Was Ian Brady truly “born evil”? – A deep dive into the serial killer’s childhood
The circumstances surrounding the late Moors Murderer’s childhood are often deeply misunderstood. So how exactly did the illegitimate son of a Glasgow waitress grow up into one of the most disturbing child killers Britain has ever seen?
N.B. This article is a 39-minute read as it goes into immense detail. You can read a shorter, 5-minute version here.
Few British serial killers have achieved the lasting notoriety of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
The young couple unleashed a wave of terror and panic across the Greater Manchester area over a two-year span when four children suddenly vanished without a trace, only ceasing when their fifth murder was reported to police by a witness in October 1965.
Though by “victim count,” Brady and Hindley were nowhere near as prolific as the likes of Harold Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, the Wests, or Peter Sutcliffe, the details of the sheer brutality and perversion of their crimes against children have never been forgotten.
The foreboding backdrop of Saddleworth Moor, the abolition of the death penalty prior to the couple’s trial, and the closing comments by the trial judge that described Brady and Hindley as “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity” helped condemn the couple into infamy.
Hindley in particular received particular interest from newspapers, owing in part to her infamous glaring mugshot and in part to the sheer disbelief surrounding how a woman could be complicit in the sexual assaults and murders of children, no less a woman who seemed “normal” to her friends and family. Her subsequent campaign for parole earned her the unofficial title of “the most evil woman in Britain” and led to even further condemnation by journalists, politicians, the general public, and the families of her and Brady’s victims.
Yet even at this time, it was still universally understood that Brady was the instigator of the murders. Most experienced commentators on the case agree that even though Brady and Hindley were equally responsible for the horrors they inflicted upon so many families, it was Brady himself who took the most direct satisfaction from sexually torturing and murdering children (whereas Hindley’s satisfaction seemed to lie, in large part, in seeing Brady sexually fulfilled).
I explored the dynamic between Brady and Hindley in another article (which also pieced together their accounts of how it was that they came to murder children), but I steered clear of discussing their respective early lives in too great detail in that particular article.
It is easy to write off individuals like Brady and Hindley as “monsters,” yet what such labels fail to acknowledge is that the couple were, in fact, two incredibly calculated people who blended in with their surroundings, insidiously abused their human qualities and relatability to lure in their unsuspecting young victims, and then once their horrific and monstrous crimes were completed, they proceeded to live very ordinary lives before rinsing and repeating the cycle in a few months’ time.
In fact, Brady himself perceived the crimes as him and Hindley simply acting on their innermost desires as humans, which he saw as suppressed through socialisation and the confines of a regime founded upon false principles of law and order.
“Nothing could have changed him”
When discussing what shapes the decisions of serial killers, FBI profiler Jim Clemente is often paraphrased in true crime forums and documentaries: “Genetics load the gun, personality aims it, and events within the individual’s life pull the trigger.” Yet despite the extensive and documented details surrounding Brady’s and Hindley’s crimes, and Hindley’s own childhood, there is comparatively little information surrounding the early life of Ian Brady.
Though some of the reasoning for this is due to the relative banality of his early life, much of it is arguably his own later doing. In reflecting upon his own childhood from behind bars, Brady frequently claimed that other people’s negative memories and perceptions of him were either false or exaggerated before giving his own usually positive, detailed accounts in place. Another dimension to this is that Brady was a fantasist, so some of his claims, particularly regarding delinquent and sexually aggressive behaviour in his childhood, need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Maurice Richardson, who was in the gallery of the courtroom in 1966 in a journalistic capacity on behalf of The Observer newspaper, concluded that Brady “had had a hopeless start and probably drew something sinister in the chromosomal lottery.”
But in Brady’s own eyes, he was no more morally corrupt than the world and circumstances around him were. He also tended to avoid answering questions about more personal and psychological experiences from his childhood, unless it was something that he could write down in flowery prose.
He laughed off the notions of predestination that one biographer, Emlyn Williams, put forward in his best-selling but controversial book on the case, Beyond Belief (1967): “From the day of his birth, the spell had been woven. And nothing could have changed him. Nothing.” He was born at 12:40 p.m. on Sunday 2nd January 1938, at Rottenrow Maternity Hospital in Glasgow and christened Ian Duncan Stewart.
Margaret “Peggy” Stewart (who went by the nickname “Maggie” during the first few years of her son’s life) was the only parent listed on Ian’s birth certificate. She was 27 years old, single, and she did not appear to have any close relatives at the time. Young Ian would eventually come to understand that his father was a journalist, but Peggy, for reasons of her own, kept his identity a secret.
A widely reported narrative surrounding Brady’s childhood is that he was abandoned by his mother. This conjures up the worst of images, but Peggy did not simply drop Ian off on a doorstep or send him into a foster home or adoption centre; she still remained a significant figure in his childhood, even though she fluttered in and out of it somewhat unpredictably. Regardless, it is important to clarify that Peggy did everything she could to provide for her young son, but as a single, working-class mother to an illegitimate child in 1930s Glasgow, this was going to prove difficult.
At the time of her son’s birth, Peggy was living with a friend at 8 Huntingdon Place in St. Rollox and was barely getting by as a waitress in the tearoom of a city hotel. She just about managed to cling onto her job afterwards, though it did come with a sacrifice. A change to part-time hours in the immediate weeks after Ian’s birth (and no available provision of child support or other kinds of benefit payment) meant that she had to look for accommodation elsewhere.
Peggy eventually found a first-story single room in a tenement on the corner of Crown Street and Caledonia Road in the Gorbals — a rough, and particularly violent, Glasgow slum. On a lesser wage, Peggy struggled to provide herself and Ian with basic necessities such as food and clothing, having no choice but to work at every given opportunity and then use almost all of that money to keep up with rent and extortionate winter energy bills.
