December 24, 2025 • 47 mins
Serial Killer Documentary - Ian Brady： Endgames of a psychopath
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
The more we look, the more we learn.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Documentary Zone four, sponsored by.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Hunt Ian Brady, Britain's notorious child killer, sadist, psychopath and
longest serving prisoner. The abhorrent crimes he committed with accomplice
(00:39):
Myrah Hindley in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Shocked the nation.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
This is a story of his attempts to manipulate and
control throughout nearly half a century of incarceration and psychiatric confinement,
told by those who know and work with him, many
of them talking for the first time, and.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
One of the very few people he trusts.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Possibly well, people try and get into his head, you
won't get into his head.
Speaker 5 (01:13):
Do you feel yourself in the presence of a human
being who isn't really quite human?
Speaker 6 (01:18):
One by one, their bodies were found, all except Keith Bennett.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Now seventy four and brought close to death by a
recent illness. Brady sent a letter which suggested he was
about to reveal the secret he has held since the murders.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
A simple prayer from Keith Bennett's mother, please find my
son's body.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
The burial site of Keith Bennett.
Speaker 8 (01:43):
I received a letter.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Within the sealed envelope is a letter to Winnie Johnson,
that is the means to her possibly being able to rest.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Is this a genuine gesture to help a grieving family
knowing that Winnie Johnson was nearing the end of her life,
or one more cruel game to assert power and satisfy
his sadistic nature.
Speaker 9 (02:06):
You so you still will a bit of power, a
bit of poe to keep daunting the families and taunting
Winnie Johnson.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I had been making a film about Ian Brady's thirteen
year hunger strike, his battle to stop being force fed
by psychiatric authorities and return to prison. I'd come to
a hotel outside Liverpool to meet his mental health advocate
when events took an unexpected turn.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
What's happened?
Speaker 8 (02:41):
It's crazy, It's absolutely crazy.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It's just got to give me time.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
I'm not coming to there about an hour and a half.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Is it a very serious situation?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Though extremely serious as far as all executives are being called,
power of a journeys are being called.
Speaker 10 (02:56):
And I'm not going to talk to you anymore on
the film.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Paddy, and really not see we're seeing about an and
a half. Okay, all right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Good afternoon.
Speaker 11 (03:06):
War's murderer Ian Brady has been taken to hospital after
reportedly suffering a seizure.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
The seventy four year old child serial.
Speaker 8 (03:12):
Killer was due to it.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Ian Brady had collapsed in his high secure psychiatric ward
and been rushed to hospital.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Say for that his legal team have told me in
the last ten minutes that he is very, very unwell.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I had a.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Phone call at approximately it's three o'clock to say that
he was foaming it around the mouth, he couldn't swallow,
and that he was jerking in the chair.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
They bought in a.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Defibrillator and they started to fibulating. They then took him
to a too exactly hospital.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
As his advocate, Jackie's a key figure in Brady's life,
expressing his wishes and instructions. In the fifteen years she's
worked with him, she's become familiar with the scale of
activity that accompanies his every move. Do you feel there's
a disproportionate amount of resources going into the and Brady's
case where other people are lacking.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Well, they're the humongous amount of security to transport a
seventy four year old man for me to be obviously
he has to go in an ambulance, But does he
need armed response? And does he need helicopters when there's
other people that leave prison, leave hospital with nothing, with
(04:27):
nothing at all.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
News has spread of Brady's condition, and Jackie soon becomes
the focus of constant media interest.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Hello, Well, nobody knows what the matter is at the moment.
They use a lady I spoke to from sky before.
I wouldn't be able to do an interview today. I'm
absolutely up to my eyes. Oh, for God's sake.
Speaker 8 (05:00):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Decades on from his crimes, Brady continues to provoke intense fascination.
What possible motivation could he have had for inflicting such unimaginable,
suffering child murders that he later described as an existential exercise,
crimes that had their genesis in an apparently innocent relationship.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
Brady appeared to be a striking personality, riding around on
a motorbike, the man from nowhere who knew deep thoughts,
who read books, even who could philosophize. He decided that
he would prove to her that he could do something
that was superhuman, take a life, because there is nothing
(05:54):
more absolute in terms of exercising power over other people
than taking their lives. He wasn't out to demonstrate he
was physically powerful but mentally powerful, and to cold bloodedly
pick up a child, to abduct that child, kill that
child statistically, and then anonymously bury it in a place
(06:19):
like the Moors demonstrated a powerful mind that would make
an impression on the girl that apparently was infatuated with him.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
October nineteen sixty five, acting on a tip off, police
discovered the body of seventeen year old Edward Evans at
sixteen Wardoorbrook Avenue. He had been bludgeoned with an axe
and strangled. A few days later, they recovered the bodies
(07:05):
of two children from Saddleworth, Moore, first Leslie and Downy,
who disappeared from a Manchester fairground two years previously. She
had been raped and strangled.
Speaker 12 (07:24):
I mean I was fifteen at the time. I remember myself, me, mum,
my dad went on to where the fair ground was
and just going down, just shouting and am out Yeah
more I do remember, yeah, even though it was a
(07:47):
long time ago.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
But evening we found in.
Speaker 8 (07:51):
Leslie asked he had helped.
Speaker 13 (07:54):
Because I don't think anyone had harm.
Speaker 8 (07:56):
How you know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Days later, the body of twelve year old John Kilbride
was found. He too, had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Speaker 13 (08:09):
And just couldn't see him going away with anyone. He
wasn't a kind of why you would leave home for
any reason.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
On the sixth of May nineteen sixty six, just six
months after the abolition of the death penalty, Ian Brady
and Myra Hindley were each sentenced to life imprisonment. For
(08:46):
the families of the victims, time has stood still ever since.
Speaker 9 (09:00):
To express what the feeling is. You couldn't understand what
the feeling is. You know, the angle, what's there, and
and plus the passion for your brother, you know, and
for the other liquors. That's what happened, and you just
(09:22):
can't understand it.
Speaker 12 (09:23):
You can't get your red round.
Speaker 9 (09:25):
Why this picture him?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
When was that taken? That was taking.
Speaker 9 (09:34):
It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Two or three.
Speaker 9 (09:40):
Week, four week, just after John he's gone missing. And
then this chair area was where John sat always stayed
like that until the day where they found John. Because
we've always thought you were coming back.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
How long was it after you went missing that he
was found two years?
Speaker 9 (10:06):
Two years after, which is a long long time when
you remembering your broildering youdle early hell years, you know,
all long long.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Brady and Hindley carried out the murders periodically over two years.
During that time, they would frequently revisit and photograph each
other at the grave sites of their victims. Following Brady's arrest,
(10:50):
police discovered these macabre trophies and other mementoes, a tape
recording photographs of Leslie and Downey in her last moments,
and Brady's cryptic ledger, a coldly precise list of actions
(11:11):
to carry out the perfect murder.
Speaker 12 (11:21):
Leslie was found on the moors at the back where
we lived. When they actually found her, I just remember
going going to the in our house and my mum
had to go out to identify her, and we're just waiting,
(11:42):
you know, waiting to hear all the family who was
back at the house. I just remember coming in and
just you know, just not insane. Yeah, it was, as
you know, I can't imagine what my mum had gone through,
(12:15):
you know, what she had to see, what she had
to hear. She always get things to herself me, Mum,
you know she wouldn't She shouldn't tell me anything, including
what was on them tapes. And now she just kept
(12:37):
back to herself. She did what was to know. I
wouldn't want to know.
