One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  In his official statement given to the police the next day, Dave described what happened next: ‘We got almost to Myra’s house. I intended to leave her there, then she said, “Ian has some miniature wine bottles. Come and collect them now.” As we got to the front door, Myra stopped walking and she said, “Wait over the road, watch for the landing light to flick twice.” I didn’t think this was unusual because I’ve had to do this before whilst she, Myra, went in to see if Ian would have me in. He’s a very temperamental sort of fellow. I waited across the road as Myra told me to, and then the landing light flicked twice, so I walked up and knocked on the front door. Ian opened the front door and he said in a very loud voice for him, he normally speaks soft, “Do you want those miniatures?” I nodded my head to show “yes” and he led me into the kitchen, which is directly opposite the front door, and he gave me three miniature bottles of spirits and said: “Do you want the rest?”

  ‘When I first walked into the house, the door to the living room – which was on my right, standing at the front door – was closed. After he put the three bottles down in the kitchen, Ian went into the living room and I waited in the kitchen. I waited about a minute or two, then suddenly I heard a hell of a scream; it sounded like a woman, really high-pitched. Then the screams carried on, one after another, really loud. Then I heard Myra shout, “Dave, help him”, very loud . . .

  ‘When I ran in, I just stood inside the living room and I saw a young lad, about 17 years old . . . He was lying with his head and shoulders on the couch, and his legs were on the floor. He was facing upwards. Ian was standing over him, facing him, with his legs on either side of the young lad’s legs. The lad was still screaming. He didn’t look injured then, but there was only a small television light on, the big light was off. Ian had a hatchet in his hand, I think it was his right hand, it was his right hand, he was holding it above his head, and then he hit the lad on the left side of the head with the hatchet, I heard the blow, it was a terrible hard blow, it sounded horrible.

  ‘The young lad was still screaming, and the lad half-fell and half-wiggled off the couch, onto the floor, onto his stomach. He was still screaming. Ian went after him and stood over him and kept hacking away at the young lad with the hatchet. I don’t know how many times he hit the lad with the hatchet, but it was a lot, about the head, about the neck, you know that region, the shoulders and that . . .

  ‘I felt my stomach turn when I saw what Ian did, and some sick came up and then it went down again. I couldn’t move. When he, Ian, that is, was hacking at the lad, they got close to me and one of the blows Ian did at the lad grazed my right leg. I remember Ian was swinging about with the hatchet, and one blow grazed the top of Myra’s head . . .

  ‘After Ian stopped hitting the lad, he was lying on his face, with his feet near the door. I could hear a gurgling noise in the lad’s throat . . . Ian got a cover off one of the chairs and wrapped it round the lad’s head. I was shaking, I was frightened to death of moving, and my stomach was twisting. There was blood all over the place, on the walls, fireplace, everywhere . . .

  ‘Ian never spoke a word all this time, and he got a cord, I think it was electric wire, I don’t know where he got it from, and he wrapped it round the lad’s neck, one end of the cord in one hand, one end in the other, and he then crossed the cord and pulled and kept pulling until the gurgling stopped in the lad’s throat. All the time Ian was doing this, strangling the lad, Ian was swearing, “You dirty bastard.” He kept saying that over and over again.

  ‘Myra was still there all this time, just looking. Then Ian looked up at Myra and said something like: “It’s done. It’s the messiest yet. It normally only takes one blow.”’22

  In those first moments after Edward’s life was so violently ended, Dave felt himself grow very still: ‘You think you would jump out of a window or run into the street shouting blue murder, but I knew if I did that I wouldn’t even make it to the front door, that Evans’s wouldn’t be the only murder that night. It was an almost animal self-preservation that clicked in. I suddenly became very calm, knowing I couldn’t put a foot wrong if I was to survive. I knew I had to show no emotion, no bad reaction to what he had done, or I wouldn’t be going home. It frightens me to think I was even capable of that.’23

  As the thick smell of death filled the room, turning it from a place where plastic chrysanthemums sat on a sideboard to a charnel house, the air was shrill with silence. Dave turned to his sister-in-law: ‘Myra just looked at [Ian]. She didn’t say anything at all. Ian got up then, the little light was still the only one on, and he lit himself a cigarette, after he’d wiped his hands on a piece of some material. Then Ian turned the big light on, and he told Myra to go into the kitchen and get a mop and bucket of warm water, and a bowl with soapy water in it and some rags.

