Jealous Brady was the one who wanted to die

While Myra Hindley tried ceaselessly tried to win her freedom, her fellow child killer Ian Brady has fought to die behind bars.

Since Brady, 64, began his hunger strike in 1999, he has campaigned for the right to end his life. He launched two unsuccessful High Court appeals challenging the right of hospital authorities to force-feed him.

He says he is not interested in living for another 20 or 30 years and would rather die than rot in jail. Brady, who was jailed in 1966 for the murders, started refusing food and water in protest at being moved from the ward he had occupied at Ashworth Special Hospital since 1985.

He ended speculation about a possible release by declaring he would never apply for parole. In a letter in December 1999, he wrote: "I prefer to die healthy rather than rot slowly for their vested interests and expediency." He said he had spent 35 years in captivity and was destined to die in "some garbage can". But he argued that hospital authorities "in their expedient blindness" could not accept he was not "even remotely interested in living another 20 or 30 years merely to provide employment for an over-manned army of penal bureaucrats and prison warders".

Brady and Hindley exchanged letters after they began their life sentences but their relationship soon soured and most of their time in captivity the former lovers regarded each other with contempt. As her lawyers began their repeated appeals to the Home Secretary to secure her release, Hindley attempted to represent herself as a woman drawn under Brady's evil spell. But her efforts to portray an innocent corrupted were at odds with the facts. Hindley's female presence was instrumental in persuading the couple's young victims to get into their car. It was Hindley who drove the car to Saddleworth Moor where they buried their victims, and posed for photographs at the scene.

Brady was incensed by Hindley's attempts to rewrite their history and continued to undermine her version of events in letters to newspapers.

During his failed right-to-die campaign Brady revealed his jealousy of Hindley for having a life-threatening condition. He said: "I envy Hindley. Myra gets the potentially fatal brain condition, whilst I have to fight simply to die.

"I have had enough. I want nothing, my objective is to die and release myself from this once and for all.

"For years here I've been wishing for any sort of cancer, the perfect deus ex machina [unexpected event saving a hopeless situation], as I would refuse all surgery. So you see my death strike is rational and pragmatic. I'm only sorry I didn't do it decades ago, and I'm eager to leave this cesspit in a coffin."

That Hindley has been released from her life sentence in the manner he so craved will irk him even more.