Couples Who Kill (21 page)

Judge Sparrow, who attended the case in his capacity as a journalist, recognised that she was redeemable and would later write that she ‘could be made the subject of successful psychotherapy.’ And two days later the judge who had sentenced her said that she could be salvaged, but that Brady could not.

Ian Brady was sent to Durham Prison and Myra Hindley to Holloway, where they remained devoted to each other for the next six years, writing frequently. He even went on hunger strike in an abortive attempt to be allowed visiting
rights. But as she approached thirty, she at last began to form close relationships with other female prisoners and realised that he’d helped ruin, rather than positively define, her life. She told him to stop writing to her and she began to have lesbian relationships, though other prisoners have noted that these were more emotional than physical.

Myra’s life remained relatively static for the next twenty years as she worked in the prison sewing room, had visits from her mother and crushes on various other female prisoners. Meanwhile Ian Brady’s mental health deteriorated and in 1985 he was diagnosed as a psychopath and moved to Ashworth Hospital, a psychiatric prison. His emotional wellbeing remained incredibly changeable, with some visitors finding him alert and normal whilst others noted that he was close to collapse. He suggested to various journalists and detectives that he’d committed other murders whilst acting alone, but they checked back and found that his stories were either mental confusion or outright lies.

Myra, too, had lied to her fellow prisoners for almost twenty years, telling them that she had no part in the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Then – in 1985 and 1986 – she received counselling from the Reverend Peter Timms and decided to confess. (Peter Timms is interviewed in
Women Who Kill
.)

Both killers were taken separately onto the moors to locate the graves and the information Myra gave helped the police to locate Pauline’s body. But Ian became much more confused so Keith Bennett’s skeleton remains undiscovered to this day.

The numerous boring days spent in prison – and the nights sleeping with the lights on to escape her demons – took their toll and in 1999 Myra Hindley collapsed during an angina attack and was rushed to hospital. The medics warned her that she had to stop smoking and start exercising, but she remained depressed and chose not to heed their advice. She had technically met all of the criteria for parole but had never been granted this, and was losing the will to live.

The following year, five lawlords upheld the Home Secretary’s decision that Myra Hindley should die in prison. Meanwhile Ian Brady wanted to die as soon as possible in prison. He attempted to starve himself to death for the next three years, but the authorities force fed him through a tube.

Ian Brady hadn’t changed much in prison – but Myra Hindley had, earning a degree in humanities and reverting to her previous working class conformity. She got religion again and made various influential religious friends. She was never going to attain Brady’s superior IQ or elevated vocabulary, but at the same time she was no longer a danger to anyone else.

But as far as the tabloids were concerned, Myra Hindley wasn’t allowed to change. When she cuddled her friends’ babies in jail they suggested a sinister motive – but she had genuinely loved children before meeting Ian Brady and was a trusted babysitter. Similarly, they suggested that she acted fawningly around animals whereas she genuinely loved them too. Much was made of the fact that she had lesbian lovers in prison, but the reality was that these affairs were based on writing impassioned poetry
and having someone to dream about.

Diana Athill, an editor for Andre Deutsch, was given some of Myra Hindley’s prison writings and began to understand how a nineteen-year-old from an unambitious family could have become besotted with a well-read man whose philosophy was ‘above the petty considerations which governed most people’s despicable little lives.’

Diana describes her impressions of Myra Hindley in her intriguing portrait of the publishing world,
Stet
. ‘She was intelligent, responsive, humorous, dignified.’ Diana came to the conclusion that Hindley only managed to live with her murderous actions by blurring the part that she’d played in her mind and by exaggerating her fear of Brady. The editor decided that making Myra confront the true gravity of her actions might result in a nervous breakdown so she decided not to commission the book.

Many newspapers continued to give the impression that Myra Hindley was a cold, heartless prisoner but in truth she was a timid woman who was too frightened to go into the television lounge with the other prisoners for fear of censure – and when she was violently attacked and had her nose broken she refused to strike back.

In contrast, Ian Brady, the mastermind and instigator of the murders, has remained wedded to violence. He wrote in his book
The Gates of Janus
, published in 2001, that serial killers (presumably including himself) have chosen to spend one day as a lion rather than decades as a sheep. Yet many of us choose not to live as sheep – and we still don’t resort to killing children. He also suggests that most serial killers choose victims who have had much nicer lives than they themselves. But – given that many serial killers select girls who have been in care and then become
prostitutes – this simply isn’t true. Brady himself was earning a reasonable salary as a clerk and had enough money for wine, cigarettes and a motorbike when he selected impoverished working class children to kill.