Speaker 14 (12:43):
Yeah, people would talk of these crimes as being senseless,
and they don't make any sense to normal people because
they're driven by the impulse to control and hurt other people,
which is the fundamental abnormality in sadism.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Many of the aspects of the killing don't just involve
physical harm. The actual enjoyment and pleasure of terror in
the victim, as well as the sort of the destruction
of them, both physically and also sort of psychologically, is
a key component and one which the individual finds enormously pleasurable.
Speaker 9 (13:21):
How many more or more?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Boat many more?
Speaker 9 (13:31):
As you, Golush not said anything in the boat, hoblyns.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
The consequences of Brady's crimes would not end with his imprisonment.
Nearly fifty years on, he still attempts to exert power
and control over the families of his victims.
Speaker 12 (13:51):
He will never die until he's dead. When he heard
about this seizure that he had, I thought that that
might be it. Maybe we then you can get on
with our lives properly and put the room in the
wreck now as it is.
Speaker 15 (14:14):
Was murderer Ian Brady has been returned to Ashworth's Psychiatric Hospital.
Speaker 16 (14:18):
After undergoing medical.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Ian Brady was returned to Ashworth in a serious condition.
The two broken vertebra he had suffered in his seizure
mean he cannot be force fed for the first time
since he began his hunger strike nearly thirteen years ago.
(14:40):
Jackie Powell is on her way to see him. Besides
his solicitor, she is the only person who has permission
to visit him. How's he managed to keep up the
determination to refuse food?
Speaker 4 (14:52):
He has a very strong will, that's extremely strong will.
He doesn't speak to his care team, his clinicians, psychologists,
social workers. He said he feels as if he's dead,
has settled in a grave.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Brady has spent the last twenty seven years of his
sentence sectioned in Ashworth High Secure Hospital, an institution for
which he has developed a deep antipathy. Jackie was appointed
Brady's advocate under the Mental Health Act in nineteen ninety nine.
(15:38):
And what makes that such a lasting relationship.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
I suppose because unlike most people, I'm not interested in
what happened fifty years ago, and I've never questioned him
about his index offenses. It's up to him whether he
discusses them. I never question him over them.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Can you feel his rights are important?
Speaker 9 (16:04):
Well?
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I feel everybody's rights are important. Yes, and many would
say that that shouldn't be the case. But I feel
every human being, whoever they are, it should be treated
with some amount of respect and dignity.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
With her long standing proximity to Brady, Jackie was uniquely
placed to offer an insight into his psychopathy. Now directed
towards the institution he loathes.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
Ashwiz operates on what I've termed the crematorium principle, extensive
landscaped grounds, decorative trees and shrubs designed exclusively to impress
visitors and divert their attention from the smoke installations and
the absence of human life. In short, Ashworth is merely
(17:06):
an open grave for patients, or more accurately, a concrete tomb.
Speaker 8 (17:11):
So that's how he was feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Then, how would you characterize his relationship with Ashworth?
Speaker 4 (17:20):
He has no relationship with Ashwith he is any relationship
has completely broken down. In nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 17 (17:29):
Ian Brady stopped eating at the end of last month
because he was angry that he'd been transferred to a
new ward from a part of the hospital he'd been
in for four years.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
At the end of nineteen ninety nine, Brady began the
hunger strike that has lasted to this day.
Speaker 11 (17:43):
Mister Justice Kay totally and Brady, but if he continues
the hunger strike, the high security mental hospital where he's
held has the right to continue to force feed him.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Brady has not eaten for nearly thirteen years. To keep
him alive, he has been force fed a high calorific
liquid through a nasal gast cube. I wanted to understand
what motivates Brady's behavior. Has anybody been able to comprehend
(18:15):
the nature of the forces that drive him. I went
to meet the man who has represented him longer than
any other, the eminent civil rights lawyer, Benedict Bernberg.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
What was he like to work with? Very difficult.
Speaker 16 (18:36):
He's an extremely difficult person. He's a man with a
terrific built up sense of anger inside him, and that's
kept on, kept very often, kept him going over the years.
Anger directed at various things and people, institutions of course,
like the prison and the hospital, newspapers, doctor, even solicitors
(19:02):
and so on. You know, it boils up in him
and that's part of his.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Pathology according to the logic of that pathology. By committing
the murders, Brady proved to himself that he was above morality,
and even after imprisonment, Hindley remained faithful to him and
his ideal.
Speaker 6 (19:29):
Brady created this killing cult that was a cult of two.
He had sunk everything into proving what a powerful personality
he was. This was his cocoon, his little world, a
demented mind that could apparently see clearly, that had constructed
(19:52):
a reality to make sense of his existence. It was
a perverse existence, of course, and innocent children paid.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Despite their separation, the bond remained powerful. Brady staged the
first of many hunger strikes after he was denied conjugal
visits in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
He seemed to believe that he was in spiritual communication
with Myra Hindley. This then became a part of his
initial battle that he inappropriately was insisting on having visits
Mara Hindley, and he went on hunger strike to try
and achieved that.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
It was a union that provided an outlet for Brady's
sadistic urges, but ultimately the possibility of freedom became more
important to Myra Hindley in May nineteen seventy two, she
wrote to him breaking off their relationship.
Speaker 6 (20:51):
She betrayed him by denying the sanctity of that cult
that they had, namely that they had killed children.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
For Brady, it was more than the loss of a relationship.
It was the destruction of the pre eminent symbol of
his powers.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
The nature hunger strikes and his demands seemed to be
become more bizarre, and also the nature of his preoccupation
was starvation and food became increasingly bizarre, things like putting
very large amounts of salt on his food, so he vomited.
So his mental state deteriorated very severely, and he appeared
(21:40):
to be starving himself to death. Not any longer in
a protest, but on the basis of very bizarre beliefs.
I think that the battle what we're talking about, this
battle with authority, it's not a battle with authority, it's
a battle in his mind with himself.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Over the course of the nineteen seventies, Brady's mental condition
deteriorated towards psychosis, but he was to find an ally
in the prison reformer Lord Longford, who famously became involved
with the Moor's murderers and agitated for Brady's transfer to
psychiatric care.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
You visited Brady quite recently.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
How did you sum up his condition?
Speaker 8 (22:22):
Well, I'm not a medical man, but I've never seen anybody.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Oh look quite so ill.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
By that time, Brady had been in prison for eighteen years,
mainly in solitary confinement.
Speaker 12 (22:35):
He looks like a skeleton.
Speaker 8 (22:37):
There is a mental factor there.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It was Lord Longford who introduced Brady to Benedict Bernberg.
Despite the onset of mental illness, Brady's need for control
compelled him to fight countless legal campaigns.
Speaker 16 (22:56):
I've never come across anyone prisoner who's such an inveterate
litigator as the young Brady. He had running battles with
authority throughout his time, right up to now. In fact,
he's an inveterate campaigner.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
As pressure mounted for his transfer to a special hospital,
a journalist Fred Harrison started visiting him in prison.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
At the time I was seeing him, he was still
tormented as an individual, not by the guilt of what
he had done, but by the whole history of what
became the personality of Ian Brady.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
At the same time, Longford was spearheading a highly public
campaign for Hindley's parole.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
A good many people have come to know and like
her very much.
Speaker 8 (23:47):
So as I said, she was completely ready.
Speaker 18 (23:49):
She has been for years to come to them.
Speaker 6 (23:52):
Brady who that was a fake, that it was a
show for the sake of people like Lord Longford. It
left him angry and he wanted to do anything he could,
assuming he could, to block her getting out. And so
I believe that part of his motivation was that by
feeding me enough information about her complicity that that would
(24:15):
damage her prospects of securing parole.
Speaker 7 (24:20):
Peace have now been searching these wars for a week
without success, and Chief Superintendent.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Toppings in nineteen eighty six fed Harrison's revelations cause a sensation.
In an attempt to salvage her bid for parole. Hindley
confessed to her involvement in other murders and assists the
police in their search for bodies.
