One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Satisfied that they knew what they were doing, Myra turned the Ford Anglia onto the A635 and drove through the darkness towards Ashton-under-Lyne.

  The Mongols finished at five o’clock. As the crowds spilled out of the cinema onto the pavement, John and his friends decided to see if they could earn a few bob running errands on the market. ‘I knew John and his mates used to help out there,’ Danny recalled. ‘They did it for spending money because most parents couldn’t afford much – you were lucky if you got a packet of toffee. And there were quite a few of us, so it was hard for our parents. I used to give the biggest part of my paper money to my mum.’7 Their parents were unaware of the errand-running; John’s father was there that afternoon, buying himself a pair of shoes, but left at quarter to five. John and his friends rolled up to the stalls about 20 minutes later.

  The market spread across the square and into a long hall whose clock tower was a familiar landmark. Over 100 stalls were lit up that evening; the market sold everything from custard tarts, fresh fish and oven-bottom muffins to cheap perfume, diamond-mesh tights and school uniforms. The striped awnings were decked out with bits of tinsel, ‘snow’ made from cotton wool and plastic Santas to remind people to start thinking about their Christmas list. John and his friends split up to ask the stallholders if they needed a hand with anything. John Ryan later told a hushed courtroom: ‘We went and fetched a trolley from the station for a man on the market. I got sixpence for this. John got about threepence or sixpence, I’m not sure exactly. Then we went to a man who sells carpets in the open market . . . There were two lads, one from the same class as me. After I had some talk with them, I decided to go home. When I set off to catch the bus, John Kilbride was not with me. I last saw him near the carpet dealer’s stall. There was no one with him.’8 The hands on the clock tower pointed at half past five.

  Inside the ladies toilets in the market hall, Myra adjusted her black wig in the mirror. She recalled later that the other women washing their hands and reapplying their lipstick didn’t pay her any attention as she tied the knot of the headscarf tighter beneath her chin. Then she left and weaved her way through the aisles between the stalls to where Ian waited in the chill night air. He told her he’d already spotted a young boy who seemed to be alone. Linking arms to give the impression of a contented couple, they joined the bustling crowds and headed towards a wall where John sat nibbling broken biscuits from a plastic bag, the treat he’d bought with his earnings. Myra made the initial approach: ‘You’re out late for such a young lad, aren’t you?’9 Ian added that they had children of their own and could imagine that John’s parents might be worrying about him. In answer to their smiling questions, John told them his name and said that he lived on Smallshaw Lane. Myra offered him a lift, and John readily agreed, pushing the bag of broken biscuits into his pocket as he jumped off the wall. Ian and Myra promised John a bottle of sherry, claiming they had won it in a raffle, and the three of them climbed into the car. John sat in the front passenger seat next to Myra. She locked the doors.

  As the engine purred into life, Ian mentioned that they’d have to collect the fictitious sherry from their home in Greenfield. John was unruffled by the proposed detour; he sat gazing out of the window as the familiar streets rushed by, giving way to dark lanes and autumn trees. On the approach to Greenfield, Ian added that they ought to try and find the glove Myra had dropped on the moor – it had sentimental value. He addressed his comments to John, who didn’t reply, engrossed in the unknown road as it snaked down into the village and then coiled upwards onto the bleak, black moor.

  In the town the three had recently left behind, the Kilbrides were beginning to experience the first tremors of nauseous, bewildered panic. ‘John was usually home for five o’clock at the latest,’ Danny remembers. ‘Six o’clock came, half past, then seven. He didn’t come back. I was sat there waiting, we all were, the kids watching telly. My mam and dad thought at first that he’d gone to one of his friends and he was going to get his arse smacked when he came home for giving us all such a fright. That was the attitude at first. We thought he might have gone out with his mates to the local woods, something like that. I went down to a couple of my cousins’ houses to see if he was there. But he’d vanished.’10

  On the moor, Myra steered the car into their regular parking place to the right of Hollin Brown Knoll. On the other side of the lozenge-shaped rocks lay Pauline’s body in the peaty soil. In her account of that night, Myra recalled that Ian asked John if he would help him look for the glove and fetched the torch from the boot. In the pocket of his overcoat were the knife and string Myra had bought that afternoon. John stood awkwardly in the car doorway until Ian beckoned him to follow down a slight incline to the left of the car as it faced Greenfield. Myra watched them walking away, the small boy and the tall man, in the muted light of a half-moon that gleamed on the reservoir in the valley below. She turned the car onto the road.

