ONE OF YOUR OWN

I can’t remember when I first heard about the crimes committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. They occurred before I was born but have seeped into the national consciousness over the years, becoming something we absorb as part of our collective history. Although there have been other similarly horrific crimes in the decades that have passed since then, the Moors Murders case remains unparalleled in terms of the strength of emotion it provokes and the sense of utter incomprehension that a woman could abduct children with her lover, then collude in their rape, murder and burial on the moor. Repulsion at Hindley’s part in the crimes, above all, gives the case its notoriety.

Myra Hindley died in prison in November 2002 but remains as omnipresent in death as she was in life. There have been acres of newsprint written about her since the 1960s, several books about the case, as well as documentaries and drama series. Those who attempt to say anything in her defence are met with a storm of protest while those who feel that she was evil are accused of being too emotional and unwilling to believe in redemption. The truth, as always, is more complex. It is an unbearable fact that Myra Hindley was capable of love and kindness towards her family and friends, adoring of her niece and the children of those who visited her in prison, yet had been responsible for the sadistic murder of other children. The dichotomy is difficult to process – it calls to mind how the perpetrators of the Holocaust were able to inflict torture and murder on a vast scale, then return home to their families quite clear of conscience. Contrary to what some sections of the media would have us believe, people who commit monstrous acts look no different to the rest of humanity and have likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses too. What sets them apart are their choices – acts of appalling cruelty and violence – but otherwise they exist among us as nursery nurses, doctors, office workers, shopkeepers . . . In some cases, they are even children themselves – Mary Bell, Constance Kent, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the Doncaster boys who cannot be named . . .

What lay behind Hindley’s choices and whether she was genuinely remorseful or not remain points of contention. She and her supporters claim that she acted under duress and had redeemed herself, while her victims’ families and a large section of the public believe her crimes were committed out of sheer wickedness and her remorse was simply a facade to win her freedom. This book explores her motivation and what followed it as dispassionately as possible in order to leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

A biography of Myra Hindley understandably draws accusations of sensationalism and unnecessarily raking over painful memories; I hope to have steered clear of the former, while the latter may also be true of almost any study of contemporary history. I’ve also tried to give a voice to the people who are rarely heard in books of this kind: the victims’ families. Myra Hindley’s supporters and friends present their views, but it seems to me that a book about someone who has committed murder should reflect – if they wish it – the impact on the people closest to the victims. The book also draws on the memories of the policemen involved with the original investigation, none of whom have ever spoken in-depth publicly about the case. Their recollections result in the overturning of a number of persistent misconceptions. Myra Hindley’s recently released prison files give new insights into the woman, her crimes and the institutions that contained her. They include personal papers, prison reports, documents and correspondence, many of which are published here for the first time.

Several books have been written on the Moors Murders case since the trial in 1966, focusing on the crimes and their detection. To date, there has only been one biography ‘proper’, published in 1988: Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess, by Jean Ritchie. Well researched, it was nonetheless written over 20 years ago, before such a vast archive of new documentation was made public, and focused on her life in prison. Duncan Staff’s The Lost Boy (2007) is the most recent publication on the Moors Murders; he met and corresponded with Hindley and was permitted access to some of her personal papers. Despite its subtitle, ‘The definitive story of the Moors Murders and the search for the final victim’, there are a few inaccuracies throughout the book – for instance, the date when Keith Bennett went missing is given as 18 June 1964 when it was in fact 16 June, and the photograph purporting to be of Lesley Ann Downey’s funeral is actually the funeral of John Kilbride. There are others, some of which are flagged in the text as endnotes.

Myra Hindley remains a gauge of female iniquity; One of Your Own is both a study of the woman and her crimes, and an attempt to redress various factual errors that have accumulated over the years.

