by David Smith
‘I don’t know why I decided to marry him then,’ Mary laughs. ‘He didn’t even get down on one knee to ask me properly! He did do the traditional thing in asking Dad’s permission, though. The three of us were sitting in the lounge bar of the Spinners at the time. Dad turned to me after Dave had asked him and said, “Mary, is that what you want?” I told him, “Very much so.” Dad announced, “Right, we’ll drink to that, then.” And he bought a round for the whole pub.’
The wedding took place on 16 February 1975 in Flowery Field Church, Hyde. David’s former probation officer, Mr Potter, was best man. A coach ferried Mary’s friends from Hyde to the reception in Prestwich, where a reggae band entertained everyone. ‘I didn’t have anything like the number of guests that Mary had,’ David admits gloomily. ‘Just Uncle Bert, the Duchess and my cousins John, Graham and Adrian. My guest list was all colleagues from the Dunlop factory – I worked there then, and so did Mary.’
Then he grins: ‘Mr Potter didn’t drink as a rule, but he certainly had a few that day. He sobered up enough to drive us home after the reception. Mary was still in her wedding dress because she’d forgotten her “going away” suit. But there was a bigger panic when we realised in the car that we’d forgotten Jody. She was only two! At the reception she’d been tired out, so we made a bed for her in a large drawer and tucked her away under the main table. Panic stations! We sped back and woke up the landlady of the place. Fortunately, Jody was sound asleep in the drawer where we’d left her, surrounded by party mess.’
The cost of the wedding had depleted their finances; a honeymoon was out of the question. Instead, Mary’s father and brother looked after the boys for a week to give them a little more time alone together, although Jody remained at home with them because she was so young. ‘We only had a shilling left between us,’ Mary recalls, smiling. ‘So we couldn’t afford to buy any food and lived on wedding cake until Tuesday, when we collected our family allowance. At the end of the week, we went to pick up the boys and the three of them came barrelling down the path, shouting, “You’re our mum now! You’re Mum!”’
David looks at her from his spot at the kitchen table; Mary is sitting on a stool at the worktop. ‘You took on the responsibility of three boys without any qualms or difficulties,’ he tells her.
Mary shrugs: ‘It was something that happened naturally. There was no conscious decision on my part and it never entered my head to think: Oh, I can’t have three boys at my age. It was as simple as that. And back then there were plenty of girls my age looking after their younger brothers and sisters. I certainly didn’t feel that I was losing my freedom. I had everything I wanted.’
The past was not yet behind them, however. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – particularly her – were rapidly becoming tabloid fodder. Lord Longford had begun his campaign to rehabilitate Hindley in the public eye, with a view to her eventual release, and she had amassed extensive headlines following a walk on Hampstead Heath in 1972 with Holloway’s governor, and again in 1974, when she was found guilty of attempting to escape from prison with the help of her lover, prison officer Patricia Cairns. For the first six years of their incarceration, Brady and Hindley had remained in contact, but once she set her mind on gaining freedom legally, Hindley cut off all communication with him, leading to blistering exchanges in the press. Brady accused her of revelling in the murders; she claimed that he had beaten and bullied her into becoming his accomplice. Publicly, they agreed on one issue alone: David’s alleged involvement. Both Brady and Hindley retained an intense hatred for the man who had brought the police to their door, and lost no opportunity to besmirch him.
No one at the Dunlop factory knew that David was Myra Hindley’s ex-brother-in-law, but Mary recalls one notable incident: ‘We were all in the pub, and someone had a newspaper with Hindley’s mugshot on the front page. I can’t remember now what the story was, but a friend of ours called June pointed to it and said she lived next door to that David Smith and his girlfriend. I tried not to let my surprise show. Then June said, “That girlfriend of his is even worse than him. How could any woman sleep with a man like that?”’
David takes up the story: ‘Curiosity got the better of us. We started asking her questions: What’s he like? What’s she like?’ He laughs. ‘We never told June the truth. It makes the mind boggle, though, to think that people invent these things and talk about them with such conviction. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have believed her.’
