Ian Brady was born Ian Stewart in the Royal Maternity Hospital, Glasgow, to Peggy Stewart, an unmarried 28-year-old waitress. He never knew who his father was. Shortly after his birth she moved to a single room in the notorious slum area of the Gorbals.
She had to work to survive, so she placed an advert in the window of a local newsagent asking if anyone would take in the child. A local couple, John and Mary Sloan, agreed. Peggy would pay them £1 a week to look after him – which was more than a third of her weekly wage.
Little Ian Stewart was never formally adopted by the Sloans but, in due course, in order to avoid awkward questions, they gave him their surname. Peggy did visit the boy and even brought him toys, but he was not told she was his mother.
This confused upbringing left him with a sense of being unloved and unwanted, a loner who lived by his own rules. In my view this was a crucial component in him growing into an adult who wanted to abduct, rape, torture and murder innocent young children, a highly abnormal individual, cruelly and horrifically deviant, with a lack of empathy for his victims and a lack of remorse.
In all his later writings, Brady is the ultimate misanthrope, full of contempt for his fellow humans – he often describes them as ‘maggots’, ‘parasites’ and ‘filth’.
He was full of contempt for society as a whole, for the world around him, for its petty laws and pretensions, and its silly moral squeamishness.
There were strong hints of this in his childhood. During the Second World War, Glasgow was subject to extensive aerial bombardment by the German Luftwaffe. The Nazis and Hitler were the enemy. Yet in the immediate aftermath, Ian Sloan, barely seven years old, began cadging Nazi souvenirs off returning soldiers. When he and his schoolmates took part in war games, only he wanted to play the Nazi enemy.
He apparently would also strut around shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’ and giving the Nazi salute, and people would laugh.
You might dismiss all this as trivial, except we know that Brady the adult was obsessed with Hitler and Nazism. He continued reading Nazi literature, listening to the Fuhrer’s speeches and even trying to learn German. He denied that he hero-worshipped the Nazis but he was obviously strongly attracted by them and their culture.
Brady told Hindley it was while he was still a teenager that he began having violent sexual fantasies
Seeing the Nazis not as bogeymen but as admirable was a very odd reaction for a boy who had lived through the terrors of the war and was subject to the same unrelenting and all-encompassing anti-Nazi propaganda from the government as everyone else.
But my conclusion is that he identified with them. And this provides a profound insight into what was going on in that young man’s mind. Little Ian Sloan was at war with his own society and hated it so much that he actually preferred the enemy and sided with them.
But as he grew up, he would have become aware of another feature of Nazism, to which he was strongly drawn: physical cruelty.
What appeared to appeal to Brady in the Hitler regime was the beating up and murder of those who opposed it.
As a logical sequence to this kind of thinking, the comparatively compassionate welfare-state philosophy that prevailed in England moved him to contempt. And sure enough, we find alongside his attraction to everything Nazi, the young Ian Sloan demonstrates from an early age active involvement in behaviour that would permeate his later crimes – physical sadism.
It began with cats. In primary school, he began throwing them out of upstairs windows to see if they could survive the fall. Brady told Myra Hindley that aged just ten he killed his first cat, throwing it off the top floor of a tenement building. It screamed all the way down, he added, and he’d enjoyed seeing its fear.
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Brady reportedly once impaled a cat on a spiked railing, where other schoolchildren found it terrified though still alive. He subsequently conducted an ‘experiment’ in which he buried a cat alive, supposedly to see how long it would take to starve to death.
He told Hindley that as a child he had sliced open caterpillars and spent hours catching flies, pulling off their wings and sticking them to the end of a spider’s web. Then he waited, fascinated, for the spider to eat them.
There was then a significant development in Brady’s sadistic proclivities when he came to realise it was far more satisfying to hurt people because, as he later told Hindley, ‘it was on a higher plane’.
Reportedly he tormented a disabled child and once tied a boy and a girl to a lamppost and left them there. He also set fire to a classmate, John Cameron, who lived on the ground floor of the tenement where Brady lived. He tied him to a steel washing post in the backyard and persuaded his schoolmates to help pack newspapers around his feet. They thought he was joking when he said he was going to set fire to it. They still couldn’t believe it when he got the matches out and the fire crept about the boy’s feet. Only when the victim started screaming did the others react, swatting at the flames with their jackets as he walked away laughing.