It is uncertain to what extent Brady was left on his own whilst his mother was working; a later correspondent of Brady’s, Colin Wilson, claimed that he was ‘farmed out’ to various babysitters whilst Peggy worked in the evenings. Antonella Gambotto-Burke, author of Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood, and the Recovery of the Feminine (2022), writes otherwise, and this assumption forms the basis for a substantial portion of her book. Carol Ann Lee, author of two acclaimed books on the Moors Murders case, claims that Peggy “struggled to find someone to care for the baby while she returned to waitressing.”.
In either case, the first few months of Brady’s life are clearly an issue that has not been addressed enough from a psychological standpoint. Gambotto-Burke discusses the negative impacts of malnutrition on the development of an infant’s temporal lobe in some detail. Amongst other functions, the temporal lobe regulates “bonding and emotional stability, sexual desire, the ability to identify the emotions of others, and the integration of emotion with perception.”
Peggy soon acknowledged that she couldn’t return to working full-time, as she would end up neglecting her son altogether. But there was also no way that she was going to put him in an orphanage. The only option she had left was to seek alternative care for her baby.
When Ian was a few months old, Peggy put a note in a newsagent’s window, offering to give £1 per week to anyone willing and suitable to look after her baby on a full-time basis. On a wage of less than £3 per week, this was yet another huge sacrifice for Peggy. It is unknown how many people responded to her advertisement, but Peggy would later maintain to Ian that she chose it with care. She chose a friend of hers, Mrs. Mary Sloan, who lived nearby at 56 Camden Street.
Brady would go on to spend virtually his entire childhood living with the Sloan family, and by all accounts, they treated him as one of their own. Mary and her husband, John, were approaching middle age. John (who would pass away in 1962, a year before Brady and Hindley’s first murder) worked as a grain-mill worker at a nearby firm named Motherwells, while Mary was a full-time housewife. At this point, they had three children of their own, with a fourth being born four years later, in 1942.
The brownstone tenements of Camden Street were no different than the sordid single room that Peggy was living in. The tenements were three stories high, each level consisting of three rentable apartments and a shared toilet. The Sloans occupied a two-room apartment on the first floor.
Though the family were clearly not particularly well off themselves (after all, they were living in one of the poorest slums in Scotland), they were more than happy to help Peggy out in her desperation and foster her son into a traditional home — another child was not too much of a financial strain. Peggy would come to 56 Camden Street whenever she could, making a firm commitment to visit her son at least every Sunday.
Even though later in his life Brady said that he always knew he wasn’t one of the siblings, and even though he found out from an early age that Peggy was his real mother, he had told a psychiatrist who examined him prior to his 1966 trial that he was thirteen years old when he learned he was illegitimate. This casts some doubt on both of those claims, and even though he had said that learning about this left him feeling resentful, he later stated:
The dichotomy between parents was not pivotal; I was aware of it from an early age. Searching for fashionable stereotypical excuses and scapegoats in childhood would be fruitless in my case.
As this article progresses, it will become even more clear that Brady would usually reflect on his own childhood with nostalgia and glee, in spite of other accounts that dispute him (and even some of his own contradictions). Nevertheless, from what little we know for certain, his life was content with the Sloan family, and he unofficially adopted their surname — the neighbourhood boys would even nickname him “Sloaney.”.
Having moved back to working full-time, Peggy paid for Ian’s clothes and upkeep and enjoyed spoiling him with gifts whenever she could afford to. She bought him a frilly silk shirt, a kilt for Sundays, and black velvet trousers that he would wear during the week — unique for a Gorbals lad. The neighbours agreed, and at five or six years old, he was considered “the smartest wee lad in the treet.” But some remember that he was also clearly troubled, even at this young age.
The war
On 1st September 1939, Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded Poland. Brady was not even two years old at this point, and as a naturally curious child, the devastation of the ensuing global war was always going to be a challenge for him to come to terms with during his early years. Over 1,200 civilians across Glasgow’s metropolitan area were killed over the course of two nights during the Clydesdale Blitz of March 1941, and the city itself suffered through a total of eleven air raids over the course of the war. According to Brady, his foster brother was serving on a HMS destroyer ship, and many of Ian’s own future classmates also had relatives who had been drafted abroad to fight the Nazis.
“To all of my age, it was an exciting time, not one of fear or danger,” he would eventually recall. “The blackout was also hilarious, with families bumping into one another and tripping over cats as they negotiated the streets and alleys to reach cinemas.”
As air raid sirens sounded, sprinting from apartments to the relative safety of the tenement doorsteps also became somewhat of a routine for the residents of Camden Street. Brady would vividly detail one instance where a parachute bomb decimated the church at the end of the street, leaving the buildings on either side completely untouched.
By all accounts, Brady’s home life was as comfortable as it could have been during wartime. The Sloans had the rare luxury of a piano in their front room, which Brady learned to play by ear. He was a huge fan of the cinema and also enjoyed the comics Hotspur, Rover, Adventure, Beano, and Dandy. Ma Sloan allowed him to play in the communal backyard under her supervision, although the rubble left behind from Luftwaffe bombing likely did nothing but exacerbate the already-toxic grime of the city suburbs.
Brady began his education at Camden Street Infants School in 1943. He claimed that he had already learned to read by this point thanks to his beloved comics, and he graduated into the primary section a few months later.ter.
Brady was a bright — and even promising — young lad, but according to his peers, a troubling duality was already emerging.
“Bastard”
Brady was reportedly nicknamed “Big Lassie” by the neighbourhood boys due to his poor football-playing skills. Persistent reports also suggest that Brady, from a very young age, threw temper tantrums that often culminated in repeated and violent head-banging. If this was true, it might have resulted in further emotional development stunting.
Whether either of these things were true or not, two things are for certain: that he was an introverted child, and that the now somewhat-dated stigmas surrounding “being a bastard” were impossible for him to shake. However, the extent of the psychological and/or emotional impact that Ian’s illegitimacy had on him (and the treatment he received from his peers as a result of this) is unknown.
Even if he did not actually find out about his parentage until he was a teenager, Brady’s distinct lack of physical resemblance to the rest of his family and the quality of his clothes may have given the hint away to other families.
