One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  Lying on their picnic blanket on the moor in the spring sunshine, they came up with a line that became their secret catchphrase: ‘Money and food is all I want, all I want is money and food.’43 Myra scrawled the words on the walls of their office in Millwards, beneath the scenic pictures she’d torn from calendars to remind her of the moor.

  As the weather grew warmer, the conversation switched from robbery to murder. According to Myra, Ian had given her Meyer Levin’s Compulsion to read, a fictionalised account of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. Aiming to commit the perfect crime, wealthy students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, both of Chicago, USA, abducted and killed a 14-year-old boy. Keen adherents of Nietzsche’s Übermensch theory, the two young men burned their own and their victim’s clothes after the murder and thoroughly washed down the abduction vehicle but were caught when Leopold’s distinctive glasses were found at the crime scene. During their sensationalised trial, defence attorney Clarence Darrow gave one of the most celebrated speeches in court history, pleading for their lives to be spared by arguing that their crimes were innate and that they should not be hanged simply because they had fashioned their lives upon philosophy. The two were sentenced to life for the murder and 99 years each for kidnapping.44 One commentator noted that what amazed most in the case was that two killers ‘met and fitted each other’s needs like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’.45

  Myra claimed that Ian had handed her the book – in which one character is called Myra – to read as a blueprint for the murder he and she would commit; he told her that Leopold and Loeb had failed to plan properly and that had proved their downfall. Ian denies having read the book at all – he claims the inspiration came from the 1959 film Compulsion, in which his favourite actor Orson Welles played the defence attorney. ‘To the perfect crime!’ runs the opening line.

  The rape and murder of children were something Ian and Myra talked about during sex. Myra admitted, ‘Sex with children was an interest he had that influenced his offending behaviour, but it was a sadistic trait, gaining excitement from their suffering.’46 She resolutely denied sharing his paedophilia, but the discussion of it was part of their sex lives and they observed children at play with a view to the crimes they would eventually commit. In the months before she passed her driving test, Myra borrowed a black Ford Prefect van from greengrocer Benjamin Boyce – who knew her as a reliable babysitter – and drove around Manchester with Ian in the passenger seat to watch children. They parked outside her old school, Ryder Brow, and Ian slid down in his seat to take surreptitious photographs of schoolboys through the railings, with Myra sitting next to him. She later confessed to driving about Gorton’s streets, stalking children, and imagining what she might say to lure them into the van. ‘I was considered to be good with children, an excellent babysitter and able to put children at ease,’ she reflected. ‘Could I therefore be considered capable of child abduction or violence towards children?’47

  The moor would be the burial ground for their victim. They chose Hollin Brown Knoll, a shelf of land behind a knot of black boulders protruding from the roadside. It was where they lay on the picnic rug, discussing plans. From the heather-strewn plateau, it was possible to see for miles over the moor and across to where the land sloped down to Greenfield reservoir in the hollow. Their cemetery unfolded before them like a map. ‘[Ian’s] attention to detail was such that major landmarks on the horizon, viewed from a particular vantage point on the roads across the moors, provided a perfect grid reference for his trained mind,’ Myra recalled. ‘Ian had spent months planning the murders and plotting each location.’48 They rehearsed the burial meticulously, ascertaining what was possible: ‘We used to climb up to and over the big rocks,’ she remembered, ‘where he would tell me he was going to practise carrying a body, tell me to make myself as limp as possible, then he’d hoist me up and over his shoulder, with my arms and head hanging over one side and my lower body and legs over the other side. The blood used to rush to my head until I thought I was going to faint. Sometimes he would stumble over a small rock or large tuft of grass and we’d both fall . . .’49

  In a letter from Gartree Prison, Ian described himself and Myra as ‘demon folk’.50 They felt themselves to be above the ‘normal mundane consciousness of most of society’, residing not in the ordinary world but with ‘demons and angels’.51 Myra told one journalist that she and Ian had been separated by a ‘chasm’ from the rest of humanity.52 In his writings, Ian expands on the idea that certain murderers believe in ‘a form of personal philosophy (predominantly nihilistic in character) so devoutly that it has the psychological power of a religion . . . Metaphorically gods in their own kingdom . . . eventually taking the lives of those who have entered their own private domain, witnessed their darkest desires and therefore, must never be allowed to leave or testify.’53 Myra had doubted the existence of God since Michael Higgins’ death; her brief dalliance with the Church at the age of 16 hadn’t healed the rift within her: ‘Perhaps I was almost convinced about God’s non-existence without Ian’s influence. He simply made it even more plausible. We became our own gods.’54

  Almost half a century after the murders began, Ian quotes W.H. Auden in his book The Gates of Janus: ‘The sky is darkening like a stain/Something is going to fall like rain/And it won’t be flowers.’55 The poem, titled ‘The Two’, features a couple whose presence is both sinister and seemingly deadly in a town where they guard a gate in a rock. Nearby is a green field whose ground, if removed like a lid, would reveal something deeply unpleasant. At the end of the poem, a funeral car departs and the twin shadowy figures warn the people of the town to be careful, never to forget that they are being watched and that time is ticking, inexorably, on.

