Brady to release letters

Moors murderer Ian Brady is planning to take revenge from the grave on his former lover Myra Hindley for claiming he forced her to take part in killing five children.

The Evening Standard has learned that Brady will release coded letters from her which cast doubt on her claims.

Brady has spent recent weeks preparing for his death, his funeral and the disposal of correspondence from Hindley that has remained under lock and key for 36 years. That correspondence includes letters written to him in code in which Hindley advocates inflicting pain on children.

Brady and Hindley were jailed for life at Chester Assizes on May 6 1966 for the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, in 1964 and Edward Evans, 17, in 1965. Brady was also convicted of murdering John Kilbride, 12, with Hindley as an accessory. Twenty-one years later, they confessed to killing Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.

Brady, who has been force-fed for the past three years during a protest over his conditions, has issued instructions to his solicitors about his funeral and the disposal of his papers.

He has asked for copies of the instructions to be sent to Benedict Birnberg, the executor of his will, who has confirmed Brady gave him letters written to him by Hindley before their trial.

Hindley admitted the existence of the letters in 1998 before she launched a failed appeal against her sentence. During an interview, she said her appeal was based on a claim that Brady forced her to take part in the murders and she feared he would authorise the release of the letters. She said they would show her in a desperately bad light.

Although furious, Brady held on to the correspondence. However, he has now issued instructions that all his private papers be gathered together upon his death so they do not fall into the hands of Ashworth hospital staff.

It is then thought he will release the letters. In one, details of which were given by Hindley as an example of what she feared, the contents appear innocuous until a simple code is applied to it. Then, the message emerges: "Why don't you get someone to throw acid on Brett?" Brett was the four-year-old brother of Lesley Ann Downey.

Hindley told the Standard Brady had asked her to write sexually stimulating messages on several subjects. But Brady was furious.

In a letter after her appeal failed, he wrote: "She shot herself in the foot by mentioning them and the coded methodology. As for the suggestion I told her to write certain messages, that too was an error and a vast underestimation of general intelligence and credulity. Catch 22. She had to invent some excuse and, in the circumstances, she had no real choice."

Hindley is expected to benefit soon from a European Court ruling that it is improper for politicians, such as successive Home Secretaries, to extend prisoners' sentences. If a panel of Law Lords agrees, she could be freed within months.