Professor Jeremy Coid assessed Glaswegian Brady at Ashworth High Security Psychiatric Hospital in Merseyside in 2003, and said the killer provoked a revulsion he hadn’t experienced before.
Ian Brady(Image: Evening Standard/Getty Images)
One of the UK’s top forensic psychiatrists has told how meeting Glasgwegian Moors Murderer Ian Brady triggered revulsion he hadn’t experienced with any other criminal he has come across. Professor Jeremy Coid assessed infamous Brady at Ashworth High Security Psychiatric Hospital in Merseyside in 2003.
Brady, who was 65 at the time, had been jailed for 37 years for the gruesome Moors killings in the 60s along with girlfriend Myra Hindley. The murderous pair had engaged in the torture and killing of five children, before burying their bodies in Saddleworth Moor, the Sunday Mail reports.
Coid said just being in the presence of “beyond narcissistic” Brady brought a reaction he had never experienced with any other killer, including Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.
Professor Coid said: “I went to see Ian Brady at the request of a solicitor to prepare a report on him and it was a remarkable experience.
“It was a battle of control which I lost in the sense he had to dictate how the interview was going and what he’d talk about. But the key thing about it was how negative I felt towards him.
Professor Jeremy Coid(Image: Handout)
“It’s crucial in all areas of psychiatry to be aware of your feelings. Am I afraid? Do I like the person and why do I feel these waves of hatred coming over me?
“In psychodynamics it’s called countertransference and it’s the idea that the individual produces in you particular feelings. Clearly he was a psychopath, he was a sadist. I’m sure he will have got sexual gratification from his victims.
“This was somebody who perceived himself as almost God-like. It was beyond narcissism, it was almost like he had a God-like feeling so he was entitled to murder children.
“No one is particularly going to like someone who committed offences like that but it was more than that. It was something he produced in me, in terms of reaction to him. It was profoundly different in contrast with Sutcliffe.
“When I started my heavy duty training as a registrar I was in Broadmoor Hospital. I interviewed him and he had all the symptoms of schizophrenia.
“But I didn’t feel like he had schizophrenia at all and he behaved absolutely normally. I found him a polite, pleasant Yorkshireman who you might find leaning up against a pub in Leeds somewhere.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were both sentenced to life imprisonment(Image: Getty Images)
“Affable, polite, I didn’t have any reaction. Obviously I knew what he’d done and he had told me how he’d done this for God and that God was controlling his hands on the steering wheel when he was driving to commit the offences. But as a person, there was a lack of any negatives. That was interesting in itself.”
Professor Coid made the revelations on the Ladbible interview series Minutes With. Brady was born in 1938 in Glasgow, where he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals.
He and evil accomplice Hindley killed five children between July 1963 and October 1965 in and around Manchester.
The victims were Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans – all aged between 10 and 17. At least four of them were sexually assaulted. Brady died in a secure psychiatric unit in 2017, aged 79.
The killer never showed any remorse for his heinous crimes, while Hindley maintained she had been beaten and drugged by her partner into becoming a cold-blooded killer.
Sutcliffe died in November 2020 at 74. He was serving life for killing at least 13 women between 1975 and 1980.