He also says, rightfully, that latent homosexual men often turn their aggression towards the object of their desire – yet he has never dared examine his own victim choice. Only the first victim, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, had a developed female body – and Myra Hindley chose her for him. He demanded that she procure smaller victims in future. Three of the other victims were male and Lesley Ann Downey was only ten so she had a boyish frame.

It’s clear that Ian Brady had some confusion in his head about his own sexuality. He liked to have a candle inserted into his anus during sex play and we know that he raped Keith Bennett and John Kilbride prior to their deaths. The bar where he met his final victim, Edward Evans, was frequented by gay men and he explained this to Myra Hindley by telling her that ‘he was going to rob a queer.’ He denied at the trial that he’d had sex with the youth – but someone had, for hairs from Myra’s dog were found around the boy’s anus. And Brady had sent Myra from the house, leaving him alone with the teenage boy.

Whilst bringing the axe down on the terrified Edward Evans, Brady shouted again and again ‘you dirty bastard.’ It was the most violent of the five deaths and he said himself that it was ‘the messiest yet.’

So what drove Myra’s normally quiet lover to such paroxysms of rage? Was he raped at Borstal by older inmates? Did he feel a need to both repeat such rape and also take murderous revenge? He was clearly ashamed
when the prosecution said that he’d frequented gay bars and stammered that he liked to mock the homosexuals there.

The Gates Of Janus
makes it clear that, even today after over thirty years in a special hospital, he sees murder as the supreme pleasure and believes that people should do exactly as they wish regardless of who they hurt. He believes that none of us are capable of genuine charity, suggesting that we only make charitable gestures in order to feel good about ourselves, making it an essentially selfish act. In short, he apparently has no feelings for other people, the benchmark of the psychopath.

But the situation may be slightly more complex than that. He voluntarily transcribes books for the blind, has allegedly offered to donate one of his kidneys to anyone who requires it, and has told journalists that he can’t bear to think of the murders because he feels ashamed.

So why the disparity between his actions and his written word? It’s possible that Ian Brady had mellowed slightly in old age but that recent events in prison led to this outpouring of anger. He alleges that hospital staff broke his wrist when forcibly moving him to the Personality Disorders Unit in 1999. (An errata slip to
The Gates Of Janus
issued on behalf of Ashworth Hospital states that his wrist wasn’t broken in the move, but that medical evidence showed ‘an undisplaced crack fracture of his right arm.’) He also alleges that guards have talked loudly outside his door all night to keep him from sleeping, something which the hospital disputes. Ian Brady notes that he was unable to edit
The Gates Of Janus
because he was kept ‘in conditions of captivity, where all items of interest are sold to the tabloids by officials.’ The book,
then, may be his final way of saying ‘up yours’ to what he perceives as a hypocritical and corrupt world.

Unfortunately he doesn’t mention Myra Hindley in the book so we don’t get to know what he thought of her in 2001. Most sources believe that he hated her for distancing herself from their shared crimes, but one visitor noted that he sometimes slipped up and called her ‘my girl.’ Myra was probably the first girl he ever had sex with – and the last.

At the start of November 2002, Myra Hindley collapsed in her cell at Highpoint Prison in Suffolk and was rushed to hospital suffering from a suspected heart attack. She stabilised and was returned to prison but was readmitted a fortnight later suffering from a severe chest infection which was leading to respiratory arrest.

At lunchtime on the day that she died – Tuesday 15th November 2002 – my phone started to ring and literally didn’t stop until 11pm that night, starting again at 7am the next day. Because I’d profiled her in
Women Who Kill
, numerous radio, television and print journalists wanted me to make a statement. When they wanted to know how I felt about the prospect of her dying (by early afternoon she’d been given the last rites) and, hours later, about her death at 5pm, I said it was the inevitable sad end to a blighted life.

I was interviewed by dozens of broadcasters that day, but none of them wanted to know the truth. Instead, they’d already decided that she’d been born evil, remained evil and died evil. When I suggested that she’d originally been comparatively normal (albeit with unresolved issues resulting from her upbringing) they changed the subject.
When I said that she hadn’t been a risk to children for decades the interview would swiftly come to an end. Several other writers – notably esteemed psychologist Oliver James and distinguished crime writer Brian Masters – said the exact same thing but they got very little airplay compared with journalists who said that she was a hundred percent bad.

