One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  13

  Shut up or I’ll forget myself and hit you one. Keep it in.

  Myra Hindley, tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey, Boxing Day, 1964

  Lesley Ann Downey was ten years old in 1964. She was the only girl in a family of three boys: Terry, fourteen, Thomas, eight, and Brett, four. The children lived with their mother Ann, and her partner, Alan West, in a new council flat at 25 Charnley Walk, Ancoats. Ann had largely been brought up by her grandfather following her mother’s death; her father was a sergeant-major. Her disjointed childhood made her determined to give her own children a stable home, but her marriage to Terence Downey had broken up in early 1964. Although Terence had remarried, he remained in touch with his children. Ann was working in the city as a waitress when she met Alan West, a lorry driver from London who provided the stability she wanted for her family. Their new home on Charnley Walk was in the shadow of Bradford Road gasworks in the redeveloped quarter of Ancoats, a once thriving industrial region of cotton mills and foundries.

  Lesley, a porcelain-faced little girl with bobbed, wavy dark hair, was an extremely shy child who – like Pauline Reade – only came out of her shell when singing and dancing. Her favourite song was ‘Bobby’s Girl’ and she had a poster of Chris Montez, the ‘Let’s Dance’ vocalist, on her bedroom wall. She had gone with her brother Terry, an apprentice butcher, to her first dance a few months before at the church hall, where a skiffle group were playing. Lesley bashfully admitted to finding one of the boys in the group lovely, and Terry asked for a lock of the lad’s hair, which Lesley kept in a box on her dressing table. Although quiet by nature, she had several close friends at school and at the Trinity Methodist Church’s Girls’ Guildry, where she was a member. When she went away with her Sunday School group to north Wales, she was terribly homesick and spent her money on a small bottle of freesia perfume for her mother. The only lingering sadness in Lesley’s life concerned the family dog, Rebel; he was given to her uncle for safekeeping following the move to Charnley Walk. Lesley missed Rebel every day and visited him whenever she could.

  A fortnight before Christmas, Alan treated Lesley, Tommy and Brett to an outing to Henry’s Store on Manchester’s Market Street, where they met Santa Claus. Lesley, undergoing one of the swift growth spurts that occur between childhood and adolescence, had her photograph taken there, among the tinsel and twinkling lights, looking very much the proud ‘big sister’ next to her younger brothers. Within a month, that same photograph – cropped to show only Lesley – had been distributed to thousands of city shops and cafes in the search for her.

  On Christmas morning, Lesley unwrapped her presents with delight: a small electric sewing machine, a nurse’s outfit, a doll, an annual and various board games. After breakfast, she carried her little sewing machine to Trinity Methodist Church, where the local children were encouraged to bring their favourite presents to have them blessed. As the skies darkened that afternoon, a few flakes of snow floated down with the faint music from Silcock’s Wonder Fair, pitched on the recreation ground half a mile away on Hulme Hall Lane. Lesley was due to visit the fair with friends on Boxing Day, while her older brother Terry had already been with his friends, winning a string of white beads and a matching bracelet on the shooting gallery. He’d left the plastic jewellery on Lesley’s dressing table while she was sleeping; they were the first things she saw when she opened her eyes the following morning. She clipped the necklace on immediately and rolled the bracelet onto her wrist.

  In Hattersley on Boxing Day morning, Ian handed Myra a record in a paper sleeve: ‘Girl Don’t Come’ by Sandie Shaw, who had scored a huge hit earlier in the year with ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’. Upstairs, the wardrobe in Myra’s room had been emptied of incriminating materials; Ian had already deposited a suitcase at the left luggage department of a railway station as part of the preparations. There was no need to invent an excuse to get rid of Gran because it was Jim’s birthday, and Myra was taking her to his home in Dukinfield after breakfast. While they were gone, Ian set up his camera and photographic lights in Myra’s room and checked that all the equipment was in working order. He slid his reel-to-reel tape recorder under the divan bed.

