One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Moral deformity implies a monster, another term frequently applied to Myra; it was the title of a 2003 documentary by Michael Attwell, Myra: The Making of a Monster. On old, nautical maps, unexplored oceans were inscribed with the legend ‘Here Be Monsters’ and often supplemented with images of gigantic and fearsome beasts of the deep. The unknown is still regarded as threatening; in our fears that which is strange and unfamiliar becomes monstrous, ugly. Yvonne Roberts explains: ‘In Myra, it was as if the public could see the dark side of all women. That mugshot of Hindley from the 1960s is the symbolic incarnation of woman as witch, woman as monster. She looked a certain way and played into our nightmares.’16 Peter Stanford agrees: ‘It’s a picture of the twentieth-century devil. That’s all the devil was – a face that we put to the intangible reality of evil, a religious construct. Now we find that rather medieval and foolish, but continue to create our own devils through the media, and that picture became the icon of evil.’17 In 1997, Marcus Harvey’s vast canvas of the mugshot, recreated using children’s handprints, was unveiled at the Sensation exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Winnie Johnson led the protests by Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, academicians resigned and the painting had to be reinstalled behind Perspex after someone threw eggs and ink at it. Myra herself asked for the work to be removed, writing in a letter to The Guardian that the idea that art was meant to be challenging was ‘a lame and unacceptable excuse’.18 The artist defended it as a critique of the media’s exploitation of the original photograph. It was also ‘a classic example of a pittura infamante – a painting intended to defame. The handprints of the child . . . literally brand Hindley with her crimes.’19

  An article published in The People two months before Myra’s death in 2002 epitomises the tendency to equate physical ugliness with moral deformity. It reads in part: ‘These are Myra Hindley’s twelve faces of evil . . . she is always marked out by her: STARING, close-set eyes, TIGHT, cruel thin lips, UGLY, bulbous nose, and SQUARE, masculine jaw . . . 1965: She is just 23 – but looks years older when arrested for the Moors Murders . . . a chilling stare sends shivers down the spines of parents everywhere . . . 1966: her jaw is defiantly set . . . 1967: the unblinking darkness of her staring eyes . . . 1969: the smile never reaches those evil eyes . . . 1973: even with long hair curling around her neck it’s impossible to soften those hard-edged features . . . 1976: there is no mistaking that glare . . . 1977: nothing can ever add sparkle to a face so blank and dead . . . 1978: The years are beginning to take their toll on the ageing monster . . . 1980: The soulless eyes are tired and narrow . . . 1982: Any attempt at femininity has gone . . . 1996: The change is dramatic. Bloated and puffy . . . 2002: Her bulbous nose could be reshaped, her square jaw softened and lines reduced with collagen. But could even the most skilled surgeon ever hope to hide the Hindley Mask of Evil?’20

  Female criminals are portrayed either as treacherously beautiful or hideously repulsive; their appearance is regarded as uniquely relevant to their deeds. Vanessa George, the nursery worker charged in 2009 with abusing toddlers in her care and taking indecent photographs of them, is habitually referred to as ‘18 stone Vanessa George’, hinting at the uncontrollable appetites beneath her skin. The media demonisation of women who harm is to no one’s advantage. Such descriptions serve to remove them from humanity and place them firmly in ‘Here Be Monsters’ territory, thereby cloaking the unpalatable and largely unspoken fact that ‘ordinary’ women both collude in and instigate the abuse of children. Such imagery builds on the stereotypes established by Caesar Lombroso and William Ferrero in their 1895 study The Female Offender, in which the woman criminal was characterised as biologically abnormal; her sexuality is always suspect, whatever her offence – she is essentially more male than female. Now, as then, a woman who behaves cruelly is seen as betraying her nature. ‘Rarely is a woman wicked,’ wrote Caesar Lombroso, ‘but when she is she surpasses the male.’21 A woman who deliberately harms a child commits ‘the sin for which there is no forgiveness . . . a boundary which we cannot imagine ourselves crossing’.22 Because of her gender we either banish her completely or find excuses for her; if she acts in conjunction with a man, she is either handmaiden to a master or a dominant female who enslaves her partner. Past prejudices complicate our view: we find it impossible to believe that she might simply be equally culpable, equally inclined to abusing and murdering children.

