One of Your Own (57 page)

Following the loss of the two men who had provided her with staunch public and private support, Myra became reclusive, shuffling out of her room only to make herself a cup of tea or receive one of her few visitors. Bridget Astor recalls: ‘I saw her a couple of times after David died. She definitely wasn’t well. She smoked a lot and gained a great deal of weight and then lost it again . . . She wasn’t herself any more.’
³⁷
In May 2002, the House of Lords ruled that the Home Secretary should not have the power to increase tariffs such as hers. ‘Edward Fitzgerald fought for Myra so eloquently that the Law Lords had no choice but to agree with every word he said on her behalf,’ Andrew McCooey remembers. ‘He also represented Mary Bell and Maxine Carr, so he’s no stranger to female notoriety. He always says that women are not forgiven for their crimes. Myra knew that if the ruling was upheld – a decision was due within months – she would be free. Of course, David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary then, directed Greater Manchester Police to come up with fresh charges to keep her imprisoned.’
³⁸

In autumn, Myra conducted an interview in her cell with crime writer Kate Kray. She spoke of her wish not to die in prison, then added, ‘Over the years I wished many times that I had been hanged. It would have solved a lot of problems – for everybody . . .’
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Weeks later, she was admitted to hospital with unstable angina, then returned to prison, where she caught a cold that left her struggling to breathe. She was habitually on a cocktail of medication for angina, asthma, bronchitis, osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, raised cholesterol, insomnia, depression, menopausal symptoms and psychological problems; on 10 November she was also given antibiotics for a chest infection. Two days later, on the evening of 12 November, she was admitted to Ward G2 of West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds.

Barely able to breathe, she asked doctors not to resuscitate her in the event of cardiac or respiratory failure. She was given morphine as her condition deteriorated. On the morning of 16 November 2002, she began pulling at her oxygen mask and grew increasingly distressed. Nurses had to restrain her as she fought against them, finding it too painful to lie down. She drifted in and out of consciousness as Father Michael administered the last rites. Sister Bridget, a nun to whom Myra had grown close, held her hand. Then she seemed to rally, ‘and we spoke about general things’, Father Michael recalls, ‘and she mentioned her mother in passing before she closed her eyes again’.
⁴⁰

At 4.55 p.m., Myra Hindley died in hospital of bronchial pneumonia. ‘She slipped quietly from a world still raging against her,’ Father Michael reflects. ‘She wasn’t frightened of death. It held no fears for her. Why should it? God doesn’t have any favourites: he doesn’t say, I’ll forgive that sin but not that one, and I’ll forgive you but not you. That’s my belief and I tried to instil that in Myra before she died.’
⁴¹

Following her death, the governor of Highpoint Prison wrote to the hospital administration: ‘Would you please pass on my most sincere thanks to all of your staff who helped to keep the dignity and decency of a very sick woman.’
⁴²
A document lists the property Myra left behind in her cell, including: photographs, cards, clothes, jewellery, a Westlife CD and a CD player, a plastic rosary and a pink baseball cap. Most of it, together with the bedding and furnishings in the room where she died, was consigned to an incinerator.

In their coverage of her death, the press reported how close Myra had come to freedom, highlighting that she had died ‘within weeks of a decision by the House of Lords, which is likely to have led to her release . . . She was one of 70 prisoners who had already served longer than the recommended sentence . . .’
¹
Personal reactions abounded: Nina Wilde told reporters that she had been struck by Myra’s ‘sharp mind and great wit’.
²
Peter Stanford penned her obituary in
The Guardian
, insisting that ‘in middle age, Hindley was warm, funny and blunt, unrecognisable as the Gorgon who haunted parents’ imaginations . . .’
³
There were a surprising number of cautiously sympathetic articles in the press, as well as the vituperative;
News of the World
announced triumphantly: ‘Myra Hindley Went to Hell this Weekend’. Sara Trevelyan recalls: ‘I felt very angry at the media exploitation of her death, the ghastly things that were written. If we cannot be respectful of death, what does that say about us as a society? I felt sad about the waste of her life, the lost potential of it. I felt very sad for her family and very sad for the victims’ families. But the media had always demonised her. Always.’
⁴

