Brady reveals location of Keith Bennett's body

[Swan Red]

Legal obligation appears quite clear, imo.

 

If she believes as firmly as she appeared to on the telly that Brady knows and that the letter has key info then she is party to preventing a lawful burial, isn't she?

 

I haven't seen the programme so can't really comment

[smithdown]

I haven't seen the programme so can't really comment

 

 

Think you'd be surprised, tbh. She was really quite arrogant about it - 'I wouldn't have been given it if I was the type of person who would have opened it' - and seemed to be on all the wrong type of terms with Brady, very defensive about him as if it's his right to tell where the body is when and if he chooses, 'well thats what you get with psychopathy', deffo gone native that one which was in huge contrast to everyone else interviewed.

Edited August 21, 2012 by smithdown

[matty]

As Brady's advocate her moral obligation is to her client. She either tells him up front that she will provide any letters to the police or she doesn't take accept them. You're right we still don't know that there was a letter and can only speculate to the contents in the event that there was one.

She has a moral obligation to her client, but she also has a moral obligation to society, if that's not putting it in grandiose terms.

 

Brady doesn't have the right to have everything he says, does or writes kept confidential. If there's a wider public interest issue, as there would be here, then I'd argue there is an obligation to disclose.

[Swan Red]

As his advocate she has to be defensive.

 

There's obviously problems with her credibility she shouldn't have mentioned the letter to the producer of the documentary and she's decided what the letter likely contains. I don't know that she should be used to undermine the role of advocates though.

[Bigal]

Think you'd be surprised, tbh. She was really quite arrogant about it - 'I wouldn't have been given it if I was the type of person who would have opened it' - and seemed to be on all the wrong type of terms with Brady, very defensive about him as if it's his right to tell where the body is when and if he chooses, 'well thats what you get with psychopathy', deffo gone native that one which was in huge contrast to everyone else interviewed.

 

was she the one that got dead defensive when he said the letter was like a triumph dance or something?

[Flight]

Some people found it difficult to believe that Hindley had played a full and willing part in it and that, having been so manipulated by Brady (they knew what he was like), thought that she could be rehabilitated after talking to her.

 

The likelihood is that she was just as manipulative as him in her own way. She tried every trick possible to get to the parole board. Sadly Lord Longford, who was in many ways a great man, was taken in by her.

 

 

An interesting read :

 

 

 

 

 

Dangerous liaison

 

For 35 years he championed her cause, yet to Myra Hindley Lord Longford became a 'pestilential pain'. Duncan Staff, who knew both of them, re-examines their relationship in light of letters made public here for the first time

 

Myra Hindley was still in love with Ian Brady when Lord Longford first went to visit her in Holloway Prison in autumn 1968. It was two years since her conviction for the Moors murders and she confronted the Earl with an extraordinary request: she wanted him to persuade the Home Office to permit inter-prison visits between her and Brady.

Frank Longford, as minister for Germany in the Attlee government, had met concentration camp guards but, according to his friend and biographer Peter Stanford, the enormity of Hindley's crimes "made even him pause to draw breath for a moment." But Hindley had formidable powers of persuasion and Longford stayed to hear her out. "Frank was extremely sharp. He was alive to what was going on, but believed that no one was beyond redemption - not even Myra Hindley," says Andrew McCooey, Hindley's solicitor. Longford was by now a member of Harold Wilson's cabinet and Hindley the most reviled woman in the country. The meeting at Holloway ended with Longford agreeing to do as she requested, and for the next 35 years he continued to argue her case.

 

For all that, by 2001, when Longford died, Hindley had cut him off. She would not permit him to visit her and had come to see him as a liability. She wrote to me while I was making a BBC documentary on her case for freedom: "It is a task even beyond Hercules to gag Frank Longford... if the dangerous dogs act was still in force, I'd take it upon myself to muzzle him."

 

How the man most closely associated with Myra Hindley's campaign had fallen so far from favour, and what that says about the continuing public obsession with her crimes, are questions that a new drama, Longford, to be broadcast by Channel 4 later this month, attempts to answer. In general, the film represents Longford fairly, but in the end it's a drama, not a documentary. Factual details and the balance of relationships are distorted, notably between Brady and Hindley - to Hindley's advantage. This matters still, in particular to the family of the last missing victim, Keith Bennett. To them, this is an unresolved case, and Hindley might have done more to lay it to rest had she not been so preoccupied with her own image and chances of parole.

