One of Your Own (44 page)

Myra enlisted her mother’s help in trying to obtain visiting rights to Ian. She put in a request to the governor of Holloway and Ian pressed the assistant governor of his wing for the same, but inter-prison visits were refused. Myra wrote to her mother, telling her to contact Lord Stonham of the Home Office, with whom Myra had become friendly during one of his regular visits to Holloway. He described Myra as ‘very calm and collected . . . She was studying for her O levels. Apparently she was more concerned about the fact that she was not recognised as Brady’s common-law wife than about anything else.’
⁹

A number of titled individuals called upon Myra regularly during the course of their prison work, and some became friends. One who visited but did not cross the boundary from philanthropic caller to ally was forty-year-old Lady Anne Tree, daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, whose family home was Chatsworth.
¹⁰
At the request of the prison governor, she began visiting Myra, whom she found ‘a dull figure. I did find it rather difficult until we got on to books. I used to look very carefully on Saturdays at the book reviews to have things to talk about, to say, “Myra, have you seen this is coming out?” I’d take the books in sometime, or she’d get them through the prison library.’
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She dismisses Myra’s reputation for being extremely intelligent: ‘No, I don’t think that was true at all. Or else she wouldn’t have done it, would she? They were both monsters actually. I think they had no pity, just were lacking it. And I don’t think she ever thought about her victims. She passionately loved animals, but I once saw her kicking a pigeon that was lurking about in the prison. It was horrid.’
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Although they didn’t discuss her crimes, Myra talked often about Ian: ‘She was absolutely obsessed with him. She was mad about the moors, of course. She had a definite calling to nature to that part of the world. And to animals, in spite of kicking one.’
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Lady Tree admits, ‘I didn’t like Myra. I felt outraged, really, because she was so blaming of other people. She really wanted to prove herself fit for release from the start. She never expressed remorse with me, but I have to say we kept pretty well off it. I think she saw everyone as a saviour. She definitely regarded herself as a heroine.’
¹⁴

Despite her firm attachment to Ian, Myra embarked on her first lesbian affair. Prison officers largely ignored relationships between inmates, with a view that if it kept them quiet, then it was fine. Myra’s prison counsellor feels that her many affairs with other inmates were largely due to her situation rather than being indicative of her true sexuality: ‘She told me she was a lesbian only because of circumstance, though I’m sure she’d say different about Nina and Tricia, two later relationships. I felt that she was very confused about her sexuality. She loved Brady and fancied him like mad, and she was naturally heterosexual, but this happens with women in prison. Not as much with men. I think women want touch and comfort more. But I know lesbians who are sure of their sexuality and she definitely wasn’t.’
¹⁵
Myra’s first affair was with a pretty, bespectacled girl with cropped blonde hair called Rita whom she met on D Wing. This was followed by a fling with a gangster’s wife, and another with a woman in her forties called Norma who was in prison for stabbing her girlfriend to death with scissors. Myra and Norma spent hours closeted together in Myra’s cell. In the prison kitchen, Myra worked with an ex-lover of Norma’s called Bernadette, who exploded with anger when she discovered the affair, attacking Myra, throwing urine on her clothes and defecating in her bed.

Despite these affairs, Myra remained in constant touch with Ian, who wrote to her just before Christmas to say that he was ill and confined to bed. Myra found herself reminiscing about the previous Christmas, which they had spent together in Risley on remand. Peggy Brady sent her some chocolate liqueurs as a substitute for the port wine of the year before. By this stage, Myra had been moved to Holloway’s newly upgraded maximum-security wing, E Wing. There, two members of the Portland Spy Ring, Helen Kroger and Ethel Gee – who loathed each other – were being held, together with a small group of other long-term prisoners. She was allowed to cook her own food and sunbathe in the garden when the weather was fine. There was no work for the inmates when the wing was initially opened, so she was woken at 7 a.m. to the strains of Tony Blackburn’s Radio 1 show and spent her time having her hair done by another prisoner, cooking, reading or strolling in the garden. Myra was in cell 11; next to her, in cell 12, was Ethel Gee, whom Myra said she felt sorry for because she’d become embroiled in crime after falling for the wrong man. Myra was attacked by Ethel’s fellow spy one day in the kitchen: Helen Kroger hit her on the head with a teapot, then pummelled her to the ground, screaming, until officers ran in to intervene.

