Detective Topping interviewed both Myra and Ian extensively and found her to be the more credible interviewee who genuinely wanted to help find the bodies. She was, indeed, willing to be hypnotised in case it would help her remember further details of the gravesites. She agreed to do it, her medical adviser agreed she could do it, and Detective Peter Topping found a skilled hypnotherapist who wanted to do it - but the Home Office repeatedly turned the request down.
Ian, like Myra, went back up to the moors with the police and looked for familiar landmarks. He was less visibly distressed than she was during visits there, but also less helpful. He told Peter Topping that he felt ashamed of his actions and could not bear to think about what he’d done.
Denial
Myra has also admitted to feelings of shame and remorse. She seems to have blocked out the picture of the deaths: leastways when a relative died, Myra said that it was the first time she’d seen a dead body, forgetting that she’d seen the corpse of Pauline Reade. Freed from Brady’s influence, she returned to normal - and has apparently rebuilt her past vision of herself so that it resembles a more normal one.
Though considered to have a hard side, Myra Hindley is not without her demons. She still opts to sleep with the light on, has occasionally been hospitalised for severe depression and is said to fear death. Yet for some years she has smoked forty cigarettes a day and refused to exercise, despite the fact that she has angina and brittle bones.
In 1999 she was hospitalised after collapsing in her cell and asked doctors to let her die if she lapsed into a vegetative state. Prison visitors report that if she doesn’t change to less destructive habits she is likely to die before her sixtieth year.
The tabloids have suggested that this chainsmoking is either a death wish or a last desperate attempt to make herself seem so frail that she is released on compassionate grounds. Peter Timms sees it merely as a means of reducing boredom. ‘What else is there to do in prison?’ the former prison governor says with disarming honesty.
Personality
So what kind of personality starts off caring for children but is eventually persuaded to lure them into a car so that her lover can murder them? Some journalists have called her a psychopath but psychopathy seems unlikely in a woman who loved her mother and gran and the children she babysat. Psychopaths cannot form strong and lasting bonds with anyone.
Psychologists claimed at the time of the murders that she had a hysterical personality - the term used nowadays is histrionic. That is, someone who is over-emotional yet emotionally shallow, who is gullible and very susceptible to suggestion, a human sponge. This makes more sense as Myra presented herself as anti-social to Ian Brady when he wanted to use another anti-social personality. He wanted to dominate so she pleased him by pointing out the terror in the victim’s eyes. But no one acts wholly to please another person so she must have derived satisfaction from the acts herself. It’s been said that the female serial killer kills a version of herself, a version she wishes to disassociate from - and Myra helped kill impoverished working class children who were on their own.
The theory of violentization (for more on this please see chapter sixteen’s theories of why women kill) suggests that violent people have either suffered strong physical abuse or seen other people close to them suffering from it. Myra fits into both these categories, as her father beat both her and her mother. Myra’s mother also hit her, even striking the teenager across the face in the street one day after she’d missed the last bus home and been away all night.
One of the other stages of violentization is when someone coaches the initially normal person to be violent - and when she met Ian Brady he spent years encouraging her into violent ways. For many months he took her to see the films of violence and gave her books filled with violence. He spoke of bank robberies, Nazism and murder night and day. Then came the fantasized rehearsals, prowling the streets looking for potential victims and prowling the moors talking about what he’d do to them there. Only when he was sure that she was completely enthralled by his vision of superiority did he ask her to help him carry out his first murderous act.
Myra today
Even now she doesn’t talk about certain aspects of what she did, writing about the other murders to a journalist - as broadcast in the BBC2 programme Modern Times - but in the case of Lesley Ann Downey saying ‘I’m finding it very difficult… It just hurts so much to think that I could have been such a cruel bastard.’ She was quoted in the programme saying that she ‘chose to sacrifice Pauline so that my own family would be safe.’ But if she’d wanted nothing to do with the abductions, Myra could have simply reported Ian’s threats to the police.
If Myra was to admit that her own childhood rejection and her father’s abuse had left her with suppressed rage, and that Ian Brady brought that rage into the open, she would sound more plausible. Certainly, the trial judge thought her redeemable if removed from Brady’s influence - and even her harshest opponents don’t actually believe that she’d kill again.
It’s true that if Myra Hindley hadn’t met Ian Brady her life would have been very different. She would probably have married and become a mother - she was distraught when her sister Maureen’s first baby died and she has been kind to the children of friends and relatives who have visited her in prison. Under Ian’s influence she became a very dangerous young woman but there’s no evidence to suggest that she’s a dangerous older woman now.
Searching for the truth
It’s unlikely that Myra Hindley would have told the truth to psychiatrists during her first six years in prison when she still saw herself as the love of Ian Brady’s life, when he was all she cared about. But after that, surely much could have been learned from her and put to good use to avoid others making the same mistakes?
