The most dramatic evidence was given by Janet Leach, who was called as the ‘appropriate adult’ (witness) to Fred West’s police interviews. Confidentially, Fred had told her that Rose was involved in the murders and that Rose had murdered Charmaine and Shirley Robinson without him but that he made a deal with his wife to take all the blame on himself. Janet was so stressed by this confidential confession that she suffered a stroke. It was only after Fred’s death that she felt that she could tell the police what he had said to her. After her testimony, she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital. Her evidence was to be the final nail in the coffin as far as Rose West was concerned. The jury found Rose West guilty of all the murders. The judge sentenced her to life imprisonment on each of 10 counts of murder.
Following several failed appeals, Rose West has indicated her intention to spend the rest of her life in prison and plans no further appeals, despite being eligible for parole in 2019, when she will be 66 years of age.
IAN BRADY AND MYRA HINDLEY, AKA THE MOORS MURDERERS
Myra Hindley was born in Manchester in 1942 and raised by her grandmother; she was regularly beaten by her alcoholic father, despite having an IQ of 107, being able write creatively and considered a responsible and sporty girl. She left school in 1957 and, after working in different jobs, on 16 January 1961 she started work as a typist for a chemical firm called Millward’s. It was there that she met Ian Brady, a man four years her senior with a history of violence and a string of burglary convictions. Brady was the stock clerk, having worked there since February 1959.
Ian Stewart (he later took his stepfather’s surname) was born in 1938 and grew up in an economically deprived area of Glasgow. His mother gave him up for adoption at birth. Early on, Brady showed troubling signs of dysfunctional behaviour and moodiness. When he could not have his way, he would throw violent tantrums that made him unpopular with local children. At school he was lazy and struggled to apply himself, and misbehaved. He started smoking and virtually gave up schoolwork.
Ian developed a fascination with Nazi pageantry and Nazi symbolism. He often asked other boys for souvenirs that their fathers brought back from the war and, when playing roughhouse war games, he would insist on being ‘the German’. It was at this time that Ian also became known for perverse and sadistic tendencies, including bullying smaller children and torturing animals in a variety of grotesque ways.
As a teenager Ian was arrested for burglary and housebreaking. On the first two occasions he was given probation, but on the third he was deemed incorrigible and the court ordered him to leave Glasgow and live with his adopted mother. She had since moved to Manchester and had married an Irish labourer named Patrick Brady. In November 1954, two months before his 17th birthday, Ian travelled down to join his mother and her new husband. Although he did not get along with Mr Brady, Ian took his stepfather’s name and used it as his own.
Brady started to collect books about torture and sadomasochism, domination and servitude. He also began drinking heavily and gambling, so often found himself in need of extra spending money to support these new habits. He soon resorted again to thieving and, after being convicted several more times, he was sentenced to two years training at a borstal school as well as a term of imprisonment in Strangeways prison.
While incarcerated, Brady learnt other criminal methods for acquiring money from other prisoners, and dreamt of becoming a big-time criminal, pulling off lucrative bank robberies. He also studied bookkeeping. Following his release, he moved from job to job and in 1961, while employed at Millward’s, he met Myra Hindley, although it would be almost 12 months before they would actually form a long-lasting relationship. It would ultimately lead to them becoming the most publically reviled criminals of their era.
It was at the firm’s Christmas party that Brady asked Hindley for their first date. This was to be her initiation into his secret world. That first night, he took her to see the hour-long film The Nuremberg Trials. As the weeks went by, he played her records of Hitler’s marching songs and encouraged her to read some of his favourite books – Mein Kampf, Crime and Punishment and De Sade’s works. Hindley happily complied – after her tough upbringing, she had waited so long for something different. Her inexperience and hunger left her incapable of distinguishing the new experiences that were healthy from those that were dangerous.