For interviews and source material (and hospitality), I would like to thank Bernard Black and his wife Margaret, Joe Chapman, Allan Grafton, Yvonne Roberts, Duncan Staff (who kindly provided tapes of his documentaries on the case), Father Michael Teader, the Revd Peter Timms and his wife Veronica, and Sara Trevelyan. I am especially grateful to Andrew McCooey for his interview and for extending permission to quote from Myra Hindley’s own words. I must also offer a heartfelt thank you to Mrs Bridget Astor, who generously allowed me access to her husband’s papers, and to Geoffrey Todd and his secretary, Paula Corbett, for making them available to me. Anne Maguire shared painful memories of the wrongful imprisonment inflicted on her and her husband and two sons, and I am grateful to her for talking to me. I’d also like to thank Angela Handley for putting me in touch with Mo Statham and Anne Murdoch. I owe a special debt of thanks to Peter Stanford, who was particularly helpful and kind in giving me access to his letters from Myra Hindley and a (then) unpublished interview with Lady Anne Tree, as well as for putting me in touch with Bridget Astor, Anne Maguire and the Revd Peter Timms, and for providing a lively interview and ideas for further research. Clive Entwistle, the first reporter to speak to Myra Hindley and the most knowledgeable, gave me a terrifically helpful interview; his documentary, The Moors Murders (1999), is exceptional in its detail and accuracy. I must also thank Michael Attwell for his documentary, Myra: The Making of a Monster (2003), and Katie Kinnard for sending me a copy of Martina Cole’s documentary, Lady Killers: Myra Hindley (2008). Thanks, too, to Norman Luck for allowing me to draw on his interview with Dorothy Wing.

I spent a wonderful day with Margaret Mounsey and want to thank her for that and our contact since, and for sharing with me memories of her husband, the redoubtable Joe Mounsey. To Mike Massheder, I offer my thanks for his insights and friendship, and extend the same to Ian Fairley, Tom McVittie and Bob Spiers, all of whom are exceptional men. I’d also like to thank Maureen Spiers for the lunch she provided when I interviewed her husband.

Anthony Ainsworth talked to me about the geography of the moor and provided the introduction to Norie Miles, Winnie Johnson’s close friend; sadly, he died a few months after this book was published. Norie Miles has studied the photographs taken by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and also facilitated an interview with Winnie Johnson. I thank them both, and Elizabeth Bond who looks after Winnie.

Although David Smith did not wish to be interviewed for a book about Myra Hindley, I am very grateful to him for agreeing to an informal chat, and for his and his wife Mary’s hospitality. Thank you, too, to their son David and his wife Diane, for providing initial contact.

Together with my son River, I spent two wonderful days at the splendid National Library of Wales, where the papers of Emlyn Williams are kept. The staff there – Manon Foster, Anwen Pierce, Glyn Parry, Caronwen Samuel and others – were unfailingly kind and helpful, and I’d like to thank them not only for their assistance with the Williams’ archive, but also for making my son so welcome. I only wish the staff of every archive were as thoughtful and knowledgeable. Thanks, too, to the staff of the National Archive in Kew for their assistance with Myra Hindley’s prison files, and National Image Library Manager Paul Johnson especially for his kindness and patience in dealing with the photographs. I’d also like to thank the staff at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull for providing copies of Myra Hindley’s letters held there.

Many literary sources have informed this book, and I am grateful to the authors and publishers for allowing me permission to quote from their works.

Closer to home, I must thank my agent, Jan Michael, and her agent, Jane Judd, for supporting the project from the start. Jan’s suggestions on the text were incisive and made a difference to the manuscript generally, and Jane and her husband Brian very kindly let me stay with them while I worked in London. At Mainstream, I offer sincere thanks to Bill Campbell, Peter MacKenzie, Deborah Warner, Ailsa Morrison, Graeme Blaikie, Karyn Millar and all the staff for their hard work and faith in the book.

And literally closest to home, I have to thank my friend Tricia Room especially, for ferrying me around various places and discussing ideas. I’m also grateful to my family and other friends for putting up with me while I wrote the book, and to my mother, for listening as I talked about it every day and for looking after River when I needed more time to write. And to River, who knew only the most basic facts of the book, I offer the deepest thanks, for keeping me grounded and bringing joy into my life while I worked on a complex and distressing subject.

I corresponded, briefly, with Ian Brady, and would like to echo Danny Kilbride’s words: ‘Tell us where Keith is. Stop being a coward. There’s a little boy out there on the moor who should be brought home to his family. It can’t end like this.’

Finally, there is one other person I would like to acknowledge, whom I did not meet whilst working on this book, but who contacted me after publication. That person is now my partner, Keith’s brother Alan Bennett. His support, courage and love mean everything to me and I want to thank him for it all from my heart, with love.

