The Gates of Janus Read online

  The Gates of Janus:

  Serial Killing and its Analysis

  Expanded Edition

  By Ian Brady

  The Gates of Janus © 2015 by Ian Brady, Feral House

  All rights reserved

  A Feral House book

  ISBN 978-1-62731-014-7

  Feral House

  1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

  Port Townsend WA 98368

  www.FeralHouse.com

  design and illustration by D. Collins

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Dr Alan Keightley

  Introduction, The Moors Murders by Colin Wilson

  THE GATES OF JANUS BY IAN BRADY

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eight | HENRY LEE LUCAS

  Chapter Nine | JOHN WAYNE GACY

  Chapter Ten | GRAHAM YOUNG

  Chapter Eleven | DEAN CORLL

  Chapter Twelve | PETER SUTCLIFFE

  Chapter Thirteen | RICHARD RAMIREZ

  Chapter Fourteen | THE MAD BUTCHER

  Chapter Fifteen | TED BUNDY

  Chapter Sixteen | THE GREEN RIVER KILLER

  Chapter Seventeen | CARL PANZRAM

  Chapter Eighteen | THE HILLSIDE STRANGLERS

  Epilogue

  Afterword by Peter Sotos

  New Material for the Paperback edition by Colin Wilson

  Bait by Peter Sotos

  Ian Brady article for The Guardian Killed

  Chris Campion on The Guardian, Brady, and Gates of Janus

  FOREWORD

  by Dr. Alan Keightley

  As soon as I received and began to read this manuscript I knew that I had a remarkable document in my hands.

  The author, who did not reveal his name to me, and whom I assumed to be a man, seemed to be offering a hunting manual for the tracking down of the serial killer by the use of psychological profiling and a study of his afterimage at the scene of the murder. Doing this successfully would be an achievement in itself. I leave others at the knife-edge of forensic investigation to judge its efficacy in the pursuit of what the author calls the greatest and most dangerous game in existence: man.

  Expert profilers have, of course, already produced studies of serial killers. FBI detective Robert Ressler wrote the substantial Whoever Fights Monsters. His associate at Quantico, John Douglas, produced Mindhunters. So, what’s new here?

  The Gates of Janus is a book written by a serial killer about other serial killers, or, as the author himself says, a dissection of what murder is really all about from the point of view of a murderer, for a change. Criminals have written books before — and classically, Dostoevsky and The House of the Dead, but the present study has a uniqueness of its own.

  This leads me on to the second reason for its special character — the sheer quality and intelligence of the writing and its acute observation of human behaviour. The author investigates the psychology of the serial killer by discussing a number of notorious cases, which fleshes out the bare bones of his general conclusions about profiling. Again, it’s true that lay authors have written high-grade books on murder. Joseph Wambaugh, Stephen Michaud and Ann Rule come to mind. They themselves were not killers, although Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy quite well according to her book The Stranger Beside Me. But Bundy remained the stranger beside her. A murderer writing on murder possesses a perspective denied crime writers and detectives. As the author of Gates of Janus sees it — we are all beyond one another’s experience, but, hauntingly, not so far beyond.

  Most books, particularly in the true crime genre, are simply books about books. This one is an exception. It is mercifully free of footnotes — or, should we say, footprints? In his own field of disturbing expertise, the author speaks with great authority and originality.

  The third reason for the uniqueness of this study is, for me, the most fascinating. Although I have read a great deal in the areas of true crime and criminal psychology, my own field is philosophy and religious studies. I am impressed by the philosophical and spiritual light it sheds on the dark corners of homicide and its occult dimensions. It’s apparent that the author has spent a great deal of time reading and reflecting on the world he once knew prior to years monastically shuttered within a prison cell. The result reaches a rare level of philosophical maturity, a ‘spiritual’ perspective of existential relativism, questioning vital issues in psychology, philosophy and theology.

  The author shrewdly observes that psychiatrists rarely stray into the field of philosophy. Psychology, like every other discipline, has hidden metaphysical assumptions regarding human identity and the nature of reality. The poverty of Western academia in the fields of psychology, philosophy and theology is highlighted by their failure to respond radically and passionately to the idea, the assumption, that life is meaningless. Academic philosophy is a nine-to-five job in which its professionals spend their lives repeating the assumption that life has no ultimate meaning.

  Perhaps it requires the aptitude of a highly sensitive and perceptive serial killer to spell out the consequences of this belief. Dostoevsky, whose psychological perceptions are highly valued by the author of this book, observed that without God, everything is permitted.

  Since the time of St. Augustine, theologians have addressed the problem of evil with an inherent naïveté. It’s a naïveté which this book indirectly but mercilessly exposes to the point of mockery and even of pity. In this universe, everything comes in two’s, everything. Wherever there is the light of consciousness there is a shadow. There is a dark force in this universe that will have its way.

