One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  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.’12 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 . . .’13

  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.’14 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’.15

  The widespread disgust that greeted Longford’s defence of Myra acted as tinder to the news that broke in September’s press. Myra’s categorisation status had been lowered from A to B, which gave her more freedom within Holloway and meant that the governor, if she chose, could escort her beyond the walls for a certain length of time.16 She had already visited Dorothy Wing’s house within the prison perimeter to discuss poetry, and in early September Mrs Wing decided to take her out to Hampstead Heath, where they were accompanied by a friend of Mrs Wing and her cairn terrier, Piper.17 Myra was exhilarated: ‘It was as though I had never been inside. Everything came back to me. It was the smells – of grass and trees, and throwing a ball for the governor’s dog. There were children playing.’18 They were seen returning to the prison and the ensuing firestorm provoked deep anger in television and radio debates, and questions were asked in the House of Commons. The Home Office released a statement declaring that the outing was not an attempt to prepare Myra for release and that the Home Secretary [Robert Carr] considered it ‘an error of judgement [and] not to be repeated’.19

  Following an internal inquiry, Mrs Wing – who was about to retire – issued her own statement: ‘I took Myra out because I thought it would do her some good to see some grass and trees and have a breath of fresh air. Bless her heart, she enjoyed it very much. She said, “Doesn’t the grass smell beautiful?” . . . I now realise that it was an error of judgement because Mr Carr has said that it was.’20 Journalist Norman Luck tracked Mrs Wing down to her sister’s home in Wales where, after a chat about flowers and a few glasses of Glenfiddich, she told him it hadn’t been Myra’s first outing: ‘One day we took Myra to the Tutankhamen exhibition [held at the British Museum in spring, 1972]. We queued up for a while but couldn’t wait, so we took her for tea at a store in Oxford Street, where she was recognised by a member of the public who thought she’d escaped from prison. The police arrived and the incident was hushed up when we explained the outing was a compassionate visit under strict supervision of prison staff designed to start Myra’s rehabilitation programme.’21

  The outcry left Myra in little doubt over public feeling. She realised that she was unlikely to be granted her freedom in the immediate future and began to fantasise wildly instead about escaping to Brazil with Tricia to work as a missionary. The two women decided to put their pipe dreams into action: Tricia asked Carole if she knew of a gang who could spring Myra from prison and offered the £4,000 she had in her savings account as payment. Her friend laughed, telling her the people she knew would expect about five times that and would probably kill Myra in the process. They then turned to 22-year-old Maxine Croft, who was serving time on Myra’s wing for handling counterfeit cash. She was a ‘green band’, a more trusted prisoner who had access to the officers’ sitting room as part of her cleaning duties. Myra became friendly with her and enlisted her in the escape plot. Maxine, intimidated and aware that the last woman to speak to the authorities about the couple hadn’t been believed, took photographs of Myra for the passport she would need to fake and made impressions of keys from modelling plaster, which she then sent in a package to her friend, a garage owner. Immediately suspicious, he handed the parcel over to the police, just as Maxine plucked up the courage to confess to the prison authorities. Under questioning, Myra and Tricia denied the plot, despite the authorities having taken possession of a driver’s licence found in the name of Myra Spencer. The press had a field day with the story.

  The case was heard at the Old Bailey in April 1974. One of the reporters present was amazed at the difference in Myra’s appearance: ‘She looked softer, prettier, and feminine.’22 All three women pleaded guilty to the charges laid before them. Maxine’s solicitor defended her client as a much younger, naive woman intimidated by two older women, while Tricia’s defence counsel insisted that the relationship between her client and Myra was merely platonic; when Tricia took the stand she told the court that Myra was sorry for her crimes and had been ‘purified in the crucible of suffering’, a phrase that Myra picked up on and used herself in the future. Lord Longford appeared as a defence witness. Maxine was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, while Tricia was given a six-year sentence and had her Prison Service pension frozen until she was sixty. Myra was sentenced to another 12 months’ imprisonment to be served consecutively with her other sentences.23

  Myra tried to retain contact with Tricia, who was sent first to Durham, then to Styal, where she was singled out for harsh treatment by prison officers. Myra smuggled letters to her via other prisoners moving between Holloway and Styal, ignoring Tricia’s warning that she was going to hand in her letters to the authorities. Myra was furious when Tricia carried out her threat and vowed to have nothing more to do with her. Upon her release, Tricia returned to her family in Manchester and found a job as a bus driver. Danny Kilbride recalls: ‘I got on the bus one weekend to go to Ashton and she was the driver. I just stood there and said, “Oh my God.” I turned round and told everyone on the bus who she was, and she had a tough time of it. I never saw her again after that – she obviously asked for a transfer.’24

  Myra wrote to Lord Longford in the wake of the trial: ‘I have forfeited every right to be trusted in here and I am not trusted an inch. Looking at this objectively, on the whole I agree, but with several reservations.’25 She told him how sick she was of the authorities taking into account public opinion every time they made a decision about her, citing her recent application to study with the Open University as an example. She had written to her mother, ‘I’ll be the first woman in prison to do
it, right from scratch. So to speak. It’ll be nice to make “history” in a more pleasant way.’26 The press and public disagreed, and the prison had another outcry on their hands when the news leaked that Myra was taking a course in humanities.

