One of Your Own (43 page)

On the morning of Friday, 6 May 1966, Myra tried to compose a letter to her mother. She knew that the day ahead would determine the rest of her life: ‘Dear Mam . . . I don’t know what the verdict will be yet, but I do know that I will be convicted of something, like harbouring Ian after he and Smith killed Evans. Once you know what the verdicts and sentences are you must not let them affect your life as they will mine. I’ve just started crying and don’t want anyone to see me . . .’
⁵⁶

In Chester, the van carrying the two accused swept through the vast crowds and blinding flash of camera guns to the back of the courthouse. Myra climbed the stone steps to the dock, and Fenton Atkinson finished his summing up by referring to her as being ‘very closely in Brady’s confidence . . . Brady was quite dependent on her for transport.’
⁵⁷
He described the Downey case as the ‘really crucial’ one against her and told the jury that if they were convinced she was guilty in that instance, then they might think similarly about the Kilbride case, and thus conclude that she was a willing participant in the Evans murder. Nonetheless, he advised, ‘The first thing to remember in considering Hindley is this: that a great deal of the evidence against Brady is not evidence against her; and in particular Brady’s statement to Smith about killing people and burying them on the moors. That is something said behind her back and that is not evidence against her. Anything that Brady may have said to the police by way of an apparent admission is not evidence against her. The plan to dispose of Evans’s body is only evidence if you think that from the whole of the evidence she must have seen it and known its contents. It is very important to remember this . . .’ He paused: ‘There it is. You have listened long and very patiently to all the evidence in the case and you must now go and consider your verdict.’
⁵⁸

At twenty to three, the jury retired. Two and a half hours later, they filed back into the courtroom and took their seats. Myra and Ian stood side by side in the dock, staring resolutely ahead. The clerk asked the foreman of the jury to stand and give their verdict: Ian Brady was found guilty of all three murders; Myra Hindley was found guilty of the murder of Edward Evans, guilty of the murder of Lesley Ann Downey, not guilty of the murder of John Kilbride, but guilty of the charge that she ‘well knowing that Ian Brady had murdered John Kilbride did receive, comfort, harbour, assist and maintain the said Ian Brady’.
⁵⁹

Myra’s hands tightened on the wooden edge of the dock.

‘Are those the verdicts of you all?’ asked the clerk, to which the foreman responded, ‘Yes, my Lord.’
⁶⁰

‘Call upon them,’ Fenton Atkinson declared.

The clerk proclaimed: ‘Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, you have been convicted of a felony on the verdict of the jury. Have you anything to say why the court should not pass sentence upon you according to law? Have you, Ian Brady?’
⁶¹

Ian responded, ‘No – except the revolvers were bought in July 1964.’
⁶²

‘And you, Myra Hindley?’
⁶³

Myra shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly.

The judge looked down at them. ‘Ian Brady, these were three calculated, cruel, cold-blooded murders. In your case, I pass the only sentence the law now allows, which is three concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. Put him down.’
⁶⁴

Ian was led from the dock without a glance at Myra, whose grip remained taut on the wooden frame. A feeling of numbness seeped through her, though when she’d heard Ian sentenced to life, ‘I prayed that I would get the same because the world outside meant nothing to me as long as he wasn’t in it . . .’
⁶⁵

The judge turned to her: ‘In your case, Hindley, you have been found guilty of two equally horrible murders and, in the third, as an accessory after the fact. On the two murders, the sentence is two concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, and on the charge of being an accessory after the fact to the death of John Kilbride a concurrent sentence of seven years’ imprisonment.’ He gave a brief nod: ‘Put her down.’
⁶⁶

Myra swayed forward and the female prison officer sitting behind her grasped her arm, steadying her. Catching sight of Myra’s ashen face, one observer commented: ‘. . . we were reminded that here, after all, was a woman’.
⁶⁷
The
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
noted: ‘Hindley, still sucking on a mint as sentence upon her was passed, turned and was escorted quickly from the dock. The click-click of her high-heeled shoes could be heard on the steps as she was taken down to the cells.’
⁶⁸