  Western ethical monotheism still speaks touchingly of the eventual advent of the kingdom of God, in which all things shall be well, either in this world or in the bright blue yonder. The writings of Carl Jung were an exception to this monotheism in its recognition of the shadow archetype. Oriental philosophy and religion also share a realism about this world’s polarities. Humans think in categories and divide in thought what remains undivided by nature. Western culture, by and large, is a celebration of the illusion that light may exist without darkness, good without evil and pleasure without pain. This book will have none of it. It leaves the challenge on the table: is there really a great gulf between the instincts of a serial killer and the public at large? Wittgenstein said, ‘Man can regard all the evil within himself as delusion.’ But is there what Kierkegaard would call a ‘fatal defect’ in everybody? One hopes that the present study goads the philosopher, psychologist and theologian into talking turkey and addressing the real issues.

  The author asks us to look through the lace curtain of the conventional world, to wake up from the ontological sleep and see the world in its terrifying grandeur. Most people live and dream enchanted by the social trance of mediocrity, blind to what the Zen teacher Sokei-an Sasaki called the ‘shining trance.’

  Imprisoned for years with psychopaths, psychotics and schizoids, the author has seen things the rest of us can scarcely dream of. Here we have human nature in all its fascinating devious guises. As Dostoevsky darkly observed, ‘If the devil doesn’t exist, that man has created him, he has surely created him in his own image and likeness.’ In this book we are in a short time introduced to the extremes of behaviour, the psychospiritual quagmire: ‘The horrors of hell can be experienced within a single day; that’s plenty of time’ (Wittgenstein). We are offered observations from personal acquaintance of the likes of the poisoner Graham Young and the ripper Peter Sutcliffe. All of this is done with verve, wit and arresting imagery in a manuscript stud
ded with literary, philosophical and religious allusions.

  The author surveys the scene in which he once participated. He laconically admits that he is genuinely glad his life is as good as over already, that he is a ghost on the human stage. He feels no sense of betrayed fellowship or breach of loyalty in giving the game away. The murderer knows the dangers anyway. Perhaps it will require another serial killer to recognize the paradoxical wisdom of these pages, as written by an authority situated in the shadows.

  Dr Alan Keightley

  King Edward VI College

  Stourbridge

  West Midlands

  England

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Dr Keightley wrote the Foreword when Ian Brady wanted to publish The Gates of Janus under the pseudonym François Villon.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MOORS MURDERS

  by Colin Wilson

  One Saturday morning, soon after Easter 1990, my wife Joy told me that we had had a visitor after I had gone to bed the previous evening. A young lady had knocked at the door asking to see me. She claimed to be a friend of the Moors Murderer Ian Brady, and wanted to ask my advice about a book she intended to write. To prove that she knew Brady, she had left behind one of his letters. It was written in a neat, very readable handwriting, and signed ‘Ian’ — it certainly looked genuine. Moreover, Brady talked about ‘outsiders,’ and it was obvious that he knew my work.

  We will call her ‘Christine,’ and she told Joy that because of her orphaned background she had identified with Brady and had then been the victim of a press stunt. This rang a bell. I had been going through my press cuttings and had seen a popular tabloid with a headline: AM I IAN BRADY’S DAUGHTER?

  I showed my wife the picture of a pretty blonde girl on the front page.

  ‘Yes, that’s her.’

  The girl was apparently staying at a local hotel, and I rang and arranged to meet her. After explaining why she wanted to write a book, she moved to our house for the rest of the weekend.

  She had spent the first six years of her life in a Manchester orphanage, then been fostered by a couple from London. Unfortunately they had returned her to the orphanage when she was ten. And life ever since then had been miserable and insecure.

  That was why she decided to write to Ian Brady. Brady, one of the most notorious murderers in jail in Britain, had been committing his crimes in Manchester at about the time Christine was born. She fantasised that he might be her father. So she wrote to him; he replied, and she went to visit him in jail. A journalist got wind of the story that he was being visited by an attractive blonde, and came to interview her. She told him that she believed she might be Brady’s daughter. Hence the tabloid story.

  Now she wanted to write an autobiography in which he would feature largely. She identified herself and Brady as ‘Outsiders’ and she proposed quoting some of his letters. That was what she wanted to ask my advice about.

  I told her that Brady’s letters remained his copyright, and that she could only quote them with his permission. But this, she explained, was unlikely, for he had recently decided that she was trying to exploit him, and they were now no longer on the best of terms.

  In due course, she sent me some of her book, and I was impressed — she was a born writer. I encouraged her, and she found herself an agent who believed he might sell the book for a huge advance, and for months she dreamed of overnight celebrity. Unfortunately, this failed to materialise, and the book was finally accepted by a small publisher for a minuscule advance. I wrote an Introduction. And in 1993, The Devil’s Daughter appeared, and after a minor flurry of publicity, was soon remaindered. The publisher had given it this title to perpetuate the myth that Ian Brady was her father, and I regarded the whole business as exploitative and dishonest.

  By that time I had already been corresponding with Ian Brady for more than a year. He had written to me in November 1991, asking me if it was true that Christine intended to write a book about him quoting his letters. I wrote back explaining just what was happening, and that I had told her she was not allowed to use his letters.

  We have been corresponding ever since. By this time, I alone have written enough letters to fill twenty-seven disks of files — about the length of a five-hundred-page book, and Ian has probably written about the same.

