Couples Who Kill (20 page)

Amy and Brian are now free and remain close to their respective parents. They have not seen each other since the trial. Their unwanted baby was buried beneath a headstone which bears the dubious message
Always In Our Hearts
.

Myra Hindley was an ill-educated teenager until Ian Brady awakened her interest in books and philosophy. Unfortunately his philosophy was one of moral relativism and he eventually convinced her that ‘laws and externally enforced moral and ethical norms are put into their proper secondary perspective in affairs of emotion when it makes one feel good to break the law.’ Put simply, this translated into the couple luring three children and two teenagers to their deaths.

Myra was born on 23rd July 1942 to Hettie and Bob Hindley in Crumpsall, Manchester. Her father – a
hard-drinking
aircraft fitter – didn’t like her and her mother was too busy working as a machinist to spend much time with her, so by age four she was sent to live with her gran. That same year the Hindleys had a second daughter, Maureen, whom Myra adored.

Unfortunately the Hindley household remained deeply divided. Bob frequently hit his wife, and Myra saw some of that violence. She also received it. And she saw that the relationship between her mother and grandmother was very poor.

With no good role model in her life, she grew up to be an awkward child, old beyond her years yet emotionally vulnerable. But this made her an excellent babysitter as she was desperate to be liked. She’d spend hours caring for the neighbourhood infants and toddlers, basking in their
approval and in the appreciation of their parents.

Myra had been brought up to believe that education didn’t matter for girls, so left school at fifteen and drifted from one unskilled job to the next, her life increasingly dreary. But when she was eighteen she started her fourth office job and immediately noticed Ian Brady, the handsome clerk. He ignored her completely – just as her father had done when he wasn’t hitting her – but soon she was writing in her diary that she was in love.

Ian was born on 2nd January 1938 to Margaret Stewart, an unmarried waitress. (Years later she married and became Peggy Brady.) She lived in the Gorbals, a slum area in Glasgow, Scotland, and had to work nights to support herself and newborn baby Ian, so he was frequently left alone. Babies who aren’t cared for in their first few months of life often become psychopaths as the neural pathways which ensure that they bond with other people remain unstimulated. Brady would later show classic psychopathic traits.

At three months he was unofficially fostered out to a couple who already had four children. But as he matured he felt different to them and remained withdrawn. Peggy visited him every weekend, but he was merely told that she was a family friend. At eleven, desperate for stimulus, he broke into a house but didn’t steal anything. The following year Peggy moved to Manchester and he felt increasingly adrift.

He began to play truant from school and wandered the streets for hours on his own. He committed further burglaries and ended up, at age thirteen, before the juvenile
court. At fourteen he faced the juvenile court again and was bound over for nine months, but he continued to steal.

At sixteen he was put on probation and sent to live with Peggy in Manchester. She’d now married a meat porter named Patrick Brady and Ian was given his surname. It was an awkward reunion as he’d hardly seen his mother for the past four years and his stepfather was soon threatening him with violence if he didn’t shape up. The man found him a labouring job (which was beneath him as he had a high IQ) where the Mancunians laughed at his Scottish accent. Increasingly alienated, he retreated into his room.

Mocked and underestimated by the world, he found reassurance in books which were about gaining power – books about the occult, about extreme sexual sadism, about Hitler. He even eventually taught himself German in order to read Mein Kampf.

When he helped to dispose of some stolen lead and was caught, he was given the harsh sentence of two years in Borstal, a type of detention unit for criminal and usually violent young men. There, he may well have been sexually assaulted. He was definitely badly treated and his resentment against society grew.

By the time he took a clerical job at a Manchester chemical firm called Millwalls, he was a lonely young man who hated conventional society.

Initially, Ian saw Millwall’s typist Myra as being part of this mindless society. After all, she was a desperately conventional girl who wanted marriage and babies, who went to church and lived for weekend dances. But after a year of ignoring her, he realised that she would make an
excellent disciple and began to try out his philosophy that it was the natural order for the strong to overcome the weak.

