Could Ian Brady's missing memoir help solve the Moors Murders mystery?
The second and final episode of this conscientious, unsensationalist series reveals that the film-maker and journalist Duncan Staff has unearthed Ian Brady's secret typewritten autobiography — which Brady grandly called 'Black Light' — in which he describes the planning, murder and hasty burial of his and Myra Hindley's first victim, Pauline Reade, in 1963, including counting out the paces from her grave. This document could be the guide to where Keith is buried on Saddleworth Moor — though frustratingly it stops abruptly before getting to him. There are 200 pages missing. But they must, Staff reasons, be somewhere.
Astonishingly, the pages that Staff has been given have laid hidden for years, with the police seemingly unaware of their existence. Staff believes the missing ones may have been deposited with Brady's solicitor. Hours before Brady's death in 2017 he asked for locked suitcases of papers in his room to be handed to Robin Makin, his solicitor. Police and members of the victims' families have requested access to it but this has been denied. Makin did not respond to the film-makers' request for information about the autobiography, said a statement.
Bennett was one of Brady and Hindley's five victims
PA
Perhaps even more astonishingly, when Staff presented his findings to Greater Manchester Police it was at first interested but then appeared to have a change of heart. In the past, searches on the moors have proved very expensive, though this was not cited as a reason. 'We will carefully consider and respond, in a timely and professional manner, to any credible evidence shared with us that may lead us towards finding Keith,' said a statement.
I'm no expert but Staff's findings seem very credible. Staff has been given access to a trove of Brady's documents and tape recordings of his voice held by Brady's confidant, the former religious studies teacher Dr Alan Keightley. Though it feels soiling to hear Brady's self-pitying, foul-mouthed whingeing (he even calls his own solicitors 'c***s') that he is allowed only a 'f***ing typewriter'.
This film is not interested in raking over the gruesome details of the torture, rape and murder of their young victims, which, depressingly, are all too familiar. Instead it examines the possibility of harnessing new technology — GPS, drones, analysis of Brady's photographs and 3D scanning of the landscape — perhaps finally to bring closure of sorts for Keith's family. (His mother, Winnie Johnson, was buried with his little spectacles — all that she had left of him.)
Of course Brady was a calculating psychopath. It is quite possible he deliberately removed the pages to play mind games from the grave with those still seeking Keith's body, the last power card he had to play. Maybe they don't exist; maybe he destroyed them, relishing sending people on a wild goose chase after his death. But as someone said, this is a social matter now as much as a criminal one. This mystery needs to be solved and this child laid to rest, and if there is a chance these pages can help with that, then surely it's worth a shot.
★★★★☆
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