One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Myra’s ex-fellow inmate and friend Janie Jones immediately began writing her own book about how she had been ‘duped’ by her; other ex-inmates similarly gave interviews to the press about their feeling of having been hoodwinked. Nellie’s life was altered immeasurably by the news of her daughter’s confession; she resigned from her work and became a recluse, sitting indoors with the curtains closed, leaving the grocery shopping to her husband, who wanted no more to do with Myra. Bill Scott, Maureen’s widow, stopped taking Sharon to visit her aunt and grandmother until the furore had abated. The house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, which the council had long ago abandoned attempting to rent out and used as an on-site office, was demolished in an effort to discourage visits from ghoulish sightseers.

  Myra was psychiatrically assessed following the confession and found to be of sound mind, although she declared that confessing had ‘unleashed a thousand demons and they have not left me alone’. She felt ‘like a walking time bomb’ and was ‘haunted by not talking earlier’.72 The psychiatrists concluded that her revelations ‘might have been partly motivated by a wish to remain a centre of interest to acquaintances, if not in the public mind as a whole’.73 Myra’s subsequent ‘open letter’ to Ian gave some credence to their analysis; via the BBC, she urged Ian to assist the police as she had done. Ian had already spoken to detectives again, but in return for his full cooperation, he asked for a ‘human week’ of being allowed to eat and drink whatever he pleased and permission to watch old films such as Gone with the Wind. He told Topping that Myra knew perfectly well where the graves were and could have taken him straight to them if she had wished.

  After six weeks, torrential rain flooded the excavated areas at Hoe Grain and Shiny Brook and the search moved to the higher ground at Hollin Brown Knoll, in the immediate vicinity of Lesley’s grave, out of sight of the road. During her confession, Myra had remarked on Pauline’s body lying on the grass, which seemed to suggest the search should be concentrated deeper onto the moor, away from the road. On 17 June, Topping questioned Myra again by telephone; prompted by him, she recalled that Pauline was buried further back than Lesley and not in the gas pipeline trench. Almost in passing, she mentioned that when she had stood next to the dying girl she could clearly see the rocks of Hollin Brown Knoll outlined against the sky.

  On 1 July 1987, the body of Pauline Reade was unearthed from the moor. The discovery came towards the end of the afternoon. Topping was with Ian at Park Lane when Knupfer rang to inform him that they had noticed a change in the vegetation and after a few minutes of careful digging, a white shoe had poked out of the soil.

  The search team left the moor as usual in order not to alert the press and returned to the site that evening, with Topping. In the copper sunlight, the grave revealed Pauline’s almost perfectly preserved body; like Lesley, she lay on her side, but on her left, facing the road 150 yards away, and 100 yards from where Lesley had been found. Her left arm was crossed over her front and her right lay along her side; her knees were bent up towards her abdomen. The injury to her throat was evident, and the disarray of her clothing left detectives in no doubt that she had been sexually assaulted. One shoe had fallen off; the exposed foot was better preserved than the other. As police lifted the shoes from the grave, the manufacturer’s gold lettering glinted brightly.

  Topping visited Amos Reade. Pauline’s father received the news quietly, expressing deep regret that his wife Joan was in psychiatric care. Topping then had the equally painful task of informing Winnie Johnson that a body had been found but it wasn’t Keith. She wept on the telephone as he assured her the search would continue. The media tide finally turned in the police’s favour; Myra read about the discovery the following day. Visiting Ian, Topping was angered by his gloating comment about how close police had been to Pauline’s grave for so long without finding it.

