One of Your Own (14 page)

The revolution in Myra’s intellect manifested itself in her appearance. Ian was obsessive about the cut and fabric of his suits, which he either bought from Burtons or had made to measure by a Jewish tailor (temporarily setting aside his virulent anti-Semitism). His clothes were classic in style; Myra had always followed the fashion pack with her pencil skirts and neat blouses, which tended to look ageing on her, but she began dressing provocatively, ditching the flat ballet pumps for stilettos or knee-length boots, and wearing her skirts shorter and her trousers tighter, and topped it all off with a leather jacket. She drew her inspiration from Ian’s crush on Irma Grese, the notorious female concentration camp guard who was executed in 1945, and kept a photograph of Grese in her handbag.

At Millwards, foreman George Clitheroe noticed Myra ‘starting to become overbearing, and wearing kinky clothes. They used to laugh and joke together over dirty books.’
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Tom Craig was disappointed in her: ‘She was a good shorthand typist, I’ll say that for her, and she was always smartly dressed. She wore these short skirts and boots and fancy stockings. But she would have been fired if it hadn’t been difficult to get a replacement. With most of the girls in an office you have a bit of a lark around, you pull their legs and everyone tries to get a bit of fun out of their work. But Myra was heavy going. You got no response from her at all. She was surly at the best of times and aggressive if you spoke to her the wrong way. She didn’t come in contact much with the other girls, but she still managed to have a bad effect on everybody. The pair of them were just plain surly and unsociable.’
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Outside the office, Myra was the curt public face of the closed unit she and Ian presented to the world. He provided the funds, but if they travelled by bus, she bought the tickets; if they frequented a pub, she paid for the drinks; and if they visited an off-licence for cigarettes, she requested the brand in newly clipped vowels. She even placed bets at bookies while Ian sat outside in his sunglasses to wait for the ticket stub. Otherwise, she rarely spoke to anyone; in Gorton, the neighbours called her Miss Hoity-Toity because she wouldn’t acknowledge them. One school friend recalls: ‘She went from this happy-go-lucky girl to not wanting to speak to anybody, not wanting to be with anybody. You’d shout to her and she’d completely ignore you.’
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Even Pat Jepson felt sidelined as Myra withdrew from their friendship and ‘start[ed] to speak posh’.
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Pleasantries from her were so rare that when she rewarded Mr Spencer from the chip shop with a smile and a thank you after he repaired the primus stove she and Ian used on their travels, he passed the news on to his customers.

Only the affection Myra and Ian felt for their families survived the cohesive rejection of everyone else. Ian mourned the death of his foster father, John Sloan, from lung cancer in 1962 and returned to Scotland for the funeral, but postponed the introduction of Myra to his mother and stepfather for months. Peggy still washed and cooked for Ian, and was delighted when he mumbled that he had found a girlfriend, but he never brought Myra indoors, asking her to wait for him instead on the corner of Westmoreland Street while he changed his clothes or finished a meal. The neighbours became accustomed to seeing ‘Blondie’ sitting on the low wall in front of the house, stonily smoking a cigarette and ignoring all polite nods until Ian appeared and the two of them disappeared on his Tiger Cub motorbike.

Dance halls and coffee bars held no attraction for the couple; they craved the countryside beyond the city, travelling into Derbyshire and Staffordshire on Ian’s motorbike, stopping at the old-fashioned pubs he loved. Myra recalled, ‘We had some pleasant, relaxing times in country places that he’d found on his travels on his bike; we’d pack a picnic lunch, flasks of coffee and bottles of wine and spend whole days in peace and tranquillity . . .’
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They recorded their explorations on camera: Myra wearing a motorcycle helmet and sitting on the old stone stile that led into Shallcross Wood; Ian standing with his dog hoisted onto his shoulder below the great jutting fin of a vast rock formation; Myra teasing the dogs with a twig held high at Ladybower reservoir, where a pair of drowned villages lay beneath the still surface of the water. One day they took a different route, passing east through the city suburbs to the old mill villages out towards the dark shoulder of Saddleworth Moor, an undulating, vast and empty landscape that reminded Ian of his boyhood visit to Loch Lomond. He was enraptured as the moor rose and fell on either side of the twisting road, where long expanses of water lay glinting in the hollows of heather-marled valleys. They came to regard the moor as their kingdom, riding through it slowly enough to catch the thick smell of the black soil on the air or walking for miles across wind-soughed hills to mysterious rock formations callused by time. They ate and drank on the moor, had sex in its cotton-grass vales and named its soaring outcrops for themselves.

