The Jewish Inspiration for the Moors Murders

The ‘Moors Murders’ are the second most famous incidence of serial killing in British history with the most famous being the ‘Jack the Ripper’ crimes of the 1888 ‘Autumn of Terror’. Like the ‘Jack the Ripper’ crimes there is a significant jewish angle to the ‘Moors Murders’ that is often completely forgotten or deliberately suppressed.

Unlike the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings of 1888 – ‘Jack the Ripper’ is extremely likely to have been jewish and this fact is broadly recognized in the ‘Ripperologist’ community – (1) we know that the Moors Murders were committed by two non-jewish Britons named Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965 in and around the suburbs of Manchester and neighbouring Peak District.

However, what is not well-known is that Ian Brady’s direct inspiration and model for the ‘Moors Murders’ was decidedly and exclusively jewish. This was a book called ‘Compulsion’ published in 1956 by an American jewish writer named Meyer Levin.

‘Compulsion’ is a what you might call a ‘true crime novel’ in that it isn’t a fantasy but rather a non-fiction book written in the form of a novel to argue a particular thesis.

It covers the famous ‘Leopold and Loeb’ trial in Chicago in 1924 of two wealthy jewish homosexuals named Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb; who murdered a fourteen-year-old boy named Robert ‘Bobby’ Franks and then proceeded to pour hydrochloric acid on Franks’ face and genitals to obscure Franks’ identity and that he was a jew (because he was circumcised).

Leopold and Loeb’s famous defence – conducted by prominent non-jewish attorney Clarence Darrow – relied heavily of psychological factors as well as the alleged sexual abuse of Leopold as child by a female governess. It was this and Leopold’s weird interpretation of the philosophic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche – which served as part of the sub-text for the crime – which formed the basis of Levin’s novel.

In ‘Compulsion’ – as Staff rightly notes – Levin sought to excuse Leopold and Loeb’s brutal planned murder of Franks on psychological grounds (2) and did so in part because he was ‘liberally politically-minded’, (3) but one also suspects it was also because Levin, Leopold and Loeb were jews as was Franks. Thus, preventing – or at least offering a counterargument to - critics of the jews of the era using the case as a weapon to illustrate the criminal nature of the jews.

The exclusively jewish nature of ‘Compulsion’ may well account for why it figures so little if at all in many treatments of the ‘Moors Murders’ and while it can be argued that we only learned about ‘Compulsion’s’ role in Brady and Hindley’s murders rather late on (probably in the mid-late 1980s) the fact that Adolf Hitler is often falsely credited with being the ‘inspiration’ behind them – (4) which I will debunk in a different article – to this day is absurd. (5)

However – as Staff once again notes – reading ‘Compulsion’ was ‘a key moment in the development of Brady’s fantasies’ (6) and it served as both the inspiration and blueprint for the ‘Moors Murders’ (7) with Levin’s positive depiction of Leopold and Loeb’s psychology and ‘Nietzschean philosophy’ serving as the inspiration of Brady’s own claims that are so often falsely credited to Hitler. (8)

We even know that ‘Compulsion’ was later referred to by Brady in regard to how to dispose of the bodies of the children that he and Hindley killed. (9)

Writing in his autobiography in 1989 Peter Topping – the man who interviewed Brady and Hindley as well as the policeman who led the ‘Moors Murders’ case – referenced the central role that Levin’s ‘Compulsion’ played in the ‘Moors Murders’ as follows:

‘Brady talked often to her about a book called Compulsion – later, when I was talking to him, he mentioned the book to me himself. It was the story of two boys from rich families who had wanted to commit the perfect murder, and who had kidnapped and subsequently killed a twelve-year-old boy: they had escaped the death penalty because of their age.’ (10)

Thus, in spite of Brady being a fan of other books and authors such as the works of the Marquis de Sade (11) it was Levin’s book ‘Compulsion’ that serves as the inspiration and the blueprint for the ‘Moors Murders’ and further that Levin’s book is a jewish writer defending two jewish child-murderers of a jewish boy.

In other words: the inspiration behind and the blueprint for the ‘Moors Murders’ of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley was entirely jewish.

References

(1) See my monograph on the jewish role in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders in 1888: https://archive.org/details/karl-radl-2024-jack-the-ripper-and-the-jews

(2) Duncan Staff, 2008, ‘The Lost Boy: The Definitive Story of the Moors Murders and the Search for the Final Victim’, 1st Edition, Bantam: London, pp. 173-174

(3) Ibid., p. 173

(4) For example: Fred Harrison, 1986, ‘Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders’, 1st Edition, Ashgrove Press: Bath pp. 57; 71 and Robert Wilson, 1986, ‘The Devil’s Disciples’, 1st Edition, Express Newspapers: London, pp. 17; 21

(5) Harrison, Op. Cit. and Wilson, Op. Cit. may well have been unaware of ‘Compulsion’s’ role in the ‘Moors Murders’ but Chris Cowley, 2010, ‘Face to face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady’, 1st Edition, John Blake: London has no such excuse.

(6) Staff, Op. Cit., p. 173

(7) Anon., 2014, ‘Ian Brady and Myra Hindley: Murder on the Moors’, 1st Edition, Igloo Books: Sywell, pp. 17; 67

(8) Ibid., p. 82

(9) Staff, Op. Cit., p. 287

(10) Peter Topping, 1989, ‘Topping: The Autobiography of the Police Chief in the Moors Murder Case’, 1st Edition, Angus & Robertson: London, pp. 80-81; Topping is mistaken about Franks’ age at the time as he was fourteen not twelve.

(11) Staff, Op. Cit., pp. 26; 81