Brady became Hindley’s first lover and she was soon totally besotted with him, soaking up all of his distorted philosophical theories. Her greatest desire was to please him. She even changed the way she dressed for him – Germanic-style with long boots, miniskirts and bleached hair. She allowed him to take pornographic photographs of her and of the two of them having sex. With such a devoted audience, Brady’s ideas became increasingly paranoid and outrageous, but Hindley lacked the necessary skills and experience to discern good from bad – and bad from evil. When he told her there was no God, she stopped going to church, and when he told her that rape and murder were not wrong, that in fact murder was the ‘supreme pleasure’, she did not question it. Her personality had become totally fused with his.
Early in 1963, Brady put Hindley’s blind acceptance of his ideas to the test. He began planning a bank robbery and needed her to be his getaway driver. Immediately, Hindley started taking driving lessons. He made her join the Cheadle Rifle Club and purchased two guns. The robbery was never carried out, but Brady’s purpose had been fulfilled. Myra had shown herself willing. Brady knew she was ready to cement their relationship.
On the night of 12 July 1963, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley claimed their first joint victim, 16-year-old Pauline Reade. She was on her way to a dance at the Railway Workers’ Social Club when she disappeared. Originally, she had planned to go with three girlfriends, but at the last minute they did not go, so Pauline decided to go alone. At 8pm Pauline, dressed in her prettiest pink party dress, left home. What Pauline didn’t know was that her girlfriend Pat and another friend, Dorothy, had seen her leave. Curious to see whether she would really have the nerve to go to the dance alone, Pat and Dorothy followed her. When they were almost at the club, the two girls decided to take a short cut so they could arrive at the club before Pauline. They waited for her but she never arrived. She had been enticed by Hindley into her minivan. Hindley drove off, with Brady following behind on his motorcycle. They drove up to Saddleworth Moor, where Hindley asked Pauline to help her look for a lost glove. They were busy searching the moors when Brady pounced on Pauline and raped her. He then smashed her skull in with a shovel and slashed her throat so violently that she was almost decapitated. Brady then buried Pauline’s body on the moor, where it would remain for the next 20 years.
When Pauline did not arrive home by midnight, her parents went out to look for her. They called the police the next morning when the night-long search had failed to find any trace of their daughter. A police search also proved negative; it seemed that Pauline had disappeared into thin air. The second child victim disappeared on 11 November 1963. Twelve-year-old John Kilbride and his friend John Ryan had gone to the local cinema for the afternoon. When the film finished at 5pm, they went to a local market to see if they could earn some pocket money helping the stallholders pack up. Ryan left Kilbride standing beside a salvage bin near the carpet dealer’s stall to go and catch his bus home. It was the last time that anyone saw Kilbride alive.
As before, Hindley lured the unsuspecting victim into her vehicle from the market place and drove him to Saddleworth Moor. Brady was waiting there and ordered Hindley to wait for him in a nearby village in the Ford Anglia he’d hired to drive to the moor. While Hindley waited, Brady raped and attempted to stab the boy with a knife, but the weapon was too blunt. Brady lost his temper and strangled him to death with string before burying the body in a shallow grave. When John did not return home for dinner, his parents called the police. For the second time, a major search was conducted, with police and thousands of volunteers combing the surrounding area for any clue as to John’s disappearance.
> On 16 June 1964, 12-year-old Keith Bennett left to go to his grandmother’s home to spend the night. As his grandmother’s house was only a mile away, he walked there by himself. His mother watched him over the crossing and onto Stockport Road, and then left him to go in the opposite direction. Again, Brady and Hindley enticed him into their car and drove to Saddleworth Moor. Hindley stood and watched from the top of an embankment while Brady raped Keith in a ravine before strangling him to death with a piece of string and burying his body. When Keith didn’t arrive at his grandmother’s house, she assumed that his mother had decided not to send him. Keith’s disappearance was not discovered until the next morning when his grandmother arrived at her daughter’s home without Keith. Again the police were called and again a search was conducted; again another child had disappeared without a trace. Keith Bennett’s body has never been found.
