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Thursday, Jan 8, 2009
The 1960s "Moors Murderer," Ian Brady, still haunts the British psyche. His recently published book shows why.
Jan 3, 2002 | Ian Brady's darkly handsome visage is forever floating to the surface of Great Britain's collective psyche, a sleek, brooding specter of malevolence and sadism that the tabloids and the broadsheets simply cannot leave alone. The most iconic image in Brady's portfolio of infamy was snapped in 1966 as he was being tried for three of his five murders of Manchester children and teens during a two-year killing spree. Sitting in the back of a police car on his way to court, the stylish, Scottish-born sociopath exudes an imperious nihilism as foreboding as it is seductive.
In one particularly sinister, oft-used head shot, a defiant Brady looks like he could give suspected terrorist mastermind Mohammad Atta lessons in ghoulishness. On February 29, 2000, the Sun took up the whole front page with this picture and the bold legend "Brady: Let Me Leave This Cesspit in a Coffin." The story told of the murderer's campaign to starve himself at Ashworth Mental Hospital, near Liverpool, where he's a permanent resident. So far British justice has been unwilling to intervene, and his keepers have been force-feeding him.
The most chilling photo is from 1987. In it an older Brady, in sunglasses and surrounded by policemen, returns to the Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester, to help find the grave of his very first victim, the lovely, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, whom Brady had consigned to the earth some 20 years before. When they uncovered the corpse, it was apparent that her throat had been cut and that she had been sexually assaulted. To this day, the body of one other victim, 12-year-old Keith Bennett, has never been located on the moors where Brady says he buried him.
Given the recurring simulacra of horror, it's understandable that all hell broke loose in Albion once American publisher Adam Parfrey of Feral House revealed that he would be releasing a manuscript the child killer had produced under the tutelage of acclaimed crime and occult writer Colin Wilson. Titled "The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis," the book is a mixture of sociology, psychology and philosophy wherein Brady theorizes that serial murderers rise above the "bovine conformism" of the human herd. He then goes on to dissect the work of his peers: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Peter Sutcliffe (aka the "Yorkshire Ripper"), among others.
Here in the States, where few but the most ardent crime buffs know about the homicides Brady and his paramour Myra Hindley perpetrated in the early '60s, the book has been selling online since September. The book's journey to the shores of Brady's homeland has been far more tortuous. Ashworth Mental Hospital initially objected on the grounds that their privacy rules had been violated, but they eventually relented. Relatives of the victims called the book obscene on principle, and pundits raised Cain because Parfrey paid a $5000 advance.
"Ian Brady doesn't see a cent," asserted the L.A.-based Parfrey when asked about the deal. "The proceeds go to Benedict Birnberg, Brady's solicitor, who has reconfirmed to me that the money goes to Ian's 90-year-old mother. [Brady] has no way to spend the money; no commissary accounts, nothing. After all, he is trying to kill himself."
A British court cleared the way for the book to be released in Britain, where it became available in stores on Dec. 4, but that only provided more fodder for Fleet Street's insatiable minions. British journalists leap at any opportunity to write more about their caged pet demon, now 64 and decrepit. In the '60s, when both Brady and accomplice Hindley escaped the hangman's noose by a few months because of the abolition of the death penalty in Britain, reporters clamored for blood. More recently, when Brady's appeal for the right to stop eating failed, one cheeky tabloid started a "Post a Pie to Brady" effort to "keep the evil bastard alive." Even the far more sophisticated Guardian ran a commentary by columnist Hugo Young on March 2, 2000, in which the author demanded that both Brady and Hindley rot in their cells.
"The Moors Murderers have no parallel in the culture, no equal in the almanac of foul, remembered crimes," wrote Young. "A vast publication industry has been built on their continued existence unhanged, after butchery which 10 years earlier would have sent them to the gallows."
This national obsession strikes me as a sort of fetish, like the mania for Nazism that an endless march of films, books and documentaries will never slake. But why Brady and not some other notorious psychopath? Certainly there have been more successful killers in Britain and in the States, murderers far more monstrous in their modus operandi. For example, Charles Manson, though iconic, doesn't get nearly the amount of spilled ink in America that Brady gets in England.
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