One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  That summer the couple travelled on the Tiger Cub to Scotland for a holiday. Before their departure, Myra called in at the local police station to ask if they would mind watching out for her van, which was parked on the croft behind Bannock Street. She was a familiar face at the front desk there, asking for coins for the gas meter and checking whether the police had seen Gran’s dog Lassie, who wandered about the neighbourhood.

  On a previous trip to Scotland, Ian had shown Myra where he’d been brought up: they visited the derelict tenements of the Gorbals and drove out to Templeland Road, but he didn’t introduce her to his foster mother and siblings, despite spotting Jean Sloan at a distance. They’d climbed the stairs of a tower block to observe Ian’s old home more clearly and a girl emerged from one of the flats and swore at them, wanting to know what they were doing. Ian had answered her with equal aggression but told Myra afterwards that he would never hurt a fellow Scot. In summer 1963, they visited Glasgow again, then drove north to Loch Lomond and sailed on the Maid of the Loch, Britain’s last large paddle steamer. From the promenade deck, Ian snapped away with his camera, while Myra admired the scenery that had enraptured him as a young boy.

  Returning to Gorton, Myra answered the door one day at Bannock Street to find a policeman standing there. She didn’t mention in her writings whether or not his uniformed appearance frightened her, instead recalling, ‘Outside was one of the tallest, most good-looking men I’d ever seen. He said he’d come to talk to me about the van and could he come in for a few minutes?’17 He introduced himself as Norman Sutton and asked whether, in view of the legal trouble over the van, she would sell it to him. When Myra agreed, suggesting £20 for it, he told her he would be happy to pay £25 but couldn’t exchange money while he was on duty and asked if she would consider an evening out with him so that he might hand over the money later. Myra accepted, and recounted the incident to Ian during a picnic. He laughed hysterically and Myra admitted later that she found it amusing too, in view of the murder they had committed.

  She arranged to meet Norman after the night-school classes she had enrolled in at her old school, Ryder Brow. She took maths on Friday and English on Wednesday, taught by her old English teacher, Miss Webb, who remembered her. During their conversation, Myra brought up her date with Norman, adding that he was a policeman. Miss Webb said that if Myra ever felt inclined to join the force, she could put in a good word for her because a friend of hers worked at Mill Street station. After the class, Myra found Norman waiting for her on his motorbike, and they drove to a pub in West Gorton, where he said he remembered her from Belle Vue; his mother, May, was the manageress there. After last orders, he drove Myra home. She asked him in for a cup of tea and, in Gran’s front room, she explained that she was seeing Ian. He asked if she was serious about Ian. She nodded, but when Norman kissed her she didn’t rebuff him. They had sex, and Myra claimed later that he asked her to marry him – though he was already married – at which point she felt an overpowering urge to tell him about Pauline’s murder. She quelled the urge and they ended up discussing whether she should apply to join the police force, then made plans to meet after her next evening class.

  Myra recalled: ‘I went to Mill Street for an interview, and was considered suitable for training, and given forms to fill in, a formal application to join the police and a list of questions to answer. When I told Ian what I had done, he thought it was hilarious. Then he said, “Join the force, you’ll pick up a lot of useful information.” That made me change my mind.’18 There is no record of Myra’s attempt to become a policewoman because she didn’t complete a formal application, but an officer who worked at Gorton station at the time confirms: ‘She was given a number of brochures which outlined the opportunities open to a woman officer. That much is certain, but it’s impossible to confirm whether or not she actually went for an interview.’19 After his hilarity about her application to the police subsided, Ian asked Myra if she was sleeping with Norman. Her silence provided him with an answer. She alleged that Ian threatened to kill Norman, who later stated that Ian had arrived at Bannock Street one night while he was there and warned him off, but without resorting to violence. Myra and Norman continued their affair for months unharmed, visiting pubs and attending dances, despite the combined threat of Ian’s rage and Norman’s wife finding out about the relationship.