Rain slanted in from the Fens, as it had all day, beating with a thin, hollow sound on the roof of the small 1930s-built chapel. The gardens of remembrance were pitch-black, but the gravel courtyard burned with light and the white draughts of breath issuing from the multitude of journalists who represented every broadsheet, tabloid and TV news company in the country. Closer to the chapel, and guarding the gates, were the legions of police drafted in to search the grounds for intruders, the luminous bands on their uniforms a glare of brilliant yellow among the black trees.

But no one uninvited came. The warning to the public to stay away proved unnecessary, for in a curiously medieval display of suspicion the woman was shunned in death. There were none of the incendiary scenes of rage and hatred predicted by jittery government officials. In life, all that she said and did met with widespread revilement; the ferocity of feeling she evoked gave rise to seething statements by those who could not reach her and physical violence by fellow women prisoners. The few who sought to defend her found themselves attacked. But in death, it was as if her power to terrify and repulse was multiplied – as if mere nearness to her corpse would contaminate the bystander.

Against that backdrop, the burning of her body was not simply a funeral rite. It was an act of ancient justice. The woman herself had sensed that no resting place on earth could contain her bones peacefully; she left instructions in her will that her remains be cremated and her ashes scattered in secrecy.

‘I know people would have liked for me to be chucked into a pond three times to discover if I sank or swam,’ she wrote, five years before her death.¹ It was a shrewd observation. The nature of her crimes and their unfathomable source tapped into old, unspoken fears.

Whilst she was free and still young, she and her lover visited the Perthshire village of Dunning, where they climbed through a gap in a wall to reach the cross-capped stone cairn that marks the execution place of an obscure witch. A grainy black-and-white photograph captures the woman perched on the monument, grimacing, staring at nothing. The stones behind her are daubed in white paint: ‘Maggie Wall, burnt here 1657 as a witch’.

A few weeks later, detectives searching the house the woman shared with her lover dug deep into the garden, uprooting plants and destroying the little rockery where a boulder stolen from Maggie Wall’s grave sat, squat as a toad.

In her will, Myra had requested the presence of 12 close family and friends, though the chapel secured for her funeral could accommodate 60 mourners. Her mother, brother-in-law and 27-year-old niece informed the authorities that they wouldn’t be attending. A couple of invited friends were also expected to avoid the ceremony, which, like all the funeral arrangements, was funded by Myra’s estate (reports that she had willed other monies to charities, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, were refuted; the NSPCC said it had no record of her as a benefactor and that donations from her estate, if offered, would be returned immediately). Another memo, strictly confidential, posited a question: ‘Will Ian Brady be allowed to attend the funeral? For guidance: he is not related to Myra Hindley and has had no continuing contact with her.’³

Myra’s death from natural causes – bronchial pneumonia brought on by hypertension and coronary heart disease – occurred on Friday, 15 November 2002 in a remote corner of West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards, Room J on Ward G2 was torn apart by staff with instructions to incinerate every article, from the bed linen to Myra’s clothing. A spokesman told the press that the hospital administration was sensitive to future patients and therefore ‘the room has been cleared of everything that was used during her care and has been redecorated’.⁴ The smell of fresh paint drifted down the corridor, but not as far as the mortuary, where Myra lay isolated from the other dead and under constant police guard.

The anonymous firm of undertakers came for her on the evening of 20 November. Her 5 ft 8 in. ‘heavily built’ body was laid out in a light beech coffin with gold handles.⁵ Once the lid had been secured, they covered it with white lilies and orange gerberas, then carried the coffin through to the waiting hearse, driven up to one of the rear exits. Cellophane-wrapped chrysanthemums and bouquets of carnations filled the glass compartment where the coffin would rest. After a few minor security checks, the hearse departed under police escort.

A reporter noted that a doctor standing at the exit doors muttered ‘good riddance’ before returning to his rounds.⁶

One of the attendant policemen told the reporter that the floral tributes would be destroyed, although the cards were to be kept for Myra’s ailing mother, living in sheltered accommodation in Manchester under an assumed name. In the courtyard where the two men stood hunched against the rain, the glorious flowers were momentarily visible as the hearse turned onto the road for the crematorium. In a low voice, the policeman said, ‘There should have been thorns.’⁷