This stigma is something that has been hinted towards by writers such as Jean Ritchie, but there are very few accounts that outright state that he was ever bullied or teased over it. If he ever was, that would have meant that in his later prison interviews, he was either: a) deliberately sugar-coating or glossing over his childhood in order to paint a certain narrative; b) repressing negative memories of it — perhaps as a result of trauma; and/or c) not recognising or remembering the extent of certain negative emotional experiences — which, according to a study that was published in the 2022 British Journal of Psychology, could potentially be an indicator of a psychopathic personality.
To a later correspondent, religious studies professor Dr. Alan Keightley, Brady discussed the trauma that would have been experienced by any mother who tried to bring up a child without a father in the 1940s. Though he did not reference his own experience directly, Brady also believed that years of only referring to his real mother as “Peggy” created a psychological barrier between the two of them that was only overcome when she stayed loyal to him during his eventual imprisonment.
Most biographers in the case maintain that Brady was a lonely child, a lanky outsider who would never join in on team games like football. Brady even admitted to a psychiatrist prior to his trial that he had difficulty making friends as a child due to his introversion. But decades later, he wrote that:
In my childhood years, I was not the stereotypical ‘loner’ so beloved by the popular media. Friends formed around me eagerly in the school playground, listening to me talk, and I took it as natural. Apparently, I had a descriptive talent and contagious enthusiasm.
“Abusive behaviours”
Modern studies have since revealed that antisocial behaviours, such as those associated with psychopathy and sociopathy, typically have their onset before the age of eight years old and that boys develop symptoms earlier than girls.
From the moment the case became headline news, there have been tales told of a young Ian Brady throwing cats out of windows, beheading them, stoning them, burning them, impaling them on spiked railings, starving them, and burying them alive. He would reportedly carry a flick-knife around with him and use it to taunt (or cut down) any neighbourhood cat that was unfortunate enough to cross his violent path. As for the fate of other animals, various reports have stated that he sliced open caterpillars with razor blades, pulled wings off of flies, decapitated rabbits, broke one dog’s leg and set another on fire, killed birds, and crucified frogs.
To the journalist Fred Harrison in 1985, Brady admitted to “throwing cats out of the window and things like that. Everybody did in the Gorbals,” but he would later backtrack and deny abusing any animal. Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, the police chief who reopened the Moors Murders case in the 1980s, noted that Brady was “always upset if he read about cruelty to animals, and he did not like the articles and books that claimed he had been cruel to a cat when he was a child.”
In his later years, Brady would tell numerous anecdotes with the aim of communicating how empathetic and sympathetic he claimed he was towards animals. One story he often recalled concerned how he was traumatised by the sight of an injured horse on an icy road. He witnessed the construction of a canvas screen surrounding the injured horse, prompting him to flee, fully aware that the horse was about to be shot out of its suffering.
But the rumoured early penchant for sadism did not just extend to animals; apparently the young Ian Brady inflicted his wrath on other neighbourhood children as well. John Deane Potter, the author of the first book on the case, The Monsters of the Moors (1966), asserted that he used to torment a disabled child and once tied a boy and a girl to a lamppost and left them there. Another early biographer on the case, Judge Gerald Sparrow, reported that “if a playmate was weaker than he was, it was not very long before he or she was being either bruised, cut, or burned by Ian Brady.”
One of the most infamous tales from this period of Brady’s childhood was told by John Cameron, an old playmate who lived on the ground floor of the Camden Street tenement:
He once tied me to a steel washing post in the backyard, heaped newspapers around my legs, and set fire to them. I can still remember feeling dizzy with the smoke before I was rescued.
Recalling this incident years later, Brady maintained that it was only harmless role-play and that John was loosely tied and released himself when a few pieces of paper had been lit.
Street games
More significant, however, is the fact that dangerous street games were frequent in the Gorbals. One such game was called “catching a hudgie,” which proved deadly on several occasions. Essentially, the game involved waiting for a truck or van to pass, then leaping onto its back, grasping onto anything available for support. Brady mentioned that he knew Billy Wallace, a boy who died while playing the game, but his death didn’t deter him or the other local children from participating.
Brady would also recall that one time, he and his friends were standing on a street corner waiting to “catch a hudgie” when one boy in the group jumped onto the back of a passing truck. He was unable to hold on and fell off, rolling underneath a truck filled with crates and empty bottles. A crowd of adults gathered around the scene, and Brady ended up seeing nothing but a small brown shoe filled to the brim with blood.
“Green death”
Though both the Sloans and Peggy attempted to raise Ian as a Christian, he was decidedly agnostic from an early age. During a Religious Instruction lesson, the teacher apparently asked the class if anybody there didn’t believe in God, and only Ian’s arm was raised.
In the summer of 1946, when Brady was eight years old, the Sloan family went on vacation to Loch Lomond. This was his first documented experience of the great outdoors, and he would later return to the Lochs as an adult and take a boat trip with Myra Hindley. He considered this first visit a transcendental experience: “I was shattered by the sense of vastness. It was as though I had suddenly stepped through an invisible barrier and had arrived in a different dimension.”
This was the first of several spiritual awakenings he claimed to experience in outdoor settings, which later included Saddleworth Moor, throughout his life. He said that he found himself inexplicably drawn to natural substances such as stone and rock, and that as an adult, he would often travel back from Manchester to the Gorbals to touch the stone tenements near where he grew up.
Pollok
In 1947, the Sloan family, along with hundreds of other families in the Gorbals district, were resettled onto the Pollok overspill estate as part of Glasgow’s post-war “slum clearance” scheme. The council allocated them a semi-detached, three-bedroom home on Templeland Road, a significant improvement from their previous home on 56 Camden Street. It had both front and back gardens, as well as an indoor bathroom. Brady secured a provisional spot at Househillwood School to pursue his primary education, subsequently transitioning to Carnwadric School, where he commuted daily by bus.
