One of Your Own (16 page)

Towards the end of this litany of violence, she suddenly comments, ‘I must be totally honest and say he wasn’t always cruel and sadistic towards me . . .’, then recounts the walks, picnics and days out that she and Ian had enjoyed together.
¹⁵
The abrupt change in tone jars, and undermines everything that has gone before. Unsurprisingly, Ian denies Myra’s claims; he admits only to having struck her twice, and recalls just one instance when his jealousy almost erupted in violence, but not towards her: ‘We had come out of a cinema and gone for a late-night drink in a town centre bar in Manchester. As we were drinking, a group of five or six men came in together and sat at right-angles to us. The one nearest kept staring at M[yra] with a stupid grin on his face. I gave him a few warning glances, but he continued . . . Casually, I slipped my hand into my overcoat pocket and, with thumb and forefinger, opened the lock-back knife I always carried, made entirely of stainless steel, devoid of ornament and with the functional purity of scalpel. I glanced at the bottles on the table in front of me, selecting which ones to choose as additional weapons. I felt marvellous, delighted and ready to hack the halfwits. I turned towards them. “Who the fuck are you staring at? You looking for trouble?” Words to that effect. I waited for the first move and intended to deal with the starer first . . . Suddenly, apologies were coming from the men, including the starer. I felt a mixture of disappointment and relief.’
¹⁶
Myra also remembered the incident, admitting, ‘Ian started shouting and offering to take them all on. I was secretly pleased.’
¹⁷

Aware that her failure to go to the police about the murder plot was one of many insurmountable hurdles she faced in changing public opinion, Myra attempted one explanation in an open letter to
The Guardian
: ‘I knew by the time he began talking about the perfect murder that I was going to help him, that I had very little choice. Again, even if I went to the police there was no proof, only my word against his. And then he would know what I’d done if the police had told him I’d made these allegations against him, and although I knew he wasn’t stupid enough to do anything to draw attention to himself, I also knew that he would bide his time while he thought of what to do and how to do it without raising suspicion. I would have had to leave my job, which wasn’t a problem; I could go away and lose myself somewhere, but how could I possibly tell my family all that had happened and been said by him without terrifying them? They couldn’t move; a family just can’t uproot itself and move somewhere and find places to live, jobs, etc. and still live in fear, looking over their shoulders all the time. I knew I was trapped and would have to do what he wanted of me.’
¹⁸

She gave an alternative, more prosaic answer in an interview with detectives in the 1980s: ‘It was out of fear in the beginning and after that just to remain safe, and hoping that between murders he would display affection and never fancied anybody else.’
¹⁹
More frankly, she told a close friend, ‘I simply could not envisage life without him any more . . . It was, at best, a tenuous, unsettled relationship, but I cannot deny that I didn’t prefer it to an existence from which he was absent.’
²⁰

Ian offered his own explanation in a letter to Jack Straw, then Home Secretary: ‘Myra Hindley and I once loved each other. We were a unified force, not two conflicting entities. The relationship was not based on the delusional concept of
folie à deux
, but on a conscious/subconscious emotional and psychological affinity. She regarded periodic homicides as rituals . . . marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer. As the records show, before we met my criminal activities had been primarily mercenary. Afterwards, a duality of motivation developed. Existential philosophy melded with the spirituality of death and became predominant.’
²¹
He confided more forthrightly in journalist Fred Harrison, stating that what happened between himself and Myra was ‘a meshing into one . . . We didn’t need to speak. Just a gesture – something had got to be done, something would happen. I’d just look, or just make a gesture with my hand and the thing would happen. It was so close, we knew exactly what was in each other’s minds. We were one mind.’
²²
And despite her efforts to distance herself from Ian, unwittingly, Myra echoed his words in prison therapy sessions: ‘We were of one mind, not troubled by our consciences.’
²³

1963 was the summer of the Beatles. Their first single, ‘Love Me Do’ – which prompted one music executive to enquire upon initial hearing, ‘Is it Spike Milligan in disguise?’ – reached number seventeen in the hit parade of October 1962.
²⁴
Five months later, they topped the charts with ‘Please Please Me’ and that summer Britain was caught between twin obsessions: Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler, and Beatlemania.

