Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Ian Brady, born in 1938, was the illegitimate son of a cocktail waitress from Glasgow. She led a promiscuous, disordered, alcoholic’s life and her custody of Ian was sporadic. Childhood acquaintances recall Brady bullying other children in foster homes, burying cats alive, breaking the hind legs of dogs, and once setting his foster parents’ dog on fire. Once he was accused of chopping off the heads of four rabbits at school. Brady was said to have felt superior to his peers and was not known to have friends. Indeed he possessed and possesses today a superior intelligence. (He is a prison author of a recent book, The Gates of Janus, an analysis of serial murder.)

  Brady did not get in trouble with the law until the age of 11, when he began to engage in petty crimes. He served a four-year probation for burglary, followed by the commission of another burglary, then a year’s sentence in a reformatory when he was 15. When he got into trouble again at 17, it was decided that his foster parents could not control him, and he was sent by the courts to Manchester to live with his recently married mother. Brady hated his mother and resented this new arrangement.

  Although Brady was a disciplinary problem student, he was very bright and could be charming and manipulative. He took to reading on his own. When he was 19, Brady became fascinated with Nazis. He devoured a pulp genre of semipornographic paperback accounts of Nazi atrocities popular in the early 1960s—lurid stories that focused on forced brothels, naked gypsy women herded into gas chambers, and sadistic female camp guards. Feeling out of step with his fellow British victors over Nazism, Brady taught himself German. He discovered the literary pretensions of Marquis de Sade. Brady concluded that society was corrupt and that priests, in order to subjugate the poor, conceived the idea of God.

  At 23 years old he found himself going nowhere while working in a position beneath his capacity, as stock clerk at Millwards, an industrial chemical supply house. It is there he would meet a typist—18-year-old Myra Hindley.

  Myra As a Child

  Myra has been described as a perfectly “normal” girl who loved animals and children and brightly colored lipstick. Born in the industrial district of Manchester in 1942, to a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, according to reports, Myra was sent to live with her grandmother at the age of 4 when her younger sister was born and her mother decided the house was now “too overcrowded.” Rejection by their mothers in childhood would appear to be the common denominator between not only Myra and Ian but with many other serial killers—the storing up of fatal childhood resentment. But the story is not as simple as that. Myra’s grandmother apparently lived down the same street as Myra’s mother, and Myra moved effortlessly between the two homes.

  If anything, Myra was spoiled by her grandmother, who essentially let the little girl have the run of the house. Although somewhat self-centered, Myra lived a conventional childhood, playing in the playgrounds and going to school. She was an adequate student. Adequate and average. Her marks only suffered because her grandmother allowed her to stay at home whenever she claimed she was not feeling well. Everything in her life was adequate and average and normal, until Myra turned 15.

  Myra became attached to an underdeveloped 13-year-old neighborhood boy in the role of a big sister or mother. She spent all her spare time and energy taking the boy on walks, playing with him, defending him against bullies, buying him candy. One hot afternoon the boy came by and asked Myra to accompany him to an abandoned reservoir where local kids gathered to play and swim. Myra was feeling lazy that day and declined. The boy went off without her and drowned that afternoon.

  Myra was devastated. For days she walked about as if in a trance and did not sleep. Her only activity was to go door-to-door collecting money for a wreath for the boy’s coffin. Some of the women who opened the door recall that there was a strange, aggressive edge to the stony-faced girl at the door. One said:

  She wasn’t like a little girl needin’ sympathy, she made you feel sort o’ guilty, like as if it was your fault [he’d] gone drowned and you better fork out for them flowers or she’d go an’ tell on you.204

  Myra mourned for the boy for months until her mother came by and forcibly took her black clothing away. Her morbid mourning became a self-centered focus of everything in her life. She could not understand how the rest of the world and everybody else in it could go on with their lives while she suffered her loss. How dare they? She behaved like a mother whose child had perished and who will never be able to have another and nobody cared. Somebody had to be blamed.