The families of her victims responded to the news with mixed feelings; glad that their struggle against her parole was over but despairing that she had died without leading them to Keith Bennett. Winnie Johnson, a widow since 1991, wept when she heard: ‘At every opportunity, I begged Hindley to tell me exactly where Keith’s grave was but, in my heart, I knew she was a wicked sadist who would never tell and would take her terrible secret to the grave.’
⁵
Pauline Reade’s father died six years before Myra; Joan Reade died in 2001, but in a last interview spoke movingly of her daughter’s discovery: ‘She’s not suffering now. No one can hurt her now. I feel her that close, you see. That seems to buck me up a lot. I feel her so close to me. I miss her so much. I still do. She’s my little girl.’
⁶

Danny Kilbride spoke for his family in the aftermath of Myra’s death; his mother had also passed away by then. Today, he reflects: ‘I didn’t believe Hindley was dead at first. I told the authorities I thought they were lying – I was certain she’d been secretly released. I phoned the police chief constable of Manchester and said I wanted to attend her funeral, but he told me that if I, or any member of my family, did that we’d be arrested on sight. I know she’s dead now. I’m just glad she’s not still pestering for parole.’
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When he heard the news, Alan West visited the grave where his wife Ann was buried with Lesley: ‘I just sat there and told them about what had happened. I’ve placed my flowers on the grave again and I’ll be going to see them every Wednesday, just like I’ve always done . . . Somehow, the spirits seemed to have lifted a little now that Hindley’s gone.’
⁸
Edward Evans’s surviving relatives have never spoken to the press; they retreated from the intense media glare following the trial in 1966. David Smith refused to speak to journalists but admitted later that the news came as a relief. Myra’s brother-in-law, Bill Scott, told reporters that he and his daughter had absolutely no comment to make.

In the sheltered housing where Myra’s mother lived, no one knew how deeply personal the news was to one of the residents. Nellie managed to retain her anonymity until her own death. Father Michael recalls, ‘I stayed in touch with Myra’s mother until the end. After Myra died, she became rather confused and would still ring me to ask how her daughter was. Sometimes I would gently remind her that Myra wasn’t with us any more; at other times I would go along with it because her frame of mind seemed so disturbed. She lived in a state of abject terror – she’d suffered so much over the years, as a result of people discovering she was Myra Hindley’s mother. She didn’t socialise at all where she lived and wouldn’t even go into the communal lounge because she was so frightened of getting into a conversation that might lead to the truth about her identity. She died within about a year of Myra’s death.’
⁹

There was no response from the man with whom Myra Hindley’s name would be eternally joined.
¹⁰
In Ashworth Hospital, Ian Brady watched the news footage without a word, his face expressionless.

Duncan Staff, one of the last people to interview Myra, recalls, ‘When she talked to me about Ian, I got the feeling there was still a very strong connection between them, that she knew exactly what he’d be thinking and how he’d react to anything. It was as if she hadn’t left him behind. The connection was very, very alive. He was still a very real presence to her. And all the time they were in prison, even though they weren’t physically together any more and didn’t have any contact, that bond wasn’t broken. I’d say, “What would Ian think?” and she would laugh, as if she had total understanding of him at any given point. There was a very powerful bond and understanding between them and that never went away.’
¹¹

