One of Your Own (45 page)

Myra still hoped to be reunited with Ian, writing to her mother: ‘I’ve been in prison for three years now, Mam, and I haven’t seen Neddy for two and a half of them, which I think is awful, thinking how many other prisoners have been granted this privilege.’
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In Durham, following the refusal of his petition to see her, Ian’s anger exploded. He flung scalding tea at fellow child-murderer Raymond Morris, which resulted in the loss of 28 days’ privileges, including cigarettes. He then went on hunger strike, and there followed further fights with Morris. In a calmer period, Ian declared, ‘I realised that, in a way, I was attacking myself. I could see a reflection of me in the Cannock Chase killer.’
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When the maximum-security status of Holloway’s E Wing was relaxed in autumn 1969, more prisoners arrived on the wing, although there were never more than 20 inmates at a time. Myra was nervous of the influx but worked quietly in the tapestry room and had her meals in her cell. She wrote to Longford that November: ‘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.’
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She began thinking about Catholicism and spoke to the prison chaplain, Father William Kahle, whose parents had emigrated to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. He recalls, ‘I was asked to see her because I was a Roman Catholic and a German with a lot of knowledge of a cruel people.’
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Dorothy Wing, Holloway’s governor since 1967, strongly supported Myra’s renewed interest in religion, feeling that she would either kill herself or become irreparably hardened to prison life otherwise. Wing bonded with Myra over a passion for nineteenth-century poetry. She believed in giving prisoners as much freedom as possible and allowed them to furnish their cells as they wished. Encouraged by Wing, Myra told Father William that she would like to attend Mass and wrote to Longford: ‘I’m still desperately trying to make my peace with God and to prove myself worthy of being a Christian . . .’
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Her friend Carole told her that a burst of religious fervour would boost her parole chances; Ian wrote that he hoped she wouldn’t be disillusioned by the process.

Their relationship was under strain, not only from their separation and her leanings towards Catholicism, but also from the thinly veiled threats in his letters concerning the ‘scenic’ photographs. An issue ever since their imprisonment, their desperation to retrieve the photographs first surfaced in Myra’s letters to her mother in June 1966. She wrote that Fitzpatrick, their solicitor, had a list of photographs to send on when he managed to reclaim them. Three months later she wrote again to her mother, asking her to phone Fitzpatrick to ensure the photographs were returned. A year later, she complained that their solicitor was still trying to get the photographs – and tapes – sent back and had written to the Director of Public Prosecutions. In August 1968, Fitzpatrick finally succeeded in gaining possession of the photographs, negatives, slides and tartan album and passed them on to Nellie. The police took copies of everything before handing it back.

Although there was a great quantity of material, Myra asked her mother to have three specific slides developed and sent on to Ian. A week later, she wrote again about the slides, but Nellie hadn’t sent them, her suspicions roused by the insistent tone of Myra’s requests. Fitzpatrick informed Myra and Ian that he had been offered a large fee for the tartan album from the press; Myra was against the publicity that would arise from the sale, while Ian suggested that the money might prove useful upon her release. He was unconcerned about the album – the photographs that held special significance were the three slides of Myra that he knew Nellie had. But he grew agitated when the slides didn’t arrive. By the end of 1969, Myra wrote to her mother: ‘He keeps asking why he hasn’t received them yet. In his last letter he said he’ll have to send someone round for them . . .’
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The photographs still occupied Myra’s thoughts at the beginning of the year. She wrote to her mother, demanding to know why they hadn’t been sent, adding that she was having to ward off Ian’s threats. Eventually, Nellie did send the slides, but Ian continued to pester Myra for other photographs. Months later she admitted to her mother that she was sick of the whole thing and just wanted them all sent on to Ian, telling Nellie not to make things difficult for her, adding that she was ‘sorry (in more ways than one) to have to mention the slides and photos yet again’.
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But still Nellie didn’t send the rest of the collection: her suspicions remained strong enough for her to take a rare stance against her daughter.

In January 1970, Myra attended Mass for the first time since she’d been a teenager and wrote to 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 onto 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.’
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She reassured Ian that she hadn’t revealed anything of substance in her confession. He became openly scornful of her return to the Church, asking, ‘What colour hair-shirt are you wearing?’
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She reflected, ‘Ian, like so many other people, considered my returning to the Church simply as a means of “working my ticket” . . . I realise it is something I will always have to contend with, but as long as God knows, it matters little what anyone else thinks.’
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That summer Myra sank into a deep depression as her last birthday in her twenties approached. She grew nostalgic, listening to the music she and Ian loved, and pressed a fellow Mancunian inmate to ask relatives for photographs of the house on Wardle Brook Avenue. When they arrived, she grew maudlin, appalled at the neglected state of the house, which the council were finding difficult to rent out. To lift her spirits, she began searching for a new crush. Her friend Carole told her about a new officer, small and slim, with short, dark hair. Tricia Cairns was the officer in question; like Myra, she had been brought up in Gorton. During the months of the Moors investigation and trial, she had been a Carmelite nun in Salford but left the convent following a crisis of faith and joined the Prison Service, working in Bullwood Hall, where she met her partner, a fellow prison officer, before they were transferred to Holloway. Due to a shortage of staff accommodation at Holloway, they lived in a subsidised flat in Earls Court. Myra enlisted Carole’s help in writing a letter to Tricia; her friend recalls a few lines: ‘Is it too much to hope that one day we may sit in the sunshine together enjoying a glass of wine . . . it gives me hope just being able to see you, and when you’re not on duty the day drags by . . .’
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On Myra’s 29th birthday, Tricia presented her with a Rachmaninov record and their affair began; she remained part of Myra’s life until the end. Discovering that Tricia hailed from Gorton cemented the relationship between them. Carole loitered outside Myra’s door to allow the two women to conduct their relationship in private, while Myra’s then favourite song, ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’, played. If anyone approached, Carole started singing ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ loudly; she also wrote poems, which Myra then handed to her lover, pretending they were her own.

