One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  None of this is surmise; it is all by her own admission. Afterwards, she spoke eloquently of remorse and her supporters have no doubt that she was genuinely a changed woman who regretted with every ounce of her being what she had done. But what troubled those of us who didn’t know her personally was summed up in an article by Nicci Gerrard, when she asked: ‘How could the pleasant-looking woman peaceful in the garden, the smiling woman receiving her Open University degree, be the one who had tortured and killed children, who had posed laughing on the moors beside a grave? Can you change so much that you are someone else entirely, struggling free from the ghastly wreckage of your past?’43 Yvonne Roberts, who did meet Myra very briefly, is convinced that she was psychotic. Is it possible, then, to enter a psychotic state in which such crimes are committed and then to return – and be allowed to return – to a normal life? Father Michael tells us that she wasn’t psychotic at all because she was capable of empathising with others and feeling deep love for people. Yet even as she professed remorse and offered heartfelt prayers for those afflicted by leprosy, starvation or homelessness, she wrote spiteful letters about the mothers of her victims, suggesting one required a ‘brain implant’ and the other was a ‘pain in the neck’.44

  Andrew McCooey believes that religion saved her from insanity, but redemption on Earth proved impossible. ‘What happens to us in a world which has no rituals for recognising repentance, atonement and forgiveness?’ one commentary asked.45 But the public heard the resoundingly hollow ring in Myra’s expressions of remorse, while her desperation for freedom seemed to further undermine the repentance she assured us was sincere. In prison terms, she was a ‘nonce’, but she refused to cave in to being a ‘nothing’. It was this determination to fly in the face of public revulsion by not bowing under the weight of hatred that set her apart from other once-notorious women such as Carol Hanson and Marie Therese Kouao. She was a gift to politicians, certainly; while other female killers served their sentences and were released, keeping Myra Hindley imprisoned provided successive Labour and Conservative governments with a spurious example of how tough they really were on crime.

  Throughout her incarceration, as she became more Girton than Gorton, Myra attracted the support of many high-profile individuals. Sara Trevelyan, who campaigned for Myra’s release during the 1970s and was shocked by her confession ten years later, believes there are lessons to be learned: ‘We know that these kind of crimes happen, and that men and women are responsible for them. I think we need a collective willingness to look more deeply at them, to ask what kind of light this sheds on us as a society. Children are becoming increasingly sexualised, and pornography is no longer something people look at in private. Alcohol and drugs play a part in dulling people’s senses and allowing things to happen. We have to look not just at the individual but also take a broader view. Some of it goes back to childhood, which we can see clearly in the life of someone like Ian Brady. But Myra’s childhood wasn’t unremittingly awful; there were some good bits, it wasn’t all bad. We need to look at how we create the conditions where these crimes happen, but I also think that the roots go further into our history, national history even. Think of someone like Josef Fritzl; his crimes have their roots in the collective consciousness of Austria after the war – the wall of silence that built up then, generational dysfunction. There’s always a cause, no matter how terrible the crime, always. And I think we have to be willing to go into that darkness in order to achieve some kind of resolution.’46

  Not all of Myra’s prison visitors were in favour of parole. Lady Anne Tree, who introduced Myra to Lord Longford, reflects: ‘I kept well clear of his campaign. How could you be safe if you had this strange urge to kill someone? I still don’t have the faintest concept. Think of going out to kill someone. Think of leaving their body on the moor. Think of capturing a little boy. It is actually unthinkable and I don’t think you should embark on this without thinking of what unhappiness this has led to. Dreadful unhappiness.’47

  Danny Kilbride confirms: ‘No one has any idea of what our family – and the other victims’ families – have undergone. People say they understand, but they don’t. There is no excuse for what she and Brady did, and no amount of talking about causes and resolutions can help us come to terms with it. Unless you’ve gone through something like this, you haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. Where’s the resolution for Keith Bennett’s family? There’s none for any of us. One of my sisters says now, “I can’t remember our John and I feel awful.” But, God, she was only four years old when it happened. I’ve still got very strong memories of John. I can see him. I remember him. But it shouldn’t be about memories. He should be here.’48

  Ian Brady’s philosophies made sense to Myra Hindley; together they indulged in paedophilic fantasies that led to the horrifying deaths of at least five young people. They acted in tandem. ‘She had no judgement’, one obituary in The Independent read.49 But judgement was precisely what Myra Hindley had – in a sense, it is all any of us have – and she chose to use it with the most wicked of intent.