Seventeen-year-old Maureen Hindley was fanatical about the Beatles; she would let out an ear-piercing shriek at any mention of the band. After leaving school, she worked in a bewildering succession of low-paid jobs until Myra secured her a position at Millwards as a filing clerk, swearing her to secrecy over the obvious relationship with Ian. Despite working with her sister’s boyfriend and seeing him almost every night at Bannock Street, talkative Maureen barely managed to elicit more than a curt nod from Ian. But she had noticed a change in Myra: ‘She stopped going to church. She said she didn’t believe in it. She didn’t believe in marriage. She said she hated babies and children and hated people. She never used to keep things under lock and key, but she started after she met Brady. She kept books, her tape recorder, all her tape recordings and all her clothing locked up in the wardrobe.’
²⁵
Gran seemed resigned to the changes in her household; increasingly frail, there was little she could do about anything that concerned her granddaughter. The neighbours complained angrily about Ravel’s
Boléro
thumping through the walls – Ian and Myra played it incessantly – but Gran could only offer an apology on her tenants’ behalf and left it to Maureen to question their taste in music.

Among Maureen’s wide circle of friends was 16-year-old Pauline Reade. In Gorton’s tightly packed network of streets, invisible threads bound Pauline loosely to her murderers. She attended primary and secondary school with Maureen and had briefly dated Maureen’s boyfriend, David Smith, who lived with his father at 13 Wiles Street, next door but one to the Reade home at 9 Wiles Street, a ‘dog-leg’ from the Hindleys on Eaton Street. Pauline worshipped at St Francis’ Monastery and knew Myra, who used to walk to work with Pauline’s mother, Joan. Amos Reade, Pauline’s father, was a regular customer in the Steelie, where he sometimes drank with Bob Hindley.

Pauline was a trainee baker at Sharples on Gorton’s shopping thoroughfare, Cross Lane. She worked alongside her father, rising with him at the crack of dawn, and was delighted when her photograph appeared in a Christmas 1962 issue of the
Gorton Reporter
; using her baking skills, she was one of three winners in a Christmas cake competition. Exceptionally pretty and slim, with dark hair and an effervescent light in her blue eyes, Pauline was beginning to come out of her shell a little. She enjoyed a holiday at Butlins Filey in 1961, loved dancing – proudly accompanying her dad to a works dinner dance in Tottenham in early July – and composed poems and songs. Beneath the budgie’s cage in the Reades’ front room was a piano; Amos could play and Pauline had lessons from a neighbour. She got along well with her shy brother Paul (her senior by one year) and her friends were the girls she had known all her life, including Barbara Jepson, sister of Myra’s friend Pat. She was closest to Pat Cummings of Benster Street, and the two girls often conferred on their outfits before attending dances, keen to ensure they dressed alike. Pat remembers Pauline as ‘very quiet. When she came to our house, she would ask me to walk her home if it was dusk. She was very frightened. She was not the sort to get into a car with a stranger.’
²⁶

On Friday, 12 July 1963, Ian and Myra decided to commit their perfect murder.

The sun had shone all day and the early evening air was warm. When Pauline finished work at the bakery, she was alone; her father had already gone home for a quick nap before heading to the Steelie for a pint. She called on her friend Linda Bradshaw in Bannock Street to ask if she’d like to go with her to the dance that night at the British Railways Social Club in Cornwall Street. Although the club was only half a mile from home, Linda’s mother refused to allow her to go because alcohol was available there. Pauline tried Pat Garvey next; the two of them had gone to a dance the previous week wearing identical white skirts from C&A. But Pat wasn’t allowed either, for the same reason. Pauline trailed home and asked her mother if she could persuade one of her other friends’ mothers to agree, otherwise she would have to go alone.