Among the other mourners was Bridget Astor, widow of Observer editor David Astor, whom Myra regarded as her adoptive father. Bridget recalls, ‘It was a very quiet affair. There were only about eight or ten people in all. Tricia, a former partner of Myra’s and still a close friend, didn’t go either, despite what the press said. She rang me up afterwards and said, “Tell me every detail.” I went with my daughter Lucy, who had once visited Myra with me. We travelled to Suffolk by train with the two lawyers, Andrew McCooey and Edward Fitzgerald. There were two other people at the chapel who looked as if they didn’t want to talk to us, but they were definitely among the mourners. An elderly lady and another woman. I just felt they were hostile in some way. I remember thinking, “What have the police done with the crowds of troublemakers?” There weren’t any. That was interesting. I saw the barriers, those cattle-fence things. The funeral was very dignified.’⁸

Three members of the crematorium staff were brought in for the service. The mourners sat talking quietly, listening to the persistent drumming of the rain on the chapel roof. Outside, where camera crews stood rank and file behind the steel barriers, exhaust fumes from vehicles passing on the main road coiled and vanished in the beam of generators. In lay-bys, long-distance truck drivers settled down in their cabs for the night, while others woke from their naps and continued on their journeys. Most had no knowledge of the funeral about to occur; those who did sounded their horns or shouted as they passed the crematorium gates. But that was all.

A set of headlights swung onto the driveway of the chapel, followed by a second, and the press threw down their cigarettes, stamped the numbness from their feet and began jostling for an uninterrupted view of the black Volvo carrying Myra’s coffin. The tyres of the police escort vehicle ground over the gravel, then waited to let the hearse pass. Flashguns lit up the clock tower of the crematorium and the stark rows of winter trees lining the path. The hearse drew up to the chapel porch and the pallbearers stepped out, clutching their coats against the wind and rain.

Father Michael Teader, Myra’s priest and close friend, appeared from inside the chapel, his white cassock billowing in the wind. A solitary lamp hung creaking in the porch, and the priest stooped below its flickering light to sprinkle holy water on Myra’s coffin before the pallbearers raised it onto their shoulders. They entered the chapel beneath a stone arch engraved with the Latin text: Mors Janua Vitae – Death is the Gateway to Life. The doors of the chapel silently closed; the press had had their last encounter with Myra Hindley.

Father Michael addressed the mourners from the lectern beside the coffin on the blue-clothed catafalque. ‘I used the story of the prodigal son at her funeral because I felt she was the prodigal daughter,’ he explains seven years later. ‘She’d gone away from the decency of humanity and from God, but somewhere she made the decision to return to us and to the Church. God forgave her and she became a different person.’¹⁰ He conducted a short Mass, and the music Myra had requested on her deathbed, Albinoni’s Adagio, briefly masked the pattering rain. When the service ended, the curtains were drawn while the crematorium staff bore the coffin to the incinerator, where it was heated to 1,000°C and razed to a pile of ash. The crumbling residue was covertly removed through a side entrance, carried to a prison van and driven away from the black, wet Fenlands.

There had been endless press speculation about Myra’s ashes. Cambridge City Council, on whose property she was cremated, issued a statement: ‘The cremated remains will be taken as soon as they are available after the funeral back with the Prison Service. They will take possession of them and will make the arrangements in consultation with the family as to what happens with them.’¹¹ The Prison Service put out a statement of their own: ‘Myra Hindley did not say exactly where she wanted her ashes placed because she was worried that the news might leak out. She left it to Father Michael to scatter them in a peaceful and secret place.’¹² In truth, Myra had specified where her ashes should be scattered, and by whom. Her powdery remains were handed first to the Prison Service and then to her family, who gave them to her ex-partner, Tricia Cairns. On a clear day in February 2003, she scattered Myra’s ashes at Stalybridge Country Park, an area of woodland and water at the foot of Saddleworth Moor. One tabloid claimed to have photographed the ashes and printed a picture of a leafless shrub shrouded in white dust. The possibility that someone would attempt to photograph Myra in death seemed strangely inevitable; an internal memo from Suffolk Constabulary noted: ‘Photographs of Hindley alive are greatly valued. Those of her dead are believed to be worth more.’¹³

For it was, after all, by a photograph that the world knew Myra Hindley best: an image that captured ‘the most evil woman who ever lived’, ‘the devil’s daughter’, ‘a Medusa’, a ‘peroxide-haired Gorgon’ and ‘a disgrace to womankind’.¹⁴ A photograph sealed her transformation from convicted murderess to something that modern language could not adequately convey: she was both the stuff of age-old nightmares – hence the references to mythical female horrors – and the depraved product of modern society. ‘She was the end of innocence.’¹⁵