Over the years, the nation had largely divided into two camps, those who thought that she was still a cold-hearted manipulator who should die in jail and those who thought that thirty-five years in prison was excessive given that she probably didn’t kill any of the victims. I was indifferent as to whether or not she was released, merely pointing out that technically it had been years since she met the conditions for parole. She’d shown remorse and had improved herself by studying several languages. She hadn’t shown any sign of violence since leaving Brady’s thrall yet she died with the press still suggesting she was a monster, rather than an inadequate person who had once done monstrous things.

Ian Brady remains in Ashworth Hospital near Liverpool. Colin Wilson, who wrote the introduction to Brady’s deeply depressing but often insightful The Gates Of Janus says that ‘it is the only work in world literature in which a criminal right man argues his case that society is really to blame for his crimes.’ He also describes it as ‘paranoid, obsessive and wrong headed.’ Brady, who is sixty-seven, still expresses the wish to die. He often refuses food and is sometimes skeletally thin. His birth mother Peggy is now dead.

David Smith, Myra’s brother-in-law, who had the courage to testify against the couple, eventually moved to Ireland where he married, found employment and a
much-deserved
tranquillity.

Myra Hindley was cremated at a Cambridgeshire crematorium, the service attended by a dozen close friends. Her father and her sister Maureen are long dead but she is survived by her mother, who has commendably refused to sell her story to the newspapers and who lives in relative penury.

Rose and Fred West were born into violent, incestuous families and, like many abuse survivors, they longed for children and domestic bliss. But their shared love of cruelty and need for control ensured that they physically and sexually abused their offspring then graduated to abducting girls whom they eventually buried under their beloved home…

Rose was born on 29th November 1953 in Northam, Devon, to Bill and Daisy Letts. Bill, an electrical engineer who’d spent years in the Navy, was a paranoid schizophrenic who viciously abused his wife and all seven of his children. Daisy, a housewife, eventually had a breakdown and was given electric shock treatment whilst pregnant with Rose. She received six of these controversial treatments, the sixth one taking place just days before Rose was born.

By the time she was a toddler, Rose had picked up on the violence and tension in the household and she’d rock herself back and forth for hours in an attempt to
self-comfort
. Like many children from chaotic backgrounds, she also frequently lapsed into a fugue state.

Rose was somewhat withdrawn by the time she started school and couldn’t relate to children her own age, so she was mocked and bullied. But by twelve she’d learned to hit back. Some criminologists believe that her father took her virginity at twelve, but all that’s certain is that by age
thirteen she’d begun to masturbate her ten-year-old brother. At fourteen she was allegedly raped on two separate occasions by strangers (she didn’t report either incident) and at fifteen she found comfort in casual sex. Her deeply religious mother now disowned her and left her father. Rose was at his mercy and he liked young girls…

Her vulnerability remained apparent, especially to sexual predators. So it’s no surprise that a sexually-insatiable labourer called Fred West approached her at a bus stop and began chatting. Though she was only fifteen and he was twenty-eight, he soon asked her out.

Fred was born on 29th September 1941, the first son of Daisy and Walter West. The couple had him baptised, his christening card reading ‘He that believeth and is baptised will be saved.’

Daisy was still a teenager when she gave birth to Fred but Walter was twenty-seven years old. The couple lived in a tied cottage in the tiny Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, where Walter worked as a farm hand. They had lost their first baby, a girl, after which the already introverted Walter turned to drink.

During the next few years, the household became increasingly crowded as Daisy gave birth to John, David, Daisy, Douglas, Kathleen and Gwendoline. (David died when he was a month old.) She put on weight with each child and became seriously obese.

But Fred was her favourite and she beat him less than her other children. As a result his siblings teased him for being a mummy’s boy. He was even bullied by his younger brother but refused to fight back.

Fred went to school at five years old, and it was soon apparent that he had a low IQ. He had great difficulty with reading and writing. In fairness, he had to work incredibly long hours on the farm to help his parents, so possibly had little energy left to concentrate in class. He had to milk the cows, chop wood, pick berries and bring in the harvest. He learned to drive a tractor when he was nine years old.

Walter West had begun sexually abusing his daughters when they were young – and when Fred was twelve his mother took his virginity. Fred saw this as entirely normal and went on to sexually assault other young female relatives and their friends. Walter may also have sexually abused Fred. He also practiced bestiality, telling the boy how to disable a sheep by trapping its back legs in his wellington boots in order to have sex with it.