 

After Hindley's death I was passed her personal papers in the hope that they might help locate the body of Keith Bennett. It was thought her papers might provide a clue. I don't yet know if that will prove to be the case, but the documents do shed light on the secrets behind the Moors murders and on the true nature of Hindley's relationship with Longford.

 

In letters home to her mother Nellie, Hindley relates how, when they first met, she sat and listened to Longford's account of his conversion to Catholicism. This must have taken some doing. A rejection of Christianity and its role in "subjugating" the working class, lay at the heart of her relationship with Brady. Nevertheless, Hindley sought common ground. Longford particularly admired the Franciscans - and she had been baptised and confirmed in the monastery church of St Francis in Gorton, east Manchester. McCooey thinks it would be wrong to say Longford was duped by her. "You have to understand that a deep religious conviction underpinned everything Frank did," he says. "That did not mean he was naive; it did mean that he was willing to set aside doubts and cynicism in pursuit of the goodness that he felt lay within every individual."

 

It did not take long before the newspapers discovered that Longford was visiting Holloway. Rather than eschew publicity, he courted it. A close friend of Hindley's told me that this decision was to have disastrous consequences for her: "He started the whole thing. He got the Sun to come along and photograph him going through the gates. Until then the story had started to fade away - his involvement kept it on the front pages."

 

Hindley did not initially grasp the effect of her relationship with Longford, reasoning that having "friends in high places" could only help her cause. Longford knew everyone from the prime minister down. He'd helped Beveridge lay the foundations of the welfare state and been a minister in two Labour governments. She was delighted when he was made a Knight of the Garter. If anyone could arrange for her to see Ian again, surely it had to be Frank?

 

This hope, and her attachment to Brady, survived for some years. But the drip-drip of disappointment took its toll and in 1972 Hindley wrote to Brady to tell him it was all over. Longford's role was now no longer to secure inter-prison visits - it was to get her out of prison altogether. Hindley began to attend mass every week.

 

Longford was convinced that the reversion to her childhood faith was genuine. But in a letter to her mother, Hindley confessed that, while she had agreed to attend mass, she doubted she would "see the light" again. The press, informed by Longford of her renewed faith, pursued the story. In 1972 the Daily Express tracked down Father William Kahle at the Abbey of Our Lady in Chimay, Belgium. He had just left Holloway after six years as the prison's priest. He told the reporter Colin Lawson, "Lord Longford said to me when he had seen Myra on one occasion, 'Has she not changed a great deal? Hasn't her personality changed?' I told him, 'I don't think so.' "

 

The story ran on the front page, under Hindley's arrest photograph. Kahle had his doubts about her religious conviction, but none about the effect the coverage would have: "I must stress that the publicity will not do Myra any good and will only be worse for her, possibly set her release date back many years - and just think of the parents and the neighbours and all those who were concerned in the case."

 

The priest was right. The former Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, William Palfery, said that "do-gooders" like Longford were living in cloud- cuckoo-land, and called for the return of hanging. It was a pattern that was to repeat itself over the next three decades.

 

Longford's wife, Elizabeth, was at first deeply opposed to his involvement with Hindley. She told the Daily Express's Jean Rook, "I didn't want Frank to have anything to do with these people. I wanted him to keep his hands clean of these monsters." Over the course of their marriage, Lady Longford fought with her husband over just one other political issue - his inquiry into pornography, which led to him being labelled "Lord Porn". He shook off the tag only when a sub-editor on the Sun came up with a replacement: "Lord Wrongford".

 

But Elizabeth Longford's opposition weakened over time. In December 1976, she finally agreed to accompany her husband to Holloway. She and Hindley became firm friends. When Myra's sister Maureen died, Elizabeth wrote to Nellie Hindley:

 

"Our dear Myra has just told me about the terrible tragedy in your family caused by the loss of Maureen, and I want to send you my deepest sympathy... I do understand the agony of a mother like yourself. It seems so terribly unnatural that a young and happy girl should leave this world before her own mother."