Six months passed before a fourth child, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, disappeared. It was on the afternoon of 26 December 1964. Lesley had gone with her two brothers and some of their friends to a local fair only 10 minutes away. They had not been there long before they’d spent all of their money and become bored. All but Lesley left for home. A classmate last saw her, at just after 5.30pm, standing alone next to one of the rides. Brady lured her from the fairground into his car. He took nine obscene photographs of her, showing her naked, bound and gagged (these would later be found in a suitcase in a left luggage locker). Hindley recorded the child’s rape and torture by Brady on audiotape. The tape clearly identifies the voices of Brady, Hindley and the child, who is heard to scream and protest and ask to be allowed to go home and pleading for her life. It is believed that Brady then killed her. The following morning, Brady and Hindley drove Lesley’s body to Saddleworth Moor, where it was buried in a shallow grave.
When Lesley had not returned home, her mother began to search for her. She called the police when she could find no sign of Lesley. The countryside was searched, thousands of people were questioned and missing posters were displayed but no new leads were discovered. It would be another 10 months before the gruesome truth was uncovered.
On 6 October 1965, the couple claimed their fifth and final victim, 17-year-old Edward Evans. They enticed him from Manchester Central railway station to their house in Hattersley, where Hindley’s 18-year-old brother-in-law David Smith was visiting. Smith heard a long, loud scream. Hindley called to him from the living room. When Smith first entered the room, he saw Brady holding what he initially thought was a life-size rag doll. As it fell against the couch, no more than 2ft from him, the realisation dawned on him that it was a young man, and not a doll at all.
As the young man lay sprawled, face down on the floor, Brady stood over him, his legs apart, holding an axe in his right hand. The young man groaned. Brady lifted the axe into the air, and brought it down on the young man’s head. There was silence for several seconds and then the young man groaned again, only it was much lower this time. Lifting the axe high above his head, Brady brought it down a second time. The young man stopped groaning. The only sound he made was a gurgling noise. Brady then placed a cover over the youth’s head and wrapped a piece of electric wire around his neck. As he repeatedly pulled the wire tighter, Brady kept saying, ‘You fucking dirty bastard,’ over and over again. When the young man finally stopped making any noise, Ian looked up and said to Hindley, ‘That’s it, it’s the messiest yet.’
Hindley then calmly made them all a cup of tea. She and Brady joked about the look on the young man’s face when he had struck him. They laughed as they told David about another occasion when a policeman had confronted Myra while they had been burying another of their victims on Saddleworth Moor. Brady had told David that he had killed some people before, but David thought it was just a sick fantasy. This was real. He was horrified and scared for his own safety. He decided that the best thing he could do was to keep calm and go along with them. He helped them to clean up the mess, tie up the body and put it in the bedroom upstairs. It was not until the early hours of the morning that he was able to escape, promising to return in the morning to help dispose of the body. Safely back at home, he was violently sick. He then went to a public phone box to call the police.
The police at first did not know whether to believe this bizarre story. However, when they went to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the home address of Brady and Hindley, their doubts were put aside. At the house, they first spoke to Hindley, who reluctantly gave them a key to the upstairs bedroom, the only room in the house that was locked, where the body of Edward Evans was still wrapped in a grey blanket. The axe described by Smith as the murder weapon was found in the same room. Brady was then formally arrested.
Brady, when questioned at the police station, told police that there had been an argument between himself, David Smith and the victim. A fight had ensued that had quickly got out of control. Smith had hit Evans and kicked him several times. There had been an axe on the floor, which Brady said he had used to hit Evans. According to Brady, he and Smith alone had tied up the body and Hindley had had nothing to do with Evans’s death.
Hindley was not arrested until four days later after police had found a three-page document in her car that described in explicit detail how she and Brady had planned to carry out the murder. When questioned, she corroborated Brady’s story, describing how she had been horrified and frightened by the ordeal. The police investigation would probably have gone no further if Smith had not told police of Brady’s claim that he had buried other bodies on Saddleworth Moor and the fact that numerous photos of the moors were found in their home.