Throughout her years in prison, Myra fought against the impact of the photograph, launching persistent campaigns to rehabilitate herself in the public eye. She grew bitter when they failed. In an open letter to The Guardian, she wrote: ‘The truth of this continuing Gothic soap opera is that most people don’t want to accept that people like myself can change. They prefer to keep me frozen in time together with that awful mugshot so that their attitudes, beliefs and perceptions can remain intact.’¹⁶ Each fresh story of her efforts to educate herself, to express remorse, or of her conversion to ‘good Catholic girl’ was accompanied by the same infamous photograph. Towards the end of her life she admitted defeat: the crude black-and-white mugshot from October 1965 was impossible to efface. It defined her, no matter how fervently she and her supporters insisted she had changed, and would serve as her epitaph.

She was 23 when the photograph was taken in the basement cells of Hyde police station. Six months later, the ‘Moors’ trial closed at Chester Assizes and Myra began life in prison. She and her lover, Ian Brady, were known then to have killed two children and one teenager; they were also strongly suspected of killing a twelve-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, but the police investigation was contentiously shelved, although the case itself remained open. Two of their victims were discovered buried on the vast, bleak moor between the villages of Greenfield in Lancashire and Holmfirth in Yorkshire. The crimes had gone undetected until David Smith, Myra’s then brother-in-law, told the police that he had witnessed a murder in the newly built council house Myra and Ian shared, and that Ian had boasted of other victims, on the moor. David Smith insisted that Myra was no mere accessory to her lover’s crimes but an active participant. She denied his claims for almost a quarter of a century; although she never admitted an equal role in the murders, she did eventually confess that the children had been willing to go anywhere she and Ian suggested, simply because they trusted her. Like all children of that era, they had been diligently warned about strange men, but it never crossed their young minds to fear a woman.

The murders were cold and calculated, committed, in the parlance of the day, ‘for kicks’. When the known details were made public, there was both seismic shock and outrage, and calls for the two accused to be hanged. But there could be no question of that; the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act had been passed one month after their last victim was killed. The convicted pair were sent to prison for life instead.¹⁷ Ian Brady accepted that he would never be free and apparently succumbed to mental illness; Myra worked obsessively at winning parole, sustained by a number of high-profile figures who crusaded publicly on her behalf, and she kept her sanity.

Widespread indignation greeted Myra’s reaction to her punishment. Her desire for freedom seemed unaccountably arrogant in view of the relentless suffering endured by the families of her victims. Her resistance to insanity once she had – or professed she had – come to terms with her crimes defied common logic. The idea that she could have committed such appalling acts of cruelty over a sustained length of time, then emerged with a sound mind and the good heart her campaigners accredited to her was deemed unthinkable.

And yet, in reverse, it had proved possible: a few years before the murders began, in the close-knit streets of Gorton where she was raised, young Myra was regarded by local mothers as a dependable, cheery babysitter. As a teenager, she defended her sister and school friends against neighbourhood bullies. Despite claims by both Myra and those who have written about her, there was nothing substantive in her background to hint at the crimes she committed in her early twenties. Her roots were as normal and absent of wickedness as that most homely of local dishes, the Lancashire hotpot.

But if that is the case, then might it not also follow that her crusaders may have been right and that a succession of Home Secretaries acted unethically in keeping a repentant and rehabilitated woman imprisoned? After her death, should Myra Hindley be viewed with more compassion than she was in life? Or is the summing up of her character by the detective in charge of the original Moors Murders investigation closer to the unpalatable truth: ‘She was an evil girl – if you ask me who was responsible for what [she and Ian Brady] did, I’d say it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.’¹⁸

In her unpublished autobiography, Myra declared: ‘I am a child of Gorton, in Manchester. Infamous, I have become disowned, but I am one of your own.’¹⁹ Towards the end of her life, she gave her birthplace and site of her crimes another name. One of the few journalists to whom she spoke relatively unguardedly recalls: ‘The one phrase that really sticks in my mind is that she referred to Manchester as “Victim Country”. She was talking to me about a friend who lived in the area and she said, “She lives in Victim Country.”’²⁰

The red warren of Gorton’s terraced houses where every working day began and ended with the din of the foundry buzzer; the soot, brick and iron of the streets and the high-railed playgrounds of old Victorian primary schools where countless knees had grazed and beaded with blood on the asphalt . . . And then the moor: the stark swell of the land, with its pallet of myrtle green, charcoal and indigo; the black stone ruins and barrelling winds, and birds that spark up from the heather like tinder. Two very different geographies overlaid with a chilling name: ‘Victim Country’. Her journey through it, from wartime slum-kid to funeral pariah, was down a long and crooked path.

