Devil's Disciples: The Moors Murders 0850791561

Citation preview

|. BY ROBERT WILSON

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from - Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/devilsdisciplesOO00wils

fF a5 BY ROBERT HdCi

©1986 EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS plc Fleet Street London EC4P 4JT

ISBN

0-85079-156-1

j

THE AUTHOR ROBERT WILSON is a reporter who, then working for an evening newspaper, covered the Moors Murders case and the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley after the sensational story first broke in 1965. He was born in January, 1938, the same month and

year as Ian Brady. Married, with two teenage daughters, he has been on the staff of The Star since the paper was launched in 1978 and has been with Express Newspapers — ten years with the Daily Express -— for eighteen years. *

*

*

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS MY thanks are due to my colleagues Donald Blankley for his long memory, his contacts and most of all his “leg work” on my behalf; Neil Wallis for his invaluable contributions; Jeff McGowan for his tolerance and support and Harry Pugh for all the time he spent passing on his knowledge of the moors.

Grateful

thanks

also to Arthur

Smith, Mary Smith, Margaret Campion, Danny

Kilbride,

Ann

West,

Tom

Benfield,

David

Sheila Kilbride,

Butcher

and

Patrick

Downey. And in memory of my two friends and colleagues of twenty years ago, Beryl Jones and Norman Jackson.

*

*

*

CONTENTS PAD OR Dee CA BY ahi sree Sent cas cn See ockscaceneck: Pe OMCROM Ee

ee

Pages

ee fl

SPR ACR CCORMI Se. foe. see segs dente sbecssences Bee eva an FANS MYT. oii cccs se seevegesossedees MMR PCMIS WOE

ee

ices

5

7 11

occ cbeccl eens

18

3. Never Take Lifts From Strangers. ...................... Se Me Me MO Re eck ss. c Se ogc eacte give opnseen

26 32

5. *Won’t You LetMe Go. . . Please.” ........6:......... USES EOI NT SLE A Permvitation TO A\MUrder, ioc. iic.deeseecs.scccscoesecsceees SESE RS AE TS kat it, a a ne a Re a RUE ROTO SL TIAE Tg een ses cs coc ecocncn usec cecceade 10, The Secrets of Saddleworth Moor... .................-+6

39 45 54 61 68 Is

11. Myra—The Signpost to Murder. ....................0008 MEERA ce ee oot alc hag ects thew etc vnvnss

81 88

7 wat Do Monsters Look Like? |...0.. 5c liecdeesccesees MIME IRNERS he 00S oe os Plo rpdadcv'es idee seo teene seeks

95 97

MN

fo

4

IM RC PAID, otis 0509 heeiocmn s ven ee exon dv aes dana slevos decay

119

RINE ECEOMECCLOL oo ic-cici vs coven ed sicle didccWseedascagenbcake cabs 129 eI VE ETITIN hos ka eis fekin dose dc Seah ash Soe ndeodee suns 136

MN NE

ee

ECGS

rg sore nnn ch ciaseis'den's pvp ipasign stheebin eink od

147

eS OG PATE 6 og casas vs ove cs cbdchdaruoooasawiasedsche 156

CADE NAT,

ol nap -ecscene vo dsseyvenneee tescaceeenshces

163

MUCOUS ods. dscsd dae de setaeddichsacheaneaueteeee 170 ME EHO NIC! ae os, casas coi eevee beiaefovdente ueseahokaan 177 Pere ivian 111 Cell BOUL. eevee esse ed ecescecevesceneseuads 184

Pete tives Lhey Lett Behind. (..2) 20. 6.....5. cs. deaes 193 MMNEM ASESE SOI

eee eee

yond. tnt piaitaaces sco den ov oteeheciesweaee alk cece Wa dvc as sts cc sods nadeddecwenn

201 208

Published by Express Newspapers plc Fleet Street, London.

Printed by R J Acford, Chichester, Sussex. Typesetting by E.C.M., London, & Co-ordinated by Roederprint Services Ltd., Fleet Street, London.

3

[13S

SUISSIW

youusg

"9194 POYSIUPA

yey

PACPMPZ

YALSAHONVW

poyoid sueag

uuy Kaumog WIA Aajse7

a10y peysiuea

WIA

11S -SuIssiw pue Apeig

Aa|pulH s

oplqily UYOF WIIIA

NOILVLS

POYSIUPA ouljned

3194 PIysiUeA,

TWHLNAD

"9194 apeay HLYOMIAI1GGVS

oy

Apeig pue splaqily uYyof Aojsey uuy Aaumog

jl0uNOS osnoy

swi0y jo

Yeap 0} poyoey SPM SUPAZ PAPMPFZ d494M Adjpulp]; pue

AS 1SYALLVH

319M punoj

YOOW

Devil’s Disciples Robert Wilson INTRODUCTION HIGH above the twinkling lights of a city crouches Saddleworth Moor, gaunt, hooded with mist, silent. And the keeper

of dreadful secrets. In the valley below, in a sprawl of stone-built Pennine cottages, chilling stories are told. The older people repeat tales handed down from their grandparents — accounts of unsolved murders and of the days when fearful hill farmers carried charms in their pockets to protect them from evil spirits. Many of the stories are about children... children being snatched from their cradles by the “little people”... children vanishing and suspicions of their being buried. The yellowed pages of old books in the little public library in Uppermill tell of the ghosts of ill-treated pauper children rising from their burial ground to haunt the moorland. And of their screams on “dark, wild winter nights” heard above the sighing of the wind. Of the witches, the boggarts, the childsnatchers, the murderers, the ancient local history books repeat the legend: “The devil’s children always have the devil’s work...” But

of all the stories of Saddleworth

Moor, none is so

incredible, haunting, evil, as that first told a generation ago. For this, also about children, is no legend, no fantasy. It is true. And more than two decades later the soft peat of the still-secretive moor — and the lives of dozens of people living among those twinkling city lights below — still bear the scars of what became known as the Moors Murders. It is almost twenty-one years since a policeman’s knock on a council house door, ten miles from the moor’s boulder-

strewn summit, was answered by a young blonde woman. The woman was Myra Hindley. Inside the house was her lover, Ian Brady. Soon their names would be known all over the

5

world. For also in that house, on the outskirts of Manchester,

was the body of a teenager who had been savagely, mercilessly, hacked to death. Hardened detectives blanched at the terrible sight. But they little realised that their discovery represented but a short chapter of a murder story that was to arouse more public feeling, more emotion, than any in British criminal history. For clues they found:in that council house were to lead them to Saddleworth Moor — and the bodies of two young missing children. And to uncover a web of evil, spun by Brady and Hindley, so cruelly incredible it was almost impossible to believe. Twenty years ago, on May 6, 1966, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were jailed for life. Now middle-aged, they are still serving their sentences but, even today, their names are never far from the headlines. Hindley — backed by campaigners like Lord Longford — has waged a long fight for her freedom. Brady, who is said to have confessed to the murders of more children, seems certain to

end his days among the criminally-insane. Should Hindley walk the streets once more as a free woman? And what should be done with Brady? This is the story of their liaison, the crimes that cost them their freedom, that led to so much anger, so much sorrow,

and changed so many lives. Judge for yourself. For, many people swear, never did the devil have more devoted children do his work.

THE TAPE RECORDING A PRETTY, innocent little girl went, briefly, to hell on her last Christmas on Earth. Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, vanished on December 26, 1964. Her body was found, in a shallow grave on Saddleworth Moor, ten months later. Only two people know how she died. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. But before they murdered her they recorded, on tape, some of her last moments. This is the transcript of the tape recording that damned them:Brady: “Get out of the fucking road. Get in the fucking

basket.” Then there are various noises, a door banging, crackling, footsteps, heavy, steps across the room, recording noises,

blowing sounds in the microphone, more footsteps. Hindley’s voice, quiet and indecipherable. Footsteps, light, walking across room. Whispered conversation, at the same time footsteps. Speech, distant, containing word “upstairs.” Then footsteps, two sets. Lesley Ann, screaming: “Don’t” and “Mum” and “Ah.” Hindley: “Shut up.” Lesley Ann: “Please, God, help me, ah, please, oh.”

Hindley: “Come on.” Whispering, footsteps. Hindley: “Shut up.” Whispering. Lesley Ann: “Oh, please, please.” Lesley Ann: “Oh.” Then, faintly: “Help, oh.” ' Lesley Ann: “I can’t go on, you’ve got hold of my neck.” Lesley Ann: “Oh,” followed by scream. “Help,” followed by a gurgling

noise.

Heavy

breathing,

sounds

of distress,

laboured breathing. Hindley: “Shh. Shh. Shut up, shut up.” Screams and gurgles. Lesley Ann crying.

Hindley, whispering: “Keep” (then there is something unintelligible and) “You will be right.” Hindley: “Sit down and be quiet.” Whispers. Brady: “Come on.” Whispers. Footsteps on stairs, then entering room. Lesley Ann, crying, muffled. a

Brady: “Here.” (whispered). Hindley: “Hush, hush, go on. Sit” (indecipherable). Lesley Ann crying. Hindley: “You are all right. Hush, hush. Put it in your mouth.” Lesley Ann crying. Hindley: “Put it in your mouth and keep it in and you will be all right. Put it in. Stop:it. If you don’t” — then a blank and “shh.”

Lesley Ann crying. Hindley: “In your mouth. Hush, hush. Shut up or I’ll forget myself and hit you one. I'll hit you one. Keep it in.” Lesley Ann whimpering. Brady: “Put it in.” Hindley: “Put it in.” (spoken quickly). Brady speaks but words indecipherable except for “in Then footsteps. Brady: “Put it in. Keep it in. Stop it now, stop it now.” Hindley: “I am only doing this and you will be all right. Put it in your mouth. Put it in now.” Further words spoken by Hindley indecipherable except for “put it in.” Hindley: “Will you stop it. Stop it.” Hindley’s voice indecipherable. Lesley Ann whimpering. After more conversation, Lesley Ann’s voice: “Can I tell you summat. I must tell you summat. ”

“Please take your hands off me a minute. Please, mummy,

daddy, please.” Lesley Ann: “I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you. I can’t breathe. Oh. Lesley Ann again: “I can’t bear it.” Later: “Please, God.”

Brady: “I want to take some photos, that’s all.” Lesley Ann: “Don’t undress me, will you?” Brady: “No.” There is an indecipherable part followed by the voice “al Lesley Ann: “I want to see mummy, honest to God.” Lesley Ann later: “I will swear on the Bible.” Brady: “The quicker you do this the quicker you get home.”

8

Lesley Ann: “I will have to go because I am going out with mama. Leave me, please. Please help me, will you?” Then: “What are you going to do with me?” Brady: “I am going to take some photographs. Put it in your mouth.” Lesley Ann: “What for?” Brady: “Put it in your mouth.” Pause. “Right in.” Lesley Ann: “I am not going to do owt.” ; Brady: “Put it in. If you don’t keep that hand down I’ll slit your neck.” (Pause) “Put it in.” Lesley Ann: “Won’t you let me go, please?” Brady: “No, no, put it in. Stop talking.” _ Brady: “What is your name?” Lesley: “Lesley. Lesley Ann.” Brady: “What is your second name?” Lesley Ann: “Westford.” Brady: “Westford?” Lesley Ann: “Ihave to go home for eight o’clock. I have to get or [ll get killed if Idon’t.” Pause. “Honest to God.” Brady: “Yes.” There are then quick footsteps of a woman leaving the room and going downstairs. Then there is a click, then the sound of a door closing, then a woman’s footsteps coming upstairs, followed by eight longer steps. Brady: “What is it?” Hindley: “I have left the light on.” Brady: “You have?” Hindley: “So that...” The next part of the tape is unrecognisable, then a child’s voice is heard crying. Lesley Ann: “It hurts me neck.” Brady: “Put it in your mouth and you'll be all right”. Hindley: “Shut up crying.”

Lesley Ann (crying): “It hurts me.” Hindley (interrupting): “Hush. Shut up now. Put it in and don’t dally. Just keep your mouth shut please.” Hindley: “Wait a bit. I’ll put this on again. Do you get me?” Lesley Ann (whining): “No, I...” The rest of the sentence is indecipherable. Hindley: “Shh. Shush. Put it in your mouth again, packed more solid.”

There is then a whispered sentence which is indecipherable. Lesley Ann: “I want to go home. Honest to God I'll... before eight 0’ clock.” Hindley: “No, it’s all right.” Brady: “Eh?” Then music begins with a country-style tune, followed by the tune of Jolly Old St. Nicholas and The Little Drummer Boy. Three loud cracks are then heard on the tape and there are

various non-vocal noises. The music of The Little Drummer Boy grows fainter, then there is a sound of footsteps. The tape ends.

10

Chapter One “MYRA — IAN” “TAN —- MYRA” THE freezing wind from the east swept over the Pennines, moaning as it flattened the sparse brown grass, then rushing on, down

to the valley, the farmhouses,

the cottages, the

villages, then the city. The icy finger of winter that had touched Saddleworth Moor as it passed homed in on its target, a young woman, her coat tightly buttoned against the cold. She shivered as it plucked at her clothing, and clicked on, along the frostwhitened pavement, a slight knot of apprehension in her stomach at what lay ahead. She stopped to cross the road, busy now with red corporation buses, and glanced right, to the east, the wind stinging her cheeks, ruffling her flimsy headscarf. The sting of winter always came from the east, from those damned moors she could see in the distance. They looked so close sometimes that you felt you could touch them. But the girl, in a city fabled for its preoccupation

with the weather,

had other

things on her mind that chill January Monday. She was on her way to start a new job. That morning she had preened herself in the mirror. The face she saw was now that of a woman. “Eighteen years old and never been . . .” She chided herself for the thought. And her a good Catholic girl, too. She stubbed out the cigarette and slowly applied the red lipstick, glancing out of the window as the milk bottles clinked on the doorsteps outside.

The scene, on that fateful day in 1961, could have been the set of Coronation Street. The place was Gorton, a grimy Manchester suburb of condemned two-up, two-down slums with no baths, no hot water and the lavatories outside in the

backyards. And where the women seemed to permanently wear curlers and, a peculiarity of Northern cities, appeared to 11

walk between each others’ homes with their across their bosoms. Chester’s and Wilson’s pubs were on almost corner. Pianos still jangled in them on Saturday nights then and beer was only a couple of bob

arms folded every street and Sunday a pint. The

policemen still plodded the beat, on foot, and on their own and, though the people cursed it at the time, the air was thick,

blessedly for the large families, with the smoke of industry. Anda girl of eighteen, with no O- levels, could still get a job in office. She had lived with her gran, in one of the sooty Victorian terraces since she was four, when her younger sister Maureen was born and last night, in the tiny kitchen, had had a bath in the tin tub, warning: “Now NOBODY, not even Maureen, is

- to come in.” ; It was the dawn of the swinging ’Sixties. The girls swooned over Elvis, went daft in the cinema when Bill Haley and the Comets Rocked Around the Clock, giggled at smutty jokes. But they clung, more tightly then, to their virginity, were more modest. Naked bodies were dirty. None was more modest than the girl in the tin tub, despite the hard shell she was building around herself. Nobody was going to see her without her clothes. She took one last look in the mirror in gran’s parlour, in Bannock Street, ready, now to put into practice the shorthand and typing she had learned at school. The short, dark-brown hair of not so long ago was now a bleached, back-combed, lacquered crown. The lips were crimson. But the face was too hard, too square, the nose too beaked, to be

beautiful. But she was attractive, she decided. The boys,

boring and childish though they were, were interested in her now and she wasn’t the wallflower at the dance hall any more. Satisfied, she slipped on her coat, picked up her handbag. “Bye, gran. See you tonight.” God, it was freezing outside. “Wish I had a car. I must learn to drive. Just think of all the places I could go.” She had a mile to walk to the firm where she was to start work — Millward’s Merchandise, a chemical distributing company in West Gorton, towards the city centre. Along the 12

familiar streets, past her old school where she had been captain of the netball team, and the toughest girl in the class, she clicked on, her feet, in the new high heels, numbing with

the cold. Millwards, who had advertised for a typist, at eight pounds ten a week — “excellent prospects for chosen applicant” — lay ahead. She walked up to the door, pushed it open. “Good morning.” Tom Craig, the boss, greeted her in the little office and nodded towards her new colleagues, hanging up their coats, settling at their desks. Slowly, unblinking, the cold grey eyes of one of them looked up and held her gaze. She felt a strange tingle, the self-conscious smile still frozen. She took in his appearance with approval. Dark, three-piece suit, dark tie. The features

were thin, the forehead high, the thick, brown hair swept back. He stood up. He was surprisingly tall, at least six feet. Their gaze was still locked, then someone spoke. “Myra — Ian. Ian — Myra.” The introduction had been made. Two lives had come together, two names to be linked one day. Then forever. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. *

SHE

was

in love.

*

She

*

had fallen for the thin, sallow,

brooding Scotsman who dictated her first letter, in his harsh, Glaswegian accent at Millwards. “Dear Sirs.” The Gorbalsnurtured tones of the stock clerk, Ian Brady, punctuated by deep, thoughtful draws on his cigarette, captivated her. He was so different. But, Myra sighed to herself, so remote. She wondered about his background. Why had he come down to England, to Manchester? The days became weeks, months and, although she felt those grey eyes on her, when she looked up from her notepad, there was no warmth, no encouragement. Winter had turned to spring, then to summer. She scribbled on her notepad, in Pitman’s shorthand: “Wonder if Ian is courting . . . Still feel the same.” And in her red-backed diary, at home: “Ian looked at me today... .” He wasn’t married, she knew that much. He was twenty-

13

three, had a motor-bike, didn’t seem to have any girl friends. And he didn’t seem to want her. If only . . . And then: “He smiled at me . . . I wonder if he’ll EVER take me out.” She went home each night to Bannock Street, and gran, and her diary. “The pig. He didn’t look at me today.” She went jiving, in tight, hip-hugging skirt, at the Alhambra; trooped around Belle Vue, a giant amusement park and zoo in Gorton, with the other girls. But her thoughts were still on Ian. Myra, by then, was nineteen, born a war baby, on July 23,

1942, the elder of the two daughters of paratrooper Bob Hindley and his wife Nellie. She left the family home at four to be taken from the two-up, two-down in Eaton Street to live in the two-up, two-down with her gran, Mrs. Ellen Maybury, at Number 7 in nearby Bannock Street. To the low income groups of an immediate post-war city, in an era of ration books, utility clothing, working mothers and

cramped houses, the arrangement was not uncommon. But some of her teachers believed it had led her to form an attitude which set her apart from the other children at Ryder Brow Secondary School. She was the loner, the Plain Jane,

the ugly duckling, with short, dark-brown hair, cut, the other girls would giggle, as if her gran had trimmed it with a basin on her head. Nobody, though, said it to her face. For, despite her reserve, her day-dreaming, Myra Hindley was as tough as they come. She was brilliant at team games — captain of the school netball team, the star rounders player, a strong swimmer, and went for judo lessons. A fierce, aggressive, competitive spirit had broken through. The other girls saw her as “masculine.” Once home at night she would slip out of her navy-blue uniform and put on trousers. At playtime she would sit alone, in a corner of the playground, scribbling with pencil and notepad. “What? S that Myra? What are you writing? Poems?” Her teachers, aware of her background, were concerned about her retreats into a dream world and one of them, kindly Lewis Jones, who taught English, had the idea of setting her an essay to try to reach her innermost thoughts. He was

14

amazed by the result. The story she wrote flooded three exercise books. Beautifully illustrated, it was written in the style of Arthur Ransome or, perhaps Enid Blyton. About the adventures of a close, happy group of children; friends. The lonely girl’s daydreams had been about companionship. And then, at fifteen, the girl who was always the last to be

asked to dance at the school hops, found friendship, with a boy. His name was Michael Higgins, two years younger than Myra, and a Catholic. They shared their sweets, went for walks together. She protected him from bullies. And then he died. He drowned in a reservoir, in Station Road on a hot

June afternoon after getting stomach cramp, while swimming with other children. Myra had not gone with them but she was there when they pulled him from the water. She was

devastated,

inconsolable

at first. She recoiled

more deeply into her shell. And then she sought solace, in the Roman Catholic Church to which he had belonged. She took her first Communion on November 6, 1958, and

as a memento of the occasion, she was given a white prayer book by her Uncle Bert and Auntie Kath Maybury. That prayer book. was to provide, one day, seven years later, the most vital clue of all for police investigating her dreadful crimes. It led them to, among other things, a tape recording. And the last, terrified screams of a little girl. Lesley Ann Downey. *

*

*

GRADUALLY, she began to slip back into the world. She went baby-sitting for the neighbours and, three times a week, went to Stan’s one-and-six-a-night dancing school. And, at ten-and-six a time, she started to have her hair tinted at a

place with a posh-sounding name, Maison Laurette. The ugly duckling was becoming a swan. Then, briefly, she found romance and became engaged to young Ronnie Sinclair, a tea blender at the Co-op who lived nearby. They fixed a wedding date and she proudly showed off a ring with three diamonds. But the engagement lasted for only six months. Myra Us)

Hindley was looking for more excitement than the dull, predictable prospect of marriage, home, children, that most of the girls seemed keen to settle for. Besides, she had said, Ronnie was not mature enough. Too young in his outlook, like the “childish” lads she and her friends chatted to on the street corners and told not to be “filthy” when they went too far. . The job at Millwards — she had already drifted through three office jobs — had led her to the man she wanted. The mature, silent man of her dreams. But the love affair she yearned was still just a fantasy. “He MUST have a girl friend. Or maybe he’s one of those; queer. Or perhaps he just doesn’t fancy me. He does take sly looks at me, though. Why, oh why, won’t he ask me out. Ask

me out. Ask me out.” The questions, the thoughts, flitted daily through her mind. “He had a black shirt on today . . looked smashing. Wonder if he’s a good dancer. Wonder if he’s any good at . . . oh, how awful, Myra Hindley . . . you know what. . .?” But Ian Brady, unknown,

then, to the lovestruck girl —

“What the bloody hell is she always staring at?” — already had a consuming passion. He worshipped it, alone, in his bedroom. He was infatuated, obsessed, with the greatest evil the world has ever known. At night, from that little back bedroom, the neighbours in Westmoreland Street, Longsight, two miles across the city from Gorton, heard spine-chilling sounds that had not abused their ears since the wartime cinema newsreels. A record player, blasting out at full volume, was playing German marching songs. And the screaming, hysterical speeches of the Nazi leaders. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler. The butchers

of twelve million people. And that was the evil that finally brought Ian Brady and Myra Hindley together: It was almost Christmas, 1961, lunchtime. He sat, as usual, alone at his desk, leaning back in his chair, reading. “Good

book?” “Hmm.” “What’s it about?” “Germany.” “Germany? I’ve always wanted to go there. There’s nothing round here. I once nearly joined the NAAFI so I could go there.” For the first time in almost 11 months there was a flicker of

16

interest in the grey eyes. They even seemed to be softer.

His lunchtimes were solitary no more. They ate their sandwiches together as he taught her German words. He would point out a passage from a page in a dirty book with a smirk. She would smirk, too. But his favourite literature:

Mein Kampf, Six Million Dead, Eichmann. The stories of his heroes of the Third Reich and their atrocities. And then, at Christmas, it happened. The question was put: “Would you like to go out with me?” “Eureka,” shouted the entry from the page in the red diary. “Today we have our first date!” And it was Myra Hindley who had done the asking... .

1

Chapter Two

THE DEVIL’S WORK ~ SADDLEWORTH Moor stands sixteen hundred feet sea level, a long climb up-the twisting, lonely road, the away from the bustle of Manchester towards the little built Yorkshire town of Holmfirth. A place famous for ter. It is the home of Bamforth’s, who produce the

above A635, stonelaugh-

saucy

seaside comic postcards, and, more recently, was the location

for the television comedy series Last of the Summer Wine. It is a grim irony that the hilltop only eight miles away was the setting for such horrifying tragedy. It is a place where the traveller has always quickened his pace. There is an awesome stillness and, save for the sighing of the wind, silence. Little grows in the black, soggy peat. It seems another world. And on its summit are the rocks, black,

and grouped, by some geological freak that was to become so tragically significant one day, like tombstones in a cemetery. _ They stood close to the rocks, the man and the woman, drinking in the sharp air, savouring their surroundings where, said the legends, death was no stranger. Where, in another century, the “little people, the devil’s children,” stole babies from their cradles.

In the villages below, Diggle, Delph and Dobcross, Greenfield and Uppermill, they told the stories of the poor pauper children, forced to work, as cheap labour, in the woollen mills. And when they died, prematurely, their spent, overworked little bodies were buried in a plot at Greenfield. Their ghostly screams, said the tales, were so terrifying that an exorcist was called in and the bodies were exhumed. Not far away, at Diggle, a “black, evil-looking ruin” at Brun Clough was said to be haunted, too, by the ghosts of children who, according to the legend, “were heard screaming on wild, dark nights in winter.” There is a farm in the valley just below Saddleworth Moor 18

where, it is said, children disappeared as soon as they were old enough to walk. And the farmer was seen digging in his fields “at all times of day and night.” Then there is the story of the parson, a normally mildmannered man to whom something unaccountably evil seemed to happen during a walk on the Moor. The Reverend Charles Zouche, vicar of Saddleworth in the late eighteenth century, returned to Uppermill clutching a tree branch he had fashioned into a walking stick and, unusual, then for a man of

the cloth, entered the Cross Keys Inn. There, seated in an armchair by the fire, he pushed the stick into the glowing embers and sat, staring into the flames, his shoulders heaving. The kindly landlady, Mrs. Annie Broadbent sought to comfort him. The wild, maniacal look in his eyes as he leapt to his feet was the last thing she saw. For he thrust the white-hot stick into her eyes and blinded her. The man of God, it seemed, had been possessed by the devil during his lonely walk on Saddleworth Moor. The best known, and documented, story had been of the murder of William Bradbury and his son, Thomas, who were found, horribly battered to death at the Moorcock Inn,

Greenfield, on April 2, 1832. Their murderers had ended the lives of the two men with horse pistol, sword stick and spade. The murder, unsolved to this day, brought thousands of visitors to the moorland. It aroused the curiosity of the whole country. 133 years later the curiosity, and the horror, of the whole world was to be concentrated on the same area. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley stood, soon after the courtship that was to grow into an evil partnership began, savouring an atmosphere that turned the blood to ice of the villagers below. One unfortunate young man, destined to have his life scarred forever by his association with them, told me recently with a shiver: “Up there, on that Moor, there is nobody but

you, the Earth and the sky. And ona

really wild day you can

hear strange sounds, like voices, in the wind.”

Ian Brady had taken Myra Hindley to the place, his place. Together they listened for the voices. Now the devil’s children had the devil’s work to do.

19

*

*

*

THE spell had been cast. They were lovers, partners in crime, fellow-travellers along a wicked road. Like Bonnie and Clyde. Only worse. She learned of his background. Or what he chose to tell her. Ian Brady never knew his father. He was born, the illegitimate son of Glasgow tea room waitress Maggie Stewart, on January 2, 1938. And, strangely, like Myra Hindley, he did not live in his mother’s home. He spent his boyhood being cared for by another family. When he was three months old, Maggie, who needed to keep on her job to support them, took him, in an old battered pram, to live with her friend, warm-hearted Mary Sloan, her

husband John and their two sons and daughters. He with “Ma” Sloan and her family, living among granite tenements of Camden Street in one of the areas of Europe: The Gorbals, in Glasgow. The Gorbals was then one of those places where

grew up the grey toughest the rent

man often feared to tread, where the coal was still delivered by horse and cart, the kids hurled bricks at strangers, where,

other Glaswegians swore “they’d cut your throat for five Woodbines.” And where, unlike Gorton, even forty-eight years ago the policemen went around in twos. Maggie Stewart visited him as often as she could, usually on Sundays. And leaving with a wistful look at the bonnie lad with the then corn-coloured hair, dressed specially for her arrival in kilt and frilly satin shirt. He did not, it is supposed, know the identity of the lady with the sad look in her eyes who called on Sundays. Perhaps not. But there was something about the boy that set him apart from the Gorbals ragamuffins, mostly the sons of manual workers. His father, it was rumoured, had been an evening

newspaper reporter in the city, which could have explained his “way with words,” and his later passion for literature, albeit cheap and nasty. He was always immaculately dressed — “you never saw wee Ian with his arse hanging out of his trousers” — could pick out tunes on the parlour piano and was 20

polite to grownups. What a nice lad thought the neighbours. A minus point from the other kids. He was, by the end of the war, tall for his age, hair fair, eyes icy, grey. Like a German? Another minus point. And, although it is not known just when he became aware of it, he was, rarer, less socially-acceptable, even in the Gorbals, in those days, a bastard. Definitely a minus point. The boy from number 56 was known to some as Ian Sloan, to others

as Ian Stewart

and, cruelly,

sometimes

on

the

football field as The Big Lassie. The nickname infuriated him. He had earned it because, unlike a certain girl, younger, ina city 200 miles away, he was useless at team games, especially soccer. His cheeks burned to the taunts. “Come on, ye Big Lassie. Kick the bloody ball.” Yet another point against him. And so, like Myra Hindley, he dreamed. But his fantasies were not of the innocence of hers. They began, as he grew older, to be woven around a growing adulation of the recently-defeated enemy, Germany. War games, as in every other city in Britain then, were the most popular pastime in the playground of Camden Street Primary School. “I’m Monty. . .” “I’m Ike,” piped up the voices. “Bang! Got you, Sloany.” Ian was content to play the only part left. The German. ; He had an inquiring mind. The reporter in his parentage? It was the way he went about satisfying his curiosity that stuck in the minds of the tough Gorbals kids. Did a caterpillar bleed when you Sliced it up with a razor blade? Did a cat always land on its feet even when you threw it from the third-floor window of a tenement? How long could an animal live without food? In each case there was only one way to find out... . There was an old graveyard in the Gorbals, devastated by Hitler’s bombs and, according to the lads who knew him, a

place where the young Ian carried out some of his more macabre experiments. There, more than one neighbourhood

cat was imprisoned in a cairn of stones, and left there, their

pasty-faced tormentor returning each day to see if they were

still alive. Such a nice lad, that Ian Sloan, said the mums of the

Gorbals. Their sons knew different. There was something scary about The Big Lassie that was building up plus points. 21

His best pal, John Cameron, who lived on the tenement

floor below remembered a childhood incident in which he was tied to a steel washing post during a game. Paper was piled around his feet and then lit. The lad who struck the match, the other kids swore later, was Sloany. He was then, they said,

aged somewhere between nine and ten. “People tell me that by the time I was cut free I had blacked out,” John told me later, adding: “Mind you, we were all rough lads in those days but Ian was the toughest of the lot.” For by now, Sloany — no-one called him The Big Lassie any more — several inches taller than most, was

a lad to be

reckoned with. He may have played football like a tart, but there was something that made the others wary. It wasn’t just the daft, cruel things he did with cats — “let’s be honest, none of us were angels,” one of his pals told me — but it was the way he looked at them, with those cold, grey eyes. In 1947 he moved, with the Sloans, to a semi-detached

council house on the new overspill estate of Pollok and he became a pupil at Shawlands Academy, a school for betterthan-average pupils. He smoked in the lavatories, furtively showed off a flick-knife and developed a passion for horror films. He saw them over and over again. And the obsession earned him a new nickname. The one-time Big Lassie, then Sloany, was now Dracula. And then he crossed the law. Twice, before starting work,

he appeared in court for housebreaking and was put on probation.