  APPENDIX:

  HE KEPT THEM CLOSE

  There is little intellectual or spiritual inducement for the captured serial killer to cooperate in any way. To all intents and purposes, his real life is over and done with, as he knows he shall never be free again, so why should he volunteer information . . .

  Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus

  The official search for Keith Bennett ended on 1 July 2009. Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Heywood, head of Greater Manchester Police’s serious crime division, told the press: ‘As a force, there is nothing we would have liked more than to draw a close to this dark chapter, and we are very disappointed that we have not located Keith’s remains, but we will never close this case and remain open to any new lines of inquiry which may come about as a result of significant scientific advances or credible or actionable information.’1

  Most people were unaware that the police had been searching the moor since 2003, when Operation Maida was launched to find Keith’s grave. Detectives began by visiting Ian Brady, who refused to cooperate, despite declaring his confidence in being able to pinpoint the grave to ‘within 20 yards’.2 The search of Shiny Brook was resumed using information ‘already in the public domain’, along with Ian’s photographs.3 In the immediate aftermath of the announcement confirming the end of Operation Maida, Ian wrote to Keith’s mother: ‘The Manchester Police, having bungled the search 20 years ago, opposed my offer of assistance to the Yorkshire Police, fearing that it might expose their former incompetence. Therefore, in the tenth year of the force-fed by nasal-tube hunger strike, this is my last word on the matter.’4

  ‘Brady holds the key,’ Joe Chapman declares. ‘He is capable of standing on the grave and telling police he had no idea where Keith was. Chapman recalls Myra’s words: ‘His attention to detail was such that major landmarks on the horizon viewed from a particular vantage point on the roads across the moors provided a perfect grid reference for his trained mind . . . Ian had spent months planning the murders and plotting each location.’5

  Standing on the rocks of Hollin Brown Knoll, Ian and Myra could survey their dominion: the graves of Pauline, Lesley and John were all within close sight, plotted in a wavering line. A photograph of Myra taken by a stream shows her clutching a map and compass; it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Ian, innately methodical, charted the graves with such precision. It was his ‘landmarks’ – the rocks of the Knoll, the peat bank and certain flat stones – that had enabled detectives to pinpoint the location of John Kilbride’s grave. In her autobiography, Myra admitted that the graves of their victims were ‘marked by photographs and not headstones’.6 It was this macabre significance that lay behind Ian’s fixation with retrieving the photographs after his arrest. ‘The police on the original case returned the slides after about 18 months,’ Myra wrote in her autobiography. ‘Ian had them in prison, where he had permission to view them through a hand-siz
ed projector.’7 On one occasion when Peter Topping visited, Ian took out the photographs, murmuring that he wanted to see how the landscape had changed, then flicked slowly through them while the detective sat nearby.8 In a 1988 letter to Ann West, Ian describes the tartan photograph album as ‘my property for reference purposes’.9

  Duncan Staff’s 2004 documentary, The Moors Murders Code, discussed the use of photographs as grave markers. One previously unknown photograph was highlighted in the programme: it showed Myra Hindley hunkered down on a patch of grass with her dog on her knee. But the image has no landmark or detail within it and research into it ‘proved to be fruitless’, according to a police spokeswoman.10 There is just one picture that resembles the infamous shot taken of Myra crouching on John Kilbride’s grave. It was taken in a spot the couple visited often with their dogs, and where they photographed themselves at different times of the year, in snow and in sun, always showing the same clearly identifiable landmark in each shot: a tree, struck by lightning, on which the initials ‘FW’ have been carved. In one particular photograph, Myra Hindley kneels beside the tree, clutching her dog and staring straight at the ground. But as with the shot of her crouched on John’s grave, the landmark is impossible to place – except to those already familiar with it.