  In the maisonette on Charnley Walk, Lesley played with her new toys and looked forward to her visit to the fair that afternoon. Whenever her mother, Ann, opened the kitchen window, the tinny music and stallholders’ booming, magnified shouts wafted up from the recreation ground. Lesley elicited a promise from her mother that she would show her how to make clothes for her two favourite dolls, Patsy and Lynn, on the new sewing machine later that day. Shortly before four o’clock, she pulled on her coat and left the flat with Tommy to knock on the Clarks’ door downstairs. Mrs Clark and her children – Lesley’s friend Linda, and her younger brother and sister, Roy and Ann – had planned to spend an hour at the fair, but Mrs Clark declared herself too tired to venture out. Undeterred, the children left Charnley Walk without her, agreeing to return at five o’clock. At ten years old, Lesley was the eldest of the small group walking along the frosty, twilit streets.

  Myra returned from Dukinfield after lunch, having arranged to pick up Gran at nine-thirty that night as usual. By late afternoon, she and Ian were driving out to the Tesco store they had visited a few days before Christmas; the posters for Silcock’s Wonder Fair, emblazoned with a big wheel, were everywhere. They did their shopping, packing it with deliberate carelessness in a few cardboard boxes. With the groceries in the back of the car, Myra pulled on the black wig and headscarf, careful that no one should see her. She started the ignition and they drove on to Hulme Hall Lane, parking the car in a quiet side street, away from the whooping crowds milling about the recreation ground. She and Ian overloaded a couple of boxes, locked the car and began walking towards the dazzling, flashing lights of the fair.

  By five o’clock, Lesley’s small group had run out of money and knew they should be heading home. Lesley was still breathless from a ride on the cyclone as they threaded their way past the soft toy prizes dangling from the stalls. Away from the main booths and whirling waltzers, they trod on dank grass and entered the dimly lit streets where a pale, thin flurry of sleet fell. As they trooped towards home in the shadow of the gasworks, Lesley suddenly said, ‘I’m going back’, and turned and ran up Iron Street before anyone could stop her, past the red-brick wall and in through the dark opening, met by a surge of deafening music and glaring lights.

  At six o’clock, Lesley was still at the fair. Bernard King, an 11-year-old boy who attended the same school, spotted her from where he stood beside the spinning waltzers. She was by the dodgems, alone, gazing at the bright, speeding cars as they thudded about the rink, the jolt of buffers colliding. Bernard passed Lesley to get to the cyclone and that was the last he saw of her.

  The sliding guitars of the Rolling Stones’ recent number one single, ‘Little Red Rooster’, blared from the fairground speakers as Myra and Ian watched Lesley from the darkness behind the dodgems’ rink.1 They waited several minutes, observing her spellbound expression as purplish sparks of electricity flickered on the wire mesh overhead from the car rods, and when they were sure she was alone, they made their approach.

  Groceries spilled from the overfilled boxes Myra and Ian carried awkwardly in their arms; as Lesley turned to look, Myra smiled and asked if she would mind giving them a hand taking the boxes back to their car nearby. She promised Lesley a reward for her help and the little girl readily agreed, following where the couple led through the glittering fairground to the dim side street where their car was discreetly parked. Myra asked Lesley if she might help them unload the boxes at home, and again the little girl nodded, climbing into the front passenger seat. They piled the boxes around Lesley to hide her from view, then drove away from the hectic noise and light of the fair to the quiet, dark streets of Hattersley.

  After saying goodbye to the other children, eight-year-old Tommy rushed up the stairs at Charnley Walk and burst through the door of the flat, ex
pecting to find Lesley already there. His mother stared at him, aghast, as he stuttered out his sister’s decision to return to the fairground alone. Ann sent Tommy back down to Mrs Clarke’s flat to see if Lesley was there; when he returned white-faced with shock, she and Alan threw on their coats and dashed out with instructions for Tommy and Terry to stay with four-year-old Brett. They ran down Iron Street, Christmas lights twinkling in every window they passed, and headed onto the recreation ground, where the Ferris wheel revolved endlessly on the skyline. One of Lesley’s favourite songs, ‘Let’s Dance’, belted out across the heads of the shrieking, excited crowds. But Lesley – like Pauline, John and Keith before her – had vanished.