During Britain’s ‘winter of discontent’, Dunlop began cutting back on its workforce; Mary was made redundant first and David was laid off soon afterwards. They left their rented house in Cheetham Hill and moved in with Big Martin, who was living with his son in a two-bedroom council house on Leyton Avenue in Hyde. The three boys slept in one bedroom with Big Martin and Little Martin, while David, Mary and Jody slept in the other. Eventually, David found employment at Redferns rubber factory, and he and Mary began looking for their own home. They found a suitable house on Dukinfield Road in Hyde, but the news that David Smith was hoping to move in spread like molten lava.
‘The whole neighbourhood signed a petition to keep us out and handed it in at Hyde Town Hall,’ Mary recalls. ‘It didn’t do them any good because one of the local councillors was a good friend of Dad’s and he pulled a lot of strings to ensure we got the house. We had no furniture, mind you. At Leyton Avenue, we’d binned all Dad’s old stuff and replaced it with ours, and because we couldn’t deprive him of it we left with just a Calor Gas camping stove and a few blankets. We slept on bare floors.’
Renting a home in Hyde proved to be calamitous. ‘Hardly a day went by without some form of abuse,’ Mary states. ‘There was always something. A young builder who didn’t like having David Smith as a neighbour used to get tanked up and then start effing and blinding outside our door. Weekends were the worst: we’d often get drunks banging on the door, wanting “a word”. Bricks were thrown through the windows and the kids’ pet rabbits were slaughtered – someone slit their throats and slung the bodies out in the garden. Once Paul was on his way home from walking the dog when a gang attacked him. We were in bed when we heard a commotion on the street. Dave raced outside and punched one of the lads who had hold of Paul, knocking him to the ground. The lad lay still and people were leaning out of their windows, screaming, “Them Smiths have murdered somebody again!” But Paul was the one who had his arm broken. His relationship with his girlfriend at the time ended when her family told her, “You’re not going out with him any more, he’s got bad blood.” Our children heard a lot of that sort of thing at school.’
David nods slowly. ‘Hyde was always a black spot for us. Back in the early ’70s, Dad, Mary and me were in the White Lion one night, sat on our usual barstools in the vault, when a group of lads came in and started glaring at us. I heard someone say “Bastard” and knew it was directed at me. Then all of a sudden, a door crashed open and everyone piled in, pulling me backwards by the hair – I wore it long in those days. But I grabbed the rolled edge of the bar and refused to let go. I hung on so fiercely that a great chunk of the bar top came away in my hand.’ He gives a wry grin. ‘It was still missing, the last I heard.’
The attacks increased towards the end of the 1970s, when Hindley’s press profile peaked during Lord Longford’s campaign. David recalls that one assault almost proved fatal: ‘Mary and I were stood at a taxi rank when a gang approached us. One of them recognised me and, before I knew it, they were beating me to a pulp. I was dragged out into the road and into the path of oncoming cars. Mary was screaming, but no one came to help us. They beat me until I was unconscious.’
The two of them fall silent, remembering. Then David clears his throat and declares, ‘Although the trouble was almost as bad as it had been while I was with Maureen, it strengthened the bond between Mary and me. My first marriage collapsed under the weight of so much hatred, but with Mary it was different, for many reasons. I was able to deal with it better in my own mind too, because I wasn’
t “poorly in the head” any more.’
‘But in one sense it was harder because the boys and Jody were caught up in it all,’ Mary interjects. ‘That’s also why we were determined that they should know exactly what had happened in the past. There was never an occasion when we sat them down and said, “Now, look . . .”, but we told them gradually and if they had any questions, then we answered them as fully as we could, though nothing could have prepared them for that level of abuse.’