Seven years after Myra Hindley’s death, the Moors Murders remain part of our collective consciousness. There are a number of reasons why this is so. The victims were children abducted at random from streets regarded as safe and the killers were an upwardly mobile young couple. The murders occurred in the 1960s, a period viewed with particular nostalgia but which also seemed to usher in a new dawn of violence, from the Kennedy assassination in 1963 to the Manson Family murders in 1969. The crimes occurred in the working-class North at a time when it was the geographical focus of contemporary books, films and theatre, and were sadistic acts that tapped into people’s fears of the progress of society. Capital punishment had been abolished shortly before the Moors trial, leaving many people feeling that resolution was lacking and justice had not been served. The searing impact of the mugshots has never lessened, despite the years that have passed since their taking. Lord Longford’s involvement in Myra’s persistent lobbying for freedom brought the case back into the headlines and kept it there. And above all, at least one victim remains unfound on the moors that gave the crimes their epithet and the case its chilling setting. The moors hold a distinct resonance in British literature and folklore, invoking the girl who is frightened of the brooding landscape in Myra Hindley’s favourite book,
The Secret Garden
; Dewer, the huntsman, in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, throwing a bag to a man walking on the moor, who finds the body of his own child inside; and the ghost of young Cathy Earnshaw scratching wretchedly at the window in
Wuthering Heights
. Hindley and Brady will continue to haunt us after their deaths, a demon Cathy and Heathcliffe condemned to stalk the moor for eternity.

The murders tap into our deepest fears; Myra Hindley’s involvement serves to echo the fairy tales of our childhood where boys and girls are lured away by evildoers – usually women, as Helena Kennedy QC points out in
Eve Was Framed
: ‘Wicked witches, old crones, evil stepmothers and ugly sisters leap from the pages in greater numbers even than the giants and ogres. Terror is a man, but wickedness is a woman. These women, who either have a cruel beauty like the stepmother of Snow White or are as ugly as sin, insinuate themselves into positions of power over children and grown men, luring them to danger . . .’
¹²
The public war waged between Myra Hindley and Ann West reflected the age-old fight between the evil, barren female who stole the child of a virtuous, devoted mother: ‘I believe that
The Sun
newspaper has a note on my file which instructs whichever journalist intends to put their name to yet another scandalous, sensational and fabricated article not to forget to prefix my name with the now hackneyed adjective “evil”,’ Myra wrote in a 1987 letter.
¹³
Evil is not a psychiatric term but a moral and religious one; it is a void, a dearth of goodness. In the absence of madness, evil is the only answer if we are to make sense of the crimes. Ian Brady’s diagnosis as psychotic is both a motive of sorts and a punishment in itself, although he, too, was deemed sane at the time of the trial. Myra’s prison therapist declared some years before her death: ‘Myra was evil then, but is not evil now.’
¹⁴
His opinion, echoed by several of her supporters, implies that evil is not predetermined and fixed, as we like to believe, but is something that shifts, transmutes, even fades. Diane Athill, who was approached to edit Myra’s autobiography, took a different view: ‘It seems to me that there are strands of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned.’
¹⁵

Moral deformity implies a monster, another term frequently applied to Myra; it was the title of a 2003 documentary by Michael Attwell,
Myra: The Making of a Monster
. On old, nautical maps, unexplored oceans were inscribed with the legend ‘Here Be Monsters’ and often supplemented with images of gigantic and fearsome beasts of the deep. The unknown is still regarded as threatening; in our fears that which is strange and unfamiliar becomes monstrous, ugly. Yvonne Roberts explains: ‘In Myra, it was as if the public could see the dark side of all women. That mugshot of Hindley from the 1960s is the symbolic incarnation of woman as witch, woman as monster. She looked a certain way and played into our nightmares.’
¹⁶
Peter Stanford agrees: ‘It’s a picture of the twentieth-century devil. That’s all the devil was – a face that we put to the intangible reality of evil, a religious construct. Now we find that rather medieval and foolish, but continue to create our own devils through the media, and that picture became the icon of evil.’
¹⁷
In 1997, Marcus Harvey’s vast canvas of the mugshot, recreated using children’s handprints, was unveiled at the Sensation exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Winnie Johnson led the protests by Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, academicians resigned and the painting had to be reinstalled behind Perspex after someone threw eggs and ink at it. Myra herself asked for the work to be removed, writing in a letter to
The Guardian
that the idea that art was meant to be challenging was ‘a lame and unacceptable excuse’.
¹⁸
The artist defended it as a critique of the media’s exploitation of the original photograph. It was also ‘a classic example of a
pittura infamante –
a painting intended to defame. The handprints of the child . . . literally brand Hindley with her crimes.’
¹⁹