Brady obviously enjoyed inflicting pain or harm on both animals and people. If a schoolmate was weaker than he was, it was not very long before he or she was being either bruised, cut or burned by Brady.
By far the most serious incident in his developing taste for sadism, and the most significant harbinger of the future, happened when Brady raped a boy.
At Brady’s secondary school he and some other boys had been involved in thieving, but another boy had informed on them, which had led to them being punished.
Brady didn’t settle well in Manchester. He seemed rootless and unhappy. He didn’t find his job at all enjoyable
Brady had forged a letter from his foster mother to excuse him from PT, and found himself alone with the informer purely by chance in the changing room of the school gym.
The last few stragglers from the previous PT lesson had left and the informer was struggling to get dressed. Ian was sitting out his class’s session impassively, having lit up a cigarette.
After a minute or so the boy began to cry. The informer’s sense of helplessness fanned Brady’s instincts and imagination.
No word was exchanged between the two of them as the informer, in Brady’s own shocking words, ‘melted before me like a girl as I lowered him to the dirty floor and had him roughly, devoid of feeling or affection’.
Sex, and more specifically sadistic sex, was obviously going to play a hugely significant role in Brady’s life and crimes. The question is why? What is it that gave him pleasure in doing what most of us would recoil from?
The Viennese psychotherapist Alfred Adler characterised sadism as a way for individuals to assert dominance and power over others, often stemming from feelings of inferiority, and a need to compensate for those feelings by a desire to feel superior and powerful. In other words, some people hurt other people because they themselves have been hurt.
They avoid making themselves vulnerable with other people because they believe that revealing intimate pieces of information or their feelings is tantamount to yielding power. For them, control and power are the drivers behind their rigid personal boundaries. This again is an uncannily accurate description of the adult Ian Brady – very secretive, a loner, quick to fly off the handle and highly controlling. His sadism was in large part about getting pleasure or satisfaction from asserting power and control over others.
A prime motive for the Moors murders was Brady’s sadistic paedophile drives. Where did these come from? Thirteen-year-old boys don’t go around spontaneously deciding it would be fun to sexually assault another boy.
This was almost certainly learned behaviour. Brady was already displaying a high degree of age-inappropriate and premature sexual familiarity, which is powerful circumstantial evidence that he himself had been a victim of child sexual abuse.
That sexually precocious behaviour can be seen in an incident at Brady’s secondary school where a group of boys were pulling each other’s trousers down in the toilets to expose their genitals and teasing and ridiculing each other – a not uncommon practice among boys as they approach puberty and begin sexual exploration.
Brady was skulking in a corner and pre-empted any attempt to force the issue by confidently unzipping his trousers and exposing himself to them.
Brady’s sexual self-confidence in so readily ‘proving his manhood’ apparently reduced the other boys to silence. But it also suggests that this was not the first time he’d shown his genitals to others. It was also reported that, at age 17, Brady told another boy that he had had sexual connections with homosexuals and that he got money ‘off men’ for doing this.
Sexually precocious, he appears to have reached puberty early, at around the age of ten. He began sexual experimentation with the opposite sex around the same time as the rape of the boy informer.
His first sexual encounter, he told one contact, was with a ‘quick-witted and streetwise’ young girl with whom he had indulged in ‘forbidden pleasure with that wild energy only the youthful can experience’. But despite his bravado, it seems that the couple hadn’t gone ‘the whole way’. This would later chime with what Hindley would say about Brady’s apparent lack of heterosexual experience.
Brady left school at the age of 15 and got a job as a butcher’s errand boy. He met a girl on his delivery rounds and after going to the cinema, they had sex in a park. Brady’s penchant for sadism didn’t abate with his first heterosexual encounters.
He told Hindley it was while he was still a teenager that he began having violent sexual fantasies.
By now Brady was involved in burglaries and, eventually, he was arrested, charged and sentenced to time in a remand home.
Mrs Sloan appears to have been surprised by his nefarious activities and was ‘bewildered at the way in which Ian had turned out’. After this latest episode, she contacted his mother in Manchester, explaining what had happened. Peggy, now married to Peter Brady, travelled up to Glasgow by train and went with Mrs Sloan to visit Ian at the remand home.