A crowd of over 250 people milled in the twilight outside the court. Circled around them were the media, boom and camera held high, waiting for the couple to emerge. The anger surrounding Chester Castle that evening was palpable; Pamela Hansford Johnson described the mood: ‘When the Moors trial ended, we did feel a lack of catharsis: something violent should have happened to put an end to violence. Throughout,
we were missing the shadow of the rope
.’
⁶⁹

MP Sydney Silverman’s Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act had been passed on the day of Myra Hindley’s arrest. Since then, John Kilbride’s aunt and uncle, Elsie and Frank Doran, had organised a petition to reinstate it for child murder and had sent more than 10,000 signatures to the Home Secretary. Lesley Ann Downey’s uncle stood as a pro-hanging candidate in the general election against Sydney Silverman and polled 5,000 votes; he also urged Emlyn Williams to make his next book a call for the return of hanging. Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Benfield felt that Myra and Ian might have said more had that terrible threat still been in place: ‘There was no question of capital punishment in the Moors case. Brady and Hindley were not fools, so why should they admit any more? If they did, there might be no possibility of release in the future.’
⁷⁰

Francis Wyndham, writing in the
Sunday Times
, declared that what was missing was not the rope but the souls of Brady and Hindley themselves: ‘This “sensational” trial seemed to have a hollow centre, where the accused should have been. It was almost as though they were being tried by proxy, ghostly presences in an empty dock, as dead as their victims on the moors.’
⁷¹

In the corridor below the courtroom, Myra and Ian met briefly in the presence of their solicitor. Myra recalled, ‘The first thing I asked [Ian] was not to kill himself, as he’d said he would do.’
⁷²
Within minutes, guards stepped up and led them separately to the prison van, where they remained in different compartments. It was dark as the van swept out of the yard behind Chester Castle, but the crowds had waited for that moment and Myra could feel fists pounding the sides of the vehicle and hear the screams and jeers. Blinding lights flashed outside the tinted windows as the van veered away, taking her back to Risley for one night before she was driven south, hundreds of miles from the man with whom her name would be forever linked, towards the forbidding gates of Holloway Prison.

In Hattersley, 16 Wardle Brook Avenue lay in pitch darkness, every one of its windows shattered, the curtains billowing in the winds that came down from the moor to blow through the still and silent house.

 

‘My first impression of London was of trees . . . mercifully I didn’t see the yawning gates of Holloway until we were locked inside them.’
¹
Myra’s arrival at Britain’s largest prison for women left her bewildered. Built in north London in 1852, Holloway was home to half the country’s 950 female inmates. Myra was told to strip and bathe under guard and her hair and pubic hair were inspected for lice, which ‘appalled and affronted’ her, since she had already endured the process in Risley.
²
The prison uniform – blue shirt, grey skirt and thick black shoes – was handed to her, and she was shown into the hospital clinic, where the elderly female doctor instructed her to take her underwear off for a VD test. Myra burst into tears, insisting that she had only had one sexual partner (which wasn’t true) and that she’d never heard of VD. After dressing again, she was provided with bedding, medicated soap and the tin of green tooth powder that was used by inmates instead of toothpaste. Prisoner 964055 was then taken to her cell in the hospital wing, C Wing, where she was held until it was deemed safe to move her into the prison proper.

Myra was a ‘nonce’, a sex offender (the term literally means ‘nothing’). Shortly after her arrival on D wing, the whispering began: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, suffer the little children to come unto me . . .’ Then the attacks: she was struck with a broom by one prisoner cleaning the stairs, while a group of ten women asked her to join them for a game of cards, then beat her badly before hurling her on the wire mesh that hung between each landing. She didn’t fight back and refused to name her attackers, asking instead to be put on solitary confinement, Rule 43. The doctor and an assistant governor advised her to stick it out because she faced a long stretch inside. An officer was temporarily assigned to escort her whenever she left her cell.

