One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  On 10 December, Edith and John Evans were photographed entering the court. Edward’s mother, her face a study in bewildered sorrow, was described in a local newspaper as ‘a small, frail woman dressed completely in black, and wearing glasses’.12 Edward’s 15-year-old brother, Allan, was photographed outside the family home in Ardwick, crying. After the evidence was heard in relation to Edward’s murder, the photographs discovered at Wardle Brook Avenue were discussed. Myra wrote to her mother, imagining that the slides, negatives and tartan album had been returned, ‘Keep all the photos for us, for reasons, the ones of dogs, scenery, etc.’13 On 13 December, Myra’s solicitors, Bostock, Yates & Connell, applied on her behalf for a hairdressing appointment because ‘her dark roots are becoming very obvious. This fact has been the subject of press comment, which is naturally a source of irritation to our client.’14 The request was refused.

  The following day, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother took the stand. Dressed in black with a chiffon scarf over her hair, she stumbled over her words as she described the events of Boxing Day 1964, then clutched the sides of the witness box as her voice spiralled: ‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!’15 She screamed at Myra: ‘She can sit staring at me and she took a little baby’s life, the beast.’16 Detective Constable Frank Fitchett, sitting just below the witness box, spun round and grabbed the water carafe just as Ann’s hands reached out for it. She carried on screaming at Myra, calling her a tramp, then broke down, sobbing. Myra recalled that she had whispered to Ian that she wasn’t a tramp; he had squeezed her hand and reassured her, ‘No, I know you’re not.’17 The policeman who’d found Lesley’s body, Robert Spiers, was there that day: ‘It was the first time I saw Brady and Hindley and they were truly faces of evil. All the goody-two-shoes who complained later that the mugshot of Myra was the only photo ever shown, it was nonsense. That’s how she looked.’18

  The evidence about Lesley’s murder continued the following day. The court was emptied of press and public as the tape recording of Lesley’s last moments was played. Rain beat against the long windows as Ian’s voice snapped through the silence: ‘This is track four . . .’ Lesley’s mother had already listened to part of the tape and had looked at two of the pornographic photographs in order to identify her daughter. The quality of the tape recording had been improved by BBC Manchester technician John Weekes so that every sound was appallingly clear.

  The prosecution case then turned to John Kilbride. The jacket he had worn on the day of his murder was unwrapped from its polythene cover and shown to the court. The stench of putrefaction clung to it. Ian had tried to pin John’s murder and Lesley’s abduction on David Smith and another man, increasing public suspicion against Myra’s brother-in-law.

  On 16 December, the weather was so atrocious that Myra and Ian spent the night in separate cells below the courtroom. Myra sat huddled under a blanket, shivering and unable to sleep. When she asked for her make-up bag the next morning, the guard ignored her, and she was given a cup of tea laced with salt, not sugar. She lodged a complaint with the station commander. Later, she wrote to her mother, ‘Nothing matters in the world as long as Ian is all right. If you’d drop a short note and a box of Maltesers, I’d be glad. He says he doesn’t want anything sending in, even from his mam, but I know he’ll be glad you sent them.’19

  The committal proceedings came to an end on Monday, 20 December 1965. The couple pleaded not guilty to all charges and headed back to Risley. The Gorton & Openshaw Reporter announced that they were committed in custody awaiting a decision on 11 January to decide where, and when, the trial should take place.

  Shortly before Christmas, Robert Fitzpatrick visited Myra and Ian in Risley, bringing them a volume of poetry each: Wordsworth for Myra and Ovid for Ian. During their few minutes alone together, Ian surreptitiously handed Myra a notebook. In her cell, she read its coded stories of sexual cruelty towards children. Using the key Ian had provided, she deciphered the stories and camouflaged them as poems in an exercise book. She also invented similar stories of her own, which she confessed afterwards were written as ‘stimulation’.20

