One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Undeterred by The Sun’s 1997 declaration that she was ‘the most evil woman of all time’, Myra decided to redraft her autobiography, giving it the provisional title A Model Prisoner. On 20 February, she wrote to Astor, railing against her ‘medieval’ punishment: ‘confinement for 32 years, with ever-declining hope throughout, because of what I did when I was a daft and besotted girl . . . I seem to have been turned into a sort of real-life Countess of Monte Cristo in the closing years of this century . . .’47 Astor remained troubled by Myra’s alliance with Nina Wilde; he told barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC that he was still prepared to help her if she were released, ‘but only via a charitable institution willing to be responsible for her care. She never liked the idea of protection by an institution, but I see no other possibility.’48

  Fitzgerald was preparing to put Myra’s case to a Judicial Review. Married to one of Lord Longford’s granddaughters, his hugely successful legal career gave Myra renewed hope of overturning her tariff. Astor had absolute faith in Fitzgerald, but fretted about the loopholes the Home Secretary might exploit to keep Myra imprisoned, even if the review went in her favour: ‘An objection to her release on the grounds that this would invite crimes against her is expected. As things stand, this would mean holding her, after over 30 years, for perhaps another 20 years.’49 He viewed it as ‘the moral equivalent of a woman who had been turned into a witch, being put in an “oubliette”.’50 Joe Chapman, on the other hand, no longer believed that Myra would ever set foot outside prison and abandoned the campaign. As the review approached, the media was saturated with articles and television programmes about Myra. Danny Kilbride resigned from his job to petition against her and collected 140,000 signatures in Ashton-under-Lyne alone from people who felt she should die in prison.

  On the eve of the appeal, the Bolton Evening News reported the death of Joe Mounsey, whose dogged determination helped bring Myra Hindley and Ian Brady to justice. His widow, Margaret, recalls, ‘He was “demobilised” at the age of 64 and had a grand retirement, really. We did talk about Hindley when she was making her bid for freedom. Joe always said, “They can do what they bloody like with her, as long as they don’t stick her next door to me.”’51

  On 18 December 1997, the Divisional Court dismissed Myra’s appeal.

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  I wonder if that horrible young woman would have managed life all right if she hadn’t met him. Not so badly, anyway, I think. Indeed, if I can raise a glimmer of sympathy for her at all, it isn’t exactly for her – but for the kind of blinding passion that drove her. In another context it could have seemed classic and wonderful. Not in this one . . .

  Pamela Hansford Johnson, letter to Emlyn Williams, 5 June 1967

  In early 1998, Myra was moved to Highpoint, a medium-security prison in Suffolk whose rules were so relaxed in comparison to other prisons that it was known as ‘High-de-hi-Point’. On 2 March, she wrote to David Astor that she was delighted with the place, and especially with her room in the segregation wing: ‘The walls are a pale restful green with a lovely papered frieze across the centre of each wall, and a brown fitted carpet . . . a TV, which to me is magical – it’s also got video facilities . . . I also have a job as the segregation unit library orderly . . . so far as anyone can be content in prison, I am.’1 She wrote to Bernard Black in similarly joyful terms, describing how her visits were to be held away from the other prisoners in the adjudication room, ‘unsupervised but with the door open, of course’. She explained that she was ‘considered to be a Category D inmate, as in 1995, the Parole Board recommended that I go to an open prison for two years to be prepared for release – which [Michael] Howard the Coward vetoed immediately, with the aid of Doris Karloff [Anne Widdecombe].’ She was astonished to be given her own garden, ‘a large, square weed and rubble-filled mess’, which she planned to split, turning half into a Japanese herbal rockery and the other into an English cottage garden, inspired by the creaking garden door that ‘reminds me of the secret garden in that lovely book of the same name’.2 She was so buoyed by the changes in her life that she intended to alter her image with a different hairstyle and new clothes.