Speaker 11 (24:39):
Ira Hindley appointed police towards Shining Brook, about two miles
from where.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Victims Leslie and Danny and John Kilbride.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Were buried, the body of sixteen year old Pauline Reed,
missing for over two decades, was found the following year.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
What you must appreciate is We've recovered a body that's
been in the ground for a long time. The body
is well preserved.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
For Brady, choosing to reveal details to Fred Harrison was
more than just revenge on Hindley. It was a chance
for him to gain omnipotence over the macabre crimes that
he once described as an existential exercise.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
The world was as it was and as he had
established it, and the order was being upset by Mara Hindley.
He re established control over that world and herd life
as well.
Speaker 10 (25:27):
A high speed convoy took Ian Brady into the outside
world for the first time in twenty one years. This morning,
collecting him at dawn from his Merseyside.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Meant some months later, Brady announced to police he would
assist their search for his undiscovered victim, Keith Bennett.
Speaker 16 (25:44):
He sounded on the phone very confident, self assertive and
so on and something which is quite new to me.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Once on the more, police observed Brady walking purposefully in
a specific direction, and he claimed to be disorientated and
confused by changes to the landscape. Keith Bennett's body remained unfound.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Withholding the information as to where bodies might be buried
is an enormously pleasurable sense of control for somebody who
is obsessed with control.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
No site was found. After eleven hours on the moor,
Brady was led back to a range.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Robert Malcolm McCulloch, the psychiatrist who treated Brady in the
nineteen eighties, suggested that he may have had another motive
for assisting the police.
Speaker 17 (26:35):
It's just possible that Ian Brady was on the moor
and checked the site without letting on as it were.
Final control is the possession of the body. I know
you don't know. You want to know, and I'm not
(26:58):
going to tell you.
Speaker 12 (27:03):
He knows.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
You see, you still got a bit of power, hey,
that bit of poet to keep dawns in the families, Well,
he still got that. He thinks he's in charge. Dun'te.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
July twenty twelve. Ian Brady's condition is worsening. Recently, Jackie
Powell's role has developed. She is executor to Brady's will,
and in light of his precarious health, she's taken on
additional legal responsibilities.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
All he wanted to do was get on with the
power of attorney, make sure all the doctors knew about it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
The power of attorney.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
What do you mean the power.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Of attorney as to whether he gets resuscitated or not
feeling well. I just feel that he's probably given up
the will to fate. He doesn't look as if he's
got anything left in him. So the difficulty is with
him lying flat on his back and the emphysemia. There's
a feed coagulating in his long area and therefore either
(28:18):
choking him, drowned in him, or him get pneumonia.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
It appears that Brady will end his days within the
walls of the institution he loathes. Brady was first moved
to Ashworth Hospital in nineteen eighty five after developing acute
psychotic symptoms, hearing voices and exhibiting delusion or behavior.
Speaker 16 (28:50):
I took the view then that anyone who commits crimes
of disorder really needs psychiatric treatment, because no rational person
would commit the crimes that Brady committed.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
In the clinical setting of Ashworth, Brady's more extreme psychotic
symptoms abated with a regime of medication, but fundamentally Brady's
psychopathy was untreatable.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
The interview was in fact about a battle of control.
Speaker 14 (29:29):
It was more like listening to a monologue than engaging
in a conversation.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
This was somebody who would manipulate me to his own
ends if he could.
Speaker 14 (29:45):
After several meetings with it, I was quite glad not
to have any further involvement in the case.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
His new circumstances afforded him greater freedoms. He was able
to correspond with the outside world, allowing him to seek
an audience less likely to challenge him, Among them the
now retired religious studies teacher Alan Keighley.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Jesus Christ I usually teaching about on evil cause teaching
on evil course.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I did a.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Course on evil for the point of view philosophy, theology
and religion and all the other dimensions. And I wrote
to the Invraiety because he's supposed to be the daddy
of the devil and the ultimate path.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
We had a.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Little correspondence for a bit, and I said, would you
like me to come up and sink with here?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
You say, but generally, you say, wouldn't engage with the
clinicians or the psychiatrists at Ashworth?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
No? No, why not?
Speaker 18 (30:59):
Well sick, yeah, I mean some people like yours shower.
Speaker 9 (31:09):
And they might have all these.
Speaker 18 (31:12):
Qualifications, but I mean it wouldn't prepare them at all,
I can assure you free and Brady, I mean, he's
been doing forty five years and he mat mince meat
of them. But in the end he got to just
ignore them, you know, waste it down talking to them.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
You know they read the late this sort of.
Speaker 18 (31:35):
Build it in in the psychology today.
Speaker 8 (31:38):
What the hell is that got to do with life?
Speaker 18 (31:41):
And of course you'd have to know Brady what he
would think of Heck, yeah, you were donishing with.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Brady didn't merely dismiss his psychiatrists, as I would learn.
He now claims he manipulated them in order to orchestrate
his move to.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
What are all the notes that he's added to this?
Speaker 8 (32:04):
These are notations he's made.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
I caught sight of a note in Brady's handwriting on
a document relating to a mental health tribunal that.
Speaker 8 (32:13):
Stanislavski, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
He's a method acting teacher name.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
He states that he used this methodology whilst in prison
by mimicking other patients where as he worked on the
hospital wing there.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
So he faked his diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
He faked his symptoms in order to get moved from
prison to hospital.
Speaker 8 (32:33):
That's what he's stating.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yes, yeah, you're familiar with.
Speaker 16 (32:39):
It's not something I'm familiar with, but I'm not surprised
by it. He's perfectly capable of doing this.
Speaker 5 (32:47):
A man like this will want to do anybody because
of the psychopathic personality. But I think it's quite difficult
to tom people the symptoms he was malifest.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Brady's promotion of his grandiose self image.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Knew no bounds. I did not.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
He said that any instruments of murder.
Speaker 12 (33:14):
I wasn't even kill me.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I said, no, I don't know there are any instruments,
and I didn't know.
Speaker 18 (33:22):
It went on from there.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
The sinister dimensions of his narcissism were never far from
the surface.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
He said.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
Another very interesting thing during his interview was that he
maintained that some of the victims, or two of the victims,
the cause of death had not been established. What I
felt that he was implying was that actually he had
(33:54):
frightened them to death. That actually his ability to be
so powerful psychologically meant that the pathologists had been unable
to determine the exact cause of death of the child.
What I thought he might be implying was that he
was so powerful mentally that he had frightened his child
(34:17):
to death.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Brady's pathology had proved untreatable to his clinicians. In nineteen
ninety nine, the hospital tightened security and he was moved
to another ward.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
On the morning of the thirty of September nineteen ninety nine,
a crowd of prison warders in riot great gear, crashed helmets,
plastic shields, padded jackets, rushed in, held my arms violently
up behind my back, pushed my head to the floor,
and always held in these violent holes, wrenched and dragged
(34:54):
me around like a parser for over an hour.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Brady's possessions were confiscated. He was stripped of his privileges.
In protest, he immediately went on hunger strike. This was
to become his most enduring campaign of all.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
He was taken over to the medical center and a
tuber was inserted up his nose and into his stomach.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
And what was that scene like to witness?
Speaker 8 (35:21):
Not very pleasant?
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Is n X ray to make sure the tubers in position?
It wasn't the first time, so they had to do
it the second time.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And what was the atmosphere like in the room?
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Not extremely tense?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Did you not want to resist that?
Speaker 4 (35:39):
He did resist verbally, he once his wishes known that
he does not agree or wish to have this tube inserted.
Speaker 6 (35:48):
Back in court after thirty four years, Ian Brady, please.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Let me die. This hunger strike was different. His only
demand was to be allowed to end his life. He
went to the High Court in a bid to stop
force feeding.