  Myra’s defenders – very few of whom were women willing to state their support of her publicly – believe that she was coerced and browbeaten into the crimes. Her solicitor, Andrew McCooey states: ‘She was intimidated and threatened, entirely in Brady’s thrall, in fear of her own life and frightened for those she loved. It should also be borne in mind that she didn’t physically harm the children herself, except maybe to slap them once or twice to get them to do as they were being told.’23 David Astor was of the opinion that Myra was brainwashed by Ian Brady and described her state of mind as similar to the German nation under Nazi rule. Helena Kennedy QC writes that ‘while her role was criminal and appalling, she was not the prime mover in the murders’.24 If that were true, should it minimise her culpability? Were the guards at Auschwitz and Belsen less blameworthy than the architects of the Holocaust, asserting that they were merely carrying out the duties demanded of them by their superiors? Myra wept as she discussed the issue with her prison therapist: ‘Could they be so forgiving if they knew the whole story? I have said that I became as evil as Ian, but if they knew how deep that went everything would be spoiled.’25

  The roots of her iniquity are regarded as an enigma. The primary explanation offered publicly by Myra herself – that she acted under duress – is upheld by her supporters. In a curious adjunct, Myra offered another justification. In the first draft of her autobiography, she ended her introduction with a question: ‘If the sins of the father cause the child to be born with congenital syphilis, does it follow that the sins of the child should cause the innocent mother to become infected by that sin, and to be persecuted and harassed almost beyond endurance? I hope not; I pray not.’26 Her implication – which is unconfirmed and may simply have been another attempt to find a pretext for her crimes – was that her father had at some point contracted syphilis and infected her mother who, when pregnant, had passed it on to her daughter. On 28 July 1987, Myra’s then solicitor, Michael Fisher, wrote to David Astor after a conversation he had had with Dr Betty Tylden, a psychiatrist often called in as an expert on child abuse cases. Tylden had expressed the opinion that Myra’s state of mind at the time of her crimes could have been affected by her apparent congenital syphilis. Fisher felt that Myra might take some small comfort from the idea that her actions had perhaps been influenced by an inherited illness and he wondered whether it might be worthwhile investigating further.27 The following month David Astor replied tersely to Michael Fisher, advising him to drop the subject: he was in little doubt that a doctor’s reference underlining Myra’s congenital syphilis would be detrimental to her morale.

  More commonly, in an effort to convince her detractors that she hadn’t suffered ‘moral deformity’ she asked women to empathise with her and men to pity her: ‘I challenge any woman who loved a man as deeply and as blindly as I loved Ian Brady to look into her heart and say under similar circumstances she would have gone to the police.’28 When that failed, she drew on the psychoanalytic staple of vindication for her actions – a brutal childhood. And it was brutal in parts, but perhaps its deepest injury to her was the inconsistency of her upbringing: spoiled and indulged by Gran, flitting home daily to her warring parents. She learned to embellish the hardships, especially after submitting the first draft of her manuscript to her advisors, who encouraged her to amplify ‘whatever were the chief strains of childhood’.29 Her father became an unredeemable ogre in her subsequent memoirs, yet there are hints in her private correspondence that the truth was more complex. In a 1999 letter to Myra, David Astor praises her inner strength, remarking that her ‘emotional warmth
’ probably came from her mother or grandmother, and her ‘courage and daring from your dad’.30 After a visit to Nellie, the Revd Peter Timms wrote to Myra: ‘I showed her the pictures [of the Open University ceremony] and her comment immediately was how proud your dad would have been of you and of your achievements.’31 Despite Myra’s protestations that she was the cuckoo in the nest as a child, when her sister Maureen went to the police about her crimes, the family rallied around Myra, ousting Maureen for several years until finally they were reconciled. Danny Kilbride is angered by psychologists who cite Myra’s childhood experiences as a factor in her crimes: ‘Look what happened to me when I was a kid. Why didn’t I become a maniac? Millions of people have had her childhood, and much worse, but they don’t then go on to murder children. There is nothing in her childhood that can account in any way for what she did.’32