  She began taking communion in her cell, where Father Michael Teader visited her every week to hear her confession and hold a Eucharistic service. Despite 20 years’ experience in the Prison Service, he admits to ‘a certain apprehension when I first went to see her. The photo of her in the press was that young, hard-faced mugshot. But I met this elderly woman who was using sticks, had arthritis and wasn’t well. She was very quiet, polite and cautious because everything she said and did ended up in the press. It took some time for her to trust me. Father Bert White provided the bridge between us, then when he withdrew I became more trusted. Because of her isolation, services were always in her room with Sister Carmel. She was in a little wing off the segregation unit. It wasn’t a cell, although it was very small. She did everything in her room, from washing to going to the toilet, from having her meals to sleeping there. The room next to hers was for vulnerable prisoners. Myra would chat to the person there and help them if she could.’3 Myra joined a number of charities that year, including Amnesty, Greenpeace, Common Ground and the Worldwide Society for the Protection of Animals. Father Michael recalls: ‘When we took services together, she would pray for different things that had happened in the world. God became very strong in her life. She often talked about the church she had known in her childhood and became very wistful about its beauty. She was a spiritual woman. Spiritual more than religious – also because of the way we practise our religion in a community, gathering with others to pray and sing. Hers was only with myself and Sister Carmel. I was very aware that Sister Carmel and myself were probably her only true friends.’4

  Occasionally, they discussed her past and her crimes: ‘I wouldn’t have said she was a psychopath because she empathised with people and was capable of deep love. I think Brady was the psychopath. She did have an obsessive streak, I will say that, she got these interests and would just focus, focus, focus on something. There would be a trigger and then it would be all or nothing. She was a very strong woman and could be manipulative, but that’s also part of being in prison – it’s survival. But the lies in the press hurt her. She’d created victims, but in the end she became a victim too – of the press and politics. I don’t think the media understood the conflict she had within herself. She had gone through denial, self-loathing and fear. Redemption is the right word because redemption is a process; there are very few people for whom it is a flash of light. She was redeemed and rehabilitated. If she’d been released and housed next door to you, there would have been no problem. You would have seen her as a nice old lady and the next thing you would have been offering to help her with her shopping. Before much longer she would have had you running all sorts of errands because that’s who she was, but I don’t know that Myra would have had any knowledge of the reality of life outside. Prison doesn’t rehabilitate in that sense. She would have been no danger to the public, but I’m not certain how she would have coped going out into a world she hadn’t known for 30-odd years.’5

  Journalists were among the people Myra trusted least of all, although she had been corresponding with The Independent’s Steve Boggan and reporter Alan Watkins since he had written to her concerning a detail of European law. In one letter to Watkins, Myra deliberated: ‘I do not think you understand killing, although you may mean to try to. I don’t think anyone who has not killed can understand killing.’6 In 1998, she began working with Duncan Staff, who had contacted her a few months earlier about a possible World in Action special. She agreed to cooperate with the programme, writing to David Astor: ‘In exchange for my participation in a way to be discussed at a later date, I asked for a written guarantee that Nina would not feature in any way in the programme.’7 The World in Action feature fell through when Duncan Staff left Granada, but he remained interested in her case and intended to produce his own programme. In April 1998, he wrote back to Myra, agreeing t
o her terms and reassuring her that he had no intention of interviewing the victims’ relatives since he felt that their emotional involvement made an intelligent assessment of the case impossible. Myra and her supporters were won over by his premise.