  ‘Myra did that and Ian turned to me then and said, “Your stick’s a bit wet”, and he grinned at me. The stick he meant was a stick I’d taken with me when I went with Myra from our place. It’s like a walking stick, and the only thing I can think is that when I rushed into the living room at first I’d dropped it, because it was lying on the floor near the young lad . . .

  ‘Then Myra came in with the bowls of water and that. She didn’t appear upset, and she just stepped over the young lad’s body and placed the bowls of water and that on the carpet in front of the fireplace.

  ‘Then Ian looked at me like, and said: “Give us a lift with this mess.” I was frightened and I did what he said and I helped to clean the mess up . . . No one spoke while this was going on, then after we’d cleaned most of it up, Ian – he was speaking to Myra – said, “Do you think anybody heard the screams?” Myra said, “Yes, me gran did. I told her I’d dropped something on my toe.” Then Myra left the living room.24

  ‘While she was out, Ian offered me a bottle of wine . . . The young lad was still lying on the floor. Myra came in with a white bedsheet. I think Ian had told her to get one. And a lot of pieces of polythene, fairly big they were, and a large blanket . . . Ian told me to get hold of the lad’s legs, which I did, and Ian got hold of the lad’s shoulders and we lifted him onto the sheets and blankets. The only reason I did this was out of sheer bloody fear. Then Ian came out with a joke. He said, “Eddie’s a dead weight”, and both Ian and Myra thought it was bloody hilarious. I didn’t see anything to laugh about . . .

  ‘On the stick I had, the one I mentioned to you, there is some bound string, and Ian took the stick and unwound the string. He cut it into lengths, about two or three foot in length, and he gave me one end, and he tied the lad’s legs up in a funny way, so that the lad’s legs were together and bent up into his stomach. Then Ian carried on tying the lad up; it was like a maze of bloody knots . . .

  ‘I had to help him while he folded the corners of the sheet together, with the lad in the middle, and then he tied the corners together. Then he made me do the same with him with the polythene sheets, and last of all came the blanket. He didn’t tie that – it was like a kind of cradle. Myra was mopping up all this time. Then Ian told Myra: “Go upstairs and hold your gran’s door to”, and he said to me: “Lift your end up”, and between us we carried the young lad upstairs into Myra’s bedroom and we put him down near the window.

  ‘Then we came downstairs and I saw a wallet lying on the floor. Ian picked it up and pulled out a green sort of card and said, “That’s his name. Do you know him?” I looked at the card and saw the name Edward Evans. I didn’t know him. I saw a pair of shoes lying on the living room floor as well as the wallet, and Ian picked them up, and a couple of letters that were lying there, and put them in a shopping bag. He picked the hatchet up, gave it to me, and said something like: “Feel the weight of that. How did he take it?” I said nothing and gave it him back. I was frightened of him using it on me. He put the hatchet in with the rest of the things, and he took them upstairs. Myra was still cleaning up, and by this time the house was looking something like normal . . .’25

  Questioned later about M
yra’s attitude that night, Dave said, ‘She would pick bone and hair up off the floor and not have a problem with it. Just drop it in the bag. There was no, “Oh . . . would one of you pick that up . . .” No. Just straightforward.’26 There was no doubt in his mind that she was a young woman used to witnessing murder; what she said next established that she must have been standing in front of Edward as Ian drew out the axe.

  ‘Ian went on to describe how he’d done it,’ Dave confirmed in his police statement. ‘How, he said, he’d stood behind the settee looking for some miniatures for me, and the lad Eddie was sat on the settee. He said: “I held the axe with my two hands and brought it down on his head.” Myra said: “His eyes registered astonishment when you hit him.” Those are the exact words she said.’27

  One of the blows had taken a piece out of the fireplace plaster; Ian put his finger into the gap.