 

Frank Longford lobbied successive home secretaries to release Hindley, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his courting of the newspapers helped make it politically impossible for them to do so. He forwarded the replies he received to her in prison. One, from William Whitelaw, dated January 29 1982, reads, "The joint parole board... has again felt unable to recommend that a date should be fixed for the case of either prisoner." A wobbly hand, more likely Longford's than Hindley's, has underlined the words "barring any unforeseen circumstances" as though finding some glimmer of hope in these words.

 

McCooey says Longford's actions were driven by a sense of injustice: "This was an important point of principle. When hanging was abolished, it was never intended that it would be replaced by the punishment of incarceration until death. It was clear that Hindley was no longer a risk. She had been punished, and Frank believed she should be allowed to go free."

 

In 1985, Longford's support was tested to breaking point: Brady revealed to a journalist that there were another two bodies buried on Saddleworth Moor. Hindley admitted her involvement. The police reopened the search and recovered the body of Pauline Reade; Keith Bennett has never been found. In the ensuing firestorm of publicity Hindley abandoned her latest application for parole. Once over the shock, Longford resolved to stand by her. But he was in for a final, painful surprise.

 

Lord David Astor, a former editor of the Observer and another rich and powerful friend of Hindley's, decided that the only way to save her from death behind bars was to change strategy. He set about trying quietly to re-shape public opinion. This could not be achieved so long as she remained close to Longford. "David's view was very clear," McCooey says. "He wanted carefully targeted articles in upmarket publications that might influence decision-makers, rather than constant coverage in the tabloids. Myra agreed with him. She felt that Frank kept the temperature of the case up: for every step forwards, there were seven back."

 

Longford, who had supported her for 20 years, destroying his reputation in the process, found that prison visiting orders stopped arriving in the post. He spent much of the early 90s in the hope of a reconciliation. A letter on House of Lords notepaper, dated January 1 1992, reads, "Thank you very much for the Christmas card with its message of friendship for Elizabeth and me. I cannot resist telling you how much I miss coming to see you, but understand your feeling that it is better not to."

 

Although Longford took his ostracism with good grace, he refused to stay quiet. In 1995 he proudly sent Hindley an extract from Hansard showing how he had given Home Office minister Baroness Blatch "an uneasy time" over her case. On and on he went - giving interviews to the Manchester Evening News, the Sun, the News Of The World, television.

 

Hindley expressed her exasperation in a letter to me: "Frank has been a pestilential pain in the neck over the years with his 'campaigning' and he glories in the publicity himself. God help me; he wrote an article a couple of months ago which was published in the Catholic Herald, and was over the moon because they offered him a column once a month where, he said, he can write whatever he wants about me to promote my cause. God knows I've caused so much suffering in my life, but this is a cross that I can well do without!" Within two years of this letter, both Hindley and Longford were dead.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/14/ukcrime.weekend7

 

 

 

I made the mistake of reading the Wiki page on Brady and Hindley. I couldn't bring myself to read the details of their crimes. Only thing that has ever made me feel so sick was an overview of the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

[smithdown]

As his advocate she has to be defensive.

 

There's obviously problems with her credibility she shouldn't have mentioned the letter to the producer of the documentary and she's decided what the letter likely contains. I don't know that she should be used to undermine the role of advocates though.

 

 

I don't think many advocates would spring to her defence after her display last night. Quite the opposite I'd have thought. It's obviously something beyond professional the relationship she thinks she has, she is bound to him by some sort of loyalty herself by the look of it. She could have let this happen in all sorts of ways, eg let the police find the letter when they searched her house and tut-tutted about her professional responsibilities but she gave the f*cking thing back to Brady. Her loyalty is to him, not some dead kid, and she has assisted him in his ongoing crime of preventing a burial.

[Swan Red]

I don't think many advocates would spring to her defence after her display last night. Quite the opposite I'd have thought. It's obviously something beyond professional the relationship she thinks she has, she is bound to him by some sort of loyalty herself by the look of it. She could have let this happen in all sorts of ways, eg let the police find the letter when they searched her house and tut-tutted about her professional responsibilities but she gave the f*cking thing back to Brady. Her loyalty is to him, not some dead kid, and she has assisted him in his ongoing crime of preventing a burial.

 

As his advocate who do you think her loyalty should be towards?

 

Like we want defendants to get the best defense right? We want the sick to get treatment and we want those that will speak to the rights of those no one else wants to speak for.