The Sloans were fortunate to be among the first families to secure a house in Pollok during its construction. Much of the inland was still a wide-open space, with trees to climb and the safely-shallow White Cart Water to play in. It was the perfect opportunity for young Brady and his peers to put the stresses of life behind them. He eagerly helped Da Sloan out in the garden, and he even built a rabbit hutch. He soon acquired three rabbits, and Ma and Da Sloan bought Brady’s foster sister a cocker spaniel that she named Sheila (Brady also doted on the dog dearly and was distraught when she died less than a year later, claiming that this was the night he turned his back on religion for good).
The only real drawback to the move was that Brady’s former friends now lived six miles away from him. He would catch the bus back there as often as possible to meet up with them. He claimed to have also regularly visited Peggy back in the Gorbals, though the visits gradually became fewer and further between once she started dating Patrick ‘Pat’ Brady, an Irish ex-army man who was now working as a labourer.
When Pat took a job opportunity in Manchester, Peggy followed him, and the two married on 16th May 1950, at the All Saints Registry Office. Though communication between Ian and Peggy was now entirely through letters, they supposedly never lost touch, although it would be four years before he would adopt his new stepfather’s surname.
Adolescense
Around the age of eleven, Brady reached puberty and claimed to have started dating girls. He said that he discovered that he most enjoyed kissing when he was drawing blood — this even carried on into his eventual relationship with his future co-defendant, Myra Hindley. His most significant relationship was with a girl named Evelyn, although the two were casual. He considered her to be very much his type — honey-blonde hair, high cheekbones, and grey, almond-shaped eyes — that he saw a fierce glint in. “Once, during some horseplay, I gave her a bite as a barbaric token for a ring.”
Brady and Evelyn would both achieve top grades in their ‘Qualifying’ (the Scottish equivalent of the eleven-plus exams of the time), and the two of them graduated from the relatively prestigious Shawlands Academy. During this time, the school’s community was embarking on a cultural reckoning due to the construction of the Pollok estate, as well as several other overspill estates around the city that would soon emerge throughout the ensuing decade.
A historic school with a reputation for serving Glasgow’s middle class, Shawlands was now seeing an influx of high-achieving students from the nearby council estates, including Brady, and a new wing had been built next to the old building to adapt to the surge of new students. The school’s ethos of formality and structure remained, but this did little to steer Brady, who was lacking in ambition and already questioning the notions of morality and established order, away from the path of juvenile delinquency.
Whether the integrated environment of his new school was a significant culture shock to Brady is unknown, though he did later speak of a particular materialism — or rather, an attachment to material objects — that he could trace back to his time at Shawlands.
I began more and more to invest in inanimate objects with personality and sentience — perhaps because they didn’t change as people do and were more reliable.
This was an attachment that not only helps to illustrate how he came to perceive human life as comparatively fragile, but it was also one that would eventually crystallise into his adulthood passion for photography, whether it be of a romantic boat trip at Loch Lomond with Myra Hindley or to help them mark the nearby grave of a murdered child on Saddleworth Moor.
There were more troubling indications arising at this time in Brady’s childhood. Shawlands had a large Jewish population at the time, and while there are no written accounts of Ian ever subjecting his Jewish peers to antisemitic bullying or violence, some of his classmates started noticing his fondness for Nazi Germany. Some biographers have stated that Brady’s interest dates back even further, and that he collected Nazi souvenirs around the age of nine. A former Shawlands classmate, Frank Fraser, commented:
He read all kinds of books about the Nazis and never stopped talking about them. Even when we were playing war games, he made a great point of being a ‘German’. My brother was stationed in Germany, and Ian was always badgering him for Nazi souvenirs. When Ian used to shout, ‘Sieg Heil!’ and give the Nazi salute, people would laugh.
The author, Gerald Sparrow, wrote:
What appeared to appeal to him [Brady] in the Hitler régime was the cruelty of the racial philosophy directed against races other than the purely Aryan. The beating-up of those who opposed the Hitler régime gave him immense pleasure, and, as a logical sequence to this kind of thinking, the comparatively compassionate welfare-state philosophy that prevailed in England moved him to contempt.
Brady would later claim that his interest in the Nazis was overstated by the media and popular imagination, and was aesthetic rather than politically or racially motivated. He claimed he simply enjoyed the spectacle of the rallies and admired Hitler’s ability to captivate an audience through words and sheer passion.
“Green death”
The most abstract of Brady’s supposed early spiritual experiences would supposedly not occur until he was fourteen years old. For years, it was difficult for him to explain, but it was connected to the colour green; he would recall that his various trips to the countryside with the Sloans gave him an enormous feeling of elation to be surrounded by such a vast expanse of green. He did manage to piece it together to an extent in his later life, though. He told Dr. Keightley that this particular awakening did not happen in the countryside, but it happened as he was riding his bike on the way home from a job interview.
I felt a strange change coming over me. My body felt light, and I felt a little dizzy. My bicycle appeared to be moving with a will of its own. I was being enveloped by some kind of bright radiance. The buildings, vehicles, and people around me seemed not to belong to my world any more. I felt removed from them. I had never experienced anything like this before, but I succumbed to it and became completely passive about what was about to happen to me.
[…]
I managed to stop the bike on its own course at the corner of Paisley Road, slumped against a newsagent’s shop window, and then moved into the dry shelter of the shop’s entrance.
It was dim in these early stages. Then it slowly grew more intense. […] There was a green radiation, beautiful and warm, making what Charles Dickens would describe as mere phantoms of passing individuals and the road traffic, making both insignificant. I entered willingly into the green manifestation, immersing my whole being in the swirling, warm cloud.
There was something waiting within it, as yet indistinct, seen in brief glimpses through the green mist as a more substantial, fluctuating formation. Sounds were coming from its centre as though from a great distance or depth, hollow and not yet identifiable as a familiar language. Features formed slowly in the shimmering green radiance. Was it male, female, or hermaphroditic? They were sounds rather than words. Were they coming from my subconscious?