  The Moors case had always interested me. Brady was the first British example of a type I had noted several years earlier: what I called ‘the self-esteem killer.’ The American psychologist Abraham Maslow, about whom I was later to write a book, had made me aware that the psychological evolution of human beings tends to follow a definite pattern, like a flight of steps. If you are poor and starving, the only thing you care about is food, and you imagine that if you could just have one square meal a day, you would be ideally happy. But if you achieve this — let us say, by moving into a hostel — the next step is to want your own home; every tramp dreams of a country cottage with roses round the door. And if you achieve this, the next stage is the desire for sexual fulfillment — not just sex, but to be loved and wanted. And if you achieve this, then the next step emerges — the self-esteem level. You want the liking and respect of your fellow men. (This is the stage when men join Rotary clubs and women give coffee mornings.) And, according to Maslow, if you have achieved all these things, there is a fifth possible stage, which he calls self-actualisation. This basically means some kind of creative fulfillment, although not necessarily writing poetry or symphonies. It is just doing something you are good at for the sheer fun of it — and it might be as simple as putting ships in bottles.

  I had noted that, historically speaking, crime follows the same stages. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when most people were poor, crime tended to be motivated simply by the need to stay alive — highway robbery, burglary and so on. Then came the Victorian phase of domestic murder, where the motivation was home and security.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new type of crime emerged — sex crime. In the previous century, sex was so easy to obtain, with working girls selling themselves for the price of a glass of gin, that rape would have been absurd. But nineteenth-century respectability made sex morbidly desirable. The murders of Jack the Ripper are the most notorious sex crimes of the period, and it is significant that most people did not even recognise them as sex crimes; the most popular theory was that he was a religious maniac who hated prostitutes.

  In the late 1950s, a jazz musician named Melvin Rees committed a number of sex murders in Maryland, including a family of four, whom he forced off the road with his car. He killed the husband and baby then took the mother and five-year-old girl to a remote location where they were raped and murdered. Rees was finally arrested in Arkansas and sentenced to death. But he had told a friend: ‘You can’t say it’s wrong to kill — only individual standards make it right or wrong’ — an argument also advanced by the Marquis de Sade.

  It struck me immediately that these were, to some extent, crimes of intellectual rebellion, and therefore could not be classified simply as sex crimes. He was justifying his sex crimes with his intellect, and felt, like Sade, that he had seen through the sham of morality. He saw himself as being above normal morality, and in that sense, could be classified as a self-esteem killer.

  This was even more clear in the case of eighteen-year-old Robert Smith, who went into a hairdressing parlour in Arizona, made three women and a child lie on the floor, then shot them all in the back of the head. Asked why he did it, he replied: ‘I wanted to get known — to get myself a name.’

  During the Moors trial, extracts were read aloud in court from the journals of Brady’s friend and disciple David Smith. ‘Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure,’ ‘People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless fish bait,’ ‘God is a disease, a plague, a weight around man’s neck,’ And when Smith admitted he had absorbed these views from Brady, it was clear once again that the Moors Murders could not be classified simply as sex crimes; they involved Maslow’s fourth level,
self-esteem.

  The Moors Murders always seemed a typical case of ‘folie à deux,’ yet there were certain anomalies. I entered into correspondence with Ian Brady hoping to solve some of these riddles, such as why a quiet, normal girl who loved animals and children should take part in child-murder; from this point of view, it proved as intriguing and rewarding as I had hoped.

  Even a bare outline of the case is electrifying. A girl of eighteen takes a job in an office in Manchester, and becomes wildly infatuated with a tall, good-looking Scottish clerk in his early twenties, who at first ignores her. Eventually they become lovers, and she is not too shocked to learn that he has been in prison, nor alarmed when he proposes that they embark on a criminal career, robbing banks and building societies. In fact, this Bonnie and Clyde collaboration never comes about; instead, they decide on a more sinister agenda — killing children; she lures them into the car, and later helps in the disposal of the violated bodies on Saddleworth Moor.

  It was this young girl’s involvement in child murder that so shocked the British public, and led to a morbid fascination with the case that is still as strong after forty years. As I write this, in May 2001, the chain-smoking Myra Hindley is known to be in poor health, possibly with only a matter of months to live, and there is still a furious public outcry every time a newspaper even hints that the Home Secretary may be thinking of granting her parole. For some odd reason, she is hated even more than Brady, who was, after all, the instigator of the murders.

  Who is Ian Brady? He was born Ian Duncan Stewart on January 2, 1938 in Glasgow. His mother, Margaret Stewart, was a twenty-eight-year-old waitress in a hotel tea room; his father was a journalist, who died three months before Ian’s birth.

  Margaret Stewart did her best to support the child, farming him out to babysitters when she had to work in the evening, but finally advertised for a full-time ‘childminder.’ Mary and John Sloan took him into ‘their warm and friendly home’ (to quote Jean Ritchie’s book on Myra Hindley), where his mother, who now called herself Peggy, came to visit him every Sunday, bringing him clothes and presents. So it hardly seems that Ian Brady can be regarded as someone who was subjected to childhood neglect and brutality.