[matty]

As his advocate who do you think her loyalty should be towards?

 

Like we want defendants to get the best defense right? We want the sick to get treatment and we want those that will speak to the rights of those no one else wants to speak for.

Isn't the role of the advocate to act on the individual's behalf with the prison/hospital authorities? Surely it's not to be the messenger to the outside world? That's a solicitor's role, I'd have thought, especially when these things may have legal import.

[cymrococh]

The reports I heard have been calling her a Mental Health Advocate.

 

Their role is very clearly defined here(pdf) and is restricted to helping detained patients understand their rights under the Mental Health Act.

 

I don't see any conflict of interest on her part if she were to give the letter to the police.

[smithdown]

The reports I heard have been calling her a Mental Health Advocate.

 

Their role is very clearly defined here(pdf) and is restricted to helping detained patients understand their rights under the Mental Health Act.

 

I don't see any conflict of interest on her part if she were to give the letter to the police.

 

 

don't even appear to require any formal qualifications there - "a range of life skills"?

 

nah, I know what Swan Red is getting at here but this really isn't a woman you should go in to bat for, for real.

[Swan Red]

Isn't the role of the advocate to act on the individual's behalf with the prison/hospital authorities? Surely it's not to be the messenger to the outside world? That's a solicitor's role, I'd have thought, especially when these things may have legal import.

 

I'm not sure she was to be the messenger to the outside world merely the conduit. I'm not well informed enough to talk to the specifics of this but I expect I'd rather have her not take a letter than take it on the premise she wouldn't hand it over only to hand it over. It compromises her and the position if she does.

 

I'm also not sure I want to bat for her I'm just concerned about what rights we extend to those in prison and how any errosion of those rights should be avoided.

[smithdown]

I'm not sure she was to be the messenger to the outside world merely the conduit. I'm not well informed enough to talk to the specifics of this but I expect I'd rather have her not take a letter than take it on the premise she wouldn't hand it over only to hand it over. It compromises her and the position if she does.

 

I'm also not sure I want to bat for her I'm just concerned about what rights we extend to those in prison and how any errosion of those rights should be avoided.

 

 

He compromised her and she took it further, telling the world of the existence of this letter and what it most likely contains. Then she gave it back. She began to renege on any perceived ethical or moral position as soon as he opened her gob about the power she now held in her handbag. When quizzed she became very irritable, a 'you wouldnt understand' attitude. She began with 'Ian knows, he has told me he knows, I told the police he knows...' (so no ethical problem there?) and as if to prove he knows and to show that Brady wasn't the type to keep this a secret forever she tried to reassure that 'there is a letter that will clear things up', and was gobsmacked that this wasn't the end of the matter.

 

I'm not sure this situation can be projected onto many others anyway though. A crime is still being committed and she is now an accessory.

[Swipe]

Just watching watched the programme. Didn't like Powell at all. She seemed to revel in all the attention.

[Ant]

She seemed under Brady's thumb.

[John am Rhein]

brady's best bet is to get the us government to make a botched attempt to extradite him. Then the pc brigade will go all out to have his 1966 conviction quashed

Edited August 23, 2012 by John am Rhein

[Swipe]

He's died.

 

http://www.itv.com/news/2017-05-15/moors-murderer-ian-brady-dead-at-age-79/

 

 

[Duncan Disorderly]

Good.

[Cobs]

Good. The absolute c*** that he was

[Dan]

At last some good work by the Grim Reaper.

[Molby]

Was gonna kick off there cos I read it as Liam Brady

 

So that's gonna save about a grand a week, which is good

[cymrococh]

Good is the immediate reaction, but he managed to still torture his victims' families in death by withholding the bodies' location.

[Molby]

Good is the immediate reaction, but he managed to still torture his victims' families in death by withholding the bodies' location.

 

He should have been tortured to reveal the locations

 

The law is an ass

[Falconhoof]

He should have been tortured to reveal the locations

 

The law is an ass

Can't say I agree with that. You open the door to torture for him then its on the table for other prisoners 

[Gunga Din]

Can't say I agree with that. You open the door to torture for him then its on the table for other prisoners 

 

didn't he offer to reveal the location if they let him die? can't understand why they never took him up on that offer