The death of a monster

So, news came through late last night that Ian Brady, surely Britain’s most notorious living serial killer, had died, after a long illness. I suspect the news bulletins had been waiting for this for some time, as their coverage was quite polished and honed. He was, after all, 79 years old, and his health had been poor for some time. So ends our link to the grainy, black-and-white crimes committed on Saddleworth Moor.

How is one to react? Alan Bennett, the brother of poor little Keith Bennett whose remains were never found and, I imagine, now never will be, said he felt no sense of celebration at Brady’s death. I’m afraid I did. In the annals of British crime, Brady stands out as the blackest of souls, and the world is a better place without him in it. But I defer to those who were directly affected by his and Myra Hindley’s crimes.

Years ago, when I was working on the Health Committee in the House of Commons, one of my jobs was dealing with correspondence to the Chairman (they were still “Chairmen” then, not the modish “Chairs” we have now). One such piece of correspondence came from Ashworth Hospital, and was written by the hand of the monster himself. I confess even handling it made me illogically but superstitiously uncomfortable. I did, however, take a certain pleasure in drafting the most curt and dismissive of responses, telling Brady that the Committee did not investigate individual cases, and – I paraphrase – he would get no joy from us.

Brady, of course, wished himself dead. He said repeatedly that he wished he had been hanged when he was convicted in 1966, but the UK had abolished the death penalty the year before. He tried to go on hunger strike, but, because he was in a hospital rather than a prison, he was able to be force-fed to keep him alive. Latterly, he tried desperately to prove he was sane, surely the most hopeless of lost causes, so that he would be returned to prison and he could end his life before disease and old age got to him.

This raised, for me, a dilemma. He was a murderer, an evil, sadistic killer whom I wished dead. One of the policemen who heard the tape recording of Brady and Hindley torturing Lesley-Ann Downey said afterwards that he would have killed them both with his bare hands if he had the opportunity. As they tortured the 10-year-old, she begged for her mother. There are no fires hot enough in Hell for the people who perpetrated that. So he is dead, now, and Hindley years before him. Good. The world just got lighter.

And yet… and yet death was the one thing Brady wanted. There is a part of me, therefore, that thinks that it is the one thing which should have been denied to him. Continued existence, if it was so painful, should have been his fate. The author Colin Wilson has written that Brady never came to terms with his crimes because he was afraid to do so; asked if he ever considered the feelings of his victims, Brady replied “That would be a psychological suicide pill”. If that, for him, was torment, he should have been made to suffer it.

It is all a very long time ago now, of course, more than 50 years. I hope, for the families of the victims, that Brady’s death will provide some sort of closure. My heart breaks every time I think of Winnie Johnson, Keith Bennett’s mother, who died without ever being able to bury her son. For the survivors, surely a chapter has closed. The beast is dead, and they can, perhaps, move on.

My other thought is a more philosophically (and medically) difficult one, and one which I am not really qualified to answer, though I can muse on it: where does the line between bad and mad lie? Brady was only declared insane in 1985, more than 20 years after his killing spree. How can we accept that a mind which did what he did is sane? And, of course, it matters: sane people go to prison, insane people to hospital. This was the cause with which Brady was grappling towards the end of his life. It’s something that interests me, as my father used to be a Mental Health Act Commissioner and has seen some of the worst that Britain has to offer. I suppose, crudely, that we assume mad can be treated whereas bad cannot, but even then it’s not that simple. Some mental illnesses are so severe that they are not susceptible to treatment.

In the end, perhaps it’s a matter of semantics. What it represents, I suppose, is society’s attempts to come to terms with evil which it cannot comprehend within normal frames of reference. Psychiatrists and psychologists will never go out of business, because, while the human spirit can astonish with its generosity and love, it can also shock and appal with its depravity. In any event, Brady is gone now. I hope his victims are at peace, and that he is not.