Myra bought into this from the start – she’d probably have agreed to anything to please the man she was in love with. Though originally against sex before marriage, she gave him her virginity on their second date. And she swiftly agreed to anal sex, despite the fact that she found it painful. She also let her new lover beat her with a whip and revealed the marks for his camera.

The violence and lack of positive parental attention in Myra Hindley’s childhood had left her with a histrionic personality, and people with this personality disorder are very susceptible to suggestion. Ian wanted a lover with an anti-social approach to life so the previously friendly and conventional Myra became determinedly anti-social. He wanted to be dominant so she became sexually submissive. She expressed her enjoyment of the murder books he lent her and pretended to enjoy the brutality of the war films which they saw.

Not that Myra Hindley was completely without her own needs and desires – the treatment she’d received from her father had left her with unexpressed hostility and Ian brought this out.

He began to talk of rape, suggesting that sexual fulfilment and the satisfaction of other bodily appetites were society’s only real values. Again, Myra wasn’t shocked (or pretended not to be shocked) as his fantasies edged increasingly closer to reality.

On the evening of 12th July 1963 Ian asked
twenty-one
-year-old Myra to procure him a child to rape. Myra saw a girl she knew, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, en route to a dance and told her she’d lost an expensive glove on Saddleworth Moor. Pauline obligingly got into Myra’s car and was driven to the sunlit moorland. The friendly teenager had no idea that Ian Brady planned to follow them on his motorbike.

Myra would later allege that she went back to the car after Ian appeared, leaving him with the terrified teenager. (But Ian would eventually say that Myra helped him sexually assault the girl.) Whatever the exact nature of events, a struggle ensued in which he raped Pauline and cut her throat. He showed Myra the still-gurgling body then they buried Pauline’s warm corpse in a hastily dug grave.

The couple were shaken by the reality of this first murder. Brady had found it very difficult to overpower a struggling sixteen-year-old whilst Hindley had been horrified when she saw the dying girl. She’d later say that she considered leaving him but that he threatened to hurt her family. In truth, it’s more likely that she stayed because she remained in love with him – he’d literally become her life. Her father hated her, her mother was too busy working to spend much time with her and her grandmother, who she still lived with, was increasingly infirm. Myra had also sided with Brady at work so was regarded by her more balanced colleagues as increasingly secretive and aloof. And she’d given up on her friends because Brady proclaimed they were worthless. He’d also
moved in with her and her gran, which meant that she lived with him and worked with him. They were together twenty-four hours a day.

So Myra stayed with Ian because she believed that she couldn’t face life without him. And four months later – on 23rd November 1963 – they targeted their next victim, twelve-year-old John Kilbride, by offering him a lift home. Myra knew what was going to happen this time as she’d bought the knife. The couple took the boy to the moor and Myra remained in the van as look out. Meanwhile Ian raped, spanked and strangled the unfortunate boy.

The knife was too blunt to cut the child’s throat, so he strangled him with string and buried him on the desolate moors. Later, he took photographs of Myra posing on the child’s grave.

Another seven months elapsed then, on 16th June 1964, the couple offered twelve-year-old Keith Bennett a lift to his gran’s house. He too was driven to the moors where Brady raped and strangled him. Strangling is considered to be an especially sadistic crime, and Brady kept books about torture in a locker at the local railway station. Being in control meant everything to Brady, whose childhood themes had been those of humiliation and abandonment. Afterwards, Brady buried Keith Bennett’s body on the moorland. Despite frequent searches by the police and by members of the devastated Bennett family, his remains have never been found.

Six months later – on Boxing Day 1964 – the couple lured ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey away from a funfair. They took her to Myra’s gran’s house (her gran was away visiting relatives) and ordered her to strip.

They bound and gagged the increasingly distraught little girl and took lurid naked photographs which Ian Brady planned to sell. He also tape-recorded the child pleading ‘Please God, help me.’ Later she begged Myra to help her but Myra callously threatened to hit her and told her to put the handkerchief-gag back in her mouth. The tape, which lasted for seventeen minutes, also recorded Lesley crying for her mum.

