One of Your Own (3 page)

Father Michael addressed the mourners from the lectern beside the coffin on the blue-clothed catafalque. ‘I used the story of the prodigal son at her funeral because I felt she was the prodigal daughter,’ he explains seven years later. ‘She’d gone away from the decency of humanity and from God, but somewhere she made the decision to return to us and to the Church. God forgave her and she became a different person.’
¹⁰
He conducted a short Mass, and the music Myra had requested on her deathbed, Albinoni’s
Adagio
, briefly masked the pattering rain. When the service ended, the curtains were drawn while the crematorium staff bore the coffin to the incinerator, where it was heated to 1,000°C and razed to a pile of ash. The crumbling residue was covertly removed through a side entrance, carried to a prison van and driven away from the black, wet Fenlands.

There had been endless press speculation about Myra’s ashes. Cambridge City Council, on whose property she was cremated, issued a statement: ‘The cremated remains will be taken as soon as they are available after the funeral back with the Prison Service. They will take possession of them and will make the arrangements in consultation with the family as to what happens with them.’
¹¹
The Prison Service put out a statement of their own: ‘Myra Hindley did not say exactly where she wanted her ashes placed because she was worried that the news might leak out. She left it to Father Michael to scatter them in a peaceful and secret place.’
¹²
In truth, Myra had specified where her ashes should be scattered, and by whom. Her powdery remains were handed first to the Prison Service and then to her family, who gave them to her ex-partner, Tricia Cairns. On a clear day in February 2003, she scattered Myra’s ashes at Stalybridge Country Park, an area of woodland and water at the foot of Saddleworth Moor. One tabloid claimed to have photographed the ashes and printed a picture of a leafless shrub shrouded in white dust. The possibility that someone would attempt to photograph Myra in death seemed strangely inevitable; an internal memo from Suffolk Constabulary noted: ‘Photographs of Hindley alive are greatly valued. Those of her dead are believed to be worth more.’
¹³

For it was, after all, by a photograph that the world knew Myra Hindley best: an image that captured ‘the most evil woman who ever lived’, ‘the devil’s daughter’, ‘a Medusa’, a ‘peroxide-haired Gorgon’ and ‘a disgrace to womankind’.
¹⁴
A photograph sealed her transformation from convicted murderess to something that modern language could not adequately convey: she was both the stuff of age-old nightmares – hence the references to mythical female horrors – and the depraved product of modern society. ‘She was the end of innocence.’
¹⁵

Throughout her years in prison, Myra fought against the impact of the photograph, launching persistent campaigns to rehabilitate herself in the public eye. She grew bitter when they failed. In an open letter to
The Guardian
, she wrote: ‘The truth of this continuing Gothic soap opera is that most people don’t want to accept that people like myself can change. They prefer to keep me frozen in time together with that awful mugshot so that their attitudes, beliefs and perceptions can remain intact.’
¹⁶
Each fresh story of her efforts to educate herself, to express remorse, or of her conversion to ‘good Catholic girl’ was accompanied by the same infamous photograph. Towards the end of her life she admitted defeat: the crude black-and-white mugshot from October 1965 was impossible to efface. It defined her, no matter how fervently she and her supporters insisted she had changed, and would serve as her epitaph.

She was 23 when the photograph was taken in the basement cells of Hyde police station. Six months later, the ‘Moors’ trial closed at Chester Assizes and Myra began life in prison. She and her lover, Ian Brady, were known then to have killed two children and one teenager; they were also strongly suspected of killing a twelve-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, but the police investigation was contentiously shelved, although the case itself remained open. Two of their victims were discovered buried on the vast, bleak moor between the villages of Greenfield in Lancashire and Holmfirth in Yorkshire. The crimes had gone undetected until David Smith, Myra’s then brother-in-law, told the police that he had witnessed a murder in the newly built council house Myra and Ian shared, and that Ian had boasted of other victims, on the moor. David Smith insisted that Myra was no mere accessory to her lover’s crimes but an active participant. She denied his claims for almost a quarter of a century; although she never admitted an equal role in the murders, she did eventually confess that the children had been willing to go anywhere she and Ian suggested, simply because they trusted
her
. Like all children of that era, they had been diligently warned about strange men, but it never crossed their young minds to fear a woman.

The murders were cold and calculated, committed, in the parlance of the day, ‘for kicks’. When the known details were made public, there was both seismic shock and outrage, and calls for the two accused to be hanged. But there could be no question of that; the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act had been passed one month after their last victim was killed. The convicted pair were sent to prison for life instead.
¹⁷
Ian Brady accepted that he would never be free and apparently succumbed to mental illness; Myra worked obsessively at winning parole, sustained by a number of high-profile figures who crusaded publicly on her behalf, and she kept her sanity.

Widespread indignation greeted Myra’s reaction to her punishment. Her desire for freedom seemed unaccountably arrogant in view of the relentless suffering endured by the families of her victims. Her resistance to insanity once she had – or professed she had – come to terms with her crimes defied common logic. The idea that she could have committed such appalling acts of cruelty over a sustained length of time, then emerged with a sound mind and the good heart her campaigners accredited to her was deemed unthinkable.

And yet, in reverse, it
had
proved possible: a few years before the murders began, in the close-knit streets of Gorton where she was raised, young Myra was regarded by local mothers as a dependable, cheery babysitter. As a teenager, she defended her sister and school friends against neighbourhood bullies. Despite claims by both Myra and those who have written about her, there was nothing substantive in her background to hint at the crimes she committed in her early twenties. Her roots were as normal and absent of wickedness as that most homely of local dishes, the Lancashire hotpot.