Myra’s love for Ian had died. Not wanting to reply to his letters any more, she asked Carole to write, pretending to be her; the ruse worked. The strain of wanting to cut the ties with Ian and conducting a secret affair with a prison officer told on her own mental health, and in December 1970 she wrote to Longford that she was having difficulty ‘keeping my head above the waterline . . . I have rampant “gate fever” . . . my spirit has left me and is hovering restlessly on the other side of the wall.’
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Her friends rallied round, among them Dr Rachel Pinney, a Quaker doctor in her sixties who had lived in a commune and was serving time for kidnapping a fourteen-year-old boy whom she had judged at risk from his troubled mother. She recalled how her friendship with Myra began: ‘Myra was sitting in the corridor with her head in her hands. I went up to her and said, “I’m your friend, do you mind if I talk to you?” She said, “No, of course not. I wish you had approached me the last time you were here. I never speak to people first in case they spit at me.” So then we sat and talked for half an hour.’
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All the women in Myra’s circle believed she had acted under the spell of a wicked man; after her release, Rachel set about trying to prove Myra’s innocence by spending a year in Manchester, researching a book about her until Myra got word to her to stop. The law then forbade ex-prisoners from writing to their old inmates, but Rachel maintained contact with Myra through Honor Butlin, a wealthy Quaker widow who often visited Myra and sent her bouquets. It was Rachel who brought Myra back into touch with her paternal grandmother, Nana Hindley, who visited her in Holloway. By then, Myra’s mother had been reconciled with Maureen, who recalled, ‘It was just as if we’d never been parted. After all, your mum’s your mum! We talked about everything.’
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She moved in with Nellie and Bill but lost custody of her sons to Dave, who was working hard at building a new life for himself and his children. He lived with his cancer-ridden father but found lasting happiness with a feisty, kind-hearted teenager named Mary, the daughter of his father’s best friend.

Although Myra wanted nothing to do with Maureen, her thoughts dwelled increasingly on the past; she wrote to her cousin Glenys about Michael Higgins and places she had known in Gorton. Glenys was aware of the relationship with Tricia and acted as a go-between for the two women. Myra sent long coded letters to Tricia via Glenys; when Carole left Holloway in early 1971, Glenys then forwarded the letters on to her. Tricia visited Carole’s flat to decipher the letters away from the home she shared with her partner. The same process worked in reverse.
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Pat Ali, an illiterate prisoner, acted as a local messenger between Myra and Tricia but complained about them to a board of visiting magistrates. She was disbelieved and lost six months’ remission for ‘malicious allegations’. Despite the intensity of their relationship, neither Myra nor Tricia were faithful; both had several lovers. After falling for Tricia, Myra’s weight dropped from twelve stone to eight, largely due to the cigarettes she bought in order to bribe fellow inmates to pass messages to Tricia. She also worried about eating the prison food, which was often contaminated with urine from the prisoners who prepared it.

When Carole left Holloway, Myra was forced to write to Ian herself again. He sent her a coded message to ask if she wanted to end their relationship. Myra later claimed that she found it difficult to do so because she didn’t want him to feel alone.
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She recalled, ‘He wrote back to me and said he had waited for my letter to arrive so he would know where his fate lay, because if my answer had been yes, that I wanted to finish with him, he would do what he had originally planned.’
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Hinting that her feelings for him had changed nonetheless, she sent him a poem about the maturation of love by Wordsworth.

Ian continued to write to Myra every week following his transfer from Durham to Albany and then to Parkhurst, where he learned Braille and transcribed books for the blind. But on 13 March 1972, Myra wrote to Longford that she had found the courage to end the relationship after all: ‘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.’
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Myra told Ian not to bother writing again; she would simply pass any future letters on to the prison governor. As a final gesture, Ian returned a bookmark that Myra had given him the previous Christmas via the prison staff. Myra’s mother was so relieved by the end of the relationship that she immediately dispatched five of Ian’s sought-after photographs to him. When Myra wrote again to Longford, she used a phrase that she would resurrect in future prose: ‘. . . 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 . . . 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 . . . had it not been for him, I would never have been involved in any of the things that brought me to prison . . .’
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Myra’s friendship with Lord Longford was made public in 1972. He was lambasted that same year for his anti-pornography campaign, which saw him dubbed ‘Lord Porn’ by the tabloids. The juxtaposition of the two – his call for censorship and his insistence that Myra was a changed woman – brought criticism and ridicule upon him. Father William, who had left Holloway and was living in Belgium, made a prophetic comment: ‘Lord Longford said to me when he had seen Myra on one occasion, “Has she not changed a great deal? Hasn’t her personality changed?” I told him, “I don’t think so” . . . I must stress that the publicity will not do Myra any good and will only be worse for her, possibly set her release date back many years.’
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Lesley Ann Downey’s mother was sickened by Longford’s comments; her revulsion only increased after meeting Myra’s champion at his Sidgwick & Jackson offices. Her fury spread like flame in the interviews she gave to counteract the publicity heaped upon Longford, whom she called a ‘most dangerous and woolly minded buffoon’.
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