MANCHESTER, England, June 28 (UPI) -- Ian Brady, one of England's most notorious serial killers, should stay in the mental hospital where he has been held since 1985, a tribunal ruled Friday.
A three-person panel headed by Judge Robert Atherton made the decision after an eight-day hearing at Ashworth Hospital near Liverpool, the Yorkshire Post reported. Atherton said the specific reasons for the decision will be released later.
The hearing was transmitted by video link to a Manchester courtroom, allowing the news media, relatives of the victims and the public to hear Brady for the first time since his trial.
Brady and his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, who died in 2002, killed five children and teenagers in the 1960s. The killings became known as the "Moors Murders" because the bodies of the victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor outside Manchester.
Alan Bennett, whose brother Keith was one of the victims, praised the decision. Keith is the only victim whose body was never found, the Daily Mirror reported.
"I am hoping Brady will be seen for what he is and just how much nonsense the staff at Ashworth have had put up with," Alan Bennett said on a website dedicated to his brother and the continuing search for his grave. "No doubt Brady will feel even more hard done by now -- but I have to say that I am happiest knowing he will be at his unhappiest."
Brady, who claims to have been on a hunger strike for years, had said he wanted to be returned to prison so he would not be force fed. Witnesses said he makes himself soup and toast.
Investigators also released letters Brady wrote years ago in which he said he had killed four more people, two men in Glasgow and a man and woman in Manchester. Detective Chief Supt. Darren Shenton, who heads Manchester's serious crime division, said his predecessor, Peter Topping, investigated Brady's story in the 1980s and could find no proof of it.
In another letter in 1985, Brady said police should be looking in Yorkshire for Keith Bennett's body. It was unclear if he meant the boy was buried in another area than the other victims. Saddleworth Moore was in Yorkshire at the time of the killings but later became part of Greater Manchester.