David muses, ‘Perhaps it would have been easier if I’d left Manchester when Mr Potter suggested it. But it wasn’t in my character to run. The public abuse was one thing – the press were something else. I didn’t want to give interviews for a very long time, not only because it raked everything up again, but also because once you have a few dealings with the press you become savvy to their tactics. No matter how pleasant a reporter was or how desperate our finances, we learned to say no. What was printed was never what was said. Journalists are there to sell newspapers and the truth is irrelevant.’
The press and public might have been surprised to learn that one of the few people to visit the Smiths in Hyde was Pauline Reade’s brother, Paul. There were occasional references in the media to the unsolved disappearances of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, but Brady and Hindley denied having killed them. Paul Reade spoke often of the past on his visits, especially about the years in Gorton before Pauline went missing, and occasionally he stayed with Mary’s father.
‘Paul was lost and angry at not knowing what had happened to Pauline,’ Mary recalls, ‘and sometimes he was difficult, though never unpleasant with us. He wasn’t someone whose visits we looked forward to, but we could never have turned him away. His visits tapered off until they stopped altogether. I don’t know why.’
Myra Hindley’s determination to drag David through the mud of her crimes continued apace. In early 1978, she wrote to a close correspondent: ‘On a recent TV programme, David Smith, chief prosecution witness, admitted to planning a murder with Ian Brady. Things could be changing, rapidly . . .’ Researchers for the London Weekend TV programme had initially secured a statement from Maureen, implicating David in a plot to kill Tony Latham with Ian Brady. When the programme makers contacted him about the allegation, David immediately agreed to be interviewed on camera.
‘I spoke to producer Michael Attwell, who just wanted to know about Tony Latham,’ he recalls. ‘And I told him the truth: when Brady asked me if there was anyone I wanted rid of, I’d said Latham, but when he and Hindley took me to the pub to get a picture I forgot to put film in my Polaroid, and after that Brady never mentioned it again. Attwell was floored that I didn’t try to wriggle out of it. I looked a right state on camera – both my arms were broken and I had a curly perm. Afterwards it emerged that I’d already told police about the Latham plot during their original investigation. So the massive scoop that Attwell – and Hindley – had hoped for didn’t happen.’
Myra Hindley was not yet finished with David, however. The following year she began work on her parole plea, which ran to a mammoth 36 pages. Sent to Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, it presented her as a wronged woman, punished for crimes that had little to do with her. Sticking to her defence at the trial, she insisted that David was, in fact, Ian’s partner in crime, claiming that Edward Evans’s murder was initiated by the two men, that David had brought Lesley Ann Downey to Wardle Brook Avenue for the purpose of pornographic photographs and that ‘when David Smith and the child left the house, Ian remained with me . . .’ Rees was unimpressed and after taking into account the recommendation of a joint Home Office/Parole Board committee, announced in 1979 that it would be a further three years before Hindley could be considered for parole. Many more years passed before Hindley herself admitted that what she had written was ‘a pack of lies’.
‘I never heard directly from Brady and Hindley again after the night of Edward Evans’s death,’ David states. ‘I made no attempt to contact them and nor did Maureen while we were together. The thought couldn’t have been further from her mind.’
Following her divorce from David, Maureen had a change of heart and worked hard at a reconciliation with her sister. In 1975, after her marriage to Bill Scott and the birth of their daughter Sharon, Maureen and her new family visited Myra in Holloway. She later declared in a rare interview: ‘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.’ Myra decorated her cell with photos of Sharon, and showered her niece with gifts, calling her ‘my queen’ and ‘my little ray of sunshine’. Unbeknown to David and Mary, she wrote to Maureen: ‘Ask [David] for some up-to-date pictures of young Paul, David and John to put on my wall, Moby.’ Maureen quietly ignored the request. It was years since she and David had been in touch.
