In his talk on Tuesday, Ray Gosling mentioned something that I’d heard before. Namely that ‘moors murderer’ Ian Brady met his final victim, Edward Evans, in the Rembrandt Hotel.

I first heard this story from an elderly gay friend in the 1980′s. He claimed that Ian Brady was a regular in the Rembrandt.

The Rembrandt is one of Manchester’s oldest gay bars and used to be called the Ogden Arms. It stands on the corner of Canal Street and Sackville Street in what is now the ‘gay village’.

Some accounts of the horrible crimes claim that, on the night Edward Evans was murdered, Brady met him at Manchester Central Station (now G-Mex) and suggest that the pair didn’t know each other previously.

Perhaps the title doesn’t inspire too much confidence, but in the book ’50 True Tales of Terror’, edited by John Canning and published in 1972, one chapter is ‘The Moors Murder Horror’. In it C.E.Maine writes:

“…Brady decided to pick up some beer in the Central Station buffet. When he arrived he found it closed and he had also found young Edward Evans standing by a milk vending machine. Evans was dark and slim, wearing a suede jacket, suede shoes and tight jeans. He looked as if he might be homosexual; whatever the truth, Evans accepted Brady’s invitation to go back to his home for a drink.”

However, according to The Times of April 30, 1966, in court “Brady described how he met Evans whom he said he knew as a homosexual, at Central Station, Manchester.” Which implies Brady already knew Edward Evans?

Did Brady already know Evans from his visits to the Rembrandt? Did they in fact meet at the Rembrandt on the night of the murder?

In those days Manchester’s gay bars were forced to make payments to corrupt police officers in return for a quiet life. Before I read about Brady’s evidence in court, I wondered if the police had falsified details of the Brady/Evans meeting place. Rather than have it become public knowledge that a pub near the canal was a hotbed of homosexuality (which in the early 1960′s was still illegal)?

Or could Brady himself have lied about where he met Evans on the night of the murder? Rather than have it come out that he was a regular at the Rembrandt? Were there any witnesses to the meeting at Central Station? I don’t know…

However, police did discover some of the evidence in two suitcases that had been left at the luggage office at the station.

According to this article about Myra Hindley in the Daily Mail: “Brady was regularly disappearing on expeditions to the Rembrandt gay pub in Manchester city centre.”

However, while such bars were hardly ‘mixed’ (gay/straight) at all in those days, the fact that Brady went to the Rembrandt doesn’t automatically mean he was gay.

When a group is criminalised, it tends to drift towards hanging out with other “outlaws”. Even when I moved to Manchester and first went on the gay scene in 1982 there was that same feeling. It was then sixteen years since the law had changed regarding male homosexuality, but the authorities — including Manchester chief constable James Anderton — continued to persecute the LGBT community.

So, although the scene felt welcoming and safe in many respects, there were still lots of dodgy characters around and sometimes an air of criminality. There were crooks (which Brady certainly was), gangsters, ‘gay-for-pay’ rent boys and others who were on the fringes of society.

Would any regular at the Rembrandt in the early 1960′s have helped the police, even on this terrible case? It’s unlikely. Within the gay community there was a deep distrust of the police until well into the 1990′s.

There are some other interesting details here [archived copy]. Can it be true that someone who had a close connection to the pub burnt it down, together with “some friends”, because he felt it “to be so tainted by Brady’s presence”? This photo, from 1962, shows that the name of the pub had been changed to The Rembrandt before the murders started (the first is believed to have taken place in 1963).

I’m fairly sure that the North Wales serial killer Peter Moore was also a regular at ‘the Rem’ in the 1980′s or early 1990′s. I have a good memory for a face and his looks horribly familiar…

Update (14 September 2011)

Minor changes were made to this article, extra information was added and a link was updated to go to an archived copy because the original website has gone.