  Many years later, she admitted the stories spilled over into their correspondence: ‘Over the seven months we were on remand, Brady compiled a notebook in which he wrote dozens of messages that I was to respond to in a code he’d devised. If the date on which either of us wrote a letter to each other was underlined, it meant there was a message in the letter.’21 The code began six lines into the letter, taking the seventh and eighth words as the start of the message. There was no code in the next line, but the seventh and eighth words of the following line continued the message. Myra explained: ‘It carried on in this way every other line until the message was over [and] was written in such a way as to make complete sense as a normal letter to whoever read it – the censor, etc. – whilst containing [secret] messages.’22 She gave an example of one message she had sent Ian before the trial (the coded words are in italics):

  I’ve been thinking for a while, why don’t you ask if you can go/to church on Sundays so we can at least see each other there?/You get someone to help with this./See the Governor if necessary. There are places in the chapel for people/ in your situation Ian, so ask someone to look into it for you. There’s/someone here who goes with two officers. She’s in here for killing her own/children and also for attempting to throw acid in her boyfriend’s face. No one/likes her; she’s on Rule 43, of course. Re; your mention of facial expressions in your last letter, I too, wish/I could have seen the one on Brett. His face was a picture when you stared him out!

  The decoded message read: ‘Why don’t you get someone to throw acid on Brett?’ Myra disclosed: ‘Brett was at that time the youngest son, aged about four or six, of Ann West. This was in the papers at the time of Lesley Ann’s disappearance; details of the family as part of the reporting of the disappearance. That’s not the whole message, but those ten words were the crux, so to speak . . .’23 Through the letters, detectives discovered that Myra and Ian hoped to marry; it was their only hope of seeing each other if they were sent to prison. Myra later claimed that Ian had proposed because a wife couldn’t be forced to testify against her husband, but she filled in the necessary application forms for the Home Office nonetheless. Permission was refused.

  The couple read avidly while on remand, sharing quotations with each other. Myra copied out bits of narrative: ‘To you, my alter ego, what is there left to say? The charm of our minds is beyond the token of tongues . . .’24 and poetry by Housman, Tennyson, Wordsworth, ‘AC’ Clough (Arthur Hughes Clough), Kahlil Gibran and Charlotte Mew. She invoked the spirit of the moor through Wordsworth (‘Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/That on a wild and secluded scene impress/Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/The landscape with the quiet of the sky’) and used Shakespeare to instil strength (‘I am determined to prove a villain,/And hate the idle pleasures of these days’).25 Ian quoted from King Lear: ‘I grow, I prosper:/Now, gods, stand up for bastards.’26 They both loved Richard III; Ian later opened his own book with a quotation from it: ‘Let us to it pell-mell; if not to Heaven,/then hand in hand to Hell!’27

  In a pre-Christmas letter to her mother, Myra asked her to take care of whatever had been left at Wardle Brook Avenue and to have items moved to Peggy Brady’s flat for safekeeping. Fitzpatrick attempted to have their ‘non-exhibit’ property, including the tartan album, returned. Myra and Ian were able to look through all their photographs and pick out those they particularly wanted to keep. They indicated a handful and Fitzpatrick promised to do his best to have the photographs returned to them.

  Myra and Ian were able to spend Christmas Eve together. She described it in a letter to her mother: ‘Mrs Brady brought a meal in. We had half a chicken each, turkey sandwiches, half a bottle of Sandiman’s port wine, chocolate biscuits and Swiss rolls. I really enjoyed it, it was almost like being free again. My counsel, Mr Curtis, has written here asking permission to have my hair bleached because the dark roots are v
ery much in evidence. But permission has been refused, so I’ll appear at the trial with streaky, lifeless hair. I can’t even have it trimmed or thinned. It’s a constant source of irritation.’28

  They were each seen frequently by Dr Neustatter, a forensic psychiatrist whose notes on Ian were summarised by William Mars-Jones QC: ‘Brady had been extremely cagey and would give nothing away during a three-hour interview. Perhaps the most interesting feature had been his negative attitude. Brady had not been particularly suave, but he chatted away . . . Brady had admitted that he was illegitimate; this had seemed to cause him some embarrassment in that he had been embarrassed about giving the names of his parents. Asked whether he had any inferiority feelings, Brady said that everyone had them. Anything he felt afraid of doing, he said, made him feel inferior. If you were short-changed on a bus, even by only 4d, and you did not make a fuss about it, you felt weak . . . possibly Brady had the slight irrelevance that one found in a schizophrenic . . . The long letters he had written to Myra Hindley showed that in fact there was no difficulty in his thought processes normally . . . abnormality of mind could not be assumed.’29 Myra quite liked Neustatter until he commented how eloquent and well read she was. ‘What, for a murderess?’ she retorted, adding, ‘I don’t like being taken for a working-class idiot.’30 She refused to submit to an EEG to pick up any abnormalities in the brain.