Soon after her arrival in Holloway, Myra was questioned by police about other murders. The
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
ran an article on 12 May 1966, with the headline ‘Moors Search Plan: Belief that There May Be Other Bodies in Secret Graves’. Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade were specifically mentioned. Although the search had been called off, there were plans to resume it if incontrovertible evidence of other murders was found and, with that in mind, detectives visited Myra in Holloway on 27 January 1967. At first, she had refused to see them. It was Ian who persuaded her otherwise, having received the same request himself. He told her that a snub implied they had something to conceal. In a letter to her mother, Myra declared, ‘Once the police have been, I’m not going to see them again. They can leave us alone for the rest of our sentence and I’ll tell them that when they come down.’
¹⁶
In the same letter, she asked Nellie to send her a copy of Joan Baez’s ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the record Ian had given her for the last murder.
¹⁷

Myra spoke to Detective Chief Superintendent Douglas Nimmo and Detective Chief Inspector Tom Butcher but told them that she couldn’t help with their inquiries about Keith or Pauline, or any other victims. She repeated her pre-trial mantra that they should question David Smith.

The first books about the case appeared in late 1966 and 1967. A group of university students tried to stage a play based on the murders, but their script was banned by the Lord Chancellor’s office.
¹⁸
Myra asked for a copy of John Deane Potter’s factual account,
The Monsters of the Moors
, which was sent via her solicitor and the prison governor, and in 1967 came the publication of Emlyn Williams’ bestseller,
Beyond Belief
. A combination of fact and fiction, Williams’ book received largely favourable reviews, with comparisons made to Truman Capote’s seminal
In Cold Blood
.
¹⁹
Myra and Ian were outraged by the book – or, rather, its success. Myra called it ‘the most obnoxious piece of lies and fabrications that I have ever read’.
²⁰
She wrote to Benfield, wanting to know how Williams had managed to obtain a copy of her diary, sending the detective into a tailspin. In another letter, she fumed: ‘This diary was amongst property which was taken from my house by the police upon my arrest and was in their possession for two years, until it was obtained for me by the solicitor who acts for us in this case.’
²¹
She was further angered by plans to turn
Beyond Belief
into a film, with William Friedkin mooted as director, and disgusted when she received a draft contract to give her written consent. She instructed her solicitor to block the film because of the ‘harrowing’ effect it would have on her and Ian’s relatives.
²²
The film was eventually shelved when the victims’ families stepped in to protest.

In February 1968, Myra left Holloway to spend a week in Risley, a special privilege granted on compassionate grounds to allow Gran to visit her. Ellen Maybury died in March. The press reported the temporary transfer and the ensuing public outcry led to Myra’s reclassification as a Category A prisoner, branding her an inmate whose escape would be extremely dangerous to the public, police or national security.

She was still desperate to see Ian and recruited the help of another visitor, Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, to whom she was introduced via Lady Tree. A Labour Cabinet minister and staunch Catholic, Longford was a passionate campaigner for penal reform and an indefatigable prison visitor. Happily married to Elizabeth Harman, with whom he had eight children, his visits to Myra coincided with the dwindling of her appointments with Lady Tree, who recalls: ‘I went off her and [Myra] went off me. I was having a minor change of lifestyle, my children were growing up. I said I don’t think I shall have time. We’d come to the end of the road.’
²³

Longford was immediately drawn to Myra and blamed Ian unequivocally for her downfall: ‘She was totally unlike that picture of her with blonde hair and staring eyes that appears in all the papers. She was a quiet, dark woman . . . Many people have done terrible things. The point about Myra is that she was a good Catholic girl before she met Brady . . . She fell under his spell . . .’
²⁴
He gave her a few of the books he had written, published by Sidgwick & Jackson, of which he was chairman. Their subsequent friendship might have begun and ended on Myra’s part with less than charitable intent, but for many years they remained loyal to each other, until she came to realise that his stalwart vocal support was damaging her bid for freedom.

