One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  The police scaled down their interest in Jimmy Johnson, but Winnie’s fragile spirits were almost shattered by a stranger’s malice: ‘I was walking along Stockport Road one day with my mother and two of the kiddies when a woman stopped me. She said, “You’re Keith’s mum, aren’t you? Do you want to know what’s happened to him? He’s been chopped up and fed to pigs.” I was upset for days after that.’23 The rest of the family suffered in different ways: the girls persistently asked where Keith had gone and cried themselves to sleep, while Alan found his brother’s absence as insistent as his presence had been.

  On 3 July 1964, the Gorton & Openshaw Reporter ran the front-page article: ‘Longsight Boy Still Missing’. Mention was made of the house-to-house enquiries and the dragging of a brook near Mellands Camp on Mount Road in Gorton. Winnie gave a hauntingly prophetic statement: ‘I’m very worried now, for the longer it is, I fear there’s less chance of him being found.’24 A week later, the same newspaper featured Pauline Reade on its front page: ‘One Year Ago: Girl Went Dancing and Disappeared’. Ten days later, the local press ran a renewed appeal for information about Pauline to tie in with a television broadcast by the police. But no one came forward.

  Winnie’s desperate hope that her son might be found alive lasted only until the leaves began to fall from the trees that dotted the route Keith had taken that evening: ‘My senses told me he was dead, but I just couldn’t believe it. And then one night when my new baby was about three months old, I was feeding him and half falling asleep while I was doing it. And in my drowsy state I heard Keith call to me, as clearly as anything. “Mam!” he shouted. And then I knew for certain he was dead.’25

  On Saturday, 15 August 1964, Maureen Hindley married David Smith at Manchester’s All Saints Registry Office. Maureen had given up her job at Millwards; she was seven months’ pregnant. Her mother refused to attend the wedding out of shame at her daughter’s ‘predicament’, while Myra told Maureen she didn’t approve of marriage or David Smith and remained at home. However, that evening, a knock came at the door of 13 Wiles Street, where Maureen was living with Dave and his father, two doors down from the Reade family. Myra stood there; she knew the newly-weds would probably be in, since they couldn’t afford a honeymoon or even a reception, and she invited them to Bannock Street. ‘Ian would like a drink with you,’ she said.26

  The couple freshened themselves up before going round. Maureen and Dave were always careful about their appearance; she didn’t usually go out without her thick eye make-up on, even though she sometimes left her hair in rollers, while Dave dressed like James Dean, had Tony Curtis hair and a distinctive, self-confident walk. He had a slight stammer, and Maureen sometimes finished his sentences for him. Ian was waiting for them in the front room with a bottle of red wine next to the fire. Dave hadn’t paid much attention to Myra or Ian until then: ‘Brady was always aloof and was just the Scotsman who would turn up on a Friday night and sleep with [Myra], and they’d go off to work together on Monday morning. Myra was very hard, she rarely smiled, she was just Maureen’s older sister.’27 But that evening, with Gran safely tucked away upstairs in bed, Myra was chatty and Ian seemed more genial than usual. Dave was pleasantly surprised: ‘Everybody was dressed up, but no one was going anywhere. It was civilised and that impressed me.’28

  Ian betrayed his real interest in Dave by opening a conversation with, ‘I believe you’ve got a record.’29 Born in Manchester on 9 January 1948, on the surface Dave was the epitome of the era’s folk-devil: a juvenile delinquent. He was 13 years old when he and Maureen began their relationship (she was then 15) and had just left remand home.

  His unmarried mother, Joyce Hull, had disappeared when he was two years old, leaving Dave to be brought up by his paternal grandparents, Annie and John Smith, who lived in a neat terraced house in Ardwick. Dave believed Annie was his mother and had no idea that his uncle Jack was actually his father. Discovering the truth when he was seven marked a change in Dave’s behaviour; he became unruly, smoking and drinking despite his tender age. Then one evening Jack arrived and announced that he was taking his son to live with him. Their new home in Gorton’s Wiles Street was so filthy that Dave had to visit Gorton Baths to wash himself properly. He hated his landlady; a male relative of hers shared Dave’s bed on occasion and began abusing him. Dave lay silently terrified, too traumatised to tell anyone what was happening.