  Inside the house at Wardle Brook Avenue, Myra told Lesley to take the boxes upstairs. Ian was already in the bedroom; Myra intended to follow, but the dogs dashed into the hall. She later maintained that she had wanted to shut the dogs in the kitchen, and, as she ushered them out, closing the kitchen door on their whines, she heard Lesley screaming.

  In the account Myra gave over 20 years later to Peter Topping of Lesley’s final hours, she stated that the little girl was screaming because Ian was trying to undress her. She climbed the stairs and in the bleakly furnished room, where a window apparently hung open to let in the bitter winter air, she saw Lesley crying as Ian attempted to remove her coat. ‘I know I should have tried to protect the child and comfort her, but I didn’t,’ Myra told Topping. ‘I was cruel, I was brusque and I told her to shut up because I was frightened people would hear. I just panicked.’2 She claimed not to know that Ian had set up the tape recorder she had bought him that Christmas below the divan; a sheet hung down from the bed, hiding the machine. She also told Topping that the tape was recording before Ian started photographing Lesley in the nude, which would appear to be true, borne out by Lesley’s own muffled words on the tape.

  The sequence of events is partially verified by the tape recording: it begins with the sound of Ian moving about the room, pushing the dogs out and checking that the microphone works, then Myra’s voice is heard as she brings Lesley into the room – these are the two sets of footsteps heard on the recording, before a handkerchief was forced into Lesley’s mouth, to gag her.

  Beneath the divan, the spools of brown tape revolved inexorably.3

  Ian: ‘This is track four. Get out of the fucking road. Get in the fucking basket.’

  Sound of door banging, crackling, heavy footsteps, recording noises, blowing sounds in microphone, more footsteps. Myra’s voice, quiet, indecipherable. Light footsteps walking across the room, whispered conversation and, at the same time, footsteps. Distant speech containing the word ‘upstairs’, then two sets of footsteps.

  Lesley: [screaming] ‘Don’t. Mum. Ah.’

  Myra: ‘Shut up.’

  Lesley: ‘Please God, help me, please, oh.’

  Myra: ‘Come on.’

  Whispering and footsteps.

  Myra: ‘Shut up.’

  Lesley: ‘Oh please, please. Oh. [faintly] Help, oh. I can’t go on, you’ve got hold of my neck. Oh. [screaming] Help.’

  A gurgling noise. Heavy breathing, sounds of distress, laboured breathing.

  Myra: ‘Ssh. Ssh. Shut up, shut up.’

  Screams and gurgles. Lesley crying.

  Myra: [whispering] ‘Keep [unintelligible]. You will be right. Sit down and be quiet. [whispers]’

  Ian: ‘Go on.’

  Whispers. Footsteps on the stairs, then entering the room.

  Lesley crying, muffled.

  Ian: [whispered] ‘Here.’

  Myra: ‘Hush, hush, go on.’ [indecipherable]

  Lesley crying.

  Myra: ‘You are all right. Hush, hush. Put it in your mouth – hush and shift that hand.’

  Lesley crying.

  Myra: ‘Put it in your mouth and keep it in and you’ll be all right. Put it in. Stop it. If you don’t – ssh.’

  Lesley crying.

  Myra: ‘In your mouth. Hush, hush. Shut up or I’ll forget myself and hit you one. Keep it in.’

  Lesley whimpering.

  Ian: ‘Put it in.’

  Myra: ‘Put it in.’ [spoken quickly]

  Ian speaks, but words indecipherable except for ‘hand’. Then footsteps.

  Ian: ‘Put it in. Keep it in. Stop it now, stop it now.’

  Myra: ‘I’m only doing this and you’ll be all right. Put it in your mouth. Put it in – in.’