He had jobs as a butcher’s messenger

and a

shipyard teaboy before his final court appearance in Scotland on nine similar charges. He was given two years’ probation. But there was a special condition to the order: that he went to live with his real mother, by then married and living in another city. That condition was to change so many lives. - And end at least three young ones. For the destination of the tall, lanky deportee as he gazed from the train window, as the smoke, the tenements slipped from view that grey December day was Manchester. Good riddance, thought the Scottish policemen, never dreaming that a decade later they would be curiously delving into their missing persons files. He was then almost seventeen

22),

:

and Ian Sloan, reunited with his mother, became Ian Brady,

taking the surname of his stepfather, Patrick, who helped to find him a job at the city’s Smithfield Market. But, in 1956, following another theft charge, this time for stealing lead seals from banana boxes at the market, he was sent to Borstal.

He was released in 1958 and continued to live with his mother and stepfather. And then, after working as a labourer, he got a job as a £12 a week stock clerk at Millwards Merchandise. His dress again became smart, though sombre. Dark threepiece suit. Black long overcoat. The neighbours had a new, tragically prophetic, nickname for the Big Lassie and Dracula of the Gorbals. The Undertaker. And now he had an assistant. *

*

*

MAUREEN Hindley was puzzled. There was something very different about her big sister, Myra. She had stopped going to church, she no longer went baby-sitting for the neighbours. And she had become so secretive. There was little similarity between the sisters. Maureen was petite, china-doll like and dark. She was the pretty one.

But the two, although they had spent their lives under different roofs, had been close, sharing confidence, giggling over girlish crushes, discussing their hopes and fears. Myra called her sister Moby, an affectionate nickname she had used since she had first been able to talk. They still saw each other daily; it was only a short stroll through the streets to each others’ homes. But now Maureen felt them growing

apart. And Myra was beginning to hide things from her. Her wardrobe was always locked, concealing her clothes. And her tape recordings. Maureen knew about the new boyfriend, the surly Scotsman who scarcely spoke, the man her sister seemed to worship. But she would not have believed her eyes had she seen them together, sometimes, in private. With gran, now frail and elderly, asleep upstairs, the little parlour had become a photographic studio . . . with Myra, posing for her new boyfriend for crude, pornographic pic-

pe

tures. Ian Brady had an expensive camera, special lighting equipment of six floodlights and developed his own prints. He had to. For the photographs of Myra -— and the ones he took of himself — were for their eyes only. Myra, prudish Myra, totally naked, apart from a white hood, pictured full frontal. And then from behind with weal marks from a whip across her buttocks. And then he would put on the timer on the camera and pose with her. He was not, said those who saw the pictures later, a

particularly prime specimen of manhood. The two, though, had become inseperable and went everywhere together — trips to the moors, to the hills around Glossop, Woodhead, or Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire and, to their favourite spot, Saddleworth.

He fed her his Nazi doctrine and she took it greedily. The German marching songs grew louder, the reading more intense and bottles of Rhine wine flowed. She relished his cheap pornographic literature and the tape recordings of his Nazi heroes. She had a pet name for him . . . Neddy. It was taken from his favourite radio programme, the Goon Show, something they imitated in the nasal, quivering tones of the characters. He called her Hess, linking her christian name to the surname of the great pianist, Myra Hess. And Hess sounded so German, like Hitler’s deputy. She began to dress the part, too, often wearing leather jacket, tight black trousers, high black boots. Dressed to kill. Despite Myra’s secretiveness she could not keep one thing from her sister . . . that Ian Brady had moved in to live with her. Now, his red and silver motor bike was parked, always at teatime after they had finished work, in Bannock street.

Maureen had also started working at Millwards and had seen the friendship blossoming. “Don’t say anything at work,” Myra begged her. “It’s only a small place and you know, well, you know how they talk.” The thought of Myra, prim Myra, who wouldn’t even let her in the kitchen when she was having a bath, living with a man, shocked Maureen. “Are you going to get married?” There was a toss of the head, now platignum blonde, Teuto24

nic. “I don’t believe in marriage.” “But don’t you want to have babies?” “I hate babies. I hate children.” The blue eyes flashed. “I hate people.” Why all the secrecy? Why had she changed? wondered Maureen. What was Myra up to with her boy friend? It was June, 1963 when Maureen first learned that Brady and her sister were living together. One month later, on July 12, 1963, pretty 16-year-old Pauline Reade, who lived a few streets away, in Wiles Street, set

out to go to a dance at the local Railway Social Club. She has never been seen since.

25

Chapter Three > NEVER TAKE LIFTS FROM STRANGERS THE city of Manchester is flanked, to the east, by a string of mill towns,

the smoke

from

their chimneys,

which once

belched to the heavens} now snuffed out by the decline of the cotton industry. One of these towns is Ashton-under-Lyne, so called because it lies beneath the line of the Pennines,

climbing up beyond its outskirts, to the summit of Saddle~ worth Moor.

An industry which still flourishes in Ashton is its towncentre market, with its brightly-coloured canopies, shouting vendors. Rows and rows of stalls selling everything from cauliflowers to curtains, hot dogs to house-plants. And the diamond-patterned stockings that Myra Hindley liked to wear. She and Ian, on his motor-bike,

visited the market

on

Saturday afternoons, strolling through the alleyways of cheerful stalls. The blonde and her tall, thin boyfriend seemed such an ordinary young couple-she buying the mesh stockings that were all the rage; he looking around as she made her purchase. Looking for something very different. He had noticed the young boys who worked on the market, helping out the traders for a few coppers, pushing trolleys through the crowds of shoppers. A plan of unbelievable evil was forming in his mind. Myra Hindley had been taking driving lessons from local instructor, Harold Rainger. She was an apt and willing pupil, but developed “nerves” on her driving tests, and it was not until after the fourth attempt that she triumphantly flourished a pink slip of paper. She was now qualified to drive. No more chilly rides on the back of that motor-bike. No more wondering whether to take a chance and hire a car without having a full licence. They could go where they wanted now . . . and take whom they wanted. Ian could take his camera. And the wine. Saddleworth Moor was beckoning.

26

The date that Myra Hindley passed her driving test was

November 7, 1963.

A schoolboy called John Kilbride, who helped traders on Ashton market on Saturday afternoons, had just sixteen days to live. *

*

*

I shall never forget the look of anxiety in Sheila Kilbride’s eyes that cold November morning. Slowly, agonisingly, the nightmare of every mother was coming true. Her twelveyear-old son, John, had been missing for more than thirty-six hours. Mrs. Kilbride had not slept all Saturday, all Sunday. And now it was Monday morning, with every shadow passing the window, every knock on the door to be dreaded. There was still hope in those gentle blue eyes, though, on the morning of Monday, November 25, 1963, when she answered the door to my knock. Since then, I have seen the look change, as time went on, as the unbearable truth un-

folded. Today, almost twenty-three years later, there is just pain. The story for me really began at the Kilbride home in Ashton-under-Lyne. I was a young reporter with an evening newspaper and had called to inquire about John’s disappearance. Mrs. Kilbride, neat, home-loving and a deeply-caring mother, asked me inside her spotless little living room, where pictures of her seven children smiled down from the walls, sideboard and mantelpiece. She told me what she knew: that John, with his usual, cheerful “tarrah” had gone off to the pictures on Saturday afternoon. And that she had not seen him since. And that she was very, very worried. John was the eldest of the children of Mrs. Kilbride, then

thirty-one, and her Irish-born husband Patrick, a flagger. He was dark-haired, tall for his age, as bright as a button with a friendly grin and, regrettably, a trusting nature. He shared one of the three bedrooms with his younger brother Danny, eleven, where the two lads slept on bunk beds. and would share the news of the day. The elder boy, proud of

having started attending the “big” school — St. Damian's 27

Catholic Secondary — told Danny of the new friends he had made. And that he had been picked for the football team. It was to be a long time after John’s disappearance before Danny would allow any other member of the family to share the room in which he had swopped so many schoolboy secrets

with the big brother he adored. And to this day he carries revenge in his heart. Danny, now thirty-two, remembers well the date on which he last saw his brother‘alive - November 23, 1963. For there

was already a sense of shock in the Kilbride house, as in

homes all over the world. The previous day an assassin’s bullet had claimed the life of US president John F. Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas. There was talk of little else in the rows of terraced council houses in Smallshaw Lane, Ashton, where

the family lived. But soon the topic was to change. And the central character was to be the smiling boy — with, by a quirk of fate, coincidence: the same initials as the American president — who walked past their homes, on his way to his gran’s around the corner, that cold Saturday morning. John was a daily visitor to the home of Mrs. Margaret Doran where he helped with jobs around the house and kept her garden neat. As Mrs. Doran was to say later, her eyes misting with tears: “I can almost see him sometimes, walking along the path at the side of the football ground across the road, in his usual cheerful way. I can’t help wondering how he died; whether he suffered a lot. We shall probably never know — it doesn’t bear thinking about.” Mrs.Doran died some years ago, without ever learning the answer to the painful, haunting question. None of the family knows exactly what happened to John as, after lunch that Saturday afternoon he set off to meet his pal, twelve-year-old John Ryan. The two lads went to see the film, The Mongols, at the Pavilion Cinema, after asking an

adult to take them in to see the A-certificate performance in the one-shilling seats. Afterwards the friends strolled to the market ground where youngsters helped out the traders for a bit of extra pocket money. It was just after five o’clock. They pocketed the sixpence each for collecting a truck from the nearby railway station for the man on the carpet stall. And 28

then, with darkness falling, John Ryan met a couple of friends and decided to go home, leaving John standing by a large salvage bin. He never saw his pal again. The memory of that day still haunts the now father of six John Ryan... “Jf I’d stayed with John . . .” Or: “Jf it had been the other way around and /’d been left alone . . .” But fate had decreed that it should be John Kilbride who should fall into the clutches of evil that Saturday night. The trusting nature that led to the end of his life became

a lesson, an

example to reinforce the intensity of every mother’s warning. Never accept lifts from strangers . . *

*

*

JOHN Kilbride glanced at the clock on the tower of the market hall. It was almost 5.30. Teatime. He should really have gone home with John. His mother might only worry. But young John was never to see his home again. The next, short remaining part of his life has never been filled in. At his home, his mother’s irritation at his being late home for tea was beginning to give way to anxiety. The ever-hungry youngster was seldom late home for meals. She was to glance at the living-room clock dozens of times. The homes of relatives were checked. Three hours had passed since. the

time that John was expected home. It was time to call the police. Politely, young Danny Kilbride turned down the volume of the TV set — still showing newsreels of the Kennedy assassination —as the uniformed officers came into the house. That was his first real inclination that something was very wrong and, as he told me recently: “All I saw my mother do for the next two years was cry.”

Mrs. Kilbride was able to give a full description of everything John was wearing that day. There was the grey jacket with its distinctive, football-shaped buttons. She had turned up the hem herself. The vest — “it had been his father’s” — had been carefully taken in, to make it narrower, by herself. And

the black shoes she had recently had mended at the Co-op. Mrs. Kilbride was to see that clothing again. . . as the only 29

‘means of identifying her son, almost two years later. I left her, that Monday morning, to go and ’phone my story. Neither of us could know then, as we paused on that council house doorstep, that John was already dead. And that his body was buried on Saddleworth Moor, standing darkly against the skyline only a few miles away. One day we were to discover that John had been taken, away from the lights of his home town, up the long twisting moorland road, to a spot where the rocks jut from the ground like tombstones. And that Ian Brady killed him. And that Myra Hindley knew. We were to learn, too, that on November 23, 1963, Myra

Hindley hired a Ford Anglia from Warren Autos in Manchester. She returned the light-coloured car the next day. “It looked,” said foreman Peter Cantwell later, “as though it had

been through a ploughed field.” It was plastered with mud. The mud of Saddleworth Moor. *

*

*

MY visit to Sheila Kilbride was to be the first of many to see if there had been any news of John. Always there was the same sad shake of the head and, as a neighbour said: “It’s as if the ground had opened and swallowed him up.” The search for John was one of the biggest the area had ever known. Thousands of posters, bearing the question: “Have you seen this boy?” were printed, thousands of people were interviewed. And thousands answered a police appeal

for volunteers to scour spare land, homes, outbuildings and vehicles. Almost every Saturday Mrs. Kilbride went out herself to search for her son, always returning home disappointed, heavy-hearted. Then there was a report that a youngster resembling John had asked a newspaper seller in the centre of Bury, a town twenty miles away, how Ashton United — John’s favourite soccer team — had “gone on.” The following Saturday, the devoted mother went to Bury, shrugging off her natural reserve to knock on doors near the

30

town centre. In her hand she clutched a photograph of John and asked, always, the same question: ‘Have you seen my son. . . are you sure?”

‘In St. Christopher’s Catholic Church, Mrs. Kilbride prayed

and prayed and even sought the help of clairvoyants, including one of the world’s most distinguished seers, Dutchman Gerard Croiset. But the most chillingly-accurate vision came from psychic Mrs. Annie Lansley, who lived in the same town as the Kilbrides. She saw John’s whereabouts as “someway down a slope, with the skyline completely barren and not a tree in sight . . . a main road on the right and quite near a stream.” It was an almost-perfect description of the spot, high on the Moor above Ashton, that the body of John Kilbride was eventually found. Chief Inspector John Down and his team of detectives at Ashton CID, ready to pursue any lead to help them solve the baffling mystery, pored over maps of the area. It could be anywhere. ; And Patrick Kilbride was kicking himself. He was a strict father, given to taking off his belt to any of his kids who might step out of line. On the Saturday that his eldest son disappeared he went out to buy himself a pair of new shoes. On Ashton Market. He was there until quarter-to-five. Twenty minutes later and he would almost certainly have bumped into his son. Today, Sheila Kilbride sadly shakes her head and says: “We never knew he worked on the market and if his father had seen him he would have hawked him off right away. If only her son had tasted the sting of his father’s belt that night, instead of the fiendish, final pleasure of lan Brady.” But then, in the winter of 1963, the secret of Hess and

Neddy was safe. The game could go on. Six months passed. And in May, 1964, Myra and Brady bought a white Mini-van. The perfect transport. The following month — on June 16, 1964, twelve-year-old Keith Bennett set out on a two hundred-yard walk to his grandmother’s. He had to pass through Westmoreland Street, where Ian Brady had lived, and still visited his parents. At . night. He is still missing.

ob

Chapter Four THE DISCIPLE “SHOULD murder be punished by murder? Undoubtedly not. The only punishment which a murderer should be condemned to is that which he risks from the friends or the family of the man he has killed.” The words were repeated often, in those broad Scottish tones, slurred with wine, from Page 140 of a cheap, orange and white paperback. Ian Brady was fond of quoting the passage from one of his favourite books, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade — the mad Frenchman who gave his name to the word sadism. Myra listened to the strange philosophy from the lips of the man with whom her destiny was now totally linked. He was hers now, completely. They shared too many secrets for them to go separate ways. They were together all the time. Night and day. At Millwards they now often spent their lunchtimes sitting in the van, reading. And planning. Neddy and Hess were going to be armed. It was Myra who got the guns. They both knew that the works foreman George Clitheroe was president of a rifle club at Cheadle’on the south side of Manchester. “Ask him to take you to the club, get yourself an introduction, tell him you fancy doing a bit of .22 rifle shooting . . .” Myra obeyed. Soon she had a .22 rifle. “Now, tell him you think you might do better with a pistol.” Clitheroe shook his héad. No way. She had no certificate. “Ask some of the other members,” Brady instructed. And so, Myra Hindley bought a Webley .45 for £8 and a Smith and Wesson FOOTE). The two men who sold them to her were later banned from the club for life. But for Ian Brady,

back in 1964, now

blackshirted and now with the Smith and Wesson snugly tucked beneath his armpit in a shoulder holster, it was time for target practice in his favourite place. The Moors. He had killed and was ready to kill again. And again. “The only

32

punishment . . . is that which he risks from the friends or the family of the man he has killed.” Today, twenty-two years later, the now demented Ian aa knows that that is the real reason he never wants to be ree. *

*

*

HE was thin, dark, a tough back-street kid, with Teddy

Boy haircut, round- collared Beatles-style jacket. And a record in the juvenile courts for violence. A new character

had stepped into the story. His name was David Smith. And he will carry the haunting memory of the next few months forever. To this day, though innocent, he is shunned — sometimes attacked — by those angered by the events that leapt into the world’s headlines all those years ago. Smith, like Brady, was illegitimate, seldom worked and

had a tearaway streak of which Nellie Hindley disapproved. But in the summer of 1964 David Smith, then sixteen years old, brought shame — a comparatively minor shame as things turned out — on the Hindley home. He made Maureen pregnant. In August, Smith and the eighteen-year-old mother-to-be were married. He was now Myra Hindley’s brother-in-law. They were living with his father, Jack, in Wiles Street — next door but one from where the missing Pauline Reade, with whom Smith played as a child, had lived — Maureen, glad to have a husband and father for her unborn child; he, resigned

to having done “the decent thing.” Then, a knock on the door was to change their lives forever. It was Myra, inviting them for a day out in the Lake District in the Mini-van “as a wedding present.” They went to Windermere — Myra, as usual, at the wheel,

her sister beside her, the man and the teenager, ten years his junior, in the back. Behind the canvas partition that separated the front seats from the rear, the two men

talked,

smoked and drank the wine Ian had bought from the offlicence. Brady impressed the young, hard-up Smith. There

33

was something commanding, dominant, about the thinfeatured Scotsman that Myra seemed to worship. Windermere was crowded with trippers so, once more, the foursome piled into the little van and drove to nearby Bowness. Brady uncorked another of the six bottles of red wine he had bought. He was so generous, thought Smith, warming more and more to his new companion. They had a trip on the Lake in a steamboat. Brady insisted: “T’ll pay.” They had a meal in a restaurant. Brady paid. Gin and lime, Brady paid. Pints of bitter in a pub on the way home. Brady paid. More wine in the back of the Mini as it sped back to Manchester, Brady hurling one of his empties, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, at a passing

car. “Work,” he slurred to Smith, “is something to pass the time of day. Crime is a lot easier, money-wise.” He glanced at his companion, the long, greasy hair falling on to his face, the head nodding in drunken assent. Some day he might be a disciple. . . *

ie

ok

DAVID SMITH, young, impressionable, anxious to convey an air of toughness, of a man of the world who had been around, clung to Brady’s words. The older man did not treat him like a thick kid. And he was so generous, always paying for the drinks, always buying the wine from the off-licence. He was curious, though, about his new sister-in-law’s rela-

tionship with Brady. One thing struck him as very odd. Never did he see one give any display of affection for the other. Never, ever, did he see them kiss. He wondered, idly, what

sort of “kicks” they were into. One thing was for sure, he ~ decided. Myra was a hard bitch. Her father, by then, had suffered a stroke and became

bad-tempered in the house, ranting and raving at Maureen. “Right,” Myra would say when her sister went round to Bannock Street to tell her. “I'll sort him out.” And, says David Smith, would march around to Eaton Street, snatch up

her father’s walking stick. And beat him with it.

34

Smith noticed, too, that Myra Hindley showed a bossiness _ towards Brady. It was almost as if she had some hold over him... “You want macaroni again?” she would scream, hurling the can to the floor in disgust when the Scotsman requested his favourite meal. And sometimes, when he had had too much to drink, and he became over-talkative, one

long withering look would quieten him. David Smith more than two decades ago had reached the conclusion that Myra Hindley was, in many ways, the stronger, more dominant of the strange partnership. *

*

*

THE BULLDOZERS were beginning to move in on Gorton. Manchester, like many other cities, was starting to rid itself of its slums, the rows of decaying houses, the Victorian terraces. Ten miles away an estate had been built to re-house the families whose homes were to be demolished. The Hattersley overspill estate of four thousand homes took shape among the green meadows between the Cheshire town of Hyde and the Domesday book village of Mottram-inLongdendale. The locals were not happy about the uniform rows of houses, now squatting on fields that used to be their agricultural showground. They grumbled about the “townies” who would be “up to all sorts of mischief.” Mischief? They had no idea. For one of the tenants moving to Hattersley was Granny Maybury. And her two lodgers. The address was 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the end house

in a terrace of four, overlooking the road between Hyde and Mottram. They moved there in September, 1964 — Myra, Ian, Mrs. Maybury and the two dogs, granny’s pet Lassie and

Myra’s beloved mongrel, Puppet. By now the old lady was frail, elderly, spent much of her

time in her room — and did not even know that her granddaughter was living with her surly boyfriend. Myra had a bedroom, but it was seldom slept in. For, once Granny Maybury was safely tucked up in bed upstairs she and Brady would share the bed-settee divan in the living room. Next door lived Jamaican Phoenix Braithwaite, his wife,

35

Tessa, and their three young children. Brady and Myra, Nazi-loving, spoke little to their new neighbours. Myra particularly, said other residents, behaved as if they did not exist. And the Braithwaites became accustomed to the screeching tape-recordings, the music at full volume, playing the marching songs and the thumping, pulsating drumming notes of Ravel’s Bolero. Such was the regular cacophony from 16 Wardle Brook Avenue:that no noise, perhaps no scream for mercy, might be regarded as being out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, four miles away, in Ashton-under-Lyne, anew

CID chief had just taken over. Detective Chief Inspector Joe Mounsey, built like a barn door, gruff, blunt and with the

tenacity of a bulldog. He thumbed through the file of the boy who had been missing for almost a year. John Kilbride. The case intrigued him. It was a file he intended to close. He visited Mrs. Kilbride regularly to compare notes, to offer a word of comfort. Both of them though, the mother and the detective, shared one conviction, never voiced by either. “Deep down,” Sheila Kilbride told me recently, “I always knew something had happened to John —- right from the start.” Joe Mounsey felt the same. That is why he never gave up. But the mystery was to remain for a long time yet. For, in all the world, only two people knew where John Kilbride was. And they had just found another young “friend.” “COME here, doggie. Nice dog.” The girl bent down to pat and ruffle the fur of the mongrel that had bounded towards her. She looked up at the young woman standing alongside the dog. “What’s its name.” “Puppet.” “Puppet? Nice dog, Puppet. Good dog. I love dogs.” The woman smiled. They had another dog, Lassie. Would she like to see her? “Come in. I’m Myra.” The girl lived two doors away from Brady and Hindley on the new estate. Her name was Patricia Hodges, almost twelve

years old, and soon she became friendly with the “nice”

young couple from number 16. She would go in to their home,

with its red carpet-square, red moquette settee and the green armchair, the plastic flowers and the chirping budgie, Joey, in his cage on a stand. :

36

The young girl was impressed and flattered that the two grown-ups had become so friendly towards her. As they talked, Ian would click on his tape recorder. And take photographs. She laughed at the grown-up jokes and drank their wine — as many as four glasses, filled to the top. It was such good fun. And then, Myra asked, how would she like a ride out in the van, with her, and Jan? Patricia’s mother, Elsie, who had five

other children, readily gave her permission. “Don’t forget to thank them . . .” They seemed so nice, Ian and Myra. It was to be the first of many trips. Night after night, through the brightly-lit streets of Manchester where Ian would call to see his mother. Then, after three weeks, Myra suggested they went somewhere else for a change. The moors. At night. And so, they had a child passenger as the little white Mini-van chugged up the bending, moorland road through the darkness, its headlights picking out the vague shadows of crumbling dry-stone walls. The girl remembered the name of the village they had just passed through, Greenfield. The last village before the A635 wound its way up and up - to Saddleworth Moor. Then there were more shapes, the outlines of rocks. The van slowed down and crunched to a halt in the roadside gravel. There was silence. They sat there, the man, the woman and the child. Not a word was spoken. Then the van roared back into life. Soon the bright lights were reappearing. And Patricia went home. After that the trips to the moors became more frequent. Sometimes Brady and Hindley would take with them sacks . . . and a spade. They would fill up the bags with peat “for the garden.” And then Ian would uncork the bottles of wine. And twice they took a stroll together, the three of them, through the soft peat. There was another child nearby. But Patricia never saw him. For he was dead, and buried.

His name was John Kilbride.

37

*

*

*

THEN it was Christmas Eve. The council houses of Hattersley were festooned with decorations. Christmas trees glittered in the windows. Stockings were being hung up. And at 11.30 at night, Patricia Hodges had an unusual request for her mother. “Can Igo out with Myra and Ian?” Her mother was surprised. “At this ‘time . . . whatever for . . .” But still, it was Christmas. Why not? So, when most children of her age were tucked up in bed, Patricia went with Myra and Ian — up, up, along the now familiar road to Saddleworth Moor. Myra had made some sandwiches, Ian had brought the wine. Up there, in the darkness, the three of them. “Merry Christmas Ian... Merry Christmas Pat.” Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow .. . It was almost time to kill. But Patricia Hodges did not die that Christmas Eve, 1964. She would have been too obvious . . . though there can be little doubt that she came so close to sharing that unhallowed moorland burial ground with John Kilbride. Today she is married, with three children of her own. And for twenty-one years the subject of her escape from evil has seldom been mentioned by Patricia. Her mother, who now has twelve grandchildren, said at the time: “It makes me go cold every time I think of it.” Still, today, the frightening question of what might have been remains. She told me recently: “Pat never talks about it. I’ve been the worst affected and have had the nightmares, when I’ve thought of her, alone with them. Suppose she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to . . .” She shudders. By 1.30 am on that Christmas Day Patricia was back » home... with her companions announcing that they intended to spend the rest of the night on the moors. They would just collect some blankets from home, first.

As Patricia got ready for bed she heard the Mini-van start up again. The following day it would have another passenger. Another girl, two years younger. But she would not be returning from Saddleworth Moor.

38

Chapter Five “WON’T YOU LET ME GO... PLEASE?” THE voices of the wind moaned across Saddleworth Moor that cold, grey Christmas morning of 1964. They were heralding the snow, coming from the east, to add to the joy of the thousands of children in warm, happy homes in the valley, and the city below. Eighteen miles away from the Moor, an excited, happy little girl was unwrapping her Christmas presents... a nurses’s uniform, a sewing machine, a doll, books, games.

Her eyes sparkled with delight. Lesley Ann Downey was ten years old and pretty, with bright blue eyes and soft, dark curls. And her mother, Ann, worshipped her. She watched fondly, lovingly, as Lesley tore

the wrappings from the gifts. For the last time. The little girl lived with her divorced mother and her three brothers, Terry, fourteen, Tommy, eight, and Brett, four, in a council flat in Charnley Walk, Ancoats, Manchester, an area that, with its stark, gaunt warehouses and chimneys,

provided a backcloth for many of the paintings of L.S. Lowry. It was, tragically, to become, soon, the scene of some of the

greatest police activity the city had ever seen. For, high above the flats of Ancoats, the ribbons of streets stretching beyond, the villages, the cottages, up on Saddleworth Moor, a plan

had been hatched. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had spent the night in their place plotting, on that day of all days, to kill a child. *

*

*

THE VICTIM was to be chosen at random. There must be nothing to connect them with a child’s disappearance. But first, Myra and Brady had to keep Granny Maybury out of the way . . . and Uncle Jim’s birthday was as good an excuse as

any. Bo

And so, at two o’clock on Boxing Day afternoon, Granny was taken to the home of Myra’s uncle, Mr. Jim Burns, who

lived in the neighbouring town of Dukinfield, three miles away. “I’ll be back for her between nine and half past,” said Myra. The Mini-van roared away. Meanwhile, in Ancoats, the bright lights of a travelling fair were luring Lesley Ann. Ann Downey was reluctant to let her

daughter go. Still, she reasoned to herself, it was only a short distance away, and she wasn’t going alone. There was a carpet of snow on the streets as Lesley, wearing her new pink cardigan, red and green tartan skirt and blue coat, set off for the fair, two hundred yards away with her

friend, eight-year-old Linda Clarke. Skipping along beside them were Tommy and Brett and Linda’s little brother and sister, Roy and Ann. It was 4.30 pm. Around her neck, Lesley proudly wore a string of white beads Terry had won earlier at the fair. She had only sixpence and half an hour later it was spent. The children decided to go home. But something, just as with John Kilbride, made Lesley stay behind instead of leaving with her friend. The pattern was almost identical. Teatime. Dark. The iast time Lesley was seen she was standing by the dodgems on which she could not afford to ride. One more go on the penny-rolling game . . . if only she had a penny. Or, perhaps, a last wistful look at the cheap.chalk ornament she wished she’d won for her mum. Lesley Ann Downey was alone at the fair. But not for long. The young-couple she met seemed so nice. . . *

*

*

“DON’T. I want to see my mummy... honest to God . . .” The terrified little girl pleaded with the man and the woman. But her cries were unheeded. The tape recorder whirred, recording her screaming, pitiful pleas for mercy. The camera, on its tripod, had been clicking, too.