  The murderer uses the poem to illustrate the propensity of individuals to slip into criminal activity, and perhaps as an allusion to the events that began happening in the summer of 1963, when something did, undeniably, fall like rain.

  8

  Out of my mind I was, really. It was a dark world. I always had a living hope that she were about somewhere . . . [Myra’s] sister was a near neighbour. Lived next door but one, Maureen. She went visiting there. Myra Hindley was talking to me normally and saying she was sorry about Pauline, knowing she’d done that . . .

  Mrs Joan Reade, interviewed in The Moors Murders documentary, Chameleon TV, 1999

  In May 1963, Ian and Myra took a series of pornographic photos of themselves. Ian bought the equipment – a more technical camera, a tripod and lighting paraphernalia – and developed the photographs in an improvised darkroom. The pictures show them having sex, Ian urinating on a curtain, Myra in crotch-less black pants, both of them wearing white hoods with eyeholes cut out and Myra bearing whip marks on her skin. Thirty-five years later, the photographs became a bone of contention between the two of them regarding their original purpose – whether the photos were intended for private use or for sale – and also the degree of manipulation involved. Ian insisted that Myra had posed willingly in the knowledge that he would attempt to sell the photographs and said that the whip marks were ‘drawn on with lipstick . . . not raised welts’.1 Myra emphasised the opposite and was relieved to learn that the photographs had not been destroyed, hoping they would give credence to her claim of having been ‘under duress and abuse before the offences, after and during them, and all the time I was with [Ian]’.2

  The photographs, she asserted, were taken after Ian had drugged her with the intention of distributing them to her family and work colleagues unless she fell in with his murderous plans – but she didn’t explain how he would manage to do so without incriminating himself, particularly given his strong streak of public prudery. According to Myra, the day after he had drugged her, she woke up at lunchtime with a pounding hangover only to be harangued by Gran for getting into such a state. Going outside to clear her head, she borrowed her neighbour John Booth’s motorbike and drove for miles until she lost control and crashed into a bus. The next time she saw Ian, he apparently
told her that he had mixed her grandmother’s Nembutal tablets with red wine to sedate her. She claimed later that she had been too terrified of him to go to the police, or even to end the relationship.

  The issue of the photographs formed part of a carefully orchestrated campaign by Myra’s supporters in an effort to change the public perception of her role in the crimes. In letters to her solicitor and journalists deemed sympathetic to her, she wrote at length about how Ian ‘used to threaten me and rape me and whip me and cane me. I would always be covered in bruises and bite marks.’3 An inventory of the alleged incidents can be found in Myra’s 3 June 1998 letter to her solicitor Jim Nichol; it was evidently written in response to a request from one of her legal team. In the letter, she declares that prior to the first murder, Ian had also drugged her grandmother: ‘When I went upstairs to give my gran the cup of tea I’d made for her, as I did each morning before I left for work, I couldn’t wake her up. I ran round the corner to my mother’s house and she came back with me; she couldn’t wake Gran either, although she could see that she was breathing. I ran to the family doctor’s, who was nearer to us than the nearest phone box, and begged him to come back with me and see what was wrong with my gran. When we got home, where my mother was still trying to wake her, the doctor examined her and told us both that she was alright, that she had probably forgotten, the night before, that she’d taken her sleeping tablets and had taken them again. She would sleep them off and be okay and that he’d call in and see her the following day.’4 When Myra questioned Ian that night, having phoned in sick from work: ‘He said that unless he convinced me he was serious about murder, it would be my fourteen-year-old sister Maureen next, and then my mother, and said he might also stand in my bedroom until Gran came out of hers – she passed my bedroom to go down the stairs – and push her down the steep stairs, which would undoubtedly kill her . . .’5

  In the same letter, she claimed to have applied to the NAAFI in order to escape Ian. The episode is repeated elsewhere, though several books date her intention to go abroad as having occurred before she and Ian met, while others contend that she didn’t even trouble to fill in the application form. In Myra’s version of events, she travelled to London for an interview after a botched abduction attempt; she hadn’t been able to find a child whom she felt it was safe to approach, and when Ian lost his temper with her, she responded to an advert to join the NAAFI. During her interview in London: ‘I had to have a medical. Maybe six weeks beforehand [Ian] had bitten my breasts so badly that, although the teeth marks had faded, the bruises were still there. The doctor asked me immediately how I got these. My body was covered in bruises from where he had bitten me so I told a half-truth; I said I had been involved in a motorbike crash, which I had – I was the pillion passenger – and I said I had sustained quite a lot of bruising. She must have believed me because I got the job. I wish I had gone.’6

