One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Myra’s hands tightened on the wooden edge of the dock.

  ‘Are those the verdicts of you all?’ asked the clerk, to which the foreman responded, ‘Yes, my Lord.’60

  ‘Call upon them,’ Fenton Atkinson declared.

  The clerk proclaimed: ‘Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, you have been convicted of a felony on the verdict of the jury. Have you anything to say why the court should not pass sentence upon you according to law? Have you, Ian Brady?’61

  Ian responded, ‘No – except the revolvers were bought in July 1964.’62

  ‘And you, Myra Hindley?’63

  Myra shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly.

  The judge looked down at them. ‘Ian Brady, these were three calculated, cruel, cold-blooded murders. In your case, I pass the only sentence the law now allows, which is three concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. Put him down.’64

  Ian was led from the dock without a glance at Myra, whose grip remained taut on the wooden frame. A feeling of numbness seeped through her, though when she’d heard Ian sentenced to life, ‘I prayed that I would get the same because the world outside meant nothing to me as long as he wasn’t in it . . .’65

  The judge turned to her: ‘In your case, Hindley, you have been found guilty of two equally horrible murders and, in the third, as an accessory after the fact. On the two murders, the sentence is two concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, and on the charge of being an accessory after the fact to the death of John Kilbride a concurrent sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.’ He gave a brief nod: ‘Put her down.’66

  Myra swayed forward and the female prison officer sitting behind her grasped her arm, steadying her. Catching sight of Myra’s ashen face, one observer commented: ‘. . . we were reminded that here, after all, was a woman’.67 The Gorton & Openshaw Reporter noted: ‘Hindley, still sucking on a mint as sentence upon her was passed, turned and was escorted quickly from the dock. The click-click of her high-heeled shoes could be heard on the steps as she was taken down to the cells.’68

  A crowd of over 250 people milled in the twilight outside the court. Circled around them were the media, boom and camera held high, waiting for the couple to emerge. The anger surrounding Chester Castle that evening was palpable; Pamela Hansford Johnson described the mood: ‘When the Moors trial ended, we did feel a lack of catharsis: something violent should have happened to put an end to violence. Throughout, we were missing the shadow of the rope.’69

  MP Sydney Silverman’s Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act had been passed on the day of Myra Hindley’s arrest. Since then, John Kilbride’s aunt and uncle, Elsie and Frank Doran, had organised a petition to reinstate it for child murder and had sent more than 10,000 signatures to the Home Secretary. Lesley Ann Downey’s uncle stood as a pro-hanging candidate in the general election against Sydney Silverman and polled 5,000 votes; he also urged Emlyn Williams to make his next book a call for the return of hanging. Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Benfield felt that Myra and Ian might have said more had that terrible threat still been in place: ‘There was no question of capital punishment in the Moors case. Brady and Hindley were not fools, so why should they admit any more? If they did, there might be no possibility of release in the future.’70

  Francis Wyndham, writing in the Sunday Times, declared that what was missing was not the rope but the souls of Brady and Hindley themselves: ‘This “sensational” trial seemed to have a hollow centre, where the accused should have been. It was almost as though they were being tried by proxy, ghostly presences in an empty dock, as dead as their victims on the moors.’71

  In the corridor below the courtroom, Myra and Ian met briefly in the presence of their solicitor. Myra recalled, ‘The first thing I asked [Ian] was not to kill himself, as he’d said he would do.’72 Within minutes, guards stepped up and led them separately to the prison van, where they remained in different compartments. It was dark as the van swept out of the yard behind Chester Castle, but the crowds had waited for that moment and Myra could feel fists pounding the sides of the vehicle and hear the screams and jeers. Blinding lights flashed outside the tinted windows as the van veered away, taking her back to Risley for one night before she was driven south, hundreds of miles from the man with whom her name would be forever linked, towards the forbidding gates of Holloway Prison.

  In Hattersley, 16 Wardle Brook Avenue lay in pitch darkness, every one of its windows shattered, the curtains billowing in the winds that came down from the moor to blow through the still and silent house.