  ‘Everything imaginable went through our heads – more so for my parents,’ Danny recalls. ‘Then it got to about nine o’clock and my mum knew he wouldn’t stop out that late, not even for a prank, we all did. So my mum went to my auntie’s, because we didn’t have a phone, and she called the police from there.’11

  Myra drove down as far as the small roundabout at the foot of the moor road, where bright lights and the chink of glasses came from the Clarence, a four-square pub in the fork of the road. She parked in an unlit spot opposite the pub and got out to retrieve the rifle and ammunition, placing them on the passenger seat, then climbed back behind the steering wheel and sat glancing from the pub to her watch until half an hour had passed. She spun the car around the roundabout and drove up the winding road to Hollin Brown Knoll, flashing the headlights as she pulled in. Through the darkness she saw three blinks from Ian’s torch and turned the car until it faced Greenfield again. Ian appeared, slightly out of breath. He unlocked the boot and thrust the spade in.12 Myra got out of the driver’s seat and saw that he was holding a shoe. Ian told her it must have come off John while he was raping the child; he’d noticed it after filling in the grave. Then he said he hadn’t been able to kill John with the knife because the serrated blade was too blunt and he’d had to strangle him with the cord instead. He put the weapons next to the spade in the car boot before walking round to the passenger seat. Myra slid in beside him and they drove away from the moonlit moor.

  In Ashton-under-Lyne, Danny Kilbride turned the TV sound button to mute when the police entered the front room. The newsreels of Kennedy being shot played silently in the background as Danny witnessed his mum breaking down under the weight of her fear: ‘All I saw my mother do for the next two years was cry.’13

  Ian told Peter Topping that after he killed John, he looked up at the sky, shook his fist and shouted, ‘Take that, you bastard!’14 Afterwards, he was angry with himself for acknowledging God, following years of denial. In The Gates of Janus, Ian writes that for a serial killer ‘nothing less than challenging God or the indifferent universe will satisfy. A form of reversed hope, as it were: “Show me your power, your existence, by stopping me” . . . To be ignored is to be deprived of human dignity and meaning.’15

  Shortly before her death, Myra wrote of John Kilbride’s murder: ‘I knew I’d never be able to come to any kind of terms with this; that it would haunt me for the rest of my life, as would the murder of Pauline Reade. That is why I’ve said several times that I am more culpable than Brady is, even though he committed the crimes. Not only did I help procure the victims for him, I knew it was wrong, to put it mildly, that what we were doing was evil and depraved, whereas he subscribed to de Sade’s philosophy, that murder was for pleasure. To him it had become a hobby, something one did to get absorbed into, interested and often fascinated with, and it had become literally a deadly obsession.’16

  In Bannock Street, she helped Ian remove all traces of John’s murder. Adhering to every stage of Ian’s written plan, they cleaned the soil-encrusted spade in the sink and l
ocked it in a cupboard with the rifle. John’s shoe was consigned to the fire, together with Ian’s own clothes. This time, the handle snapped easily off the knife and Ian burned it, disposing of the blade by some other method. The plastic sheeting in the boot of the car was thrown away and the car was given a thorough wipe down, inside and out again. When every item on the murder plan had been ticked, the two of them settled down by the fire, where John’s shoe was turning to ash, and drank: three bottles of wine followed by whisky chasers. Myra wrote later: ‘With the killing of John Kilbride, a child, I felt I’d crossed the Rubicon. [Ian] said good, admitting to having crossed the Rubicon was tantamount to admitting what he’d tried to drum into my head: that what was done was done, and couldn’t be undone, there was no going back and even after the first murder we were irrevocably bound together and more so after the second one. Just then he looked up at the TV – there was either a football match on or late sports news. He said: “Look at that massive crowd. Who would miss one person, two, three, etc., from all the millions of people in this country?” I didn’t say their parents and family – he never gave them a thought and I knew I’d really have to steel myself to do the same.’17