  Returning home with a two-year contract to work in Germany, she claims she was met by Ian, Nellie, Gran, Maureen, Aunt Annie and cousin Glenys: ‘He had got them all together. He was standing behind me and everyone started crying and saying, “Please don’t take the job.” We were a really close family. And I was thinking, “For Christ’s sake, it’s because I want to protect you that I am trying to leave.” Then he put his hand on my shoulder – and he never touched me in public – and he said to everybody in general, “Don’t worry, she has two weeks in which to make her mind up.” He squeezed my shoulder and I knew then that he wouldn’t let me go. When everyone had gone home and Gran had gone to bed, he stripped me, gagged me and beat me with a cane, raped me anally, which he often did because he knew I cried with the pain and hated him doing that to me. Then he turned me over and urinated inside me. Before leaving, he warned me that if I ever tried to get away again, I’d be the sorriest person alive.’7 She told her solicitor that having originally wanted to leave for her family’s sake, she now decided to stay for them because ‘I couldn’t go to the police about him for there was no proof of anything, and whilst I feared and often hated him, I was so emotionally obsessed with him I just couldn’t change my feelings for him.’8

  At the time of Myra’s letter to her solicitor, none of the incidents could be verified; however, one person came forward to speak on Myra’s behalf after her arrest in 1965: her friend May Hill. May was one of the few people with whom Myra had retained contact, and the two of them occasionally met at the Bessemer or Steelworks Tavern for drinks. When May’s boyfriend finished with her, she and Myra spent the evening drinking heavily at the pub and on the way home May blurted out that no one liked Ian. When they reached May’s house, Myra asked for pen and paper, then sat down at the kitchen table to write a letter that she refused to let May read. She sealed it in an envelope and pushed it under the carpet in the sitting-room before leaving. The following Saturday, Myra claims, Ian revealed the pornographic photos he had taken of her and told her she had no choice but to do as he wished. Immediately afterwards, Myra asked May to return the letter to her, which she did. Two years later, when the news about the murders broke, May informed the police about the letter, in which Myra had written that she was ‘frightened of Brady’ and was ‘contemplating going abroad and joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in order to get away from that man’. William Mars-Jones QC related in 1967: ‘He had administered a drug to her and she had no idea what he had done while she was unconscious. When she came to she found him leering over her and she was frightened. She said in the letter that in the event of her disappearing or in the event of the disappearance of three men, whose names and addresses she gave, [May] was to go to the police with the letter . . .’9 Myra wouldn’t discuss the letter with the police until the mid 1980s, when she disputed having mentioned three men but confirmed her fear that Ian might kill her and bury her by the rocks on Hollin Brown Knoll.

  Myra’s letter to her solicitor continued: ‘Some weeks later, he stopped talking to me at work, except to tell me to take dictation, and didn’t come near the house . . . for a whole week he ignored me, then on the Friday afternoon not long before we all finished work, he came through to my small office and dropped a note on my desk before going upstairs to the bathroom . . .’10 That night, she alleged, he called for her and they travelled to a favourite country pub in Whitefield, but instead of stopping, he drove the motorbike down a lane and produced a Stanley knife. After arguing with her about a lift she had accepted from another man, he ‘laughed, put the knife away, told me never to accept a lift from Brian again and we drove back to the pub . . . [That night] he raped me anally, urinated inside me and, whilst doing so, began strangling me until I nearly passed out. Then he bit me on the cheekbone, just below my right eye, until my face began to bleed. I tried to fight him off strangling me and biting me, but the more I did, the more the pressure increased. Before he left, when he’d seen the state of my face, he told me to stay off work the next day . . . My gran almost fainted when she saw me, and went to get my mother, who asked me if “he” had done that to me . . . I told them what he had told me to say [that she had been hit by a stray beer bottle in a pub fight] but I knew they didn’t believe me.’11

  Among the many other instances she listed was an account of how, after reading de Sade, Ian attacked her when she refused to have sex with him: ‘He said he would soon wake me up. He went into the kitchen and came back with a sweeping brush and, using the handle and head in turns, beat me until I was a bleeding bruised mess. I’d learnt not to cry out when he was hitting me, for my gran had been wakened several times and shouted down the stairs.’12 She went on: ‘He did many other things to me, such as forcing my mouth open and urinating in it, or urinating all over my body, in my ears, up my nose, everywhere he could think of. I was so humiliated . . .’13 When she asked Ian ‘why he kept strangling me so much, so many times – this was before the offences took place – he told me he was “practising” on me. I said one of these days he was going to go too far and would kill me, but he just laughed and said he woul
dn’t – he needed me. That wasn’t an affectionate remark; I knew what he needed me for.’14

  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