And it was on the moor in 1963, lying together on a plaid picnic blanket in the sun, that they began to discuss what Ian called ‘switching on the dark’ inside oneself: the execution of a classic bank robbery – and the perfect murder of a child.
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‘For years people have assumed that Ian totally corrupted me, but he didn’t,’ Myra admitted a few years before her death. ‘I have to own the part that I played in things, to accept that I wanted some of the things to happen.’
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Her initial infatuation with Ian Brady isn’t difficult to understand; it was based on simple sexual attraction to a man she perceived as good-looking, intelligent and arcane. But, within a short while, everything else that he was had become clear to her and rather than being repulsed by the discovery, she found it stimulating. Why she was ‘attracted to his “theology” of fascism and nihilism’ and went on to participate in the murders are questions that have never been adequately answered, and it is – as writer Helen Birch phrases it – ‘around this absent centre [that] knowledge and understanding fail’.
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Psychoanalysts inevitably point to Myra’s upbringing as fully culpable, but the ‘absent centre’ was within Myra herself. She told her prison therapist a few years before her death that the ‘predatory instinct’ already existed within her before she met Ian, around whom her naturally obsessive nature revolved.
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This, coupled with a strong, dominant element in her character and a desire to rise above her background, drew her to the atrophy of established morality offered by her relationship with Ian.
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She described him as having ‘a powerful personality, a magnet-like charisma’, but she is the only woman to have ever felt that way about him.
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What he did have was the insidious ability to awaken in her an extant urge to ‘kick against social and moral convention’, as she herself phrased it.
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She admitted finding it ‘exciting to swim against the tide, to do things that others would never dream of . . . I just don’t know how much, but I have always wanted something different, more exciting. I have never been satisfied with any situation for long.’
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The discussions she and Ian had on the moor quickened her blood. ‘Not killing people initially, but criminal activities,’ she told her prison therapist, ‘the perfect robbery, its planning and execution.’
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She described her participation in the crimes as ‘exciting’ and owned up to experiencing an adrenalin rush beforehand.
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She maintained that her incentive was a form of social sedition: ‘I did not gain any sexual gratification from the murders. The prime motivation for the murders, for Ian Brady, was the feeling of power and control. In my case, it was rather compensation in the sense of being different from other people and being set apart from the world.’
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She had a sense of having been asleep until she met Ian; his stated desire to ‘shed the boring, accepted realities that suffocate the majority and embrace or confront what lies beyond’ – of being able to see ‘far and deep’ – was the base element in the alchemy of their relationship.
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Before he met her, Ian had used literature as a means of validating his darkest impulses to himself; as a couple, they continued to do the same, discussing the philosophy of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Ian introduced her to moral relativism, the concept that there is no universal ethical code by which a person should have to live his or her life, only societal and cultural conventions that can and should be cast off. Decades after their arrest, when they were each preoccupied with constructing dissimilar accounts of their involvement in the crimes, they agreed on one issue: having practised a form of self-hypnosis to liberate them of guilt and to deflect outside suspicion. ‘One important aspect of our relationship was that we shared equally the ability to shut down our feelings and our emotions,’ Myra explained. ‘Ian talked of controlling the subconscious urges or presenting a cold exterior. This ability plus the use of alcohol influenced our sexual experience and would eventually influence everything in our lives . . . We had to be able to blend into our surroundings like chameleons. To exist on two different planes, convincing others that we were normal, not capable of committing crimes . . . He taught me how to conquer my emotions, to do things on autopilot and disregard the consequences. I was a willing apprentice.’
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Until then, Ian’s impulses had been internalised, but the relationship with Myra justified them: ‘Before I met Myra it was all inside me, and the feeling of unreality kept me down . . . I feared it. The energy was kept in. When I met her, she made me feel confident. She believed in me and looked up to me so much that I lost all fear, and the energy projected outwards and I lost control . . .’
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Their initial plans revolved around robbery, although it may have been a ruse on Ian’s part to discover whether or not Myra was truly capable of carrying out the criminal activities they discussed. Ian retained the names of several men whom he had known in Strangeways and borstal, and Myra recalled his mooting Gil Deares as a possible accomplice in a bank raid.
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They debated seizing money from couriers, and Ian suggested that Myra should stake out the electricity showroom on Hyde Road in preparation. Among the thousands of papers in the relevant files at the National Archives is a note from Ian to Myra on the subject, dated 16 April 1963. Written during his absence from work, after he had injured his ankle crashing the Tiger Cub into railings at Belle Vue, it reads: ‘Well Myra, Ich habe meinen Fuss verboten [
sic
] . . . However, let us capitalise on the situation, I shall grasp the opportunity to view the investment establishment situated on Stockport Road, next Friday, to go over details.’
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He digresses with a slur about Jews before ending: ‘please excuse this atrocious scribble as I am writing this in a yoga stance (filthy swine) upside down. Well Myra, just wanted to put you in the picture. I’ll sign off now, as I am writing to Tommy [Craig], poor soul. See you soon, love from I.’