  As one of Hindley’s biographers writes, “Where a girl of normal sensibilities would have thought—and gone on thinking—as much of the dead boy’s tragic cutting-off and of his parents’ loss as of her own grief…this girl’s heart stayed exactly where it was: broken perhaps but immovable, right in the center of Myra Hindley.”205

  Again, perhaps it is grasping at straws in a sea of normality, but death of a childhood friend or sibling is sometimes a reoccurring theme in serial killers’ childhood histories: the death of Jerry Brudos’s “girlfriend” when he was five (he would go on to murder four women so he could dismember their feet);206 the death of Genene Jones’s adopted sibling and her subsequent morbidity. Yes, it’s tenuous, but what else do we have here? Myra was just so normal.

  Aside from a fervent adoption of the Catholic faith, Myra appeared to overcome her obsession with the boy’s death over the next few years. She left school, hardly saying good-bye to any of her friends, and began working as a secretary, moving from company to company in search of better wages and opportunities. She dated but “kept herself for marriage.” She went to dances and movies, attended church, did not drink, became engaged, but then called it off.

  “Out with Ian!”

  In January 1961, she went to work as a typist in the secretarial pool at the Millwards industrial chemical supply company. There she would take dictation from stock clerk Ian Brady. Although the two did not date for a year, Hindley’s diary would reveal that she was obsessed with Brady, who appeared to be domineering and arrogant, so unlike all the other boys she had known. He would arrive at work on his motorcycle in a leather jacket, goggles, and helmet and peel off the gear at his desk to reveal his business suit beneath. He was mysterious—nobody knew anything about him. For the first seven months, Myra didn’t even speak with Ian Brady.

  In her diary on July 23, Myra wrote: “Wonder if Ian is courting. Still feel the same.” July 25: “Haven’t spoke to him yet.” July 27: “Spoken to him. He smiles as though embarrassed. I’m going to change, you’ll notice that in the way I write.”

  August 1: “Ian’s taking sly looks at me at work.” August 2: “Not sure if he likes me. They say he gambles on horses.” August 8: “Gone off Ian a bit.” August 11: “Been to the Friendship Pub but not with Ian.” August 14: “I love Ian all over again. He has a cold and would love to mother him.” August 24: “I am in a bad mood because he hasn’t spoken to me today.” August 29: “I hope he loves me and will marry me some day.”

  September 9: “Ian is wearing a black shirt today.” October 18: “Ian still ignores me. Fed up. I still love him.” November 1: “Months now since Ian and I spoke.” November 28: “I’ve given up on Ian. He goes out of his way to annoy me, he insults me and deliberately walks in front of me. I have seen the other side of him and that convinces me he is not good.” December 2: “I hate Ian, he has killed all the love I had for him…” December 15: “I am in love with Ian all over again.”

  December 22: “Out with Ian!”

  On New Year’s Eve, Ian went over to Myra’s house to celebrate with her parents and younger sister. He brought a bottle of German wine and a bottle of whisky, a luxury in those days. The whisky was Myra’s first taste of alcohol. In her diary, Myra would write, “Dad and Ian spoke as if they’d known each other for years. Ian is so gentle he makes me want to cry.”

  January 1, 1962: “I have been at Millwards for twelve months and only just gone with him. I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get marri
ed and are happy ever after.”

  There are a few more innocuous entries, but Myra’s diary stops as abruptly as it begins. She would have little time left from now on to make diary entries or to contemplate her life. Ian would be keeping her busy.

  On their first date, they went out to the movies—Judgment at Nuremberg, a Spencer Tracy film about the war crimes trial of former Nazi judges who ordered forced sterilization.

  Myra had been obsessed with Ian for nearly a year. In her own mind, she was his long before he even knew it. In real life, Myra lost her virginity to Brady and became his slavish girlfriend. Her recent adoption of Catholicism vaporized as Myra was soon convinced by Brady of the nonexistence of God. She was completely enthralled with the older and “sophisticated” Brady, who read intellectual books, sported black shirts, drank German wine, and was learning the language.