Speaker 14 (36:04):
I was asked to comment upon his mental capacity, and
in fact I thought he did understand that what he
was doing was potentially putting his life at risk.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Dr Collins, Brady's responsible clinician at Ashworth, called his hunger
strike a florid example of his psychopathy in action.
Speaker 14 (36:23):
The one thing you don't want to do with a
person with psychopathy is get into a battle of wills.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Brady felt the need to re establish control. What better
way to do this than through a hunger strike.
Speaker 14 (36:36):
There's something gratifying for the individual about a battle of wills.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
And he is still determined to end his life.
Speaker 15 (36:41):
Yes, I mean he has no requests and no demands
apart from he wants to have the bibe to die.
Speaker 14 (36:47):
A person with psychopathy is not going to back down
in that battle.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
It was quite a dramatic, in tense environment.
Speaker 11 (36:55):
Leave to appeal was denied by the court today, but
his solicitor says Ian Brady is determined to fight on.
Speaker 15 (37:01):
I think people you know did from the strain of everything.
Speaker 17 (37:05):
Brady has now been taken back to Ashworth Hospital where
he will continue to be fed through a plastic cube.
Speaker 15 (37:10):
And we recollect Ashworth's psychiatrists saying, you know, it's more
demanding dealing with him than perhaps the rest of the
award put together. Mister Justice Morris Kaine agreed that the
proceedings were a staging post and his intention was to
protest and to win a power struggle, but not to die.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
The Court's decision to continue force feeding set in train
a standoff between Ashworth and Brady that would last until now, because.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
When you think of somebody like in Brady, you're getting
somebody right down the very furthest end of the spectrum,
and by that time you're dealing with something which psychiatry
is not All psychologists still not very good at really
defining and explaining, but actually you're dealing with a very,
very unusual and very extreme human being.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Almost half a century has passed since the horrific murders
committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were uncovered on
Saddleworth More. Despite the decades, this desolate landscape still maintains
Brady's last secret, the undiscovered grave of victim Keith Bennett,
(38:46):
who has murdered four days after his twelfth birthday in
nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 7 (38:53):
A simple prayer from Keith Bennett's mother, please find my
son's body.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Despite the official police search being called off in two
thousand and nine, Keith Bennett's mother, Winnie Johnson, continued to
search for her missing son for the rest of her life.
Speaker 13 (39:10):
I will never give up, never in a month, Sunder
if it takes me to me very well Kelly on
toul Learn.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Before her recent death, Winnie's final wish was to give
her missing son a proper burial, and in his final days,
Brady remains the only hope for those still searching for
Keith Bennett's remains.
Speaker 12 (39:32):
But to think that he's going to die, what he's
going to take, that's an a grave of him where
Keith is? And I feel so sorry for Winny, I
really really do.
Speaker 9 (39:44):
Is the only one what knows he is? You only
one what can put winning to rest into.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
All the whope?
Speaker 9 (39:53):
What Winner's got lies on him.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
A month before Winnie Johnson's death, Jackie Powell told me
about some instructions she had unexpectedly received from Ian Brady.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
I received a letter and a sealed envelope which said
on the front of it to be opened in the
event of my death. He says he doesn't wish to
take secrets to his grade. And within the sealed envelope
is a letter to Winnie Johnson. Within that is the
(40:32):
means to her possibly.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
Being able to rest.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
And that's paraphrase, that's not the batam.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
What does he mean by that.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Well, clearly there's something within the letter that may be
able to find her son, I would suggest, and.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
He's given the impression to you over the years that
he knows exactly where the body is.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
That he's more than giving me the impression. He has
told me that he knows where the body is. And
I've told police that.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
You went to the police police.
Speaker 8 (41:04):
The police came and interviewed me.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
So it's kind of like a victory dance, isn't it,
to say, I give you information on my death, and
it's saying that I have possession of the of the
body right.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Up until I don't like that at all.
Speaker 8 (41:19):
No, I don't like the way you're putting that at all.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Isn't that what it is? Though? Isn't that what you're saying?
Speaker 8 (41:25):
Like that at all?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Why not?
Speaker 4 (41:27):
I don't like the way you put that victory dance.
I don't like those words, puddy.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
But it is a power game, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
Well, anybody with any psychopathology, obviously there is.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
The aspect of.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Their personality is that of power and control. So of
course it's a power. Of course it's a control mechanism.
If you look at the person for who the person is,
then it would quite clearly anybody with a psycho pathology
would have these traits about them.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
But if you've got this information, you.
Speaker 8 (42:03):
Stop here, Stop here, stop here.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
I'm just trying to understand the situation you're in and
what the dilemma that you face and what you need
to do about it, what have you done in the past.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
But when you've been given knowledge.
Speaker 8 (42:17):
Of that, I don't know what's in the envelope. It's sealed.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
So what do you think might be in that letter? Then?
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, it might be
nothing in the letter. The many games have been played
before that is the mind of a psychopath. And so
until I'm actually sure what's in the letter and that
there is something in the letter, then morally I'm in
a dilemma. Yes, but until I'm actually sure that there
(42:48):
is something in the letter, then I can't really act.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
You attempt to just to open it.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Professionally, that wouldn't be and that possibly is why I've
got a letter to see.
Speaker 8 (43:04):
If I would open it, what are.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
You going to do about it? I mean, what do
you do about it?
Speaker 8 (43:10):
Well, you know what I'm going to do about you.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Jackie wouldn't show me the sealed envelope addressed to Winnie Johnson.
But whatever its contents, it has come too late for
Winnie and Brady's instruction that it only be opened after
his death seems to show that this was not an
act of empathy for the families or remorse for his crimes.
(43:39):
It is difficult to see this as anything other than
yet another example of his cruel games.
Speaker 5 (43:45):
When I interviewed him, he was absolutely aliment that he
had no remorse whatsoever, and he told me that everyone
would wait till doomsday before he will ever express any remorse.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
For what he had done.
Speaker 5 (44:03):
This will go on to the end of his life.
You have to see Ian Brady as someone who's had
grossly abnormal personality traits, sadism, intermittent episodes of severe mental
illness that come and go, but most of all, the
psychopathic personality, and this has been present since childhood throughout
(44:29):
his adolescence is continued and although he's older, the same
features of his abnormal personality are as live today as
they were right back at the beginning.
Speaker 9 (44:45):
He's always there.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
It's almost like it's a sort of shadow in your
life all the time.
Speaker 12 (44:52):
It is almost one.
Speaker 9 (44:54):
It is a shoulder when you are He's still got
us all, He's still got all the fun works.
Speaker 12 (45:00):
Yeah, well you're not going to be to him. Where
Keith is?
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Are you?
Speaker 2 (45:11):
You know?
Speaker 9 (45:12):
The main thing now is that we find Keith. Open
for any apologies as sorries or you know, or anything
wor just where is Keith?
Speaker 12 (45:30):
M hm okay, I just wake up wishing yet it'll
be dead. I'll jump for joy and that's the truth.
Soon he is out of the way, the better. Just
wait for that day now, m.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
M hmm.
Speaker 19 (46:37):
Support information can be found online. Go to Channel four
dot com and search for Ian Brady, and another chance
to see the poignant story of the late Winnie Johnson
search for her son Keith Bennett. Dear mister Brady starts
in just a minute over on More four.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
The more we look
The more we look, the more we learn.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Documentary Zone four, sponsored by.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Hunt Ian Brady, Britain's notorious child killer, sadist, psychopath and
longest serving prisoner. The abhorrent crimes he committed with accomplice
(00:39):
Myrah Hindley in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Shocked the nation.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
This is a story of his attempts to manipulate and
control throughout nearly half a century of incarceration and psychiatric confinement,
told by those who know and work with him, many
of them talking for the first time, and.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
One of the very few people he trusts.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Possibly well, people try and get into his head, you
won't get into his head.