  He started truanting from school, and after a vicious physical fight with his father – who would take out his drunken frustration on his son, beating him on that occasion with a dog chain – found himself in Rose Hill Remand Home at the age of 11. Dave returned to Gorton having learnt nothing but several new techniques for self-defence, and appeared in court on an assault and wounding charge, followed by another summons four years later. He was sent to Stanley Grove Secondary School in Longsight but was expelled after thumping the headmaster. All Saint’s School in Gorton Lane took him in, but the fighting continued and it wasn’t long before he was expelled again and sent to another school. By then, he was interested in girls, and for several weeks he and his next-door-but-one neighbour Pauline Reade were an item, much to the dismay of her parents. They were relieved when Dave turned his attentions to Maureen Hindley. He remembers Maureen as ‘a giddy person. I could talk to her. She was a fighter – rough. No one in the area had beaten Maureen in a fight. She was not an easy lay.’30

  On 8 July 1963, Dave was hauled before the courts again, when he and his friend Sammy Jepson – brother of Myra’s friend Pat Jepson – were caught stealing electrical goods. Dave was placed on probation for three years for housebreaking and larceny, and store-breaking and larceny. When Pauline Reade disappeared, their brief relationship and his criminal convictions led detectives to interview him twice, but Dave had nothing to tell them; he was completely wrapped up in Maureen, although their relationship was fiery and made more difficult by his inability to hold down a job. By mid 1964, he was working as a labourer for Jim Miller, who ran a property repair business from his home in Railway Street, but he was fired shortly before the wedding. Jim reinstated him briefly, but it wasn’t long before he fired Dave permanently, unwilling to put up with his hopeless timekeeping.

  Despite their new relationship as sister and brother-in-law, Myra didn’t warm towards Dave. In time, she grew to hate him and the refrain the police came to associate with her during their investigation into the murders – ‘I didn’t do it, Ian didn’t do it, ask David Smith’ – formed the foundation of her relentless determination to ruin his life.

  12

  Joe liked to get his teeth into things. When he went to Ashton, he became very interested in the Kilbride case. He didn’t like the idea of having a missing child on his patch. And he didn’t like loose ends, didn’t Joe. He liked to get things tidied up. He’d inherited the case and felt that if there was any more to be done, he would do it.

  Margaret Mounsey, widow of Joe Mounsey, interview with author, 2009

  Myra called on the newly-weds again the following day, inviting them on a jaunt to the Lake District. They set off in the Mini-Traveller at half past two, Maureen sitting in the front seat next to Myra, chatting nineteen-to-the-dozen, while Dave sat in the back with Ian, listening to him expound on the enforced subordination of the working class. The car was packed with wine, beer and cigarettes. Ian and Dave drank freely, and the alcohol made Ian garrulous.

  At Lake Windermere, the car parks were overrun with other day-trippers, so Myra suggested they head on to Bowness, further along the shore. They managed to park the car there and Ian paid for a steamship trip on the lake, then lunch in a restaurant and drinks at various pubs. It was after eight o’clock when they climbed back into the car; Ian and Dave were three sheets to the wind but, at Preston, Ian tapped on the glass partition to stop at another pub. Pints of bitter were downed and Ian bought a small bottle of whisky for the rest of the journey. In the back of the Mini-Traveller, Ian raged about capitalism and the futility of working for a living. D
ave let him talk, impressed by the generosity Ian had displayed that day and his exhaustive, articulate philosophy. It was one o’clock when they arrived at Bannock Street, where, as Dave later phrased it for the benefit of the courtroom: ‘We had a meal and most of it was drink.’1 The sun was stealing across Gorton’s grey rooftops when he and Maureen departed for home.