  Myra had no contact with Maureen or her father during her time on remand, but remained close – protesting her innocence – to her mother, aunts and Gran. Kath attempted to revive her interest in religion, but Myra told her mother: ‘I suppose she means well, but it means nothing to me.’31 Nana Hindley visited her in Risley; much later, when they met again, Myra asked, ‘Do you remember how we both thought I’d be out on probation in no time?’32 Before the trial, May Hill came forward to tell the police about the letter Myra had written about her fear of Ian. When the neighbours found out, a hate campaign was mounted against May until she withdrew her statement. The vitriol aimed at Dave and Maureen was ferocious. Dave’s temper snapped in March 1966, when he was on the balcony of a friend’s house in Hattersley and a group of teenagers goaded him for being ‘the third Moors Murderer’. One of the lads yelled, ‘You’re no bleedin’ good without that axe, Smith’, and Dave pelted down the stairwell and attacked him with a chain.33 Police, having witnessed the harassment he and Maureen had faced without respite, took no action.

  At the end of March, Myra’s request to have her hair bleached was granted. She had her make-up sent in from her mother and borrowed a pair of size five stilettos from her, although her own feet were a seven. She set out everything in her cell: grey suit with dark piping, one yellow blouse and one blue. Then she sat down to write to her mother before the event every newspaper had dubbed the ‘Trial of the Century’: ‘Dear Mam, This is just a few lines before the “off” in case I don’t have any time during the week to drop you a line. I had my hair done on Saturday. It looks so nice that I’m sorry that I’m all dressed up and nowhere to go (joke).’34

  21

  Put her down.

  Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, sentencing at the ‘Moors trial’, 6 May 1966

  ‘We are in danger of creating an Affectless Society, in which nobody cares for anyone but himself, or for anything but instant self-gratification. We demand sex without love, violence for “kicks”. We are encouraging the blunting of sensibility: and this, let us remember, was not the way to an Earthly Paradise, but the way to Auschwitz. When the Nazis took on the government of Poland, they flooded the Polish bookstalls with pornography . . .’1

  Of the many volumes written about the Moors case, Pamela Hansford Johnson’s On Iniquity (1967) may not have aged well, but it tapped succinctly into one of the much-discussed issues arising from the trial. Johnson covered the trial for the Daily Telegraph and out of that came her book, in which she investigated the correlation between the murders and the reading matter of the two accused. Simultaneously condemning pornography and the British Realist Theatre of Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan and Harold Pinter, she speculated that certain types of literature should not be accessible to ‘minds educationally and emotionally unprepared’.2 Her argument echoed the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, when prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked the jury, ‘Is this a book you would want your wife or servants to read?’ The influence of literature on malleable minds had also been raised by Richard Hoggart. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), he posited the theory that ‘sex-and-violence’ novels and films ‘give the working classes cheap, sensationalist entertainment, enervating, dulling and eventually destroying their sense of taste’.3

  The idea that specific books could prove damaging to the newly affluent young – even contributing to rising crime rates – was given serious consideration. As Britain moved forward into a very different age, the press picked up on the collective fear that society as a whole was becoming more violent in the aftermath of the Second World War. Crime rates were escalating: from 6,000 major incidents in 1955 to 12,000 in 1960, and four years after the Moors trial that figure had leapt to 21,000. Analysing the reasons behind the increase, one commentator lists the ‘wider anxieties [of] the decline of traditional authority, the instability of the family, the break-up of settled communities, the uneasiness of class identities . . . the impact of affluence, education and mobility on traditional customs and communities’.4 At a time when so many advances were being made, some of which seemed to threaten the future of mankind, crime became a natural focus of anxiety, and none more so than the ‘beyond belief’ crimes of the Moors Murderers.5