Speaker 5 (01:13):
Do you feel yourself in the presence of a human
being who isn't really quite human?
Speaker 6 (01:18):
One by one, their bodies were found, all except Keith Bennett.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Now seventy four and brought close to death by a
recent illness. Brady sent a letter which suggested he was
about to reveal the secret he has held since the murders.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
A simple prayer from Keith Bennett's mother, please find my
son's body.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
The burial site of Keith Bennett.
Speaker 8 (01:43):
I received a letter.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
Within the sealed envelope is a letter to Winnie Johnson,
that is the means to her possibly being able to rest.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Is this a genuine gesture to help a grieving family
knowing that Winnie Johnson was nearing the end of her life,
or one more cruel game to assert power and satisfy
his sadistic nature.
Speaker 9 (02:06):
You so you still will a bit of power, a
bit of poe to keep daunting the families and taunting
Winnie Johnson.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
I had been making a film about Ian Brady's thirteen
year hunger strike, his battle to stop being force fed
by psychiatric authorities and return to prison. I'd come to
a hotel outside Liverpool to meet his mental health advocate
when events took an unexpected turn.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
What's happened?
Speaker 8 (02:41):
It's crazy, It's absolutely crazy.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It's just got to give me time.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
I'm not coming to there about an hour and a half.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Is it a very serious situation?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Though extremely serious as far as all executives are being called,
power of a journeys are being called.
Speaker 10 (02:56):
And I'm not going to talk to you anymore on
the film.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Paddy, and really not see we're seeing about an and
a half. Okay, all right.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Good afternoon.
Speaker 11 (03:06):
War's murderer Ian Brady has been taken to hospital after
reportedly suffering a seizure.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
The seventy four year old child serial.
Speaker 8 (03:12):
Killer was due to it.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Ian Brady had collapsed in his high secure psychiatric ward
and been rushed to hospital.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Say for that his legal team have told me in
the last ten minutes that he is very, very unwell.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I had a.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Phone call at approximately it's three o'clock to say that
he was foaming it around the mouth, he couldn't swallow,
and that he was jerking in the chair.
Speaker 8 (03:35):
They bought in a.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Defibrillator and they started to fibulating. They then took him
to a too exactly hospital.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
As his advocate, Jackie's a key figure in Brady's life,
expressing his wishes and instructions. In the fifteen years she's
worked with him, she's become familiar with the scale of
activity that accompanies his every move. Do you feel there's
a disproportionate amount of resources going into the and Brady's
case where other people are lacking.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Well, they're the humongous amount of security to transport a
seventy four year old man for me to be obviously
he has to go in an ambulance, But does he
need armed response? And does he need helicopters when there's
other people that leave prison, leave hospital with nothing, with
(04:27):
nothing at all.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
News has spread of Brady's condition, and Jackie soon becomes
the focus of constant media interest.
Speaker 4 (04:38):
Hello, Well, nobody knows what the matter is at the moment.
They use a lady I spoke to from sky before.
I wouldn't be able to do an interview today. I'm
absolutely up to my eyes. Oh, for God's sake.
Speaker 8 (05:00):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Decades on from his crimes, Brady continues to provoke intense fascination.
What possible motivation could he have had for inflicting such unimaginable,
suffering child murders that he later described as an existential exercise,
crimes that had their genesis in an apparently innocent relationship.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
Brady appeared to be a striking personality, riding around on
a motorbike, the man from nowhere who knew deep thoughts,
who read books, even who could philosophize. He decided that
he would prove to her that he could do something
that was superhuman, take a life, because there is nothing
(05:54):
more absolute in terms of exercising power over other people
than taking their lives. He wasn't out to demonstrate he
was physically powerful but mentally powerful, and to cold bloodedly
pick up a child, to abduct that child, kill that
child statistically, and then anonymously bury it in a place
(06:19):
like the Moors demonstrated a powerful mind that would make
an impression on the girl that apparently was infatuated with him.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
October nineteen sixty five, acting on a tip off, police
discovered the body of seventeen year old Edward Evans at
sixteen Wardoorbrook Avenue. He had been bludgeoned with an axe
and strangled. A few days later, they recovered the bodies
(07:05):
of two children from Saddleworth, Moore, first Leslie and Downy,
who disappeared from a Manchester fairground two years previously. She
had been raped and strangled.
Speaker 12 (07:24):
I mean I was fifteen at the time. I remember myself, me, mum,
my dad went on to where the fair ground was
and just going down, just shouting and am out Yeah
more I do remember, yeah, even though it was a
(07:47):
long time ago.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
But evening we found in.
Speaker 8 (07:51):
Leslie asked he had helped.
Speaker 13 (07:54):
Because I don't think anyone had harm.
Speaker 8 (07:56):
How you know.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Days later, the body of twelve year old John Kilbride
was found. He too, had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Speaker 13 (08:09):
And just couldn't see him going away with anyone. He
wasn't a kind of why you would leave home for
any reason.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
On the sixth of May nineteen sixty six, just six
months after the abolition of the death penalty, Ian Brady
and Myra Hindley were each sentenced to life imprisonment. For
(08:46):
the families of the victims, time has stood still ever since.
Speaker 9 (09:00):
To express what the feeling is. You couldn't understand what
the feeling is. You know, the angle, what's there, and
and plus the passion for your brother, you know, and
for the other liquors. That's what happened, and you just
(09:22):
can't understand it.
Speaker 12 (09:23):
You can't get your red round.
Speaker 9 (09:25):
Why this picture him?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
When was that taken? That was taking.
Speaker 9 (09:34):
It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Two or three.
Speaker 9 (09:40):
Week, four week, just after John he's gone missing. And
then this chair area was where John sat always stayed
like that until the day where they found John. Because
we've always thought you were coming back.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
How long was it after you went missing that he
was found two years?
Speaker 9 (10:06):
Two years after, which is a long long time when
you remembering your broildering youdle early hell years, you know,
all long long.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Brady and Hindley carried out the murders periodically over two years.
During that time, they would frequently revisit and photograph each
other at the grave sites of their victims. Following Brady's arrest,
(10:50):
police discovered these macabre trophies and other mementoes, a tape
recording photographs of Leslie and Downey in her last moments,
and Brady's cryptic ledger, a coldly precise list of actions
(11:11):
to carry out the perfect murder.
Speaker 12 (11:21):
Leslie was found on the moors at the back where
we lived. When they actually found her, I just remember
going going to the in our house and my mum
had to go out to identify her, and we're just waiting,
(11:42):
you know, waiting to hear all the family who was
back at the house. I just remember coming in and
just you know, just not insane. Yeah, it was, as
you know, I can't imagine what my mum had gone through,
(12:15):
you know, what she had to see, what she had
to hear. She always get things to herself me, Mum,
you know she wouldn't She shouldn't tell me anything, including
what was on them tapes. And now she just kept
(12:37):
back to herself. She did what was to know. I
wouldn't want to know.
Speaker 14 (12:43):
Yeah, people would talk of these crimes as being senseless,
and they don't make any sense to normal people because
they're driven by the impulse to control and hurt other people,
which is the fundamental abnormality in sadism.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Many of the aspects of the killing don't just involve
physical harm. The actual enjoyment and pleasure of terror in
the victim, as well as the sort of the destruction
of them, both physically and also sort of psychologically, is
a key component and one which the individual finds enormously pleasurable.
Speaker 9 (13:21):
How many more or more?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Boat many more?