  Dave’s statement continues: ‘Ian was complaining because he’d hurt his ankle . . . they’d have to keep the lad’s body upstairs all night and he wouldn’t be able to carry the lad down to the car because of his ankle. Myra suggested that they use my wife’s and my baby trolley to carry the lad’s body into their car. Well, it’s Myra’s car. I agreed straight away. I’d have agreed to anything they said. We arranged to meet where Myra works in Manchester tonight, that’s Thursday, at five o’clock . . .

  ‘After we had cleaned up Evans’s blood, Myra made a cup of tea, and she and Brady sat talking. She said, “Do you remember that time we were burying a body on the moors and a policeman came up?” Then she drew me into the conversation and said, “I was in the mini with a body in the back. It was partitioned off with a plastic sheet. Ian was digging a hole when a policeman came and asked me what the trouble was. I told him I was drying my sparking plugs and he drove off. I was praying that Ian wouldn’t come back over the hill whilst he was there.”’28

  Shortly after three o’clock, Dave got up slowly and ventured that he should be going if he didn’t want Maureen waking up and wondering where he was. Myra saw him to the door and smiled as they said goodnight. He recalls, ‘I was terrified. I tried not to panic. I didn’t run for the first two or three streets, thinking they might be watching me, ready with an axe.’29 As soon as he was out of sight of Wardle Brook Avenue, he fled, racing through the dark streets to Underwood Court, whose lit stairwell was as welcome as a lighthouse beam to a lost sailor.

  In the flat, he washed and undressed, then crawled into bed, his mind spinning: ‘I couldn’t get to sleep, I kept thinking about the lad, about the screams and the gurgling he was making.’30 He realised why Edward Evans had been murdered: ‘I believe Brady had planned to kill him, in a controlled way, with a single blow of the axe from behind . . . I think I was meant to come in and find the dead body and that would have been the ultimate test. He would have been looking for a reaction from me, to see if I could be trusted.’31 After fidgeting in the pitch-blackness, he sat up and put on the light: ‘Maureen was in bed, I got her out of bed. I went to the bathroom and I absolutely vomited. To the point where I was retching and in a bad state. Physically in a bad state. I then had to tell her what had happened. “I’ve just seen somebody killed.” Didn’t go into any great detail . . . just . . . “How do you mean?” . . . “Look, look at me. We’ve got to do something.”’32

  Maureen started to cry as she gazed at her husband: ‘He was very white and shaky. He was sick.’33 Although Myra was her sister, Maureen was adamant that they had to call the police. Dave was frightened of leaving the flat, knowing that Ian and Myra were only a few streets away: ‘I still thought they might be outside, waiting.’34

  In the last lines of his statement, he recalls that at six o’clock ‘we decided it was the best time to go out, there were milkmen and that knocking about, so I armed myself with a carving knife and a screwdriver, in case I met Ian and Myra. Maureen came with me and we walked to the telephone kiosk in Hattersley Road West and telephoned the police. That’s it . . .’35

  The lights were on in the newspaper shop near Underwood Court. Dave and Maureen, two terrified teenagers looking bedraggled and thin and nothing like their normal fashionable selves, ran with their dog to the red telephone box on the corner of Hare Hill Road. Dave snatched up the receiver and dialled 999, the burr and clicks of the phone resounding inside the box with its strong smell of iron filings.