  Myra and Ian each blamed the other for their crimes; in a letter to a regular correspondent, Ian wrote: ‘It was my bad luck to meet Myra.’33 But they were surprisingly similar in many respects. Each felt ostracised by their parents in some way – Ian by his mother and Myra by her father. There are glimpses of excessive temper as children in both, and intimations of taking satisfaction in the violence they meted out. They shared a sense of being an outsider among their peers, although both were able to form friendships in the schoolyard. There were very minor acts of criminality in their childhoods; Ian continued that through to his teens and ended up in borstal before he met Myra. They were ambitious beyond the confines of their upbringing, and intelligent, though not the geniuses they liked to believe; the education they received in prison was viewed by them both as the only compensation for their loss of freedom. They both had a strong competitive streak that occasionally ended in outbursts of temper – Myra in sports, Ian in games and betting. They had an innate sense of superiority and a tendency towards grandiosity – Ian’s love of long words, Myra’s habit of comparing herself to literary characters. They openly admitted to having little respect for people but were excessively devoted to their pets and attacked those suspected of harming animals. When they met, their shared excessive public prudery concealed an interest in sadomasochism, use of pornography and role play in private. In place of religion, they followed the doctrines of Nazism and nihilism, and, bored with their environment, developed an existential view of the world. Power and control were important to them. ‘We became our own gods,’ Myra declared. They became hopelessly disconnected from normal life, and that sense of disconnection remained, with Ian seemingly failing to comprehend how discordant his remarks about drawing ‘energy, spiritual stimulation and delight from the relative innocence and spontaneity of the young’ are when juxtaposed with his crimes.34 Myra’s response to Yvonne Roberts’s question about her cruelty towards Lesley Ann Downey (‘That girl shouldn’t have been out so late at night’) betrays a similar detachment. In 1997, Myra wrote to David Astor about the difficulty of dealing with Lesley’s abduction in her autobiography, displaying the same lack of understanding: ‘I could reiterate that I didn’t know a tape recording was being made and say that had I known, I would have been careful what I said, given that people now think that I was the evil genius. I could also point out . . . that the child wasn’t pleading for her life but pleading to go home . . .’35 Such an inappropriate and inanely egocentric phrase: ‘I would have been careful what I said.’

  Myra insisted that before the murders she was in thrall to Ian, spellbound by his ‘powerful personality [and] magnet-like charisma’.36 She tried to convince the Parole Board that her crimes had their source in the ‘virginal, vulnerable, young and inexperienced heart’ that she gave to Ian: ‘Within months, he had convinced me that there was no God at all (he could have told me the earth was flat, the moon made of green cheese, that the sun rose in the west and I would have believed him). He became my god, my idol, my object of worship and I worshipped him blindly, more blindly than the congenitally blind.’37 Years later, she reiterated: ‘He was God . . . I just couldn’t say “no” to him.’38 But she couldn’t say no to Norman Sutton either, the married policeman with whom she had an affair in the aftermath of Pauline Reade’s murder, which suggests that her obsession with Ian wasn’t as all-encompassing as she claimed. Her character was robust enough to withstand the fears of discovery that were attached to the affair – of PC Sutton finding out about the murder, and of his wife and Ian learning about the clandestine relationship. Sutton himself provided the perfect opportunity to unburden herself of ‘the terrible secret’ she and Ian shared; if she truly felt unable to confess the murder plot to the police prior to its conclusion, afterwards she had absolute proof to present to a policeman with whom she spent many intimate hours alone. Turning Ian in to the authorities was surely a safer alternative to living with a psychopath whose alleged threat to kill her – and her family – would persist until his capture. She might have faced prison for her part in the conspiracy to murder Pauline Reade, but the charges against her would have been far less than they were two years hence.