Speaker 9 (13:31):
As you, Golush not said anything in the boat, hoblyns.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
The consequences of Brady's crimes would not end with his imprisonment.
Nearly fifty years on, he still attempts to exert power
and control over the families of his victims.
Speaker 12 (13:51):
He will never die until he's dead. When he heard
about this seizure that he had, I thought that that
might be it. Maybe we then you can get on
with our lives properly and put the room in the
wreck now as it is.
Speaker 15 (14:14):
Was murderer Ian Brady has been returned to Ashworth's Psychiatric Hospital.
Speaker 16 (14:18):
After undergoing medical.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Ian Brady was returned to Ashworth in a serious condition.
The two broken vertebra he had suffered in his seizure
mean he cannot be force fed for the first time
since he began his hunger strike nearly thirteen years ago.
(14:40):
Jackie Powell is on her way to see him. Besides
his solicitor, she is the only person who has permission
to visit him. How's he managed to keep up the
determination to refuse food?
Speaker 4 (14:52):
He has a very strong will, that's extremely strong will.
He doesn't speak to his care team, his clinicians, psychologists,
social workers. He said he feels as if he's dead,
has settled in a grave.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Brady has spent the last twenty seven years of his
sentence sectioned in Ashworth High Secure Hospital, an institution for
which he has developed a deep antipathy. Jackie was appointed
Brady's advocate under the Mental Health Act in nineteen ninety nine.
(15:38):
And what makes that such a lasting relationship.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
I suppose because unlike most people, I'm not interested in
what happened fifty years ago, and I've never questioned him
about his index offenses. It's up to him whether he
discusses them. I never question him over them.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Can you feel his rights are important?
Speaker 9 (16:04):
Well?
Speaker 4 (16:04):
I feel everybody's rights are important. Yes, and many would
say that that shouldn't be the case. But I feel
every human being, whoever they are, it should be treated
with some amount of respect and dignity.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
With her long standing proximity to Brady, Jackie was uniquely
placed to offer an insight into his psychopathy. Now directed
towards the institution he loathes.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
Ashwiz operates on what I've termed the crematorium principle, extensive
landscaped grounds, decorative trees and shrubs designed exclusively to impress
visitors and divert their attention from the smoke installations and
the absence of human life. In short, Ashworth is merely
(17:06):
an open grave for patients, or more accurately, a concrete tomb.
Speaker 8 (17:11):
So that's how he was feeling.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Then, how would you characterize his relationship with Ashworth?
Speaker 4 (17:20):
He has no relationship with Ashwith he is any relationship
has completely broken down. In nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 17 (17:29):
Ian Brady stopped eating at the end of last month
because he was angry that he'd been transferred to a
new ward from a part of the hospital he'd been
in for four years.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
At the end of nineteen ninety nine, Brady began the
hunger strike that has lasted to this day.
Speaker 11 (17:43):
Mister Justice Kay totally and Brady, but if he continues
the hunger strike, the high security mental hospital where he's
held has the right to continue to force feed him.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
Brady has not eaten for nearly thirteen years. To keep
him alive, he has been force fed a high calorific
liquid through a nasal gast cube. I wanted to understand
what motivates Brady's behavior. Has anybody been able to comprehend
(18:15):
the nature of the forces that drive him. I went
to meet the man who has represented him longer than
any other, the eminent civil rights lawyer, Benedict Bernberg.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
What was he like to work with? Very difficult.
Speaker 16 (18:36):
He's an extremely difficult person. He's a man with a
terrific built up sense of anger inside him, and that's
kept on, kept very often, kept him going over the years.
Anger directed at various things and people, institutions of course,
like the prison and the hospital, newspapers, doctor, even solicitors
(19:02):
and so on. You know, it boils up in him
and that's part of his.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
Pathology according to the logic of that pathology. By committing
the murders, Brady proved to himself that he was above morality,
and even after imprisonment, Hindley remained faithful to him and
his ideal.
Speaker 6 (19:29):
Brady created this killing cult that was a cult of two.
He had sunk everything into proving what a powerful personality
he was. This was his cocoon, his little world, a
demented mind that could apparently see clearly, that had constructed
(19:52):
a reality to make sense of his existence. It was
a perverse existence, of course, and innocent children paid.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Despite their separation, the bond remained powerful. Brady staged the
first of many hunger strikes after he was denied conjugal
visits in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
He seemed to believe that he was in spiritual communication
with Myra Hindley. This then became a part of his
initial battle that he inappropriately was insisting on having visits
Mara Hindley, and he went on hunger strike to try
and achieved that.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
It was a union that provided an outlet for Brady's
sadistic urges, but ultimately the possibility of freedom became more
important to Myra Hindley in May nineteen seventy two, she
wrote to him breaking off their relationship.
Speaker 6 (20:51):
She betrayed him by denying the sanctity of that cult
that they had, namely that they had killed children.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
For Brady, it was more than the loss of a relationship.
It was the destruction of the pre eminent symbol of
his powers.
Speaker 5 (21:19):
The nature hunger strikes and his demands seemed to be
become more bizarre, and also the nature of his preoccupation
was starvation and food became increasingly bizarre, things like putting
very large amounts of salt on his food, so he vomited.
So his mental state deteriorated very severely, and he appeared
(21:40):
to be starving himself to death. Not any longer in
a protest, but on the basis of very bizarre beliefs.
I think that the battle what we're talking about, this
battle with authority, it's not a battle with authority, it's
a battle in his mind with himself.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Over the course of the nineteen seventies, Brady's mental condition
deteriorated towards psychosis, but he was to find an ally
in the prison reformer Lord Longford, who famously became involved
with the Moor's murderers and agitated for Brady's transfer to
psychiatric care.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
You visited Brady quite recently.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
How did you sum up his condition?
Speaker 8 (22:22):
Well, I'm not a medical man, but I've never seen anybody.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Oh look quite so ill.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
By that time, Brady had been in prison for eighteen years,
mainly in solitary confinement.
Speaker 12 (22:35):
He looks like a skeleton.
Speaker 8 (22:37):
There is a mental factor there.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
It was Lord Longford who introduced Brady to Benedict Bernberg.
Despite the onset of mental illness, Brady's need for control
compelled him to fight countless legal campaigns.
Speaker 16 (22:56):
I've never come across anyone prisoner who's such an inveterate
litigator as the young Brady. He had running battles with
authority throughout his time, right up to now. In fact,
he's an inveterate campaigner.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
As pressure mounted for his transfer to a special hospital,
a journalist Fred Harrison started visiting him in prison.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
At the time I was seeing him, he was still
tormented as an individual, not by the guilt of what
he had done, but by the whole history of what
became the personality of Ian Brady.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
At the same time, Longford was spearheading a highly public
campaign for Hindley's parole.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
A good many people have come to know and like
her very much.
Speaker 8 (23:47):
So as I said, she was completely ready.
Speaker 18 (23:49):
She has been for years to come to them.
Speaker 6 (23:52):
Brady who that was a fake, that it was a
show for the sake of people like Lord Longford. It
left him angry and he wanted to do anything he could,
assuming he could, to block her getting out. And so
I believe that part of his motivation was that by
feeding me enough information about her complicity that that would
(24:15):
damage her prospects of securing parole.
Speaker 7 (24:20):
Peace have now been searching these wars for a week
without success, and Chief Superintendent.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Toppings in nineteen eighty six fed Harrison's revelations cause a sensation.
In an attempt to salvage her bid for parole. Hindley
confessed to her involvement in other murders and assists the
police in their search for bodies.