  Transferred to F wing, where she was permitted to have a small black-and-white television in her cell, Myra was surrounded by photographs of family and friends, and books and records. Prison staff felt she was suffering from genuine depression, however, and heard her ‘weeping and wailing’ in her cell.27 Her weight had dropped again; she was now seven stone and painfully thin, even though she joined in with a cookery club and paid (with cigarettes) a West Indian woman to cook her a meal once a week. She wrote despondent letters to her high-profile supporters, including actor Robert Speaight and the former Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, John Trevelyan, who was an old school friend of Lord Longford. She told Trevelyan: ‘Something is slowly dying inside me, and it’s the will to live . . . I just want to drag myself into a corner in the dark, as does an animal when it knows it is dying, and if I had no moral responsibilities and didn’t owe so much to so many people I think I could quite easily do so now . . .’28

  A new affair cheered her, but when the authorities heard about the relationship, the girl in question was moved to another prison. Myra was flattered to be chosen for the prison’s Nativity play that Christmas, but the entire remand wing filed out in protest when she walked onto the stage as Mary.

  She became hopelessly maudlin as the new year began, writing an essay, ‘The Intimate Revelations of Myra Hindley in Prison for Life’, in which she queried why her hair had not turned white ‘under the intolerable burden of my thoughts’. She described the escape plan in excessively florid terms: ‘I told [Tricia] the way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive. “You would have to give up all else. I alone would need to be your sole and exclusive standard. Your motivation would even then be long and exhausting. The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to those around you would have to be abandoned.”’29 In letters that would have appalled her victims’ families, she began to think about motherhood: ‘I would like a child, perhaps even two. I would like to have a child before I reach forty, but I’d like to have a couple of years free in order to cram in as much living as possible to make up for the years of merely existing.’30 The authorities wondered whether she was again planning to escape; internal memos refer to Myra having been given an official warning about her ability to mimic the voices of prison staff, which they feared might enable her to open the electronic door locks.31

  In an effort to convince people that she was a reformed woman, Longford, Trevelyan and Speaight released her letters to the Sunday Times, which resulted in more contempt being heaped upon themselves, while Myra was branded a hypocrite. John Trevelyan asked his daughter Sara to visit Myra, thinking it might lift her spirits. Sara, then training to become a psychotherapist and sharing her father’s campaigning zeal, agreed. She recalls, ‘Dad felt it would be good for Myra to be visited by someone her own age, instead of all these elderly men. Because I’d been living on the other side of the world when Myra was tried, I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about her. She spoke quietly but was very easy to talk to and highly intelligent. She had started smoking again, as a way of coping with a completely monotonous routine. We didn’t speak much about the past, but I was very much under the impression that Ian had dominated her and that it was his fault that she’d got into these “situations”. I was always quite sensitive about not wanting to push her and let her talk about whatever she wanted. She told me a lot about her immediate family, and about Maureen especially.’32 After ten years apart, Myra had been reconciled with her sister.

  Maureen and Dave divorced in 1973.33 She had a new relationship with lorry driver Bill Scott; on their first date, she blurted out why she hadn’t gone out with him earlier when he’d asked: ‘I’m Myra Hindley’s sister.’ But he was interested in her, not her family, and recalled later, ‘We’d had some good fun and a few laughs and she told me later it was the first time she’d laughed since 1965.’34 He eventually divorced his wife – his children were grown up – and found a place to live in Manchester with Maureen, where he witnessed the constant abuse to which she was subject. She travelled with him up and down the country in his lorry and began to enjoy life again. When she fell pregnant with her daughter Sharon, the two of them were delighted; Maureen still saw her sons from her marriage to Dave, but they were settled with their father and had come to regard Mary, who was a constant presence in their lives, as their mother.