  On 3 July, Ian returned to the moor, visiting Hoe Grain, where Topping hoped he would now lead them to Keith’s grave. The visit was a fiasco; often Ian would stride off purposefully, then suddenly become confused and stumble about. At the junction of Hoe Grain and Shiny Brook, he pointed to an exposed slope and told police he had hidden a spade there, but excavations revealed nothing. He insisted on climbing a high rock formation; Topping scrambled after him, worried that he planned to throw himself off, but he only wanted to look at the view. Afterwards, Topping realised that the visit had been of little benefit to anyone but Keith’s murderer.74

  Ian’s inability – deliberate or otherwise – to assist the search gave Myra a curious satisfaction. Her relationship with Topping had deteriorated, Fisher recalled: ‘She was terribly hurt when he didn’t ring her, didn’t come to see her . . . she was annoyed with him that he took so long finding Pauline’s body . . . On the other body, she gave him a clue that he thought he could crack – information about something, not a body buried on the moors. He preferred to go after that first, and he failed to find it. We believe he would have been better going for Pauline Reade’s body first.’75 Topping remained in talks with Ian and during one visit: ‘He told me that he was ashamed of what he’d done. He said it very simply, his head down . . . He said when he tried to recall the details of what had happened, “blocks” came down in his mind. He was struggling to explain himself; he said he did not want to discuss how he had killed the children. He got very disturbed and agitated whenever the subject was mentioned, saying he was frightened of losing control if the blocks were removed.’76 Topping also spoke to Ian’s mother: ‘She seemed a very sensitive person, very keen to help . . . both she and her home were very clean and tidy . . . she felt responsible for her son’s behaviour and was always trying to work out what had gone wrong . . . She had obviously lived with a sense of guilt and distress for many years.’77 On 4 August, he and Knupfer visited Myra to show her a video of Ian’s photographs superimposed on footage of the moor. She pinpointed different areas, some over a mile apart, leading to further confusion.

  On 7 August, Pauline Reade was laid to rest in Gorton cemetery. Her mother left the hospital under heavy sedation, accompanied by two nurses. Rain pattered down as a requiem Mass was said for Pauline at St Francis’ Monastery before the internment. Hundreds of people lined the roads as the cortège passed by; among the mourners at the graveside were Ann West, Winnie Johnson, Patrick Kilbride, Danny Kilbride and his wife Ann, and Pat Kilbride. The funeral marked a breakthrough in Joan’s mental health; although she remained hospitalised for some time, eventually she was able to return home.

  The search was called off on 24 August. Topping promised a shattered Winnie Johnson that he would return to the moor if significant information came to light. He remained in contact with Myra and Ian for some time afterwards; in December, following positive discussions, Ian returned to the moor again, but the visit proved as futile as the first. Ian’s suggestion that he and Myra should meet to discuss the location of Keith’s grave was refused outright. Topping reflects: ‘Despite the fact that he was at times very critical of her, and despite the fact that she had not hesitated to outline his crimes, I felt they both still had a lingering regard for each other. Neither seemed to want to hurt the other.’78

  Myra returned to her autobiography, opening it with the ‘unpolluted minds’ quote from Jane Eyre. Elizabeth Longford offered to help with the manuscript, but both Timms and Astor felt that any connection with the Longfords would prove damaging to both parties. Myra worried that the public would assume she was writing for financial gain; Benedict Birnberg, a widely respected solicitor who also happened to represent Ian Brady, drew up the deed of trust for the charity that would administer the funds raised from sales of her book. The objectives of the Open Hand Trust were ‘to alleviate the suffering experienced by children and young persons resulting from sexual and other abuse and violence and to promote their well-being’ and ‘to promote research into and the study of the cause, nature and effects of such abuse and violence and to publish the useful results of such research and study’.79

 
; Public condemnation followed the release of a long, introspective letter Myra had written to Ann West. Her maladroit attempt to express sorrow (‘the remorse I feel is agonising – the wounds have reopened again and are raw-edged and festering’) backfired spectacularly due to one particular sentence, which drew censure from almost every quarter: ‘I now want to say to you, and I implore you to believe me, because it is the truth, that your child was not physically tortured, as is widely believed.’80 Her words were abysmally inept; intending to refute the rumours that Lesley was not mutilated prior to her death, Myra failed to grasp that the ordeal to which the little girl was subjected before her murder was precisely that – physical and psychological torture.