Soon after their introduction, he visited Ian and announced that he had no doubt that the couple could be paroled ‘in a good many years’.
²⁵
He urged Myra to consider returning to Catholicism; she wrote to her mother: ‘I doubt I’ll “see the light” again, but who knows?’
²⁶

Myra began to form friendships with other inmates, her closest during her early days in Holloway with twenty-two-year-old Carole Callaghan, who was serving a six-year sentence for attempted armed robbery. She nicknamed Carole ‘Eccles’ after Spike Milligan’s
Goons
character. They shared a love of philosophy and English literature, listened to classical music together and studied French. At night they stood at the windows of their adjoining cells, talking for hours and looking out at Holloway Road, where lit buses rattled by and revellers spilled from Holloway Castle pub. They shared a similar sense of humour; Carole recalls laughing as she caught sight of Myra one day, balancing a dish in each hand as she went down the stairs singing ‘Swanee River’ at the top of her voice. Carole was married, but also had lesbian relationships in prison. She viewed Myra’s girlfriends as minions: ‘Not only would [the girlfriend] be useful sexually but she would also preen and polish Myra’s cell, wash and iron her clothes, and generally be servile.’
²⁷
The two of them occasionally peeped in at cell 18, the old execution chamber where five women, including Edith Thompson and Ruth Ellis, were hanged. The scaffold had gone, but the drop was there.

In June 1968, as part of a government experiment, Holloway inmates were allowed to wear their own clothes, which eventually led to the abolition of prison uniform for women. Myra’s interest in fashion resurfaced; she asked her visitors to bring her clothes, using what she and Carole termed her ‘Baby Jane’ voice. Her weight had gone up by three stone to a size sixteen since her imprisonment. She didn’t smoke – although she did try cannabis, which was stitched into the bellies of dead pigeons thrown over the wall to inmates from associates outside – but spent most of her earnings on sweets. Unlike the majority of prisoners, who depended on medication, Myra survived without pills, other than the ones she took for chronic insomnia, which plagued her until the end of her life (she was unable to sleep in the dark and permission was granted for her to leave the light on in her cell). She learned tapestry from a Royal College of Needlework tutor and discovered a latent gift for it. With two other inmates, she created an intricate carpet, working to a commission from the Polish Embassy, and recalled secretly slipping a Rizla paper inside the hem, reading, ‘Myra Hindley made this carpet.’

In January 1969, the prison authorities discussed resentment among staff towards Longford’s visits to Myra. One memo observed: ‘The already existing feelings of superiority in this very dominating woman are being augmented by his encouragement.’
²⁸
Another memo echoed: ‘Myra is a forceful, dominating woman at any time and is adept at manipulating any circumstance to her advantage.’
²⁹
Longford’s request for private visits with her was refused, although he continued to see her at three-monthly intervals.

Myra begged her mother for family news, although she and Maureen were not yet reconciled, despite her sister sending letters and photos of her three small sons: Paul, David and John. That summer, Dave was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for knifing a neighbour, William Lees, who had twice attacked him, once with a gang of people and again alone. The judge accepted that since the Moors trial he had been ‘subjected to a great deal of open and sustained hostility’.
³⁰
In prison, Dave opted for Rule 43; still only 21 years old, he slashed his wrists soon after his arrival.

Afterwards, he began to think about his life and the father he wanted to be. Maureen left him, unable to cope, and asked the social services to take their sons into care while she tried to find herself a home and work. A job in a department store ended because the other staff refused to work with Myra Hindley’s sister. Maureen recalled: ‘I learned to stick my nose in the air and close my ears to them. You’ve got to make up your mind that you are going to stay firm, no matter what you feel inside. You must act hard on the outside and say, “Look, I don’t care what you say, I’m not budging.”’
³¹
She wrote again to Myra, and asked for a visiting order, but was informed that her sister didn’t wish to see her.