One of Your Own (59 page)

We know that she was present at the tape recording and photographing of Lesley Ann Downey, helping to gag and restrain the girl, and threatening to hit her when she cried. The weird restraint of the tape recording and photographs – Lesley’s rape and murder were not documented on either, when they could so easily have been – demonstrates that their creators were connoisseurs of cruelty. Despite Myra’s pleading with Ann West to believe that Lesley was not tortured prior to her death,
all
the children were made to suffer. The blood on Lesley and Keith that Myra conceded to having seen came not from their fatal wounds but from the rapes to which her lover subjected them. Their murders were uniformly brutal: Pauline’s throat was slit; Ian tried to kill John the same way, but the knife was too blunt and he strangled him instead; Keith was strangled; Lesley was either smothered or strangled; Edward was struck 14 times with an axe but survived long enough for Ian to decide to strangle him. We know that she looked at the photographs of Lesley and Keith after their deaths because she admitted it to Peter Topping, and her fingerprints were found on the photographs of Lesley.

Then there was the preparation of it all: she conferred with Ian about the lure held out to the victim to entice them into the vehicle; she discussed with him where she should drive and what she should do; she accepted a record on the morning of each murder, knowing its significance; she ventured into a department store to buy a black wig to disguise herself, and stood at a till to hand over the murder weapons for John Kilbride’s death – a knife, rope and spade; she hired the abduction vehicles; she bought the tape recorder that would document Lesley’s last hours and Patty Hodges talking about the little girl’s disappearance; she bought the camera Ian used to take photographs of the victims and their graves.

And afterwards: she crouched on John Kilbride’s grave, staring down at the ground with that strange half-smile on her lips; she stood grinning on the rocks overlooking at least three graves, while Ian snapped away with his camera; she enjoyed picnicking on the moor beside the graves with her sister and children from the neighbourhood. After her arrest, she exchanged coded letters with her lover in which they continued to fantasise about child rape and murder. In prison, she listened to the songs that Ian had bought her to commemorate the killings and asked her mother for a fresh copy of ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, the record that marked the last murder. It was six years before she broke off her relationship with Ian. Even then, she couldn’t bring herself to be honest about the other murders until Ian forced her hand; her ex-partner, Tricia Cairns, asserts that Myra only told the truth because she had no choice. And she used a promise to be hypnotised in the effort to find Keith Bennett’s grave as a bargaining tool to receive visits from another lover.

None of this is surmise; it is all by her own admission. Afterwards, she spoke eloquently of remorse and her supporters have no doubt that she was genuinely a changed woman who regretted with every ounce of her being what she had done. But what troubled those of us who didn’t know her personally was summed up in an article by Nicci Gerrard, when she asked: ‘How could the pleasant-looking woman peaceful in the garden, the smiling woman receiving her Open University degree, be the one who had tortured and killed children, who had posed laughing on the moors beside a grave? Can you change so much that you are someone else entirely, struggling free from the ghastly wreckage of your past?’
⁴³
Yvonne Roberts, who did meet Myra very briefly, is convinced that she was psychotic. Is it possible, then, to enter a psychotic state in which such crimes are committed and then to return – and be allowed to return – to a normal life? Father Michael tells us that she wasn’t psychotic at all because she was capable of empathising with others and feeling deep love for people. Yet even as she professed remorse and offered heartfelt prayers for those afflicted by leprosy, starvation or homelessness, she wrote spiteful letters about the mothers of her victims, suggesting one required a ‘brain implant’ and the other was a ‘pain in the neck’.
⁴⁴

Andrew McCooey believes that religion saved her from insanity, but redemption on Earth proved impossible. ‘What happens to us in a world which has no rituals for recognising repentance, atonement and forgiveness?’ one commentary asked.
⁴⁵
But the public heard the resoundingly hollow ring in Myra’s expressions of remorse, while her desperation for freedom seemed to further undermine the repentance she assured us was sincere. In prison terms, she was a ‘nonce’, but she refused to cave in to being a ‘nothing’. It was this determination to fly in the face of public revulsion by not bowing under the weight of hatred that set her apart from other once-notorious women such as Carol Hanson and Marie Therese Kouao. She was a gift to politicians, certainly; while other female killers served their sentences and were released, keeping Myra Hindley imprisoned provided successive Labour and Conservative governments with a spurious example of how tough they really were on crime.

