WHAT would Ian Brady really be like?
There had been so much said about him over the past seven days, much of it conflicting, but most of us judge others almost instantaneously, through a combination of what they look like and what they sound like. We knew what the Moors Murderer had done, but who was he now?
His voice was deep – posh Glasgow, as one journalist put it. The sharp black coat looked like the same one he was photographed in 50 years ago and made him look like a Glasgow lawyer.
And when he started to talk, he had a lawyer's ability to follow arguments and a lawyer's ability to avoid them.
At one point giving evidence at his mental health tribunal yesterday he said if a criminal had asked him if he wanted to do some recreational killing – for no political or economic gain – he'd have said they were insane. Brady never quite explained why he himself shouldn't be considered insane.
"What's insanity?" he asked. It was a question that reverberated throughout this hearing to determine if he can be transferred from Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside to prison, where he believes he could starve himself to death.
Brady, 75, was speaking in public at length for the first time since he was jailed for life in 1966 after murdering five children with Myra Hindley.
Here was a man who spoke fluently, was in control of his argument and his emotions, and yet clearly had his own version of reality. His own QC had admitted the day before that far from being on a complete hunger strike he was actually eating normal food.
Yet when this was put to him, Brady flatly denied it. "In prison it's called outflanking," he said. "If they know you're going to make a complaint they get in first. They invent. It's crude but it works."
His attitude to all the paranoid or violent incidents that had been described at Ashworth was the same. Staff were "regressive" or "opportunistic".
"You're just a package," the child killer told the hearing. "If you put anybody in a cage and pin labels on them and you poke them with a stick, well, in zoology you'll get a reaction eventually and you'll say 'I told you so'."
If Brady does have a mental disorder, it's a very Glaswegian one – pugnacious, refusing to back down in the face of challenge, most of all a refusal to be deferential. He said he'd throw a net round most of the psychiatrists he'd met: "I wouldn't allow them on the street. They're worse than patients. You think 'how is it that this person got the job in the first place?'"'
Later he told Dr Cameron Boyd, one of the independent panel hearing his case: "I don't speak to anybody according to their professional title. I'm not talking to you as a doctor. I'm simply talking to you as I would to anybody of intelligence."
Intelligence is clearly very important to Ian Brady. He said he enjoyed "eclectic, freewheeling conversations with people. I can't stand robotic, feeble, whether psychologists or ordinary people. If I think they're going through a list of check points, I just switch off".
He claimed that when he was examined in a 1998 review the only significant conclusion it came to was he was of superior intelligence, though Professor Kevin Gournay said after his evidence: "Some of what Mr Brady had to say I couldn't make head nor tail of."
Yet, if anything, Brady was utterly logical. The problem is logic carried to its ultimate degree looks odd to the average person. He said his crimes were "petty" compared to those of Tony Blair and George Bush.
"Tony Blair started five wars during his period in office," he said. "You don't see any regret from him, making a fortune from his war crimes. I'm simply saying this dichotomy is common through all levels of society – bankers bankrupting the country, illegal invasion of Iraq, in Afghanistan people being killed daily. Politicians kill people by the millions. I see that as a form of insanity."
But when you combined that logic with his refusal to acknowledge his own crimes (which, incidentally, was not the remit of the tribunal) he seemed evasive. The psychiatrists who have given evidence agree he is either a paranoid schizophrenic with elements of narcissistic and anti-social personality, or has a narcissistic and anti-social personality disorder with elements of paranoia.
Brady swept all that away, saying personality disorder didn't even exist as a classification in Scotland. "It's part of their financial agenda," he said, "inventing disorders for every form of normal human behaviour.
"I don't even recognise personality disorder."
Unfortunately for him, other people do.
Counsel for both sides will make their closing submissions today before the panel is expected to release its final decision tomorrow.
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