Lesley Ann Downey had not long to live. But the last part of her short life was to be suffered in frightened, unspeakable indignity. She was wearing nothing but her shoes and socks

|

40

and when her screams became too loud a scarf was tied roughly, tightly, around her mouth. The scene was Myra Hindley’s bedroom. It was early evening. The photographs, the tape recording, would one day prove the place and time. “Won't you let me go, please . . .?” begged the little girl who, a few, short hours earlier had been so happy, so overjoyed by the magic of Christmas. Lesley had begged and had tried to appeal to the parental instincts of her captors, her torturers. “Please, mummy, daddy, please.” And later: “Please help me, will you?” Her words were chillingly, heartbreakingly, accurate. “I have to get home before eight o’clock . . . I'll get killed if I don’t, honest to God.” Just how Lesley Ann Downey finally died will probably never be known. It is a secret that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley have, in their separate worlds, kept for twenty-two years. Myra had already locked away the secret when, just after eleven o’clock that night she returned to Uncle Jim’s, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, gran, I can’t take you back, the roads are too bad.” Jim Burns looked outside. There was only a light sprinkling of snow. Surely not. “It’s not that bad. There are other cars on the road. The traffic’s moving quite normally.” Myra rounded on her uncle. “I can’t take gran—and that’s that.” She left the house. Jim Burns was puzzled. She would have to drive home, anyway, whether gran was with her or not. That night, Granny Maybury had to sleep on a makeshift bed of cushions on Uncle Jim’s living room floor. Myra and Ian had also had a guest. A much more unwilling guest. And they had killed her. *

*

*

ANOTHER doorstep. Another frantic mother. Another missing child. It was the following day and I was outside Mrs. Downey’s door as I had been at Mrs. Kilbride’s home thirteen months earlier. Blonde, thirty-four, and attractive, Ann 41

‘Downey’ s face bore the same strain, the same look I had seen in Sheila Kilbride’s eyes. Inside the Downey home the decorations, the little Christmas tree, still sparkled. The sewing machine Lesley had longed for, the doll, the nurse’s uniform,

the books, the

games, were still there. Now unplayed with. The dolly’s clothes she was going to sew would never be made, now. Mrs. Downey told me she had called the police at 10.35 that night — four hours and thirty-five minutes after the last report of Lesley being seen alive. Brother Terry had searched the fairground and the backstreets, thinking his sister might be playing snowballs with other children. But there was no sign. Just as with John Kilbride it was “as if the ground had opened...” Again a massive police hunt was launched. The fairground equipment was dismantled, the Ashton canal was dragged and searched by frogmen, thousands of house-to-house inquiries made, and thousands of people interviewed. Five months after Lesley vanished Mrs. Downey lost the baby she was expecting to her now husband Alan West. But still the city-centre cafe waitress hoped and prayed. She told me recently: “I just hoped that if she had been abducted it was by some childless couple who would take care of her, love her.”

Lesley. was

abducted,

was

taken

by a

childless couple. But the last hope, and prayer, in Ann Downey’s heart was in vain.

And as she picked up the evening paper that night and read about Lesley’s disappearance, the photograph of the pretty girl staring from the page, just as John’s had once, Sheila Kilbride, eight miles away in Ashton, knew how the other mother felt. But she could not, in her wildest dreams, have

known then exactly how much they had in common. Another grave had been dug on Saddleworth Moor . . *

*

*

THERE were now three missing children in Manchester. And one in Ashton-under-Lyne. The police dug out their files. WAS there a link? Pauline Reade. John Kilbride. Keith 42

Bennett. Lesley Ann Downey. Four mothers repeated their stories yet again. And Patricia Hodges was wishing Myra a Happy New

Year. “Come in. Nice Christmas? What did you get?”

In the living room Myra passed the girl a copy of a local paper, the Gorton and Openshaw Reporter. Across the top of the page, in bold headlines, were the words: “Have you seen ten-year-old Lesley? Big search for lost girl.” Patricia looked up. “You see that girl at Ancoats?” “Yes. . . just now,” said Myra. “She lives near my friend.” “And she lives near her house?” “Yes.” “Did she know her?” “I don’t know.” It seemed such an ordinary, everyday conversation on a subject that everyone in Manchester was talking about. There was just one difference. That conversation was being recorded, on Ian’s tape. The evil couple were relishing the words of the girl who, so easily, could have had Lesley’s place in the headlines. Meanwhile,

Maureen,

as a mother-to-be

herself, shared

the concern about the missing girl. “Did you read in the paper about that little girl’s mother offering a hundred pounds to anybody who could lead to the whereabouts of her daughter?” “What little girl,” asked Myra. “The one that went missing on Boxing Day.” “Oh, yes, I remember now.” Maureen’s voice softened. “She must think a lot of her to offer that much money.” And then she stared at Myra,

puzzled. Her sister was laughing. *

*

*

AFTER the disappearance of Lesley Ann Downey, parents, as always in such cases, were more vigilant of their children. “Don’t speak to strangers” was the watchword. In the early spring of 1965, with darkness falling, nine-yearold Anne Ashmore was walking along Armadale Road, Dukinfield, with her sister Susan, eleven.

A Mini-Countryman silently glided alongside the two girls and, as the window slid open, a man’s voice from the passen-

43

ger seat called: “Come here . . .” The girls turned. The voice continued. “Can you tell me . . .?” There was something in the tone that sounded an alarm and the sisters, heeding their mother’s warning, took to their heels and fled. Myra Hindley, whose uncle still lived in Dukinfield, had recently changed her Mini-van for a Mini-Countryman. Today, Anne speaks of the incident with a shudder. “My mother is convinced to this day that it was THEM. To think I

might have been one of the victims. ME.” For, fate has decided, that today Anne Ashmore is mother of four and wife of Danny Kilbride... the brother of John Kilbride.

44

Chapter Six THE MISTAKE FOUR months after Lesley Ann Downey died, Myra Hindley was looking at another dead child. Her little niece. At six months old, Angela Dawn, the daughter of her sister, Maureen and David Smith, died from bronchitis in Ancoats

Hospital, three hundred yards from where the murdered girl had lived. At the Smiths’ home, behind drawn curtains, Myra laid

down the flowers she had brought, with a card: “Another flower in God’s garden.” She looked at the face of the baby and then at her sister and brother-in-law. Rivulets of mascara were now Staining her face. “Oh God, look at her.” She was crying. Outside, Ian Brady was sitting, waiting in the car. Myra brushed away the tears with the back of her hand. “Lend me some make-up, Moby.” She put on the new mascara, pouted her lips and put on some lipstick. The mask had returned. “Don’t say anything to Ian about this.” And she was gone. It was the first, and last, time David Smith saw

his sister-in-law show any tenderness. From that day the Smiths grew closer to Myra and Brady, welcoming the diversion from their grief as they became regular passengers on excursions to the moors. Now Myra had a new car, a blue Mini Countryman on the HP, faster,

more comfortable than the little van and with folding rear seats. Handy for carrying things. And as she skilfully negotiated the winding moorland roads the city boy marvelled at the way she and Brady knew their way around. They went to Derbyshire, round the twisting bends of the Snake Pass, over

to Whaley Bridge, to Woodhead, to Yorkshire and to an increasingly familar place, Saddleworth Moor, stopping at spots that Myra and Ian seemed to know so well. July 23, 1965. David and Maureen — with, against the rules, their dog, Bobbie — left the Gorton back street and joined the overspillers, moving to a third-floor flat in towering Under-

45

wood Court, Hattersley, a few hundred yards from Wardle Brook Avenue. Now they were near-neighbours and the trips to the moors increased. Sometimes they picnicked in a pine forest in Derbyshire, climbing over a low stone wall, down an embankment, through the tall, withered trees to a clearing. Smith

would

remember

that forest later and shiver,

and

wonder about those summer days when Myra had spread a blanket on the grass and they had sat, eating the sandwiches she had made and drinking the wine Ian had bought. By now, the two couples had become frequent visitors to

each others’ homes, often staying the night, the sisters usually going to bed leaving Brady and Smith talking, drinking the German wine the Scotsman had bought from the off-licence, until the early hours of the morning. “Most people are cabbages and morons,” Brady would slur as he uncorked yet another bottle. Smith held out his glass. Sounded like a load of shit. But Brady was paying for the wine. Then, casually, one night, Brady handed a book to Smith, a paperback with an orange and white cover. “Now he had the right outlook on life.” The teenager took the well-thumbed

volume. “The Life and Ideas of the Markwis dee Sayed,” he read, not knowing that the author was a lunatic Frenchman who was condemned to death for sex crimes in the 18th century, escaped and later died in an asylum. Brady took the book back from him, flipped it open and began his favourite passage: “Should murder be punished by murder? Undoubtedly no . . .” Smith listened, bemused, as the strange brooding man with the cold eyes droned on. “You see,” Brady said, “the interest is not in the actual words. You have

to read him between the lines.” He held out the book again. Smith should read it. “Ta.” He pushed it into his pocket. Before long he had a stack of them to take home. Porn, sadism, torture. The indoctrination had begun. In the words of the prosecutor at the trial of lan Brady and Myra Hindley a year later: “Brady’s interestin Smith went far beyond ordinary friendship. The association was one of steady corruption of a youth by a man... . Brady was interested in murder and wanted to make Smith a student of murder.”

46

Pele

First, though, the “student” had to pass his exams. Brady had to see how far he was prepared to go. He knew of Smith’s juvenile crime record. He was capable of violence, but how much? He decided to tell him about the guns, the Smith and Wesson and the Webley, and then to show him how good he

was. Up on Saddleworth Moor the indoctrination continued, Brady showing off his skills, the bullets ricocheting off a rusty

old oil drum and rocks, while most of Smith’s efforts flew wide

of the targéts. But he could see the lad was impressed. They rejoined Myra and Maureen, who had been for a walk in the opposite direction. It was time to tell him of his plans to put the guns to more practical use. Armed robbery. Smith’s eyes widened. Was it a game, was he serious? He strung along anyway. Brady was still paying. What about doing a supermarket, using a removal van for the getaway? he suggested. Brady shook his head, smiling. “No, the only really big job worth going after is a bank.” No bullets, though, said Smith. Brady nodded his head slowly. Yes, real bullets. Crap, thought Smith, and held out his glass again. There was more “shooting practice” and more trips to Saddleworth Moor, at night, just like the night when, at 10 o’clock, they all climbed into the Countryman, after Ian had suggested a spin, and headed east to the rocks at the top, Myra swinging into the roadside gravel and braking at a place she knew well. “Come on, Dave, I want to show you something,” said Brady. The sisters stayed in the car as Brady strode, sure-footed, confident of his whereabouts,

through

the peat, the teenager stumbling through the darkness behind. Then Brady stopped, still sure, to the very spot, of his surroundings. “Look at the reservoir. Doesn’t it look nice with the moon shining on it? Smith could see only a vague glow on the water. He’d brought him here; to show him that? He shivered as the wind moaned, like a voice. They stood there for ten minutes, David Smith wondering why, as the wind, even though it was

summer, rose to ascream. But not far away, one of them close

to his feet in the clogging peat, was something that Brady was not yet ready to show to him. Not yet. The graves.

47

*

*

*

BRADY told Smith he had been keeping his eye on a number of banks for years and had pored over A to Z maps of the streets around them. He had also made notes of how money was taken away. Now he was almost ready. He had picked out a target and a bloke from Leeds would be involved with them on the big day. There was something he wanted Dave to do —a “reccy.” He was to watch a bank in Stockport Road and make notes of anybody going in or out with large cases. “Think you can do that, Dave?” _ Smith went along with the “game,” furtively noting with pen and pad the “arrivals and dispatches” as the stock clerk had ordered from nine o’clock in the morning until half past

noon, and that night Brady nodded with approval as he compared Smith’s notes with his own. Hmm. Hmm. Full marks to the student. He was coming along nicely. And had even made notes from de Sade: “Every man or woman is one

of two things — a masochist or a sadist . . . Perversion is the way aman thinks, feels and loves . . . People are like maggots, small, blind, worthless fish bait.”

And: “Rape is notacrime, itisastateofmind . . . Murderis a hobby and a supreme pleasure . . .” September 25, 1965. Brady and Myra, just back from a holiday in Scotland with the Sloans, arrived at Underwood

Court with the wine and another heavy drinking session started. As usual, at one-thirty, the sisters retired to bed. Brady refilled the glasses. It was time to talk, with Smith, about The Job. And the guns. He would file the heads of the bullets to make them into “dum-dums,” so they would make a small hole as they went in and a big hole as they went out. The lad shook his head. No, he would prefer to use blanks. Brady smiled. OK. He and Myra would carry the guns. They would load them with blanks as a “safeguard insurance,” but, it

anybody got in the way, if there was “any obstruction,” they would use live bullets. “T still prefer to use blanks,” Smith protested, showing the big man a little starting pistol to impress. Brady laughed this

48

time. No, it would be the Smith and Wesson and the Webley with real ammo. Don’t worry, the plan would be perfect. His plans always were. The boy of seventeen and the man ten years older looked at each other, both drunk, one playing along with the game, the other wondering whether the time had come to take him into his whole confidence, show him that he really was big time, what a brilliant mind he had, how he was fooling the police, fooling everybody, how very, very clever he was. Who’s a Big Lassie now? But only Myra knew. Someone else had to share the secret, just one more person. It was then that Ian Brady

made He wine. silent.

his first — and last — mistake. leaned back in the green armchair, took a sip of his “Are you capable of murder?” The teenager remained He still wasn’t having anything to do with live bullets.

Then, the boast that Ian Brady, finally, had been unable to resist: “I’ve done it. I’ve killed three or four.” *

*

*

HE knew that Smith did not believe him; he could tell by the faint smirk on the lad’s face. “You don’t really believe me, do you?” He ventured further: “Their bodies ‘are buried on the moors .. . you and Maureen were sitting near one of them.” Then he outlined his methods. First of all he would take a drug, Pro-Plus, to stimulate him. He would pick a spot, wait

in the car until somebody — preferably aged between sixteen and twenty-one, because the police didn’t pay all that much attention when people of that age went missing — came along. Then he would get out of the car and kill them there. It was necessary to take precautions like washing his shoes, brushing down all his clothes, wiping buttons and making sure there were no dog hairs in the car afterwards. But the method he preferred was to pick up somebody in the car, take them back to the house and “do it there.” That way, any clues, any evidence against him were contained in the house and he could get rid of them in his own time. A careful list of everything he was wearing or was used had

49

‘

to be made and the golden rule was to remove everything — “writing materials, books, photographs, tape recordings” — . ~ beforehand. David Smith yawned. Just the drink talking. He still didn’t believe him. “I have photographs to prove it.” “Oh, yea. . . where?” Brady would not show them to him, yet. Smith lolled back in his armchair, closed his eyes. Just the drink talking. Saturday, October 2, 1965. Brady and Smith were on their sixth bottle of wine on the third floor of Underwood Court, the girls, as usual, in bed. “You don’t believe I’m capable of it?” He could see the scepticism, cynicism, in the younger man’s eyes. He leaned forward, drunkenly. “I HAVE killed three or four.” “Oh, yes.” Smith eyelids were dropping. He szill didn’t believe him. Brady’s voice rose, harsh, indignant. “You still don’t believe I’m capable. I'll do another one. I’m not due for another one for three or four months, but this won’t count.”

Anything voice fell, be done.” Edward years old,

you say, Ian, thought Smith. You’re pissed. The low, the words came slowly, deliberately. “It will Evans, an engineering apprentice and seventeen had only four days to live. *

TUESDAY,

October

*

*

5, 1965. Brady arrived at Under-

wood Court. He wanted his books back, and all Dave’s notes, all the “writing material.” Smith’s pulse quickened. Was The Job on? “O.K, Ian. I'll parcel em up and bring ’em round.” Just a game.

Dutifully, the “student” wrapped the sadism, the porn, his notes, in a brown paper parcel, tucked it under his arm and walked round to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. “Hi, Myra. I’ve brought some stuff for Ian.” Myra took the package from him, put it on the living room table. “Ian!” Brady picked up the parcel, carried it upstairs. And a few minutes later he came down again, this time carrying two big suitcases, one blue, one brown.

The time had come, time to hide the evidence. Time for the 50

ee

bank job? wondered Smith, as he helped them over the garden wall with the cases. “Don’t drop that one,”. said Brady, “it might blow us all up.” Crap, thought Smith, though you had to hand it to Ian for keeping up a good game. All that

shit about killing and burying bodies on the moors. He must have been pissed. But Brady was, in fact, carrying out his meticulous disposal plan — taking away and concealing anything that might point.

to their previous murders . . . their souvenirs. And then if anything went wrong, the police would find nothing. Ian and Myra pushed the cases into the back of the Mini Countryman and the two of them drove off from 16 Wardle Brook Avenue to hide their terrible secrets. Until it was over. Brady smiled to himself as the little car gathered speed and headed towards their hiding place. It would not be long now before David Smith believed him. Tomorrow he would believe him. But that night David Smith had other things on his mind. The council rent man, Mr. Johnson, had left a note for them:

“T want £14 12s. 6d. at the town hall, Saturday, or I shall take legal proceedings. If that dog is not out of the building by tonight I shall have you evicted. If any more complaints of Teddy Boys and noise (the Smiths had had ‘friends’ around) J shall take further action.” So the next night, Smith walked round to Myra and Ian’s. Ian would know what to do. They were getting ready to go out. It was a quarter to eight. Wednesday, October 6. Brady studied the letter, shrugged. There was nothing he could do. That night he had more important things to think about. He put in his cufflinks, slipped on his jacket. Myra, in a clinging leopardskin dress, carefully arranged her hair. They left the house together, Smith to go home, Myra and Brady to head towards the bright lights of Manchester in their car. Soon they would return. With a guest. *

*

*

EDWARD Evans was alone, and bored. Slowly he drained

51

the remaining dregs from his beer glass and walked out into the night. He should have been going to a football match that night, to see his beloved Manchester United take on Helsinki. He had earlier arranged to meet his pal Michael Mahone in a pub, Aunty’s Bar, before they went to the match. As Mr. Mahone, then thirty-one, was to explain later: “On the previous Sunday he was at our house for tea. His last words were: ‘I’ll see you on Monday or Tuesday.’ As he never came and, therefore, we had made no proper arrangements to go to the game, I never turned up to meet him. I wasn’t feeling too well at the time — I had my leg in plaster — and wasn’t sure that he would turn up anyway.” He said a few weeks later: “I blamed myself for a long time afterwards for what happened.” In fact, the news of what happened to Edward upset him so much that he became ill — spending three weeks in hospital with a perforated ulcer. So horrible, unbelievable, was the fate of his friend.

Edward lived with his parents, lift attendant John Evans and his wife, Edith, who had two other children, in a terraced house in Addison Street, Ardwick, Manchester. He was

good-looking, dark-haired and had confidence. “I can handle any trouble,” he used to tell his parents. And he had a lot of pals — so it was unusual for him to be alone on the night of Wednesday, October 6, 1965. So, a teenage lad, bored, seeking amusement, found himself on Manchester’s Central Station. Wondering what to do next.

He was standing by the milk-vending machine, his thoughts miles from the shrilling guards’ whistles, the metallic voice on the Tannoy. “Wonder how United have . . .” His thoughts were interrupted by the tall, thin man standing next to him. “How’re

ye doin’?”

The

voice was

Scottish,

the smile

friendly. The teenager shrugged and grimaced. “Not much to do in town on a Wednesday night, is there? It’s dead.” The Scotsman shook his head and agreed. “Bloody deadly. Tell ye what. Come back to our place. My sister’ll soon have us there in the car.” Edward hesitated. Then nodded. Why not?

52

Chapter Seven INVITATION TO A MURDER THE Smiths had been in bed for about half an hour when, at

11.30, the telephone, connecting callers at the main entrance of the block with occupants, rang in their flat. Maureen got out of bed and answered the call in the living room. It was Myra. “Come up, Myra.” Her sister appeared casual. “Can you tell mam that I’ll see her at weekend?” Maureen wondered why Myra had called so late. “I’d forgotten earlier.” Smith had got out of bed, pulling on his jeans and vest.

Myra turned to him. “Dave, will you waik me home?” He put on his jacket and moccasins and picked up his “dog stick” — a stick with the handle bound with string and a loop for his wrist. It was

a handy weapon. You never know who

you might meet. It was a quarter to midnight. “Back in two minutes.” They walked through the darkness together in silence, towards 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the woman, then twenty-

three, and the teenager, jauntily swinging his dog-stick. Myra would be safe with him. Then she stopped. “While you’re here, Ian’s got some miniature wine bottles and you might as well collect them.” Smith nodded. Miniature wine bottles? He was more interested in the contents. “Just wait over the road and I’ll flick the lights three times. If you see ’em flick three times you’ll know he isn’t doing anything and you can come up.” Not doing anything? What could he be doing to warrant ‘such secrecy? Smith shrugged, and waited, in the shelter of the wall of the New Inn pub, watching as his sister-in-law climbed the slope, squeezed through a gap in the wooden pone and went round the side of the house to the front

oor. He pulled his jacket tighter and shivered in the autumn _ night air. Why the secrecy? Still, there was that time when he

54

had knocked on the door and Myra asked him to wait because Ian was “doing some recording.” Thirty seconds after Myra had gone into the house the | landing light next to the front door went on and off. Three times. It was the signal. An invitation to a murder. *

*

*

IAN Brady opened the door. “Have you come for those wine bottles?” He led the way to the kitchen, putting three little bottles on the table top. “Do you want the rest of them?” He walked through to the lounge as Smith, still in the kitchen, began idly reading the label on one of the bottles. “Produce of Germ. . .” The scream was ear-splitting, horrible, followed by another that turned David Smith’s flesh cold, his blood to ice. Then

Myra’s voice. “Dave, help him.” Somehow, David Smith got from the kitchen to the living room. He stopped dead in his tracks. For he saw what he later described as a “life-sized rag doll,” like some grotesque puppet. The “doll” had been half-on, half-off the settee, staring upwards, screaming, its face a mask of blood, arms waving crazily. Then it crashed within two feet of Smith. His stomach lurched wildly. The “doll” was a human being. A teenager. And standing over him, legs apart, was Ian Brady, wielding something high above his head. An axe. Writhing, fighting for the life ebbing from him, the youth slumped close to the feet, now rooted to the spot, of David

Smith. Now he was face downwards. The axe came down. Then up, down. A total of fourteen times. The screams had stopped. The groans had stopped. Now there was a new sound, a gurgling. It was like, said David Smith later, “when you brush your teeth and you gargle your mouth with water.” Brady straightened, grasped a cushion cover and slipped it over the horribly mutilated head. Then a length of electric cable was wrapped around the teenager’s neck. The strong,

55

sinewy hands of the murderer grasped the wire, pulling, tighter and tighter and all the time he was mouthing obscenties. “You dirty bastard.” Over and over and over. Smith, still turned to stone, met, unwillingly, the gaze of the panting Brady. “That’s it,” said Brady. “It’s the messiest yet.” Smith glanced around the room. There was someone else there. Myra. As cool as a cucumber. Later, when he had to tell it all, David Smith said of Ian

Brady: “I have seen butchers working in the shop show as much emotion as he did when they are cutting up a sheep’s nbs.” Brady picked up a cloth and wiped his hands. He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply, picked up a bottle of wine. “Want some?” Sick with revulsion and fear David Smith took only one mouthful. The liquid he had grown to love tasted, for once, vile, disgusting. Brady’s voice became brisk, commanding. “Get some old rags and soapy water in a bucket.” Myra, the lieutenant, obeyed. Casually, Brady picked up the axe and handed it to Smith. “Just feel the weight of that.” He switched on the main light, revealing the result of the carnage. Blood was everywhere, splashed even on the pinkpainted walls. It had to be cleaned up. The evidence had to be removed. Then Myra was back in the room with mop, bucket and rags. It was all so calm, the routine so precise, meticulous. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley might just as well have been clearing up after a party. And in a way, to them, they were. The three of them, the executioner, the lieutenant and the

retching, unwilling recruit, in fear of his life if he disobeyed an order, started to rub and scrub. The walls, the lino, the

carpets, Joeys cage, everything was wiped, cleaned. Then Myra brought in huge sheets of polythene, bed sheets and a blanket. So efficient. The dead boy was placed on them. David Smith had noticed something else, the thought registering in his spinning brain. The top button and zip of the lad’s jeans were undone... Brady walked across the room, picked up Smith’s bloodstained dog-stick and, smiling, said: “Your stick’s all wet.”

36-4

Carefully he unwound

the string from the stick handle, —

cutting it deftly, still calmly, into smaller lengths. Then, with

his frightened helper, he trussed up the dead boy, tying his hands and forcing his knees to his chest, lashing the string around his neck. Myra was still mopping up as they tied up the body trussed, now, like a chicken. More evidence to dispose of then. Brady picked up belongings of the dead boy, dropping them into a carrier bag. He picked up a wallet and took out a green card, bearing the National Insurance number of its owner, his name and job. Edward Evans, engineer.

Brady looked up sharply. “Shhh... . Myra, Ican hear your gran.” All the time Granny Maybury had been in her room upstairs. An old lady wondering what all the noise was about. Myra went upstairs. Mrs. Maybury had heard the screams. “Oh, it was only me, Gran. I dropped the tape recorder on my toe.” The poor, trussed-up body of Edward Evans was wrapped in the sheets, the blanket and the polythene, which was tied at both ends. He was to be taken upstairs, to the back bedroom. Quietly now, remember Gran. And as they struggled towards the staircase with the remains of Edward Evans a smile came to Ian Brady’s face.

“Eddie’s a dead weight.” Then Ian and Myra both laughed. She held Granny Maybury’s bedroom door tightly shut as they carried the body into the back bedroom. Then downstairs again. More evidence to dispose of .. . hair, tiny fragments of bone and something, thought the dreadfullysickened Smith, that looked like red jelly. Brady casually picked it up and dropped it into a bag. More cleaning, wiping, scrubbing. The job was done. And Myra made a pot of tea. *

SHE

sat beside

*

*

the fire, her feet on the mantelpiece,

sipping her tea. “You should have seen the look on his face . . . the blow registered in his eyes,” exclaimed Myra. Brady

warmed to the conversation. Yes, he had raised his axe over

57

his head with both hands and brought it down on the lad’s head. He had been amazed because the victim had half rose after that. He shook his head in amazement. “It usually only takes one blow.” Myra was in a reminiscent mood. Did Ian remember when they were nearly caught? Smith listened, numbly as she went on. She had been sitting on the moors in the mini-van and he was preparingto dispose

of a victim. She looked at Brady, her eyes alight. “Do you remember the time we were on the moors and we had a body in the back? The time a policeman came up?” Brady smiled. Her voice rose, excited. “You were over the hill digging a grave and a police car came up and asked me what the trouble was.” She had told the policeman her sparking plugs were wet and she was drying them off. “And all the time I was praying that you didn’t come over the top of the hill.” Smith, sitting on the settee where, not long before there

had been another lad of similar age, now knew this was no fanciful talk, wine talk, talk he had scoffed

at. Now

he

believed every word. He now shared their dreadful secret. A new terror, dread, began to creep over David Smith. Was he going to be allowed to leave that house alive, walk away with that knowledge? He shuddered and thought of the boy in the back bedroom. But then, Ian Brady started to rub his ankle. He must have hurt it in the struggle. The body could not be moved to its moorland burial place that night. Myra looked at Smith. “You have a pram, don’t you, Dave?” Yes, he and Maureen still had the pram that had been their baby’s. It was at his grandfather’s house in Manchester. So, the arrangement was made. He would meet them that night after work, they would pick up the pram, bring it back and move the body. David Smith, his mouth dry, stood up. “I’d better be going then.” He was

fearful of the reaction.

But Brady, to his

immense relief, just nodded, limped to the front door and opened it. “I'll see you tomorrow.” The cold morning air felt so good. Freedom. David Smith ran, as fast as his trembling legs could carry him, all the way home.

58

*

*

*

“ARE you all right?” Maureen Smith got up and put on the kettle for her white-faced husband. It was 2.45am on Thursday, October 7 and David Smith had lurched into the flat ashen-faced, shaking. He sipped at the hot liquid and ran to the bathroom. He was very, very sick. “Come on, we’d better go to bed. I don’t know. . . that wine. . .” In bed, sleep was out of the question. David Smith’s head had been on the pillow for only a few seconds when he sat up. “There’s something I have to tell you .. .” Maureen was incredulous. Ian? Myra? My sister. . .? “Yes, yes, yes, yes. I saw it all.” At 6 o’clock as dawn was stealing over the council-house rooftops, David took a carving knife from the kitchen drawer, picked up a screwdriver. He and Maureen, with their dog, half-walked, half-ran, looking over their shoulders, to the

*phone box. And, with trembling hands he made the fateful call. The night shift was nearly over at Stalybridge police station. Daylight was beginning to streak the dark October sky. The telephone shrilled. The constable picked up the ’phone, glanced at the clock. 6.10am. “County police, Stalybridge.” It was a 999 call. The voice on the other end of the line was gabbling . . . terrified. “Quick, quick, come quick.” There had been a murder. In the telepone kiosk, four miles away, casting shivering looks over his shoulder, clutching the knife and screwdriver, Smith was frantic. He had just witnessed a nightmare that even his wildest dreams could never conjure up.and which would haunt him for the rest of his life. lan Brady had proved it. He was the High Priest of Murder. And the sacrifice had been Edward Evans.

Why don’t they come. Come on, come on. It was only a few

minutes but it seemed a lifetime. Smith ran back to the phone box, sobbing with frustration. He phoned again. And then they hid in the shadows until headlights appeared. It was a police car.

59

David and Maureen Smith ran from their hiding place, he,

frantically, as they got to the patrol car, trying to wrench open the driver’s door. “Now just calm down, sir .. .” He ran round, trying to open the back doors. Constable John Antrobus unlocked the door. The man, the woman and the dog scrambled inside. For once in his life David Smith was glad to get into a police car.

And accompany an officer to the station. With an unbelievable story to tell.

60

Chapter Eight THE ARREST HATTERSLEY was waking up. It was 8.20am. Its workers were yawning at the bus stops, the morning papers had been pushed through the letter-boxes, milk-bottles were clinking on the doorsteps. And a breadman in his white coat, whistling, tunelessly, as he strode, basket of loaves over his arm.

But this was no ordinary bread delivery man. For beneath the white coat was the uniform of a police superintendent. Acting on information received. Behind the casuallywhistling face Bob Talbot’s mind was racing. Just WHAT was he going to find in that house? The lad’s story was incredible. But we can’t take any chances. It could be true. Superintendent Talbot, newly-appointed head of the Stalybridge division of Cheshire Constabulary, had borrowed the white coat from the bemused breadman. Just in case. His men were nearby. Cars parked out of sight. Just in case. He walked along the path, around the gable-end and knocked on the back door of the house. No. 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. Little did Superintendent Robert Talbot, just five weeks with

the crown on his shoulder, realise the nightmare that would be unlocked when that back door opened. Footsteps. His heart quickened. Slowly the door opened. It was a blonde woman. Myra Hindley was face to face with the law, at last. But, for some, too late.