And then came the realization. I was in the presence of death itself. I was witnessing it and hearing its sounds.
Delinquency
Despite what he would later claim, early biographies on the case paint a narrative that, to his peers at Shawlands, Brady seemed to be somewhat of an oddball.
He had grown tall and gangly, with hair that always needed trimming. He avoided school clubs and social events, and he didn’t take part in any sports. As previously mentioned, people perceived him as somewhat of a loner, with few friends and no involvement in playground fights. Aside from that, he was also known to be a horror movie fanatic and had Dracula and Mr. Hyde painted on his schoolbag; he eventually came to be nicknamed ‘Dracula’ (which he likely much preferred to ‘Big Lassie’).
At Shawlands, Brady was clearly losing interest in his studies and was displaying increasingly antisocial behaviour — perhaps this coincided with his realisations or his confirmation that he was illegitimate. Though he wasn’t known to be involved in gang crime among any of his classmates, he was said to pester the same boy who painted his schoolbag for drawings and paintings of infamous gangsters such as Al Capone and John Dillinger.
Aside from his classmates’ recollections, Brady said that by now he was living a double life between Pollok and the Gorbals — the only shared activity between both groups was breaking and entering. Brady claimed he had first done this when he was nine years old for the thrill of it; however, he and his new friends in the Pollok Gang were apparently in it mostly for the cash. He claimed that at one point, he and the Pollok gang were committing up to three break-ins per evening.
Brady spent most of his share of the profits on gifts for Evelyn, although she had no clue where the extra money was coming from. His neighbours were noticing that he had more money than most, and Ma Sloan was becoming concerned that he was staying out so late in the evenings. Brady stated that the only signs of family dispute at this time emerged when his foster parents insisted he join the Boy’s Brigade or the Scouts, and he vehemently refused. He did agree to attend Sunday school, but attended only for the first week and played tennis every other time he left the house. Although the Sloans never knew about this, it wouldn’t be long before they found out about his evening activities.
Brady and the Pollok gang appeared before Glasgow’s juvenile courts on 5th May 1951, on charges of housebreaking and attempted theft after a fellow pupil at Shawlands found out about their activities and informed them. Since none of the gang had any previous criminal convictions and were all thought to be of ‘good character’, the entire group was bound over. Brady claimed that later, he tracked down the informant and raped him.
Brady also claimed that he was starting to experiment both romantically and sexually (even though Myra Hindley would later claim that she thought he was sexually inexperienced before meeting her). He was still occasionally seeing Evelyn, but he discovered that he was attracted to men as well as women (although he would never label his sexual orientation). To maintain secrecy, the Pollok gang soon resumed their burglaries, this time a little further away in an area known as Corker Hill.
In the final weeks of summer of that year, Peggy apparently invited Brady down to Manchester for a fortnight’s holiday, where he met his new stepfather and explored the city, as well as venturing out to the market in Ashton-under-Lyne with Peggy.
Glasgow Govan Court hauled the Pollok gang on new charges of housebreaking and theft on 16th July 1952. Their latest recruit had stolen a crafted cutthroat razor in one of their burglaries, and after the boy’s father found it hidden under the cushion of a chair in his bedroom, he made his son go to the police and confess everything. Brady was implicated as the ringleader, convicted of theft of money, and admonished. Brady would later claim that he never got the chance to enact his revenge on that boy.
Brady left school the following year with no significant qualifications, no professional ambitions, and with Evelyn no longer by his side. The straw that broke the camel’s back is unclear, but it was undoubtedly due to Brady’s actions, and he would later tell Dr. Keightley that he was ashamed of how he had treated her.
Following his Shawlands graduation, Brady took on a few low-paying jobs as a butcher’s assistant and errand boy until January 1954. After that, he worked as an engine cleaner for British Railways, where his juvenile record led to his dismissal after just a few days.
There is no record of any further employment until 6th September of that year, which is when he began an apprenticeship at the Harland and Wolff shipyard on the River Clyde. Da Sloan was delighted at the prospect of Ian becoming a tradesman, but the desire was not mutual. He had zero desire to work for anything other than “working capital,” and he said that the only “jobs” that piqued his interest during this time in his life were frequent burglaries in the Gorbals.
On top of this, there was no way that the Sloan family could have known that Brady — if we are to believe his stories to the likes of Fred Harrison and Dr. Keightley, of course — was becoming increasingly disturbed with his ‘green’ visions. His tumultuous inner self and his somewhat lackadaisical persona were diametrically opposed.
Brady’s luck soon ran out at the hands of another informer, and he appeared before Glasgow’s Sheriff’s Court on 29th November, this time being convicted on seven unique counts of housebreaking and theft-related offences.
Ma and Da Sloan admitted defeat—they had done everything they could to reprimand him after his first two run-ins with the law, but clearly nothing else was going to work with this lad. Brady, who had spent a brief period in St. Vincent Street Remand Home, acknowledged that he might spend the foreseeable future in captivity. But to everybody’s surprise, the court listened to the suggestion of his parole officer—that he be placed on two years’ probation and serve no time, but only on the condition that he leave the confines of Glasgow to live with his real mother and her husband in Manchester. Naturally, Brady found this prospect unsettling, yet his options were limited.
Manchester
Ian took the train south to Manchester at the beginning of December, where Peggy welcomed him at Victoria Station, eager for a new beginning. He left Glasgow as Ian Sloan (although legally his name was “Ian Stewart”) and arrived in Manchester as Ian Brady.
When Ian first moved in with Peggy and Pat, they lived in a two-room-and-kitchen flat at 13A Denmark Street in Moss Side. Peggy set up a divan bed for Ian to sleep on. Pat worked at Smithfield Market and managed to find Ian a job as a loader and stallhand with Howarth’s Fruiterers. The Bradys had already established moving as a routine, and by 1956, they had settled at 36 Cuttell Street in Beswick, near the market on Grey Mare Lane.
