Tabloid Promotes “Paranormal Researcher” Linking Jimmy Savile to Moors Murderers

From the Daily Star:

Moors murders BOMBSHELL: Jimmy Savile part of ‘paedo ring with Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’

…Before their arrest in 1965, Savile ran the BBC studios from Manchester’s Dickenson Road – where Top of the Pops was filmed – and has been accused of meeting with Brady and Hindley to buy indecent images of children.

Erica Gregory – who has devoted years of her life investigating the Moors murders – believes they even formed a twisted “paedophile ring”.

…In 2014, Dan Davies noted that Savile chillingly replied “I am the Myra Hindley story” when asked on his opinion of it.

And Gregory believes that Savile continued to communicate with the killers after their incarceration – visiting them and using songs played on the radio to transmit coded messages.

Erica Gregory appears to be the source for a never-ending stream of tabloid fodder about the Moors Murderers: she is the author of a book, The Secret Key To The Moors Murders (2013), in which she argues that there are secret messages in Brady’s writings and that there is coded significance in the locations where his victims’ bodies were hidden. She also claims to have found objects on Saddleworth Moor that relate to the crimes.

Gregory believes that her researches will bring to light the undiscovered remains of Brady’s victim Keith Bennett; in recent weeks, the Daily Star has run articles suggesting that Gregory and investigators are “closing in” on the location, and promoting Gregory’s theory that Hindley’s late brother-in-law was also involved in the killings. But while the former story remains unresolved and the latter unsubstantiated, we now move on to yet another dramatic revelation that has somehow escaped the scrutiny of police and serious journalists: the supposed involvement of Jimmy Savile!

Savile, like the Moors Murderers, will probably be selling newspapers for years to come, and there is therefore an incentive to shoehorn him into other narratives of scandal and unsolved crime (another example: the Daily Mail ran a piece in 2015 suggesting that it was Savile who introduced Bishop Peter Ball to the Prince of Wales). It’s easy enough in this case – Savile’s cryptic “I am the Myra Hindley story” comment (given to Louis Theroux) is admittedly weird, and his association with Peter Sutcliffe at Broadmoor has already prompted lurid speculation. The idea of Savile using his position at the BBC to secretly communicate with Brady will also appeal to tabloid anti-Beeb sentiment.

However, Gregory’s new suggestion is both highly speculative and inherently unlikely, and it should be noted that her  claims to have found significant objects relating to the Moors Murders have been criticised by Keith Bennett’s brother Alan:

“Gregory must have a couple of large size wheelie bins full of all the stuff she has found on the moor and she invents some way to connect it all, whatever it may be, to Brady and Hindley. During my own ongoing search of the moor we have found many things, but the difference is that we do not invent things to go with what ever the finds may be…

“I have to try and come to terms, once again, with the fact that journalists like a ‘Sensational/exclusive’ and people like E Gregory continue with their fantasies and inventions but it does not alter the fact that it all means absolutely nothing in the end. All it does is cause grief and hamper serious investigations.

“Brady has been given his platform once again. Gregory has been given the publicity she craves in her wicked, hurtful, spiteful fantasy world.” 

That was after Gregory appeared on Channel 5 claiming to have found the remains of a shotgun used by Brady.

Some important context here is that Gregory also spends time hunting for ghosts, as part of the Worsley Paranormal Group. The website for her book about Brady no longer exists, but some of its content has been preserved on a blog run by Hayley Stevens, who takes a sceptical approach to the paranormal. Stevens noted that “the group rely largely upon Electronic Voice Phenomena” (a pseudo-scientific term for “spirit voices”), and that  EVP had been used to guide researches on the moors.

Stevens’s post dates to 2013, and it was published in response to angry messages from Gregory in the wake of a post Stevens had published the year before, entitled “Unethical Ghost Hunters Play Detective“. Stevens was here responding to a Daily Mail report that the group had found an old spade on the moor; the discovery was headlined as a “potential breakthrough in hunt for body of Moors Murder victim Keith Bennett”.

The group had the spade tested by a lecturer in forensics, but it was not apparently passed to the police. Stevens made some obvious points:

If they genuinely believed it to be linked to the murder case they should have handed it straight to the police, and Kershaw had no business testing it himself. If their aim truly was to help with the discovery of Keith Bennett they shouldn’t have even removed the spade from the scene and should have left it exactly where it was while calling the police and they had no business contacting the Bennett family directly or through their lawyer.

In a further helpful post, entitled “Debunking Ghost Hunter Erica Gregory and her Ian Brady Conspiracies“, Stevens expresses the view that the Group has “simply been manipulated by the rantings of a paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder”, and that Gregory is “a time-wasting conspiracy theorist with a hero complex.” Stevens further notes that Alan Bennett had

shared on Social Media how Gregory had sent somebody messages claiming that her work revealed that his late mother, Winnie, who died never knowing where her son was buried, was a prostitute and that his murdered brother, Keith, was purposefully visiting Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.