Lying on their picnic blanket on the moor in the spring sunshine, they came up with a line that became their secret catchphrase: ‘Money and food is all I want, all I want is money and food.’
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Myra scrawled the words on the walls of their office in Millwards, beneath the scenic pictures she’d torn from calendars to remind her of the moor.

As the weather grew warmer, the conversation switched from robbery to murder. According to Myra, Ian had given her Meyer Levin’s
Compulsion
to read, a fictionalised account of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. Aiming to commit the perfect crime, wealthy students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both of Chicago, USA, abducted and killed a 14-year-old boy. Keen adherents of Nietzsche’s
Übermensch
theory, the two young men burned their own and their victim’s clothes after the murder and thoroughly washed down the abduction vehicle but were caught when Leopold’s distinctive glasses were found at the crime scene. During their sensationalised trial, defence attorney Clarence Darrow gave one of the most celebrated speeches in court history, pleading for their lives to be spared by arguing that their crimes were innate and that they should not be hanged simply because they had fashioned their lives upon philosophy. The two were sentenced to life for the murder and 99 years each for kidnapping.
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One commentator noted that what amazed most in the case was that two killers ‘met and fitted each other’s needs like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’.
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Myra claimed that Ian had handed her the book – in which one character is called Myra – to read as a blueprint for the murder he and she would commit; he told her that Leopold and Loeb had failed to plan properly and that had proved their downfall. Ian denies having read the book at all – he claims the inspiration came from the 1959 film
Compulsion
, in which his favourite actor Orson Welles played the defence attorney. ‘To the perfect crime!’ runs the opening line.

The rape and murder of children were something Ian and Myra talked about during sex. Myra admitted, ‘Sex with children was an interest he had that influenced his offending behaviour, but it was a sadistic trait, gaining excitement from their suffering.’
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She resolutely denied sharing his paedophilia, but the discussion of it was part of their sex lives and they observed children at play with a view to the crimes they would eventually commit. In the months before she passed her driving test, Myra borrowed a black Ford Prefect van from greengrocer Benjamin Boyce – who knew her as a reliable babysitter – and drove around Manchester with Ian in the passenger seat to watch children. They parked outside her old school, Ryder Brow, and Ian slid down in his seat to take surreptitious photographs of schoolboys through the railings, with Myra sitting next to him. She later confessed to driving about Gorton’s streets, stalking children, and imagining what she might say to lure them into the van. ‘I was considered to be good with children, an excellent babysitter and able to put children at ease,’ she reflected. ‘Could I therefore be considered capable of child abduction or violence towards children?’
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