  Few journalists were willing to be magnanimous toward Myra. A rare exception was Peter Stanford, with whom she had corresponded since the beginning of the year. A reporter and then editor of the Catholic Herald, Stanford had become interested in Myra’s case through his friendship with Lord Longford. He began corresponding with her; Myra’s first letter to him largely concerns her loathing of the media, who ‘accuse me of never showing any remorse, as though I should put out a daily bulletin informing the unforgiving public of the particular degree of remorse on any given day . . . I find a great comfort in knowing that Christ, for very different reasons, was also maligned and reviled . . . It helps a very great deal to know that some small part of the media isn’t hell-bent on crucifixion but instead suggests a resurrection. The tabloids would no doubt vilify me for using such analogies as I have, but what better analogy to use?’81 She enclosed £5 for the Catholic Herald’s leprosy appeal: ‘that’s something I can all too easily identify with mentally’.82 Stanford visited her in Cookham Wood, wincing as he stood up when her name was called out in the antechamber to the visitor’s room and unsure which of the inmates was Myra: ‘I didn’t like to go up to someone and say, “Hello, are you Myra Hindley?” But then I caught the eye of this mousy-looking woman sitting at a table, her hair dyed purplish and cut in an unflattering style. She had a very red face, lots of broken veins, and was quite small, quite slight, and sitting at the table with her arms crossed. We talked mostly about three things: religion, Frank Longford and about her case. She was very witty and an acute observer of the world. We had a long conversation about Margaret Thatcher, by whom she felt very let down, and women’s rights. She was straightforward, articulate and warm. Having said that, I was never wholly won over by her. I could always think of a caveat to anything positive that she did, which was awkward. I supported her bid for freedom, but that was another matter.’83

  He didn’t doubt that her Catholicism was genuine: ‘I spend a lot of time around religious people and there didn’t seem any dissemblance there. In one of our chats she told me that she listened to Thought for the Day on Radio 4. She said, “I’d be very good on that programme.” I said, “You should do it,” and she replied, “I would if they’d let me.” I approached Reverend Ernie Ray, head of religious broadcasting at the time, but he said it was more than his job was worth. But there again, I suppose our letters and conversations were very religious because she thought that’s what I was interested in. She played the part with whoever was her latest saviour. Frank Longford was 50 years out of date with public opinion; David Astor was 20 years out of date. Basically, Frank believed that if you said it often enough people would agree with you in the end and David thought that you could drip feed these things and change opinions that way. Dear old Frank didn’t do her cause any good in the end, and he didn’t do himself any good either. It’s true what the victims’ families suspected: Frank wasn’t interested in victims. That’s the bottom line.’84

  He discussed her crimes with her but not in great depth: ‘I didn’t want to know. She talked a lot about her remorse, but it’s difficult to reconcile with her not telling the truth about the other two children for so long, although I can understand how she got herself into that fix. Frank started visiting her in the late 1960s, and very soon was talking about parole and release and she got carried away with that, and she believed it was going to happen. I don’t excuse her in any way at all, and if I was the parent of those children I would hate her for it. And it was a strange thing between her and Ian Brady, even then. Whenever he came up in conversation, she was very hostile towards him, but in an oddly competitive way. In relation to that, there was a very uncomfortable moment when I was visiting her at Cookham Wood. I’d bought Myra a bar of chocolate. Children were running round the table where we were sitting, and she picked up the chocolate bar, smiled at this little boy and waved the chocolate bar at him. I just sat there and thought, “Oh God . . . this is how you did it.” It was extremely sinister. The overtones . . . I sat there horrified, and she must have picked up on that, but it didn’t stop her, she went on waving this chocolate bar at the little boy. There was something in the way she did it that made me think there was a knowingness in it. There were things that made me uneasy. In the early days I took everything more at face value, but perhaps when you have children you look at things differently.’85