  Myra later would say, “Within months he had convinced me there was no God at all: He could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese, and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion, his softly convincing means of speech which fascinated me, because I could never fully comprehend, only browse at the odd sentence here and there, believing it to be gospel truth.”207

  Myra testified that after being seduced by Brady he took little further interest in her sexually. He preferred to have her masturbate him while he inserted a candle in his anus. He also wanted her to have anal intercourse with him, which she complained was painful. She also posed for pornographic pictures that Brady would take, using a timer, of the two of them having sex while wearing hoods. Soon Myra began dressing in neo-Nazi-chic—Ilsa black leather skirts and knee-high boots. She colored her hair platinum blonde.

  The Killings

  Brady, Myra testified, was fascinated by one particular book—Compulsion by Meyer Levin. The book was a historical account of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students from wealthy families who, in 1924, in Chicago, killed a 14-year-old boy. Their motive: To prove themselves superior supermen, they decided to commit the “perfect crime.” The two supermen were quickly arrested after Leopold dropped a unique pair of eyeglasses at the scene of the crime. During the trial it was revealed that the two were homosexual lovers and that Leopold adored Loeb and slavishly did anything the other proposed.

  According to Myra Hindley, about a year and a half into their relationship, in July of 1963, Brady began to talk to her of committing a perfect murder as proof of their superiority. On July 12, Myra and Brady set out to commit their perfect murder. Myra drove a van while Brady followed her on his motorcycle. It was Myra’s job to pick up a female hitchhiker. She offered a ride to 16-year-old Pauline Reade, who was on her way to a dance in her bright pink party dress.

  Myra told Pauline that she was on her way to the moors—a bleak, windy, grassy expanse of wasteland outside of Manchester. She had lost a glove there, Myra said, and if Pauline would help her find it, she would give her some music records as a reward. Pauline agreed, and the two set out to the deserted moors, followed discreetly by Brady on his motorbike.

  At the moors, Brady attacked Pauline, raped her, and cut her throat. Although Myra claims that she was in the van when the rape and murder took place, in an open letter from prison in 1990, Brady stated that Myra also committed sexual acts on Pauline. Afterward, using a spade that they had brought with them in the van for the occasion, Myra and Brady buried Pauline’s body on the moor. It was only in July 1987 that her body was found by police and identified by the pink party dress she was buried in.

  On November 23, 1963, using the same ruse, they murdered a 12-year-old boy, John Kilbride. Myra stated that Brady raped the boy and strangled him because the knife was too dull to cut his throat. Police were later able to find Kilbride’s grave by identifying prominent land features in a photograph of Myra posing on the grave with her dog. Later, when Myra was under arrest and was told that her dog had died in police custody, she remarked, “They’re nothing but bloody murderers.”

  On June 16, 1964, they murdered another 12-year-old boy, Keith Bennett, using the same methods again. After being raped and strangled, he was buried on the moor. His body, despite numerous efforts, including some with the help of Myra and Brady, has never been found.

  It would be a year and a half before the couple would kill again. On December 26, 1965, they kidnapped 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and took her back to their house. Once there, Brady set up a light and camera and forced the girl to pose for pornographic photographs. Then, turning on a tape recorder to record the child’s screams, Brady raped her. According to Brady’s 1990 letter, Myra “insisted upon killing Lesley Ann Downey with her own hands, using a two-foot length of silk cord, which she later used to enjoy toying with in public, in the secret knowledge of what it had been used for.”

  In October 1965, Brady decided he wanted to form a gang, and began to talk with Myra’s unemployed brother-in-law, David Smith, about committing a holdup. On the evening of October 6th, Smith dropped by the house and complained of having no money. Brady suggested: “We’ll have to roll a queer.” He went out and came back later with 17-year-old Edward Evans. Brady struck Evans with an ax and strangled him. He made Smith hold the ax so that his fingerprints would be on the weapon and then the two of them wrapped the corpse in plastic and cleaned up the blood. Myra and Brady then went to bed while Smith wandered off home in a state of shock. At home, he told his wife what had occurred and they immediately called the police.