At some stage Ian raped the little girl. Myra said she was in the bathroom whilst this crime was taking place, and that when she returned the child was dead. Ian backed up this version of events for many years but, after the couple became estranged, he said that Myra had strangled Lesley with a silken cord. The following day they buried the little girl’s body on their beloved moors. It was ten months before her corpse was found.

By now Ian Brady had murdered a teenage girl, a prepubescent girl and two prepubescent boys. But he had the psychopath’s typical low boredom threshold and wanted to increase his excitement by bringing in a third party. He chose a youth he was already friendly with, Myra’s seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith. The teenager was married to Myra’s younger sister, Maureen, and was unemployed, broke and bored.

Myra was against involving David – she’d aged visibly
since the murders and had frequent nightmares. She also begged her relatives and neighbours not to make conventional statements around her lover, as this always increased his wrath. The insecure young woman wanted to have Ian Brady’s full attention, and being his sole disciple in the murders was the ultimate way of maintaining this. But he’d already decided to bring the innocent David Smith in on their fifth kill…

On 6th October 1965, the couple went to a bar and Myra chatted up a seventeen-year-old boy, Edward Evans. She told him that Ian Brady was her brother. The threesome left the pub together and returned to Myra’s gran’s house where they probably all had sex whilst her gran slept upstairs. Afterwards, Ian ordered Myra to fetch David Smith – and David arrived at the house to find Ian battering a hatchet into the screaming Edward Evans’ head. The petrified youth continued to fight for his life, so Brady partially suffocated him with a cushion then strangled him to death.

Afterwards Myra retched and David went home and was violently sick. He told Maureen what he’d witnessed and, at first light, the terrified teenagers went to a phone box and called the police.

Meanwhile, the killer couple had gone to bed. Ian slept well, convinced that David Smith would prove to be as obedient an acolyte as Myra Hindley. She, for her part, slept fitfully and arose early next morning, aware that Edward Evans’ body was still locked in a trunk in the spare room. The police came to the door and arrested Ian Brady for the murder and she denied knowing where the key to
the trunk was. She tried to act tough to please Ian – but it’s telling that the first detective who spoke to her thought that she was at least twelve years older than her actual twenty-three.

Myra believed that Ian would get bail so she virtually camped at the police station. Eventually they had to tell her mother to take her home.

Meanwhile the police found the key to the railway locker which held the photographs and tape-recording of the missing Lesley Ann Downey. Myra and Ian’s aggressive voices were on the tape, placing them both at the scene.

When Myra was arrested she said that she had been where Ian had been, that she had done what he had done. But when they were tried for the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, both put forward a Not Guilty plea. It wasn’t yet known that they’d murdered Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, though police strongly suspected they had.

The trial began at Chester Assizes on 27th April 1966 amid tight security, as the general public wanted to lynch the killers. The prosecution alleged that the couple were equally responsible for the three sex murders, and the defence countered that Ian Brady had been the leader and Myra Hindley the follower. (The latter viewpoint is true – but Ian would have had difficulty luring his victims to remote locations without Myra. The children had been told not to go off with strange men but they understandably believed that a woman posed no threat.) She remained enamoured of her lover and stared at him devotedly throughout the trial.

The couple’s guilt was a foregone conclusion – the tape and photographs linked them to Lesley Ann Downey, though Ian Brady claimed they’d merely photographed her then let her leave the house with two male pornographers. John Kilbride’s death was also closely linked to the couple, as his body was located when the police found a photo of Myra posing on top of his makeshift grave. And David Smith had watched Brady murder Edward Evans whilst Myra urged him to help.

On 6th May 1966, the fifteenth day of the trial, the jury returned their verdict. The couple were jointly found guilty of the murder of Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey. Brady was also convicted of murdering John Kilbride, whilst Myra was convicted of being an accessory to the killing, (because she’d driven the boy to the moor then driven home without him, so clearly knew that something bad had happened). She looked close to collapse as she was jailed for life plus seven years for her part in John Kilbride’s abduction. Meanwhile her beloved Ian was given three life sentences.