  All year, her legal team prepared new evidence for the Court of Appeal which they hoped would prove Myra had been coerced into the crimes by Ian’s systematic abuse and threats to her family. To that end, she wrote a tangled, seven-page statement detailing his alleged violence towards her and asserting that the pornographic photographs in which they both appeared were taken under duress. The new material would be presented alongside reports about her progress in prison. Aware of Ian’s threat to release her post-arrest letters to him, Myra decided on a high-risk strategy; she told journalist Steve Boggan about the letters herself, explaining how the code worked and citing the line about throwing acid on toddler Brett Downey as an example, adding: ‘Won’t the media love that; that I could have been so utterly callous as to write messages like that to Brady, not knowing the facts behind it or what was coded in his messages to me.’8 She declared: ‘I’m pissed off with [Brady’s] half-raving but very lucid threats made so often over the years. I’m not prepared to have a public slanging match with him; that’s beneath my dignity and certainly my contempt, but as I said earlier in this letter, I will fight the bastard in public.’9 Myra insisted to Boggan: ‘People think I am the arch-villain in this, the instigator, the perpetrator . . . Brady made me do it . . . He dominated me completely.’10 She claimed that guilt had prevented her from speaking out before about the ‘dreadful abuse’ to which Ian subjected her.11

  Boggan published the information she gave him. Ian’s reaction was immediate; in an open letter, he sneered: ‘Hindley, in her usual Barbara Cartland prose, has created a Victorian melodrama . . . the 33 years of duplicity, taking advantage of others to achieve her impossible aims, has apparently exacted its toll . . . driving her into the realms of psychotic delusion and absurdity.’12 Joe Chapman waded in with a statement of his own: ‘Myra had a responsibility in the crimes that had nothing to do with the beatings from Brady. Myra has omitted to go into the details of her crimes openly. Perhaps the main reason is she does not want to turn people away from her by coming out with what she has done. She has to own up to that responsibility.’13 Myra raged about Boggan’s ‘betrayal’ but was equally livid at Ian’s comparison of her with Barbara Cartland: ‘The bastard, how dare he compare me to that old painted clown! I’ve never read a single one of her books; he obviously has.’14

  In the same letter she expressed concern for Alan Bennett. A Sun reporter had confronted him as he left prison after visiting Myra to discuss the location of Keith’s grave; the newspaper ran an article on the front page under the headline: ‘Evil Myra Murdered His Little Brother . . . Yet He’s Gone to Jail to Give Her a Hug’. The article had several repercussions, causing problems between Alan and his mother, Winnie, until she understood the reason behind his association with Myra. In a letter to Astor, Myra wrote spitefully about Winnie: ‘The hypocritical old bag . . . she got her solicitor to send me a letter from her, in which she said I must undergo hypnosis. I felt like writing back saying I would do, after she’d undergone a brain implant.’15

  In September, Myra’s legal team – Edward Fitzgerald QC and solicitor Jim Nichol – advised her to cease communication with Duncan Staff, worried that his documentary might be seen as an attempt to influence public opinion, which in turn might adversely affect her court case. She assured her supporters, ‘I just know that [Staff] will never betray me and will help me wherever I’ve asked him to.’16 Following concerned letters from Staff to her solicitor, Myra wrote to Astor that she hoped they could find a compromise, since she wanted the documentary to go ahead but was very anxious not to attract the ‘wrong’ sort of exposure. She had been angry with Lord Longford on a recent visit with his wife because ‘he absolutely monopolises the conversation by talking about publicity . . . there is no way I’ll ever shut him up’.17 She was upset again when the Save the Children Fund returned two private donations she had made; David Astor and Terry Waite wrote to the director of the fund, explaining that his letter of refusal had ‘reduced her to tears’.18 But the director stood firm; the fund would not accept donations from Myra Hindley.

