Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (6 page)

A friend of someone who I interviewed has visited Ian Brady for years. Brady has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and is locked up in a high security
hospital
. He is seriously underweight as he often refuses to eat for fear that the staff are trying to poison him. (Prisoners food is, indeed, often adulterated by other prisoners, either in the kitchens or enroute to the serving place.) At various periods he has refused
sustenance
altogether as he claims he wants to die.

He is apparently enraged that he has lost his hold on Myra - and one of his visitors believes his one purpose for staying alive is to keep Myra in prison until she dies.

For years Ian maintained that Myra played no part in the actual murders - and this seems likely, given his need to control every situation. He probably didn’t want a witness when he was sodomising the male children. He was high dominance and she was medium dominance, so he saw her as his inferior, expected her to do what she was told.

But in the eighties he would tell a journalist that Myra helped carry out the sexual assault on Pauline and also inflicted injuries on the sixteen-year-old’s face. He would also add that Myra strangled Lesley with a length of nylon cord.

However, Ian also told Detective Chief Superintendent Topping of another five murders of adults that he’d
committed, and police investigation later found that one of those murders was the work of someone else and that another was more likely a suicide. His part in all five of the alleged murders proved unlikely. Either a mixture of time and mental illness had confused the solitary Scotsman or he simply invented his involvement in the hope of feeling in control of his life again.

Detective Topping interviewed both Myra and Ian extensively and found her to be the more credible interviewee who genuinely wanted to help find the bodies. She was, indeed, willing to be hypnotised in case it would help her remember further details of the gravesites. She agreed to do it, her medical adviser agreed she could do it, and Detective Peter Topping found a skilled
hypnotherapist
who wanted to do it - but the Home Office repeatedly turned the request down.

Ian, like Myra, went back up to the moors with the police and looked for familiar landmarks. He was less visibly distressed than she was during visits there, but also less helpful. He told Peter Topping that he felt ashamed of his actions and could not bear to think about what he’d done.

Myra has also admitted to feelings of shame and remorse. She seems to have blocked out the picture
of the deaths: leastways when a relative died, Myra said that it was the first time she’d seen a dead body, forgetting that she’d seen the corpse of Pauline Reade. Freed from Brady’s influence, she returned to normal - and has apparently rebuilt her past vision of herself so that it resembles a more normal one.

Though considered to have a hard side, Myra Hindley is not without her demons. She still opts to sleep with the light on, has occasionally been hospitalised for severe depression and is said to fear death. Yet for some years she has smoked forty cigarettes a day and refused to
exercise
, despite the fact that she has angina and brittle bones.

In 1999 she was hospitalised after collapsing in her cell and asked doctors to let her die if she lapsed into a vegetative state. Prison visitors report that if she
doesn
’t change to less destructive habits she is likely to die before her sixtieth year.

The tabloids have suggested that this chainsmoking is either a death wish or a last desperate attempt to make herself seem so frail that she is released on compassionate grounds. Peter Timms sees it merely as a means of reducing boredom. ‘What else is there to do in prison?’ the former prison governor says with disarming honesty.

So what kind of personality starts off caring for children but is eventually persuaded to lure them into a car so that her lover can murder them? Some journalists have called her a psychopath but psychopathy seems unlikely in a woman who loved her mother and gran and the children she babysat. Psychopaths cannot form strong and lasting bonds with anyone.

Psychologists claimed at the time of the murders that she had a hysterical personality - the term used nowadays is histrionic. That is, someone who is
over-emotional
yet emotionally shallow, who is gullible and very susceptible to suggestion, a human sponge. This makes more sense as Myra presented herself as
anti-social
to Ian Brady when he wanted to use another
anti-social
personality. He wanted to dominate so she pleased him by pointing out the terror in the victim’s eyes. But no one acts wholly to please another person so she must have derived satisfaction from the acts
herself
. It’s been said that the female serial killer kills a
version
of herself, a version she wishes to disassociate from - and Myra helped kill impoverished working class children who were on their own.

The theory of violentization (for more on this please see chapter sixteen’s theories of why women kill) suggests that violent people have either suffered strong physical abuse or seen other people close to them
suffering from it. Myra fits into both these categories, as her father beat both her and her mother. Myra’s mother also hit her, even striking the teenager across the face in the street one day after she’d missed the last bus home and been away all night.

One of the other stages of violentization is when someone coaches the initially normal person to be
violent
- and when she met Ian Brady he spent years encouraging her into violent ways. For many months he took her to see the films of violence and gave her books filled with violence. He spoke of bank robberies, Nazism and murder night and day. Then came the
fantasized
rehearsals, prowling the streets looking for potential victims and prowling the moors talking about what he’d do to them there. Only when he was sure that she was completely enthralled by his vision of superiority did he ask her to help him carry out his first murderous act.

Even now she doesn’t talk about certain aspects of what she did, writing about the other murders to a journalist - as broadcast in the BBC2 programme
Modern
Times
- but in the case of Lesley Ann Downey saying ‘I’m finding it very difficult… It just hurts so much to think that I could have been such a cruel
bastard.’ She was quoted in the programme saying that she ‘chose to sacrifice Pauline so that my own family would be safe.’ But if she’d wanted nothing to do with the abductions, Myra could have simply reported Ian’s threats to the police.

