No comments about Devil's Disciples: Moors Murders.

No comments about For the Love of Lesley: Moors Murders Remembered by a Victim's Mother.

No comments about On iniquity: some personal reflections arising out of the Moors murder trial.

1 comments about The Moors Murders: The Trial of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.

1. i saw a documentary on the history channel and i wanted to further read about these crimes. there is no doubt this is some heavy stuff, the crimes are deplorable and it is sad that all the victims have not been able to obtain closure because of inability to find bodies and the stunts pulled by the defendants in order to get some kind of cheap thrill by talking the police into letting them be escorted to the moors to "cooperate". this is especially hard to stomach because of the fact the killer/accomplice was a women and i found it especially ridiculous how much compassion she showed towards her dog puppet...the book was informative and stated the facts well however it is slightly outdated

1 comments about Beyond Belief a Chronicle of Murder and Its Detection..

1. Product Description
   The Moors Murders are the most brutal, senseless and cold blooded killings to have occurred in Great Britain in many years. Between November 1963 and October 1965, Ian Brady, clerk, and Myra Hindley, typist, killed at least three--and possibly as many as five-- young people varying in age from ten to seventeen, for no apparent motive. On May 6, 1966 the two murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment (capital punishment has been abolished in England). Beyond Belief, an uncanny feat of re-creation of the minds, hearts, and motivations of the two killers, is the story of this case. In it Emlyn Williams has achieved superbly his objective: "The dual accuracy of hisotry and of imaginative understanding.

1 comments about Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders.

1. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley; two of the most hated names in British history. Brady was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two children and a sixteen year old boy. Hindley, convicted on two counts of murder, was also sent to prison for life.
   
   "Brady & Hindley : Genesis of the Moors Murders" draws heavily on a unique series of interviews with Brady, the first such interviews ever given to an author by a mass murderer in his cell.
   
   Brady's claim that Myra Hindley assisted in the killing of sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade and that David Smith, the youth who led the police to the killers, was also involved, led the author into a thorough new investigation of the Moors Murders and their background.
   
   Originally published in 1986, before Brady and Hindley confessed to killing Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, this specially updated edition (published in 1987) includes extra material regarding these two murders.

5 comments about The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis.

1. The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis
   
   I bet Amazon does not have the guts to publish this. Anyone who supports Brady's coffers by buying this book is as bad as Brady himself. He was a serial killer of little children and has no remorse. Why would anyone see him profit? I am disgusted, Amazon.



2. Brady, a man of some intelligence, struggles with the written word. Like many an undereducated suburban letter-to-the-editor writer he tries to lift the tone by using long words where short would do. A fair proportion of the book is more or less lifted from other sources. Many of the crimes analysed start with fairly ludicrous descriptive passages dealing with the weather or the traffic, typical of lower end true crime writing. Given Brady was unable to do any field research you might assume that is what they are. Other more technical passages are lifted from such sources as Robert Hare's "Without conscience".
   
   Brady could be accurately described as Sadean in that his crimes mirrored the fantasies you find in "120 days of Sodom", "Juliette" and other sources. On the other hand Nietzsche seems little more than a catch phrase to him. Old Friedrich would probably have found Brady's attacks on children more unter than uber.
   
   Brady possesses little insight into his own psychological state and the resentments that drove him but does sometimes reveal himself obliquely. His analyses of the crimes of others are facile and occasionally random. All this is what we expect from a psychopath.
   
   The book tries and fails to alter our impression of Brady, a small man who tortured and killed the weak.



3. Remember if you read this book that there is no Evil more depraved than to molest and kill children. And that is Ian Brady's only claim to recognition.
   
   Brady obessionally praises the evil-doer as a heroic figure. Yet no where does he discuss or even allude to his own torturing, sexual molestation and murder of five helpless children. A strange omission indeed. Instead this accomplished child abuser treats, and largely bores, the reader with lies about his fanciful criminal career, incessant displays of his grandoise and fragile ego, inferior re-hashes of other serial killers and verbose psuedo-philosophizing. All mixed with ample doses of whining self-pity about the way he has been treated.
   
   Remember too that Ian Brady is a consummate and complusive liar. He inadvertently reveals his lies {at page 284} when he points out that many prisoners escape into fantasy and come to half believe their "fictitious past". So take anything he says with more than a grain of salt.
   
   The first half of "Gates" is taken up with Brady's sociopathic rantings. He hates everyone indiscriminately- except for himself. His monotonous diatribes are interpersed with idle threats about how the criminal classes are going to rise up and kill all the rest of us. In actuality, criminals despise child killers like Brady who they call "baby rapers" and attack whenever they are given the opportunity. Brady has had to be protected for his entire prison stay from his fellow prisoners. These comical rantings are more evidence of Brady's disconnect from the real world.
   