  The next morning the police raided Brady’s house and found the corpse in a spare bedroom still wrapped in plastic. In the spine of a prayer book, the police found a key to a train station locker where they discovered the pictures and tape recording of Leslie Ann Downey screaming for mercy as she was being killed. The tapes were played in court during Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s joint trial.

  “Instead of the Requisite Lady Macbeth, I Got Messalina.”

  They were both sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1966 on three charges of murder. Ian and Myra would not confess to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett until twenty years later, in 1986. They were brought to the moors to assist police in searching for the bodies, but the body of Keith Bennett was never found.

  After their sentencing, Myra and Ian continued to correspond with each other for seven years and even asked permission to be married. In 1972, she seduced a prison guard and attempted to escape. Eventually, Myra began to distance herself from Ian and as she began appealing for probation she began to portray herself as a victim. Ian had beaten and drugged her into submission, she claimed. He threatened to kill her if she did not participate in the murders, she said. Claiming to be reformed, Myra began a vigorous campaign to be released in the 1990s after she had served the minimum time of thirty years before becoming eligible for parole.

  The crimes of Brady and Hindley touched so raw a nerve in Britain that even in 1997 their crimes remained a sensitive issue. When in September, British Royal Academy of Arts held an exhibition of young artists’ works that included a thirteen-foot portrait of Myra Hindley by painter Marcus Harvey, objections were raised. The family of one of Hindley’s victims appealed to the Academy to exclude the work. On the opening day of the show, the portrait was splashed with paint, ink, and eggs and had to be withdrawn for a week for restoration.

  At the height of her campaign for freedom, when it looked very likely that she would be successful on a technicality, Myra Hindley died on November 15, 2002, of complications related to a heart attack. She was 60 years old.

  Ian Brady, from the beginning, confessed to his crimes and insisted that he and Myra should never be released. He recently wrote a study of serial murder without referring to his own crimes, which was released in the United States by the alternative publisher Feral House, much to the indignation of the British.

  When Myra was appealing for her release, Brady wrote a letter to the British Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1990, who was respo
nsible for justice policy, arguing that Hindley should not be released. In it he said:

  First accept the determinant. Myra Hindley and I once loved each other. We were a unified force, not two conflicting entities. The relationship was not based on the delusional concept of folie à deux, but on a conscious/subconscious emotional and psychological affinity.

  Folie à deux is a psychiatric disorder sometimes offered as an explanation for why some women might commit horrific murders in the company of their lover or husband. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) it is called “Shared Psychotic Disorder.” It is induced by a stronger personality upon a weaker one (the folie impossée), but delusions can also occur simultaneously in associated predisposed individuals (folie simultanée.)

  Brady concluded:

  She regarded periodic homicides as rituals of reciprocal innervation, marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer. As the records show, before we met my criminal activities had been primarily mercenary. Afterwards, a duality of motivation developed. Existential philosophy melded with the spirituality of death and became predominant. We experimented with the concept of total possibility. Instead of the requisite Lady Macbeth, I got Messalina. Apart our futures would have taken radically divergent courses.

  Carol Bundy and Douglas Clark—the Sunset Boulevard Killers

  In 1980, in Los Angeles, Douglas Clark murdered at least six young women who were either hitchhiking or working as prostitutes in the Sunset Boulevard area. Clark apparently enjoyed shooting his victims in the head as they performed oral sex on him. He would then have sex with their corpses. His girlfriend, Carol Bundy, accompanied Clark on at least one of the murders, sitting in the backseat of the car and watching as Clark murdered the victim in the front. When she felt that Clark was no longer interested in her, she committed a murder of her own.