Once the area where Brady and Hindley frequented was pinpointed, the digging began. Police believed that the bodies of four children who had mysteriously disappeared over the past two years might have been buried in the moors. They were proved right on 10 October 1965 when the naked body of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was found in a shallow grave, with her clothing at her feet, but the police had nothing but hearsay and circumstantial evidence to connect Brady and Hindley to her death. They needed much more. A more thorough search of the house at Wardle Brook Avenue on 15 October gave them the evidence they needed.
They found a left-luggage ticket inside a prayer book, which led them to a locker at Manchester Central station. Inside were two suitcases filled with pornographic and sadistic paraphernalia. In among these were nine semi-pornographic photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, showing her naked, bound and gagged, in a variety of poses in Myra Hindley’s bedroom. A tape recording was also found. The voice of a girl could be heard screaming, crying and begging for her life. Two other voices, one male and one female, could be heard threatening the child. Police were able to identify the adult voices as belonging to Brady and Hindley, but they needed Ann Downey’s assistance to identify her child’s voice. She listened in horror to her daughter in the last moments of her life. Even with such damning evidence against them, Brady and Hindley denied murdering Lesley. As in the case of Edward Evans, they attempted to implicate David Smith. They claimed that Smith had brought the girl to the house so Brady could photograph her. The tape recording was of their voices as they attempted to subdue the girl so they could take the pictures. Hindley protested that she had only used a harsh tone with the girl because she had been concerned that neighbours would hear her. As far as they were concerned, Lesley Ann had left their house, unharmed, with Smith, suggesting that Smith must have murdered her later.
As the search of Saddleworth Moor continued, 11 days after the discovery of Lesley Ann Downey the body of John Kilbride was found, also in a shallow grave. The evidence linking Brady and Hindley to his murder was mainly circumstantial and not overwhelming, but the police believed it was sufficient to charge them. They found the name ‘John Kilbride’ written, in Brady’s handwriting, in his notebook and a photograph of Hindley on John’s grave at the moors. It was also found that Hindley had hired a car on the day of John’s disappearance and returned it in a muddy state. Also, according to Hindley’s sister,
Brady and Hindley shopped at Ashton market every week, where John had disappeared. Despite all their efforts, the police were unable to find the bodies of the two other missing children or any evidence to link Brady and Hindley to their disappearances. They had to content themselves with prosecuting them both for the murders of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride.
On 27 April 1966, Hindley and Brady were brought to trial at Chester Assizes, where they pleaded not guilty to all charges. Throughout the trial, they continued their attempts to blame David Smith for the murders, a cowardly stance that deepened public hatred of them. At no time during the trial did they show any remorse for their crimes or any sorrow towards the families of their victims. To those who were present at the trial, the accused appeared cold and heartless. Despite protestations of their innocence, Ian Brady was found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride and Edward Evans. Myra Hindley was found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and for harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had killed John Kilbride. They escaped the death penalty by only a couple of months as the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 had come into effect just four weeks before their arrest. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1965, this murder investigation was unique. It was the first time in British legal history that a woman had been involved in a killing partnership that had involved the serial sex murders of children. The public could not comprehend how any woman could take part in such a horrific crime; her involvement made the crimes seem even more evil and unforgivable.
The trial judge spoke of his doubt that Brady could ever reform, describing him as ‘wicked beyond belief’ and effectively giving him little hope of eventual release. Successive Home Secretaries have agreed with that decision, while Lord Lane (the former Lord Chief Justice), set a 40-year minimum term in 1982. In 1990, Brady was told by the then Home Secretary David Waddington that both he and Hindley should never be freed. His successor Michael Howard agreed with this judgment in 1994 and told Brady so. Although in the UK Home Secretaries can no longer decide the minimum length of a life sentence, Brady has always insisted that he never wants to be released. He went on hunger strike in September 1999 and had to be force-fed, after the High Court refused him the right to starve himself to death. In early 2006, Brady was hospitalised and wanted to be allowed to die. He is, at the time of writing, still alive and is being held at Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 43