After their visit, the authorities agreed to release him. Brady was later to claim that the concern of his mother and foster mother was evidence that he was loved and had a happy and supportive upbringing. I think it much more likely that Mrs Sloan had now had enough of this disruptive boy, thieving and always in trouble with the police, and had contacted Peggy, asking her to take her son back and get him off her hands. So Ian went to Manchester to live with Peggy and Patrick.
Patrick got him a job as a porter in Manchester’s Smithfield Market, and Ian adopted Patrick’s surname, apparently to make it more difficult for anyone to trace his police record.
Patrick Brady can have had no idea when marrying Peggy that in due course, through the extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune, although he was an entirely innocent man, his surname would become forever identified with one of the most chilling and notorious murderers in British history.
The adoption of Brady’s name meant that by the time he had turned 17, Ian had had four different identities: first Ian Stewart, then Ian Sloan, then Ian Stewart again, and now finally Ian Brady. It would not have been surprising under these circumstances if he’d had a very confused sense of who he actually was: a person’s name is central to their sense of self.
Brady didn’t settle well in Manchester. He seemed rootless and unhappy. He didn’t find his job at all enjoyable. Patrick Brady found him taciturn, withdrawn and surly.
Brady also began drinking more heavily now. His job entailed hanging around the market and nearby streets and he passed most of his idle time in local bars getting sloshed.
Surprising by modern standards, the pubs in the market opened mid-morning, so he was able to drink fairly constantly throughout the day until nearly midnight.
His already developed inclination for sadism was now becoming imprinted on his awakening sexuality. It was a profoundly dangerous coming together in him of two hugely powerful urges.
The same was true when Hindley came into his life. Here, too, was a profoundly dangerous coming together, though she did not start out with the anti-social and murderous thoughts that he did.
While much of the explanation for how and why Brady became a serial killer lies in his background and upbringing, we cannot say the same about Hindley. There are few, if any, hints in her background of how she came to be Brady’s partner in their murderous crime spree.
If Hindley hadn’t met Brady, the likelihood is that – just as her grandmother and mother and sister and friends had – she would have gone on to get married, have children of her own and even become a doting grandmother.
But she fell in love with him from the moment she first saw him at the company where they both worked, Millwards Chemical, he as a clerk and she as a typist. It was the most fateful of meetings.
Brady was tall – at least 6 ft in height – if a little gangly, with good looks and an alluring personality. His way of dressing stood out. At a time when most of the young men in the neighbourhood were dressing like little teddy boys, wearing very tight jeans and winkle picker shoes, Brady would wear a three-piece suit, waistcoat, cufflinks, shirt and tie to work.
No one in Hindley’s world dressed like that. His clean, well-manicured nails also impressed her. They contrasted with her father who didn’t wash his hands before meals and whose oily, greasy fingers, to her disgust, would be holding a piece of bread.
Brady’s off-duty persona added to the passion she was beginning to feel for him. This was the mid-1960s, the era of Elvis Presley and rebel-without-a-cause James Dean. Brady had swept-back, jet-black hair, wore a leather jacket, jeans and sunglasses and roared around the neighbourhood on his motorbike.
Hindley thought him incredibly glamorous and where so many of the young men around her seemed like immature boys, 23-year-old Brady struck her as a real man. Hindley, only 18, fell for him hook, line and sinker.
She said her fatal weakness was that she was emotionally immature, relatively unsophisticated and sexually inexperienced. She was still a virgin and intended to be so until she got married.
Hindley (left) thought Brady incredibly glamorous and where so many of the young men around her seemed like immature boys
This was somewhat unusual for her environment. Many young women in the working class area of Manchester where she grew up were already married and having children by that age.
With her own younger sister Maureen married and heavily pregnant by age 16, she cannot have been unaware that other girls were experimenting with sex, but she herself seems not yet to have found the man who would trigger her sexual development.
It was her misfortune that the man who caused her as yet unrealised sexual potential to be released and to spring powerfully into life was Ian Brady.
But Brady virtually ignored her. In her first nine months at Millwards, his only conversation with her was an occasional monosyllabic grunt. This only increased her fascination with him.
She found him mysterious and she was strongly attracted by how he seemed so unfathomable.
Unconsciously, he must have held out the potential for her to savour some of that more exciting life to which she aspired, rather than the normal humdrum existence of pregnancy and babies.
To her, Brady seemed wiser, cultured, exciting and different from others. In the office, he was not popular and kept his own company. While the other men would chat about football, he wasn’t interested. Sometimes he might join in a conversation about what had been on the TV the night before, but it was noticeable that he only talked about crime films or the Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
She noticed that he read intellectual books at lunchtime in his cubby hole at the back of the office and this added further to his attraction as it made him seem more intelligent.
