Serial killers and true crime

The 73-year-old convict “wishes the world ill” and expresses no remorse for killing five children with his lover Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965. If he had the opportunity, he would be likely to shoot people he had a grudge against.

I would love to know what frigging value he puts on these horrific acts!

* Compares himself favourably to statesmen including Tony Blair, claiming they have committed worse crimes than his.

* Says he turned down several opportunities to escape shortly after his arrest in October 1965.

Brady – who has been told that he will never be released – emerges from the study as a sociopath with few redeeming features, showing no compassion or feeling for anyone other than himself.

He has been confined to Ashworth since 1985, when was declared criminally insane after spending twenty years in normal prisons. He and Hindley were sentenced to life for the killings of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17; Brady was also convicted of killing John Kilbride, 12.

Later the pair admitted two additional murders, of Pauline Reade, 16 and Keith Bennett, 12.

For the past eight years Brady has been on hunger strike, insisting he wants to die and surviving only by being force fed twice a day by staff at Ashworth. In 2000 a judicial review refused to overturn the decision to keep him alive.

IMO, this is one guy that should be allowed to off himself.

Dr Cowley, who runs courses for police officers and social workers, began writing to Brady six years ago as part of his research on the profiling of serial killers.

After gaining Brady’s trust Dr Cowley held a number of face to face meetings with him at Ashworth, from which he wrote a book published this month, Face To Face With Evil.

I want  to read this book. If anyone has read it I would love to hear your comments on it.

In it he concludes that if Brady was ever released from custody – something no Government has been prepared to countenance – he would “probably” resume killing.

I am willing to bet that Brady would kill as long as he was physically able. He states above that he would likely shoot people, makes me think that even as he sits in an institution he is wanting and planning on the next kill. His fantasies still playing in his mind.

In the interviews, Brady told Dr Cowley that paintballing is “no substitute for the real thing”, that  “at least Columbine [the massacre of US high school students by two fellow pupils] demonstrates that there is some spine left in America” and that “I wish this place and this country and this world ill.”

He seems to be connecting killing with bravery? I wonder if he actually followed the killings or if he only heard that there were shootings. I also wonder if knowing the details would change anything in his mind?

On one unsettling occasion, Brady suggested that Dr Cowley should kill his own boss over a minor bureaucratic dispute. At another point he stated: “There is no great gulf between the criminal and others except the will to enact.”

Dr Cowley told The Sunday Telegraph: “Ian Brady is a sociopath who shows no remorse and no compassion. He will only do things for other people if he has something to gain. He intellectualized his murders, calling them his ‘existential exercise’ – which he planned in advance in careful detail – or ‘that Moors business’, as if they were a glitch in his great criminal career.

“His only thought for the victims or their families is what he can get out of it. He would kill again without a thought for anyone who gets in his way.

For him it’s like swatting a fly, which is how he regarded the children he murdered.“

In his letters to Dr Cowley, Brady repeatedly dismisses the scale and significance of his crimes in comparison to the killings carried out by Governments and political leaders.

Justifying and trying to excuse his brutal child murders by comparing them to political issues and wars. I hope that people do not buy into this. I don’t believe he believes it.

In one letter he states: “The politically chosen establishment judge for the judicial review [of his force feeding] was the one who, weeks prior, allowed [Chile’s General Augusto] Pinochet to flee the UK and escape charges of war crimes.

“He found Pinochet unfit to stand trial for the torture and murder of 4,000 political prisoners, and me not fit to die by voluntary starvation, refusing to halt Ashworth force feeding me.”

I am all for allowing him to starve to death! I do want to add that if he decides the last minute to not die, tough. Let him make his own bed the allow him to lie and die in it!

When Dr Cowley asked Brady about his murders his frequent response was that British forces had killed far more people than he had during the invasion of Iraq.

Does not matter, one does not, can not, will never cancel out or excuse the other.

Asked during one conversation why he does not publicly express any remorse for the Moors murders Brady says he does not see the point, stating defiantly: “It is just bringing up ancient history and revives, openly, old wounds and sores.

“Nobody is going to gain by it, nobody.”

The only remorse he appears to feel is for Hindley’s capture and imprisonment until her death in 2002.

