Geoff Knupfer

Brady was in a, by this time, was in a psychiatric hospital.

and classified in lay terms as being mad as a hatter she isn't and she's in obviously doing a full life term in a female prison but everybody we spoke to from prison officers present and past and fellow inmates past said that you won't get anywhere with her she's highly intelligent which she she was and she's very manipulative you know she won't give you the time of day

So Peter Topping, my boss at the time, and I went down to a place called Cook and Wood Prison in Kent.

The only person who knew we were going was the prison governor.

You couldn't tell anybody because it would leak.

So we knocked on the door and said, could we speak to the prison governor, please?

He came down obviously knew who we were and we went in and spoke to Mara Henley and straight away she said in coded terms I'm prepared to help.

She said that she was prepared to point out areas that were of interest to Ian Brady on this piece of moorland.

Yeah, we did several times.

We spoke to her first.

Yeah.

We'd taken advice from, as I say, it's a long convoluted tale, but long story short, we'd taken advice from psychiatrists who said that this guy could well be on the brink of, you know, teetering on the brink of spilling the beans.

And if you can apply pressure to him, he might actually tell you what happened.

We hadn't really contemplated her because of this background we'd been told about her being very manipulative and want to give you the time of day.

We hadn't realized that that was an avenue we could explore.

So we were very shocked when we went in and she said, yeah, what do you want to know, basically?

And we'd set up a press briefing outside the prison on the assumption that she wouldn't tell us anything when, in fact, she did.

So we wanted to cancel the briefing.

But, of course, we couldn't because it was all there.

So national television was out there with the cameras rolling when we got out.