Throughout her incarceration, as she became more Girton than Gorton, Myra attracted the support of many high-profile individuals. Sara Trevelyan, who campaigned for Myra’s release during the 1970s and was shocked by her confession ten years later, believes there are lessons to be learned: ‘We know that these kind of crimes happen, and that men
and
women are responsible for them. I think we need a collective willingness to look more deeply at them, to ask what kind of light this sheds on us as a society. Children are becoming increasingly sexualised, and pornography is no longer something people look at in private. Alcohol and drugs play a part in dulling people’s senses and allowing things to happen. We have to look not just at the individual but also take a broader view. Some of it goes back to childhood, which we can see clearly in the life of someone like Ian Brady. But Myra’s childhood wasn’t unremittingly awful; there were some good bits, it wasn’t all bad. We need to look at how we create the conditions where these crimes happen, but I also think that the roots go further into our history, national history even. Think of someone like Josef Fritzl; his crimes have their roots in the collective consciousness of Austria after the war – the wall of silence that built up then, generational dysfunction. There’s always a cause, no matter how terrible the crime,
always
. And I think we have to be willing to go into that darkness in order to achieve some kind of resolution.’
⁴⁶

Not all of Myra’s prison visitors were in favour of parole. Lady Anne Tree, who introduced Myra to Lord Longford, reflects: ‘I kept well clear of his campaign. How could you be safe if you had this strange urge to kill someone? I still don’t have the faintest concept. Think of going out to kill someone. Think of leaving their body on the moor. Think of capturing a little boy. It is actually unthinkable and I don’t think you should embark on this without thinking of what unhappiness this has led to. Dreadful unhappiness.’
⁴⁷

Danny Kilbride confirms: ‘No one has any idea of what our family – and the other victims’ families – have undergone. People say they understand, but they don’t. There is no excuse for what she and Brady did, and no amount of talking about causes and resolutions can help
us
come to terms with it. Unless you’ve gone through something like this, you haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. Where’s the resolution for Keith Bennett’s family? There’s none for any of us. One of my sisters says now, “I can’t remember our John and I feel
awful
.” But, God, she was only four years old when it happened. I’ve still got very strong memories of John. I can see him. I remember him. But it shouldn’t be about memories. He should be here.’
⁴⁸

Ian Brady’s philosophies made sense to Myra Hindley; together they indulged in paedophilic fantasies that led to the horrifying deaths of at least five young people. They acted in tandem. ‘She had no judgement’, one obituary in
The Independent
read.
⁴⁹
But judgement was precisely what Myra Hindley had – in a sense, it is all any of us have – and she chose to use it with the most wicked of intent.

The official search for Keith Bennett ended on 1 July 2009. Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Heywood, head of Greater Manchester Police’s serious crime division, told the press: ‘As a force, there is nothing we would have liked more than to draw a close to this dark chapter, and we are very disappointed that we have not located Keith’s remains, but we will never close this case and remain open to any new lines of inquiry which may come about as a result of significant scientific advances or credible or actionable information.’
¹

Most people were unaware that the police had been searching the moor since 2003, when Operation Maida was launched to find Keith’s grave. Detectives began by visiting Ian Brady, who refused to cooperate, despite declaring his confidence in being able to pinpoint the grave to ‘within 20 yards’.
²
The search of Shiny Brook was resumed using information ‘already in the public domain’, along with Ian’s photographs.
³
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement confirming the end of Operation Maida, Ian wrote to Keith’s mother: ‘The Manchester Police, having bungled the search 20 years ago, opposed my offer of assistance to the Yorkshire Police, fearing that it might expose their former incompetence. Therefore, in the tenth year of the force-fed by nasal-tube hunger strike, this is my last word on the matter.’
⁴

