Life Means Life Page 14

  Di Stefano dropped a bombshell in January 2008, indicating his client was about to confess to the killing of a 14-year-old hitchhiker identified as ‘JT’, thought to be Jenny Tighe. Jenny disappeared from a children’s home in Oldham on 30 December 1964, at the height of Brady and Hindley’s murderous rampage.

  Jenny was the product of a broken home and when she went missing those close to her believed she had fled to London – she had run away many times before. Police have dismissed Brady’s claim as ‘hogwash’ and a cynical marketing tool by his lawyer. Jenny Tighe remains officially a missing person.

  But di Stefano challenged police: ‘If it turns out that JT or any more children were murdered by Brady and Hindley, then I would invite Greater Manchester Police to prosecute my client. If Brady is fit to plead in court, then he is not mad and cannot stay in Ashworth.’

  In 2007, it emerged that Brady has been allowed to retain photographs taken on Saddleworth Moor in 1964, potentially giving clues as to the location of Keith Bennett’s grave. Frustratingly, because Brady was never charged with Keith’s murder, the police have no power to apply for a warrant to seize the pictures and the killer is not about to surrender them.

  Brady even wrote a book in 2001 called The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis. To widespread fury, the work was published by an underground American publisher called Feral House. His continued games are a final insult to the memories of his victims and a source of continued anguish to their families. In 2006, he let it be known that when he eventually dies he would like to be buried in his home city of Glasgow. Winnie Johnson, the mother of Keith Bennett, said: ‘He should not be allowed a proper burial when his victims didn’t get one. Keith is still up on Saddleworth Moor and never got a proper burial, so why should Brady get one?’

  Jackie Powell was Brady’s Mental Health Advocate – an independent specialist who represents psychiatric patients – at Ashworth. She said: ‘The only time I saw Ian Brady cry was when he was talking about the death of his mother, Peggy. His emotions for her came to the surface. He was angry she’d suffered for decades simply because she was his mother.

  ‘He was bitter about not being able to attend her funeral and angry that, when he visited her for the last time, they were not left alone.’

  Ms Powell added: ‘He believes he has the right to die, and having spent a lot of time with him, I believe he’s right.’

  ‘THE MAN IN BLACK’

  ‘You are as dangerous a man as it is possible to find.’

  Sentencing judge Mr Justice Kerr

  Name: Peter Moore

  Crime: Quadruple murder

  Date of Conviction: 29 November 1996

  Age at Conviction: 50

  Violent and sadistic predator Peter Moore was the ‘Man In Black’. At night, he lurked in the gay haunts of North Wales, attacking his victims in a way designed to cause maximum terror, always dressed in black from head to toe. ‘Black was his uniform,’ said prosecuting barrister Alex Carlile, QC, at Moore’s trial in November 1996 for the brutal murders of four men. ‘He was the man in black, with black clothes, black thoughts, and the blackest of deeds.’

  Homosexual Moore, 50, had been committing violent assaults on fellow gay men for nearly 20 years. Police believe he was responsible for at least 50 attacks during that period. Each time he used a large knife or truncheon to terrorise, dominate and humiliate his victims before disappearing into the night.

  He had an unhealthy interest in Nazism, often wearing Nazi-style caps, leather boots and other black leather apparel. He even sported a moustache like Adolf Hitler’s. Mr Carlile told Mold Crown Court: ‘He thought it gave him the dominant and overbearing appearance he sought to frighten his victims and for his own sexual gratification.’

  Moore lived alone in St Asaph Avenue, Kinmel Bay, Clwyd, after the death of his devoted mother in May 1994. She called him – her only child – the ‘miracle son’ after having him in her mid-forties. When his father died in 1979, he and his mother became inseparable and did everything together. Mrs Moore was very proud of her Peter, who ran a successful chain of small cinemas, and he returned her praise with expensive treats, from meals out to holidays abroad. Police believe his mother’s death in May 1994 may have triggered the change in his criminal behaviour, from sadistic attacks to serial killing.