But if that is the case, then might it not also follow that her crusaders may have been right and that a succession of Home Secretaries acted unethically in keeping a repentant and rehabilitated woman imprisoned? After her death, should Myra Hindley be viewed with more compassion than she was in life? Or is the summing up of her character by the detective in charge of the original Moors Murders investigation closer to the unpalatable truth: ‘She was an evil girl – if you ask me who was responsible for what [she and Ian Brady] did, I’d say it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.’
¹⁸

In her unpublished autobiography, Myra declared: ‘I am a child of Gorton, in Manchester. Infamous, I have become disowned, but I am one of your own.’
¹⁹
Towards the end of her life, she gave her birthplace and site of her crimes another name. One of the few journalists to whom she spoke relatively unguardedly recalls: ‘The one phrase that really sticks in my mind is that she referred to Manchester as “Victim Country”. She was talking to me about a friend who lived in the area and she said, “She lives in Victim Country.”’
²⁰

The red warren of Gorton’s terraced houses where every working day began and ended with the din of the foundry buzzer; the soot, brick and iron of the streets and the high-railed playgrounds of old Victorian primary schools where countless knees had grazed and beaded with blood on the asphalt . . . And then the moor: the stark swell of the land, with its pallet of myrtle green, charcoal and indigo; the black stone ruins and barrelling winds, and birds that spark up from the heather like tinder. Two very different geographies overlaid with a chilling name: ‘Victim Country’. Her journey through it, from wartime slum-kid to funeral pariah, was down a long and crooked path.

 

‘Once upon a time,’ she wrote, ‘I was simply Myra Hindley, a very normal child.’
¹
In her memory, Gorton was ‘a tough but respectable working-class district. There was a lot of poverty but virtually no crime and a strong ethos of Victorian prudery.’
²
Today, the Gorton of Myra’s childhood no longer exists. It was swept away in the 1960s and 1970s, when town planners ordered its demolition as part of the city’s slum-clearance programme. Most of the inhabitants were resettled on overspill estates in council houses and tower blocks that were supposed to provide them with a better standard of living; what was lost was a watertight sense of community, replaced by crime levels and rigid disenchantment as high as the electricity pylons dominating the skyline.

Ghosts of the old Gorton remain – the odd, mouldering pub and recognisable street name – but the rest has gone. It was once a neighbourhood interchangeable with countless others throughout the north of England, an urban village where the inhabitants all knew each other and life revolved around the neighbourhood. There were few, if any, feelings of inferiority; everyone was in the same boat. Apart from the weekly wage, the only other source of income was an occasional win on the horses or (for the truly blessed) a windfall on the football pools. Communities were close-knit because different branches of one family lived in the same street or nearby; children ran between virtually identical homes of grandparents, aunts and uncles. This invisible gridwork extended to leisure, where outings were taken en masse, with whole streets hiring a charabanc to ferry them to the nippy coast for the day. The era of cheap foreign holidays was but a speck on the horizon; Gorton’s clans looked forward to public holidays and traditions to lighten their working lot – Easter, Shrove Tuesday, Whitsun, Guy Fawkes, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. Otherwise the days were indistinguishable: when the buzzer of the foundry sounded every morning and afternoon, a labour-filthy line of men poured down Gorton Lane, leaving or returning to condemned houses where their wives strove to manage an equally heavy workload of domesticity.

It was into these unambiguous surroundings that Myra was born, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘an ordinary baby’, in the middle of the Second World War.
³
Her mother, Nellie Hindley, went into labour on the sweltering midweek afternoon of 22 July 1942, and travelled six miles by bus from Gorton to Crumpsall Hospital, a former workhouse. Nellie was 22, delicate in appearance though headstrong in character, and had been married for little more than a year when she fell pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Bob, was serving in the war overseas and so it was on her mother Ellen Maybury’s arm that Nellie leaned as she made her way to F Block, the hospital’s maternity wing stretching over four floors.

In the early hours of the morning, Nellie gave birth to a healthy daughter whom she called Myra, a name that had been popular since the mid nineteenth century. A hundred years after it came into common usage, ‘Myra’ fell into sharp obscurity, a phenomenon entirely due to the deeds of the girl born that stifling night in the red-brick Victorian building in north Manchester.

Nellie entrusted the baby into Ellen’s care while she returned to her job as a factory machinist earning a meagre wage. Ellen now became ‘Gran’ to all the family and was to be the most constant figure in Myra’s life, providing her with a proper home and the stability of unconditional love. In common with most children of her age, Myra grew up in a house where the mantelpiece bore a sepia photograph of a soldier killed in the Great War: Gran’s first husband, Peter. When the war ended, Gran married a coal carter, Bert Maybury, and with her son and daughter from her first marriage, James and Louie, settled into a cramped house at 24 Beasley Street in Gorton. Three more children followed: Anne, Bert junior and, in 1920, Myra’s mother Nellie. Louie died of peritonitis shortly after her marriage to an Irishman called Jim, and Myra was fascinated to hear how Gran’s hair had turned white overnight from grief.

Myra’s parents met in 1938. Eighteen-year-old, wilful Nellie began a fiery courtship with twenty-five-year-old Robert (Bob) Hindley, who was tall, dark-haired and sinewy. The Mayburys were Protestant, and though the teenage Nellie was indifferent to religion, she was scathing of the Catholic Church, a ubiquitous presence in Gorton. Bob was born and raised a Catholic: he had been educated by monks at the school in the shadow of St Francis’ Monastery on Gorton Lane. Religion was rarely a cause for argument during the early days of their courtship – that came when Myra was born – but Nellie and Bob had furious rows and equally passionate reconciliations. They married in 1940 and moved into the two-up, two-down house on Beasley Street that was packed to the creaking rafters with occupants: Gran’s husband had died, but her other children – James (Jim), Annie and Bert junior – had not yet left home.