  ‘Curse all goddamned bad men,’ she wrote to a friend from prison, ‘and curse the bad luck we women have – and the bad judgement – when we meet them and fall for them and lose our sense of perspective and just about everything else we have to lose.’39 No doubt most of us have been fools for love in one form or another, but Myra’s loss of perspective went much further than mere stupidity. ‘I knew what we were doing was wrong,’ she admitted. ‘But I can’t explain it.’40 The real depth of her involvement will never now be known, but over the years fragments of her participation in the crimes emerged from Myra herself. We know from what she was willing to admit that she and Ian fantasised about abusing and murdering children as part of their sex lives. Before the murders, she drove about Manchester with Ian at her side, tailing children, while he told her what he would like to do to a victim, and they sat together outside her old school, Ryder Brow, taking surreptitious photographs of children at play. She admitted that having the power of life and death in her own hands excited her and that their best performances sexually as a couple occurred in the immediate aftermath of a murder. She abducted the children. We don’t know whether she was present at the first four murders: predictably, she insisted she wasn’t, and equally predictably, Ian asserts that she was, but she was standing in front of Edward Evans when he was killed, passing the comment an hour or so later: ‘His eyes registered astonishment when you hit him.’41 Ian Fairley, who arrested Ian Brady the following morning, proclaims: ‘How she acted afterwards reveals that she had seen other killings. Evans’s death was particularly bloody. There aren’t many women who could stand in front of a young man as an axe was brought down upon his head, help clear up the mess and then dress for work the next day as if nothing had happened. I’ve been a policeman long enough to recognise the difference between someone who’s just witnessed their first murder and someone who is used to it. She was the latter.’42

  We know that she was present at the tape recording and photographing of Lesley Ann Downey, helping to gag and restrain the girl, and threatening to hit her when she cried. The weird restraint of the tape recording and photographs – Lesley’s rape and murder were not documented on either, when they could so easily have been – demonstrates that their creators were connoisseurs of cruelty. Despite Myra’s pleading with Ann West to believe that Lesley was not tortured prior to her death, all the children were made to suffer. The blood on Lesley and Keith that Myra conceded to having seen came not from their fatal wounds but from the rapes to which her lover subjected them. Their murders were uniformly brutal: Pauline’s throat was slit; Ian tried to kill John the same way, but the knife was too blunt and he strangled him instead; Keith was strangled; Lesley was either smothered or strangled; Edward was struck 14 times with an axe but survived long enough for Ian to decide to strangle him. We know that she looked at the photographs of Lesley and Keith after their deaths because she admitted it to Peter Topping, and her fingerprints were found on the photograp
hs of Lesley.

  Then there was the preparation of it all: she conferred with Ian about the lure held out to the victim to entice them into the vehicle; she discussed with him where she should drive and what she should do; she accepted a record on the morning of each murder, knowing its significance; she ventured into a department store to buy a black wig to disguise herself, and stood at a till to hand over the murder weapons for John Kilbride’s death – a knife, rope and spade; she hired the abduction vehicles; she bought the tape recorder that would document Lesley’s last hours and Patty Hodges talking about the little girl’s disappearance; she bought the camera Ian used to take photographs of the victims and their graves.

  And afterwards: she crouched on John Kilbride’s grave, staring down at the ground with that strange half-smile on her lips; she stood grinning on the rocks overlooking at least three graves, while Ian snapped away with his camera; she enjoyed picnicking on the moor beside the graves with her sister and children from the neighbourhood. After her arrest, she exchanged coded letters with her lover in which they continued to fantasise about child rape and murder. In prison, she listened to the songs that Ian had bought her to commemorate the killings and asked her mother for a fresh copy of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the record that marked the last murder. It was six years before she broke off her relationship with Ian. Even then, she couldn’t bring herself to be honest about the other murders until Ian forced her hand; her ex-partner, Tricia Cairns, asserts that Myra only told the truth because she had no choice. And she used a promise to be hypnotised in the effort to find Keith Bennett’s grave as a bargaining tool to receive visits from another lover.