   Brady's current populist pose is ridiculous. He was an avowed neo-Nazi who held the" masses" in contempt and himself above the law. And his child victims were hardly oppressors of the poor and down-trodden. Indeed they came from the same lower class working background as Brady himself. Brady never lifted a finger in his life against the upper-classes.
   
   One of Brady's "heroes" is Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles "Night Salker" of the mid-1980s. Brady paints him as a fellow revolutionary who attacked and killed members of the WASP establishment. He did no such thing. Instead Ramirez attacked tiny Asian- American women because they were easy to subdue,like the wimp Brady who only attacked children. And Ramirez was finally captured by a crowd of his fellow Hispanics who were as appalled as everyone else by his butchery.
   
   Another fantasy of Brady was that he killed after applying "auto-hypnosis" to himself. He never explains what this is. But what he really did was to idrink massive doses of alcohol. He was a heavy drinker and incipient alcoholic. Like Ted Bundy, he used alcohol to dull his senses and self- control. Colin Wilson, in his introduction to the book, makes a fundamental error in glorifying Brady as a man seeking super- normal experiences. But the opposite is true. Brady was incapable of any kind of exalted experience. His personal life was one of unremitting banality.
   
   Brady incessantly lies too in portraying himself as a master criminal. He asserts he travelled about England committing unspecified crimes with a band of disciples. No such incidents occurred. He committed only his child killings and only in and around Manchester. His "disciples were only Myra Hindley and the dullish 17- year old Daivd Smith. And it was Smith who turned him into the police.
   
   Like other serial killers, Brady was a weakling and coward who attacked by ambush only the weakest prey he could find. In the face of authority he became meek and compliant. And when the end came he meekly surrendered to an unarmed policeman disguised as a baker.
   
   Only at the typewriter does he now construct a fictional larger-than- life portrait of himself. Then he asserts he killed disloyal disciples. Another lie, the result of wishful thinking. His follie-a- deux with Myra Hindley ended in prison when she opportunistically turned against him to tried to get released through her champion the deranged "Lord" Longford.
   
   In compensation for all Brady's b.s., there is his laughable bad writing. One example is his fantasy of master criminal "whilst in pursuit of multifarious criminal activities in many cities". {page 217}. Such "multifarious criminal activies" never occurred. Brady's criminal career consisted of petty crimes for which he had a genius for being caught.
   
   There is one key insight in the book. Brady admitts that his child-killing episodes were less than satisfactory. He realizes much too late- for Lesley Ann and his four other victims-the superiority of Fantasy over deed. Brady writes here in a rare authentic moment. He notes that killing itself is secondary. The real goal is to gain control over the victim. But the mundane requirements of this obviate the "pleasure". He cannot enjoy the tormenting, torturing and sexually abusing the victim because the practical considerations interfere. Hence he argues for the pure pleasures of fantasy. Too bad five children had to go through such torment for him to learn this lesson. But the children were killed primarily to destroy the evidence.
   See page 39.
   
   Conclusion:
   
   Given the propensity of novelists and movie- makers to concoct serial killers as brilliant, bigger-than-life monsters- a la Hannibal Lector and "American Psyche"- Brady's book is a needed corrective. Behind his mask of "Janus" he is a pathetic loser, a tawdry little man.
   
   Despite these criticisms, Brady's turgid exercise in self- justification is worth reading. He is the only child serial killer ever to try to justify himself in print. But it is the lies and fantasies that impress the discerning reader. It is Brady's own badly damaged ego that is most on display here.And his appallingly bad writing do provide some black comedic moments



4. I'm so glad to have this in my collection of all of the True Crime books I own!



5. I for a brief time studied criminal psychology, and was fascinated with Brady and Hindley. I never could wrap my mind around them, as they do not fit with the typical profile of couple killers. To me what made them all the more monstrous was the fact that, despite the way the evidence looked, I do not believe these were sexual killings, but intellectual exercises in evil. Personally, the guy that just can't help but eat human flesh because of some bizarre need is far less frightening than the controlled, icy-cold Brady and Hindley, who just wanted to see how far they could go into the darkness just because it was there. The fact that their victims were children speaks volumes that Hindley and Brady never did. So I began a short correspondence with Brady which lasted long enough for me to know that he would never really let anyone know why, because the real reasons were so cloaked in all his verbosity that one would only come away with an impression of Brady as a learned man who just happened some years ago to murder. Which is what this book displays. I agree with some of the other reviewers- if you are into this sort of thing, you will probably find something worthwhile in it, if one can use that term in this context. But I do feel moral qualms about buying it- I read it at the library.