  His first murder victim was Henry Roberts, a 56-year-old retired railwayman, who he killed in late September 1995 with a £25 hunting knife he bought as a 49th birthday present to himself. Henry lived alone in a filthy and ramshackle cottage on the outskirts of Caergeiliog, Anglesey. The loner was well off, courtesy of inheritances and a large redundancy payment from his former employer. His money went on taxis to the Sportsman’s Inn two miles away, where he was a virtual fixture, paying for every round with a banknote and feeding the change into the pub’s fruit machine. Despite his wealth, he chose to live in squalor, with rubbish piled high on each surface and carpets encrusted with dog faeces.

  Henry’s cottage stood off the A5 on Moore’s route home from his cinema in Holyhead, which he visited late at night, once or twice a week. By coincidence, Henry was also interested in Nazi paraphernalia and had a Nazi flag on the wall of his home.

  Fellow drinkers at the Sportsman were unaware of Henry’s unsavoury domestic life and he was well regarded by those who knew him. When he failed to turn up at the pub for the third day running, one of the regulars visited his home to check he was OK. He found his body lying face down near an outhouse; his trousers were round his ankles and there was a stab wound to each buttock. The rest of his body was riddled with knife wounds: 14 to the front and 13 to the back. ‘He had been killed by an attack of frenzied and sadistic viciousness,’ said the prosecutor at the trial. Deep cuts to his hands and arms showed that he’d tried to defend himself against the attack. He died from a single stab wound to the heart. After the killing, Moore took Henry’s Swastika flag as a trophy.

  Next to die was Edward Carthy, 28, described in court as ‘a rather sad figure’. Prosecution counsel added: ‘He was a young drug addict and a drunk – a disaster waiting to happen.’ Edward, from Birkenhead, was openly homosexual and frequented Paco’s gay bar on Stanley Street, Liverpool. One Friday in early October, Moore visited Paco’s to scout for prey and met Edward, who he recalled was very drunk.

  The young man latched onto Moore, wanting him to drive him home for sex. Instead, Moore drove him to a forest in North Wales. Moore told police that when Edward realised he was not being driven back to Birkenhead, he became suspicious and tried to jump out of the van. ‘I think he got a bit frightened, actually,’ the killer recalled. In the forest, Moore stabbed him four times, killing him.

  After his arrest in December 1995, Moore led police to Edward’s badly decomposed body. He drew them a map showing where he had dumped it in the trees. By then foxes had ripped off his head and one of his arms.

  His third victim was Keith Randles, 49, from Chester. Keith, who was divorced with two daughters, had lost his long-term middle management job, but managed to find work as a traffic safety officer guarding a set of roadworks on the A5, the main road across Anglesey. On 30 November, Keith bought fish and chips from a local takeaway and settled down for the night in the caravan he occupied on the roadworks’ compound. Moore, again returning late at night on the A5 from his Holyhead cinema, knocked on the caravan door, dragged Keith outside and repeatedly stabbed him. Construction workers arriving for work at 7.30 the next morning found him lying dead on his back, covered in blood.

  Moore made detailed confessions that were ‘disturbing, chilling and callous’, describing how he killed Keith for pleasure. On his arrest, he delighted in telling police that Keith had pleaded for his life on behalf of his grandchildren and asked him why he was doing it. He had replied with one word: ‘Fun’. Detectives asked Moore how Keith reacted and he replied: ‘He looked nonplussed.’ A detective asked him: ‘Would you say that at that point he accepted the inevitable?’ Moore had replied: ‘No,
he carried on screaming.’ Asked if he had enjoyed it, Moore said: ‘There was a certain enjoyment from it, but the enjoyment certainly wasn’t sexual. Like everything, it was a job well done. You know, the job was done.’ This time, he took the victim’s video recorder and mobile phone as trophies.

  The last man to die was married father-of-two Tony Davies. He lived with his family in the Colwyn Bay area and worked at the local crematorium in Mochdre. On the afternoon of Sunday, 17 December, Tony, 35, had taken his aunt to the cemetery to put flowers on her husband’s grave, but she fell and broke her leg and they spent the rest of the day in hospital. At 11pm, he told his wife Sheila that he was going out to his aunt’s to check that she was settling down for the night. He never returned and at 4.30 the next morning, Sheila phoned the aunt, who told her that he had left her home three hours earlier.