Talbot spoke. “Is your husband in?” “I haven’t got a husband.” It was time to drop the disguise. Talbot opened the white coat to reveal the uniform. “I am a police superintendent and I have reason to believe there is a man in this house.” Myra kept hold of the door. “There is no man here.”

No more niceties now. “I’m not satisfied. I want to come in.” And he stepped into the kitchen. Myra Hindley shrugged and nodded her blonde head towards the living-room. “He’s in‘the other room, in bed.”

61

ee {

Then another figure slipped im through the back door. Detective Sergeant Alex “Jock” Carr, who had been hiding around the side of the house, stood alongside his chief. The man looked up as the two tall figures loomed in the doorway. He was lying on the divan bed, naked except for his vest, and writing. The two policemen glanced around the

room. Spotless. No signs of any disturbance. Perhaps the lad had been romancing. “What? s your name?” asked Talbot. “Tan Brady.” Time for the official jargon. “I have received a report that

an act of violence took place in this house last night and we are investigating it.” Brady’s silence was broken by Myra’s voice, indignant. “There’s nothing wrong here.” “Who lives in this house?” Brady was still silent. Myra: “My gran — she is upstairs in bed — myself and Ian.” Talbot slipped off the white coat, straightened his tunic. “I’m going to have to search this house. Any objections?” The blonde head shook. Up the stairs. The bathroom, empty. A bedroom, a puzzled Granny Maybury. The back bedroom door was locked. “What’s in this room?” Myra, standing behind the superintendent: “I keep my firearms in there and I always keep this door locked.” Firearms? The lad had mentioned guns. Talbot let the thought go, for the moment. “Can I have the key?” “It’s at work.” Talbot went back downstairs and spoke to the man on the divan. “There’s a locked room upstairs and I will have to search it. Have you got the key here?” Silence. “It’s at work,” repeated Myra. Talbot sighed. “OK. Will you get your coat on and we'll take you by car to work and bring you back?” “I don’t want to. It’s . . . it’s not convenient.” “I’m afraid you must get the key because I’m not leaving this house until I’ve searched that bedroom.” There was a long, long silence. Myra searched Brady’s eyes. Talbot: “Please get your coat.” And then Myra: “Well, you'd better tell him.” Brady stood up. “There was a row last night. It’s in the back bedroom. Give him the key.” The Glaswegian tones were calm, the face showing no emotion, in spite of the indignity of

62

the body being half-naked. Talbot took the bunch by the key she was holding from Myra and climbed the stairs once more. The bedroom door creaked open as he turned the key and Talbot stepped inside. He glanced around. A single bed, wardrobe, table and chair.

And, underneath the window, a bundle, wrapped in a dark grey blanket. Talbot walked towards it. There was something protruding from one end. The shape of a human foot. *

DOWNSTAIRS,

*

*

Ian Brady had been writing a letter, in

green biro, to his boss, Tom Craig. . . “Tom, Sorry I could not phone yesterday. My family are at Glasgow this week. I was crossing the road in town last night when someone on a bike came round a corner and knocked me down. Except for a few bruises I was all right until I got up this morning. I could not put my weight on my ankle. I must have weak ankles or something. If it is no better tomorrow I will see the doctor. Ian.” He looked up. Sergeant Carr was back in the living room, clearing his throat. He knew what was coming next. No need to send the letter now. “We have found a body in the back bedroom and I am taking you to Hyde police station for further inquiries to be made. I must caution you. . .” Ian Brady nodded, stood up and dressed — shoes, socks,

trousers, jacket. And with Myra and her beloved dog Puppet close behind, stepped out of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue for the last time, to be taken to the red-brick police station at the back of Hyde town hall. There, in the little CID office there were the brisk formali-

ties. And then the statement: “Last night I met Eddie in Manchester. We were drinking then went home to Hattersley. We had an argument and we came to blows. After the first few blows the situation got out of control. When the argument started David was at the front door and Myra called him in.” And then Brady began to try to implicate the youth he had

63

—

hoped would be his apprentice. It was to be the first of a number of allegations against David Smith by the killers, now trapped, and betrayed. They were allegations that to this day affect Smith’s life. He went on: “Eddie was on the floor by the living-room door and David hit him with his stick and kicked him about three times. Eddie kicked me at the beginning on the ankle and there was a hatchet on the fireplace which I hit Eddie with. Eventually the only noise Eddie made was gurgling. Then Dave and I began to clean up the floor. The gurgling stopped and we tied up the body — just Dave and I and nobody else. Then Dave and I carried it upstairs. We sat about the house until three or four in the morning, then we decided to get rid of the body in the morning or the next night.” Meanwhile

in the back

bedroom

of the council

house,

detectives were carefully removing an axe, a stick, a bloodstained letter addressed to Edward Evans, and two loaded

revolvers. The trussed-up body was being examined by Home Office pathologist Dr. Charles St. Hill. Later, in the morning, he found 14 wounds on the boy’s head. Ian Brady was charged with murder. *

*

*

MYRA Hindley was sitting in the police station canteen, sipping a cup of tea, Puppet curled at her feet, alone with her thoughts. She looked up. A slim woman was standing in front of her. She spoke quietly. “Good morning. My name is Margaret Campion, detective policewoman. I'd like to ask you a few questions . . .” The face was expressionless. “I’d like some food for my dog.” “Yes, all right, in a moment, just a few questions first.”

Margaret Campion, then thirty-seven, was the only woman detective in the division. She had been on another murder

investigation twelve miles away when the call from her chief, Talbot, came: “You’re wanted urgently at Hyde.” She looked at Myra. Not a blonde hair out of place, lispstick, mascara, perfect. And so calm. Margaret spoke. 64

“This morning the body of a man was found at your house. Who is that person?” “I don’t know and I’m not saying anything. Ask Ian. My

story’s the same as Ian’s.” What story? “We came home from work about six o’clock then went out about eight o’clock and then we went to the ‘outdoor’ in Stockport Road near Longsight for some wine. _ We often go there. Then we went up Glossop (a Derbyshire town five miles from Hattersley) near the moors and sat talking for ages. It was just a normal evening out before all this happened. It was the same as hundreds of other evenings out. Now, can I have some food for my dog. . .?” “What happened last night at your house?” “All I’m saying is that I didn’t do it and Ian didn’t do it. We are involved in something we didn’t do. We never left each other. . . we never do. . . What happened last night was an accident. It should never have happened.” Margaret Campion pressed on: “It’s in your own interests to tell the truth.” The blonde head shook. “No, ask Ian. His

story’s the same as mine. We never left each other. Ian can’t drive. And that’s that.” She was defiant. Then, softer, she

asked: “What are they going to do with Ian?” Then loyalty . . . “because whatever he’s done I’ve done.” Policewoman Campion leaned forward. “Do you realise how serious this matter is?” “Yes. ..andI also know David Smith told you this.” The voice rose. “And he’s a liar!” “David Smith alleges that you cleaned up the mess in your living room after the murder of this man. Is this true?” A

sneer: “Yes, and I suppose he told you that he sat in the chair benevolently looking on while I cleaned up.” “Is it true that you went to David Smith’s house last night and he walked home with you?” “Yes.” “What time did you go?” “I’m not saying. All‘this happened because there was an argument. And that’s it.” “What was the argument about?” “I can’t say. All I’m saying i$ that there was an argument. Jan will tell you and I agree with what he says.” “How did this man get to your house and who brought him there.” “I’m not saying how he got there or what. I’ve told you before. I’m not 65

saying anything. “Do I understand by this that you’re refusing to say how the youth came to your house, when he came, or what happened to him?” “T told you before. My story is the same as Ian’s . . . what he has told you my story is the same as his.” But it wasn’t. . . Brady had said he had gone to Manchester — the opposite direction to Glossop. A serious slip. A final toss of the head. “We didnt do it and I’m not talking any more about it. Please get me some food for my dog. . .” Margaret Campion, walking across the road to the grocer’s for a tin of dog meat for Puppet, marvelled at the calmness of the young woman she had been questioning. A teenager was dead, horribly dead, in her house. And all she could think about was food for her dog. . Meanwhile, at Hattersley, knots of neighbours curious, chattered about the comings and goings at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. “You know who I mean. A thin chap. Didn’t say much... She’s a blonde . . . They’re always going out in that Mini. . .” Then a tall, trilby-hatted figure arrived. Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Benfield, head of Cheshire CID. He was fifty-two, a bachelor with a friendly smile, the air of a country vicar and had scarcely got used to his new desk at the Chester headquarters before the call came through from his old friend Bob Talbot. For he had been appointed to his new post only six days earlier. Inside the house he looked at the body, its terrible injuries. It was a nasty one all right. He did not know it then, but this was only the beginning. *

*

*

BY four o’clock that afternoon, Chief Superintendent Benfield was also quizzing Myra. But the answers were the same. Monotonous. Like, thought the detectives, a record with the needle stuck in the groove. “Ian didn’t do it . . .-} didnit doit. Let me see lan...” As the questioning went on, a heartbroken,

bewildered

little figure was gently shown into the mortuary across the

66

police station yard. Sobbing, Mrs. Edith Evans looked down at the body, the face now cleaned of the blood of its terrible wounds. Yes, it was her son, Edward. The officers had heard her cries. They looked at Myra. Her face was still expression-

less. She was a tough one, all right. Two more people were shown into the canteen, Myra’s uncle Bert Maybury and his sister, Nellie - Myra’s mother, a taller, more willowy figure than her daughter, but with the same blonde thatch of hair. Nellie looked at her daughter. What was happening? Our Myra. . . what’s she mixed up in? “Now, come on Myra, if you know anything tellthem. . . tell the truth.” Uncle Bert begged: “Tell them exactly what happened in the house. Tell them. . . you’ve got nothing to hide.” Margaret Campion looked at Myra, puzzled. She was stroking her dog, calm, as though oblivious to what was happening around her. She had seen many girls in all sorts of trouble but this one was so different. So apparently unconcerned. She should be heartbroken in the circumstances. Benfield spoke. “Can I have your car keys, please?” She handed them over and a few minutes later he was heading back to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, and the pale-blue MiniCountryman,

CNC

153C, still parked outside

the council

house. He unlocked it, opened the door and peered inside. The experienced policeman’s eye scanned the interior. Clean, tidy, nothing unusual. Hello, what’s this? His hand, searching the parcel shelf, closed on a brown leather wallet near the steering wheel. He opened it and pulled out three sheets of white, ruled paper, each about six inches by four inches. Unfolding the sheets he saw the first two had been neatly divided into five columns. And there was a curious code of leer b..k HAT... DET. « \ His brow creased. This was important. He did not realise its complete significance then, but-he had found the Master Plan in Ian Brady’s wallet. A plan for murder.

67

Chapter Nine P/B — WHERE’S THAT? AT eight o’clock that night Benfield saw Brady again. To ask about the code. “Yes, that was the plan for the disposal of Eddie. We planned that after it happened. We sat up doing Bees Benfield pointed to the letters GN. “What does this mean?” “Gun.” “Gun?” Matter-of-fact, Brady explained: “If anybody had seen us burying the body. For self-protection.” Benfield mentally raised an eyebrow, then returned to the de-coding. The abbreviations were quite simple. They were worked out, partly with Brady’s help. OB for object; DET - detail; HAT - hatchet; CARR - car;

GN - gun; REC - reconnaissance; PRO P - Pro-Plus (the stimulant drug); PTS - prints (fingerprints); END - finish. Thus, it seemed, according to the coded list, that the object, the hatchet, should, under the heading “detail,” be

cleaned before, wiped for prints and, at the end, its head buried. Then: Object: Car; Detail: Remove all removable objects, clean covers, floor and seat poly (polythene); End: Count all moveables. Destroy poly. Inspect car for spots. Object: Reconnaissance; Detail: Check periodically to see if inmoved; End: W/H.

Benfield paused. W/H. What did that mean? And to check periodically to see if WHAT unmoved? He left the questions, for the moment, unanswered, and continued down the list.

Object: Pro-Plus; Detail: Stimulate. Object: TIC; Detail: Place P/B . . . Benfield stopped again. This time he asked a question; pointing to the letters. “P/B — what does that mean?” “Penistone Burn,” replied Brady quickly. But it did not mean that at all. The Chief Superintendent was later to discover that the code letters TIC mean ticket. But Penistone Burn? It did not

add up. Penistone is a town in Yorkshire, on the other side of the Pennines from Manchester. 68

The abbreviation, in fact, stood for something much, much closer to home. Benfield would find out. *

*

*

AN hour later and the chief superintendent walked into the room where Myra was still waiting, still wondering. She had nothing to say . . . “until you let me see Ian.” Then Benfield told her. Ian had been charged with the murder of Edward Evans and would be in court tomorrow. “Til be in the court. I’ll see you after I’ve seen Ian.” Wearily, Nellie Hindley, still there, looked at her daughter. She never thought then that, twenty years later, she would be sadly saying that Myra should spend the rest of her life in jail. They left the police station together and went, in Uncle Bert’s car, back to Nellie’s home in Gorton. Myra was wearing clothes borrowed from her mother. Her own, like Brady’s and Smith’s, had been taken for forensic tests. And down in the basement of the old Hyde police station they were taking Ian Brady to the cells. To lock him up .. . for the first of at least seven-thousand four hundred and ninety-six nights. *

*

*

THE house at Hattersley had, during that day, been a hive of police activity. Granny Maybury, seventy-seven years old, and wondering what it was all about, was now staying with friends. The detectives went over 16 Wardle Brook Avenue with a fine-tooth comb. Samples of hair, blood, clothing, had been

taken away in plastic bags for forensic examination. Two tape recorders and a collection of tapes were taken from the house. So were two guns, a Webley °45 and a Smith and Wesson

738, and bullets, found in a cardboard box. Then

there were one hundred and seventy photographs and one hundred and forty-nine negatives. There was also a tartan-

69

backed photograph album with, inside, pictures of Ian, cuddling a neighbours baby in Glasgow, Myra, cuddling Puppet. Indoor snaps, outdoor snaps .. . on the moors. And then Detective

Sergeant Roy Dean

found, in the wardrobe,

an

exercise book. Superintendent Talbot, carefully examining the items back at Stalybridge police station, flipped open the book. Inside were drawings, doodles, sums and a list of names, some of them film stars, Jean Simmons, Alec Guinness: Just idle,

almost childlike jottings by lan Brady. Then one leapt from the page. Talbot remembered the smile that had been on thousands of posters police station in the area with the appeal: “Have boy?” The name was John Kilbride. *

*

of the names gap-toothed and in every you seen this

*

THE magistrates remanded Brady in custody on the Evans murder charge the next day. But the response was still the same from Myra. “All I’m saying is that Ian didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. ’'m saying nothing till I’ve seen Ian’s solicitor.” And all the time: “I want to see Ian.” Someone else wanted to see Ian, too. The man who always believed that John Kilbride had been murdered, had seen, so many times, that pain in Sheila Kilbride’s eyes, the policeman who never gave up. Detective Chief Inspector Joe Mounsey.

Soon he was alongside Talbot and Benfield, examining every clue, re-reading every word of David Smith’s incredible statement. The policemen carefully studied the pictures in the album with the tartan cover. They seemed ordinary enough. Innocent, everyday poses. But the moorland scenes were the ones that interested them most. They remembered David Smith telling them of the moonlight trips. And of Brady’s words to his young companion: “I’ve killed three or four. . . their bodies are buried on the moors.” So next day David and Maureen Smith again found themselves heading towards the moors. This time in a police car. It seemed so incredible, so 70

unbelievable. But the evidence was mounting. Joe Mounsey, at the wheel, glanced at David Smith, who shook his head. This wasn’t it. Smith couldn’t really remember. It had been the moors, but this landscape was unfamiliar.

He had always sat in the back when Myra had driven them there. The police car had headed towards Penistone . . . the officers remembering that “Penistone Burn” had been mentioned by Brady while de-coding his plan with Benfield. But none of the moorland photographs matched up with the Pennine ridge at Woodhead where they were searching. Smith, though, had heard the name Woodhead mentioned

during the wine-filled nights on the moors. And surely the abbreviation W/H in Brady’s code fitted. So the search began. Ahead of the police: thousands of square miles of moorland, the Peak National Park. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The trouble was they were

in the wrong place. For, as the grouse flies, Saddleworth Moor was five miles away. *

*

*

MY colleague Donald Blankley is The Star’s crime reporter,

a man

who, in the last twenty-one

years, has covered

some of Britain’s most harrowing cases. For him, horrendous stories of brutal murder are an everyday part of the job. He has covered them all — from the Black Panther to the York-

shire Ripper. But nothing, no story, shook the ice-cool, laconic Blankley as the biggest exclusive of _ his career . . . what many journalists still regard as the scoop of the century, especially when the full facts began to emerge. Blankley was working for the Express group — which launched The Star — then. And eight whispered words gave him his exclusive: “We’ve been digging for bodies on the moors.” The date: Sunday, October 10, 1965. The words, over a glass of beer in a Manchester pub, came from a senior Lancashire

police officer, one of Blankley’s

closest contacts. That was it. Nothing more. There was an official denial. And there was nothing then to a

connect the brief, whispered tip with a council house in | Hattersley and the arrest of a man for the alleged murder of a teenager. But Blankley, the son of a Yorkshire policeman, and possessed with a tenacity rivalling that of Joe Mounsey, persevered. And three days later the police offically confirmed it. The story of the decade; perhaps the murder story of the century, hit the headlines. The biggest hunt ever launched in Britain for the bodies of missing children. Blankley knew that not only did Lancashire police have a missing child — John Kilbride — on their files. Manchester police had three — Pauline Reade, Keith Bennett and Lesley Ann Downey. “The secret had been kept so well,” Blankley told me, “that when the search first started the policemen wore overalls and wellington boots so they wouldn’t attract attention. Passersby would think they were just ordinary workmen.” All the newspapers could say then was that “information reached the police that a man had boasted of burying bodies on the moors.”

But they were STILL digging in the wrong place .. . *

*

*

THE next day Brady again appeared in court on remand on the Edward Evans murder charge. Three hours later, at Hyde police station, Detective Sergeant Carr charged Myra Hindley with being an accessory after the fact. She was taken into custody. “Nothing to say until I have seen Mr. Fitzpatrick” (a local solicitor who was representing Brady) was all she said. Meanwhile, Joe Mounsey had been grilling Brady, along

with Detective Chief Inspector John Tyrrell of Manchester City police, still anxious to trace their missing youngsters. Mounsey put David Smith’s allegations of discussing “killing people and burying their bodies on the moors.” Brady: “Yes, I talked about it in a vague sort of way . . . it

was all part of the fiction to impress him.” Mounsey: “You have boasted to Smith of killing three or four people.” Brady: “I may have given him a vague impress72

ae)

ion but it was just part of the fiction I was promoting to impress him.” Then, later, Tyrrell asked about trips to the moors. “I think you went on the moors at night to dispose of the bodies of the victims you have killed, just as you have killed Evans.” Brady: “No, that’s not true. What I told Smith was only to build up an image.” Mounsey then produced the coded plan found in Brady’s wallet. He asked about One entry: “Check periodically to see if unmoved.” Did that refer to bodies Brady had buried on the moors and was it a reminder to check that the graves were still intact? Brady: “It was only to do with Evans.” And still, when asked about other bodies: “It was just part of the fiction.” But it was not fiction. The senior police officers knew that. They were now convinced there were bodies on the moors. But where? The digging went on. STILL in the wrong place. *

*

*

IT was time to talk about John Kilbride. Mounsey: “We are making inquiries about the disappearance of a young boy, John Kilbride. He was last seen on Ashton Market.” Brady: “I have read about him, I think, but I don’t know anything of him.” Slowly, Mounsey opened the exercise book and pointed to the name. Why was that written there? “I don’t know.” Did it refer to the missing boy? Brady: “No, it was a lad I knew at

Hull” (Brady had been in Borstal there). But a check there showed that no-one of that name had been in Borstal at the same time as Brady. He and Myra were taken to the prisoners’ remand centre at Risley, near Warrington, thirty miles away. But, despite her first taste of jail, Myra remained unshakeable, cool as ever. Three days after being charged she was calling Smith’s allegations “rubbish” and saying: “Smith’s an idiotic moron.” And then Tyrrell asked her about Lesley Ann Downey. There was indignation. “What ARE you suggesting?” There

73

was not so much as even a faint blush; nothing to give her away. Myra shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t know ANYTHING about her.” Back to Brady to show him one of the photographs from the tartan-backed album: a picture of him standing on a rock, the Mini-van in the foreground and the road just behind. The picture, said Brady, was taken at Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire. It wasn’t. It was on Saddleworth Moor, along, long way from Whaley Bridge. And very near a little girl’s grave. But then came the break the police had been waiting for. The officers, stilh combing every corner, every cranny of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley for clues, had been talking to the neighbours. The girl from number twelve knew Ian and Myra. She had been on the moors with them. Patricia Hodges.

74

aan

Chapter Ten THE SECRETS OF SADDLEWORTH MOOR YOUNG

Pat remembered the road well. Over towards Staly-

bridge and then take this way. No, not towards Woodhead.

Along here. The police officers glanced at each other as the car swung up towards Uppermill, then at the sign at the last village: Greenfield. Past the Clarence pub on the left and up, up the winding moorland road that Patricia Hodges had known so well. What fun they had had together, the three of them, Pat, Myra and Ian. And still up. “Further on yet, further on.” To Saddleworth Moor. “Here, stop here. This is where we came.” Detective Constable Peter Clegg stepped from the police car. He and Policewoman Pat Slater had picked up Patricia from school in Dukinfield that afternoon. Now they were standing by the roadside, surrounded by miles of open moorland, black peat,

a chill breeze rippling the sparse grass and heather. They shivered and looked around them. This, said Patricia, was where they used to sit, drinking wine, talking, with the wind buffeting the little Mini-van. The place: Hollin Brow Knoll. Close to Wessenden Head. It fitted. Wessenden Head... W/H. And it matched the photographs perfectly. *

*

*

NOW they were in the right place. The thin blue line of once-disguised, overalled officers had now swelled to a fullscale police operation. One-thousand-six-hundred feet up,

on the°A635 between Greenfield and Holmfirth they fanned out towards the tombstone-like rocks on the skyline — the rocks on the photograph. They looked, probing the rainsodden peat for tell-tale signs, until it was dark. They would return tomorrow and every day until they found what they were seeking.

75

As the grim search had been going on, two mothers, united in their anxiety, stood in the drizzle and watched. Sheila Kilbride and Ann Downey, hoping, praying. Hopes that their children, their son, their daughter, might somehow, somewhere, by some miracle, still be alive; that this was all some long, long ghastly nightmare. And prayers that if they were

dead they could, at last, be peacefully laid to rest. At 9.30 next morning, Saturday, October 16, 1965, a convoy of police vehicles arrived at Saddleworth Moor. What an eerie, God-forsaken place it was. The policemen zipped up their anoraks, pulled on their wellington boots and, with the

wind from the east biting their cheeks, resumed the search. They moved closer, closer to the rocks. Still nothing. All day they plodded on and on. Closer, closer. Still nothing. And then, at ten minutes to three, Police Constable Rqbert Spiers, a rookie just out of police training college, felt the call of nature. He needed somewhere out of sight. Just over the hilltop. With his colieagues, still prodding, probing, walking towards him, their bosses looking at their watches in the

gathering gloom — almost time to call it a day — he saw something. The rain had filled a little hollow, a depression in the black, stinking peat. Then, through, the murky water, he saw it. A piece of bone. Heart thumping, white- faced, the

young bobby shouted hoarsely to Detective Sergeant Leslie Eckersley. “Sarg . . . here.” Eckersley squelched through the mire and stood alongside the young constable. “What is it, lad?” “Just here, sarg . . . could be a sheep, I suppose, but there’s something here. A bone.” Eckersley sank to his knees in the quagmire and carefully, gingerly, scraped away the peat. The bone was a child’s arm. The sergeant pushed away more of the cloying peat. A head. Human. Saddleworth Moor had revealed the first of its - secrets. Eckersley radioed his headquarters. Joe Mounsey, out on another inquiry, was summoned. He was soon on the scene. He knew, he always knew, that John Kilbride had been murdered... But that poor little body, naked, now becoming skeletal, its

76

_ clothes at the foot of the grave, was not that of John Kilbride. It was a girl. She was lying on her side, her right arm raised above her head. In death the girl seemed to be pointing towards the heavens, almost as if reaching for help. And to help. To help them to find her. Near her feet were a royal blue coat, a pink cardigan, a red and green tartan skirt. And a little string of white beads, the present from her brother she had so proudly worn at the

Boxing Day fair. They had found Lesley Ann Downey. *

*

*

THE growing army of reporters evacuated the Moor to file their stories. The pressmen, like the policemen, knew then that there were many more hours, days, weeks, perhaps months, to be spent on Saddleworth Moor. There were still three missing children. They were digging, too, back at Hattersley. The front and back gardens, nurtured by the sackfuls of peat from the Moor, were turned over by police officers until they struck stone. Inside the house, Chief Inspector Tyrrell had also been doing some digging. Going through the cheap, trashy literature he came across a white-backed book. He opened it. Inside .was an inscription: “Jo Myra, from Aunty Kath and Uncle Bert, November 16, 1958.”

What Tyrrell discovered next was, eventually, to earn him a judge’s praise for his fine detective work. For, turning the book in his hands, he felt a slight ripple on the back edge. Something was tucked down between the cover and the spine. Carefully he eased out the tightly-rolled slip of paper, unfurled it. It was a railway left-luggage ticket, number 74843. That ticket was the key that would unlock undeniable, damning evidence against Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. The flyleaf inscription continued: “Souvenir of your first Holy Communion.” The ticket had been hidden in Myra’s prayer book. NOW they knew what P/B meant.

a,

*

THE MOOR

*

*

burst into light. Arc-lamps were rushed to

the scene and forensic scientists arrived. There, behind can-

vas screens, Dr. David Gee from Leeds University and his colleagues set about their dreadful task. It was impossible then, or later, to determine the cause of death.

Two hours later, in the thick, swirling mist which regularly envelops Saddleworth Moor at night, Lesley Ann was gently carried through the bracken. The spot where she had been found was seventy yards from the road, just out of sight of passing headlights. They should have known . . . The grimfaced policemen carefully put the little bundle, now wrapped in a plastic sheet, in a van waiting to take her to Uppermill Mortuary. The next morning Mrs. Ann Downey was driven to the village to identify her daugther. For the case-toughened

policemen this was the hardest part of all. Yes, it was Lesley. Her clothing, her red shoes, her beads.

Ann Downey, head bent, all hope now gone, left the mortuary and went home. To Hattersley. A few months earlier, to get away from the bitter, heartbreaking memories of her Ancoats flat, she had asked the council for a move. Her

new home was on the overspill estate. She had been living only a few hundred yards from her daughter’s killers. And the house where little Lesley Ann had suffered so much. *

THE

*

*

British Transport Police were called in to help.

Where was that ticket Tyrrell had found in Myra Hindley’s

prayer book issued? Detective Constable Denis Barrow of the BTC police checked at the city stations and, later that day,

came up with the answer. The ticket matched a stub issued on

October 5, 1965, for two shillings. And two suitcases. Their

secret hiding place had been discovered: the left-luggage office at Manchester’s Central Station. It was also the place 78

from where Edward Evans had been lured to his death. And the cases, one blue, one brown, were those which

Brady and Hindley had driven off with the day before the teenager was butchered. The police had found Ian and Myra’s souvenirs ... and the proof they needed was inside the cases, in heart-rending words and pictures. They had been collected by Detective-Sergeant Carr who took them to Talbot, his chief. The senior officer snapped them open and began to go through the contents: letters addressed to Brady, books on porn and perversion and sadism, a woman’s black wig, a cosh, gun cartridges. And two

tape recordings. He would hear them soon. And never, ever, forget them. But first Talbot turned his attention to a halibut-liver oil tin and prised it open. Inside were nine photographs of a little girl, naked except for her shoes and socks, a scarf around her mouth. And in, as Talbot was to say in court later, “various poses.” Lesley Ann Downey, the little girl too modest to let her brothers see her in her pyjamas at home, had been forced to pose for pornographic pictures. One of them was in an attitude of prayer. And in the background was something that Talbot had seen before; something that pinpointed their location. Myra’s bed. *

*

*

BY now the combined police operation was massive, the biggest-ever of its kind in Britain. Five forces were involved: Cheshire, Lancashire, Manchester, Derbyshire and the West

Riding of Yorkshire. The North West Regional Crime Squad was there too, with Eric Cunningham, Assistant Chief Constable of Manchester, acting as co-ordinator. They would leave no stone unturned on Saddleworth Moor. Or any moor. And the story was going around the globe like wildfire. The

world’s press arrived. The foreign journalists, unaffected by British laws governing publication — two people had been charged; therefore no link could be made with the activities

on the moors — filed fantasy-filled stories. But, as it turned 79

out, none was more fantastic than the truth of this incredible

tale. No imagination could conjure up a more bizarre saga. Saddleworth Moor became a honeycomb of spade-marks, the hub of the world’s most amazing story. On the Monday after Lesley Ann had been found Ian Brady and Myra Hindley made brief, separate remand appearances before the magistrates at Stalybridge. He, greysuited,

white,

open-necked

shirt, on

the Evans

murder

charge; she, wearing a red coat, was charged with “well knowing that Ian Brady had murdered Edward Evans did, on October 6 and on other days thereafter, receive, comfort,

harbour, assist and maintain the said Ian Brady.” Three days later they made another appearance, this time at Hyde. And this time there were more charges. Brady was charged with both the murders of Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey; then Myra, first with the harbouring charge. And then with the murder of Lesley. It was all so formal, the charges read out in the full, archaic language of the law, and the court being told that Brady had replied, when charged: “Not guilty.” And that Myra had said: “It’s not true.” But soon there would be even more charges. Ten miles away on Saddleworth Moor, and only two hours after the latest charges, they found another grave.