In Bannock Street, Ian and Myra arrived home from Millwards on the Tiger Cub and ran through their meticulously thought-out plans for the evening.
²⁷
Myra still hadn’t qualified as a driver, although Harold Rainger, a local driving instructor, gave her lessons and she drove about regularly in Ben Boyce’s black Ford Prefect van since he’d bought himself a new vehicle; she had arranged to help Ben pick up his broken Dormobile later that night. Myra would drive Ben’s old van around the streets of Gorton until she found a potential victim, with Ian following behind on the Tiger Cub. If Ian agreed with her choice, he would indicate by flashing the headlamps on his motorbike and they would then drive up to the moor on the pretext of needing to find a lost glove, offering the victim a set of records as a reward.
²⁸
Everything was premeditated, nothing left to chance. ‘He’d told me what to wear and had counted the buttons on my coat,’ Myra wrote later. ‘He’d counted the buttons on his coat and jacket and shirt and made a list of everything . . . He was so methodical and precise, he thought of everything, every possibility, absolutely everything.’
²⁹

While Myra and Ian ate dinner, in her bedroom on nearby Wiles Street Pauline dressed carefully for the dance. With her wages from her apprenticeship at the bakery, she had recently bought a ‘Twist’ frock – a pink shift dress with a square neck and a hemline that finished just above the knee. She added new white court shoes whose gold lettering gleamed on the insoles as she slipped them on, white gloves bought from Gorton market and only worn once before, and then a light-fitting powder-blue ‘duster’ coat. After adding 10s to her pocket, she went downstairs. Her mother lent her a locket, fastening the clasp at the base of Pauline’s neck, beneath her dark hair. At half-past seven, Pauline left home. Amos had just arrived from the pub, and Joan served him fish and chips before dashing out to catch up with her daughter; their son, Paul, had gone to the cinema with friends for the evening.

Pauline and her mother called first on Barbara Jepson on Taylor Street, but Mrs Jepson still wouldn’t let Barbara go to the dance. They tried Linda Bradshaw next, on Bannock Street, where, just a few doors away, Ian and Myra were preparing themselves for the night ahead. Pauline made a fuss of the Bradshaw twins in their pram while her mother tried valiantly to convince Linda’s mother to relent, but Mrs Bradshaw couldn’t be swayed. As they left Bannock Street, Pauline insisted that she was bound to know people at the dance once she got there, and although Joan Reade hated the idea of allowing her daughter to go alone, she trusted her to be sensible and come home on time. A quick peck on her mother’s cheek and Pauline was gone, a quick, fragile figure in her pastel-coloured clothes, disappearing in the slanting copper light of evening.

A few minutes later, Myra climbed into the van parked on Bannock Street and switched on the ignition, as Ian started up the Tiger Cub. They drove slowly down Taylor Street and turned right into Gorton Lane. The Plaza cinema, where Myra had glimpsed the ghost of Michael Higgins, shrank in her wing mirrors as the van trundled past Casson Street rec. Myra’s old primary school loomed on the right, and she saw a small girl walking alone towards them on the pavement. She slowed the van and squinted at the child. She recognised her: eight-year-old Marie Ruck lived with her parents and brother Kevin next door but one to Myra’s mum on Eaton Street. Myra put her foot down on the accelerator; the risk was too great. She told Ian the same thing when he indicated sharply for her to stop and explain why she hadn’t picked up the little girl. He accepted it and told her to drive down Froxmer Street towards the railway line and Ashton Old Road.
³⁰

Pauline passed the Hindley home on Eaton Street, crossed the road and took a shortcut through the backyard of the Shakespeare, where the warm smell of beer and Woodbines wafted from the air vents, and turned down Gorton Lane.

Pat Cummings couldn’t believe that her best friend Pauline, always so reserved until she knew someone well, would dare go to the Railways Social Club dance alone. She called for another friend, Dorothy Slater, and the two girls set off to spy on Pauline, intending to catch up with her near the club. They hid on the croft behind Benster Street to watch for her and were amazed when she walked by, her pale-blue duster coat swinging around her. It was a little after eight o’clock. They trailed her along Gorton Lane, the black dust motes of the foundry opposite swirling in the sunlit draught of a vanished car. Pauline turned down Froxmer Street, heading for the long stretch of Cornwall Street. The girls waited until she was almost at the end of Froxmer Street, then dashed across the croft to where it opened onto Railway Street, expecting to meet up with Pauline there.