Becoming Ian Brady - First Season

Saddleworth Moor became indelibly linked

with crimes which repulsed post-war Britain.

Volunteers searched for the bodies of children murdered

and then buried by Hindley and her lover, Ian Brady.

Seeing the pictures of the two that were involved

in killing these children, it struck fear into me.

His eyes, he has evil eyes.

The victims would beg to be freed.

He was absolutely possessed

by a need to create pain.

I have never been able to understand

why a human being takes the life of another.

The misconception of Brady is that he is evil,

but Ian Brady was ill.

If you're looking for deep, psychiatric reasons,

no one has yet come up with them

and that's one of the horrifying paradoxes

of the whole case.

Brady's crimes are a window into his mind.

None of this explains

why he goes to the heart of darkness.

I wouldn't call him a man,

I wouldn't, no, a monster.

When it comes to Ian Brady,

genetics loaded the gun, his personality aimed it

and Myra pulled the trigger.

Ian Brady is currently held

at the high security Ashworth Hospital

and can only be moved from there

with the Home Secretary's permission.

He stopped eating at the end of last month,

because he was angry that he'd been transferred

to a new ward from a part of the hospital

he'd been in for four years.

He's now being force fed after a 30-day hunger strike.

Ian Brady arrived at court

for the first day of a case which will decide

if he is allowed to die as he wishes

or whether he'll have to live behind bars,

force fed by doctors.

He has no requests, no demands,

apart from he wants to have the right to die.

He should never have an easy life of dying,

not like an ordinary person.

He made kiddies suffer 35 years ago

and he should suffer and so should she.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, horrible psychopaths,

that chose to take the lives of young people

in the most horrific crimes that the UK

and probably the world has ever seen.

The Moors Murders happened between 1963 and 1965.

I think everybody knows the Moors Murders,

because of those photographs,

the mugshots of Hindley and Brady.

Myra Hindley is the cultural warning

of femininity gone wrong.

She's very much part of what happened,

but she wasn't actually the one who had the impetus to kill,

the need to kill was Brady.

Ian Brady, he raped and molested,

tortured and killed.

One of the victims has never been found.

Those are the details about these crimes that make him

one of the worst serial killers there's been.

That name, Ian Brady is a name,

that will always be remembered

as being synonymous with evil.

I'm fascinated why an individual chooses to commit crime,

why an innocent child goes from being an innocent child

to somebody that can kill or harm or do something bad.

What is it that happens in that person's life,

in that person's brain,

in that person's mind to make them a killer?

There are lots of theories,

for me, all killers are born evil.

I didn't believe that they were evil,

that's the cultural representation of them.

When I looked into the crimes,

I knew that he was psychopathic.

Ships from Glasgow,

in Clyde-built vessels powered by coal

hewn in the pits a few miles from this famous port,

a highway to the export markets of the world.

In the late thirties and early forties,

there was multiple deprivation in Glasgow.

Every city has deprived areas,

but Glasgow particularly had a reputation for violence

and the reputation for deprivation.

Ian Brady was born in Glasgow,

brought up in his early years in Glasgow.

I'm David Swindle, former Senior Investigating Officer,

Strathclyde Police in Scotland.

Ian Brady was born as Ian Duncan Stewart

on the 2nd of January, 1938.

His mum, Maggie, was a waitress, she was a single parent,

his dad apparently was a journalist,

but he had died before Ian was born.

In the 1930s, this building here

was called Rottenrow Hospital,

this is where Ian Stewart was born.

It's a very modern building now,

but that was the original Rottenrow Hospital,

a well-known maternity hospital in Glasgow.

His mother claimed that his father died

during her pregnancy, she looked after him,

but that was very difficult for an unmarried mother

in those days, life was difficult.

My name is Richard Finley,

I am Professor of Scottish History

at the University of Strathclyde.

Glasgow at this period had a population

of about a million people,

it was one of the biggest cities in Europe,

so it was a bustling metropolis.

It had been very badly affected by the impact

of the economic dislocation caused by the First World War

and the impact of the Great Depression,

the Wall Street Crash in 1929,

which meant that many of the traditional industries,

such as ship building, heavy engineering, steel,

which had been this main locus of the Glaswegian economy,

all went into decline.

In the thirties, in the world slump,

Scotland was badly hit.

These ship builders were paid off, the yards were still

and on a despondent Clyde side, this rusting skeleton,

the world's largest liner to be stood unfinished.

This is the Gorbals area of Glasgow.

It has changed over the years,

drastically changed over the years.

This is the area where Ian Stewart lived

in the very early years of his life with his mum, Peggy.

The Gorbals was an area

associated with widespread poverty,

it was an area where there was largely working class

ended up living there, there was significant overcrowding,

significant infant mortality rates.

When we look at Brady's early childhood,

there are so many risk factors.

He was born into a single parent family,

which because she was poor,

she had to leave him alone to go out and work.

An unmarried mother was someone,

who would have a major social stigma.

A woman of a kind of loose morality

is how many would've described it.

It would be difficult to find employment,

it would be difficult to find shelter.

My name is Dr. Keri Nixon

and I'm a consultant forensic psychologist.

So we know that environmental factors

absolutely create criminals.

There's something called the Vulnerable Locations Index,

where the government have actually looked at areas,

where there's high crime rates, high unemployment rates,

high mental health rates, high poverty rates

and we know by looking at that,

it's a hotspot for criminal behavior,

a hotspot for mental health and substance abuse,

so we know that those factors absolutely correlate to crime.

However, they don't necessarily correlate

to producing serial killers because if they did,

we'd have a lot more serial killers.

Peggy couldn't afford to raise him on her own

and so Peggy put a sign in a local shop window

advertising for somebody to take Ian.

The crucial things about early childhood development

is ensuring that a baby feels safe and secure and nurtured

and this includes touch, play, feeling secure and safe.

It's crucial in terms of how our brain develops

and it's crucial in terms of how we have

interpersonal relationships with other people.

I'm John Parrington, I'm an Associate Professor

of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology

at the University of Oxford.

Our brains start to develop,

our nervous system starts to develop very early on,

when we are only a very tiny, tiny embryo.

I find the brain is an incredible thing really,

it's the most complex object in the known universe,

out of it can come the most amazing art

or music or literature,

but equally, some horrific thoughts and actions

have come out of the human brain

and trying to understand how those thoughts and desires

and wishes all come out of this structure.