Dr Cowley believes Brady still “carries a torch” for his former lover, despite the fact she blamed him for the murders in an attempt to win parole from prison.

At one stage Brady tells him: “The line between remorse for the victims and remorse for being captured can be somewhat blurred.”

I think that is one thing that is true and common among serial killers. Often what their friends, family and sympathizers think is remorse for the murders is actually just remorse over being caught, it is a form of self-pity.

Dr Cowley states that the only regret felt by Brady for his crimes is “because of the consequences that have to be endured [by him] not because they were truly wrong in themselves from any kind of moral perspective”.

Brady and Hindley were eventually arrested at his home following a tip-off to police.

Brady, who turned 73 earlier this month and is suffering from cataracts and severe weight loss, told Dr Cowley he would have shot his way to freedom when police arrested him – had he not left his handgun in an upstairs room because it was getting in the way of moving the body of his last victim.

Farcically, Brady forgot to destroy lists reminding himself to destroy any telltale evidence of the murders. One list even included a note reminding himself to destroy such notes.

These were subsequently found by police in his car and formed a key part of the evidence against the couple.

But, intriguingly, Brady told Dr Cowley he had several opportunities to escape immediately following his arrest.

While at Hyde police station in Manchester he was left alone in a canteen with an unbarred window, while his police guard took a phone call.

A second opportunity presented itself when he was escorted on foot, without handcuffs or police dogs, to the women’s section of Risley remand centre for an interview with his solicitor.

Thick fog meant all he had to do was step sideways to disappear from sight.

“It was a cinch,” said Brady.

Dr Cowley suspects that loyalty to Hindley and the hope of acquittal, or even the delusion they might only receive a normal ‘life’ tariff, prevented Brady seizing his opportunity.

Again, not uncommon. Serial killers often consider themselves much smarter than the police, juries, judges and all other people in general. They get sloppy and get caught as much due to their own arrogance as due to police work and forensics.

His study of Brady leads him to argue that the criminal profiles of killers drawn up to aid their capture are frequently too one-dimensional.

According to Dr Cowley profiling is usually attempted too late, when police have exhausted other lines of inquiry, rather than from the start of an investigation, when evidence is fresh on the ground.

He told this newspaper: “Profiling should begin at the very start of an investigation, not when everyone else has trodden all over the evidence.”

Dr Cowley is forgetting that profiling is a tool, just one tool of many that police use. Profiling is not THE biggest part of any investigation, it is just a part of it.

Also, evidence is needed to make a profile, the more evidence the better and more defined the profile can be.

Furthermore, Dr Cowley says that with both contemporary and present-day profiling techniques, someone like Brady would probably have been excluded from the Moors murders inquiry, as he did not match several of the characteristics regarded as central to any suspect.

While there are ‘starting’ points in any profile those points are not set in solid stone. Yes, we hear white male late 20’s to early 30’s very often, especially in popular television shows and novels but that is not a set profile. If crimes happen in a primarily all black area a white person would stick out so you start with a Black male and using the victims and the evidence available you build from scratch based on what we know.

He did not have a history of mental illness or of failed relationships, and he was not a loner uncomfortable in social settings.

There have been many serial killers without the traits above and profilers know that. Also, MOST serial killers do not have a history of mental illness.

“Brady would probably have been quickly eliminated from the possible suspect pool if his data had been included in an investigation using the above criteria,” said Dr Cowley. “Hindley would have been eliminated at the very first step.”

Dr. Cowley is assuming that had a profile been made it would have stated those things. He obviously doesn’t understand profiling at all. He does not seem to understand how a profile is made, what it is based on or even how it is supposed to be used in an investigation. Most people don’t, but usually they do not write books that seem that they do!

As it was, the couple were caught because they allowed Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, to watch the murder of Edward Evans. On leaving the scene Smith simply turned the two killers in.

* Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady, by Chris Cowley is published by John Blake and is out now.

I do not think that Dr. Chris Cowley really understands the law enforcement side of things, but I still want to read his book. Not for what he says but for what Ian exposes about the mind of a serial killer.

Wiki article on the Moors Murders

Ian Brady ; The Right To Die

See No Evil. A movie about the murders.