80

Chapter Eleven MYRA

... THE SIGNPOST TO MURDER

INSPECTOR John Chaddock, from the little police station at Uppermill, where they normally listened to little more sinister than complaints of sheep-stealing, was at the scene of the biggest case of his — or any other policeman’s — career. He had joined the huge search of Saddleworth Moor, using his knowledge of the terrain to guide the bobbies from the towns and city of the valley below. The policemen were preparing to dig in a new spot and, just before they started, the country inspector pushed his stick into the ground. Straight away he knew. The smell of putrifaction made his stomach heave. And nine inches below the surface of the peat they uncovered a black, left shoe with a chisel toe. A boy’s shoe. Then socks, a heel, a leg.

Twenty-three months after he vanished from the market at Ashton they had found John Kilbride. Again the canvas screens went up. The top brass arrived. Mounsey was already there; then came Benfield, Cunning-

ham, Chief Superintendent Harold Prescott, head of Lancashire CID and Detective Chief Superintendent Douglas Nimmo, head of Manchester CID.

Then came the scientists, Dr. Cyril Polson, Professor of

Medicine at Leeds University and Dr. David Gee. Carefully they moved the soil. Again it was impossible to ascertain the cause of death; the body had been there too long. But one thing the scientists did notice. John Kilbride’s trousers had been pulled down to mid-thigh, his underpants rolled in a band one-and-a-half inches broad and knotted at the back. As with Edward Evans and as with Lesley Ann Downey there had been a sexual element involved before he died. Just HOW had Inspector John Chaddock found that grave with such pinpoint accuracy? Walked straight to it and unlocked the dreadful secret of the peat? The grave was found

81

on the opposite side of the road from where they had discovered Lesley Ann five days earlier. And more than three hundred yards away. How had he known? The spot was almost identical to the one, almost two years ago, that a local clairvoyant had seen inavision . . . “downa slope . . . barren skyline.” But this discovery had nothing to do with the supernatural. And it was no fluke. For standing alongside Chaddock when he pushed that stick into the ground was Joe Mounsey. Holding a photograph. It was one of the pictures from the tartan-backed album: one of Myra Hindley holding a puppy. She was squatting and looking down at the ground ~ a particular piece of ground. Police photographer Peter Masheder, using the photograph as a guide, had lined up the exact spot through his own lens. Myra Hindley, posing for the camera, had been acting as a human marker; a signpost to the evil of herself and Ian Brady. *

*

*

THE knock on Sheila Kilbride’s front door was the one she had always dreaded, yet had always known would come one day. And next morning the heartbroken mother went to Uppermill mortuary, taken there by Joe Mounsey who had visited her so many times when there had been that slender thread of hope. Dressed in black, with a black lace scarf around her head

Mrs. Kilbride was shown the little bundle of clothes. There was the check-pattern jacket with the football-shaped buttons. It was John’s. It had been given to her by a friend whose grandson had outgrown it and she had turned up the hem herself. The vest that had been one of his father’s — she had made it narrower herself. The odd buttons on the trousers. She had sewn them on herself. The size four shoe. Yes, she

had had them mended at the Co-op. The pain still shows in her eyes to this day. *

*

82

*

“A little flower lent, not given, To bud on Earth And blossom in heaven.”

THAT is the inscription on the gravestone of Lesley Ann Downey who, on Tuesday, October 26, 1965, was given a

Christian burial. The service was at Trinity Methodist Church in Ancoats where she had belonged to the Girls’ Guildry. More than two thousand people gathered outside in silence, some to gawk. But most to say, by being there, how very, very sorry they were. And to thank God that their children, some sleeping in their prams, were safe. A £100 reward raised by the neighbours “for information leading to her whereabouts” after she disappeared was used to pay for Lesley’s funeral. And inside the church, the minister, the Reverend Harold

Ford was saying: “The justice, wrath and punishment of God will, I fear, be terrible — terrible indeed.

It is not only a.

terrible crime, but an awful sin and the person or persons responsible will one day have to face God. Lesley Downey was

a bright, intelligent, affectionate

little child and, like

most children, was trustful. Unfortunately that quality in her was a means whereby some evil person led her away.” Then he quoted the words of Christ: “Woe be unto you that cause one of these, my little ones, to stumble. It were better for that person that a millstone were hung around his neck and thrown in the depths of the sea.” It is a quotation that Myra Hindley who, twenty-one years later, says she has found her religion again, has, no doubt, pondered many times.

ne

*

SUPERINTENDENT Talbot looked at the two spools of tape lying on his desk. Let’s see what’s on these. He picked up one of them, slotted it onto a tape recorder and flicked on the switch. It crackled into life with a familiar sound, a recording of the Goon Show, taken from the radio, and then a snatch

from another programme with the voice of presenter Freddie 83

s

i

,

«*

Pee

Grisewood . . . talking about Hitler. Then came a young voice — that of Patricia Hodges discussing “that little girl at Ancoats” with Myra. That was all. Talbot took off the tape, put on the second one. A man’s voice: “Get out of the fucking road. Get in the fucking basket . . .” Somebody talking to a dog, mused Talbot. There was the sound of a door banging, crackling on the tape, footsteps. Two sets. Whispers. And then, a blood chilling terrible scream. The scream of a child. “DON’T ...mum... aah.” A woman’s voice: “Shut up.” And then the child: “Please, God, help me, ah, please,

oh .. .” The Superintendent had felt the blood drain from his cheeks, a knot tighten in his stomach. Bob Talbot had been a detective before going back into uniform. He thought he had heard everything. Until this. They were the last pleas for mercy from “that little girl at Ancoats” before she died. Silently he listened to the tape to the end, then stood up, switched off the machine. Another terrible ordeal lay ahead of a mother. Ann Downey had to identify the voice. Yes, it was Lesley Ann. At the same time in those horrifying, event-filled days Myra Hindley was showing concern . . . for her dog, Puppet. The woman who had once told her sister she hated babies, hated children, hated people, lavished whatever love of which she was capable on the mongrel. While she was in custody Puppet was being looked after by

a neighbour and she was forever making inquiries about its well-being. The police, too, became

interested in the dog.

They wanted to find out its exact age. For, in the damning photograph of Myra, in “uniform”, jacket, trousers and high boots, at the grave of John Kilbride, the black, tan and white dog she was holding was then a

_ puppy. Benfield wanted to prove that the picture had been

taken after John vanished and not before. The dog was taken to kennels in Ashton by Margaret Campion for a veterinary expert to X-ray its teeth to ascertain

its age. But, unknown to anyone, Puppet had suffered from kidney trouble and died under the anaesthetic. _

Myra, the woman who had shown no compassion, no pity,

84

for the heart-rending appeals of a little girl, was quivering with rage when Benfield and his colleagues broke the news. She had just one word for them: “MURDERERS!” 1”

*

te

THE Queen’s Hotel at Hyde, five hundred yards from the police station, was at its bustling busiest. The big town-centre pub was packed with pressmen — there were now four hundred of us — and policemen, taking a breather from the massive excavation high on Saddleworth Moor. The Queen’s had become headquarters for all of us engaged in the grim saga; a place to snatch a few minutes in the normal world. Landlady Nellie Bebbington and her pretty blonde daugh- © ter Derry were pulling pints, dishing up steaks, hot-pots. One minute the Queen’s would be full; the next, empty: a press conference at the station, something else happening on Saddleworth Moor. Day in, day out; week in, week out.

It was there that I first met fellow-journalists like Harry Pugh, Donald Blankley, the man who first broke the story, and Jeff McGowan. We had each ordered a hot-pot. They came, steaming, mouth-watering, from the busy kitchen. And then outside, above the noise of the passing traffic, came

a low drone overhead, growing louder. The first forkfuls froze. We ran outside, looked up. The Royal Air Force had been called in. Canberra and Victor planes were heading towards the Moor to sweep low, to begin to take the first of hundreds of aerial pictures to try to spot changes in the landscape that might point to more graves. Christ, what a story it all was. Today, we are all twenty-one years, and many thousands of stories, older. We are now all colleagues on The Star. But — and Jeff McGowan,

today our News Editor, who has read

millions of words of copy from all over the world, is no exception — none of us has ever known a story so totally beyond belief. More than one hundred policemen were by then prodding,

probing the moorland. There was talk of bringing in troops. Two other areas were also being searched: the Snake Pass,

85

near Glossop, Derbyshire and Woodhead, Cheshire. Jan Brady’s camera had been clicking there, too. Ramblers and members of mountain rescue teams joined the police. The houses in Westmoreland Street, Manchester, where Brady had once lived and Wiles Street, Gorton, where the Smiths had lived were fine tooth-combed. Bannock Street had,

cursed the policemen, been flattened by the bulldozers. There were still missing children to find. The files were still open on Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade. Meanwhile, Brady and Myra were due for another court appearance. And their first taste of the grief turned to anger of the families of their victims. *

THE

AVENGERS

*

*

were Terry Downey,

the father of

Lesley Ann, and his brother, Patrick, sitting, on October 28,

1965, in Hyde magistrates’ court. Patrick, forty-one, and heavily built, nudged thirty-eight-year-old Terry. “That’s him.” Ian Brady, in the grey suit, the white open-necked shirt, still without the tie he never had time to put on three weeks ago, stepped into the dock. Then: “That’s her.” Myra Hindley, in her cherry-red coat, flanked by Detective Policewoman Margaret Campion and young policewoman Hazel Simpson, stood by his side. They faced the magistrates, chaired by Dr. Couzens, the headmaster of the local grammar school. Brady glanced around the court, then looked the five magistrates in the eyes; Myra stood, head bowed, the brown

roots now showing through the blonde hair. Magistrates clerk Mr. Kenneth Pickup read out the charges: two of murder — _ Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey — against Brady; one

of harbouring Brady in the Evans case and one of murdering Lesley Ann against Hindley. It lasted only two minutes. But in those one-hundred-and-twenty seconds Patrick and Terry Downey had been sitting close behind the couple. Almost within touching distance. Beneath his feet Patrick had felt a loose floor block, oak, heavy, the size of a house

brick. And he had been trying, with his shoe, to prise it free,

86

to use as a club, a weapon. “I would have smashed their heads in,” he told me recently, “if only I could have snatched it up in time. But I daren’t reach down. The police were watching everywhere.” By the time the wooden block was loose enough the prisoners were walking down the steps from the dock, remanded for another week.

Outside in the rain a crowd of two hundred waited to see the prisoners driven away. A police car started up. Suddenly, through the umbrellas, two men darted forward: Terence and Patrick Downey, anger blazing through the tear-filled eyes. Scuffles. Police grabbed Patrick. Terry reached the car door, wrenched it open. The car gathered speed, the door slammed, it accelerated away. It contained, anyway, only decoys — Margaret Campion and a young male colleague. Brady and Myra left later, when the crowd had dispersed. There were no charges against the emotional father and uncle. The North Cheshire Herald reported next day: “A young couple who had been spectators in the public gallery were later chased across Hyde market by a group of shouting women. As cameramen’s flashbulbs popped the couple dodged in and out of the rows of stalls. The girl, in high heels and a grey suit, had difficulty keeping up with the man accompanying her.” The twenty-one-year torment of David Smith had begun.

87

Chapter Twelve | MYRA’S SHAME THERE were now three vital pieces of evidence: the nude photographs of Lesley Ann, the pictures on the moors and the tape recording. It was time to confront Brady and Hindley They were quizzed by the senior officers in the with them. big, new modern police headquarters at Ashton-under-Lyne on the same day as their joint court appearance. Benfield showed Brady the two suitcases they had found at Central Station left-luggage office. Yes, Brady admitted, they were his. What about the photographs of the little girl, naked, with a scarf around her mouth. “Did you take them?” An admission: “I did. At Wardle Brook Avenue.”

Benfield: “I have reason to believe these are photographs of Lesley Ann Downey and you have already admitted taking them.” He pushed an enlarged picture of the girl across to Brady. Brady nodded. “Yes.” Would he like to say anything about the photographs? A shake of the head. “Not at present.” And then, said Benfield, he was going to play a tape recording. “I know the tape,” said Brady quietly. The Chief Superintendent looked at the accused man as the tape was played, as the girl cried, pleaded, screamed. His head was bowed. Then Benfield told him he believed the voices on the tape were his, Hindley’s and Lesley Ann’s. Brady: “She didn’t give the name Downey. It was something else.” Benfield: “The body of that girl was recovered from Saddleworth Moor.” Brady: “There is an explanation for it. I didn’t kill Lesley but I took those photographs.” Where did he meet her? “I met her at the house . . . I don’t know how she got there.”

The detectives exchanged glances. The police, said Benfield, believed,she had died at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, but again Brady insisted: “I only took the photographs.” How and where had he met the girl? “I don’t know. . . there were only the photos on my part.”

88

And then: “She was brought to the house, in either a car or a van by two men. One stayed outside. I don’t know him.” Brady hesitated. “The other man .. .” “Yes?” “The other man I do know.” “Oh?” Benfield waited.“But I am not prepared to tell you at present.” Who was present, in the bedroom, when those photographs were taken? “Only Myra, myself and the little girl.” Where were the men? “Downstairs.” Where was Myra’s grandmother? “I can’t remember.” What did the man say when he arrived at the house? “He didn’t need to say anything. I knew why he had brought her.” Benfield persevered. But WHO WAS HE? “I met him in Manchester . . . he went in Liston’s Bar . . . I’ll consult my solicitor and take his advice on the matter.” Benfield shrugged. The tape recording. “During the recording of the tape it appears you are trying to get the girl to put something in her mouth. What was it?” Brady: “The scarf.” Benfield: “Was she alive when she left that house?” Brady: “Yes, I was told later she had been dropped off by Belle Vue (an amusement

park in Gorton, Manchester).” Again: “Who was the man?” Brady still shook his head. “Tl think about it. I may let you know later.” It was time to talk to Myra. And that day, at the police station, the hard, defiant shell cracked a little. For the first

time, in the twenty-one days since she opened the door to a policeman, she showed remorse. Benfield had brought in the “souvenirs.” He put down the suitcases. Silence. He put down the photographs of Lesley Ann. Myra’s hands rose, held her head. In the room, Benfield glanced at his companions — Bob Talbot, Margaret Campion and Detective Chief Inspector Clifford Haigh of Manchester police. Next Lesley’s clothing, the little pink cardigan, the royal blue coat, the shoes. Myra sat, still, head in hands. What about the Phot oer rus | Still she did not speak. Then the tape recording. As the tape began to whirr Myra’s lips started to tremble. There were the voices. Hers. Ian’s. And Lesley Ann’s. Something, perhaps some long latent

89

emotion in Myra Hindley, apparently stirred. The police officers looked at her. A pulse in the side of her neck was visibly, rapidly, throbbing. And then a tear stole down her cheek. The tape whirred on. . . “Don’t. . . I want to see my mummy...

honest to God...”

She was crying. Myra Hindley was crying. She looked up, saw the questions in the eyes of the police officers. Tears, by now, were staining her face. She whispered. “I’m ashamed.” *

*

*

IT was the turn of the hard man, the tough, tenacious, Joe

Mounsey to go in. But Myra Hindley’s composure had returned when the Detective Inspector walked into the interview room. He put down, in front of her, the photograph of her crouching over John Kilbride’s grave. She turned away, refusing to look at it. te De ~~ Mounsey: “Why are you crouched over his grave?” There was no reply. “I have reason to believe that you and Ian Brady killed John Kilbride.” Myra: “It’s not true.” Mounsey: “I don’t believe you.” Myra: “I refuse to answer any questions.” Then, later, Tyrrell: “What are you looking at there on the photo?” Myra: “The dog.”Tyrrell: “You’re looking at the ground.” Silence. Tyrrell then showed her a second picture of herself, standing on rocks. Where was that taken? Myra: “It could have been one of a dozen places.” Back to the other picture. “This photograph is taken from close to the grave of Lesley Ann Downey and on the spot you are looking at there is the grave of John Kilbride. The ground in the area of both photographs was dug up and immediately beneath where you are crouching, looking at the ground, the ~ body of John Kilbride was found.” Myra: “So there could be bodies all over where I have been stood, then?”

Tyrrell: “It is known that Lesley Ann Downey was in your bedroom shortly before she died . . . then we found a photograph of you standing on the moors very close to her grave.” Myra: “It must be coincidence.” Tyrrell: “It is not a coincidence that we then found a photograph of you standing on

90

John Kilbride’s grave.” Myra: “As far as Iam concerned they are two normal photographs I have had taken. I don’t know when or where.” “T suggest to you that the purpose of these photographs was to locate the graves again and satisfy yourselves that the graves had not been disturbed.” “They have no significance for me . . . I can’t remember the circumstances about hundreds of photographs I have had taken.” Tyrrell: “I have reason to think you know what happened to John Kilbride.” “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about people’s graves.” More grilling, more questions about John Kilbride. “I don’t know anything about John Kilbride.” And then, began Myra: “As far as Lesley Ann Downey 1s concerned. . .” Tyrrell interrupted. “Think carefully before you say anything further. If you say you are innocent we will do everything possible to prove it. You are being given the opportunity now to tell the truth. A thorough investigation will be made into any explanation you give.” She began again. “As far as Lesley Ann Downey is concerned, Ian didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.” They were the all-too-familiar words. But then: “I suggest you see Smith.” The words were to condemn David Smith, their betrayer, to a lifetime of suspicion and hate. “You know she was at the house. She was brought there by Smith and taken away by Smith.” As the prosecution was to say later when she was committed for trial: “The implication is she says it was David Smith who killed Lesley Ann Downey.” *

*

*

DETECTIVE Inspector Norman Mattin of Manchester City police was curious. Why had Myra Hindley, the woman sitting calmly, almost aloofly, across from him, changed so much since she met Ian Brady? It seemed he had changed her outlook, her attitude to life, her make-up. Everything. She looked at him. “I made all my own decisions. People go through several stages in their lives. After discussions they

91

Yo

RSCaS eae 7 é

ae

change their mind. Ian never made me do anything I didn’t want to do.” And then, quickly: “All that about killing is bloody rubbish.” It was Myra’s turn to ask the questions: “What time did Smith say he left our house that night (the night Edward Evans was killed)?” Mattin: “I don’t know, but it was very late.” Myra: “It was about 3am or just after, and,” a smirk,

“what time did he go to the police?” She rushed on: “They told me it was some time after he left the house.” A sneer:

“Well, obviously, he was getting his

story straight.” Mattin: “If you say he is responsible for these deaths let’s be knowing just what it is that you know.” Myra: “I’m not saying any more except that he brought her to the house with another man and Smith took her away with the other man.” The questions were over. For that day. Brady and Myra were driven back to the Risley remand centre. The police had really been gunning for them that day. But someone else was gunning for them, too. Literally. The next day Patrick Downey, the uncle with revenge in his heart, went out and bought a gun. *

*

*

“Kilbride. In memory of John,

eldest child of Sheila and Patrick. Missing: November, 1963. Buried: November, 1965.

Aged 12 years. At rest with God.”

WITH this inscription on his gravestone, they gave John Kilbride a Christian burial on Monday, November 1, in Hurst

Cemetery near his home, after a service in St. Christopher’s Church. The inquest on John had been opened, and adjourned, at Uppermill. His body, coroner Bernard Little had been told, 92

SRP tm igh Ue ie wet

Ae

ae

hts

.

was unrecognisable and unidentifiable. And the only way Sheila Kilbride, sitting bravely in that little courtroom, had been able to tell it had been her son was by the clothes she had altered herself. She also recognised hair found in his moorland grave as being similar in colour and texture. As Mrs. Kilbride quietly wept at her son’s funeral they were still digging on Saddleworth Moor. Now the vast, barren landscape was hardening with the frost in winter. The policemen wore gum boots, heavy, protective clothing. Mobile police stations were set up over an area of the Pennines covering twenty miles. The police wanted to hear of “suspicious incidents” seen by ramblers or picnickers over the last year or two. The RAF jets roared overhead and even the Army was consulted. The result: policemen were now using the same tactics as wartime searchers for landmines. On November 3, Benfield and Haigh went to see the © Director of Public Prosecutions in London. They had a case. But no more bodies. Then, on November

10, a final all-out

search was launched. One hundred policemen, many of them using a specially-designed probing rod, fitted with a bulbous end to which tell-tale particles of earth would stick, set out again. The rod was the brainwave of local mill engineer Victor Hird. But the invention was not new. He developed it with the co-operation of the War Graves Commission. But still there was nothing. And two children were still missing. * ON

December

*

2, 1965, Detective

* Chief Superintendent

Arthur Benfield cautioned and charged Ian Brady with the murder of John Kilbride. And Myra Hindley with being an accessory after the fact of his murder. It was two years and nine days after the schoolboy vanished from Ashton market. Myra Hindley was charged with another murder: that of Edward Evans. So that was the score: Brady three murders; Hindley two, and one accessory charge. The digging had _ stopped. Winter had closed in.

93

Oea nan

And there was one other factor. For the spot where the detectives centred their suspicions is also the site of a transPennine methane gas pipeline. That pipeline had been laid, from May, during the summer of 1963, the summer when sixteen-year-old Manchester girl Pauline Reade vanished. The deep trench for the pipeline had lain open, and unguarded at night, while the work had gone on. And there was another photograph of Myra, standing on rocks on Saddleworth Moor, holding her dog and wearing the same clothes as those in the picture that pinpointed the grave of John Kilbride. Police photographers who lined up the same scene in their viewfinders discovered that her body on the picture was obscuring a sign — a marker for the gas pipe. The detectives believed that the picture had been taken on the same day as that of the John Kilbride grave photograph. And that it could well be another “marker” to a burial site. Benfield inquried about the possibility of digging up that giant pipeline. He was told that that would mean diverting the gas supply. And that would cost up to ten million pounds.

aea a a a

eet ee a ale WNahh SL

94

Chapter Thirteen WHAT DO MONSTERS LOOK LIKE...

.?

THE clock at Hyde town hall had just struck ten. We had taken our seats in the oak-panelled courtroom. And we were waiting. Ten miles from Saddleworth Moor where dreadful discoveries had been made a man and a woman would soon step into the dock, accused of some of the most appalling crimes of the century. My curiosity was intense. For although I had written so much about the results of their alleged activities I had never seen Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. In the last few weeks I had stalked Brady’s past — back to his life in Glasgow’s Gorbals — heard about his sadism, his love of Nazis, his contempt of the human race. I had knocked on countless doors in the backstreets of Manchester to find out about Myra Hindley. I had followed the path they had taken together gathering background for my newspaper. The path had, finally, led to the courtroom in which I was sitting that cold winter’s morning. I had spent weeks on Saddleworth Moor, watching the grim operation and its tragic results. And I had seen the heartbreak, the anger those two people, now

accused, had left

behind. I thought of the mothers: Sheila Kilbride, Ann Downey, Edith Evans. The pain in their eyes. I had tried to build up a mental picture of Brady and Hindley. I could not. What would they look like? How could anybody do those things of which they were accused? Especially her, a woman. What DO monsters look like? — The man and the woman were about to step into the dock on which all eyes were riveted. It was Monday, December 6, 1965 — the day the Crown would begin to unfold its case against them, the horrifying catalogue of evil. The fifty-yearold courtroom, part of the town hall building and adjoining the police station, had never known a case like it. Normally, on Monday mornings, it dealt wearily with the weekend’s drunks, brawlers and speeding motorists.

25

Sh,

eels

yore

ms

:

i Every seat in the public gallery was full, snapped up by those first in a queue that had formed in the pouring rain before dawn. And the world’s press were there — fifty-seven

_ reporters from Britain, America, France, Germany, Austra-

lia, all with special passes. And there were twice as many

- cameramen outside. Above the dock, twin chandeliers were

suspended, like the scales of justice. We waited, notebooks open, pencils poised, to take down that first description. You could have heard a pin drop. Then a lock snapped back downstairs. The door linking the court with the police station cells creaked open. We looked at our

watches. 10.10am. Then we heard footsteps, growing louder, echoing, climbing up the twenty-one stone stairs that led to

the dock. More than one hundred pairs of eyes were now fixed, waiting, to see two heads appear. First Ian Brady. Then Myra Hindley. They stood before the world, he, flanked by two policemen, she by two policewomen. I stared them, puzzled. There had been some mistake, the police must have got the wrong people. That isn’t Ian Brady. That isn’t Myra Hindley. I still don’t know what I expected. But I had never expected this. They looked human. *

*

*

BRADY, dark bushy hair brushed back, neat grey suit, white shirt, now wearing a tie, grey and red-striped, was nonchalantly chewing gum. He reminded me, for all the world, of a man charged with nothing more serious than riding a bicycle without a rear light. His grey eyes swept around the court, then he turned to face the magistrates’ bench. Myra, the high crown of blonde hair, re-bleached, immacu-

late, was in a black and white speckled suit and high-necked canary-yellow blouse. Cool, calm, she too faced the bench.

Thad, in a way, seen them before. For they were so typical of thousands of other young couples you might see together, sitting holding hands in a cinema, smooching on the dance floor at Ashton Palais. They had now been in custody for two

96

RNs

Ww

.

&

addieworth Moor. .. where, the legends say, the ghostly screams of \ildren can be heard “on dark, wild winter nights.”

as

=

5

® Fs

*

5

2%

es

gs

£2 £8

eal

co

Fos.

vs

bas

ae

2%

os 28

ox

a>

=->54 Hoy

free

oe

—=

a.) ae

Myra at 13. Star of the school

netball team.

RY

7—La

UNG

Wi

oo Yj

GZ

YN:

Yl LY

we WZ

SZ KD Wi

YA

yew Wi

.

.

S se shy toddler.

€

h is

a Lo© me)~~ - & ® infamous

arres ic

KGe

< ~.

~~ Re \

e house

in Westmoreland Street where Brady lived

p Ic ture after

~ LANCASHIRE

CONSTABULARY

HAVE YOU SEEN

JOHN

v KILBRIDE

Description:

12 years. old, 4ft 10in. sin build,

gark brown hair. blue eyes, fresh complexion: wearing gray check

——

John Kilbride, the cheerful schoolboy

with

the

friendly

grin. . . and the trusting nature.

Patrick and Sheila Kilbride waiting

for news of their son soon after he

vanished.

jdistraught

rs

=

7) CoSs ~~(+) ® ih> 2) ems ol®o n ® >

The crowds at Lesley Ann’ s funeral

’

s body

i SY

e body of John K Ibri de is carr 2 ze)

he search.

°=

hem hen

WY)bs) x)o a

3s S) = a = ° re)

tJ

Saddleworth Moor and the spots where the graves of John Kilbride and Lesley

Ann Downey (inset)

were found. Two other missing youngsters— Pauline Reade (right) and Keith Bennett (middle right). Where are they? Pauline vanished on July 12, 1963, Keith on June 16,

1964.

The telephone box from where the frightened David Smith made his fateful call, and right, the victim: Edward Evans.

Javi d

and

Maureen

”n E

2 , PICkod)

eR

RON

Ma

ROS

Bek 5

nt

ein

mi

The prosecution suggested it was inconceivable that it was just a chance snapshot. If the man taking the picture knew it was on the scene of the grave, he must have taken part in burying the body and if he had buried the body he must have had a car and someone to drive it, because he could not drive.

The jury had evidence that he had transport available . . . Of the allegation that David Smith had taken Lesley Ann Downey to the house and left with her. “Smith’s voice was never heard on the tape and there was no possible reference to his presence in the house.” A lot of the evidence against Brady was not evidence against Hindley, though there was no doubt they were very close and shared each other’s views. It was quite clear she was the driver and Brady could not drive. From early in 1964 she always had her own car and the defence had said she was

completely infatuated with Brady and under his dominance. The case against Hindley in the murder of Lesley Ann was substantially the same

as that against Brady.

If, on the

evidence, they came to the conclusion that the girl was smothered shortly after the photographs had been taken then the prosecution invited them to say that she was as guilty as

they claimed Brady was. If they decided the killing of Edward Evans by Brady was premeditated and that the teenager had been lured to the house is some way the only possible inference to draw was that Hindley was in with Brady. And in considering this the jury would be entitled to bring in consideration of the other two cases. “If you were satisfied that she was a party to the other two cases — the burial of Downey and Kilbride — it does seem very difficult to see her as an innocent bystander in the killing of Evans,” said the judge. In the case of John Kilbride there was an alternative charge to murder against Myra Hindley that of being an accessory after the fact — that is, knowing that Brady had killed him, helped him to escape justice by helping him to bury the body on the moors. A possible view was that Brady killed John Kilbride and Hindley was not a party to that, but found out shortly

afterwards and, knowing the child had been murdered she 151

helped her lover to bury the body. = If that was the right view of the case she would be guilty of harbouring and not guilty of murder. “But she is not running that as her defence. Her defence is that she knew nothing about it at all, including the burial. It would, in fact, even if it

were true, be a very difficult case for her to run, having regard to her relationship with Brady and other counts for consideration.

.

But whether she ran that case or not there was no doubt that the jury would consider it as one of the views they had to consider. Of Lesley Ann Downey. Apart from Hindley’s allegations about Smith’s involvement the jury would also have to consider the prosecution’s points about her close involvement with Brady . . . together with the transcript of the tape recording. It was quite right that Hindley was first charged with being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Edward Evans. That was before the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride had been found and before the discovery of the suitcases and their contents. Then, when all the evidence had been gathered, it had been decided that she would be charged with taking part in the murder of the youth. “So far as she is concerned you may take the view, or you may not, that the crucial case is the Downey case. You may think that is the prosecution’s strongest case. It leaves Smith right out of it and you have heard her voice speaking in that recording.” If the jury were satisfied she was guilty there and had lied, putting the blame on Smith, that might throw new light in their minds on the John Kilbride case, having regard to the marked similarity. of the disposal of the bodies. The legal jargon was over. The judge leaned back in his chair. Now it was up to the jucy. They filed from the assize court to consider their verdict, taking with them Ian Brady’s body disposal plan, his exercise book containing the name of John Kilbride and Myra Hindley’s shoes, spattered with the blood of Edward Evans.