The house also remained casually violent. Fred was playing with a plastic sword one day and inadvertently pushed it into his mother’s stomach. She promptly battered him with the coal shovel that she had in her hand.

Fred finished his schooling at fourteen, a sub-literate but apparently docile incest survivor. He left home the following year without telling his parents and found work in the city. But when he eventually returned, his mother took off her belt and beat him black and blue.

He took off sporadically thereafter, but otherwise lived and work on the farm with his parents, an apparently
mild-mannered
youth and a hard worker. But there were still family problems, his mother becoming enraged when he bought himself a motorbike. She wanted to keep him close to her and also banned his girlfriends from the house.

At seventeen Fred accidentally drove into a wall, hit his head and was unconscious for a week. After the accident,
in which he fractured his skull, broke his nose and his leg, he became withdrawn and irritable for a time.

Two years later he suffered a further head injury when he sexually assaulted a girl he’d been chatting up at a disco, and she pushed him away. He hit his head on a metal fire escape and was knocked out for twenty-four hours. It’s possible that he incurred damage to the left side of his brain, the side which controls our impulses. Without this control, a person is liable to explode into violence.

That same year – his nineteenth – Fred West impregnated his thirteen-year-old sister. The case was scheduled for court but she dropped the charges. Fred’s parents were angry that an act of family incest had been made public and they insisted he move out.

Fred took a labouring job and began to date Rena Costello, who was pregnant by an Asian bus driver. They married and moved to a town near Glasgow, Scotland, where she’d grown up.

But it was a difficult marriage from the start. Fred liked bondage and anal sex and thought only of his own pleasure. They briefly split up and she began to prostitute herself to earn a living, something which she’d done sporadically before. Even when she gave birth to a daughter – who she named Charmaine – she continued to solicit men for money, a practice which excited Fred. After all, he’d grown up watching his father having sex with his sisters – and other family members may have watched him having sex with his mother and his father. Voyeurism had dominated his sexuality from the time he was a boy.

Now he began to drive an ice cream van for a living, a job which brought him into close contact with young girls. He often had sex with – and sometimes impregnated – them.
He also impregnated his wife and she gave birth to their daughter, Anne Marie, in July 1964.

Sadly, Fred increasingly parented as he’d been parented. His life had been severely controlled when he lived at home, with endless tasks to perform from first light till bedtime. Now he expected to control his little children, and put chicken wire around their bunk beds so that they were caged in for the day. Rena would let them out, but if he came home and found them playing he’d beat her and terrorise the kids.

When he accidentally killed a small boy with his ice cream van and received death threats he realised it was time to leave Glasgow. He returned to his parents’ cottage in Much Marcle, bringing his daughter Anne Marie and his stepdaughter Charmaine with him. Two months later, Rena joined them and they moved into a caravan. Chillingly – in light of the way that he would later carve up his victim’s corpses – Fred found work in an abattoir. Not that killing animals was new to him: as a teenager his parents had ordered him to slaughter the family pig. These annual slaughterings had brought tears as he’d become fond of the animal – but now he began to enjoy carving up blood-red flesh.

Soon Rena left the increasingly violent Fred, and to punish her he insisted on keeping the children. He would put them naked on his lap and rub them against his penis. He also took a girlfriend eight years his junior, Anne McFall. Soon she was pregnant with his child and declared that she was in love with him. Fred claimed that he loved her too – but when she was eight months pregnant he took her life.

The session may have started as bondage sex, as he
definitely tied a dressing gown cord around her wrists. It may be that this led to a flagellation session (he owned several whips) and that he beat her so hard that she went into cardiac arrest. Or he could have suffocated her by accident during one of his erotic breath control games.

Fred took her body to his lockable garage, where he cut off the fingers, toes and kneecaps, using the skills he’d learned in the abattoir. He also cut the foetus from her body then buried both mother and baby in a field near his childhood home. (It would be discovered sixteen years later in 1994.) It seems that this murder, planned or unplanned, was enormously exciting to Fred, as shortly afterwards he murdered Mary Bastholm, a waitress who disappeared on her way to meet her boyfriend. Her body has never been found but Fred – who frequented the café where she worked – hinted to various people that he’d buried her in a field.