  After leaving, Tony drove to Pensarn Beach, a known haunt for gay men looking for casual sex. At 6.12am a policeman found his blood-soaked body a few hundred feet away from his car. Moore later told police that he had been cruising around, looking for someone to kill, and had ended up at the beach. He said he watched Tony get out of his car, light a cigarette and walk to the water’s edge. When Moore got to him, he found him with his trousers round his ankles. ‘I just took the knife out and stabbed him,’ he told police. ‘I think he screamed or shouted a bit.’ A duffel coat belonging to Tony was later found in Moore’s kitchen and his keys were in the killer’s fishpond.

  The brutal murders sent shockwaves through the gay community in North Wales and Moore was caught after the deputy editor of the Gay Times persuaded police to open a confidential hotline. Among the names passed on anonymously was one that came up many times. It was Peter Moore, and one man who left a message said he had been taken back to Moore’s place six months earlier, where he had been tortured for several hours. He said he kept quiet about the episode because he felt ashamed.

  On 21 December 1995, police visited Moore at home. As detectives questioned him about the murders, others searched the house. In his bedroom they found many of the tools of sexual domination, including a black wooden truncheon, handcuffs and rubber gags. In the wardrobe there was a staff sergeant’s uniform, leather trousers, long black boots and leather caps. On his bedside table was a book entitled The World’s Most Evil Men. As well as his many suspicious belongings, police also found a number of items stolen from his victims, including the Nazi flag taken from Henry Roberts and several sets of keys.

  He was arrested and taken to Llandudno police station where, during 14 hours of questioning spread over two days, he delighted in telling detectives about his crimes. His blood also matched that of a sample found on the beach where Anthony Davies had been slaughtered. He explained that he had cut himself on his knife as he stabbed the man. Police were aware of only three murders, so he then told them of the fourth: ‘There’s one you haven’t found yet, a young man I picked up in Paco’s club in Liverpool. I drove him to North Wales to a forest and I murdered him. The body is in the woods there; that was about 12 weeks ago.’

  Relishing the attention, Moore said to shocked detectives: ‘I used the same knife on them all.’ Asked why he bought the knife, he said: ‘To kill somebody. With the sole intent of killing somebody.’ He added that killing ‘relieved pressure on me, it was a relief from stress. I don’t feel any remorse whatsoever for what I’ve done.’

  As well as the murders, he confessed to many more crimes, informing police: ‘I want to tell you that I have been responsible for a lot of things going back to the 70s, like attacks on men in the Conwy Valley, assaults, another on a tramp in a garage… In the 70s and 80s, mostly sexual.’

  Despite his detailed confessions to police, Moore pleaded not guilty at his trial which began on 11 November 1996, claiming a gay lover of his called Alan, whom he nicknamed ‘Jason’, committed the murders. Eric Somerset-Jones, QC, defending, told the jury how Moore had met ‘Jason’ in the ‘twilight world’ of gay sado-masochist sex in the summer of 1995. On the 11th day of his trial, when asked how Jason had earned his nickname, Moore said: ‘He was fascinated by knives, he always had a flick knife with him, so I called him Jason after the character in Friday the 13th.’

  In court, Moore said it was Jason who had ‘wielded the knife’ while he remained at a distance. When questioned by Mr Somerset-Jones about the murder of Anthony Davies, he burst into tears as he described his death. He said that he cradled him as he bled after Jason had stabbed him six times. ‘He said he loved his wife and that he had two children. Then he gave a sigh and he died on the beach; he died in my arms.’

  Moore said he had been an unwilling bystander to all the murders and that he had argued with Jason to make him stop. The jury heard how on one occasion Moore was in fear for his life after Jason had forced him to drive at knifepoint to where Keith Randles was murdered. Moore had been ‘heartbroken’ by Tony Davies’ killing and had fought with Jason, a waiter, who he had not seen again after his arrest. Asked how he felt about Jason now, he answered: ‘I still love him.’ Asked by prosecution counsel why he had confessed to the police about the killing, he replied: ‘I led them up the garden path and back because I wanted Jason to get away.’ Mr Carlile then asked Moore to look around the court. ‘Do you see Jason here?’ he asked. Moore replied: ‘No.’‘He doesn’t exist?’ suggested Mr Carlile. Moore replied: ‘He does exist; he’s still out there – I don’t think he will ever stop.’