152

See /eee

*

*

*

IT is said that there is a way of telling the decision of a jury before the foreman announces the verdict it has reached. It probably goes back to the days when murder trials reached a more dramatic climax when, if they dreaded word Guilty was uttered, the man or woman in the dock could well face the

scaffold. And that, knowing the result of their deliberations could send a prisoner to his death, a final, early-morning appointment with the hangman, no juror could look him in

the eye as he walked back into court for the decision to be announced. The trial had lasted for fourteen days. And, at 4.56 pm on Friday, May 6, 1966, the twelve men, after retiring for two hours and sixteen minutes, filed back into the assize court

with every eye, especially the four in the dock, upon them. Not one juror, so far as we could see, stole one glance in the direction of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. The foreman faced the judge. Had they reached their verdicts? They had. The foreman, an ordinary, kind-faced

middle-aged man looked down at the desk in front of him. Ian Brady: Guilty of murdering Edward Evans. Guilty of murdering Lesley Ann Downey. Guilty of murdering John Kilbride. Myra Hindley: Guilty of murdering Edward Evans. Guilty of murdering Lesley Ann Downey. Not guilty of murdering John Kilbride. Guilty of harbouring Ian Brady knowing he had killed the boy. Brady stood, arms folded, staring straight ahead, his face expressionless and now Myra was looking upwards, at that chink of light from the spring day outside, her eyes towards

the heaven she had rejected for the hell of the man by her side. Had they anything to say? asked Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson, before he passed sentence. Brady nodded. Just one thing. “Revolvers were bought in July, 1964.” Even then, at that fearful moment, when his life was about to be changed forever, Ian Brady had to try to get the tiny details right. Myra shook her head. Nothing to say. The judge turned to Brady. “These were three calculated,

153

‘

ba

e law — which the cold-blooded murders. I pass the only sentenc now allows, which is three concurrent sentences of life imprisonment.” The convicted murderer had stood, arms folded,

face, as always, impassive. The judge turned to the jailer in the dock. “Put him down.” Myra now stood, alone, hands behind her back, head

slightly bowed. The judge: “In your case, Hindley, you have been found guilty of two equally horrible murders and to the third as an accessory after the fact. On the two murders the sentence is two concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. On the accessory charge a concurrent sentence of seven years’ - imprisonment.” She swayed slightly forward, a woman warder caught her arm, steadied her, turned her and led her

down the eighteen stone steps. In lan Brady’s footsteps. For the last time. Outside, in the soft May rain, three-hundred policemen moved into position as the prisoners stepped into the separated compartments of the prison van. One last look at each other. Bye, Hess. Bye, Neddy. The van swung out of the gates of Chester Castle. At the gates was a crowd, booing, jeering, thumping the sides of the van with angry, clenched fists and shouting “hang them.” The van accelerated away to take Brady and Myra, the shouts dying away behind them, away from the outside world. Forever .. .'? Meanwhile, in the outside world, there was another court

case going on — about the Great Train Robbery. George Brown was saying we were going into the Common Market, Dr. Kildare, Emergency Ward 10 and Bonanza were on the telly that night. Arthur Benfield went home to pack his bags for a couple of weeks’ salmon fishing. Saddleworth Moor, forty miles away, had grown its sparse spring plumage, to partly cover the scars of the grimmest police search of all time. And someone had smashed all the windows at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley.

4

:

aa hee

a

_

NEXT morning the two faces stared from the front pages of every newspaper. Two frowning, hard, cruel faces, photographed by the police cameramen. These were the faces the public would always remember, and hate. Some quirk of the camera had stripped the ordinary, acceptable veneer from the features on Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, faces, remember,

that children had trusted. And

bared their evil souls. Did it underline the truth behind that

old saying: “The camera does not lie . . .?” Soon they would be two hundred and fifty miles apart — he in Durham Jail, in the maximum security wing; she in Holloway Women’s Prison, London. Their paths had been divided forever. Yet, in a way, they would cross again and again.

155 —~

Chapter Eighteen TILL LIFE US DO PART... ~ HAD Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson donned the black cap that day at Chester Castle and uttered those final, dreaded, chilling words. . . “hanged by the neck until you are dead,” the next part of this story, the next twenty years, would never have been written. But Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had, by their cunning, their time at large, escaped the hangman. Consider how closely. On November 8, 1965, one month and two days after their final victim, Edward Evans, died beneath that terrible welter of axe blows, the British Parliament made one of its most

controversial decisions of all time. It abolished capital punishment. The debate on its rights and wrongs, particularly when the names of the Moors Murderers are mentioned, still rages on. The death penalty was still in force when they committed their murders.

In fact, the last two men to be executed in

Britain were hanged on August 13, 1964 — nine months after John Kilbride vanished from Ashton Market and four months before Lesley Ann Downey’s terrible déath. Peter Anthony Allen and Glynne Owen Evans were sentenced to death for the murder of laundry van driver John Alan West at his home in Workington. Allen was executed at Walton Jail, Liverpool

and Evans at Strangeways, Manchester, a few miles from where Brady and Hindley committed their dreadful atrocities. On May 7, 1966, they had been driven, in the grey dawn, Tan Brady north to Durham Jail, Myra Hindley south to Holloway. Almost ten years earlier another blonde woman, four years older, had also been driven there, for a much shorter stay. She, in what many now recognise as a crime of

passion, had shot her lover. Her name was Ruth Ellis who, on July 13, 1955, was the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

156

It was a distinction that Myra Hindley knew, and still knows, could have been hers. *

*

*

IAN Brady screamed with pain as the scalding liquid soaked rapidly through his clothing and seared his skin. A pan had “accidentally” been tipped over as he passed, in the cookhouse of Durham Jail. He had been there for only a few days, a rough prison uniform now replacing the smart clerical suit, and he knew there was no escape for him from the outrage of Britain, not even in prison. It is well known that child molesters are the targets of hate for “legit” criminals. And the Moors Murderers, then the most notorious of their sickening species in the world, were already marked. On that day Ian Brady, at his own request exercised his right under Rule 43 of the prison regulations. He asked to be put into solitary confinement. His cell was in the top-security E-Wing, where some of

Britain’s most dangerous criminals were housed. His walks, in the high-walled, barbed-wired exercise yard were in the company of three warders, the other prisoners locked in their cells. He ate his meals alone, sewed mail bags alone. And wrote, every week, to Myra Hindley. One month had passed when there was a message for him. His mother, Margaret, who had gone, with her husband Patrick to live in a council flat at Heywood, a few miles from Manchester, was now alone, too. Patrick, the man who had

given Brady a home, and his name, collapsed and died in the street. He was only forty-eight years old. Ian Brady’s age today. The prisoner stayed in his self-imposed solitude and started to get books from the prison library, but no longer was his choice the cheap, trashy literature he had read at home. He selected the works of the Russian writer Tolstoy, author of one of the world’s largest volumes, War and Peace. He had all the time in the world to read it. And he clung to one hope. To see Myra again. It was a hope she shared as, two hundred and 157

- fifty miles away in Holloway, she remained loyal, faithful to the still-fresh memory of the man who had been her lover, her teacher, the man she had followed to hell.

“Religion?” she was asked when she first arrived at the prison. She shook her head. She had no religion. A white card, indicating this, was placed on the cell door so that the chaplain, Father William Kahle, would know when he was doing his rounds. ; Then there were visitors for her. Detective Chief Superintendent Douglas Nimmo, the Manchester CID chief with two missing children still on his mind and Detective Chief Inspector Tom Butcher wanted to ask some questions. The reply, so reminiscent of those in the police station interviews: “Ask Tan.” They already had, two hundred and fifty miles away in Durham on the previous day. His reply had also amounted to two words. . *

*

*

MYRA, as she had expected, was running the gauntlet of hate. in Holloway. “Slut”: .. “cow”. ». “bitch”: 7% Schild killer”. . . the words were hissed whenever she came within earshot of the other prisoners. “We'll get you. . .” She was friendless. Abused by the rougher prisoners, shunned by the quieter ones. When she sat in the darkened TV room prison officers were close by and she always took her baths alone. Never at the same time as the other women. So it was a surprise that night when she was invited to play cards with her fellow inmates. She hesitated, remembering the taunts, the threats and the day one woman sweeping the stairs had suddenly lashed out at her with a broom. She shrugged. Why not? And sat down. Minutes later she was lying on the floor, ten women, a heaving mass of anger,

hitting, kicking and pummelling her. Like Ian Brady she

_

:

asked to go into solitary confinement. Her only comfort in her sparse, tiny single cell was the photograph of him, her only joy the Saturday morning letter from Durham. The other women had noticed. “She just lives

158 ly

7

for that letter arriving. . . it’s the only thing that seems to keep her going. That and the hope that she’ll be able to marry him one day. You can tell. She’s still madly in love with him.” A prison doctor persuaded Myra not to stay in solitary confinement. She was in prison for life and could not go through all those years alone. But she wanted to be alone, then. Alone with her thoughts of the isolated man in Durham. “She just stares straight ahead when she walks around with the screws. She ignores everything that’s shouted at her.” The talk went on. The report of the attack on Myra had, meanwhile, been © read by her sister Maureen in the newspaper. She had written to Myra, but there had been no reply. Maureen was, by now, the mother of two baby sons and had sent their photographs to Myra. There was no response. She decided to ask for a visitor’s permit. But the reply came back from Holloway: her sister did not want to see her. Maureen looked at her husband, David Smith. “Possibly Myra may hate me. But I know I’m the only member of the family writing to her. . . that must mean something.” But the only letters that meant anything to Myra were those from Ian Brady who, to the concern of the prison authorities, was still insisting on Rule 43. Perhaps he had read the signs. For a plan was being hatched. To kill him. ; *

*

*

THE plot was not only to “execute” Ian Brady, but to kill

another child murderer, too. Serving life, alongside Brady in the maximum security wing, was David Burgess who had killed two little girls in a disused gravel pit at Beerham, Berkshire. And the scheme to carry out the death sentence on them came as twenty-one dangerous men, hard-liners, planned a demo. Their aim was to take over the wing and erect barricades after snatching the keys from a prison officer. And on that night, in March, 1968, it started to work like

clockwork. The keys were seized, the rioters slipped down the narrow corridor and took over two offices and a chapel.

159

Right, now we'll have the bastards. . . But before they could carry out the next part of the plan, to swoop on the two cells, prison officers sealed off the area they had taken over. The plan was claimed some time later by John McVicar — once known as Public Enemy Number One — who was one of the prisoners in the top security wing. In his book, McVicar by Himself, he said: “When the demo was originally being

discussed a few of us had wanted to take the wing over for long enough to get Brady and Burgess into the office before we erected the barricade. Of course, as it turned out, we’d

have failed completely if we’d tried. But that didn’t prevent us from wishing we had. They would both have died that night — _ perhaps as painfully as their victims.” The demonstration lasted for more than twenty-four hours before the prisoners finally took down their barricades. Things returned to normal on maximum security. And Ian Brady wanted to see the governor. “I’d like to study for an O-level,” he said. “In German.” So, grim E-wing was, to conform with GCE regulations, designated an official examination centre and a lecturer from Durham University called each week to coach the now-studious prisoner. He told Myra in his weekly letter. It was not the Myra he remembered. The blonde, brassy hair was now deep brown, the mascara, the lipstick gone. The leather

jacket,

trousers,

boots,

now

replaced

by a neat,

floral-pattern dress. But she still loved ‘him. And she, too, started to study for her O-levels in their beloved German. Now they were doing something together again. *

*

*

SIX months after starting his studies, Brady passed his O-level German exam. He was told of his success by John Green, assistant governor in charge of E-wing and now Brady had another request: he wanted to see Myra. It was, of course, out of the question. They were not even married.. Myra Hindley’s requests from Holloway met with the same answer. But, she argued, they had lived together. Commonlaw wives and husbands were allowed to visit each other when

160

they were both in prison. Why could she not be recognised as Ian Brady’s common-law wife? She fumed and fretted and wrote to the authorities. Even the news that she, too, had passed her O-level German exam

was little consolation. And then a new man was to step into her life. Tall, gaunt, wire-rimmed spectacles. A penal reformer Francis Aungier Pakenham. Better known as Lord Longford. The eccentric peer had gone to visit her after she had written to him as part of her campaign to see her lover. It was to be the first of many visits and many letters from Myra, published later in the Sunday Times, to Lord Longford. “I have completely accepted the possibility that I may never be released. Or, at least if I am I will be much older than I am now,” she wrote in November, 1969.

Lord Longford visited Brady, too and, for the first time, began to stir public indignation against himself by declaring that the couple could be set free “in a good many years” if they became reformed characters. “Anybody who calls himself a Christian would agree with me,” he said. “Anybody who says the opposite would be inhuman.” Myra Hindley was calling herself a Christian again, now. She had stopped Father Kahle. “I'd like to go to Mass.” From that day, the white card on her cell door was replaced by a red card, indicating that she was a Roman Catholic. But she still wanted to see Ian. And he wanted to see her. He had, by now, had more examination successes — O-levels in English Literature and English Language — and was also venturing more from his lonely cell. And making an enemy. Ironically it was another child killer, Raymond Morris, who had murdered a seven-year-old girl in Cannock Chase, Staf-fordshire. Whenever they met there would be taunts, insults, mainly from Morris. Brady bit his lip, returned to his cell, to write yet another letter to the Home Secretary, asking to see Myra. On December 12, 1969, his petition again flatly refused, some-

thing snapped as he encountered Morris. He snatched up a jug of scalding tea and hurled it over the other prisoner. The flash of temper cost him twenty-eight days loss of priveleges, 161

i.

ee

i

‘

oo _.

mie pb,i

:

E

in

,

~

*

,

/\

:

i

:

h

i

;

Pe

Ee MEST:

i Se

Ol Se A vk

ap

pe i

er

Ce

ee

including the one remaining comfort left from his days of freedom, smoking. | That day Brady made a gesture of love for Myra Hindley. He went on hunger strike. Day after day he stubbornly shook his head when food was offered to him. He refused, too, to

take exercise. After a week he was tube-fed. He accepted the tube, pushed down his throat, without protest, but he still

declined solid food until his twenty-eight-day punishment ended. Only days later Morris was sentenced to loss of priveleges, too. In a tit-for-tat reprisal at the next, earliest opportunity, he flung a jug of hot water over Brady. At the same time, Myra Hindley was still trying to wrest her

“i

soul |

from the devil to whom she had sold it in that house in

Wardle Brook Avenue and on Saddleworth Moor. The same month that Brady ended his hunger strike she wrote to Lord

Longford: “I wish I could put complete trust in God, but I’m frightened to do so for my faith is full of doubt and despair that I'll never be good enough to merit complete forgiveness. I don’t think I could adequately express just how much it means to me to have been to confession and to have received holy communion. It is a terrifyingly beautiful thing — terrifying because I have taken a step which has taken me on to the threshold of a completely new way of life which demands much more from me than my previous one, and beautiful because I feel spiritually reborn. I made such a mess of my old life and I thank God for this second chance.” Back at Durham Jail police, with specially trained dogs, were investigating claims that cyanide had been smuggled into the kitchens as part of a new “plot” to “execute” Ian Brady and the other child killers. Nothing was found, but Brady shrank further into his shell of isolation. Still wanting to see Myra. He went on a hunger strike again. But in Holloway Prison Myra Hindley’s love was slowly beginning to be replaced by a new, burning, consuming, passion. She wanted her freedom. At any cost.

162

aa

oy Woes ‘ Sire wee Src ale , pase he niet

Chapter Nineteen THE ESCAPE PLAN “T feel so mashed up mentally that it is taking all my energy just maintaining my equilibrium and keeping my head above the waterline. The truth of the matter is that after only five years of a life sentence I am obsessed with an inordinate desire to be free. In other words I have rampant ‘gate fever.’ I’ve always lived with both feet well and truly inside the prison gates which is, I think, the sensible thing to do with a long and indeterminate sentence. But now, not only have I got one foot outside but, which is much worse, my spirit has left me and is hovering restlessly on the other side of the wall.” The letter from Myra Hindley, in December, 1970, came

weeks after Brady ended his new hunger strike. This time it had lasted for fifty days. Still he could not see her: Twelve weeks later he was refusing food again. Meanwhile, the authorities were planning to close the ageing E-wing. Gradually the sixty cells were vacated and prisoners were transferred to other jails, until, by August, 1971, the block held only Brady and the crazy triple killer John Straffen. What should be done with Ian Brady? The Government could not make up its mind. They decided to move the two men to the Isle of Wight, Straffen to Parkhurst, Brady to Albany Prison. Now the letters to Myra had a new postmark. They still came weekly, every Saturday morning, but now there was a note of cynicism in them. Myra wrote: “Ian, like so many other people, considered my returning to the church simply a means of ‘working my ticket’: i.e, in the hope that this would suitably impress people and might obtain for me favourable release reviews, etc, etc. Whilst this knowledge hurt me, nevertheless I realised it is something I will always have to contend with, but as long as God knows, it matters little what anyone else thinks.” Now Myra, who had wooed Ian Brady in that little office in

163

Manchester, had first asked him to go out with her, was, with

her desire to be free, preparing to make the final break with the man she had worshipped. She told Lord Longford, in a letter dated March 13,1972: “The decision was an agonising one which cost me dearly. It shattered me because previously I had deemed it impossible that my feelings for him could ever change and this, coupled with my long religious struggle which took place before my complete reconciliation with God, convinces me for, at the

moment, some inexplicable reason, that I am doing the right thing, however much it may cost. I know he fears that I am growing away from him which, to a certain extent is true, since we are no longer on the same wave-length and I feel no affinity at all with him in a religious sense.” Two months later she wrote: “Although my feelings for him are only a mere shadow of what they used to be the fact remains that at one time, and for a long time, I literally idolised him. Flaubert once said we should never touch our idols because some of the gilt rubbed off on our fingers and this is all too true. For a long time I had him on a pedestal and he was always just out of reach and there was always an air of mystery surrounding him which I could never solve, never quite touch. “But in the past few years I have been able to look at him and at the past, through eyes of reason rather than the heart and so much of the gilt rubbed off that I find it virtually impossible to recapture even a shred of my previous feelings for him. I wish to put him out of my life as totally as I do all the unhappy, destructive and Godless aspects of my past life with him, and I must admit that I rarely ever think of him now. At times I tend to blame him entirely for my involvement in things, which is unfair, since I was not a mindless idiot without the ability to say no to the things I acquiesced to. “Although, of course, had it not been for him, I would

never have been involved in any of the things that brought me to prison. However, I made my own bed and so I lie init, even though I often complain of its unpleasantness.” But soon that “unpleasantness” was, briefly to be replaced by something that Myra had dreamed of. A taste of freedom.

164

*

x *

THE sweet smell of newly-mown grass, the hum of lawnmowers, the distant happy shouts of children were in the air. The younger woman of the two, strolling together that late summer afternoon, looked around her, inhaling deeply the joy of the life around her. “Doesn’t it smell beautiful?” she sighed. No one would have known, that day in September, 1972 that the young, brown-haired woman, savouring the heady delights of the world outside for the first time in almost seven

years, was, unmanacled,

Myra Hindley,

the Moors

Murderess. The place was Hampstead Heath, London and her companion was Mrs. Dorothy Wing, governor of Holloway. And that two-hour stroll in the park was to be their last. Within hours the news had leaked out. There was outrage. Was she being prepared, gradually trained, for possible parole? There was a rebuke for Mrs. Wing from Home Secretary Robert Carr. It had been, he said, “an error of judgement.” And

there were to be no more walks in the park. Or anywhere. Myra wrote to Lord Longford: “I spent the two happiest and quickest hours of my life. The only regrets I have are that I feel wretched about the very unkind publicity which Mrs. Wing has had to endure and that such a kind and thoughtful gesture has been so abused and strongly criticised. I can accept the fact that certain feelings towards me are more or less justified by virtue of my convictions and the myths that have sprung up around me. But that the governor, a kind, humane and sensitive person, should be subjected to such unkind criticism makes me feel inordinately sad.” Myra’s hopes of eventual freedom had taken a jolt. She returned to her studies and enrolled as a student of the Open University. The break with Ian Brady, who was later moved to Parkhurst, was now complete. And now she had another lover. A woman. Her name was Patricia Cairns who had once been a Carmelite nun for six years. She was the same age as Myra, a Roman Catholic like Myra, a Mancunian like Myra. And a prison officer at Holloway.

165

Now Myra, her hoped-for freedom moving further into the future, was wooing again. She had smiled:coyly at the prison officer, feared by many of the inmates. She had smiled in the same way as she smiled at Ian Brady. Her smile was returned. And, as at the start of her affair with Brady, it was she who

made the first approach. The go-between was a prisoner called Carol O’Callaghan with whom Myra had struck up one of her few friendships. “I got Myra to write her a letter which I slipped to Pat. Then later she slipped a letter to me to give to Myra, and things went from there,” Carol recalled later.

They met in the prison chapel, exchanged love letters, whispered to each other through a gap in the cell wall, planned to live together one day — “perhaps be missionaries in Brazil” — and Myra carried photographs of the new love of her life next to her body. A body that had ached for the brutal sex of Ian Brady since October, 1965. Some saw the affair as platonic. “It was like a schoolgirl crush,” the admonished Mrs. Wing was to say later. But, says Carol: “They used to use my cell, with me on the lookout, to

make love whenever they could.” But Myra Hindley saw something else in her relationship with her smitten guard . . . A way to escape. *

*

*

MYRA Hindley had changed her name. She was now Myra Spencer. A new name, a trusted name, almost like Marks and Spencer, for a new life outside. But four locked doors stood between Myra and freedom and that new life with her lesbian lover. The problem was getting her through them without suspicion falling on Patricia Cairns. The plan they hatched was elaborate, bearing the cunning hallmarks of what Ian Brady had taught her during their murderous years together. © But they would need an accomplice to carry it out. The girl they chose was Maxine Croft, twenty-two years old, serving three years for possessing forged £5 notes. She was due to be released at Christmas. And she was frightened of the threatening prison guard.

166

a

Te ge ‘s iy

iy

——

The first part of the plan was to make impressions of the jailer’s keys to the doors in bars of soap. “You’re in it now,” Cairns told the timid new helper. “If you say anything I’ll have you nicked.” The scheme was to leave the key impressions in a brown paper parcel, in a railway station left luggage office ... . just as Ian Brady and Myra Hindly had once left their terrible “souvenirs.” First, Maxine, whose brother regularly visited her, was to

ask him to get her address book from their mother’s home. The book was to be sent to a friend of Cairns who would then collect it from her. In the book was the address of a friend of Maxine Croft, to whom the left luggage ticket, once the

parcel had been deposited, would be sent. The friend would then collect the parcel and have the keys cut from the impressions. The day the parcel was to be left at the station a frightened Maxine Croft had been allowed out of Holloway with a probation officer. Patricia Cairns went with them, with the parcel. The women did some shopping and then arranged to meet later. The parcel was taken to Paddington Station. But then, a big snag. There had been a bomb scare. The station’s left luggage section was closed down. What should they do with their precious, incriminating parcel? Maxine phoned a friend, George Stevens at work, She was sending some “personal effects.” Would he look after them for her? She returned to the probation officer shaking, her lips trembling. What was wrong? She looked at the questioning eyes of the probation officer. “I’m ... I’m frightened.” Frightened? Why? What’s the matter? Maxine Croft blurted out the truth: “Cairns is going to break Myra Hindley out.” The next day the “personal effects” arrived for George Stevens. There had been bomb scares in the area. He was suspicious and told the police. Inside the package they found the imprints of keys to Holloway Jail. And when they searched [atricia Cairns’ flat they found a driving licence bearing the name of Myra Spencer. The officers found out that Patricia Cairns had been using another name, too, in letters she exchanged with the Moors

Murderess

through her mother’s address. The name

167

the

i

Sfse

nace was a chill-

former nun had assumed for the COE ing, sickeningly reminiscent name. Glynis MOORS. *

Daf

an ul ina |P /ee

*

“T HAVE forfeited every right to be trusted in here and I am not trusted an inch. Looking at this objectively, on the

whole I agree, but with several reservations. An indisputable fact is that I have betrayed the trust which the governor had in me and nothing I can say or do can alter this fact, nor can I ever really make amends.” So wrote Myra Hindley to Lord Longford a month after her court appearance for the abortive escape plot. She had been sentenced, at the Old Bailey, to a token year’s imprisonment for the conspiracy, her lover to six years and Maxine Croft to eighteen months.

The younger woman,

though, was freed

two months later after the Appeal Court reduced her sent-ence. Ian Brady had now been moved closer to her, to Wormwood Scrubs, but her thoughts, now of self-pity, were a million miles away. She was also, then, writing to John Trevelyan, the former film censor, and late that summer of 1974, she had talked, in another of the letters, published in the Sunday Times, of

“giving up.” “That’s just how I feel at the moment. Something is slowly dying inside me, and it’s the will to live. . . I don’t know whether it’s because of the acute depression which makes me

|

feel, deep in my heart, that I’ll never be released, or if so, not

until I’m quite old. I feel tortured with grief and remorse about the disaster I have caused others and I can hardly live with myself. I feel I just want to drag myself into a corner in the dark, as does an animal when it knows it is dying, and if I

had no moral responsibilities and didn’t owe so much to so ~ many people I think I could quite easily do so now.” Her yearning for the world outside went on, and on. “Some of the sunrises I see when going to collect the breakfasts are extraordinarily beautiful.” Later, she wrote: “I found myself thinking how fervently I wished that there was no-one whom I 168

loved or loved me so that I could tell life to go to hell and simply lie down and wait to die. . .” Then weeks later the woman who once said she hated children, hated babies, was saying now, wistfully: “I would like a child, perhaps even two. I would like to have a child before I reach forty but I’d like to have a couple of years frée in order to cram in as much living as possible to make up for the years of merely existing. I’ll be thirty-three soon which leaves seven years for me to realise my ambitions. I fear I am living in dreams.” On May 8, 1975, she wrote to Trevelyan: “What is life for?

To die? Then why not kill myself at once? No, I’m afraid. Wait for death until it comes? I fear that even more. Then I must live. But what for? In order to die. I can’t escape from that circle.” Meanwhile,

Ian Brady was still alone, still isolated, still

reading, studying and revealing an unexpected, apparently humane side to his nature. He was writing books for the blind. He had learned Braille after being transferred to Parkhurst from Albany Prison and his first completed book, which went to a woman in her eighties who had lost her sight, was from the works of William Blake. He was resigned to his fate. Prepared to spend the rest of his days in jail. And it was obvious he thought that Myra Hindley should be, too.

169

Chapter Twenty

LET ME OUT

j

TEN years in Holloway. Myra Hindley gazed in the mirror. She looked, if anything, younger than the picture of the hard-faced Moors Murderess that had first leered from the front pages a decade ago. It had seemed, like the Portrait of Dorian Gray, to look more evil every time it was reproduced, every time her name returned to the headlines. The face she

Z

saw now was softer, prettier. Kinder. And she was, to many,

the Queen of Holloway. She had reached an uneasy truce with the old lags who still remembered, knew who to avoid and had fawning cronies, intrigued, even captivated, by the woman they called Queen Myra. She had used her body promiscuously to gain advantage, to win friends, influence, and to protect herself. Now there were those who clung to her every word, who would do her bidding at the snap of her fingers, protect her. She had a strange power, a dominance. The taunts, the attacks, had almost stopped. Her cell was cosy. Flowered curtains, bedspread, books to read and study — she was now taking an Open University degree course for her BA (in The Humanities!). She had three different outfits of clothes, a radio cassette recorder on

her bedside table, cuddly toys, plants. And, on the walls, photographs of her three nephews. For by then Myra had made her peace with her sister Maureen, who had given evidence for the prosecution against her, whose husband, David Smith, had betrayed them, all those years ago. She had forgiven Maureen, her Moby, who had tried so hard to see her. And that David Smith was not on the scene any more. He had been in jail for two years after stabbing a man in a brawl in 1969 and he and Maureen had been divorced in 1973. Maureen later married an older man, Bill Scott, who seemed to

have made her a good husband. And she had a lovely little daughter, Sharon. Smith had the three boys, though. “Ask 170

3

ee eee} A hee ‘

ih

we

vk

-tor r

o

t

him for some up-to-date pictures of young Paul, David and John to put on my wall, Moby,” she had asked. How nice it was to be friends with Moby again. To forgive and to be forgiven. She was her sister and she had done what she thought was right. Wait until she told Moby her latest news. She had won a prison pop song contest with something she had written herself, accompanied herself on the guitar and taped. She had called it Love Song to a Stranger and she had actually beaten Janie Jones, the singer (she was serving a seven-year sentence in Holloway on vice charges) into second place. Myra and her cronies knew how to look out for the danger signs. Prisoner 964055, experienced, now jail-wise, had, though, misread them that September day when she stepped out of her cell in D-wing. A newspaper had recalled the details of the crimes of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, by now dimmed by time for some. The story had, however, inflamed

one young inmate, twenty years old, who would have been ten — the same age as Lesley Ann Downey — when the Moors Murderers were first jailed. As Myra passed the glaring girl had hissed an insult. The Hindley face, accustomed to ten years of taunts, baiting, remained impassive. Only the lips moved,

pursed,

as if to tut-tut.

Or was

it a mock

kiss?