  While Myra and Ian drank themselves to sleep, in Ashton-under-Lyne police station, scene-of-crime officer Mike Massheder was in the darkroom. He recalls that evening vividly: ‘Everyone knows where they were when Kennedy was killed, and John Kilbride went missing a day later. I was working late in the darkroom and I had a radio fixed up on one of the shelves and the announcement about the little lad came on there, crackling over the airwaves.’18 It was his exceptional photography skills that, two years later, led to the discovery of John Kilbride’s grave.

  The following day marked the start of the search proper. Detective Chief Inspector John Down took charge of John’s disappearance. At first light, the police swooped on the market, peering into lorries and questioning stall-holders, opening boxes and probing the area around the square. ‘The police took it seriously right away,’ Danny recalls. ‘They searched everywhere: people’s attics; sheds; the market, of course. In the days to come, I went all over the place with my mum, looking for him. My dad was working, but we used to get on the bus and go to different towns to see if there was any sign of him. But there was no reason for him to run away, so we knew it was hopeless, but we had to do something.’19

  In Gorton that morning, Ian left Bannock Street and returned to his mother’s house in Longsight. Myra tried to quell the worst of her hangover as she returned the Ford Anglia back to Warren’s Autos, where foreman Peter Cantwell noticed it was spattered with mud. In his evidence to the court during the Moors trial, he remarked, ‘It looked as if it had been through a ploughed field.’20 When Myra arrived home, Gran rebuked her for drinking too much then fetched her a cup of tea and an aspirin. Myra climbed the stairs to sleep off her hangover.

  On Monday, 25 November, the Manchester Evening News ran a headline story about John’s disappearance: ‘Dogs Join in Massive Comb-Out for Boy’. Myra and Ian read the newspaper while sitting on a bench together in Sunnybrow Park, not far from Millwards, where the office buzzed with the news of another missing youngster. Reading about his crimes gave Ian a sense of satisfaction; he states in The Gates of Janus: ‘The audience is the value and quality of the act. During the process of artistic creation, in the killer’s psychic dimension beyond good and evil, the audience is merely a possible offstage threat. If his “play” is a success, he will read the critical reviews with interest, not least as a technician in search of dangerous, structural flaws.’21 Over 700 statements were taken from stall-holders and people frequenting the market in the search for John, which was highlighted on the local television news. Five hundred posters were distributed bearing his smiling image and the words: ‘Have You Seen This Boy?’ Danny recalls, ‘I remember seeing the posters wherever I went. When I got on the school bus, I’d see his picture at the bus stop. It was horrible – something you can’t imagine. And there was still no sign of him.’22

  On Tuesday, 26 November, the police appealed to the man who had accompanied John and his friends to the cinema to come forward; he did, immediately, and was eliminated from their enquiries. The following day, Myra and Ian returned to the moor for what Ian termed ‘a reconnaissance’, checking that the recently dug grave hadn’t been disturbed. On the same date, the Manchester Evening News drew attention to the search again, reporting that the police would welcome anyone over the age of 18 to join them in the hunt for John.

  Patrick and Shelia Kilbride struggled valiantly to keep their anguish from their other children and to retain a semblance of normality while their world changed irrevocably. ‘John went missing on Saturday and I went back to school on the Wednesday,’ Danny recalls. ‘It was terrible. Until then, I’d enjoyed school, but every Monday morning there was an assembly when we’d all stand in the hall and the headmaster said – this was the following Monday – “Let’s say a prayer for John Kilbride.” And every single kid in school turned round and stared at me. It was just . . . terrible. But I also understood and appreciated what he was doing. The first time I went into the school canteen afterwards, the dinner lady who was dishing out puddings tried to give me double helpings – that was her way of doing something kind. But I said, “No, don’t do that.” I knew she was only doing it because of who I was and that was something I didn’t want – to be singled out from my mates. Most people were kind. The others were very few and far between. The kids at school . . . well, my true friends were fine with me, but I got one or two lads – one especially – pushing me about and saying, “You haven’t got your big brother to protect you now, have you?” I felt like ripping his head off.’23