  From then on, the Smiths socialised regularly at the weekends with Ian and Myra, either at Bannock Street or Wiles Street, and Saturday was ‘fish and chip night’. Dave recalls: ‘[Myra] would be talking to Maureen. Girly talk. The girls would get bored and go to bed. Leave us drinking and listening to big band music, Hitler tapes . . . a pretty bad atmosphere altogether, to be honest.’2 Ian enlightened Dave about his own past, describing his months in borstal as a kind of criminal apprenticeship, and the 16-year-old youth was happy to listen, sprawled by the fire with a pack of cards on the table and a drink in his hand: ‘Myra didn’t like it too much, relegated to girls’ talk with baby sister, but I didn’t care . . . I think I just felt contented enough to be impressed out of my mind.’3

  Dave was curious about his new pal’s relationship with his sister-in-law: ‘Both he and Myra were fond of dogs, but I cannot remember ever seeing Brady show any sentiment at all over any human being, nor can I remember him ever showing any affection towards Myra. Never once have I seen him put his arm around her or speak to her affectionately. She was just there and he just seemed to accept her. On the other hand it was quite obvious that Myra was very fond of him.’4 But there was no sense of her being dominated by Ian or showing meekness; on several occasions Dave witnessed Myra losing her temper violently, both towards her father – whom she would beat with his own walking stick and punch about the head when she discovered him in a drunken stupor after he had attacked her mother – and, to a lesser extent, Ian: ‘He liked eating tinned macaroni cheese and she hated it. I’ve seen her fling a tin on the floor and scream at him that it was worse than dog food and what was he, a baby?’5 One withering glance from Myra was enough to warn Ian he was straying into dangerous territory during his inebriated rants. Myra was easier company when Ian wasn’t there; on the evenings when she dropped him off in Manchester to go ‘people-watching’, she would often call on Dave and Maureen and revert to a more girlish version of herself. She was openly affectionate to Maureen and the two of them would discuss fashion and gossip, then dance in the front room, the dial turned up to ear-splitting volume on the record player.

  Nonetheless, Myra was jealous of Dave’s friendship with Ian and was convinced he wasn’t good enough for her sister. In her autobiography, she describes enacting a form of revenge when Dave appeared at Bannock Street looking for Maureen, who had run off after a row. It was bucketing rain and Dave was drenched. Myra pretended that she was going to visit her sister at an address in Blackpool and offered to drive Dave there. They sped out of Gorton and headed north-east. Dave fell asleep on the journey; he awoke when Myra shook him to say there was a problem with the car. They were parked on the hard shoulder and the rain was still pelting down. He got out obligingly when Myra asked him to listen to the noise coming from the car outside, then spun round in shock as she slammed the door behind him, locked it and sped away, the wheels spitting gravel, leaving him standing there in the downpour with no immediate means of getting home.

  Dave disputes the incident on the motorway ever took place. Recalling his evenings with Myra and Ian, he reflects: ‘On looking back, it’s easy to see the obvious, but to do that is a big mistake . . . Nothing stuck out as plainly evil. Time wasn’t easily measured in separate days, it just flowed into one mass event.’6 During one of their get-togethers in Wiles Street, he and Ian went outside in the dark to urinate by the garages behind the house. As they strolled back, Ian put an arm around Dave’s shoulder and nodded towards the Reades’ home, where a light burned in an upstairs window, and asked softly, ‘What do you think happened to that girl?’7

  In 1955, almost 70,000 homes in Manchester were declared unfit for human habitation. The slum clearance programme, largely interrupted by the war, had been resumed fully in 1954, aiming to transform the city into an ultra-modern metropolis: 8,000 homes were demolished in Manchester before 1960, and another 3,000 in Salford. Expansion of the programme in 1960 led to four areas being earmarked for clearance, including Gorton, where once-proud industries such as the Beyer Peacock Works were already closing down. Europe’s biggest council estate, Wythenshawe, was starting to rise on land bought from the Cheshire authorities, and satellite towns were planned, with scope for 55,000 homes, based on the Garden City principle. The new neighbourhoods were intended as self-contained communities, with shops, schools, surgeries, parks and so on, but what emerged were crime-ridden districts comprising unsightly red-brick council houses and high-rise flats that the architects themselves wouldn’t have dreamt of living in. Families who had lived en masse in the same streets were split up, with older members often isolated in other neighbourhoods.

  Hattersley, 12 miles east of the city, was the largest town of them all, with homes for 14,000 people. Myra was pleased when Gran was allocated a house there because she saw it as a step up in the world. Her mother was less impressed.