  At 6.07 a.m., Police Constable Edwards, the duty policeman at Hyde station – a town described as ‘an S-bend with chip shops’ – took Dave’s stammered call: ‘There’s been a m-murder . . .’36 Edwards rang through to Police Constable Antrobus, who said he would drive out to Hattersley. Dave replaced the receiver, then picked it up and dialled again to ask if they were definitely sending someone. ‘This is a matter of life and death,’ he insisted. ‘My life is being threatened!’37 Reassured that a car was on its way, he and Maureen carried Bobbie over to an overgrown gateway and hid there. ‘Before, the hours had seemed like minutes,’ Dave recalls. ‘Now the minutes it took the police to arrive seemed like hours and we hid in a bush nearby.’38

  PC Antrobus pulled into the estate in his panda car: ‘David Smith was carrying a carving knife in one hand and a large screwdriver in the other, and both he and his wife were clawing at the doors of the car before it stopped. Police cars are usually locked from the inside, so that they were not very successful in making an effort to get in. In fact, they could not get into that police car quickly enough . . .’39 Dave tried to climb into the front seat in his panic. Eventually, PC Antrobus managed to calm the young couple down and prised the knife and screwdriver off Dave, who leapt into the passenger seat. Maureen sat trembling in the back with the dog on her knee, staring out of the window like Dave, gazing at the houses and shops as if they didn’t recognise them, while the car rolled away from Hattersley and headed towards Hyde.

  IV

  * * *

  The Shadow of the Rope: 6 October 1965 – 6 May 1966

  16

  On the day Brady and Hindley were arrested, Joe came in at night and told me this terrible tale about the phone call made by a young chap called David Smith and a body being found in a house in Hattersley. The story went through the force like a dose of salts. One of the Lancashire lads kept Joe briefed. It came out of the blue . . .

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

  ‘The original files will not tell you the truth. If you look at the evidence . . . I’m not saying it’s lies, but sometimes, because of expediency, facts get muddled. Who did what changes depending on certain factors, including who was there to give evidence at the time. Names have been changed. There’s never been a single book on this case that’s got the facts right. I’ve given interviews, but people still get it wrong because they’d sooner tap into old myths. I know the truth because I was there.’1

  Scotsman Ian Fairley was Hyde’s newest member of the CID in October 1965, a 21-year-old single man living in digs: ‘A sergeant from Hyde, John Mosley, called me to go in, even though I’d been working all night. There were more people knocking about at the station than usual. Detective Sergeant Alex Carr, Superintendent Bob Talbot and another Detective Sergeant called Roy ‘Dixie’ Dean, who was based at Stalybridge. There was a buzz about the place. Dean was interviewing a young lad called Smith. I asked what was up and was told there had been a murder the night before.’2

  Dave and Maureen were given cups of tea after being shown through to the inquiry office. At 7.20 a.m., PC Antrobus, who had taken Dave’s telephone call, had rung his superior, Detective Inspector Wills, at home in Hyde; he then called his boss, newly promoted Superintendent Robert Talbot, who was due to leave for 12 days’ holiday that morning. Talbot was a plain-spoken, serious man, married with two grown children. When he arrived at the station, he found Wills had called in Detective Sergeant Alex ‘Jock’ Carr, who was also supposed to be enjoying a day off. Carr was the burly six-foot son of a Rosyth docker, a quiet man who got on with the job without fuss.3 Talbot a
nd Carr went into the inquiry office, where Dave and Maureen were sitting with Antrobus and Dean. Dave stammered out his story again; Talbot’s eyebrows rose at mention of pistols and rifles hidden in a suburban semi.

  Fairley recalls: ‘Jock Carr came out of the inquiry room and said, “It looks like you and me are going up to Hattersley. Roy Dean is talking to the lad who said he witnessed the murder last night.” Just then, Dean appeared and was . . . let’s say, disparaging towards David Smith. He basically said the lad was talking a load of shit. I suppose it did sound a bit far-fetched at first, but it had to be looked into, so I ended up with Jock in his car, while Talbot sped up to Hattersley in his blue Hillman Minx.’4 He dismisses the story reported in the past about Talbot deploying a veritable army of men in a circle around the estate: ‘There was a traffic car put at Godley, near the railway arches, and a car put somewhere north up Mottram side. And that was it. We drove up to Hattersley and parked our cars on the road below the New Inn. Bob Talbot was in uniform. Jock and I were in plain clothes. Then Talbot took it into his head to disguise himself.’5