Her infatuation with him lasted nearly a year before they finally went out together. It was a year of emotional torture for her as she went from loving him to hating him and loving and hating him at the same time. When he smiled at her or was nice to her, she felt blessed and floated on air.
In her diary, she recorded in excruciating and agonising detail her longing to form a relationship with him. When he did take notice of her, it was either a covert ‘come on’, which sent her hopes soaring, or an ostentatious apathy towards her, making cruel and sarcastic remarks or totally ignoring her except when he had to ask her to take dictation and type letters.
It has never been entirely clear when Brady became aware of her interest. He said later that he barely noticed her at first and didn’t find her particularly attractive. But the fact he took little notice of her brought out a side of Hindley’s personality which had never been evident before.
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Far from being deterred by his indifference, this previously passive young woman became determined to bag him.
She tried all kinds of ruses in make-up and dress to attract his attention. She even smartened herself up and hung around pubs near his home in the evenings in the faint hope of running into him.
When none of this worked, she tried another tactic – appealing to Brady’s intellect. She bought a book of poems by Wordsworth, read and studied them, and then artfully left the anthology lying open on her desk where Brady couldn’t fail to see it.
Brady saw what she was reading and asked her questions about it. Hindley had already anticipated this and, having swotted up beforehand, she was able to discuss the poetry knowledgeably.
She could not have known this but, in choosing Wordsworth, she not only encouraged Brady to take an interest in her, but struck a theme that resonated with him.
They discussed Wordsworth’s depiction of landscapes and she talked about how she loved the moorlands and communing with nature. He offered to take her for a ride on his motorbike to the moors above Manchester.
After many months of agonising in secret to her diary – he was ignoring her, he never spoke to her – and commenting on what he was wearing, wondering all about him and what secret life he kept hidden, swearing she was going to stop fancying him, and then fancying him all over again, Brady eventually began to respond to her very obvious attempts at flirtation.
At a company social get-together, he invited her to dance. Soon it graduated to kissing. Hindley could hardly believe her luck.
It was a victory for persistence, determination and single-mindedness. In December 1961, they began dating. Brady took her to the pictures. His choice of film? Judgement At Nuremberg, about Nazi war crimes.
Throughout many months of desperately trying to woo him, Brady cannot have been unaware of her desire for him. At first, he was slightly amused by her obsessive and rather unsubtle courting of him and decided just to ignore it.
But at some point, he clearly began to take greater notice of this young woman who was so keen.
He was a person who had spent his entire life up until then turned in on himself, someone who had developed from a very early age a hard shell to protect himself from the world. He had never had any close relationship with another human being. And now there was this young woman pounding on the door, demanding to be let in.
It must have been difficult for him to let his guard down even fractionally and begin to admit Hindley into his life.
Yes, he was a past-master at control who knew how to dangle people on a string. Yes, he played with her interest, toyed with her, teased her. And yes, he was of course going to control the situation. But deep down, I suspect Brady was also very wary of letting her anywhere near his soul.
The long period of her courtship of him was as much to do with his own suppressed self-doubt as an attempt to deliberately string her along. A part of him couldn’t quite believe that someone was genuinely interested in him; that here was an actual other human being who seemed to want him.
Brady came to believe that if he had never met Hindley, the Moors Murders might never have happened. In a very telling letter written in his later prison years, he described how, before he met her, he had led an unfulfilled life.
Until then his ambition had been merely to make enough money to be able to do what he wanted where he wanted – a quiet, leisurely life without nine-to-five drudgery. She triggered a kind of moral collapse in him.
No matter how much he tried to progress, he had been swimming just to keep in one place. ‘Resentment and frustration became prevalent,’ he wrote. ‘Existential hatred began to grow apace.’
It was the unfortunate coincidence of meeting Hindley that unleashed the anarchy inside him, a mental turbulence which arose from feeling unable to achieve anything effective in his life and having his goals unfulfilled.
It was the release of this pent-up rage that drove his sadistic crimes. He was not apportioning blame, he said. It simply evolved that way.
Adapted from The Moors Murders by Michael Attwell (HarperElement, £10.99) to be published June 4. © Michael Attwell 2026. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid until May 30) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