  Bob had suffered a stroke, and he and Myra enjoyed a short respite from their habitual antagonism. ‘For the first time in my life, I saw him almost helpless,’ she recalled. ‘Unable to walk, sitting almost constantly in his, the only, armchair in the house or lying in his bed in the living room . . . I felt sorry for him, compassionate and even tender towards him. I could never love him but seeing this strong, brutal man reduced to the helplessness of a baby made me feel strong and almost maternal towards him. I waited on him, fetched and carried for him, because I wanted to and not because I had in the past.’8 Nellie had been having an affair with a man named Bill Moulton and had no intention of moving as far as Hattersley with her invalid husband. She held out for another offer from the council.

  Among those residents packing their belongings reluctantly were the Reades. Joan hated leaving Gorton, distraught at the idea that Pauline, if she returned, would not know their new address.

  Gran and Myra were given a half-timbered house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the end of a short terrace. The road through the estate ran in front, sloping ten feet as it passed number 16, which stood behind a brick wall. Avoiding the path along the terrace, Myra would park her car directly below the house, then climb up the slope and vault the fence. Beyond the front garden and the road, planted with saplings, was a grassy patch of land next to the New Inn pub on the main road, Mottram Road. The rear garden faced onto the houses of Wardle Brook Walk. The view to the front, past the back walls of the New Inn, was of fields and farms. On the horizon, clearly visible from the upstairs rooms of Wardle Brook Avenue, was the moor.

  Seven skyscrapers reared above the red-brick council houses. At night their stairwells were lit, creating ‘tall pencils of light’.9 The static sizzle of the electricity pylons crackled over the neighbourhood, whose streets bore old-fashioned names: Sundial Close, Pudding Lane, Fields Farm Walk. Among the new houses stood Sundial Cottage, a low stone building with tiny windows and a lintel engraved ‘1697’, inhabited by two elderly sisters who kept chickens and goats, and sold eggs and milk to their new neighbours. The roads through the estate were unfinished when the first residents arrived, so workmen had to lay down planks of wood so that mothers could wheel prams safely across the churned-up ground. Since there were no facilities, at different times during the week grocery vans and mobile chippies trundled about the estate, stopping with a ‘pip-pip’ to let residents know they were there, and housewives would appear, clutching their purses. The milkman delivered medicines together with the milk for those who couldn’t reach the surgery in Hyde, and offered lifts to people on the back of his float. Buses were crowded with people whose jobs were in the city centre; Hattersley Road West was known by the drivers as ‘Debtors’ Retreat’.

  Many residents were happy with the mo
ve from Gorton: fresh air, gardens and inside bathrooms were a welcome novelty, and the houses felt palatial in comparison to the poky terraces they had left behind. Inside 16 Wardle Brook Avenue was a small entrance hall with stairs to the left, and a kitchen and sitting room. There were windows at either end of the sitting room and a modern fireplace, and a serving hatch through to the kitchen with its smooth Formica worktops. Upstairs were a double bedroom and a single bedroom, and a bathroom with plumbed-in bath, basin and toilet.

  Myra was eager to furnish the house with new belongings. Together with her friend May Hill, whose family were living directly behind them at 2 Wardle Brook Walk, she visited Ashton-under-Lyne for a pair of fireside chairs, curtains and rugs. Ian fitted lino under the rugs in the sitting room and slept most nights on the red bed-settee there. Myra placed a vase of plastic chrysanthemums on the sideboard under the back window, a magazine rack under the telly, a mirror above the fireplace and horse-and-foal figurines on the mantelpiece. She hung a couple of lithographs of dogs on the distempered cream walls, added a pair of coffee tables to complete the furnishings, and stood Gran’s budgie Joey’s cage next to the front window. In the hallway, she and Ian installed a cigarette-vending machine. Every Sunday a man would pop round to empty the half-crowns from the machine and refill it to its 20-packet capacity. Myra smoked 40 Embassy Tipped a day, while Ian favoured Disque Bleu or, when he was feeling flush, good-quality cigars. Throughout the rest of the house, boldly patterned curtains hung at the windows and the floors were fitted with lino. Myra’s bedroom was spartan because she shared the sofa bed with Ian almost every night. He eventually fitted a lock on the door to her room, where she kept more than just her clothes in the wardrobe. The ‘souvenirs’ of their crimes were hidden there, along with the guns.