If Myra was to admit that her own childhood
rejection
and her father’s abuse had left her with suppressed rage, and that Ian Brady brought that rage into the open, she would sound more plausible. Certainly, the trial judge thought her redeemable if removed from Brady’s influence - and even her harshest opponents don’t actually believe that she’d kill again.

It’s true that if Myra Hindley hadn’t met Ian Brady her life would have been very different. She would probably have married and become a mother - she was distraught when her sister Maureen’s first baby died and she has been kind to the children of friends and relatives who have visited her in prison. Under Ian’s influence she became a very dangerous young woman but there’s no evidence to suggest that she’s a dangerous older woman now.

It’s unlikely that Myra Hindley would have told the truth to psychiatrists during her first six years in prison when she still saw herself as the love of Ian Brady’s life,
when he was all she cared about. But after that, surely much could have been learned from her and put to good use to avoid others making the same mistakes?

This would have involved analysing Myra at length but the prison service seems disinclined to do this. One prison authority, who wished to remain nameless, told this author that ‘prisoners don’t receive any significant therapeutic help.’

You can argue that killers don’t deserve help, in which case let’s change the law so that it no longer gives the impression that prison is partly about rehabilitation, that people can change.

The Reverend Peter Timms is uneasy that he was prevented from fully counselling Myra, especially when she was starting to confide in him. He told me that he was ‘willing to give ten thousand hours because it was important for her to know why.’ (And surely for the public to know why.) He adds that he is ‘seriously troubled about not being able to commit the time to counselling Myra to explore not when and how - which she was very honest and frank about - but why and what did it represent for her own inner life.’

He has tried to talk about this publicly but finds that the tabloids simply believe that men like him are seduced by the power of the female prisoner. Similar taunts have been thrown at some of Myra’s legal representatives.

Aware that newspapers were still using pictures of
the prisoner that were over thirty years old and that showed her looking deliberately emotionless, he gave them all one of her recent graduation photographs. But most papers prefer to use the old photographs, giving the impression that someone who commits evil acts as a very young woman in the thrall of a more sadistic man can never change.

Some newspapers also give the public an entirely erroneous impression of events. One reported that Myra Hindley had become a close friend of the
child-abuser
Rose West, profiled later. The report was
completely
untrue.

On 31st March 2000 five Law Lords upheld the Home Secretary’s decision that life should mean exactly that in Myra’s case - in other words that she should die in prison. The reasoning given was her ‘exceptionally wicked and uniquely evil crimes.’ Ironically her former lover Ian Brady actually
wants
to die in prison as soon as possible - but earlier that same month he had lost his court battle to be allowed to starve to death in Ashworth Hospital where he has been treated for mental illness for many years.

Some criminologists view Myra Hindley as a
political
prisoner because successive Home Secretaries have
refused to free her to avoid a public outcry. She apparently meets the usual criteria for parole yet has never been granted this.

4 If I can’t have you

The extreme reactions of Martha Ann Johnson

Martha Ann Johnson is one of a growing number of women (and men) who see their offspring as pawns to be used rather than as individuals to be nurtured. Between 1977 and 1982 she would kill all four of her children in order to hurt the man who cared for them.

She was born in Georgia, America, in 1955. Her IQ was a mere 78 - most people score at least a hundred. She was almost illiterate, spoke ungrammatically and often suffered from depression and a lack of self esteem.

Throughout her childhood Martha (who was
sometimes
called by her middle name of Ann) lived with her mother. She grew into an unhappy teenager with an increasing weight problem who had no confidence in herself and hated her small but heavy body, brown eyes and curly brown hair. Martha was desperate to find herself a boyfriend who would spend lots of time with her as she was afraid of being on her own.

She married for the first time when she was just fourteen. The marriage was to Bobby Wright and, like most teenage relationships, it was very difficult. The couple had a daughter, Jennyann, in 1971, who would remain with Martha when the marriage failed.

All of Martha’s husbands would cheat on her, but she was always desperate to maintain the relationship or to remarry. Being a wife and mother was her entire
existence
as she had no educational or career prospects. She also had a very dependent personality and feared that she couldn’t cope with running a household on her own.

After Bobby left her, Martha married Tommy Taylor and gave him a son, James, in 1975. This marriage was also argumentative and unhappy. Psychologists would later state that Martha had a personality disorder - presumably referring to her intense neediness - and that she found relationships with other adults difficult. She also moved around a lot from county to county,
perhaps
seeking a home or a relationship that would bring her happiness.

In 1976 Martha, by now an immature twenty-two, married for a third time. Her new spouse was called Earl Bowen. He was good to both of her children from her earlier marriages and loved them deeply and treated them as his own.

But his relationship with Martha was contentious from the start. She wanted him home all the time and he presumably felt trapped. She was also very threatened by his increasing bisexual activities and became intent on exacting her revenge.

He walked out after one of their fights, and stayed at a friend’s house whilst he tried to decide how to resolve their many problems. Martha’s entreaties failed to win
him back so she decided to do something cataclysmic that he couldn’t ignore…