‘£3m to keep me alive is a waste’
Reporter: by RICHARD HOOTON
Date published: 29 October 2009
MOORS murderer Ian Brady claims taxpayers have wasted £3 million to keep him fed and alive rather than granting him his wish to die.
The child killer has been on hunger strike since October, 1999, when doctors began feeding him by tube because they can’t allow him to kill himself by starvation.
Brady (71) claims his care at high-security Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool costs £300,000 a year, paid for by Merseyside NHS Trust, and is a waste of public funds.
He was transferred there after being declared criminally insane in 1985 but describes it as a “pigs trough for a sub-standard prison” in a new letter, part of which was published in a national newspaper.
He wrote: “I request and expect nothing from the vermin here, except a coffin.
“I am politically force-fed as they can’t leech a living from dead bodies.”
He criticised the “moral, professional and mental bankruptcy of the hospital, where corrupt over-manning and continued fake employment of redundants means it now costs more than £300,000 to store a tramp, immigrant or minor thief per annum.”
But the mother of murder victim Keith Bennett says Brady should not be allowed to die.
Winnie Johnson (pictured) said: “Despite the shocking cost, I hope he stays alive — I want him to keep on suffering day by day for what he did to Keith and those other children.”
Keith was only 12 when he went missing in 1964 but it wasn’t until 1987 that Brady and Myra Hindley — who died in 2002 aged 60 — owned up to the murder while in prison.
The police announced this summer that they had given up the search for Keith’s body but, as reported in the Chronicle last week, friends and family of Mrs Johnson (75) are setting up a trust fund to continue the hunt.
Brady has never revealed where he buried Keith but Mrs Johnson says the trust has given her new hope in ending her torment over finding her son and giving him a proper send-off.
The evil pair also murdered Lesley Ann Downey (10), John Kilbride (12), Pauline Reade (16) and Edward Evans (17), burying some of the bodies on Saddleworth Moor.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “It’s a scandal that Ian Brady has cost taxpayers such a large amount of money. Many will see this letter as him thumbing his nose at both the taxpayers who pay for his care and the victims of his crimes.”