  The issue of literature’s pernicious influence was raised immediately at the trial when, before the jury was sworn in, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson asked whether the books read by Myra and Ian might be used as evidence. The Attorney General replied that they were evidence only insofar that Brady had told David Smith to return the books before Edward Evans’s murder; he added that he intended to read aloud an extract from de Sade, to which Fenton Atkinson responded, ‘You are not asking the jury to read Justine?’ The Attorney General replied dryly, ‘No, my Lord, I have suffered the agony of having to read that myself.’6 But inevitably, just as the Chatterley trial sent sales of D.H. Lawrence’s novel soaring, so the Moors trial provoked a surge of interest in de Sade; when William Mars-Jones QC and a colleague arrived afterwards at Brompton Air Terminal in London, they were amazed to find Marquis de Sade novels prominently on sale.

  The trial opened on Tuesday, 19 April 1966 at Chester Assizes. The oak-panelled Castle Courtroom had been adapted to accommodate the particular needs of such a highly charged case under the glare of the media spotlight. Microphones were fitted in the witness box, carpet had been laid to reduce noise and press rooms were set up with telephones installed for those reporters who couldn’t get a seat in court. Otherwise, as Pamela Hansford Johnson commented, ‘it is clean, bright, has been newly decorated. Canopy and curtains of red velvet, braided with gold, frame the judge’s seat. The benches of the public auditorium and of the Distinguished Visitors’ gallery are upholstered in scarlet leather. Above the galleries are royal portraits . . . the dock has been shut in, on three sides, with splinter-proof glass.’7 The other noticeable security feature was the police presence: 300 officers had been drafted in.

  One hundred and fifty journalists arrived in Chester, bringing with them camera crews and technicians who largely ignored the Queen when she visited the races. The BBC originally intended to cover the trial, having accumulated more than 25,000 feet of filmed interviews, but on the second day of the hearing it was decided that the details of the case were too shocking for television – only the verdicts were given airtime. A number of authors turned up, including Mary Hayley Bell, the wife of actor John Mills, and Emlyn Williams, who had begun his book about the case at the end of 1965. In the courtyard, those wishing to enter the public gallery were carefully screened. Only 60 seats were available, and the queue of mostly women forming at dawn each day was never less
than hundreds-strong. They were greeted by a downpour on the first day, followed later by a freak heatwave. The courtroom remained cool, but the odour of damp plastic mackintoshes hung about the wood-panelled walls.

  The judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, presided over the court coolly and unobtrusively. Myra’s solicitor, Manchester-born Godfrey Heilpern QC, discovered on the first day of the trial that his sister-in-law, the manageress of a Salford dress shop, had been murdered (her death was not related to the case); in his absence, Philip Curtis took over. Ian was represented by Emlyn Hoosen QC, Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire. Sir Frederick Elwyn Jones QC, appointed Attorney General two years earlier, led the case against Myra and Ian; he had been a prosecution counsel at the Nuremberg War Trials.8 His presence underlined the enormity of the case, since the Attorney General only prosecutes in the most serious murder cases and those involving national security. His occasional absences (due to the opening of Parliament and Cabinet discussions on the Rhodesia crisis) were filled by William Mars-Jones QC.

  Before the trial began, despite the submission by the defence counsels, Fenton Atkinson decided that the two accused should be tried together. Ian had no doubt that he was facing a lengthy prison sentence but hoped to achieve an acquittal for Myra. She was now charged with all three murders, together with the secondary charge of harbouring Ian after the murder of John Kilbride. ‘I wanted to help the girl,’ Ian said in retrospect. ‘All my evidence was to get her off . . . I was reinforcing some things by saying, “Yes, that’s right”, and on other things I was going out of my way to be destructive with the prosecution.’9 He clarified: ‘I also told her to adopt a distancing strategy when she went into the witness box, admitting to minor crimes whilst denying major.’10