BEYOND BELIEF

I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t write about such things in something as trivial as a “blog” but sometimes a news story gets into my head, and the stuff that’s in my head, I suppose, is what these posts are supposed to be all about.

Some things, some terrible, awful things deserve never to be forgotten just so that we can try – as best we can - to make sure that they never are allowed to happen again, and to speak out for those innocent victims who remain unable to speak for themselves.

The Moors Murders have left a huge stain on the part of the world in which I grew up. The scars remain pretty deep even nearly fifty years after those sickening couple of years in the first half of the 1960s, when the terror of children randomly vanishing as walked the streets of more than one northern town embedded itself into a generation of worried parents.

When I was growing up it was an open wound, the one subject guaranteed to reduce a room of chattering adults to whispers and silence, and a lot of that outrage, resentment and anger still bubbles up whenever the story resurfaces, polarising the community again, confusing those who didn’t have to live through it, and, arguably, shaping the entire lives of a whole community.

So much so in fact that when Ian Brady occasionally resurfaces and pokes a stick into the beehive of resentment that has built up around his crimes, it is always “news”, and it always causes fresh pain, and that, I fear, is precisely what he wants. Once again, the stories of his crimes are splashed across the front pages to introduce his face to yet another generation who previously might not have recognised him.

Time scours.

Crimes once considered “too terrible to ever be forgotten” are surpassed by other crimes that might seem far worse because they are happening right now. The crimes of half a century ago can seem like ancient history if they happened thirty or more years before you were even born. Like the horrors of Nazi Germany, it’s far too easy for those who didn’t actually experience them to dismiss them and imply that they couldn’t have been so bad.

But they were that bad.

In fact, they were even worse than you can possibly imagine simply because ordinary human beings were doing what is simply unimaginable, and the true horror is that, if the circumstances were correct, they’d do it all over again and indeed they have done.

Winnie Johnson, the mother of Keith Bennett, the child the location of whose body Brady has never revealed, is now his latest victim, and, in many ways, what he did to her was possibly on a scale of cruelty that few of us can even imagine, allowing the withholding of that tiny piece of information to fester in her mind and scratch away at her life for all these years. Holding back that one morsel of knowledge has given him the power over the people whom he wished to keep on hurting and you know that he knows it.

Because he’s a psychopath, and this means that respecting the usual laws of decency simply does not occur to him. If his particular brand of notoriety hasn’t been getting the tabloids all hot under the collar, or if he gets the faintest notion that he is being “forgotten” about (and really, how could we…?) then he will throw out another morsel to the pack of baying hounds and get another couple of days in the spotlight.

Usually, you’ll perhaps have noticed, after some other “child killer” has been in the news, almost as if he can’t stand the competition for being the most reviled man in Britain.

Perhaps the loss of Winnie is also her final victory over him. For once she was able to snatch control of the “news agenda” away from him after the “revelations” of the day before, and whilst it is a tragedy that she never did get to bury her son properly, perhaps that final “trump card” that his killer thinks he is still holding is now nothing more than an empty handful of fetid air as worthless as Brady himself.

I first read Emlyn Williams account of the story “Beyond Belief” when I was still an impressionable teenager, and it already felt like ancient history to me then, despite those events having only taken place in the previous decade. Certain places and dates from the text resonated with me, sometimes for the most trivial of reasons, and it sent a shiver down my spine when I considered those horrific events happening on those very familiar streets I knew so well.

I do also have a massively tenuous link to the case in that the doctor who first examined Brady was a close personal friend of my grandparents as I found out when I first read that book all those years ago and his name leapt off the page at me. It shouldn’t surprise me that I found out this way, because, as I’ve said, it was not a topic for polite conversation in the houses in which I grew up.

At about the same time I was reading my copy in a bedroom somewhere near to Manchester, and being inspired to look for the bleak side to just about everything, Morrissey was reading his copy too. It inspired him to write the Smiths song “Suffer Little Children” which only goes to show that such stories effect people in many different ways, and that some people can turn the most horrific things into “art” of a kind…

Before his notorious accomplice Myra Hindley died, I did used to think some (possibly quite liberal) nonsense about the things that are done in our name when it comes to judicial punishments. Whilst I’m still not in favour of capital punishment, I did used to have a nagging doubt about her hopeless situation with the parole board, thinking that, in some ways, the law in her case was not acting with quite the impartiality that it ought to, but that’s irrelevant now, ten years on, and, perhaps, as the years have passed I’ve possibly become more intolerant of cruelty and I think my opinion might not be quite the same if you asked me today.

Strangely enough, as far as he is concerned, I have never had any doubts: Throw away the key.

Anyway, because of the sombre nature of these thoughts, there will be no picture accompanying them today - I wouldn’t want to give him the satisfaction and, to be perfectly honest, what would be a “suitable” image to attach anyway...? Perhaps instead I should just end with a list of the names of their victims, who are far more deserving of our memories…

John Kilbride (12), Lesley Ann Downey (10), Edward Evans (17), Pauline Reade (16), and Keith Bennett (12), wherever he may be, and, of course, his mum, who never stopped looking…