Speaker 11 (24:39):
Ira Hindley appointed police towards Shining Brook, about two miles
from where.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Victims Leslie and Danny and John Kilbride.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Were buried, the body of sixteen year old Pauline Reed,
missing for over two decades, was found the following year.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
What you must appreciate is We've recovered a body that's
been in the ground for a long time. The body
is well preserved.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
For Brady, choosing to reveal details to Fred Harrison was
more than just revenge on Hindley. It was a chance
for him to gain omnipotence over the macabre crimes that
he once described as an existential exercise.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
The world was as it was and as he had
established it, and the order was being upset by Mara Hindley.
He re established control over that world and herd life
as well.
Speaker 10 (25:27):
A high speed convoy took Ian Brady into the outside
world for the first time in twenty one years. This morning,
collecting him at dawn from his Merseyside.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
Meant some months later, Brady announced to police he would
assist their search for his undiscovered victim, Keith Bennett.
Speaker 16 (25:44):
He sounded on the phone very confident, self assertive and
so on and something which is quite new to me.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Once on the more, police observed Brady walking purposefully in
a specific direction, and he claimed to be disorientated and
confused by changes to the landscape. Keith Bennett's body remained unfound.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Withholding the information as to where bodies might be buried
is an enormously pleasurable sense of control for somebody who
is obsessed with control.
Speaker 10 (26:21):
No site was found. After eleven hours on the moor,
Brady was led back to a range.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Robert Malcolm McCulloch, the psychiatrist who treated Brady in the
nineteen eighties, suggested that he may have had another motive
for assisting the police.
Speaker 17 (26:35):
It's just possible that Ian Brady was on the moor
and checked the site without letting on as it were.
Final control is the possession of the body. I know
you don't know. You want to know, and I'm not
(26:58):
going to tell you.
Speaker 12 (27:03):
He knows.
Speaker 9 (27:05):
You see, you still got a bit of power, hey,
that bit of poet to keep dawns in the families, Well,
he still got that. He thinks he's in charge. Dun'te.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
July twenty twelve. Ian Brady's condition is worsening. Recently, Jackie
Powell's role has developed. She is executor to Brady's will,
and in light of his precarious health, she's taken on
additional legal responsibilities.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
All he wanted to do was get on with the
power of attorney, make sure all the doctors knew about it.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
The power of attorney.
Speaker 8 (27:53):
What do you mean the power.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Of attorney as to whether he gets resuscitated or not
feeling well. I just feel that he's probably given up
the will to fate. He doesn't look as if he's
got anything left in him. So the difficulty is with
him lying flat on his back and the emphysemia. There's
a feed coagulating in his long area and therefore either
(28:18):
choking him, drowned in him, or him get pneumonia.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
It appears that Brady will end his days within the
walls of the institution he loathes. Brady was first moved
to Ashworth Hospital in nineteen eighty five after developing acute
psychotic symptoms, hearing voices and exhibiting delusion or behavior.
Speaker 16 (28:50):
I took the view then that anyone who commits crimes
of disorder really needs psychiatric treatment, because no rational person
would commit the crimes that Brady committed.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
In the clinical setting of Ashworth, Brady's more extreme psychotic
symptoms abated with a regime of medication, but fundamentally Brady's
psychopathy was untreatable.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
The interview was in fact about a battle of control.
Speaker 14 (29:29):
It was more like listening to a monologue than engaging
in a conversation.
Speaker 5 (29:36):
This was somebody who would manipulate me to his own
ends if he could.
Speaker 14 (29:45):
After several meetings with it, I was quite glad not
to have any further involvement in the case.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
His new circumstances afforded him greater freedoms. He was able
to correspond with the outside world, allowing him to seek
an audience less likely to challenge him, Among them the
now retired religious studies teacher Alan Keighley.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Jesus Christ I usually teaching about on evil cause teaching
on evil course.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I did a.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Course on evil for the point of view philosophy, theology
and religion and all the other dimensions. And I wrote
to the Invraiety because he's supposed to be the daddy
of the devil and the ultimate path.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
We had a.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Little correspondence for a bit, and I said, would you
like me to come up and sink with here?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
You say, but generally, you say, wouldn't engage with the
clinicians or the psychiatrists at Ashworth?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
No? No, why not?
Speaker 18 (30:59):
Well sick, yeah, I mean some people like yours shower.
Speaker 9 (31:09):
And they might have all these.
Speaker 18 (31:12):
Qualifications, but I mean it wouldn't prepare them at all,
I can assure you free and Brady, I mean, he's
been doing forty five years and he mat mince meat
of them. But in the end he got to just
ignore them, you know, waste it down talking to them.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
You know they read the late this sort of.
Speaker 18 (31:35):
Build it in in the psychology today.
Speaker 8 (31:38):
What the hell is that got to do with life?
Speaker 18 (31:41):
And of course you'd have to know Brady what he
would think of Heck, yeah, you were donishing with.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Brady didn't merely dismiss his psychiatrists, as I would learn.
He now claims he manipulated them in order to orchestrate
his move to.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
What are all the notes that he's added to this?
Speaker 8 (32:04):
These are notations he's made.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
I caught sight of a note in Brady's handwriting on
a document relating to a mental health tribunal that.
Speaker 8 (32:13):
Stanislavski, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
He's a method acting teacher name.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
He states that he used this methodology whilst in prison
by mimicking other patients where as he worked on the
hospital wing there.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
So he faked his diagnosis.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
He faked his symptoms in order to get moved from
prison to hospital.
Speaker 8 (32:33):
That's what he's stating.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yes, yeah, you're familiar with.
Speaker 16 (32:39):
It's not something I'm familiar with, but I'm not surprised
by it. He's perfectly capable of doing this.
Speaker 5 (32:47):
A man like this will want to do anybody because
of the psychopathic personality. But I think it's quite difficult
to tom people the symptoms he was malifest.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Brady's promotion of his grandiose self image.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Knew no bounds. I did not.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
He said that any instruments of murder.
Speaker 12 (33:14):
I wasn't even kill me.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
I said, no, I don't know there are any instruments,
and I didn't know.
Speaker 18 (33:22):
It went on from there.
Speaker 3 (33:27):
The sinister dimensions of his narcissism were never far from
the surface.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
He said.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
Another very interesting thing during his interview was that he
maintained that some of the victims, or two of the victims,
the cause of death had not been established. What I
felt that he was implying was that actually he had
(33:54):
frightened them to death. That actually his ability to be
so powerful psychologically meant that the pathologists had been unable
to determine the exact cause of death of the child.
What I thought he might be implying was that he
was so powerful mentally that he had frightened his child
(34:17):
to death.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
Brady's pathology had proved untreatable to his clinicians. In nineteen
ninety nine, the hospital tightened security and he was moved
to another ward.
Speaker 4 (34:32):
On the morning of the thirty of September nineteen ninety nine,
a crowd of prison warders in riot great gear, crashed helmets,
plastic shields, padded jackets, rushed in, held my arms violently
up behind my back, pushed my head to the floor,
and always held in these violent holes, wrenched and dragged
(34:54):
me around like a parser for over an hour.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
Brady's possessions were confiscated. He was stripped of his privileges.
In protest, he immediately went on hunger strike. This was
to become his most enduring campaign of all.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
He was taken over to the medical center and a
tuber was inserted up his nose and into his stomach.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
And what was that scene like to witness?
Speaker 8 (35:21):
Not very pleasant?
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Is n X ray to make sure the tubers in position?
It wasn't the first time, so they had to do
it the second time.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
And what was the atmosphere like in the room?
Speaker 8 (35:35):
Not extremely tense?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Did you not want to resist that?
Speaker 4 (35:39):
He did resist verbally, he once his wishes known that
he does not agree or wish to have this tube inserted.
Speaker 6 (35:48):
Back in court after thirty four years, Ian Brady, please.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Let me die. This hunger strike was different. His only
demand was to be allowed to end his life. He
went to the High Court in a bid to stop
force feeding.