  V

  * * *

  God Has Forgiven Me: 7 May 1966 – 15 November 2002

  22

  I could feel no pity for her at the trial; now I can feel some pity for what her life is to be. I shouldn’t be surprised, though it seems an improbability now, if she eventually returns to the Roman Catholic Church.

  Pamela Hansford Johnson, On Iniquity

  ‘My first impression of London was of trees . . . mercifully I didn’t see the yawning gates of Holloway until we were locked inside them.’1 Myra’s arrival at Britain’s largest prison for women left her bewildered. Built in north London in 1852, Holloway was home to half the country’s 950 female inmates. Myra was told to strip and bathe under guard and her hair and pubic hair were inspected for lice, which ‘appalled and affronted’ her, since she had already endured the process in Risley.2 The prison uniform – blue shirt, grey skirt and thick black shoes – was handed to her, and she was shown into the hospital clinic, where the elderly female doctor instructed her to take her underwear off for a VD test. Myra burst into tears, insisting that she had only had one sexual partner (which wasn’t true) and that she’d never heard of VD. After dressing again, she was provided with bedding, medicated soap and the tin of green tooth powder that was used by inmates instead of toothpaste. Prisoner 964055 was then taken to her cell in the hospital wing, C Wing, where she was held until it was deemed safe to move her into the prison proper.

  Myra was a ‘nonce’, a sex offender (the term literally means ‘nothing’). Shortly after her arrival on D wing, the whispering began: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, suffer the little children to come unto me . . .’ Then the attacks: she was struck with a broom by one prisoner cleaning the stairs, while a group of ten women asked her to join them for a game of cards, then beat her badly before hurling her on the wire mesh that hung between each landing. She didn’t fight back and refused to name her attackers, asking instead to be put on solitary confinement, Rule 43. The doctor and an assistant governor advised her to stick it out because she faced a long stretch inside. An officer was temporarily assigned to escort her whenever she left her cell.

  A week after arriving in prison, Myra appealed against her conviction on the grounds that it had been detrimental to have been tried with Ian. In October, The Times discussed the failure of the appeal. A report dated 21 September 1966 demonstrated that the Attorney General found ‘eleven points of similarity in each of these cases . . . a formidable common pattern of killing’ and that Myra ‘exhibited good general health, good general intelligence, above average powers of expression, and gave no indication either of mental or psychopathic disorder or that there was any diminution in her responsibility for her actions.’3 The Lord Chief Justice stated that Ian sought at all times to exonerate her and therefore, on that basis, a joint trial had proved beneficial.

  She remained in close contact with Ian, who was placed on Rule 43 after being scalded by another prisoner. His cell in Durham was in E Wing, where he ate his meals alone and took walks in the yard with three guards while the other prisoners were locked in their cells. He spent his time reading, absorbing all the classical works in the prison library, choosing War and Peace on his first visit. He shared his cell with a mouse, feeding it crumbs from his own meals and on one occasion left it half a chip. He wrote to inform Myra that, much to his surprise, the mouse had eaten that too. A month passed and he received a letter from his mother, telling h
im that his stepfather was dead. At the age of 48, Patrick Brady had collapsed and died in the street. Ian remained close to Peggy and his foster family in Glasgow, who refused to talk to the press.

  Myra’s lengthy letters to Ian were filled with private jokes and references. One read: ‘Dearest Ian, hello my little hairy Girklechin. It was with profound relief I received your letter today . . . It was a lovely, soothing, nostalgic letter which comforted me almost as much as if you were here yourself. I had a beautifully tender dream about you last night and awoke feeling safe and secure, thinking I was in the harbour of your arms . . . I pictured your face and said your name to myself over and over again and imagined the arms of the chair I was clenching to be your hands, lovely strong “insurance” hands (remember?). Freedom without you means nothing. I’ve got one interest in life and that’s you. We had six short but precious years together, six years of memories to sustain us until we’re together again, to make dreams realities.’4 In another she referred to the collective name by which the rest of the world knew them: ‘I didn’t murder any moors, did you?’5 They both studied O level German; Ian wrote to congratulate her when she passed with an A grade.