  In October 1963, Ian met Maureen’s boyfriend Dave Smith. Although they knew of each other, they had never spoken; Myra disliked Dave, who was regarded as a local tearaway, almost as fervently as Maureen disliked Ian. But during an office party at Millwards, one of the men had flirted with Maureen, who then told her boyfriend about the incident. Dave arrived at Millwards one lunchtime to confront the man, but he had already left after a tip-off from Maureen. Tom Craig responded to Dave’s demand, ‘I want Maureen’, with a firm, ‘Well, you can have her at five.’20 Returning shortly before five, Dave saw the man in question sprint across the car park and chased after him, but was given the slip. He appeared in the car park again out of breath and still fuming. Ian had seen the skirmish and was amused. He asked Myra to shout Dave over with the offer of a lift home. Dave climbed into the van, where Myra introduced the two; whenever Dave visited a friend who lived opposite Myra in Bannock Street, it always made him laugh to see the tin cans Ian had fixed to the back of his motorbike to ward off joyriders. Ian knew of Dave in much the same way as Allan Grafton, who recalls: ‘We used to see Maureen quite regular with Dave Smith. The two of them were always knocking about the streets. Dave was a loner, really. He moved away from the gang of lads and had the old Teddy boy hairdo, the jet-black DA at the back, winkle pickers, skin-tight jeans and leather jacket.’21 Ian and Dave chatted on the journey home, but for the time being their contact remained limited to a nodding acquaintance.

  On 7 November 1963, Myra finally passed her driving test after failing it three times. When she bought a car a few months later, she and Ian began eating their lunch in the vehicle during workdays, and they used it for travel more often than the Tiger Cub when they went out together. On shopping trips, Ian would hunker down in the passenger seat while Myra pushed a trolley around one of the new supermarkets, and he stayed in the car when she went into the betting shop to complain that Ian had been short-changed by tuppence on his winnings. The bookie remembered, ‘He sent Myra all the way round here – about 300 yards – in the car to collect it. I gave her the coppers, but in the meantime he’d been working out the odds and decided it was three pence he was underpaid. It’s hard to believe, but the next I know he’s come all the way round for a penny. He came in and thumped the counter, shouting about it – all over a penny.’22

  A post-trial psychologist’s report stressed the importance of the vehicle in their relationship. Apart from its use during the abductions and, on a later occasion, as a hearse to carry the body of one of their victims to the moor, it was like ‘a shelter to them. It carried them about safely. [Ian] instanced one occasion when they sat in the car and watched the crowds go by – he knowing what they had done and exhilarated by the secret – they were cut off in the car and the outside crowd were in ignorance of the occupants. This was a powerful and liberating feeling.’23 The incident mirrors Ian’s recollection of parking outside Strangeways, where he had been incarcerated five years earlier; he and Myra ‘just sat there, a nice sunny evening, in the car, smoking cigarettes, drinking wine. That wine tasted beautiful because we were watching people in prison.’24

  Myra joined a gun club in November. She told Peter Topping that the idea that they ‘needed’ guns came from Ian, but his borstal record vetoed his application for a firearms certificate. He had drawn up loose plans again for a major robbery. Myra made enquiries about joining Cheadle Rifle Club to George Clitheroe, the warehouse foreman at Millwards, who was president of the club and captain of the team. He suggested she accompany him to the indoor shooting range at Cheadle. She went along eight times in all, and four times to an open-air range at Crowden on the road from Ma
nchester to Woodhead. George wasn’t impressed by Myra’s shooting skills. He was annoyed by her constant querying, ‘Will it kick?’ whenever she was about to fire and her habit of closing her eyes as she squeezed the trigger, which accounted for her poor aim. When she mentioned wanting to join a pistol club, he tried to dissuade her, telling her she didn’t have the right temperament for it because she was too quick to flare up whenever anyone criticised her. Unbeknown to George Clitheroe, a few months later Myra bought a Webley .45 for £8 from John Boland and a nickel-plated, two-inch-barrel Smith & Wesson .38 for £5 from Alan Cottam, two members of the club.25 She asked if they could get hold of a Luger for her and bought a target rifle from a Manchester gunsmith’s. Ian treasured the guns, sitting for hours painstakingly cleaning them, and he and Myra roamed for miles on foot until they found suitably isolated valleys at Woodhead, Saddleworth and Wessenden Head where they could practise shooting at old railway sleepers, oil drums and tin cans.