Speaker 14 (36:04):
I was asked to comment upon his mental capacity, and
in fact I thought he did understand that what he
was doing was potentially putting his life at risk.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Dr Collins, Brady's responsible clinician at Ashworth, called his hunger
strike a florid example of his psychopathy in action.
Speaker 14 (36:23):
The one thing you don't want to do with a
person with psychopathy is get into a battle of wills.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
Brady felt the need to re establish control. What better
way to do this than through a hunger strike.
Speaker 14 (36:36):
There's something gratifying for the individual about a battle of wills.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
And he is still determined to end his life.
Speaker 15 (36:41):
Yes, I mean he has no requests and no demands
apart from he wants to have the bibe to die.
Speaker 14 (36:47):
A person with psychopathy is not going to back down
in that battle.
Speaker 1 (36:52):
It was quite a dramatic, in tense environment.
Speaker 11 (36:55):
Leave to appeal was denied by the court today, but
his solicitor says Ian Brady is determined to fight on.
Speaker 15 (37:01):
I think people you know did from the strain of everything.
Speaker 17 (37:05):
Brady has now been taken back to Ashworth Hospital where
he will continue to be fed through a plastic cube.
Speaker 15 (37:10):
And we recollect Ashworth's psychiatrists saying, you know, it's more
demanding dealing with him than perhaps the rest of the
award put together. Mister Justice Morris Kaine agreed that the
proceedings were a staging post and his intention was to
protest and to win a power struggle, but not to die.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
The Court's decision to continue force feeding set in train
a standoff between Ashworth and Brady that would last until now, because.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
When you think of somebody like in Brady, you're getting
somebody right down the very furthest end of the spectrum,
and by that time you're dealing with something which psychiatry
is not All psychologists still not very good at really
defining and explaining, but actually you're dealing with a very,
very unusual and very extreme human being.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Almost half a century has passed since the horrific murders
committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were uncovered on
Saddleworth More. Despite the decades, this desolate landscape still maintains
Brady's last secret, the undiscovered grave of victim Keith Bennett,
(38:46):
who has murdered four days after his twelfth birthday in
nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 7 (38:53):
A simple prayer from Keith Bennett's mother, please find my
son's body.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Despite the official police search being called off in two
thousand and nine, Keith Bennett's mother, Winnie Johnson, continued to
search for her missing son for the rest of her life.
Speaker 13 (39:10):
I will never give up, never in a month, Sunder
if it takes me to me very well Kelly on
toul Learn.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Before her recent death, Winnie's final wish was to give
her missing son a proper burial, and in his final days,
Brady remains the only hope for those still searching for
Keith Bennett's remains.
Speaker 12 (39:32):
But to think that he's going to die, what he's
going to take, that's an a grave of him where
Keith is? And I feel so sorry for Winny, I
really really do.
Speaker 9 (39:44):
Is the only one what knows he is? You only
one what can put winning to rest into.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
All the whope?
Speaker 9 (39:53):
What Winner's got lies on him.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
A month before Winnie Johnson's death, Jackie Powell told me
about some instructions she had unexpectedly received from Ian Brady.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
I received a letter and a sealed envelope which said
on the front of it to be opened in the
event of my death. He says he doesn't wish to
take secrets to his grade. And within the sealed envelope
is a letter to Winnie Johnson. Within that is the
(40:32):
means to her possibly.
Speaker 8 (40:33):
Being able to rest.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
And that's paraphrase, that's not the batam.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
What does he mean by that.
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Well, clearly there's something within the letter that may be
able to find her son, I would suggest, and.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
He's given the impression to you over the years that
he knows exactly where the body is.
Speaker 4 (40:55):
That he's more than giving me the impression. He has
told me that he knows where the body is. And
I've told police that.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
You went to the police police.
Speaker 8 (41:04):
The police came and interviewed me.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
So it's kind of like a victory dance, isn't it,
to say, I give you information on my death, and
it's saying that I have possession of the of the
body right.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
Up until I don't like that at all.
Speaker 8 (41:19):
No, I don't like the way you're putting that at all.
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Isn't that what it is? Though? Isn't that what you're saying?
Speaker 8 (41:25):
Like that at all?
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Why not?
Speaker 4 (41:27):
I don't like the way you put that victory dance.
I don't like those words, puddy.
Speaker 1 (41:33):
But it is a power game, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
Well, anybody with any psychopathology, obviously there is.
Speaker 8 (41:40):
The aspect of.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
Their personality is that of power and control. So of
course it's a power. Of course it's a control mechanism.
If you look at the person for who the person is,
then it would quite clearly anybody with a psycho pathology
would have these traits about them.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
But if you've got this information, you.
Speaker 8 (42:03):
Stop here, Stop here, stop here.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
I'm just trying to understand the situation you're in and
what the dilemma that you face and what you need
to do about it, what have you done in the past.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
But when you've been given knowledge.
Speaker 8 (42:17):
Of that, I don't know what's in the envelope. It's sealed.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
So what do you think might be in that letter? Then?
Speaker 4 (42:26):
Well, to be perfectly honest with you, it might be
nothing in the letter. The many games have been played
before that is the mind of a psychopath. And so
until I'm actually sure what's in the letter and that
there is something in the letter, then morally I'm in
a dilemma. Yes, but until I'm actually sure that there
(42:48):
is something in the letter, then I can't really act.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
You attempt to just to open it.
Speaker 4 (42:57):
Professionally, that wouldn't be and that possibly is why I've
got a letter to see.
Speaker 8 (43:04):
If I would open it, what are.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
You going to do about it? I mean, what do
you do about it?
Speaker 8 (43:10):
Well, you know what I'm going to do about you.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
Jackie wouldn't show me the sealed envelope addressed to Winnie Johnson.
But whatever its contents, it has come too late for
Winnie and Brady's instruction that it only be opened after
his death seems to show that this was not an
act of empathy for the families or remorse for his crimes.
(43:39):
It is difficult to see this as anything other than
yet another example of his cruel games.
Speaker 5 (43:45):
When I interviewed him, he was absolutely aliment that he
had no remorse whatsoever, and he told me that everyone
would wait till doomsday before he will ever express any remorse.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
For what he had done.
Speaker 5 (44:03):
This will go on to the end of his life.
You have to see Ian Brady as someone who's had
grossly abnormal personality traits, sadism, intermittent episodes of severe mental
illness that come and go, but most of all, the
psychopathic personality, and this has been present since childhood throughout
(44:29):
his adolescence is continued and although he's older, the same
features of his abnormal personality are as live today as
they were right back at the beginning.
Speaker 9 (44:45):
He's always there.
Speaker 1 (44:47):
It's almost like it's a sort of shadow in your
life all the time.
Speaker 12 (44:52):
It is almost one.
Speaker 9 (44:54):
It is a shoulder when you are He's still got
us all, He's still got all the fun works.
Speaker 12 (45:00):
Yeah, well you're not going to be to him. Where
Keith is?
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Are you?
Speaker 2 (45:11):
You know?
Speaker 9 (45:12):
The main thing now is that we find Keith. Open
for any apologies as sorries or you know, or anything
wor just where is Keith?
Speaker 12 (45:30):
M hm okay, I just wake up wishing yet it'll
be dead. I'll jump for joy and that's the truth.
Soon he is out of the way, the better. Just
wait for that day now, m.
Speaker 1 (45:59):
M hmm.
Speaker 19 (46:37):
Support information can be found online. Go to Channel four
dot com and search for Ian Brady, and another chance
to see the poignant story of the late Winnie Johnson
search for her son Keith Bennett. Dear mister Brady starts
in just a minute over on More four.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
The more we look
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