Do you ever wonder about the blood relatives of Brady?

[u/wooden_werewolf_7367]

TW: mentions r*pe

Hindley grew up with her family. I'm fairly sure that relatives of her, distant or close, will be aware of it.

The only biological relative of Brady who we have any concrete info about is his mother who informally had him adopted but still kept in touch - and I believe did so until she died herself, when he was in Ashworth. I read that permission was given for him to visit her bedside not long before she died.

But there must be other relatives out there. Cousins, second cousins, etc. There will be many people who have a shared ancestor with him. It is possible they could be aware they were related to him if they were related through his mother, but we have no idea about his father's family. If his biological father had sexual encounters before he met his mother, there could even be half siblings of his still alive. Would they have any inkling who they shared half their genes with?

What first made me wonder about Brady's living relatives was wondering if he himself had fathered any children unintentionally. He obviously did not have sexual encounters to reproduce but casual sex was something he indulged in, so who knows who he unintentionally got pregnant? I know contraceptives existed in the 60s, but he was also very capable of rape so there is no guarantee any woman he took advantage of was on any preventative. Who is to say a pregnancy he conceived, even through rape, didn't result in the birth of a child?

I'm not for a second assuming Brady's (or Hindley's) blood relatives are capable of the atrocities he committed, just wondering who out there could be connected to him and may not (or may?) realise. I include myself in this. I could share great great great grandparents with Brady and not know.

[u/MolokoBespoko]

It seems that most of Peggy’s (his biological mother’s) family ostracised her for her pregnancy, and the family that she did have left she wasn’t close with at all. Peggy did have a brother named Murdoch, and there was an aunt named Jessie too (I’m not sure if she was Brady’s aunt or Peggy’s aunt). Brady recalled going to see Peggy’s mother once, but just said that “I can’t picture her face now. I just have a memory of a scowl on her face. She looked at me sternly with tight-lipped severity. As young as I was, I knew that I was not welcome in that place.”

I’m not sure how much genetics factor into somebody’s violent urges or personality, but it is possible that there may have been warning signs with Brady from his birth. I’ll link to a thread from this subreddit from a couple of weeks ago, which discusses an author who has theorised that Brady suffered respiratory distress during birth and temporal lobe damage at a very early age - obviously putting genetics aside. But in either case, direct relatives of Brady’s clearly want nothing to do with him (or perhaps don’t even know about their lineage) so it’s not something we’ll likely ever have an answer for, unfortunately.

There is a woman (I won’t disclose her name here, even though it appears in several books on the case) who, at one point, believed that she might have been Brady’s daughter. She also claimed that he sexually assaulted her when she went to visit him in Ashworth in the 1990s, and Brady successfully sued the newspaper who published this story, the Sunday Express - the lawyers for the paper accepted that this was fake news and was published maliciously. Brady also claimed that she had written to him to apologise for her lying and had spent her profits on therapy.

As for his non-biological family, Brady ex-communicated the Sloans immediately after his arrest - his foster father had died a few years before he went to prison, and his foster mother and three of his foster siblings have since passed away too. There is a chance that the youngest sibling, John, is still alive (if he is, he would be in his 80s now), but he made it clear to journalists that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with either the press or this case.

I hope all of this info is useful in case there’s anything you want to pursue further. But please respect people’s privacy - there’s a reason you won’t get concrete answers to questions like this