One of Your Own (40 page)

When Myra and Ian appeared for their remand hearing in Hyde on 4 November 1965, competition for seats in the public gallery was fierce. Security barriers and extra police were drafted in to deal with an unprecedented outpouring of public condemnation. Those who had known Myra in Gorton were stunned by her crimes. Anne Murdoch remembers: ‘I never liked her sense of superiority or how, if she took a dislike to someone, they’d know it. But it was still a terrible shock when the news came out. To think I’d gone to school with her and played games with her . . . I only saw her with Ian once, and he was walking along behind while she marched ahead. I always thought, afterwards, that she must have dominated him, not the other way around. It was awful in Gorton – the press wouldn’t leave us alone. I used to dash home from the shops in case one of them accosted me.’
¹
Allan Grafton echoes Anne: ‘We just couldn’t believe it. She went from the girl who helped out at football to a sadist who buried kids on the moor. We’d all grown up together, so it was just an overwhelming shock.’
²

In her first letter to Nellie after being arrested, Myra asked, ‘If you could send to the station a decent pair of high heels, I’d feel a lot better than I do in these mules. I feel like a tramp in your clothes (only because they don’t fit me properly).’
³
Grieving for her dog – ‘I feel as though my heart’s been torn to pieces. I don’t think anything else could harm me more than this has. The only consolation is that some moron might have got hold of Puppet and hurt him’ – she asked for Puppet’s nametag to be kept for her, then added: ‘This letter will probably be censored. If you should write at all,
do not mention anything regarding the cases.
’
⁴

During her meetings with Ian, they remarked on each other’s appearance; she thought he looked gorgeous, while he teased her about her prison clothes. They discussed the books they borrowed from the library; Myra complained about the prevalence of religious books to Risley’s governor, who explained that many prisoners found them a comfort. She plucked Spike Milligan’s
Puckoon
and Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
from the shelves, instinctively knowing they would be suitable topics to include in her letters to Ian.

On Wednesday, 10 November, the moor was searched for the last time. Benfield made inquiries about excavating Hollin Brown Knoll but was told it would entail diverting the gas supply at a cost of £10 million. Ian Fairley recalls, ‘Why did it stop in 1966? Money. That’s what it came down to. I couldn’t come to terms with the search being stopped when we were sure there were other victims up there. I call it dereliction of duty. I blame Benfield and the Chief Constable, Henry Watson. The men who made the most meaningful contribution were Joe Mounsey, Alex Carr and Mike Massheder, but they received no recognition. Once the case came to trial, dates were fudged to make everything easier for the jury to understand, such as implying that the ticket stub was found before the suitcases. It disgusted me, and I know it disgusted Alex Carr, too.’
⁵

Margaret Mounsey recalls: ‘Joe didn’t want the search to end. He felt sure that they would find the other missing children. He never forgot – he often went up to the moors, even many years later, just to stand at the roadside. I’ve been with him. We’d go and he’d say quietly, “This is it.” He knew – we
all
knew – that there were other victims up there. Unfound.’
⁶

On Monday, 6 December 1965, committal proceedings against Myra Hindley and Ian Brady opened at Hyde Magistrate’s Court.
⁷
For a fortnight, the entire country was gripped by the case. The world’s media converged on the town, packing out the hotels, cafes and bars. The Queen’s Hotel, close to the police station, became a hive of journalistic activity, with reporters downing pints and wolfing down the hotpots cooked by the proprietor, Nellie Bebbington, and her daughter, Derry. The magistrates – former Mayoress Mrs Dorothy Adamson, Harry Taylor and Sam Redfern – briefly became celebrities; Mrs Adamson’s fondness for quirky headwear was pored over in the press.