  Further words spoken by Myra but indecipherable except for ‘put it in’.

  Myra: ‘Will you stop it. Stop it.’

  Myra’s voice indecipherable, Lesley whimpering.

  Myra: ‘Shut—’

  Ian: ‘Quick. Put it in now.’

  Lesley whimpering and then retching.

  Ian: ‘Just put it in now, love. Put it in now.’

  Lesley retching.

  Lesley: [muffled] ‘What’s this in for?’

  Ian: ‘Put it in.’

  Lesley: ‘Can I just tell you summat? I must tell you summat. Please take your hands off me a minute, please. Please – Mummy – please. I can’t tell you [grunting]. I can’t tell you. I can’t breathe. Oh. I can’t – Dad – will you take your hands off me?’

  Ian whispering.

  Ian: ‘No. Tell me.’

  Lesley: ‘Please God.’

  Ian: ‘Tell me.’

  Lesley: ‘I can’t while you’ve got your hands on me.’

  Lesley mumbling.

  Ian: ‘Why don’t you keep it in?’

  Lesley: ‘Why? What are you going to do with me?’

  Ian: ‘I want to take some photographs, that’s all. Put it in.’

  Lesley: ‘Don’t undress me, will you?’

  Myra: ‘That’s right, don’t—’

  Lesley: ‘It hurts me. I want to see Mummy, honest to God.’

  Ian: ‘Put it in.’

  Lesley: ‘I’ll swear on the Bible.’

  Ian: ‘Put it in and hurry up now. The quicker you do this, the quicker you’ll get home.’

  Lesley: ‘I’ve got to go because I’m going out with my mama. Leave me, please. Help me, will you?’

  Ian: ‘Put it in your mouth and you’ll be all right.’

  Lesley: ‘Will you let me go when this is out?’

  Ian: ‘Yes. The longer it takes to do this, the longer it takes you to get home.’

  Lesley: ‘What are you going to do with me first?’

  Ian: ‘I’m going to take some photographs. Put it in your mouth.’

  Lesley: ‘What for?’

  Ian: ‘Put it in your mouth. [pause] Right in.’

  Lesley: ‘I’m not going to do owt.’

  Ian: ‘Put it in. If you don’t keep that hand down, I’ll slit your neck. [pause] Put it in.’

  Lesley: ‘Won’t you let me go? Please?’

  Ian: ‘No, no, put it in. Stop talking [then] What’s your name?’

  Lesley: ‘Lesley.’

  Ian: ‘Lesley what?’

  Lesley: ‘Ann.’

  Ian: ‘What’s your second name?’

  Lesley: ‘Westford. Westford.’

  Ian: ‘Westford?’

  Lesley: ‘I have to go home for eight o’clock. I got to get [pause] Or I’ll get killed if I don’t. Honest to God.’

  Ian: ‘Yes.’

  Quick footsteps of Myra leaving the room and going downstairs. Then a click, and a door closing, then Myra’s footsteps coming upstairs, followed by eight longer steps.

  Ian: ‘What is it?’

  Myra: ‘I have left the light on.’

  Ian: ‘You have?’

  Myra: ‘So that . . .’

  Indecipherable, then Lesley crying.

  Lesley: ‘It hurts me neck.’

  Ian: ‘Hush, put it in your mouth and you’ll be all right.’

  Myra: ‘Now listen, shut up crying.’

  Lesley: [crying] ‘It hurts me on me—’

  Myra: [interrupting] ‘Hush. Shut up. Now put it in. Pull that hand away and don’t dally and jus
t keep your mouth shut, please. Wait a bit. I’ll put this on again. Do you get me?’

  Lesley: [whining] ‘No, I . . .’ [indecipherable]

  Myra: ‘Ssh. Hush. Put that in your mouth. And again, packed more solid.’

  Whispered, indecipherable sentences.

  Lesley: ‘I want to go home. Honest to God I’ll [her speech is muffled] before eight o’clock.’