  In January 1999, Myra wrote in a more optimistic mood to David Astor about a visit she had received from Geoff Knupfer, ‘with whom I’ve maintained contact, whom I trust implicitly and who has been very helpful and supportive by writing letters to the Parole Board and to my legal team for use at the courts, etc.’.19 That same month she informed Bernard Black that she had been granted Legal Aid for her appeal: ‘My legal team are cautiously optimistic . . . but personally I think we’ll have to go to the European Court of Human Rights, so have “set” seven to eight years aside until the whole process is finished.’20 She outlined her plans to upgrade her Honours degree from a lower to an upper second and perhaps an MA; she had provisionally settled on studying Charlotte Mew, a much-underrated poet whose work she had quoted in her remand letters to Ian. The following month, the Daily Mirror ran a front-page article on a story that was already five years old but which caused ructions nonetheless: ‘Jailed Moors Murderer Myra Hindley spent three hours looking after an eight-year-old girl with only her lesbian lover supervising the astonishing visit’.21 Joe Chapman recalls: ‘Prison staff are encouraged to bring their children in on occasion, under supervision, obviously. On that day, I’d taken Sophie into the healthcare centre, where she did some crayoning with Myra and spent some time doing forward rolls and so on in the gym, while Myra and Nina applauded. I don’t regret what happened, only the way it was reported, which was my fault. I was telling a journalist how Myra had changed and he said, “Ah, yes, but would you trust your own children with her?” Stupid me, I said, “Well, I have done.” And out it came.’22 An internal investigation was launched and a statement was issued, reassuring the public that measures were in place to prevent similar incidents. David Astor was infuriated by the negative publicity; his accountant informed Joe Chapman that he was withdrawing his financial support for the Replay Trust, Chapman’s charity. Several other donors followed his lead.

  In February 1999, Myra’s most formidable opponent, Ann West, died of cancer. In one of her last interviews, she described how Lesley’s grave had been repeatedly damaged; Let Myra Go had been scratched across the marble headstone, and eventually Ann and her husband decided to have her daughter re-interred at a secret spot. Shortly before her death, Ann had visited the moor and presented retired policeman Robert Spiers with a plaque thanking him for bringing her daughter home. She told a journalist to pass a message on to Myra: ‘If there is such a thing as haunting and ghosts, I’ll be on her shoulder morning, noon and night. She’ll not get rid of me.’23 As part of her posthumous battle against Myra’s bid for parole, she gave permission to journalist and producer Clive Entwistle to include one of Ian Brady’s photographs of ten-year-old Lesley, bound and gagged, in his documentary about the Moors Murders. The tape recording was deemed too harrowing for broadcast.

  Myra’s supporters continued to work ceaselessly on her behalf. Astor considered purchasing a property in the Chatham area to rent out to Myra and Tricia, who continued to be part of her life. He also made enquiries about the possibility of Myra’s release into a religious community, one of which was Turvey Abbey in Bedfordshire, recommended by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Norwich, who had visited Myra. Astor’s emotional and fiscal support was extensive: since May 1998, when he declared himself ‘shocked by the smallness of your spending money’, he had instructed his lawyers to provide Myra with the sum of £200 a month, and for a six-month period increased it to £250.24 In addition to her allowance, he paid her legal and medical bills, and her monthly expenses, which included items such as books, videos, bouquets for her cell, Moonberry Musk body spray, presents for relatives, Jungian analysis and a Filofax in response to her request to be as ‘normal’ as poss
ible, as well as fleecy bedsocks, a featherbed topper, quilted bedspread and bottles of whisky for her mother. His widow, Bridget, confirms: ‘He certainly did fund Myra’s legal campaign and so on, because he believed in it. Myra asked for financial help for her mother, but I’m not sure how often. We have a benevolent fund and I don’t know if he used that money or not, but neither of them cringed. They had a lot of dignity, Myra and her mother.’25 Bridget wasn’t involved in the parole campaign but visited Myra regularly: ‘She had her own room in Highpoint and was surrounded by her belongings and pictures of her family. We could have been visiting someone down the road, just having a cup of tea. She talked about her family a great deal. She loved her niece very much – that was completely genuine. We visited her mother, who was a very pleasant woman, angular, tall, calm and, as I said, extremely dignified. Myra was someone I would be pleased to welcome after her release, to meet up with for tea and so on. I liked her very much. One does tend to like people who’ve gone through things and come out the other side.’26