  ‘How many more trophy photographs were there?’ former Detective Chief Superintendent Ian Fairley ponders. ‘My view: somebody should speak to Brady now, before it’s too late. When we locked him up in Hyde and he smoked all my Embassy fags, I told him, “One day you will have to tell the truth.” Nothing to do with foresight. “One day you will have to tell the truth. And it will be easier for you when you do.” I accept it could be a power thing for him. I’m in no doubt at all that he knows where Keith Bennett is buried. He’s the type of fellow who would stand on the grave surrounded by police and get a kick out of saying, “Not here.” Brady is the type of individual who leaves nothing to chance, although he misread David Smith. But everything else was thought through carefully. There are other trophy photographs and what you need is for Brady to say: that’s of significance, that one.’11 Mike Massheder agrees: ‘I know for a fact that Joe Mounsey believed all the graves were marked this way. He felt very strongly that the relevant photographs were in our possession. Strangely enough, among the negatives was one which was cut in half. When we had it printed, it showed the scene at Hollin Brown Knoll, but the area where the grave was had been cut off. Just that one particular negative cut in half. After the grave was found, detectives went back up there and had a look around and said, yes, that’s it, in that half of the negative. Why it had been chopped off I don’t know.’12

  At present, Ian Brady clearly isn’t willing to divulge the whereabouts of Keith’s grave; shorn of the ‘power’ of being able to stand on the moor and survey the cemetery of his making, retaining that knowledge is the last vestige of control he can exert. But is it possible that Myra deliberately withheld the whereabouts of Keith’s grave? Her supporters are certain that she did all she could to assist Topping and his team, but we know now that she stuck to an impenetrable smokescreen: she told detectives that she hadn’t known where any of the graves were located and made it clear that she didn’t want the graves of Lesley or John pointed out to her during visits to the moor; she lied to Topping about the use of photographs as grave markers and used the promise of hypnosis as a bargaining tool, ultimately declining to submit to it.

  Yvonne Roberts muses: ‘I do wonder about Keith. I wonder if she actually did know where his body was buried but couldn’t bear to let go of it. They were both committed to having pulled off the perfect murder. Perhaps she took the biggest secret with her to the grave quite deliberately.’13 Fairley concurs: ‘I don’t trust Hindley. Much as I despise Brady, I would be more inclined to believe him than her. She has, on countless occasions, been proven to be a liar.’14 Ian Brady told Topping that Myra knew the exact whereabouts of the undiscovered graves and – his own hypocrisy aside – in a letter to Ann West wrote that Myra ‘had been deliberately misleading the police by “distancing” herself from the sites by not giving the precise locations, which she knows’.15

  Myra wrote a curious letter to David Astor in February 1987; two lines imply that she was going to reveal more than she subsequently did: ‘Everything will be resolved with satisfaction all round . . . things they have to know to clear this case up.’16 But there are no letters to shed further light on the matter. Later that same year, when discussing Shiny Brook, Ian told Topping that Keith might well be buried in a completely different area of the moor. He referred obliquely to the original investigation, when ‘the police had been close to the body of Pauline Reade and had not found it’.17 During another conversation with Topping, Ian blurted out, ‘Myra knows the location of [Keith’s] grave on that slope.’18 He went on to say that there was a railway sleeper on the side of the road where John Kilbride had been buried on the incline; he and Dave Smith had used the sleeper for target practice, but it was also ‘a marker to other matters’.19 Elsewhere, he mentioned murdering and burying a youth in 1964 (the year Keith was killed) not far from John Kilbride’s grave. The victims at Hollin Brown Knoll were buried within a few hundred yards of each other; the two girls lay in the shadow of the black, molar-shaped rocks, while John Kilbride lay on the other side of the road, his grave partly hidden from the A635 by a peat bank.