Myra’s hair was bleached and set, her make-up immaculate. She wore a monochrome flecked suit and yellow blouse, and sat with Ian, jotting down observations in a ring-bound notepad or laughing quietly over their doodles of Mrs Adamson and her natty little hat. Travelling back to Risley on the first day, she and Ian sat together, talking about dogs. Their conversation was overheard by an accompanying policeman. ‘When you’re driving, you must always run over a dog to avoid running over an individual,’ Ian said, to which Myra responded, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that.’
⁸

The prosecution presented their case the following day. On the journey back to Risley, Ian told Myra that he might kill himself. She recalled: ‘To Ian, [prison] symbolised a living death: something he told me he couldn’t endure. He had a jar of jam brought in with other things on a visit from his mother and he intended killing himself with the glass. I begged him not to, not to leave me, he was all I had lived for. He said I couldn’t be found guilty if I went on trial without him, that his influence would pall and I’d be able to rebuild my life. But he said he would wait and see what happened at the trial. I felt then that he needed me even more than I’d ever needed him . . .’
⁹

On 8 December, David Smith took the stand, giving his evidence in a voice so low and halting that microphones were brought in. His evidence was crucial to the prosecution; although there were widespread rumblings of discontent that he had been granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation, his evidence was the linchpin. As he stepped down from the dock, Ian caught his eye and nodded and smiled at him.

Maureen took the stand, noticeably pregnant. She declined an offer to be seated and spoke with more assurance than her husband. Afterwards Myra wrote to her mother, who had disowned her younger daughter for ‘betraying’ the family: ‘Did you read the lies Maureen told in court, about me hating babies and children? She wouldn’t look at me in the dock, Mam. She couldn’t. She kept her face turned away.’
¹⁰
In a reference to rumours circulating that David Smith had been offered cash by the press in return for his story, Myra wrote bitterly, ‘I noticed she was wearing a new coat and boots, and that Smith had a new watch on and a new overcoat and suit. I suppose he’s had an advance on his dirt money.’
¹¹

On 10 December, Edith and John Evans were photographed entering the court. Edward’s mother, her face a study in bewildered sorrow, was described in a local newspaper as ‘a small, frail woman dressed completely in black, and wearing glasses’.
¹²
Edward’s 15-year-old brother, Allan, was photographed outside the family home in Ardwick, crying. After the evidence was heard in relation to Edward’s murder, the photographs discovered at Wardle Brook Avenue were discussed. Myra wrote to her mother, imagining that the slides, negatives and tartan album had been returned, ‘Keep all the photos for us,
for reasons
, the ones of dogs, scenery, etc.’
¹³
On 13 December, Myra’s solicitors, Bostock, Yates & Connell, applied on her behalf for a hairdressing appointment because ‘her dark roots are becoming very obvious. This fact has been the subject of press comment, which is naturally a source of irritation to our client.’
¹⁴
The request was refused.

The following day, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother took the stand. Dressed in black with a chiffon scarf over her hair, she stumbled over her words as she described the events of Boxing Day 1964, then clutched the sides of the witness box as her voice spiralled: ‘I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!’
¹⁵
She screamed at Myra: ‘She can sit staring at me and she took a little baby’s life, the beast.’
¹⁶
Detective Constable Frank Fitchett, sitting just below the witness box, spun round and grabbed the water carafe just as Ann’s hands reached out for it. She carried on screaming at Myra, calling her a tramp, then broke down, sobbing. Myra recalled that she had whispered to Ian that she wasn’t a tramp; he had squeezed her hand and reassured her, ‘No, I know you’re not.’
¹⁷
The policeman who’d found Lesley’s body, Robert Spiers, was there that day: ‘It was the first time I saw Brady and Hindley and they were truly faces of evil. All the goody-two-shoes who complained later that the mugshot of Myra was the only photo ever shown, it was nonsense. That’s how she looked.’
¹⁸

The evidence about Lesley’s murder continued the following day. The court was emptied of press and public as the tape recording of Lesley’s last moments was played. Rain beat against the long windows as Ian’s voice snapped through the silence: ‘
This is track four
 . . .’ Lesley’s mother had already listened to part of the tape and had looked at two of the pornographic photographs in order to identify her daughter. The quality of the tape recording had been improved by BBC Manchester technician John Weekes so that every sound was appallingly clear.