Whatever the reaction had been it provoked the girl to launch herself at Myra like a wildcat, punching, kicking, forcing her back into her cell. Maureen complained later, though it was denied by the authorities, that it took prison guards a full three minutes to get to the assistance of her screaming sister. But when her attacker was dragged off Myra her nose had been broken and she had a suspected fracture of the jaw. She needed hospital treatment. On her face. The news aroused suspicions back in Greater Manchester, among the families of the victims. Was the treatment just to heal . . . or to change the face of Myra Hindley, in readiness for the freedom she craved? Four months later she did leave Holloway. But, ironically, the journey North, in a van with darkened windows, her companions, four prison guards, was to a new home, a home

her partner in murder had once known. Durham Jail. 171 ee

But the speculation continued and, in a television studio in Manchester, Lesley Downey’s mother, now remarried and Mrs. Ann West, was asking millions of viewers: “When does my parole begin? I am serving a life sentence because of that monster. I had to listen to those tapes of my daughter begging for mercy. If Myra Hindley comes out /’// be up for murder. If I get my hands on that woman there’ll be a dead woman. I want justice.” ; And Patrick Kilbride, the father of John, was saying, in a phone-in to the BBC programme presenter: “I'll wait outside the jail for her and [ll kill her.” Maureen, her face in shadow, was on the programme, too, and so was Janie Jones, who had known her in Holloway. Both saying she had “changed.” So was Lord Longford, saying: “No words are strong enough to denounce these appalling murders. We feel the deepest possible sympathy for Mrs. West and for the families of the victims, not to mention the victims themselves.” But,

he said of Myra: “Whatever she has done she should be entitled to be considered for parole. Everyone should be considered after ten years.” The BBC switchboard was jammed. Soon afterwards Home Affairs Minister Mr. Brynmor John stated publicly that there would be no early release for Myra Hindley. A public opinion poll showed that eighty-four per cent of those interviewed believed that Myra should stay in jail. Forever. And soon Ian Brady was to step back into her life. *

*

*

SHE had spurned him for her passion for freedom and for more than seven years the resentment had smouldered within Ian Brady. He had been The Master, he had called the tune, and their lives were still bound together so long as they shared the same fate. He decided on a course of action that many would say was no more than she deserved, but would sabotage Myra Hindley’s cause for liberty. When he heard that her case for parole was to be aired on the TV programme he wrote to a prison visitor saying that visits by Lord Longford to 172

him were no longer welcome . . . “the possibility of their serving any constructive purpose is negligible.” He had begun a bizarre chess like game from that cell in Wormwood Scrubs, with Myra as the pawn. He would wait. Myra’s move, December, 1977: Lord Longford found her “in low spirits” when he visited her. He wrote to The Times: “No-one who knows her seriously supposes that she would be a public menace if she were released. Her state of remorse is such that she will be haunted by it all her life.” Brady’s move, January, 1978. His first statement to the world since he had stood in the dock at Chester Castle almost twelve years ago. It was eloquently couched in the English he had learned in the long years of study, and written, this time,

for a wide audience. A month after Lord Longford’s letter to the Times, came a letter from him, to be passed to the Daily Mirror: “Noting the alacrity with which the quality and popular Press publish L.L.’s lamentably frequent utterances re the question of parole for Myra Hindley and myself, it is not widely known that he does not and never has represented my opinion on this subject. “Over the years I have repeatedly made strong requests, verbal and written, that he desists from publicly using my name in connection with parole. He has ignored all such requests and prisoners cannot write to the Press, nor can they take legal action of any sort without Home Office permission. Last summer when I heard he and Janie Jones intended to take part in a BBC television programme devoted to the possible parole of Myra I finally stopped receiving visits from him. Eventually I saw him again last October and forcefully put my objections to him. I thought he at last understood — but no. Lord Longford is well aware, as is the Home Office, that I have never applied for parole and have no intention of _ applying...” Then the sabotage . . . “and that I have always accepted that the weight of the crimes both Myra and I were convicted of justifies permanent imprisonment, regardless of expressed personal remorse and verifiable change.” Check.

173

- Later in the letter: “I have done all Ipersonally can to

impress on L.L. the insensitivity of his repeatedly raising the question of parole, not only from my point of view but also from that of the general public. But he is receiving encouragement from Myra. I can’t do anything about that, for I let her go her own way seven years ago. . . ” And later: “I wish to emphasise that the public need feel no apprehension re the possibility of parole in my case, for the situation shall never :

arise.”

A month later, February, 1978, the Home Secretary, Mr.

Merlyn Rees, announced there was no early prospect of release for Myra Hindley. A few weeks after that another poll showed ninety-three per cent were against her freedom. Check. *

*

*

NIGHT after night, word after word she wrote, until dawn filtered through her cell window. Myra, the hunger for free-

dom more intense, was writing to the Home Secretary, begging for her liberty... . “T feel I have more than paid my debt to Society and I feel that Society owes me a living. Once I am released I have my own plans to begin a new life, so much so that Society will not be admitting Myra Hindley into its ranks, either by name or reputation. I have served Society in good stead as scapegoat and whipping boy for far too many years. I can only see the light in the tunnel diminishing until nothing remains but a bottomless black pit of despair. Is Society going to be compensated for being thwarted of the rope by my perpetual imprisonment? Is my life going to be sacrificed?” The woman they had called the “Queen” in Holloway, who had the cell with the flowered curtains and bedspread, the plants, the books, the pictures, wrote: “For eleven solid years I spent every day and night in a cell no bigger than 12ft by8ft with two miniscule windows, no washing facilities other than a jug and bowl . . . If I take one average or typical day in prison then I take the whole of my life for the past thirteen years; thousands upon thousands of days, each one exactly

174

Bees, like the other, boring variations upon a stagnant theme. For thirteen years I have existed in a regime which has denied me even basic responsibilities, robbed me of virtually all initiative.” Her thoughts turned to Ian Brady and their first meeting. “I had no sexual experience. I was still a virgin. I fell hopelessly in love with Ian Brady, practically from setting eyes on him. I now know I had confused love for infatuation — an infatuation which soon became an obsession. He became my god, my idol, my object of worship. He could have told me that the earth was flat, that the moon was made of green cheese, that the sun rose in the west and I would have believed him. Such were the powers of his persuasion.” For thirty-five long, long pages it went on. Twenty-one-thousand words. The Home Secretary turned her down. It would be three

years before she could try again. A poll in The Star showed that only one reader in eighty thought she should be paroled. *

*

*

MYRA Hindley, B.A. No, Myra Spencer,

B.A. The name

had a respectable, academic ring to it. A name for the outside world. The girl from the Manchester backstreet, the secondary school girl, now in Durham Prison maximum security wing, was now a Bachelor of Arts, graduate of the Open University, in The Humanities. The graduation ceremony was held in spring, 1980, but it was an invitation she had to refuse. Would the degree help her cause to be free? Or did her BA just amount to Bugger All? She mused: “What will it matter to the decision-makers? I wasn’t sent to prison because I’m illiterate. . .” But she was proud of herself. “I do feel an amount of pride. It was a challenge.” And Moby, dear Moby, would be proud. The sisters were now closer than ever. Maureen visited her whenever she could, bringing news of home. “They’ve shut down Belle Vue . . . There’s a couple living in Wardle Brook Avenue, you should see the curtains . _,. Sharon’s growing up, now, sends her love. . .”

aara Nyse

Another

winter ‘ended,

another

175

summer

began.

The

fifteenth behind bars. And then there was a message for Myra. Maureen was very seriously ill. She was in hospital in Manchester. She had had a brain haemorrhage. This time they let Myra out of jail. She was rushed to the hospital with an escort of prison officers. “How is she. . .?” The doctors, the nurses, sadly shook their heads. She was

too late. Maureen had died an hour ago.

x

”

*

SHE was devastated. She wrote later poetically, to a friend: “When I gently kissed my love, my dove, my beautiful one on her forehead, a featherlight touch of my lips, she seemed to sigh. As much as to say ‘I have been waiting for you. You are here now and I can go. . .’ The pain of loving her and missing her is almost more than I can bear.” The intended quiet funeral of Maureen at the crematorium in Blackley, Manchester once again put Myra’s name into the headlines. For there were demonstrators there, including Patrick Kilbride, now a pensioner, and the forever vengeful Ann West, both convinced that she would be there. There

were violent struggles between the two parents, mourners and police when Mr. Kilbride and Mrs. West -— “killer, killer,” she screamed — focussed their hate on a slim blonde who had stepped from one of the three funeral cars. She was, in fact, a member of Bill Scott’s family. Myra was still in Durham Jail. She had sent flowers, crysanthemums and carnations, with a card: “There are no words to express how I miss you. I love you — Myra.” The

Home Office said later that she had not asked for permission to attend. Perhaps she knew that, painfully, Maureen’s funeral would underline that, even after fourteen years, the anger against Myra Hindley was unabated, whatever the circumstances.

176

eK

Chapter Twenty-One DON’T FREE ME ANOTHER Home Secretary made another statement to the House of Commons about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. There was no chance of an early release for them, Mr. William Whitelaw announced. And it would be another three years — 1985 — before they would next be considered for parole. The news was another terrible blow for the freedomhungry Myra. And another chance for Brady to continue his cat and mouse game. Another opportunity to turn the knife. That night in his cell, soon after his forty-fourth birthday, he wrote a letter, to the new chairman of the Parole Board, Lord

Harris: “J will not require the parole board’s consideration in 1985 or even 2005.” He sent a photo-copy of the letter to Lord Longford asking him to release it to the media “in order that my position re parole be made quite clear once and for all.” He waited. There was nothing in the newspapers, nothing on television, nothing on the radio. Weeks later there was a letter from Lord Longford to Brady, now back in Parkhurst, following a series on the Moors Murders in the Sunday Times. He picked up his pen again and wrote another letter, this time to the Sunday Times: “A week ago I received a letter from Lord Longford in which he complained, in reference to The Sunday Times series: ‘By now you will have seen, I expect, my letter in The Sunday Times. You will realise that I and others, such as Myra’s solicitor and the Trevelyan family were thoroughly conned, (by the Sunday Times). “I have not seen Lord Longford’s letter to The Sunday Times, but can safely assume from previous experience that it consists of the same wearisome apologue he has been misguidedly dissemminating on

_ behalf of Myra Hindley for over a decade. “He obviously expected that, having given The Sunday

177

~

Times access to Myra Hindley’s letter file, the newspaper would, quid pro quo, print a favourable analysis rather than an objective, perspicacious one. “T have broken silence publicly only once in the past seventeen years; in a letter to the Daily Mirror five years ago.” “He then quoted from the letter, recalling the sentence: “The weight of the crimes both Myra and I were convicted of

justifies permanent imprisonment.” He continued: “In 1978, in response to numerous statements to the media made by the then chairman of the Parole Board, Sir Louis Petch, in which he kept mentioning my name in connection with parole ‘consideration,’ I wrote to the

parole board. “I requested that Petch make note that I had never applied for parole and had no intention of applying at any future date. And that should any member of the parole board ever request to interview me re parole I would not consent to such. I then had Lord Longford ratify this letter to the parole board. “Finally, on January 31 this year, upon hearing the present Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, make a statement to the House of Commons re my next ‘consideration’ for parole being in 1985, I wrote to the new chairman of the parole board, Lord Harris, repeating what I had stated to Sir Louis Petch and added: “I will not require the parole board’s consideration in 1985 or even 2005. “I then sent a photo-copy of this letter to Lord Longford,

requesting that he release it to the media in order that my position re parole be made quite clear once and for all. The letter was not released. Lord Longford did not inform me of the fact that he was assisting The Sunday Times in what he expected to be yet another public relations exercise on behalf

of Myra Hindley re parole review. In short, in his opinion, my letter rejecting parole would morally detract from Myra Hindley’s exercise in pursuance of it. “Therefore, if Lord Longford thinks he has the right to consider himself ‘conned’ by The Sunday Times I believe I have the right to consider myself conned by him twice over in these particular matters. However, Lord Longford is correct in stating that he, the Trevelyan family, Myra’s solicitor, etc, 178

etc, were conned—but not by the Sunday Times.” The following month, detectives from Manchester arrived on the Isle of Wight. Brady had said he wanted to see them. Was this a breakthrough, at last? Detective Chief Superintendent Geoff Rimmer was there for seven hours. Ian Brady had nothing, nothing at all to say. He just stared blankly ahead. But the cunning mind behind the blank mask knew that the visit would be reported in the newspapers. And that people would think he had wanted to talk about two missing children. And that Myra Hindley would think that, too. *

*

*

JULY 23, 1982. Five weeks and three days after Ian Brady’s public contempt of her desire for freedom. And a date significant for Myra Hindley, a milestone in every woman’s life. A time to pine for lost youth and then to shrug philosophically: Life begins at forty. But for her, on her fortieth birthday, a time to bitterly reflect that, for her, “life” had begun at twenty-three. And still went on. The lives of her school friends she had once thought so dull, predictable, were so different. So free. They were married,

had children. Their weddings, the births of their babies, recorded in the Gorton and Openshaw Reporter. If only. . . There was a birthday present from Bill and Sharon, a reminder. A watch. Damn the Home Office. And men. November 5, 1982, Guy Fawkes night, in a letter to her friend Carol O’Callaghan: “Note the date and do me a favour . . no, not parliament itself. That smaller house round the corner, inaptly named the Home Office.” The depression set in. It was two years before her next parole consideration. She was, she said later, “on a total downer.” What was that song Roger Whitaker sang? I’m Gonna Leave Old Durham Town. If only she could. She went on hunger strike, refusing food for three weeks. And then there was news from the Home Office. She was to be moved. Her new home was Cookham Wood, a modern, purpose-

built prison at Rochester in Kent, light, airy, centrally-heated 179

cells, colour TV, gardens and a once-a-week disco. And,

despite being attacked by another prisoner within two days of her arrival-she could handle that by now-she soon settled down, marshalling her usual clique of hangers-on and minders to nip trouble in the bud; like a rumoured plot to pour boiling water over her. She sat down in her warm cell and wrote to Carol O’Callaghan: “Too much-like real living. It’s one helluva place. I hadn’t realised how, institutionalised I’d become although I clung to my individuality, dignity and self- respect. Now I’m here I feel almost as free as a bird. . .” What’s the date? She glanced up at the calendar to begin her next letter to Carol. The pen froze. She shivered. The nineteenth of April. “I’ve just looked at the calendar to see what date itis. . . the 19th. A shattering alarm bell reverberated around my whole head. Seventeen years ago today I was climbing up the steps to the dock in Chester Castle. And the judge and jury are still sitting in condemnation. “Oh well, it takes all sorts to make a world but ’'m damned if I’m going to be a coathanger for all their hangups for much longer. . .” * PRISONER

602217

*

*

stood up, stretched

his long, lean

frame. He had heard a prison officer approaching. Time to be let out to go to the washroom. The lock clicked back, the door swung open. The guard surveyed the man standing inside the cell, lan Brady. The hair was still thick and black, the once cruelly-handsome face only slightly lined by time. The eyes still cold, grey. The accent still harsh, Glaswegian. “I want to go to the washroom,” It was a short, daily ritual for the man in the special segregation unit at Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight, the only time of any day that he left his cell. Apart from that fifteen minutes he spent in the washroom he was in isolation, alone with his books. And his thoughts. Unlike the cosy quarters of Myra Hindley, with their flowered curtains and bedspread and picture-bedecked walls, his cell had only the basic necessities. A bed, a table, a chair

and a bucket.

180

SES

As he walked to the washroom there was no sign of any other prisoner. Every inmate of the segregation unit, whose cells normally house men who have committed crimes in jail, was locked up. For, unlike Myra, Ian Brady had made no friends, he had no hangers-on, no minders. He had commit-

ted no offence at Parkhurst. His solitude in the unit was self-exile, for his own protection, against those who had sworn to get him, maim him, kill him. Soon he was to be transferred to another jail, Gartree in Leicestershire. It would make no difference to the lonely prisoner. He would still be on his own. That was the way he wanted it. I had thought, all those years ago, when I learned of his unbelievably-evil lifestyle, his philosophy, his attempts to impress that he was “big time,” that Ian Brady would one day try to escape, to fight for his freedom, albeit vainly. But for some reason, perhaps it was the fear of the terrible reprisal that awaited outside, he had not only accepted his punishment but had, in a strange, almost masochistic way, intensified it.

The pale, sun-starved face had shown no emotion as he had said of his crimes: “They were the acts of a madman. I don’t deserve any sympathy and I would never seek it. I want to spend the rest of my life inside. “TI want to die in jail.” *

*

*

MEANWHILE, Myra was saying of her hoped-for freedom: “It'll still be a while yet, but I still believe that everything comes to her who waits.” Her looks still grew softer, there was a new,

almost maternal,

air about her. As Ian

Brady withdrew more and more into his brooding loneliness, she became more and more gregarious, smiling at the children of visitors. She was happier now than she had been for almost eighteen years. . Ian Brady’s jail switch fuelled rumours that he was again ready to talk to police about missing children. But, in a letter to Carol O’Callaghan, to whom she wrote regularly, she said: “IT couldn’t make statements regarding something I know nothing of and whatever he had to say, regardless of any

181

allegations he might make, I could only do as I’ve always done: deny and dissassociate myself from them. If he was believed there was nothing I could do. My conscience is clear whether I’m believed or not.” She later wrote to her friend: “I want out and you want me out. And, as you say, you usually get what you want. It’s often likewise said of me that I always get what I want. There’s a lot of people to win round-the Press, the public, the decisionmakers at the Home Office. But with you and I working at it ‘mentally’ and others working practically, who knows? The seemingly impossible may become possible. But you'll have to wait a little longer before we can walk along the canal bank stopping at the little pubs along the way.” She was having visits from her brother-in-law, Bill and her niece, Sharon, on whom

she doted.

After one visit, when

Carol had also.been there, she told her friend: “If I hadn’t been holding Sharon I might have danced a circuit of the visits room with you.” Bill? Sharon? Her mind, searching every avenue that might lead to freedom, toyed with an idea. Would it help, she wondered, if she were a married woman,

with a child? Why not marry Bill? She discussed the idea with Carol-— though her 52-year-old brother-in-law said later that he knew nothing of Myra’s plans to become a jail bride. But then Myra had second thoughts. It wouldn’t work. And in just over a year she would be considered for parole again. Besides, she had fallen in love with somebody else. Another woman prisoner. “Forget the bridesmaid, maid of honour or best man or anything else. I ain’t marrying no-one unless it’s on my terms. And I don’t think they’d be acceptable to Bill. . . . Of course I love him dearly, but only as a brother, a friend, and especially as my sister’s husband and father of their child,” she said. And then the “gate fever” was coming on again: “Oh Caz. I really want to come out and be with you, or you with me, for as long as we both want. So much to do, so much to do and say. One day, please God. . .” A clairvoyant had contacted her, asking to write. No

182

pa ee ee qee ee e e T ee a ee ee e ET e e tse

thanks. “I don’t particularly want to know my future-since I don’t have one really. “I try to live in the here and now with the usual ‘ifIget out. . .’ Got to hope I’ve got a future or the present would be unbearable. A future out of prison, I mean.” Soon her hopes of that future were to rise again. *

*

*

“RIGHT, just swallow this please.” The woman patient they knew as Mary took the glass from the nurse and sipped the thick, sickly liquid. It was the busy X-ray department at Medway Hospital in Chatham and she had gone in as an out-patient. Just like any other out-patient, ordinary clothes, ordinary face. And nobody gave her a second glance. She had gone for a barium meal X-ray. But there was nothing wrong with her. For “Mary” had been taken from prison to the hospital to see if she would be recognised outside. Not a soul suspected that she was anyone else but Mary. But her real name was Myra... It was the same Myra who, soon afterwards, walked into

the prison staffroom with tea and biscuits for twenty-two firemen, who had been carrying out an inspection. Again she passed the test as she went, several times in and out of the room. That night she put on her new spectacles—when she had her eyes tested “I couldn’t even see the top line of big letters with my right eye”—and wrote to Carol: “Guess what? I had to make tea for twenty-two firemen! Good grief, I’ve only seen a handful of men in donkeys years and I had to walk into a staffroom full of them.” A visit to hospital and nobody had known her. Tea. Biscuits. Firemen. So ordinary. So outside. She was buoyant. She could taste freedom again. At the same time Ian Brady in his new cell, was hearing

voices in his head. Voices. Like the voices in the wind on Saddleworth

Moor.

The screams

“dark, wild winter nights.”

183

of children, perhaps, on

Chapter Twenty-Two THE MAN IN CELL FOUR “CURSE all goddamned bad men . . . and curse the bad luck we women have — and the bad judgement — when we meet them and fall for them and lose our sense of perspective and just about everything else we have to lose.” Her thoughts, as her next parole application date approached, returned to Ian Brady, to that little office in Manchester where, more than twenty-three years ago, they had first met, where she had asked him for their first date, where she had fallen under his spell. She had fallen, now,

from elation to depression. Would they turn her down again? Would they? She had been in the prison sick-bay. “Too much prison and too many hassles, too much publicity and too many brainwashed prisoners. Too much noise. Too many

pressures ... it all became just too much to handle any longer. I know I’m perilously close to falling off the tightrope I’ve been balancing on since I can’t remember when.” She had even considered killing herself, she told Carol. “I swear if suicide wasn’t a mortal sin I’d top myself. Too many reasons why I can’t-mum and Sharon, etc. And I ain’t gonna give the goddamed rags the scoop of the century or any of the

deathwishers their thrill of a lifetime. And I can be a bigger pain in the Home Office’s proverbial alive than dead.” She was now forty-two, still young-looking, her hair now, though,‘an auburn shade, dyed to cover the advancing grey. Her eyes had misted with tears as another prisoner had shown her a photograph of her baby daughter. “That’s what I’ve missed because of this. I’ll never be able to have a baby now and I would have liked one so much. I’d have loved to have been a mother but I’ve no chance now. IF I got out tomorrow

I'd still be too old.” She was now a “trusty,” working in the kitchen, looking ~ after the prison library and the chapel, spending so much time

184

q

Re Liane

in the latter that other prisoners had nicknamed her The Church Warden. She was praying for her freedom. For she had just penned her plea for parole to yet another Home Secretary, Leon Brittan. It was almost time for Ian Brady to start the cat-and-mouse game again. *

*

*

THE recorded delivery letter to the BBC in London had come

from

Gartree

Prison,

Leicestershire.

Sender:

Ian

Brady. “In early March a prison official entered my cell and offered me a parole application form to fill in. I refused. He then asked if Iwould sign a blank form. I again refused. Two weeks ago the same prison official — the principal officer of this landing in which I am the sole patient — again entered my cell and informed me that the parole review committee had arrived at the prison to see me. I refused to see them. “T wish to make it clear that I am taking no part in a political farce on parole consideration that the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, is pretending is taking place. That is all.” The letter was sent to the BBC’s Television News on April 15, 1985. The following month on May 23, 1985, Mr. Brittan announced, following parole board recommendations: “The board have recommended to me that neither Ian Brady nor Myra Hindley should be released. The case of Ian Brady should be considered again by the local review committee where he is then held in ten years’ time. Myra Hindley should be similarly considered in five years’ time.” Another five years. Lord Longford called it brutal, revolting, astounding and disgusting. But a public opinion poll in The Times showed that eighty-three per cent of people agreed with the Home Secretary. And a pair of scissors, sharp enough to use as a suicide weapon, had been missing at Cookham Wood Women’s _ Prison. Myra had known that her parole application would be turned down. She had heard an unofficial whisper that the Home Secretary’s announcement would be unfavourable. “She just went to pieces,” former inmate Dorothy Moore, 52:

185

said recently. “She knew there was going to be a recommendation that her application shouldn’t be heard again for some time, but she didn’t know how long it would be.” | “TI won’t be able to bear it if it’s too long,” she told the other woman. Then the scissors disappeared from an office of the prison canteen, a place where only Myra, as a “trusty” and kitchen orderly, was allowed. Prisoners were stripped and searched, every cell, to which the inmates were confined for

two days, was combed inch by inch until the scissors were found — in another room in the jail in which, also, she was the

only one allowed. “An officer told me they were sure Myra had taken the

scissors to kill herself if the parole news was too bad,” said Dorothy Moore. But by the time the official decision. . . another five years. . . reached her, Myra, heavily sedated,

was in the prison hospital. It was said she had collapsed with the nervous strain. A week later she went on hunger strike. Her fast lasted for ten days, until the threat of being returned to Holloway and. maximum security unless she called it off. Holloway. Back to where she started, nineteen years ago. God, no. She picked up the spoon. *

*

*

THE change in the man in Cell Four was staggering, even frightening. He was now so thin, almost skeletal, his clothes hanging loosely on his bony frame. The once-proud, arrogant face stubbled, unshaven was drawn, the cheeks hollow, eyes sunken. He felt cold all the time and there were those voices in his head. As Myra Hindley had bloomed, Ian Brady had withered. He now talked a lot. To himself, staring at the bare wall, muttering, mumbling. And cursing. His tortured mind had returned to his childhood, the Gorbals with its grey, granite tenements.

Then Gorton, then 16 Wardle Brook Avenue.

Saddleworth Moor. Myra Hindley. His clenched, bony fist smacked against the cell wall. Ian Brady had once been thirteen stones. His weight was

186

now down to eight. In his darkened cell, at night, when sleep eventually came, he dozed off sitting up. And when sleep _ would not come, he clutched his ever-present hot water bottle to his stomach, pulled the thick, grey prison blanket around his thin shoulders and huddled up to the radiator until it scorched his skin. Cursing the Home Office “bastards,” cursing Myra Hindley. He had been overheard by one prisoner. “You’ve turned against me. I’ll crush you along with the other scum bastards . . . You'll never get out while I’m in here you two-faced bastard... Silly bastard her... thinks she’s going to get out . . . no fucking chance.” He had been seeing Lord Longford again. For although still contemptuous, now he wanted something. He wanted to leave prison and go to a special hospital, like Broadmoor. But they would not move him. Bastards. He seldom moved from the 9ft. by 8ft. cell. He still dared not. He was wary of everyone, everything. He had been a glutton, eating huge amounts of food, making home-made sweets and desserts in his cell. But then he became convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He probably had just

cause. He had recently been ill with a condition aitecting his _ bladder. He had been in pain, had had difficulty in breathing and his body had swollen up. And one prisoner claimed later that Brady’s condition had been brought about by other prisoners slipping the crushed powdered glass from light bulbs into his food. He had no visitors — save for Lord Longford — and would not even allow his mother to see him. Margaret Brady had gone to the prison after reading of his loss of weight. He would not see her. He did not, he said later, want her to see him in his emaciated condition. He and Myra Hindley had now been in custody for almost twenty years, since that day when a policeman’s knock on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue had brought their evil game to anend. Yes, he would have liked to have been free, to have felt the wind in his hair on the moors again, to savour the wine

for which he had had such a fierce appetite, but he knew, more than Myra Hindley knew, that he never would be. But 187

he wanted out of prison. He had to convince the doctors, the Home Office. And then he heard that Myra had been in touch with her lawyers. She was taking the Government

to the European

Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg over their “inhuman and degrading treatment.” The bony fist smacked into the wall again. Three weeks later, a quotation from Ian Brady screamed across the pages of the Sunday People: “Jf I revealed what really happened Myra would not get out in one hundred

5 2

j q

years.” *

*

THE words were said to have been uttered during a series of interviews with a reporter, in which Brady was alleged to have said there had been “many more” deaths than those for which he had been jailed. Some had been “spontaneous happenings” and had not involved Myra. But he had given his solicitors “new information” about her role in the killings for which they had been convicted, along with details of her involvement in “other matters.” The next day the results of another newspaper poll were published. Eighty-six per cent of people interviewed said Myra Hindley should stay in jail. The following Sunday Ian Brady was said to have “confessed” to two more murders. Two names returned to the headlines, names that came up regularly with those of the Moor Murders victims: Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.

Brady was he had killed that both he Pauline and

said the and her

;

*

. :

"

.

to have slowly nodded his head when asked if two youngsters. He was quoted as affirming Myra had been “involved” in the death of killing had taken place in another man’s

P

home. But, it was said, he had refused to talk about Keith,

saying “I’m not yet ready for the balloon to go up.” The police could not ignore this. Was Brady ready to talk at last, to end more than two decades of uncertainty for two families, to close two yellowed, dusty files? Three days later Detective Chief Superintendent Peter

pe

PL BET S a~sli ee we e

aa oe B ae aw Rr aeea

188

Saw te

Topping, of Greater Manchester CID travelled south to Gartree to talk to him about the “confession.” The conversation, as always, was one-sided.

Ian Brady, clutching his hot water-filled plastic lemonade bottle to his stomach, was not unfriendly, just unhelpful. The cat licked his lips. He had nothing to say. He had said enough. *

*

*

WEARILY Prisoner 964055 picked up her cup, saucer and plate and joined the slow-moving crocodile of women filing into the prison dining room. Another four years and six months.

Oh, God.

She had, as always, said her morning

prayer to the crucifix on the wall of her cell in South Wing. But this time it had been no prayer of hope, no appeal. She returned, as was her right as a “regular,” and because it was safer, to her cell with her breakfast, picking at the food moodily. It was late November, 1985, more than twenty years since Myra Hindley and Ian Brady had first been arrested. She was now forty-three years old. She would be nearly forty-eight, nearing her fifties, when her next review for parole came up. In the last decade of the twentieth century. She put down her plate and cup and started to tidy up her cell. Her scheming,

planning, her return to her religion, her new “changed” image had all failed. The morning newspapers arrived. The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. And one story leapt from the pages. Ian Brady was no longer in jail. He had been moved to a top security mental hospital. HIS wish had been granted. *

*

*

MRS. BRADY looked into the grey eyes that used to stare solemnly at her on Sunday afternoons in the Sloans’ living room, when he was wearing his best white satin shirt and his kilt. Now they were sunken, glazed with medication. She

189

©

thought of that day, forty-eight years ago, when she had trundled him through the Gorbals in that battered old pram. “Good to see you, Ian. How have you been?” The man sitting opposite, her son, nodded. “O.K. You?” Margaret Brady, the bright, shining hair of Maggie Stewart, the Glasgow waitress, now grey, gazed at her flesh and blood, sipped self-consciously from her teacup. “Not so far to come to visit you now.” Now in her mid-seventies, she was looking at her son for the first time in twelve years. And forty-eight years to the day since she had given birth to him. “Happy birthday, Ian.” He had turned her away before, but now they were sipping tea together, mother and son, exchanging everyday conversation about ordinary, everyday things, as mothers and sons do. Now he was not behind grey prison walls, but surrounded by the brighter decor of a top security hospital called Park Lane in Liverpool, forty miles from Manchester where Margaret Brady now lived again, alone in a ground floor flat. She

spent an hour with her son and afterwards she said: “It was lovely to be with him and actually talk face to face again after so long. It was a visit I had been longing for and one I shall remember for a!ong time... ” It was. For she would never forget the change in Ian Stewart Brady. He had been moved to Park Lane after convincing doctors that his self-diagnosed madness was not. faked. There were voices in his head. Voices from the past. Questioning voices. “We are making inquiries about the disappearance of...” There was his conviction that his food was being poisoned, explaining his massive weight loss, that had given speculation to the possibility that he was suffering from cancer.