A week after arriving in prison, Myra appealed against her conviction on the grounds that it had been detrimental to have been tried with Ian. In October,
The Times
discussed the failure of the appeal. A report dated 21 September 1966 demonstrated that the Attorney General found ‘eleven points of similarity in each of these cases . . . a formidable common pattern of killing’ and that Myra ‘exhibited good general health, good general intelligence, above average powers of expression, and gave no indication either of mental or psychopathic disorder or that there was any diminution in her responsibility for her actions.’
³
The Lord Chief Justice stated that Ian sought at all times to exonerate her and therefore, on that basis, a joint trial had proved beneficial.

She remained in close contact with Ian, who was placed on Rule 43 after being scalded by another prisoner. His cell in Durham was in E Wing, where he ate his meals alone and took walks in the yard with three guards while the other prisoners were locked in their cells. He spent his time reading, absorbing all the classical works in the prison library, choosing
War and Peace
on his first visit. He shared his cell with a mouse, feeding it crumbs from his own meals and on one occasion left it half a chip. He wrote to inform Myra that, much to his surprise, the mouse had eaten that too. A month passed and he received a letter from his mother, telling him that his stepfather was dead. At the age of 48, Patrick Brady had collapsed and died in the street. Ian remained close to Peggy and his foster family in Glasgow, who refused to talk to the press.

Myra’s lengthy letters to Ian were filled with private jokes and references. One read: ‘Dearest Ian, hello my little hairy Girklechin. It was with profound relief I received your letter today . . . It was a lovely, soothing, nostalgic letter which comforted me almost as much as if you were here yourself. I had a beautifully tender dream about you last night and awoke feeling safe and secure, thinking I was in the harbour of your arms . . . I pictured your face and said your name to myself over and over again and imagined the arms of the chair I was clenching to be your hands, lovely strong “insurance” hands (remember?). Freedom without you means nothing. I’ve got one interest in life and that’s you. We had six short but precious years together, six years of memories to sustain us until we’re together again, to make dreams realities.’
⁴
In another she referred to the collective name by which the rest of the world knew them: ‘I didn’t murder any moors, did you?’
⁵
They both studied O level German; Ian wrote to congratulate her when she passed with an A grade.

‘I still had feelings for him as I began my sentence,’ Myra declared. ‘I was prepared to die for him and that strength of emotion doesn’t go away easily.’
⁶
At Ian’s suggestion, she asked her mother to take out an insurance policy for her at half a crown a week. He encouraged her to believe that she would one day be released. Nellie visited as often as she could. At the end of 1966, she divorced Myra’s father and married Bill Moulton. Bob Hindley never visited Myra, who recalled, ‘It devastated him that his daughter could possibly have done the things I did and he disowned me.’
⁷
But she wrote weekly to her mother, including a letter in bold capitals for Gran, who had initially been told that Myra had moved to Scotland. When she learned the truth, she showered Myra with knitted clothes to demonstrate that nothing had changed between them.

Maureen read in the press about one of the attacks on Myra and wrote to her but received no reply. She and Dave were parents to a son, Paul Anthony, one of the few joys in their life: it was impossible for Dave to find work – when he managed to secure a job in a factory, the other employees threatened to walk out unless he was sacked. Every day brought hate mail, and Maureen recalled later how she would open the letters and scream with horror. Not long after the trial, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, her partner Alan West and another man called at Underwood Court one evening. A violent fight ensued between them. Ann recalled, ‘I beat Maureen Smith’s head against the wall and screamed incoherently at her. I tore at her and for a moment it was as if I had her foul sister in my hands . . .’
⁸
The next day the police called on the Wests, carrying a bag filled with Maureen’s hair. No action was taken, but the police warned them not to make any further calls.