One of Britain’s top forensic psychologists who sat across the table from some of the world’s most deranged criminal minds has revealed he has never disliked a subject more than Moors Murder Ian Brady.
Professor Jeremy Coid first met Brady back in 2003 whilst conducting a mental health review for him at Ashworth High Security Psychiatric Hospital in Merseyside.
Brady, then aged 65, had been incarcerated for 37 years at this point for the gruesome Moors Murders with evil accomplice Myra Hindley in the 1960s.
The twisted couple who have been remembered as ‘The Moors Murderers’ engaged in the sadistic brutality and murder of five children, before burying their bodies in Saddleworth Moor in North West England.
Professor Coid made his comments in an interview with independent filmmaker Thomas Gardner, recalling that his first impression of the sadistic killer was remarkably low key.
‘He was quite pleasant and courteous’, he recalled, ‘he looked to me like quite a shabby Oxford don. He was wearing a sports jacket and had a shot of grey hair.’
The child killer was born in 1938 in Glasgow, where he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals, infamously known as one of Glasgow’s toughest and most impoverished slums.
As a teenager, Brady committed a slew of petty crimes, with the courts eventually sending him to Manchester to live with his mother, and her new husband, Patrick Brady.
As time went on, with the intention to ‘better himself,’ Brady pursued new interests in building up a library of books on Nazism, sadism and sexual perversion.
Staring across the table at the psychopathy, Professor Coid remarked that he exuded a desperate sinister need to ‘control’.
He continued: ‘What happened during the interview was it became very clear it was very difficult to interrupt him.
‘This was a man who was so self centered that he didn’t want to do anything but talk about himself and about his negative feelings towards others.’
Brady and Hindley eventually tortured and killed five children aged between 10 and 17 and buried their bodies in Saddleworth Moor – at least four of the victims were sexually assaulted.
Their first victim was Pauline Reade, who was murdered by Brady and Hindley when she was just 16 years old, in 1963. She had picked up by Hindley and taken to the moor where she was sexually assaulted and strangled by Brady.
Hindley and Brady then lured schoolboy, 12-year-old John Kibride, from a market in Ashton-Under-Lyne in 1963.
In a familiar pattern, the three of them ended up taking a detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor. Brady told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy.
The third victim was 12-year-old Keith Bennet in 1964, with Hindley luring him into a van by asking him to help with some boxes and sadistic lover Brady watching his prey from the back seat.
With the three taking yet another detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor, Brady later told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy. He is the only of the five victim’s whose body has never been found.
Youngest victim Lesley Ann Downey, 10, had been lured from a fairground to Hindley and Brady’s home in 1964, where, once inside the house, she was undressed, gagged and strangled.
She was later found naked with her clothes at her feet, in a shallow grave on the moor, after a sickening 16-minute recording of her death was captured by the pair.
The final victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans, who was attacked with an axe, smothered with a cushion and strangled with an electrical cable in 1965.
Professor Coid said that although Brady’s crimes were shocking he had on the occasion encountered worse. However, the Moors Murderer’s aura engendered in him a personal dislike he had never encountered before.
He explained: ‘I think if you’re an experienced forensic psychiatrist it’s important to be aware of how your patients make you feel and how they make you feel towards them.
‘He didn’t make me afraid at all, but he produced in me a profoundly negative feeling.
‘A feeling of personal dislike towards him that grew and grew as the interview went on.
‘He was doing something to me, to my inner world. It became quite clear he was trying to control me throughout the interview
‘I’ve seen offenders who have committed extremely unpleasant and sometimes possibly even worse murders that haven’t managed to produce such a negative reaction in me.’
Brady never showed any remorse for his heinous crimes, while Hindley maintained she had been beaten and drugged by her partner into becoming a cold-blooded killer.
Touching on the deviant’s callous lack of remorse, Professor Coid said: ‘He never showed any remorse and made it clear he never would.
‘I asked him about remorse and he referred to it as wind and said “if they want wind they would have to wait till Doomsday before they got it.”‘