This would have involved analysing Myra at length but the prison service seems disinclined to do this. One prison authority, who wished to remain nameless, told this author that ‘prisoners don’t receive any significant therapeutic help.’
You can argue that killers don’t deserve help, in which case let’s change the law so that it no longer gives the impression that prison is partly about rehabilitation, that people can change.
The Reverend Peter Timms is uneasy that he was prevented from fully counselling Myra, especially when she was starting to confide in him. He told me that he was ‘willing to give ten thousand hours because it was important for her to know why.’ (And surely for the public to know why.) He adds that he is ‘seriously troubled about not being able to commit the time to counselling Myra to explore not when and how - which she was very honest and frank about - but why and what did it represent for her own inner life.’
He has tried to talk about this publicly but finds that the tabloids simply believe that men like him are seduced by the power of the female prisoner. Similar taunts have been thrown at some of Myra’s legal representatives.
Aware that newspapers were still using pictures of the prisoner that were over thirty years old and that showed her looking deliberately emotionless, he gave them all one of her recent graduation photographs. But most papers prefer to use the old photographs, giving the impression that someone who commits evil acts as a very young woman in the thrall of a more sadistic man can never change.
Some newspapers also give the public an entirely erroneous impression of events. One reported that Myra Hindley had become a close friend of the child-abuser Rose West, profiled later. The report was completely untrue.
Update
On 31st March 2000 five Law Lords upheld the Home Secretary’s decision that life should mean exactly that in Myra’s case - in other words that she should die in prison. The reasoning given was her ‘exceptionally wicked and uniquely evil crimes.’ Ironically her former lover Ian Brady actually wants to die in prison as soon as possible - but earlier that same month he had lost his court battle to be allowed to starve to death in Ashworth Hospital where he has been treated for mental illness for many years.
Some criminologists vi
ew Myra Hindley as a political prisoner because successive Home Secretaries have refused to free her to avoid a public outcry. She apparently meets the usual criteria for parole yet has never been granted this.
4 If I can’t have you
The extreme reactions of Martha Ann Johnson
Martha Ann Johnson is one of a growing number of women (and men) who see their offspring as pawns to be used rather than as individuals to be nurtured. Between 1977 and 1982 she would kill all four of her children in order to hurt the man who cared for them.
She was born in Georgia, America, in 1955. Her IQ was a mere 78 - most people score at least a hundred. She was almost illiterate, spoke ungrammatically and often suffered from depression and a lack of self esteem.
Throughout her childhood Martha (who was sometimes called by her middle name of Ann) lived with her mother. She grew into an unhappy teenager with an increasing weight problem who had no confidence in herself and hated her small but heavy body, brown eyes and curly brown hair. Martha was desperate to find herself a boyfriend who would spend lots of time with her as she was afraid of being on her own.
She married for the first time when she was just fourteen. The marriage was to Bobby Wright and, like most teenage relationships, it was very difficult. The couple had a daughter, Jennyann, in 1971, who would remain with Martha when the marriage failed.
All of Martha’s husbands would cheat on her, but she was always desperate to maintain the relationship or to remarry. Being a wife and mother was her entire existence as she had no educational or career prospects. She also had a very dependent personality and feared that she couldn’t cope with running a household on her own.
After Bobby left her, Martha married Tommy Taylor and gave him a son, James, in 1975. This marriage was also argumentative and unhappy. Psychologists would later state that Martha had a personality disorder - presumably referring to her intense neediness - and that she found relationships with other adults difficult. She also moved around a lot from county to county, perhaps seeking a home or a relationship that would bring her happiness.
In 1976 Martha, by now an immature twenty-two, married for a third time. Her new spouse was called Earl Bowen. He was good to both of her children from her earlier marriages and loved them deeply and treated them as his own.
But his relationship with Martha was contentious from the start. She wanted him home all the time and he presumably felt trapped. She was also very threatened by his increasing bisexual activities and became intent on exacting her revenge.
He walked out after one of their fights, and stayed at a friend’s house whilst he tried to decide how to resolve their many problems. Martha’s entreaties failed to win him back so she decided to do something cataclysmic that he couldn’t ignore…
The first death
On 25th September 1977 she went to two-year-old James’s bed and sat on the sleeping child, suffocating him with her 250 pound weight. She then phoned her husband saying that she couldn’t get the toddler to waken. Earl rushed round and found the little boy motionless in his crib. The body was cold and he could see immediately that he was dead.
Martha told the police that she’d gone to ask the toddler what he wanted for breakfast, only to find him rigid. The area around his mouth was a disturbing blue.
The doctors recorded the death as being Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS, and Martha was free to kill again. (Twelve years later the doctor would reverse this verdict in the light of the three subsequent deaths, saying that there was a ninety percent chance that this first death was homicide.) Martha was now reunited with her grieving spouse.
Another two births
She gave him a son, Earl, in 1979 and a daughter, Tibitha, the following year. She was still feeling afraid and inadequate and presumably hoped to cement her floundering relationship by giving her husband both a daughter and a son. Again, on the surface she was good to the children and they were always cleanly dressed and well fed.