  On one occasion, Stanford was accompanied on a visit to Myra by Bernard Black, who had written to her at the request of his friend John Trevelyan. Myra described Black, who was also Catholic, as ‘kind and caring and with such integrity and a first-class brain’.86 He recalls: ‘I saw her several times, always with other people, and most of the conversations were about trying to get her case heard again. I never got involved with that but nothing I saw or read from her indicated she might be a danger to the public. I found it hard to understand how the person I got to know could have been responsible for the crimes she had committed. Her letters were exceptionally lucid, but in person she was rather miserable, which you might expect from someone who had been all that time in prison. I felt sorry for her, but she didn’t help herself by keeping quiet for so many years about the extent of her involvement.’87 Bernard Black’s wife, Margaret, never met her: ‘No, I didn’t want to. I’m a mum and perhaps we have slightly different feelings to men.’88

  Writing was Myra’s main concern for much of 1988; she was scathing when she heard that Ian had asked Lord Longford to edit his prison letters, writing to Astor that it was ‘rather a coincidence that Elizabeth is advising me, and Brady wants Frank to edit the letters he urged Frank to destroy after he’d sent them’.89 On 2 June, she sent a delighted letter to the Revd Peter Timms about having been approached by barrister Helena Kennedy (who acted as junior counsel for Myra during her 1974 trial) to write an afterword for a book Kennedy was planning to edit about the role of women in child-connected crimes.90 In addition, André Deutsch had agreed to publish Myra’s autobiography and she was writing assiduously, mostly about her relationship with Ian, which gave her ‘a succession of most unpleasant dreams, which I really can’t handle’.91

  She was distressed the following month when she learned that her stepfather had died of a heart attack; although she had disliked him, she worried about the effect on her mother: ‘He died on July 8, the day before my sister’s anniversary, and I felt so sorry for my mother because she, like me, has never got over Maureen’s death. He was buried on the 14th, the day before Maureen’s funeral.’92 Her immediate concern was her mother’s precarious financial situation and she queried whether her publisher might advance her some funds, but David Astor came to the rescue with money from his own pocket.

  Plans for Myra’s autobiography continued apace. Diana Athill, one of Britain’s finest literary editors and writers, was approached to work on the book, but wanted to meet Myra before she would commit to the project. Athill visited her with Peter Timms, and found her ‘intelligent, responsive, human, dignified. And if someone had then informed me that this unknown woman had been in prison for twenty-two years I would have been amazed: how could a person of whom that was true appear to have been so little institutionalised?’93 Myra discussed her OU degree, Catholicism and the press. Athill recalls: ‘She was flippant rather than grateful about what she called “my old m
en” – Lord Longford, David Astor and Timms.’94 Ultimately, Athill turned down the role of editor for Myra’s autobiography, doubting its worth both for the public and as a means of purging Myra of her own past: ‘When she did what she did she was not mad – as Brady was – and although she was young, she was an adult, and an intelligent one. It seems to me that there are strands of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned: that Stangl was right when, having faced the truth about himself, he said, “I ought to be dead.”’95

  A new solicitor was secured for Myra: Andrew McCooey, who also happened to be a close friend of Lord Longford. ‘Peter Timms asked me if I would be willing to act for her,’ McCooey recalls. ‘I discussed it with my wife and she said that if I felt I should do it, then to go ahead. I never regretted it, although there were some family members who thought I was mad to take this particular case on – my brother, for instance. Of course Myra came with a huge amount of baggage and was a Medusa figure as far as the press were concerned. The tabloids would ring me at midnight and ask the most preposterous questions: “Is it true that Myra’s getting married?” I would respond wearily, “Do you know what time it is?” “Yes, but now you’re awake, can you just reply to the question?” And I would say sarcastically, “Well, of course it’s true. She has so much choice in an all-female prison.” They would then report that the next day as my having confirmed the rumour. My phone lines were constantly engaged and journalists and photographers were always at my door. John Kay of The Sun said to me, “Anything you can give us about Myra, I will guarantee you a front-page spread.” She was as lucrative to them as Princess Diana.