Are the newspapers that have so eagerly promoted Gregory aware of this context, or are they just turning a blind eye to it while Gregory provides them with more usable sensationalising material?

4 Responses

  1. Another despicable act of intellectual vandalism by unaccountable unmandated members of the British Media.

    Need we remind Barthsnotes readers of the Star’s past form on these issues?

    October 1989: SATAN KIDS KILL BABIES BRED FOR SACRIFICE (complete with picture of a baby – for illustration purposes only of course!)

    March 1990 SATANISTS WANTED MY GIRLS FOR SEX; Then Demand Evil Sacrifice. (picture of 9 year old girl who was completely unconnected with the story – for illustration purposes only!)

    September 1990: 4000 KIDS SACRIFICED each year in Satanic Rituals.

    December 2016: RIPPER HOLDS SEANCE: CLAIMS VICTIMS FORGIVE HIM.

    And a multitude of other utterly disgraceful and socially irresponsible reports of the ‘London Bus found on Moon’ variety, based on the flimsiest ‘he said she said’ hearsay evidence cynically designed to increase the shock-value of this toilet-paper’s front page to swell its circulation figures.

    However, readers should note that the SAFF Research Library is replete with similar socially divisive headlines from ALL British Media, including the smug Broadsheets who continually protect their own lies by distributing the untruth that it is the Tabloids that bring down the standards of the British Media.

    Read how the Independent carried a full page expose on ‘pictures of a Satanist eating a baby which proves that SRA exists’ and then had to apologise a week later when it turned out to be a Performance Art put-on.

    http://saff.nfshost.com/indyhoax.htm

    There are MANY others in our files.

    The varied cycles of prejudice, racism and persecution which infect this country and have set citizens against citizens in the minds of many of it’s population have been created by and perpetuated by an illusory world created by the Media for it’s own purposes. The two fundamental axioms of the Media are
    ‘Tell ’em what they want to hear’
    and
    ‘Never let facts get in the way of a good story’.

    Of course the government tried to bring the evil British Press to heel with the Leveson Inquiry ( just one of several failed historical attempts to tame their excesses) but the intellectual vandals who run the British Media squirmed out of that and created a stale-mate with the government, challenging whoever is in power to try their luck at enforcing the Inquiry’s clear recommendations. They won’t be responsible, they are willing to interfere with democracy and with the justice system and they won’t reign in the excesses of their trade.

    It is time people realised that newspaper publishing is not about News, it is about ‘News-speak’. Power-play grabs by an elite of self-interests which seeks to control and direct the collective mind of the British Public for their own benefit.

    For instance, in the millions of column inches of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the terrible Grenfell tragedy the Media have already sold the public on cladding being the cause of the conflagration and are now actively seeking a scapegoat to be prosecuted.

    Thousands of people have been inconvenienced by being turned out of their high-rise homes whilst the great and the good decide how best to un-clad the buildings. So far I haven’t seen many column inches devoted to the actual cause, the Fridge-Freezer which erupted and started the fire in the first place.

    Fridge-freezers spontaneously igniting is a fire-risk which has been known for YEARS but those people who suffered have been ignored or shouted down by the ‘experts’ in the Fire Industry who glibly authorise foam backed cladding which any person can see would be a problem in a fire. It is something to do to do with starting capacitors whose specifications are made too tight and so in a batch some will fail and explode. Your’s may be next.

    This has happened thousands of times and always causes serious fires. Do we hear the government telling millions of householders to unplug their fridge-freezers after Grenfell? NO. The Media sets the debate which the politicians follow, it’s all about blame and excuses and this time the Media have ruled that Cladding is the issue, and so the reality of millions of citizens is that they are perfectly safe because they don’t live in a high-rise block, not realising that destruction may lie in the corner of their kitchen behind their ice-cubes.

    it is the Brtish Press which runs the U.K., not Whitehall nor Europe!

    John Freedom

  2. I will leave a reply as you don’t know us and you assume ..and the finds still keep coming including my work on Brady himself. Just because certain people wont accept what I am and do docent mean I am wrong .. and that includes the idiots out there who troll not only myself but many others ..

  3. we have our work online and the work I do and research into Ian Brady .. I hide nothing .. and have done work many others have on many other cases of a similar nature.. do you research and see how many work for government alone ..

  4. Why don’t you add the finds made , the connections we have to the area which has never been searched .. And the support from many even those who have worked the case , the rantings of those few mean nothing .. Like I said , we work the area still and the more we find about that area shows they kept police off it by diverting away smith included so why ? The links to Savile with Brady keep coming also ..

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.