In July 1980, Maureen and Bill were enjoying a night out at a pub close to home when she began to complain of a violent headache. The next morning Bill woke to the sound of Maureen retching in the bathroom. He called a doctor, who told him she was probably suffering from flu but agreed to pay a home visit. The doctor took one look at Maureen and rushed her straight to Monsall Hospital. She was transferred to Crumpsall (North Manchester) Hospital later that same day, where she was diagnosed with a brain haemorrhage. She seemed to recover well after emergency surgery, but while Bill was at home he received a telephone call from the hospital: Maureen had slipped into a coma. Returning to his wife’s bedside (‘the doctors were rushing round with lots of gadgets’), and knowing that her chances of survival were diminishing by the minute, he decided anything that might help Maureen was worth trying.
He asked a friend to get in touch with David Smith.
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
It’s a hot summer’s day and I’m relaxing in the garden, enjoying a cigarette and listening to ‘Hey Jude’ turned up loud, when I notice a car going past unusually slowly, its driver peering at me.
I stand up, throw my cigarette away and go into the house; Mary is out. Instinctively, I brace myself for a visitor, thinking, another scumbag journalist wanting to poke at cold coals. I pace over to the window and, right on cue, the car returns. The driver climbs out and I wait for the inevitable knock at the door.
When I open the door, he tells me quickly that although he’s a reporter, he isn’t here for an interview. As he outlines the reason for his visit, I stare at him in stunned silence. Then he begins to prattle, insisting that I know him from a long time ago (I don’t), that he’s a friend (he isn’t) and that whatever happens today, I have his word that this won’t end up in the newspaper. On this last point, I believe him, but ask him to wait in the car.
When Mary arrives home with a few bits of shopping, she tells me there’s a car parked outside and that the driver watched her walk in. Then she sees my expression; her face whitens.
Quietly, I tell her what my visitor told me: Maureen is dying. She’s had a brain haemorrhage and is in a coma, with the thinnest sliver – or perhaps none at all – of survival. I keep my voice even: ‘They say, don’t they, that some people come round if they hear music or a voice that means something to them? Something from the past, something close. But that might be nonsense . . .’
‘We’re going to the hospital,’ Mary says firmly. The kids are scattered about the house, but she brings them together to explain the situation and tells them gently that they can come with us if they want to say goodbye to Maureen. John and Jody are too young to understand properly, so Mary arranges for a neighbour to look after them, but 13-year-old Paul and 12-year-old David – suddenly seeming like tiny boys again – change quickly into their best clothes.
We troop out to the car. I climb in beside the driver and Mary huddles in the back with the boys
. The reporter’s name is Ian, and he’s keen that I should realise how close he’s been to ‘this story’ for many, many years. He knows Maureen and her husband Bill very well and visits Myra regularly in prison. I clench my fists on my knees, thinking, you’ve just slipped into enemy territory, pal.
In the back of the car, Mary tries to reassure the boys that they mustn’t worry – everything will be all right. Paul is quiet and sullen, while David is agitated. Mary promises that they don’t have to see Maureen unless they want to and the decision is theirs alone. The boys remember too much unhappiness: too many partings and pain. ‘She’s not our mum, you’re our mum,’ David insists, very upset.
We arrive at the hospital and are shown into a grim little waiting room. Another group stand in the corridor: Maureen’s husband and family. A nurse comes in to speak to us, smiling and addressing me as David. She thanks me for coming and explains that there is very little hope for Maureen now, but her husband would like me to talk to her. ‘Miracles do sometimes happen,’ she adds.
I understand how desperate Bill must feel, but it’s like everything else: what can I do? I look at Mary. She turns to David and Paul, asking them one last time if they want to say goodbye. David is very definite in his reply (‘No!’), but Paul steps forward after a moment’s hesitation, quietly declaring, ‘I’ll go with Dad.’
The nurse gestures towards the door, telling us that there’s no rush and we are to take as long as we need. For Paul’s benefit, she explains Maureen is hooked up to various pieces of equipment that are keeping her alive. He puts his hand in mine and together we follow the nurse. Bill is still standing in the corridor with his family; our eyes meet. I can tell from his expression that he’s already grieving. We don’t speak to each other, but the sense of the two halves of Maureen’s life meeting and ending here causes my breath to come in short, rapid bursts. Only the small hand holding mine stops me from panicking.