liverpool and studied German and psychology in his cell.
He claimed that he had never been mentally ill and studied the method acting techniques of Constantin Stanislavski so he could mimic the symptoms of psychosis when he wanted to be transferred to Ashworth in the 1980s.
Brady began a hunger strike in 1999 after an alleged assault by staff and has been fed by a nasal tube ever since. Asked why he wanted to go back to prison, he said: “After 50 years I’ve had enough. Let’s get out.”
But the tribunal also heard this week that despite his claim to be on hunger strike he often made himself toast and soup in his cell.
Terry Kilbride, brother of John, one of Brady’s victims, said he did not believe the suicide threat.
“I do think he enjoys life too much, I think he enjoys manipulating everybody like he does, especially the families like he has done over the years,” Mr. Kilbride told the Daily Mail.
Author Peter Stanford, the biographer of Lord Longford, who campaigned for Hindley’s release, asked, “Is this then the latest mind-game Brady is playing — on his victims’ families and the rest of us — by willing us in our undiminished revulsion at his crimes to allow him to be moved to a prison, in the belief that this way we will finally be rid of him, only for him then to start eating normally again just to spite us?”
He then quoted psychologist dr. Chris Cowley, who corresponded with Brady for eight years, as saying, “His main aim is to score points, have his last dance on the stage.”
Mr. Stanford added, “This is the moment he has been waiting for this past halfcentury, his long-desired victory over the system that he holds in contempt, a public platform from which to demonstrate that, in his own mind, he is tough enough and clever enough to be above any punishment or mental health diagnosis.”