  Myra told a journalist that once, when Ian was cleaning the rifle, she looked up to find him ‘pointing [it] at me with his finger slowly pulling the catch back. I didn’t know if it was loaded or not, but it petrified me, until one day I said, “Shoot me and put me out of my misery.” He just laughed. Another time, he was sitting reading and I was cleaning one of the handguns, a Webley .45. When he looked up, I was pointing it at him. I told him it was loaded – which it wasn’t – and a real look of fear crossed his face. He made a slight movement and I loudly released the safety catch. The tension was palpable and, just as my hands began to shake, I threw the gun across to him and asked how it felt to have a gun pointed at him as he’d done to me so many times. Then I began to cry and he smacked me across the head twice with the handle of the gun, told me I was getting too out of line [and] not to go too far or he would put me in my place once and for all.’26

  In mid November, Ian and Myra began plotting another murder.Myra claimed that the impetus to kill again came from Ian alone and that she tried to resist. In her account, she and Ian were sitting in Gran’s front room, watching the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when he suddenly said he wanted to ‘do another one’.27 Myra insisted later that she had told him she didn’t want to be involved, but he said she would ‘only’ have to coerce the victim into a hired car. This time, he wanted a child, both because of his sexual attraction to children and because Pauline had fought him and he wanted someone smaller. Myra claimed that he began strangling her until she agreed to do as he asked, and that she felt as if the pattern of her life had been mapped out, but she couldn’t stop loving him nonetheless.

  She slept with policeman Norman Sutton once more, then told him their affair was over. He paid her for the van and that was the end of their relationship. ‘If we’d met before Ian and I did,’ she wrote years later, ‘I knew that the love that had grown between us would have blossomed. I would have had no hesitation in marrying and having children with him.’28

  Myra attempted to hire a car from Warren’s Autos on London Road in Ardwick to use for the abduction, which was planned for 16 November, but since she only had a slip of paper confirming she had passed her driving test, rather than an actual licence, her request was refused. When her licence arrived, she booked a car from the same firm on 16 November for the following weekend. The vehicle she chose was a white Ford Anglia and it cost £14 10s to hire.

  On Friday, 22 November 1963, Myra drove Ian to Central Station, where he deposited a suitcase filled with incriminating material in the left luggage department.29 Railway stations were among Ian’s favourite places; he had often walked to Piccadilly Station from his house in Westmoreland Street in the early hours of the morning and enjoyed the ‘old-world romanticism of travelling by steam locomotive, and the mysterious, sooty atmosphere of railway stations vibrant with bustle and purpose’.30 That evening, as he strolled through the concourse, he became aware of a conversation between two commuters: ‘I heard one say to the other, “Did you hear about Kennedy?” and then the word, “dead”. The girl [Myra] was in the car park and as soon as I got in, I switched on the radio and found out he was dead.’31 The US president, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated that afternoon in Dallas, Texas.

  A few years later, Shelia Kilbride, the mother of the young boy murdered and buried on the moor the following day, reflected with immeasurable sorrow: ‘I think the country was so swept up with Kennedy, they thought: now’s definitely the night . . .’32

  10

  I remember the night before, watching the news about the Kennedy assassination on the telly. Everybody was shocked, everybody was talking about it. You never heard of things like that then. All the bad stuff seemed to escalate after that . . .

  Danny Kilbride, brother of John Kilbride, interview with author, 2009

  The three-bedroom, red-brick house at 262 Smallshaw Lane in the market town of Ashton-under-Lyne was home to the Kilbride family. There were nine of them: parents Patrick and Shelia, and their children: John, Danny, Pat, Terry, Shelia, Maria and Chris. ‘Our upbringing was the same as everybody else’s,’ Danny recalls. ‘It was strict, you had to be in by a certain time and if you did anything wrong, you got your arse walloped, but that was how things were back then for everyone. As kids we ran errands for neighbours and did as we were told. My dad was a builder and flagger who always worked, right up to him being about 60. My mum was a real homemaker, though we didn’t have much. But we were a happy family. We went to church every Sunday and had lots of relatives living nearby. It was close-knit.’1