Not long after moving to Manchester, Brady also bought his first camera—a rather expensive model that he would use first during a visit back to the Sloans. Photography would become a lifelong passion of his—one that would also eventually condemn him and Myra Hindley to infamy when police found pornographic photos of a ten-year-old girl they had murdered in their possession, as well as photographs of them posing near the shallow graves of their other victims.
Alma Singleton, the Brady family’s next-door neighbour on Cuttell Street, recalled, “Anybody could tell Ian was Mrs. Brady’s son. When he was about to leave the house, her eyes followed him everywhere. She thought the world of him.” She remembered Ian as “a quiet lad,” adding that:
When I went in, he would look up and nod, and then he would blush. He always seemed to be embarrassed when he met anyone. Maybe he was a bit awkward with his mother’s friends because no one knew she had a grown-up son until he appeared.
Mrs. Singleton’s teenage daughter, Carol, also recalled seeing him “drunk and swinging around lampposts” on multiple occasions.
Although Ian and Pat never grew close, with seemingly little in common aside from an interest in horse racing, they left for work together at 4 a.m. every morning. Ian was usually finished by noon and would spend his free hours lounging about cafés, drinking whisky and beer in the local pubs, and betting (his gambling pseudonym was ‘Gorgon’).
Drink sometimes triggered what Brady would later dub the ‘black light’, although he claimed he first experienced this shortly before he finished at Shawlands, which involved him attacking a youth in a rival gang with a cosh. Again, there are no records of these instances, but essentially the term was coined in his eventual prison years; it was how Brady would nostalgically refer to the exhilaration he experienced during a violent act—specifically, one that he was committing against somebody helpless, either by stature or through being outnumbered in a group.
Power over fear simply meant outlasting the enemy by seconds or minutes, and when the danger passed, so did the ‘black light’. Conversely, if the will wilted under the threat of danger, then so did the ‘black light.
It wasn’t that Brady was more prone to violent thoughts when he was drunk, but the ‘black light’ was more visible through a clouded mind. It made his sadistic tendencies harder to hide, and he would get into multiple drunken brawls.
However, it appeared that one aspect of this was that the second Brady sensed any sort of imminent threat from his opponent was the second he wilted. John Deane Potter commented, based on his first-hand research talking to Brady’s former neighbours, friends, and associates, that “it would be in character for Brady to attack someone—as long as he was part of a gang of six against one.”
Allegedly, Brady was also fond of telling people about his crimes in Glasgow. Potter also wrote that:
He was also fond of telling anyone who would listen of his life as a Glasgow tearaway and how he and five other schoolboys attacked a boy of sixteen with knives. They ripped his shirt and slashed his chest, leaving him a bleeding hospital case in the street. When he retold this story, his eyes glistened, and he became very excited, living it all over again.
Brady also supposedly told a fictional story about how he murdered a child who informed him when he was a teenager, burying him on a bomb site in the Gorbals.
Borstal
It was an unusually warm day in late 1955. The account Ian Brady later gave Dr. Keightley was that a Howarth's truck driver approached him while he was at the market on a routine, mundane morning. The driver required assistance in loading over £44 worth of lead seals for sale as scrap. Brady, despite his suspicions about their theft, agreed to help and assisted him in lifting the large sack into the truck.
When the driver arrived at the local scrap merchant, the dealer grew suspicious when he saw the sack’s contents, making a note of the fact that Howarth’s Fruiterers was painted on the side of the truck. He contacted the police, and the truck driver implicated Brady.
Brady assumed leniency and pleaded guilty, claiming to have been honest in his questioning. When he learned he would spend the next three months on remand in Strangeways Prison, Manchester, awaiting the next quarterly court sessions, he came to regret his choice.
In the eyes of the authorities, Brady was no longer just a delinquent youngster who had gotten into trouble. He was now being treated as an adult, a convicted criminal awaiting sentencing.
Brady believed it was completely illogical. He felt that he was only trying to be helpful, and yet he was the one sitting in his cell while the truck driver was getting ready to celebrate Christmas with his family. “My natural relativism became logical relativism in Strangeways,” Brady immaturely proclaimed to Dr. Keightley in the 1990s. “I said to myself that if they wanted me to be a criminal, I'd be a proper one!”
Catalyst
Many biographers have theorised that Brady’s three months locked up in Strangeways were both the philosophical and emotional catalyst for what would eventually lead to the Moors Murders. It drilled home his absolute disdain for authority, and he could now draw even more from his own personal experience. He was always in the company of thugs and/or psychopaths.
Brady claimed to have deliberately sought out the company of hardened criminals, ranging from first-time petty offenders to convicted murderers who had been reprieved from death row, and even said that he accumulated the contact information of those who might prove useful to him in the future. Working long days in the boiler house, shovelling coke into the furnaces underneath the chimneystack, he dedicated his free time to reading, training in toolmaking, and, most significantly, studying ccounting. (He explained wanting to know how to handle money once he had “acquired” it.)
Brady made his appearance at the Manchester Quarterly Sessions on 10th January 1956, where he faced conviction and received a sentence to undergo borstal training. He soon arrived at Latchmere House in London, a former secret interrogation centre for German prisoners of war and British fascists, and claimed that he spent his free time there reading and studying whatever books he could get his hands on—often classic literature such as Dickens and Shakespeare. “I was exhilarated by the acquisition of knowledge and intoxicated by its latent power.”
As per a common training routine for somebody in the Brady position, he was eventually transferred to Hatfield Borstal in South Yorkshire, an ‘open’ establishment for those showing signs of above-average intelligence. Ultimately, Hull Prison's particularly strict borstal unit received him as a disciplinary measure for his drunken and disorderly behavior toward two staff members.
The now-extinct Borstal system has often been aptly summed up in three words: “short, sharp, shock.” Two years was usually around the maximum sentence, and the idea was to instill fear and intimidation in young offenders through a strict—often times, plain harsh—routine of work and regimental discipline. The blurring of the line between tough authority and outright physical and verbal abuse often failed to deter a large proportion of inmates from re-offending.