The second death
But Martha and Earl fought again in November 1980 and Earl went to his lover, Stanley Hullen. Martha called Stanley in the hope of getting Earl back. She said that if something happened to the baby it would all be Earl’s fault. Stanley was distressed by the conversation, though Martha would later deny to police that she made such a call.
When her husband still didn’t return, Martha partially suffocated the three-month-old girl then left the room. Shortly afterwards - as she’d doubtless intended - a distraught Jennyann told her that the baby was gasping for breath.
Earl Bowen was called and told to go to the hospital. He found his wife and her mother there and asked his wife what she had done with their baby daughter. She denied harming Tibitha, asking why she would carry the children for nine months if she didn’t want them? But her estranged husband still suspected the worst.
When Martha spoke to the police she said she’d been in the shower when her oldest daughter Jennyann appeared and said Tibitha was having difficulty breathing. Martha said she’d rushed to the baby’s side to find sweets on the bed. She wondered if her toddler Earl had given the sweets to the baby, causing her to choke. But the autopsy wouldn’t show any such sweets in the baby’s windpipe and again the diagnosis was SIDS.
Earl Bowen told the medical examiner that this was the second time one of Martha’s children had died after he’d argued with her, but this information wasn’t acted on. One reason for this was that Martha’s frequent house moves meant that she saw many different hospital staff, autopsy specialists and social workers and few of the personnel communicated with each other effectively about the case.
Inaction
All hospitals know that parents can injure or kill multiple times - but they hesitate to involve the law for fear that they can’t prove it. Former prison officer Robert Adams told me that ‘the best single predictor of future violence is previous violence.’ But he admits that it’s complex because many people have one violent episode and that most murderers don’t go on to kill again.
Martha, though, wasn’t in the category of having one violent moment. Two of her children were already dead and the circumstances were right for her to kill a third…
The third death
In early 1989 Martha was still missing her husband Earl. She spent part of January and the first days of February repeatedly taking his son, little Earl, to the local hospital saying that he’d swallowed rat poison or had a seizure. Unknown to her, at around this time Earl had applied for custody of the little boy because he feared for the toddler’s life.
Incredibly, Martha now phoned Stanley again to say that if Earl didn’t return home she’d do something to Earl junior. Stanley now strongly suspected that Martha had killed her first two children. He warned her that she’d burn in hell if she killed the third and he phoned the child protection services and told them of his fears.
But the enraged Martha was hellbent on creating another bereavement that Earl would have to comfort her over. She rolled her considerable weight on to the helpless child. She and her distraught daughter Jennyann then rushed Earl junior to hospital but he died on the way to the emergency ward. He was resuscitated and kept alive on a machine for three days after which he was declared brain dead and the machine was switched off.
This time the doctors thought the toddler had had a seizure and again failed to suspect foul play. It’s possible that Martha, like many baby-killers, could act the part of a grieving mother. She also seemed an unlikely child killer, for those who knew her testified that she was always good to her kids and she and Jennyann were apparently close.
But Stanley Hullen’s phone call to a child protection worker in Fulton County now started to produce results. The worker saw that Martha was indeed obsessed with the idea of getting Earl back and suspected she might go to any lengths to do so. Worried about the remaining child, Jennyann, she asked for the girl to be removed from the home, but a judge refused.
Earl Bowen was also concerned that Martha might harm Jennyann
so he took her back to her natural father, Bobby Wright. The girl told her father that she was afraid of what her mother might do, and that she’d had a dream in which her mother suffocated her with a pillow. Both Bobby Wright and Earl Bowen got the impression she knew something about her siblings deaths but that she was too frightened to tell what she’d seen or heard. After a few days Mr Wright took his child to Martha’s mother and she ended up back in Martha’s care.
Sadly, such inactivity or lack of later vigilance on the part of the authorities isn’t uncommon. Interviewed for this book, former prison officer Robert Adams explained that ‘many researchers feel the true incidence of fatal abuse cases, including those against children, is vastly underestimated. For instance, some highly suspicious deaths in families where violence is previously known to have occurred aren’t recorded as homicides because there is insufficient evidence to make a criminal conviction stick. Parents may admit some responsibility years later. This is not as rare as one might expect.’
He also cites research by Peter Scott in 1973 (Parents Who Kill Their Children Medicine, Science And The Law volume 13 issue 2) regarding parents who killed their children when they were under five years old. It showed that the parents who repeatedly killed weren’t usually the aggressive psychopaths. Instead, Robert says, ‘the really dangerous ones were the ones who were quiet and over-inhibited. When the otherwise passive person became unexpectedly violent the result was often fatal.’ This was the final lesson that Martha Ann Johnson’s three young children had now learnt. But Martha still hadn’t achieved her goal of having Earl back full time so she prepared to kill again.
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Page 5