  The search widened. On 29 November, the Ashton Reporter devoted its front page to John: ‘Boy Vanishes Sixth Day’. The Manchester Evening News included a photograph of frogmen wading into the foaming River Tame, noting that the search was also being ‘concentrated east of Lees Road, an area of bleak moor lands, part of which has already been combed’.24 Lees Road was close to the A635 between Mossley and Greenfield. Years later, Myra told Peter Topping that she had been aghast to read how close the police were to finding the graves. On Sunday, 1 December, in a biting cold wind, 2,000 volunteers poured across crofts, derelict buildings and parks in the search for John.

  When Shelia Kilbride was told that a boy resembling John had asked a news vendor in Bury about Ashton United’s progress, she caught the bus to Bury and went from door to door, holding out a photograph of her son. At home, she was unable to break the habit of including John at the table: ‘For a long time, I put an extra plate out, counting the seven children . . .’25 A businessman offered £100 as a reward to anyone who could offer information leading to John’s whereabouts.

  In her memoirs, Myra recounted how one evening she and Ian were watching television at Bannock Street when Sunday Night at the London Palladium came on: ‘I can’t remember if the host was Bruce Forsyth or Norman someone, but whoever it was his catchphrase was: “I’m in charge.” Brady casually said to me: “What do you think I get out of doing what we’ve done?” And I immediately said because he was in charge. It was having the power over someone’s life and death. He smiled and said good, you know where I’m coming from now.’26

  The ‘Mass Hunt for a Boy’, as The Reporter phrased it on 6 December, continued apace. The ‘biggest search ever mounted for a missing person’ meant that ‘owing to pressure of work the Police Dance at the Mecca ballroom is cancelled’.27

  By mid December, the situation was desperate enough for the press to start interviewing clairvoyants. Dutchman Emile Croiset, a parapsychologist who had worked with the police in the Netherlands on missing persons cases, was called in. His information was too vague to be even remotely useful, but a psychic based in Ashton-under-Lyne gave an accurate description of John’s grave. Annie Lansley saw John ‘out in the open, some way down a slope, with the skyline completely barren, not a tree in sight, a road on the right an
d near a stream’.28 But her ‘vision’ remained no more than a talking point for the next two years.

  On 21 December 1963, Myra again hired a car from Warren’s Autos for a reconnaissance trip to the moor. She disputed the accusation, made by journalist Fred Harrison, that she and Ian called at the Kilbride home in the weeks after John’s murder, posing as detectives and taking away some of his clothing while Ian promised John’s mother, ‘I’ll see you next week. Johnny will be with you.’29 She did, however, admit that Ian had a compulsion to visit Smallshaw Lane, and that the two of them would sit for a long time on the Tiger Cub, watching the Kilbride house. On other occasions they drove up to the moor, sitting in the lay-by at Hollin Brown Knoll and gazing across the rolling hills to John’s grave. There, Myra claimed, Ian found a measure of peace, while in Smallshaw Lane, John’s family were striving to get through each day.

  ‘My mum and dad let me stay whenever the police called,’ Danny recalls. ‘I was allowed to read the papers as well, whereas the other kids weren’t. I was the eldest, plus I’d got a good brain on me. My mum would talk to me about John’s disappearance, but my dad didn’t. I don’t think he handled it very well. If anybody said anything to him about it, he’d thump them. If he heard someone whispering behind his back, he just snapped. The police had him in twice, to question him about John, and he fought them: “They won’t bloody well accuse me . . .” But he did snap and I can’t blame him for that, because the police would come and drag him out of the house. They had to get a firm hold of him because he wasn’t going otherwise. He got locked up for battering some bloke in a pub for insinuating something.’30