Brady's encounter with the gallows at Hull Prison served as an example of negative reinforcement. For a young man hell-bent on beating the system before it could beat him, this probably did nothing but give him more drive to do so.
Brady was generally remembered by his fellow inmates as generally keeping himself to himself—an “unfriendly character who spent most of his spare time reading.” One former inmate was allegedly quoted as saying that he was “a very quiet sort of fellow but sadistic. If we were wrestling, it would start as a joke and end up with Brady putting his hands around his opponent’s throat and nearly choking them before he would let go.”
Brady was also known to avoid going to mass and often drunkenly played the piano for the other lads; an old favourite song of his to play was a somewhat clunky rendition of the theme to “The Third Man” (also known as the “Harry Lime Theme”). Some reports even state that he once told another inmate that he got paid for engaging in “homosexual adventures.”
Though there was no evidence of any sort of personality disorder or mental illness presented at the time of his and Myra Hindley’s murder trial, psychiatrists have since claimed that by the age of seventeen, Ian Brady was a psychopath. According to one psychiatric report (written many years later):
He felt that this was a time of deep crisis in his life and that, in some way, a decision had been made. He felt increasingly cut off from other people in the emotional sense—he could no longer feel concern for them or feel warmly towards them. He retained affection for his foster family. He found an affinity for literature of a sadistic nature and had sympathy with fascist ideology and Nazi practices. He says he was exhilarated by their loss of feeling, as it appeared to be liberation or freedom, but at the same time he was distressed.
A mid-twentieth-century study of psychopathic criminals claimed that “this group of people has caused doctors and lawyers more difficulties than any other class of offender.” The twentieth-century psychiatrist David Henderson categorised psychopathic individuals in three ways: the ‘aggressive’, the 'inadequate', and the ‘creative’, and this categorization had been widely accepted in Britain by the mid-1950s. Whether these classifications still hold up today is a discussion for another time, but the first two categories can be respectively defined as those who are “predominantly aggressive towards others or themselves” and “those who are predominantly passive or inadequate; their aggressiveness being confined to mild threats, to sulks, minor delinquencies, petty thieving, and swindling.”
Additionally, the 1954 Postgraduate Medical Journal reported that establishing a secure relationship between a child and his mother by the age of three to five years is essential for normal development in a child.
Though no psychiatric reports of Ian Brady from this prior period of his life have ever been made public—and for the most part, we can only speculate as to what kind of treatment he received if his psychopathic traits were recognised—at the very least the categorization of an ‘inadequate psychopath’ could have been attributed to him given the nature of his petty offences and his mostly passive demeanour. In any case, borstal staff and psychiatrists would never have guessed that somebody like Brady would eventually be capable of torturing, raping, and murdering children.
We do know, however, that Hatfield's psychological assessment deemed Brady unfit for the National Service. Brady faced severe discipline for producing and selling his own alcohol, which frequently led to his intoxication, and for operating a betting ring on another occasion. He claimed to have “gang-banged” one of his informers in a dark field.
Early adulthood
Ian later claimed that he had accumulated many details of contacts during his time served, and that upon his release from Hull on 14th November 1957, he remained particularly close to a couple of his new friends, who he later said would go on to serve as accomplices alongside him in a spree of robberies. There is no evidence that this was true.
By the time of his release, Brady had become remarkably well-read. He said that he discovered the work of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky not long after his arrival at Hull and would eventually go on to read all of his books several times over. He was particularly fond of The Brothers Karamazov, but it is worth nothing that Raskolnikov, the anti-protagonist of Crime and Punishment, took a particular hold on him.
Admittedly, it is easy to see how, on a surface level, Brady may have identified with this character. Raskolnikov is a poor student living in St. Petersburg, all but completely isolated from everyone around him. Intellectually bright but clearly discontented and mentally disturbed, he murders his moneylender and her sister with an axe towards the start of the novel. The story Brady recalled surrounding the injured horse back in the Gorbals is even reminiscent of a nightmare Raskolnikov has surrounding his childhood, where he is witness to a group of people sadistically beating an old horse to death. Brady would later describe this particular moment from the book as a “crystallised immorality of violence; almost too painful to read.” He also claimed that everything he had ever done was in that book. “That’s me; that’s what I am all about.”
Though Raskolnikov’s story is one of eventual redemption, Brady would clearly adapt his initial outlook to justify his own dysfunctional view of the world around him and indirectly draw parallels from the book to his own life. He would argue that Raskolnikov’s remorse had sprung not from empathy for his victims but because he had not thoroughly considered the crime and its repercussions. It seems that Brady uses the terms “remorse” and “shame” as if they were synonyms, which was more evident when he discussed with Fred Harrison in 1985 how he felt demonstrating remorse with actions was far more important than simply declaring that one was remorseful.
I’m not interested in verbal hairshirts, sackcloths, or ashes. I’m not interested in people expressing remorse, because even they don’t know where the line stops between remorse for being caught and remorse for the act.
In addition, Brady acknowledged that censorship in Russia at the time obliged Dostoevsky to write the character’s repentance.
Brady recalled that following Dostoevsky, he would seek out other work, including that of the philosophers Nietzsche and Tolstoy as well as that of the Marquis de Sade, the sexually deviant philosopher and writer whose writings were largely banned in the United Kingdom at this time. Various authors and journalists would attribute the Moors Murders to Sade’s work in particular.
After passing the mandatory psychological assessment, Ian returned to the company of Peggy and Pat, who were living in Beswick at the time. They assigned him a probation officer who would arrange a series of job interviews for him.
Brady still had no desire for any kind of work that was not criminal, and he said that he deliberately sabotaged it. The problem was that since he was still on licence from Borstal, he needed to take a legitimate job. Without a doubt, he would have had to explain the source of his income.
Brady secured a job as a steel erector in a gasworks early in January 1958, only to face redundancy a few weeks later. In March, he moved with Peggy, Pat, and the dog, Bruce, to 18 Westmoreland Street in Longsight — a five-room terraced house where he would remain living until 1964.