  Mike Massheder states, ‘Hollin Brown Knoll is the burial ground. I believe that Keith Bennett is there. Kilbride, Downey and Reade were all buried together. Why would Brady bury that one child two miles away? He was methodical, remember. I’m not saying the police were wrong to search Shiny Brook – on the basis of the information Brady and Hindley gave them, they would have failed in their duty if they hadn’t investigated it thoroughly. And I’m not necessarily saying they should stop looking there, but I know that if you spoke to anyone involved in the original search, they would say the same: look at Hollin Brown Knoll, where the other victims were. All right, they searched there before, but how diligently? Pauline wasn’t found until 20 years later, yet I know they searched around there when Lesley was discovered. Everybody felt there were more victims in that area. For years afterwards, Joe Mounsey would disappear up to Hollin Brown Knoll. If he wanted a driver, he’d ring through and, if I was in, it was “Send Mash”, because we’d worked together. We’d go up there and he’d stand and stare out across the moor, where John’s grave had been, and potter about. It was always on his mind. He’d say, “There’s got to be others around here, Mash.” He wouldn’t let it go. When I retired, a card went round and people wrote the usual daft comments. But he wrote on it: “A635, Joe Mounsey.” That was the road past the graves.’20

  Ian Fairley is in agreement: ‘Brady knows where Keith’s grave is, and if it was near John Kilbride’s grave, somewhere on Hollin Brown Knoll, then I shouldn’t be surprised. He knows where the others are too – because if you want my honest opinion, I’m certain there are other victims buried on the moor.’ 21 Keith’s mother, Winnie Johnson, concurs: ‘I told Topping to stop looking in Shiny Brook. I’ve thought for a long time that Keith wasn’t there. I still put flowers up there, but I think he’s near the others. That makes sense, for him to be near John.’22 Danny Kilbride holds the same view: ‘They need to search in other places, not just Shiny Brook. Why don’t they search where they found John? On that side of the road? I’ve written to Brady and he’s written back, but he won’t see me. I’d sleep in the same cell as him if he’d only admit he knows where Keith is buried. I want Brady to tell Winnie where Keith is. That’s all I want. And if he doesn’t, then he’s a coward.’23

  Chris Crowther, whose family own the land on which the other graves were found, recalls: ‘I’ve seen Brady all over the moors here, but I told Topping: “You won’t find Keith at Shiny Brook.” I told him that more than once. We’ve always felt Keith is near John. Brady was a lazy beggar, wasn’t he? He kept them close. Girls on one side of the road, boys on the other. John’s grave wa
s just under the lay-by there that we’ve created. Not far from the road at all. Those photos of Myra that were published recently, showing her with a map and a compass by a stream – that’s not Shiny Brook. If you ask me, that’s closer to here, not far from Rimmon Cottage. Birchen Clough, it might be – it looks like it. There used to be a road there down to Greenfield Brook.’24

  In a letter to Lesley Ann Downey’s stepfather, Ian described Keith’s grave in a gully ‘where a sheep pen is and a junction of two streams’.25 On Hollin Brown Knoll, not far from John Kilbride’s grave, the land slopes to the remains of dry-stone sheep pens, and two streams – Rimmon Pit Clough and Holme Clough – meet in a waterfall that drops down to Greenfield Brook. Nearby was the railway sleeper Ian and Dave had used for target practice but which Ian had said was also ‘a marker for other matters’. Between John Kilbride’s grave and Rimmon Pit Clough are the Standing Stones, a rock formation not unlike the one Myra described to her right as she sat on the plateau on the night of Keith’s murder.

  ‘There’s a photograph of Myra standing on rocks at Hollin Brown Knoll, with the puppy in her coat, the same coat she was wearing on John Kilbride’s grave,’ Mike Massheder muses. ‘In the distance is the hill – the Alderman. The day before they found John’s grave, I was standing on that same side of the moor, but further down, towards the Alderman on a piece of spongy ground, and I got a whiff, you know, this distinctive whiff of putrefaction. It’s a very distinctive smell – you can’t mistake it for anything else. And I remember looking there – somebody was prodding around the Knoll – and I thought afterwards: that must have been a grave. It was in that area. They searched and found nothing, but they must have been just off the right spot. That odour didn’t come from John’s grave, it came from another.’26