  ‘I still had feelings for him as I began my sentence,’ Myra declared. ‘I was prepared to die for him and that strength of emotion doesn’t go away easily.’6 At Ian’s suggestion, she asked her mother to take out an insurance policy for her at half a crown a week. He encouraged her to believe that she would one day be released. Nellie visited as often as she could. At the end of 1966, she divorced Myra’s father and married Bill Moulton. Bob Hindley never visited Myra, who recalled, ‘It devastated him that his daughter could possibly have done the things I did and he disowned me.’7 But she wrote weekly to her mother, including a letter in bold capitals for Gran, who had initially been told that Myra had moved to Scotland. When she learned the truth, she showered Myra with knitted clothes to demonstrate that nothing had changed between them.

  Maureen read in the press about one of the attacks on Myra and wrote to her but received no reply. She and Dave were parents to a son, Paul Anthony, one of the few joys in their life: it was impossible for Dave to find work – when he managed to secure a job in a factory, the other employees threatened to walk out unless he was sacked. Every day brought hate mail, and Maureen recalled later how she would open the letters and scream with horror. Not long after the trial, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, her partner Alan West and another man called at Underwood Court one evening. A violent fight ensued between them. Ann recalled, ‘I beat Maureen Smith’s head against the wall and screamed incoherently at her. I tore at her and for a moment it was as if I had her foul sister in my hands . . .’8 The next day the police called on the Wests, carrying a bag filled with Maureen’s hair. No action was taken, but the police warned them not to make any further calls.

  Myra enlisted her mother’s help in trying to obtain visiting rights to Ian. She put in a request to the governor of Holloway and Ian pressed the assistant governor of his wing for the same, but inter-prison visits were refused. Myra wrote to her mother, telling her to contact Lord Stonham of the Home Office, with whom Myra had become friendly during one of his regular visits to Holloway. He described Myra as ‘very calm and collected . . . She was studying for her O levels. Apparently she was more concerned about the fact that she was not recognised as Brady’s common-law wife than about anything else.’9

  A number of titled individuals called upon Myra regularly during the course of their prison work, and some became friends. One who visited but did not cross the boundary from philanthropic caller to ally was forty-year-old Lady Anne Tree, daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, whose family home was Chatsworth.10 At the request of the prison governor, she began visiting Myra, whom she found ‘a dull figure. I did find it rather difficult until we got on to books. I used to look very carefully on Saturdays at the book reviews to have things to talk about, to say, “Myra, have you seen this is coming out?” I’d take the books in sometime, or she’d get them through the prison library.’11 She dismisses Myra’s reputation for being extremely intelligent: ‘No, I don’t think that was true at all. Or else she wouldn’t have done it, would she? They were both monsters actually. I think they had no pity, just were lacking it. And I don’t think she ever thought about her victims. She passionately loved animals, but I once saw her kicking a pigeon that was lurking about in the prison. It was horrid.’12 Although they didn’t discuss her crimes, Myra talked often about Ian: ‘She was absolutely obsessed with him. She was mad about the moors, of course. She had a definite calling to nature to that part of the world. And to animals, in spite of kicking one.’13 Lady Tree admits, ‘I didn’t like Myra. I felt outraged, really, because she was so blaming of other people. She really wanted to prove herself fit for release from the start. She never expressed remorse with me, but I have to say we kept pretty well off it. I think she saw everyone as a saviour. She definitely regarded herself as a heroine.’14

  Despite her firm attachment to Ian, Myra embarked on her first lesbian affair. Prison officers largely ignored relationships between inmates, with a view that if it kept them quiet, then it was fine. Myra’s prison counsellor feels that her many affairs with other inmates were largely due to her situation rather than being indicative of her true sexuality: ‘She told me she was a lesbian only because of circumstance, though I’m sure she’d say different about Nina and Tricia, two later relationships. I felt that she was very confused about her sexuality. She loved Brady and fancied him like mad, and she was naturally heterosexual, but this happens with women in prison. Not as much with men. I think women want touch and comfort more. But I know lesbians who are sure of their sexuality and she definitely wasn’t.’15 Myra’s first affair was with a pretty, bespectacled girl with cropped blonde hair called Rita whom she met on D Wing. This was followed by a fling with a gangster’s wife, and another with a woman in her forties called Norma who was in prison for stabbing her girlfriend to death with scissors. Myra and Norma spent hours closeted together in Myra’s cell. In the prison kitchen, Myra worked with an ex-lover of Norma’s called Bernadette, who exploded with anger when she discovered the affair, attacking Myra, throwing urine on her clothes and defecating in her bed.