The prosecution case then turned to John Kilbride. The jacket he had worn on the day of his murder was unwrapped from its polythene cover and shown to the court. The stench of putrefaction clung to it. Ian had tried to pin John’s murder and Lesley’s abduction on David Smith and another man, increasing public suspicion against Myra’s brother-in-law.

On 16 December, the weather was so atrocious that Myra and Ian spent the night in separate cells below the courtroom. Myra sat huddled under a blanket, shivering and unable to sleep. When she asked for her make-up bag the next morning, the guard ignored her, and she was given a cup of tea laced with salt, not sugar. She lodged a complaint with the station commander. Later, she wrote to her mother, ‘Nothing matters in the world as long as Ian is all right. If you’d drop a short note and a box of Maltesers, I’d be glad. He says he doesn’t want anything sending in, even from his mam, but I know he’ll be glad you sent them.’
¹⁹

The committal proceedings came to an end on Monday, 20 December 1965. The couple pleaded not guilty to all charges and headed back to Risley. The
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
announced that they were committed in custody awaiting a decision on 11 January to decide where, and when, the trial should take place.

Shortly before Christmas, Robert Fitzpatrick visited Myra and Ian in Risley, bringing them a volume of poetry each: Wordsworth for Myra and Ovid for Ian. During their few minutes alone together, Ian surreptitiously handed Myra a notebook. In her cell, she read its coded stories of sexual cruelty towards children. Using the key Ian had provided, she deciphered the stories and camouflaged them as poems in an exercise book. She also invented similar stories of her own, which she confessed afterwards were written as ‘stimulation’.
²⁰

Many years later, she admitted the stories spilled over into their correspondence: ‘Over the seven months we were on remand, Brady compiled a notebook in which he wrote dozens of messages that I was to respond to in a code he’d devised. If the date on which either of us wrote a letter to each other was underlined, it meant there was a message in the letter.’
²¹
The code began six lines into the letter, taking the seventh and eighth words as the start of the message. There was no code in the next line, but the seventh and eighth words of the following line continued the message. Myra explained: ‘It carried on in this way every other line until the message was over [and] was written in such a way as to make complete sense as a normal letter to whoever read it – the censor, etc. – whilst containing [secret] messages.’
²²
She gave an example of one message she had sent Ian before the trial (the coded words are in italics):

The decoded message read: ‘Why don’t you get someone to throw acid on Brett?’ Myra disclosed: ‘Brett was at that time the youngest son, aged about four or six, of Ann West. This was in the papers at the time of Lesley Ann’s disappearance; details of the family as part of the reporting of the disappearance. That’s not the whole message, but those ten words were the crux, so to speak . . .’
²³
Through the letters, detectives discovered that Myra and Ian hoped to marry; it was their only hope of seeing each other if they were sent to prison. Myra later claimed that Ian had proposed because a wife couldn’t be forced to testify against her husband, but she filled in the necessary application forms for the Home Office nonetheless. Permission was refused.

The couple read avidly while on remand, sharing quotations with each other. Myra copied out bits of narrative: ‘To you, my alter ego, what is there left to say? The charm of our minds is beyond the token of tongues . . .’
²⁴
and poetry by Housman, Tennyson, Wordsworth, ‘AC’ Clough (Arthur Hughes Clough), Kahlil Gibran and Charlotte Mew. She invoked the spirit of the moor through Wordsworth (‘Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/That on a wild and secluded scene impress/Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/The landscape with the quiet of the sky’) and used Shakespeare to instil strength (‘I am determined to prove a villain,/And hate the idle pleasures of these days’).
²⁵
Ian quoted from
King Lear
: ‘I grow, I prosper:/Now, gods, stand up for bastards.’
²⁶
They both loved
Richard III
; Ian later opened his own book with a quotation from it: ‘Let us to it pell-mell; if not to Heaven,/then hand in hand to Hell!’
²⁷