And there was his guilt. It had been reported that he would elaborate on his “confessions” in exchange for a transfer to

hospital. But Lord Longford had said of him: “The state of his mind is so volatile it’s very hard to know whether to take that sort of thing seriously or not. I’ve seen him since those stories began coming out and I asked what he felt about them. And he said: “Not authorised, but otherwise no comment.” In other words he doesn’t say he repudiates them, he doesn’t say 190

ee E ee e OS emtee

he agrees with them. He’s quite shrewd in his own rather dotty way.” Doctors who examined him before he was moved from prison to hospital, under Section 47 of the Mental Health Act, 1983 found him suffering from acute paranoia and a type of schizophrenia. The doctors had also found out something else about the man who chain-smoked Gaulioses and sucked liqueur chocolates with relish, the man whose insanity became manifestly obvious in the late autumn of 1985. He suffered from “autumnal madness,” becoming moody, with-

drawn, after the leaves started to fall, until spring. The deaths of his three known victims, Edward

Evans,

John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey took place in October, November and December. *

*

*

ANOTHER mother had had to bite her lip, keep herself to herself, hide her torment, for twenty-one years. Nellie Moulton, as she had been for many years — Bob Hindley was long dead — looked sadly at her daughter in the prison visitors’

room. She knew that Myra was probably the most hated woman in Britain. And that if her daughter ever did realise her burning ambition to be free she would be the quarry for those who sought justice, even vengeance. She had said, at the little two-bedroom

council flat back in Gorton, where she now

lived with her lorry-driver husband Bill Moulton, with a deep sadness, based upon realism, on twenty-one years of turning over the inescapable facts in her mind, that it would be better for Myra to die in prison. “Better than to be killed out here.” Myra Hindley had gathered more hate than Ian Brady. That was a fact. He had taken his punishment. He had not sought freedom. There had been something in that that people had understood and, in some way, even respected. Just as if, in 1966, he had been hanged by the neck until he was dead. Her craving for freedom had, to those who still hated, inflamed that hate. To them, her religion, her “change,” her

poetic outpouring from her cell, had been a transparent and

191

futile public relations exercise. But most ieall they hata i _ because she was awoman.

A few months earlier, Nellie Moulton Had told a journalist, — John Lisners, that if Myra was ever freed “people wouldn’t let — her alone. She might as well die in prison. Life means life for Myra. For others it means just a few years . . . poor Myra. I love her just like I always have done. She is still my daughter. Myra was a lovely girl and is a lovely woman. People who call her a beast or the Devil don’t know what they are talking ~ about.”

She cast her mind back to 1946 when Myra went to live with her grandmother. “I don’t think she suffered in any way by being brought up by her grandmother. She died of a broken _ heart when Myra was sent to jail.” Nellie still visited Myra as often as she could. Three or four times a year. She looked again at her daughter, softened, different, the plastic surgery of all those years ago that was still unnecessary, the beaky nose snubbier, the high cheek bones rounder. People would still know. “Bye, love. See you next time.” Prisoner 964055 returned, down the iron corridor, to her >

cell. She picked up her pen. To write her life story.

_ Chapter Twenty-Three THE LIVES THEY LEFT BEHIND SADDLEWORTH Moor, high in the distance, is now softened a little with spring. The new-born lambs beneath its summit have taken their first steps on trembling legs, the wild flowers are pushing their way through in the meadows near the villages below. Life goes on. But for some it will never be the same. For the Moors Murderers left behind, in the towns

and the city, a legacy of a lifetime of pain, misery and hate. In one of those towns I am again meeting Sheila Kilbride, the mother I first met more than twenty-two years ago, when her son, John, had disappeared from the market. When she

still had hope that the smiling boy might walk through the door again. And that there would be a simple, logical, bearable explanation for his absence. The anger has gone from her heart now, but the pain still shows in her eyes. The dark hair of the then-anxious mother who opened the door to my knock that cold November morning in 1963 is now white. Two decades of grief have taken their toll. It is still hard for her to smile. The Kilbride family will never know how much John suffered, how he died,

and the question still haunts them. The last time I saw Mrs. Kilbride was when she had just identified the body of her son in that moorland village mortuary. She is still the houseproud woman she had been then, now living in a fourth-floor flat in a block, bearing a notice outside prohibiting cycling and games by order of the housing department,

near

the

town

centre,

and

the market,

of

Ashton-under-Lyne..We are sitting together in the cosy living room, neat, tidy, its ornaments gleaming, the photographs of her children still smiling from the walls. She sits, hands clasped, as we talk. Conversation does not come easily. lama reminder of something time cannot heal. I look out through her window. There is a perfect view of the rooftops of the town. And distinct on the skyline, the

193

moors. She nods slowly. “That upset me when I first moved in. I wanted to move, but,” she shrugs, “I’ve got used to it.”

She is now fifty-four. Her six other children, Danny, Pat, Terry, Sheila, Maria and Christopher, have, between them, presented her with 18 grandchildren. They are a great source

of comfort and pride to her. But the one she still thinks of every day is her own first-born. She still cherishes all his photographs and one special little treasured memento, the Flintstones annual — the television cartoon characters had made him laugh so much — he had for his last Christmas. With six other children to bring up Mrs. Kilbride had to try,

all those years, to hide her sorrow, to carry on with housework, cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping, cooking and comforting. There had been no time for the tears of grief that had welled up inside her to be spilled. Not in front of the children. When she had cried she had not thought they had noticed. But they had, particularly Danny. She tells me: “What happened to John seems to have hit me more than ever since the children left home. I’ve cried more since I moved into this flat than I ever did.” She has many a private weep when, as she often does, she gets out the photographs of her son. Photographs of him growing up. Until he was twelve. Sheila Kilbride glances at the photographs on the walls. “Do you know, for all those years my other children never mentioned John. They were afraid of upsetting me.” It had been Danny, her second-eldest son, the boy who worshipped his big brother, still longed for him, wondered what he would

have been like as a man, who first brought up the subject. By then he was married and his uncle, Frank Doran, his mother’s

brother, had shown him old newspaper cuttings about the Moors case. A kindling hatred caught fire. Since then he has waged a campaign to keep Myra Hindley —who, although, after seven years in jail after being found not guilty of killing John, but guilty of harbouring Ian Brady knowing he had killed him, had, in the eyes of the law, paid her debt — behind bars. He gathered 123,000 signatures in a petition, collecting many names on the market where his brother had last been seen alive. He had also posed for a newspaper picture holding a carving knife and threatening to

194

ia

kill her if ever she was released. The gesture brought a warning visit from Scotland Yard officers. That troubled Sheila Kilbride, who loathes aggression in any form. She had been divorced from her husband Patrick five years after John’s disappearance. His strictness with the children troubled her. Throughout the years she has borne her grief with a quiet, private, dignity. During the two years he was missing, before they found his body on Saddleworth Moor, she still bought him birthday gifts and presents for Christmas. And she had always bought seven Easter eggs, always one for John. Kept for so long that the chocolate turned white. Her love for her son had outweighed her hatred for his murderer. “I did feel anger at first,” she says. “But as the years have gone by it has gone away. As long as those two stay behind bars, and there is no chance of them getting out, I’m content.” I leave her to go to see Danny, whom I had last seen in short trousers, and now a painter and decorator, lives two miles from his mother with his wife, Anne and sons Damien, nine, Daniel, seven, Darren, five, and four-year-old daughter,

Michelle. They have all been warned of the dangers of talking to strangers. And accepting lifts from them. He is angry. Angry about what happened to his brother. And what it did to his mother. On the shelf in the lounge is a picture of John framed, together with the words of the inscription on his gravestone. He picks it up and says of Myra Hindley “She goes on about wanting a new life. What about John? He would have been thirty-five now, probably married with kids of his own. He can’t start a new life. Why should she?” He recalls all the years of silence about his brother. “My mum never mentioned John’s death when we were kids, so neither did we.

And when I told her I was organising a petition she gave me the shock of my life. “She told me:

‘I wondered when you were going to talk

about John. It’s about time you did something...” *

*

195

*

EIGHT miles away, in South Manchester, Ann West has just gently laid flowers on her daughter’s grave. There is now, at this moment, love in the eyes that have so often flashed with anger. Twenty-one years have not softened the hatred of the woman who swears she will kill Myra Hindley if ever she sets foot outside prison. Southern Cemetery is only a short walk from her home in a cul-de-sac in the city’s Chorlton district, the place where she moved to be near the grave of Lesley Ann. She lives there with her second husband, Alan West. And her memories,

rekindled often when she looks at the keepsakes of her daughter... the dolls, the nurse’s uniform, the sewing machine she had for her last Christmas, the Christmas she died. She is now fifty-six, but she grew old, inside, that

autumn day in 1965 when, like Sheila Kilbride she visited that moorland village mortuary and saw again the pink cardigan, the red and green tartan skirt, the blue coat, the string of beads. And all that was left of the girl she called her Tiny - Flower.

She pours me acup of coffee in the lounge, sitting beneatha life-size portrait of Lesley Ann and says, matter-of-fact, coldly: “If Myra Hindley came out of prison I would kill her. Oh yes, I hate Brady, but I hate her even more. She is a woman — but where were her motherly instincts when my little girl was pleading for her life? She robbed me of my only daughter and my anger gets worse when I think of the comforts she has in jail and that she wants to come out.” Like Sheila Kilbride the years of anguish have hit her hard. She cannot work because of bronchial asthma, she has had

two heart attacks and cancer of the ovaries. She blames her physical condition on the trauma she has suffered, what she calls her own Life Sentence. Her eyes still fill with tears when she speaks of Lesley Ann. “She went to Filey with some friends and brought me back a little plastic dog filled with perfume.” There is a catch in her voice. “It is one of my dearest treasures.” Mrs. West still takes the same sleeping pills, first prescribed when Lesley Ann disappeared. Sleep is the only escape from the nightmare of her waking hours: The face of Myra Hindley

196

Pen

—

she first saw in the little magistrates court in Hyde in Decem-

ber, 1965 when, despite her outburst, it had remained cold, aloof, detached from the drama, the heartbreak, the anger.

_ Her crusade has led her to cross swords on television five times with Lord Longford, campaign outside Parliament, and to form an organisation, the Murder Victims’ Association, with the aim of supporting, comforting, other parents whose children have been the prey of killers. She and her former husband,

Terence,

keep in touch,

bound together by their anger, their common determination. “They should stay in jail forever,” he told me recently. “We will never be released from it. We have to suffer for the rest of our lives, and so should they.” Close by Lesley Ann’s grave in the cemetery is that of Edward Evans, the last victim of the Moors Murderers, who

might have shared another, lonelier burial ground with the little girl if the killers’ plans had not gone wrong. His mother, Edith, now sixty-four, lives in a council house in a quiet suburb of the city. Her husband, John, died, broken-hearted,

two years after their son’s death.

She suffers a deep hurt that will never heal. “I just don’t want to talk about it any more. I want my son to rest in peace. Every time I read something about the case it upsets me,” she ‘said. I do not wish to intrude any more and turn to leave. But, despite her determination to keep her silence, one little sentence spills out, from the heart, before I leave her doorstep:

“Those buggers should be hung!” *

*

*

WHEN the full horror of the Moors Murders became apparent, when the police realised that Ian Brady had not been idly boasting, the files of many missing young people were checked. Brady had said he had “killed three or four” before he murdered his final victim, Edward Evans. Who else? Even detectives in Glasgow, where he had lived until he was almost seventeen and visited since, dug out their “missing persons” records.

197 ae

Arthur Benfield and his team, anxious to contact anyone

who had ever known Ian Brady, checked out young men who had known him during his spell in Borstal. There was one they

g

4

could not find, Phillip Deare, twenty, from Bradford, Yorkshire. He had not been seen since November 21, 1962 when,

the detectives discovered, he had left his home to keep an appointment in Manchester. With Ian Brady. Where is Phillip Deare today, twenty-three years later? West Yorkshire police, which now controls the old Bradford

City police, has no record of him on their files today and I have been unable to trace his family. Perhaps he is alive and well somewhere. Perhaps not. The mystery remains. But two much closer-to-home mysteries are unsolved: The disappearance of two Manchester youngsters, Pauline Reade, whose name, curiously, is an anagram of Deare, and Keith Bennett. It is now almost twenty-three years since Pauline Reade, in her pink and gold dress, slipped a white chiffon scarf on her head, said “tarrah mam, dad,” and clicked along the cobbles

to the dance at the local Railway Institute. It was half-past seven, Friday night, July 12, 1963, in the summer when, on Saddleworth Moor, the gas pipeline men had opened up the peat. She had less than half a mile to walk, in daylight. She closed the door and was gone. Forever. It was the last time Amos and Joan Reade saw their daughter alive, or dead. Pauline, sixteen years old, pretty, home-loving, who worked as a trainee at Sharples’ bakery where her father was a baker, lived in Wiles Street, Gorton, two doors from where

David Smith lived with his father, Jack, and a few streets — away from Bannock Street where Ian Brady had started living with Myra Hindley. She would have to pass close to Bannock Street on her way to the club. It was as though the ground had swallowed her up — a ' phrase to be used later, to describe the equally baffling cases of John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey. And her file was reopened when the fate of the two youngsters was discovered. Both Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were quizzed in jail several times about Pauline. The response was always the same. “Ask Ian,” from her, silence from him. Detective Chief

198

t

Superintendent Nimmo retired in 1970 with the case still unsolved, one of the greatest regrets of his career. Joan Reade had always clung to one slender thread of hope. It was snapped in June, 1985, when she heard the reports that [an Brady had “confessed” to her daughter’s murder. She is now devastated. “I had lived in hope all these years thinking that somehow, somewhere, she might still be alive,” she tells me.

She now

lives in a council house in

Openshaw, two miles from their former home. “I had even thought that Pauline might not know we had moved and had been trying to find us,” she says. “My nerves are very bad. I than two for more able been to work haven’t “years ....now...excuseme... I can’t talk any more.” *

*

*

AT the other side of the city Mrs. Winifred

Johnson shares

the same sense of loss. For her son was Keith Bennett, the

little lad in the wire-rimmed National Health spectacles whose face was on thousands of “missing” posters the year after Pauline disappeared. He too, set out on a short walk one summer night and was never seen again. It was a quarter to eight on Tuesday, June 16, 1964, almost

seven months after the baffling disappearance of John Kilbride that, four days after his twelfth birthday, Keith, in

T-shirt, jeans and white jerkin, waved to his mother, standing on the pavement and walked towards his gran’s. “Be careful of the road,” Mrs.

Winifred

Johnson

called to her short-

sighted son who had left his spectacles at home because they had recently been cracked. They were the last words she ever spoke to him. Keith, the eldest of Mrs. Johnson’s children — she eventual-

ly had nine — lived in-Eston Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, a: quarter of a mile from his grandmother’s home in Morton Street, where he was going to spend the night. She went with him most of the way, to see him safely across the busy Stockport Road. The “dangerous” part of the journey was over, she thought, leaving Keith with only a two hundredyard walk. . . along Westmoreland Street where Ian Brady Ie)

_ had lived and still visited his parents. Mrs. Johnson today lives two miles away from her former home with her husband, James, a joiner. Her hopes died

many years ago and her only prayer now is that lan Brady will end her torment and tell. “There is nothing worse, no fate more terrible, than not knowing,” she said. “I just want Keith

found, wherever he is, so that he can be buried properly, so that I know where he is and I can put some flowers on his grave.”

:

.

She is now fifty-two, small, motherly, bespectacled, and has had the terrible question on her mind since she was thirty. - “Twas pregnant at the time. Everywhere I went I saw Keith’s face. There were posters everywhere, with his photograph, saying: “Have you seen this child.” You can imagine how I felt.” Mrs.

Johnson has even, in the past, demanded thatlan

Brady be given a truth drug. Finally, last year, she was appealing to him personally, through the newspapers: “Please . . . for God’s sake, if you know how Keith died, tell the police.” . As I leave, she says simply: “I know Keith is dead. The terrible thing is not knowing what happened to him. I have lived in hell for nearly twenty-two years and every day I pray that my agony will end.” *

*

*

MOST of the principal police officers involved in the original inquiry — Benfield, Talbot, Tyrrell, Nimmo — are all

now living in retirement. Joe Mounsey is an assistant chief constable of Lancashire. Detective Margaret Campion, then thirty-seven, case-hardened, a policewoman since she was twenty-one, and the woman who spent many hours in the company of Myra Hindley after her arrest, became ill with her nerves after the case and was off duty for almost two months. In May, 1967, exactly one year after the trial of the Moors’ Murderers, she resigned from the Force.

200

Chapter Twenty-Four AE Te aN ee een Fe a

THE CURSE HE pours himself a mug of tea from the ever-present pot on the hearth and lights another Benson and Hedges. Though the dark hair is now greying he is still slim, lanky, and there is still a jauntiness about him, though the swagger, I suspect, is to hide from the world the torment beneath. For the killers laid a curse on David Smith, the teenager whose evidence damned them, before they were jailed for life. It was one final twist of evil, revenge, that condemned the

chief witness for the prosecution to life, too. A lifetime of facing the public outrage for their dreadful crimes. Ian Brady, foiled in his attempt to make him a disciple, and betrayed, and Myra Hindley had tried, at their trial, to implicate him. And although the law was satisfied that he had played no part whatsoever in the killings he was, from then on, a marked

man. He is now thirty-eight and lives with his second wife, Mary, eight years younger, their twelve-year-old daughter, Joddy, and his three sons, Paul nineteen, David, eighteen and John, seventeen, in a terraced house in Hyde, three miles from Hattersley. They have been there now for almost ten years. The front door, the windows, are nearly always open. It is a

gesture by David Smith that says he has nothing to hide, nothing to fear. He refuses to run away. We are sitting in the nicely-furnished living room, the drone of traffic from the busy main road outside and his favourite lilting Irish music from the record player in the background. He picks up the Manchester United mug to refill it, offers me a Manchester City mug. “Fancy a drink in the pub instead?” I ask. The serious face crinkles into a tiny smile at the irony of the suggestion. We would, he says, have to go out of town. He is not welcome in the local pubs. That is part ‘of The Curse.

Mary, attractive, of Irish descent, joins us. He calls her

201

“the boss” with affection and the two go almost everywhere together. Twenty minutes later we are sitting in a pub on the outskirts of Manchester, and, although he still wears the same kind of clothes the teenage Smith would have chosen — jeans, cuban-heeled boots, corduroy jacket — for now, anonymous. He picks up his pint of Guinness and leans back in his chair. How had life been for him since that morning, in 1965, when

he made that telephone call to the police? He puts down his glass. “You know, people haven’t been able to get at Brady and Hindley so they’ve gone for the next best thing, the nearest target . . . me. Those two threw the mud and if you throw enough of it a lot of it sticks.” His own torment, he tells me, began within three weeks of the arrest of Brady and Myra Hindley. A vigilante gang, armed with knives, went looking for him and he had to be given a round-the-clock police guard. Then the hate mail began to arrive .. . “We’re going to get you” and “rot in jail.” He holds out his hands. The fingers are gnarled, short, stubby. They used to be long, slim. “Those are like that through fighting, protecting myself, for twenty- one years.” He had, once, in the early days, carried a knife for protec-

tion and, in 1969, he was sentenced to three years in jail for stabbing a man in a brawl. . . brawls had become part of his life, the curse. He was released after two years, but the following year he was in court again . . . accused of murdering his own father. He had given him an overdose of sleeping tablets. But it had been a mercy killing. His father had cancer. “T just couldn’t see him die like an animal.” A jury accepted his plea of manslaughter and he was given a token sentence of two days in jail. But it added fuel to the feelings of those not knowing the facts, those pointing the finger of suspicion, shaking the fist of hate. He and Maureen separated when he went to jail in 1969. They were finally divorced in 1973. “She abandoned the kids and [ got custody of them,” he says. “By then I had met Mary.” Mary interrupts. “Yes, our parents were friends and when I first saw him my reaction was that he wasn’t welcome in our house. I asked my dad what he thought and he said: ‘He’s never done me any harm or anybody I know any harm.’

202

as

He took hold of my arm and said then: ‘Without him I might

not have you.’ You see. I was the same age as Lesley Ann Downey would have been.” Lesley Ann Downey. The curse on David Smith had really been inflicted when Myra Hindley had claimed that he had taken the little girl to the house in Hattersley and left with her on the night of that chilling tape recording. Smith shrugs in despair. “Nobody has ever said this in my defence, but if Iwas involved why wasn’t my voice on that tape? Why weren’t my fingerprints on any of those photographs of her. Surely, If I had taken her along to have the pictures taken I would have been shown them.” He lights yet another cigarette. “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been beaten up. Like the night I was standing in this taxi rank in Hyde with Mary, and three of them dragged me into the road and beat me up . . . none of them was more than twenty.” Mary recalls her husband, lying there, blood oozing from his nose, staining his shirt and murmuring: “It’s not the fathers coming after me any more. Now it’s the sons.” The following week, in the same spot, he was attacked again. This time he was taken to hospital with a broken nose. Why couldn’t he drink in any of the pubs in the town, I wondered. “The landlords have been very nice about it but I’ve been told they’d rather I didn’t go in. ‘Nothing to do with you, Dave.’ I know what they mean. My just being there invites trouble and violence. I can be sitting there, minding

my own business, and then I’ll feel a deliberate dig in the back, a jostle. Some won’t be so subtle, they'll just drag me off the bar stool. “T accept it and I don’t blame the landlords. I wouldn’t drink with David Smith. I wouldn’t want my name dirtied. I don’t really blame people, either. I can understand them shunning me, feeling angry, even though I had nothing to do with the killings. There was just one pub left where I was still welcome. I told the landlord ‘I’ll cost you money,’ but he insisted it’d make no difference — until he got the word that a gang from another pub would be coming to his pub looking for me. To give Smithy a good leathering. I understood, when he told me: ‘Nothing to do with you, Dave, but... !

203

All part of the curse. “I accept it,” repeats Smith. “It just hurts me when they go for my family. We have told them all about the case, from their being very young... why, the lads used to come home from school with essays to write about the Moors Murders and Paul was only seven when one of the other kids said to him: ‘Your dad killed somebody and buried them on the moors’.”

The pub is filling up. David Smith lowers his voice. “A few months ago Paul had his arm broken when a gang set on him . .

.you know, I have this dread that my name, after I’m dead,

when nobody can libel me, will be linked with theirs and that it will be called the Brady, Hindley and Smith case.” We finish our drinks and, with Mary driving, return to

Hyde. On the way Smith leans over the front seat and says: “Nobody will give me a job. A year ago I sent off thirty-six applications, every one with a stamped, addressed envelope. I got three replies — one to say the firm had closed down, one to say ‘we’ll keep you on file’ and the other marked ‘return to

sender.’” We arrive at the house and as we walk up the little garden

path he pauses. “Even when we moved into here residents organised a petition to the town hall to try to keep us out. Mary’s car has been set on fire and the kids’ three rabbits were all killed and their bodies slung in the back garden.” Inside, Mary puts on the kettle, to fill up the teapot on the hearth. As we wait for it to boil she says:.“The only thing that can release us from all this is for Ian Brady to tell the truth about David not being involved. He has had him like a fish, dangling on a line, for twenty-one years.” — But the worst legacy for David Smith is The Nightmare. He can have the same dream every night for as long as three weeks. He has just fled from the house of death, 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, after witnessing the final slaughter. He scrambles into the lift, presses the button to go to his thirdfloor flat at Underwood Court. The doors close. Then open again. A man steps in. Ian Brady. With the sacrificial axe. Today, the madman Smith betrayed is in Liverpool, only forty miles away. David Smith wakes up in a trembling cold sweat. To face another day of The Curse.

204

@

*

*

*

DAVID Smith and I are standing in a lonely pine forest, | twenty miles from Manchester. The sun is blotted out by the _ tall trees, the ground thick with a carpet of fallen pine needles. He shivers. “This is it.” We have stopped at a layby, just as Myra Hindley had done in the Mini more than two decades ago when she, Ian Brady and David and Maureen Smith had been out on their wine-filled picnics. Then over a low, crumbling stone wall, down a steep, rocky hillside, through the withered pines, to a place Smith remembered, two hundred yards from the road in the Peak District of Derbyshire. Twelve miles, in a straight line, from Saddleworth Moor. We have followed the footsteps last taken by the Moors Murderers, in their last months of freedom twenty-one years ago. And to a silent, almost petrified forest which Smith believes could hold terrible secrets. Two more graves. We had, in his living room, talked of the clues that had led

police to the childrens’ bodies on the moors. Smith had pondered. “That tartan photograph album,” he began slowly. I remembered the vital piece of evidence and the pictures in . the book of Brady and Myra especially the one of her, acting as a marker to the burial spot of John Kilbride. “There were other pictures like that in that album, and not just pictures taken on Saddleworth Moor,” he said. He had, in fact, with the police, studied every picture in the

album in great detail during the huge investigation in 1965. Two photographs in particular stuck in his mind. He believed they, too, could be markers. The first showed Brady standing three or four feet away from a rifle resting in the branches of a broken, lightning-struck pine. The rifle was pointing down, at the ground. The second was a picture of Myra Hindley, lying face down on a blanket. And staring, fixedly at the ground, just as she had stared at the grave of John Kilbride. Did he know where the pictures had been taken? Smith nodded. He had been there several times with Brady, Myra and Maureen _ during the fourteen months they had been going out together.

They had sat on blankets drinking wine. He had recognised © the place from the photographs. That is how David Smith and I come to be standing in this eerie, desolate spot, the only sound the faint ripple of water from a river nearby. We have stopped by the broken tree. Smith nods, points. “I believe he was standing there, just about there, on the photograph. Why was he standing there? — What was the point of him being photographed all that way from the rifle? I believe that gun, pointing at the ground like that, could have been a marker.” We walk, the brown, dead needles rustling beneath our feet, for fifty yards, to another place, close to the river bank. “That, I’m pretty sure, is the place where Myra was lying on the blanket in the photo,” says Smith. “She was almost incidental to that picture. It was taken from some distance away, as if she hadn’t been the subject, as if to draw attention away from her. There was plenty of background in the picture. That’s how I recognised the spot.”

He has thought a lot about those photographs, racked his brains time and again for twenty-one years, and linked them with other clues. “Remember, from the trial, about Brady boasting and telling me he had killed three or four, about their bodies being buried and that I was sitting near one of them? Well, we did sit on a blanket, here, near this spot where Myra was photographed. I never sat anywhere on the moors.” Smith pushes his hand through his hair. “I pointed those pictures out to the police all those years ago but, for some

reason,

they didn’t seem

to be bothered.

All they

seemed to be interested in was the moors. But I’ve always maintained that not all the bodies were buried on the moors and that there were other places where the police should have been looking. Ian Brady didn’t put all his eggs in one basket. He was too clever for that.” We scramble back up the slope, over the wall, across the road to the car. As we get in, Smith says: “There was another place, I can’t remember exactly where, I think it was near Whaley Bridge, where, one day the four of us went in the car. We stopped at this place, got out and got over a wall and up a very steep climb. Three quarters of the way up Brady stopped

206

and said ‘wait here.’ He went on alone, disappearing over the ridge. He must have been gone three-quarters of an hour and when

he came

back

he seemed

satisfied, somehow,

that

everything was as it should be. I couldn’t help wondering. I told the police about that too but they dismissed it. Nobody, they said, would carry a body all that way from the road. But what’s wrong with the body walking there?” Smith stares moodily through the car window at the hilly landscape, slipping by. “He was grooming me to be his disciple. He had had the kicks with Myra and he wanted to extend his gang. We could both watch and learn. It would have been my turn next to prove myself. . .” He has thought long and often about the evil that tried to ensnare him. “You know, when Ian Brady killed he just didn’t destroy one life. Just think of all the generations that might have followed his

victims their children, their grandchildren. I feel so terribly sorry for the families. I know just what they must have gone through because my own family is so important to me. I get upset when I think about the Reade family. I knew them, they lived next door but one and Pauline was one of the kids I used to go around with...” We are returning to the valley over Woodhead,

over the

Pennine plateau, stretching out, north-easterly, to Saddleworth Moor, its rise of tombstone-like rocks standing clearly

against the sky. David Smith shivers again at its mention. “That place gives me the creeps. Up there you have this funny feeling that there is no-one, nothing, but you, the earth and the sky. And then, in the wind, you can hear voices...” Voices, I wondered, from hell?

207

A LOST SOUL.

x= $ —

a:f*

/

ore Re oy Ne Qh pe e

aE Ons aE zET On =—

IT looks, from the outside, just like any other council house, just one of the uniform homes in the red-brick row, apart from the huge bush in the front garden, nurtured by Pennine moorland peat, gathered a long time ago. But no-one lives, now, at the end of the terrace, 16 Wardle Brook

Avenue, Hattersley. It is, they say, haunted by. the cries, the screams of children. With the same curse as Saddleworth Moor. The house is unoccupied now, used in the daytime as an office by the contractor’s men who are installing central heating for the overspill families on the estate. It has not hada tenant for several months since Irishman, Brian Dunne, his

wife Margaret and their three young children packed up and left, the last of a succession of occupants unable to settle in that house of death. It had, they said, suffered from incurable dampness, the only one in the row affected, as if, said a

disturbed Mr. Dunne, the walls were crying. The Dunnes,

and other tenants before them,

swear

to

having seen a figure lying on a bed. And then there are the screams, so terrible that one family asked a priest to bless the house, another organised a petition, demanding its demolition. I am reminded of the screams of children on Saddleworth Moor, “on dark, wild, winter nights,” and of the ghosts

of those poor children from another time, another century. And of another legend of the Moor. Sometimes, say the local history books, the spectre of a woman, dressed in grey, had been seen through the cold, swirling mist, where the screams had been heard. The spirit of a lost soul. I remember then, the words of Myra Hindley, in prison grey, craving release: “My spirit has left me and is hovering restlessly on the other side of the wall... ” She, too, lost her soul on Saddleworth Moor. POSTSCRIPT:

On Friday March 14th 1986, a letter arrived at the B.B.C. in

London from a hospital patient agreeing to meet Ann West who, in her determination to keep Myra Hindley behind bars, had written to him. The sender was lan Brady.

208

a \

PTR

VSS CARDS BONE

el REECE TE

SLC

LES

eine N MS

™ “The devil’s children

Ge

always_have_. devil’s work

=

the ...” So

says one of the legends of a brooding, forbidding moor where, it is said, the haunting screams of _ longdead _ children, victims of the devil's

children, are heard on wild dark winter nights. This was the place chosen by lan Brady and Myra Hindley to perform the final, ghastly rituals of crimes which shook all Bri- Je tain. They were both jailed for life on May 6, 1966. Devil's Disciples follows the long, frightening path of the Moors Mur-

derers. Should they ever be freed? Judge

|

for yourself.

PGB

ISBN

2 NET

+001.95

0-85079-15b-1

|

E "780850" 791563

00195

BY ROBERT WILSON

The shocking facts about the crimes | of the century

|AN EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS PUBLICATIO)S |