Rena now moved back in with Fred and the couple relocated to another caravan site. But she soon left again to escape his violence, and Fred met Rose…

At first sight, Fred and Rose were an unlikely couple – he a small, glib man in his late twenties, she a slow-talking fifteen-year-old. But they actually had a lot in common: both had been sexually abused by a parent and had sexual contact with a sibling. Both had watched their siblings being repeatedly beaten and had themselves occasionally suffered parental violence. They were from households where education wasn’t seen as important, and where life revolved around basic animalistic needs. Both also had mothers called Daisy who had been household servants
before marrying and repeatedly giving birth.

Fred wasn’t big on formal dates, so soon took Rosie (as he called her) to his caravan to meet Anne Marie, aged five, and Charmaine, aged six. Fred had them in and out of foster care and on one occasion social services had taken them to an orphanage after finding them in a ‘deplorable condition.’ But the thinking of the day said that a child should be with its parents so when Fred and Rena got a caravan they were given the children back. Since then Rena had abandoned Fred again and he left Charmaine and Anne Marie alone for hours on end, so they were desperate for attention. And at first the superficially-maternal Rose provided this. She quit her job at the bread shop and became Fred’s nanny but was afraid to tell the Letts, who had reconciled again.

But eventually Rose took Fred home, only for Bill Letts to let loose his explosive temper. He was violently jealous of his daughter’s relationship and his supposed solution was to put Rose into care. But the teenager had at last found a semblance of love, and she sneaked out to the caravan park every day to see Fred. And when she left the orphanage at sixteen she went to live with – and soon became pregnant by – him. Her father tried to beat the foetus out of her, but it survived.

The foursome moved to various run-down accommodations in Cheltenham then to a flat at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. In October 1970 Rose gave birth to Heather, their first daughter, in hospital and returned home to find Fred in a neighbour’s flat having sex, and Charmaine and Anne Marie alone in the house, unfed and unkempt.

Deluded as ever, the couple told themselves that they
now had an enduring love and a perfect family – but in reality, Rose soon started to batter Charmaine and Anne Marie, just as she’d watched her father batter her siblings. And Heather’s crying drove her to distraction, so that she eventually fled back to her mum’s house. But her religious parents told her that marriage was for life and she reluctantly returned to Fred.

She now took to tying the children to the bed and beating them, whilst Fred looked on without showing any apparent emotion. Outwardly Rose appeared to be the perfect mother, forever boiling nappies and buying groceries – but behind closed doors she became the tyrant that her father had been.

Fred had been a kleptomaniac since his head injury at age nineteen, but now he was caught stealing tires and was sentenced to ten months’ imprisonment from October 1970 until the summer of 1971. Rose now had complete power over the family unit, and she beat the older girls with an increasing intensity. Like most unhappy children, they began to wet the bed and she beat them for this too. Charmaine was treated at the local casualty department for an ankle injury which may have been a knife wound (Rose would later run at Fred with a knife during an argument) and Anne Marie had to have stitches in her head after Rose cracked it open with a cereal bowl because she didn’t wash up her breakfast crockery quickly enough.

In May or June 1971 she murdered Charmaine, possibly during an act of so-called legitimate punishment which went wrong. She then told anyone who asked that the child had returned to her birth mother, Rena. Meanwhile
her father began to visit the house, and it’s possible that she began having sex with him again.

When Fred was released from prison, he fetched Charmaine’s corpse from the cellar and dismembered it, then buried it in the backyard. It’s likely that by now he’d told her about murdering Anne McFall – leastways, Rose told her mother that Fred was capable of murder.

Fred had been happy to have his wife Rena prostitute herself (she was now living in Glasgow and presumably still soliciting) and he now suggested the same thing to Rose. He told her that he favoured coloured men because they were allegedly better endowed. He also believed that their sperm had special powers which would help him avoid premature ejaculation. So he’d listen behind the door as Rose had sex with a Jamaican man, then would have sex with her after her lover went home.

Anyone with self-esteem would have walked away – but Rose had been told by her parents all of her life that she was useless. Now she asked Fred to marry her. He was still married to Rena – but a pathological liar like Fred didn’t let a little detail like that prevent him from taking Rose as his wife.

On 29th January 1972 Rose Letts became Mrs Rose West at the local Registrars. As usual, there was an enormous difference between the fantasy and reality, for the couple swore they were devoted to each other, but Fred didn’t even want to change out of his greasy work
clothes or take a bath before the ceremony.