  Six weeks after Sharon was born, Maureen and Bill took their daughter to visit Myra in Holloway. Maureen recalled: ‘I was really nervous the first time. I think, honestly, in the back of my mind, I still had a repulsion for what she’d done, what she’d got herself involved in . . . I didn’t know whether I’d be able to act normally. I went in and there she was. She was nothing like she was when she first went in. Actually, at first I didn’t realise it was her. She’d really changed.’35 They hugged and wept and talked about old times; Myra called Sharon her queen and ‘my little ray of sunshine’, inundating her with gifts and cards.36 She decorated the walls of her cell with photographs of Sharon and urged her sister to ask her ex-husband for pictures of their three sons. Maureen had also been reunited with her father, who had suffered several strokes and was confined to bed in the council maisonette where he lived alone, visited by nurses. Although Bob’s speech was afflicted by the strokes, he was overwhelmed to meet his tiny granddaughter and remained in close touch with Maureen and Bill. The couple married 18 months after Sharon’s birth; she travelled with her parents and Maureen’s dog, Rusty, in the lorry until starting nursery school.

  Maureen always planned on telling Sharon about Myra’s crimes before she heard it from anyone else, insisting, ‘When she is old enough for it to sink in and intelligent enough for her to understand, I’ll take her to the newspaper section of the library and let her read all about it for herself. She’ll then have to make up her own mind about it.’37

  Despite, or perhaps because of, their renewed closeness, Maureen questioned Myra twice about other missing children; she wanted to know about her friend, Pauline Reade, especially. Myra shook her head vehemently and said she didn’t know anything about them.

  An internal report, dated 26 March 1976, on Myra’s progress noted that she caused trouble for herself and others by asking inmates to carry letters for her. She had also ‘earnestly requested’ that Lord Longford and his friends stop their campaign on her behalf. She looked ‘thin and haggard . . . On rare occasions she chooses to talk about the past, but there is absolutely nothing new to report on her revelations about her offences and there probably never will be.’38

  ‘Vice-queen’ Janie Jones was among Myra’s newer circle of friends; blonde and glamorous, she denies that her friendship with Myra ever developed into a sexual relationship but admits that Myra bombarded her with attention when she arrived. Even after their friendship began in earnest, Myra would shower Janie with extravagant poems and letters, which Janie shared with another inmate, laughing hysterically at lines such as: ‘I wish I could tell you how much and how deeply I love you, but I can’t. Words have not yet been invented to describe such feelings of such capacity and depth in such a short space of time. (Yet I feel it has been written across the face of fate even before the concept of time evolved) . . .’39 Janie also believed that Myra had fallen under the spell of a murderous Svengali. Apart from Myra’s tendency to sulk or shout when she didn’t get her way, Janie regarded her as a kind and gentle woman who adored children and would spend many hours in the prison’s mother and baby unit, cuddling the children and treating them to sweets.40 Several inmates asked Myra to be godmother to their children, and she accepted.

  On Sunday, 26 September 1976, Myra asked to see the News of the World, after a fellow inmate told her that The Sun was running a tenth anniversary feature about the Moors tr
ial. She was horrified to find that the article partially quoted the transcript of the tape recording, and told an officer, ‘I’m so uptight, I’m going to freak out.’41 She was assured that the newspaper would not be available to inmates on her wing. At the same time, 19-year-old Josie O’Dwyer, who had been in and out of custody since the age of 14, was primed to attack Myra. She recalls how she knew nothing of the case until two officers took her into a room, ‘sat me behind the door, opened out this two-page spread and said, “Read that” . . . and because what I read had made me shake and tremble with horror, they took me for a walk round the prison grounds. When I got back it was dinner time, so I went up to the recess to the loo, came out and was washing my hands when I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was Myra. I thought, “I’ll just stay here until she goes by.” But she didn’t go by, she came on across the bridge. Apparently, she had been talking to the officers and she had actually been kept in the office until they knew I was in the recess . . . I went for her.’42

  According to an internal memo: ‘O’Dwyer states that Hindley hissed at her, whilst Hindley states that she “tut-tutted” at O’Dwyer when the latter called her a “child-murdering bastard”. From staff statements it would appear that O’Dwyer’s version is probably correct.’43 Josie launched herself on Myra, punching and kicking her to the ground. Janie Jones heard the commotion and rushed to the scene: ‘Myra did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Her blood was squirting all over the place, she was being kicked and punched senseless, but she simply swayed around limply as she took every blow . . . She didn’t lift a finger to help herself. So in I charged . . . Josie released Myra – but not before she’d broken her nose and kicked out the cartilage in her leg. There was blood everywhere . . . The alarm bells were sounding but no officers came. Josie was kicking Myra full in the face . . . Then she picked her up and seemed to be trying to throw her over the rail. Myra did not scream or cry out, but she clung limply to the rail.’44