Ian Brady claimed to have killed four more people in unseen letters
The Moors murderer Ian Brady claimed he killed four more people and said the body of his victim Keith Bennett is buried in Yorkshire, in previously unpublished letters shown to The Daily Telegraph.
[PDF: ianbradyletter]
By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter
6:28PM BST 28 Jun 2013
Brady, 75, said he killed two men in his native Glasgow and then killed a man and a woman in Manchester, the city where he and his accomplice Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children in the 1960s.
Meanwhile his claims about the location of 12-year-old Keith Bennett’s body raise the possibility that police may have been looking in the wrong place during successive searches of Saddleworth Moor in Greater Manchester.
Brady has lost his legal bid to be transferred from Ashworth maximum security hospital back into the prison system after a mental health tribunal ruled he “continues to suffer from a mental disorder”.
He had hoped to return to jail so he could starve himself to death rather than being force-fed through a tube, as he has been since 1999, when he began a hunger strike.
He has the right to appeal against the decision, which followed an eight-day hearing costing the taxpayer an estimated £250,000.
Brady made a series of extraordinary claims about his crimes in a series of letters to Brendan Pittaway, an author and journalist who wrote to him in Ashworth.
In his letters Brady describes the four additional murders as “happenings” and says that he killed a man “on the waste ground behind the station” and a “woman in the canal”.
Brady goes on to say he also killed a man in Glasgow and another man “above Loch Long”, a 20-mile long sea loch at the mouth of the Clyde.
Brady gave details of the four alleged murders to Det Ch Supt Peter Topping, the man who led the search for Keith Bennett when Brady confessed to killing him in 1985.
In his autobiography, Mr Topping discusses the claims – as well as an 18-year-old youth Brady claimed to have killed and buried on the moors – but said he had serious doubts about whether Brady was telling the truth, adding that even Brady had suggested some of the claims might be “figments of his imagination”.
According to Brady, Mr Topping told him a “mentally restarted[?] man” had confessed to the killing near the station but was never charged, and that the woman found in the canal had been classed as a suicide despite “the absence of a suicide note and the presence of a bruise on her head”.
He alleges that Mr Topping told him Strathclyde Police did not keep records going as far back as the death of one of the men in Glasgow and that the second did not match any reports of missing persons.
Brady also claims he gave Mr Topping “names, places and methods used”.
He writes: “My statements were an embarrassment to the police, who, rather than admit irregularities had taken place, will move mountains to cover up.”
In the same letter, dated Nov 24, 1989, he writes: “As for Keith Bennett. The area of the site is in Yorkshire, not (double underlined) Lancashire, and should have been dealt with by the Yorkshire Police.
“I have already stated my readiness to questioning under Sodium Penthatol (sic) so-called ‘truth drug’, but not (double underlined) by the Manchester Police.”
It is unclear, however, whether Brady is suggesting police have been looking in completely the wrong place for Keith, or is merely splitting hairs over the changing locations of county boundaries in order to get West Yorkshire Police involved in the inquiry, rather than Greater Manchester, against whom he has a grudge.
At the time of the Moors murders Saddleworth Moor was in West Yorkshire, but after a boundary change in 1974 it became part of Greater Manchester.
John Ainley, the solicitor who represented Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson until her death last year, said: “There are some areas of the moors that were searched which are in Derbyshire, so if he is saying it is in Yorkshire that would be a start, as it is a vast area.
“Without additional information though, it is still a needle in a haystack and might not lead to any fresh investigations.
“I would appeal to Ian Brady to come forward and either identify the whereabouts of Keith or tell us that he doesn’t know.”
Detective Chief Superintendent Darren Shenton, head of Greater Manchester Police's Serious Crime Division, said: "During the 1980s, the Detective Chief Superintendent who was heading up the investigation into the Moors murders looked into claims that Ian Brady may have been involved in other murders.
"These claims were fully investigated based on the information available at the time and were not substantiated.
"Should any new information about historic murders come to light, these will be fully investigated."
A spokesman for Police Scotland said: “We have no ongoing inquiries into Ian Brady.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... tters.html
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