  At one point he referred to Jason in the past tense, but quickly corrected himself. ‘Do you have reason to believe that he no longer exists?’ Mr Carlile asked. ‘I know he does still exist,’ was his reply. ‘Is Jason just your imagination, and how you would like yourself to be – but even more aggressive, even more cruel?’ Mr Carlile asked. Moore replied: ‘No, no, no!’ But he agreed that he liked to dress in black because the clothes made him appear ‘aggressive and dominating, and provoked fear in those he attacked.’ He agreed that he was fascinated by knives and had twice stabbed men during homosexual assaults; he also admitted that he kept handcuffs and a truncheon in his car,‘on the off-chance of meeting a man who he could assault.’‘You’re a bad man, aren’t you, and you like other bad men?’ Mr Carlile suggested. Moore replied: ‘Yes.’

  Mr Carlile revealed that Moore told police he saw yellow flashes in his eyes ‘like zigzags’ immediately prior to and during the murders. ‘But there is no evidence at all of a psychiatric nature in this case,’ the barrister said. ‘There is no question of insanity; there is no question of diminished responsibility.’ He told the jury: ‘This most dangerous of men killed coldly – for fun, to relieve tension, to gratify his sadistic instincts.’

  The jury of eight men and four women did not believe Moore’s story about the mysterious Jason and after two hours and 35 minutes’ deliberations, they found him guilty of all four murders. Sentencing him to four life terms, Mr Justice Kerr told Moore, who wore his trademark black shirt and tie: ‘I consider you to be as dangerous a man as it is possible to find. You are responsible for four sadistic murders in the space of three months. Not one of the victims had done you the slightest bit of harm; it was killing for killing’s sake.’

  He added: ‘As you had said to the police earlier, you told one of your victims as he was pleading for his life that you were doing it for fun. At no stage have you shown the slightest remorse or regret for the killings, or for the 20 years of killings which preceded them.’ As to the possibility of release, the judge said: ‘I don’t want you or anyone else to be in the slightest doubt as to what I shall say – in a word, never.’

  When the judge finished speaking, Moore nodded his head and smiled grimly. When he was led away to begin his sentence, there were shouts of ‘Scum!’ and ‘I hope you rot in hell, boy!’ from the packed public gallery, where the relatives of some of his victims were sitting.

  Justine Ingrams, 26, whose father, Keith Randles, was stabbed to death outside in his caravan, said outside court: ‘He is an evil man and I am delighted
with the verdict. Justice has been done and the best place for this person to be is where he is going to be for the rest of his life and that is in prison. Nobody deserves to die in the way that my father and the other men died. It was a horrific death done by an evil, homicidal maniac. Only now can we let my dad rest in peace, knowing that his killer will never walk the streets at night ever again.’

  Detective Superintendent Peter Ackerley, who led the investigation, told reporters: ‘Evil, vile and depraved just doesn’t seem adequate to describe a man who is so evil. He clearly took care and prepared to commit his offences, which made it a little more difficult for us as a police service to bring him into custody. But at the end of the day I am pleased for the families with the convictions because the families really have suffered.’

  Moore’s defence solicitor Dylan Jones read out a bizarre statement from his client. It went: ‘I knew from the start that nobody could win in this matter – not the deceased, the relatives, nor myself – nobody.’

  Detective Constable David Morris heard Moore confess to the murders. He said: ‘What he said was quite shocking and horrific in places. If I had shown any emotion, be it anger or horror, it would have restricted him speaking to me. I tried throughout to remain professional and unmoved by what he was telling me, to keep him speaking; I believed everything he was telling me, but I couldn’t believe how dispassionately he was talking. He was talking the way you or I would talk about going down to town to buy a newspaper or a pint of milk.’

  ‘WE HAD A LITTLE ARGUMENT’

  ‘What he did to my Mum was straight out of a horror film. I think he killed her in some kind of sick, satanic sacrifice.’