‘Brady holds the key,’ Joe Chapman declares. ‘He is capable of standing on the grave and telling police he had no idea where Keith was. Chapman recalls Myra’s words: ‘His attention to detail was such that major landmarks on the horizon viewed from a particular vantage point on the roads across the moors provided a perfect grid reference for his trained mind . . . Ian had spent months planning the murders and plotting each location.’
⁵

Standing on the rocks of Hollin Brown Knoll, Ian and Myra could survey their dominion: the graves of Pauline, Lesley and John were all within close sight, plotted in a wavering line. A photograph of Myra taken by a stream shows her clutching a map and compass; it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that Ian, innately methodical, charted the graves with such precision. It was his ‘landmarks’ – the rocks of the Knoll, the peat bank and certain flat stones – that had enabled detectives to pinpoint the location of John Kilbride’s grave. In her autobiography, Myra admitted that the graves of their victims were ‘marked by photographs and not headstones’.
⁶
It was this macabre significance that lay behind Ian’s fixation with retrieving the photographs after his arrest. ‘The police on the original case returned the slides after about 18 months,’ Myra wrote in her autobiography. ‘Ian had them in prison, where he had permission to view them through a hand-sized projector.’
⁷
On one occasion when Peter Topping visited, Ian took out the photographs, murmuring that he wanted to see how the landscape had changed, then flicked slowly through them while the detective sat nearby.
⁸
In a 1988 letter to Ann West, Ian describes the tartan photograph album as ‘my property for reference purposes’.
⁹

Duncan Staff’s 2004 documentary,
The Moors Murders Code
, discussed the use of photographs as grave markers. One previously unknown photograph was highlighted in the programme: it showed Myra Hindley hunkered down on a patch of grass with her dog on her knee. But the image has no landmark or detail within it and research into it ‘proved to be fruitless’, according to a police spokeswoman.
¹⁰
There is just one picture that resembles the infamous shot taken of Myra crouching on John Kilbride’s grave. It was taken in a spot the couple visited often with their dogs, and where they photographed themselves at different times of the year, in snow and in sun, always showing the same clearly identifiable landmark in each shot: a tree, struck by lightning, on which the initials ‘FW’ have been carved. In one particular photograph, Myra Hindley kneels beside the tree, clutching her dog and staring straight at the ground. But as with the shot of her crouched on John’s grave, the landmark is impossible to place – except to those already familiar with it.

‘How many more trophy photographs were there?’ former Detective Chief Superintendent Ian Fairley ponders. ‘My view: somebody should speak to Brady now, before it’s too late. When we locked him up in Hyde and he smoked all my Embassy fags, I told him, “One day you will have to tell the truth.” Nothing to do with foresight. “One day you will have to tell the truth. And it will be easier for you when you do.” I accept it could be a power thing for him. I’m in no doubt at all that he knows where Keith Bennett is buried. He’s the type of fellow who
would
stand on the grave surrounded by police and get a kick out of saying, “Not here.” Brady is the type of individual who leaves nothing to chance, although he misread David Smith. But everything else was thought through carefully. There
are
other trophy photographs and what you need is for Brady to say: that’s of significance, that one.’
¹¹
Mike Massheder agrees: ‘I know for a fact that Joe Mounsey believed
all
the graves were marked this way. He felt very strongly that the relevant photographs were in our possession. Strangely enough, among the negatives was one which was cut in half. When we had it printed, it showed the scene at Hollin Brown Knoll, but the area where the grave was had been cut off. Just that one particular negative cut in half. After the grave was found, detectives went back up there and had a look around and said, yes, that’s it, in that half of the negative. Why it had been chopped off I don’t know.’
¹²