Brady continued to retreat into his own private world. He was visually recognisable for wearing a long, dark overcoat over a dark three-piece suit, earning him the nickname ‘The Undertaker’ amongst a few of the locals, including a couple of sisters who thought of him as a figure of amusement.
In 1959, he began ordering LP records of German songs, Hitler’s speeches, and the Nuremberg Trials from one Anthony Marsh of the Deroy Sound Service at Hest Bank (near Lancaster), even sending in tape recordings of German broadcasts for Marsh to make into LP records. The letters were always written in overly large handwriting, starting with “Mein Herr” and ending with “Thank you, Meine Herren.” Marsh assumed the writer was a schoolboy learning the language.
Neighbours recalled him loudly playing these records from his gramophone. One neighbour, James Spilsbury, a war veteran, recalled that:
The marching songs were bad enough. But what really got me was hearing the Nazi leaders screaming at their troops. I thought Brady must be a very peculiar chap. But he was always so quiet in the street. He rarely spoke to anyone and acted as though he was too good to live in the neighbourhood.
Meanwhile, his next-door neighbour, an elderly gentleman named Charles Sharpe, recalled:
I used to see Brady often. He was very fond of his mother and was very reserved with her. He seemed more like a student than a working-class boy. He had a brainy manner, as if he were always thinking about something. I never saw any girls with him. But then his family never mixed with anyone.
In late April 1958, Brady got a labouring job at Boddington’s Breweries. Aside from one brush with magistrates on June 9th of the same year for drunken and disorderly conduct (which resulted in a £1 fine), he managed to avoid getting into trouble. In October, he faced another layoff, but departed with a positive reference.
Millwards
Unsurprisingly, Brady still had no real desire to work. He later told Alan Keightley that his idea of a “decent job” was that of a contract killer. It appears that he went back to working at the market for a couple of months.
In early February of 1959, he spotted an advertisement in the newspaper for a clerical job in the stock control department at Millwards Merchandise Limited, a small chemical distribution plant at Levenshulme Road Works in nearby Gorton.
Having worked various labouring jobs both in and out of Borstal for years (and knowing he had no option but to work an actual job), Brady decided that a 9-to-5 in an office was the nearest option to no work at all. He looked back over his bookkeeping and accounting notes and sent off an application. A few days later, the manager, Tom Craig, called him for an interview. Following this, Craig offered him the job.
Brady didn’t make much of an impression during his early years at Millwards. He wasn’t the most punctual of people, although he was remembered as being a fairly decent worker when he put his mind to it. His colleagues were pleasant and sociable, but he would normally sit on his own at lunch, sometimes preferring to sit at his desk. His meals were repetitive; sometimes he would eat egg-and-cheese sandwiches, and other times a meal consisting of cheese, two whisked raw eggs, and black tea. He was also known for his bad temper; one story goes that they even had to cancel regular bridge sessions because he would fly into fits of rage if his team lost. Craig put it best:
He was so bad-tempered about anything that upset him. If you ticked him off about something, he would fly into a rage. He had a shocking temper, and his language was dreadful, but I used to pass it over just to keep the peace. He was reasonable at his job, but he would have been sacked long before if it hadn’t been that difficult to get staff.
I can’t say I ever got to know him at all. In an office, the lads usually chat a bit about football or something like that, but Brady wasn’t interested in anything like that. Sometimes in the morning he might join in a conversation about what was on TV the night before, but I noticed he only talked about the crime films or the Hitchcock Hour, things with a bit of horror or brutality in them. He often had a book with him — I don’t remember any of them, but they were always those paperbacks with a bit of filth in them. I think it was his first clerical job, and he was just adequate and no more. He wasn’t the sort of fellow I liked to have around.
Millwards quickly sought a replacement for the shorthand typist who left her job in December 1960 to get married. On 16th January 1961, eighteen-year-old Myra Hindley started in the role and quickly set her sights on the tall, dark, and mysterious Ian Brady. He had just turned twenty-three.
Recap the full story of the Moors Murders in my previous article.
This article has not been monetised and I own no rights to any of the photos published. All rights belong to the respective copyright owners.
I have chosen to keep my real identity a secret for the sake of not taking the shine away from my account’s central mission, which is to ensure free access to accurate information around the Moors Murders case. This is the second article in the series. Thank you for reading.
Sources
The papers (and the part transcript) of the Moors Murders trial, The National Archives at Kew, ASSI 84/425–430
Additional sources
- Anthony Stokes; Pit of Shame: The Real Ballad of Reading Gaol (2008)
- Antonella Gambotto-Burke; Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine (2022)
- C. G. C. Cook; The Moors Murderers: The Full Story of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (2022)
- Carol Ann Lee; One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley (2010)
- David Marchbanks; The Moor Murders, (1966)
- Denis Hill; “Psychopathic Personality”, Postgraduate Medical Journal, vol. 30, no. 346, 1954
- Donald W. Black; “The natural history of antisocial personality disorder”, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (Revue canadienne de psychiatrie), July 2015
- Dr. Alan Keightley; Ian Brady: The Untold Story of the Moors Murders (2017)
- Dr. Chris Cowley; Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady (2011)
- Emlyn Williams; Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection (1967)
- Fred Harrison; Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders, (1986)
- Ian Brady; The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and its Analysis (2001)
- John Deane Potter; The Monsters on the Moors (1966)
- Jonathan Goodman; The Trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (1973)
- Judge Gerald Sparrow; Satan’s Children (1966)
- Peter and Leni Gillman; “‘I had a very happy childhood free of fear — I have no excuses’ — Ian Brady”, The Mail On Sunday, 15th May 2005
- Peter Topping with Jean Ritchie; Topping (1989)
- Richard Fox; “Sin, Crime and the Psychopath”, The Modern Law Review; volume 27, issue 2, 1964
- Theodore Dalrymple; “Inside the mind of a monster”, The Telegraph, 2nd December 2001