  John, the eldest child, was a sunny-natured boy of 12 in 1963. He was of average height for his age, with brown hair and the large, almost luminous eyes of all the Kilbride children. He was well-known in the neighbourhood for his gap-toothed smile and habit of walking with his hands in his pockets, singing or whistling. Since September 1962, he had attended St Damian’s Catholic Secondary and loved it there. ‘John was 11 months older than me,’ Danny explains. ‘We were the same age every year for four weeks, so we were close. He went up to St Damian’s before me and used to say, when I was ready for going up, “Oh, you’ll like it, Danny.” He made some new friends at that school because the kids came in from different towns, though there were lads and lasses from his old junior school class. He was a kid who was well liked, always cheerful. He loved his football – we all supported Ashton United and used to go to the matches on a Saturday. And he liked going to the pictures, that was his thing – our John loved the films.’2

  All the Kilbride children had small duties about the spotless house, where Danny and John shared a room. As the eldest, John was the most trusted. Every day he walked round to visit his gran, Mrs Margaret Doran, in nearby Rowley Street, to see what she needed doing about the house and garden. She suffered from gallstones and couldn’t stoop easily; she welcomed John’s help and his company, watching out for him ‘walking along the path at the side of the football ground across the road, in his usual cheerful way’.3

  On the morning of Saturday, 23 November 1963, Danny remembers: ‘I got up early to do my paper round, same as always. I came home just after nine, and John had been up to my gran’s, doing some shopping for her. He came back after he’d helped her out. My interest then was the garden – I liked being out there, and I had a couple of sheds with budgies and finches in. I spent time with them like I always did, cleaning them out, feeding them and so on.’4

  In Gorton, Myra pulled on black trousers, a polo-neck jumper and leather jacket, then caught the bus to London Road. At Warren’s Autos, the white Ford Anglia was in the forecourt, gleaming from its wash and service. Myra drove to Westmoreland Street, where Ian was waiting with his dog, Bruce. He muttered about the ‘too clean’ car, as she’d known he would, but handed her a present: Gene Pitney’s ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’, then slowly climbing the Hit Parade with its end line about never being able to return home again. They drove south, 35 miles away from the city, to Leek in Staffordshire, and spent the morning at the Roaches, a s
errated rank of grit-stone crags.

  In Ashton-under-Lyne, after lunch, three of John’s friends called for him. ‘They were going to the pictures,’ Danny remembers. ‘All three of them were called John. I still see one of the lads, John Ryan. He was the last person to see John before Brady and Hindley picked him up . . .’5 John threw on his jacket with the football buttons his mum had sewn on for him and headed out with his friends to the Pavilion cinema. The film they wanted to see – The Mongols, starring Jack Palance as the son of Genghis Khan – was an A-rated film that children could only watch with adult supervision. John and his friends found a kind-hearted man to take them in. They sat together in their one-shilling seats in the vast auditorium, whispering to each other as the lights dimmed.

  Leaving Staffordshire, Ian and Myra travelled north through the Peak District as far as Huddersfield, where they stopped for coffee and a Danish pastry. Myra had already bought a black wig from Lewis’s department store in Manchester; she tugged it over her skull and into place, concealing her blonde hair, and added a headscarf to keep the wig secure.6 Suitably disguised, she visited a hardware shop while Ian waited in the car, and bought a small kitchen knife, a length of cord and a spade. With their purchases in the boot of the Ford Anglia, they headed across the moor and onto the outskirts of Manchester. Driving from cinema to cinema, they found one showing a film they had already seen, From Russia with Love, which would give them an alibi if necessary. Myra removed her headscarf and slipped off the black wig before they reached Longsight, dropping Ian and his dog at home.

  By four o’clock, he was at Bannock Street on his motorbike. He helped Myra line the boot of the hired car with sheets of polythene from Millwards, then placed the rifle, spade and a torch in the boot. The skies were ink-black as they left Gorton; Myra stopped the car under a streetlamp and pulled on the wig and headscarf, hiding her blonde hair again. They discussed where she should park on the moor after the abduction and arranged that she should leave Ian with the victim while she drove down to Greenfield, where she would wait for half an hour – taking the rifle from the boot and placing it on the passenger seat – then return to the moor and flash her headlights three times as a signal. Ian would respond with three flashes of his torch.