  Despite these affairs, Myra remained in constant touch with Ian, who wrote to her just before Christmas to say that he was ill and confined to bed. Myra found herself reminiscing about the previous Christmas, which they had spent together in Risley on remand. Peggy Brady sent her some chocolate liqueurs as a substitute for the port wine of the year before. By this stage, Myra had been moved to Holloway’s newly upgraded maximum-security wing, E Wing. There, two members of the Portland Spy Ring, Helen Kroger and Ethel Gee – who loathed each other – were being held, together with a small group of other long-term prisoners. She was allowed to cook her own food and sunbathe in the garden when the weather was fine. There was no work for the inmates when the wing was initially opened, so she was woken at 7 a.m. to the strains of Tony Blackburn’s Radio 1 show and spent her time having her hair done by another prisoner, cooking, reading or strolling in the garden. Myra was in cell 11; next to her, in cell 12, was Ethel Gee, whom Myra said she felt sorry for because she’d become embroiled in crime after falling for the wrong man. Myra was attacked by Ethel’s fellow spy one day in the kitchen: Helen Kroger hit her on the head with a teapot, then pummelled her to the ground, screaming, until officers ran in to intervene.

  Soon after her arrival in Holloway, Myra was questioned by police about other murders. The Gorton & Openshaw Reporter ran an article on 12 May 1966, with the headline ‘Moors Search Plan: Belief that There May Be Other Bodies in Secret Graves’. Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade were specifically mentioned. Although the search had been called off, there were plans to resume it if incontrovertible evidence of other murders was found and, with that in mind, detectives visited Myra in Holloway on 27 January 1967. At first, she had refused to see them. It was Ian who persuaded her otherwise, having
received the same request himself. He told her that a snub implied they had something to conceal. In a letter to her mother, Myra declared, ‘Once the police have been, I’m not going to see them again. They can leave us alone for the rest of our sentence and I’ll tell them that when they come down.’16 In the same letter, she asked Nellie to send her a copy of Joan Baez’s ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the record Ian had given her for the last murder.17

  Myra spoke to Detective Chief Superintendent Douglas Nimmo and Detective Chief Inspector Tom Butcher but told them that she couldn’t help with their inquiries about Keith or Pauline, or any other victims. She repeated her pre-trial mantra that they should question David Smith.

  The first books about the case appeared in late 1966 and 1967. A group of university students tried to stage a play based on the murders, but their script was banned by the Lord Chancellor’s office.18 Myra asked for a copy of John Deane Potter’s factual account, The Monsters of the Moors, which was sent via her solicitor and the prison governor, and in 1967 came the publication of Emlyn Williams’ bestseller, Beyond Belief. A combination of fact and fiction, Williams’ book received largely favourable reviews, with comparisons made to Truman Capote’s seminal In Cold Blood.19 Myra and Ian were outraged by the book – or, rather, its success. Myra called it ‘the most obnoxious piece of lies and fabrications that I have ever read’.20 She wrote to Benfield, wanting to know how Williams had managed to obtain a copy of her diary, sending the detective into a tailspin. In another letter, she fumed: ‘This diary was amongst property which was taken from my house by the police upon my arrest and was in their possession for two years, until it was obtained for me by the solicitor who acts for us in this case.’21 She was further angered by plans to turn Beyond Belief into a film, with William Friedkin mooted as director, and disgusted when she received a draft contract to give her written consent. She instructed her solicitor to block the film because of the ‘harrowing’ effect it would have on her and Ian’s relatives.22 The film was eventually shelved when the victims’ families stepped in to protest.