Moors killer: You've wasted £3m keeping me alive
MOORS Murderer Ian Brady last night claimed taxpayers have forked out £3million to keep him fed and alive for the last 10 years – when all he wants to do is die.
Child killer Brady, 71, has been on hunger strike since October 1999, when doctors began feeding him by tube because they are not allowed to let him commit suicide by starvation.
His care costs £300,000 a year, he claimed. In a new letter, Brady condemns high-security Ashworth Hospital, where he was transferred after being declared criminally insane in 1985, as a “pigs trough for a substandard
prison”, claiming his treatment, paid by Merseyside NHS Trust, is a waste of public funds.
Brady writes: “I request and expect nothing from the vermin here, except a coffin, and am politically force-fed as they can’t leech a living from dead bodies.”
He attacks “the moral, professional and mental bankruptcy of the hospital, where corrupt over-manning and continued fake employment of redundants means it now costs over £300,000 to store a tramp, immigrant or minor thief per annum”.
“Yet MPs pretend to be mystified as to why the NHS is collapsing under greed-motivated Trusts and prison wardens.” Brady was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966 for his part in one of the most horrific series of crimes in British history.
He and Myra Hindley murdered Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, John Kilbride, 12, Pauline Reade, 16, and
Edward Evans, 17, burying some of the bodies on the moors near Manchester. At the time, the judge described him as “wicked beyond belief, with no reasonable chance of reform”.
Yesterday, 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
heinous crimes.” But the mother of Brady victim Keith, Winnie Johnson, 75, 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.”
Brady’s solicitor Richard Nicholas confirmed: “£300,000 a year is generally the annual cost per head of keeping a patient at Ashworth.”
Hindley died in November 2002, aged 60.