Ghosts of the old Gorton remain – the odd, mouldering pub and recognisable street name – but the rest has gone. It was once a neighbourhood interchangeable with countless others throughout the north of England, an urban village where the inhabitants all knew each other and life revolved around the neighbourhood. There were few, if any, feelings of inferiority; everyone was in the same boat. Apart from the weekly wage, the only other source of income was an occasional win on the horses or (for the truly blessed) a windfall on the football pools. Communities were close-knit because different branches of one family lived in the same street or nearby; children ran between virtually identical homes of grandparents, aunts and uncles. This invisible gridwork extended to leisure, where outings were taken en masse, with whole streets hiring a charabanc to ferry them to the nippy coast for the day. The era of cheap foreign holidays was but a speck on the horizon; Gorton’s clans looked forward to public holidays and traditions to lighten their working lot – Easter, Shrove Tuesday, Whitsun, Guy Fawkes, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. Otherwise the days were indistinguishable: when the buzzer of the foundry sounded every morning and afternoon, a labour-filthy line of men poured down Gorton Lane, leaving or returning to condemned houses where their wives strove to manage an equally heavy workload of domesticity.

It was into these unambiguous surroundings that Myra was born, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘an ordinary baby’, in the middle of the Second World War.³ Her mother, Nellie Hindley, went into labour on the sweltering midweek afternoon of 22 July 1942, and travelled six miles by bus from Gorton to Crumpsall Hospital, a former workhouse. Nellie was 22, delicate in appearance though headstrong in character, and had been married for little more than a year when she fell pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Bob, was serving in the war overseas and so it was on her mother Ellen Maybury’s arm that Nellie leaned as she made her way to F Block, the hospital’s maternity wing stretching over four floors.

In the early hours of the morning, Nellie gave birth to a healthy daughter whom she called Myra, a name that had been popular since the mid nineteenth century. A hundred years after it came into common usage, ‘Myra’ fell into sharp obscurity, a phenomenon entirely due to the deeds of the girl born that stifling night in the red-brick Victorian building in north Manchester.

Myra’s parents met in 1938. Eighteen-year-old, wilful Nellie began a fiery courtship with twenty-five-year-old Robert (Bob) Hindley, who was tall, dark-haired and sinewy. The Mayburys were Protestant, and though the teenage Nellie was indifferent to religion, she was scathing of the Catholic Church, a ubiquitous presence in Gorton. Bob was born and raised a Catholic: he had been educated by monks at the school in the shadow of St Francis’ Monastery on Gorton Lane. Religion was rarely a cause for argument during the early days of their courtship – that came when Myra was born – but Nellie and Bob had furious rows and equally passionate reconciliations. They married in 1940 and moved into the two-up, two-down house on Beasley Street that was packed to the creaking rafters with occupants: Gran’s husband had died, but her other children – James (Jim), Annie and Bert junior – had not yet left home.

Bob Hindley wasn’t part of the household for long. A flair for sport at school led to enrolment in the Parachute Regiment; he took part in regimental boxing matches and won the championship. During the war, he worked as an aircraft fitter and left the damp streets of Gorton for the broiling heat of North Africa, Cyprus and Italy. ‘I must have been conceived during his period of leave from the army after a night on the booze,’ Myra reflected years later. ‘It would have been better if I wasn’t born at all.’⁴ On his next leave, Bob and Nellie had a fierce quarrel over the baby. He wanted Myra to be baptised, but Nellie was against it. They reached an uneasy compromise: Nellie agreed that Bob could have his wish provided Myra would not have to attend a Catholic school. Bob relented, and on 16 August 1942, Myra was duly baptised at St Francis’ Monastery. Her Uncle Bert’s girlfriend, a sensible young Catholic woman named Kath, was godmother. Myra’s father had already returned to his regiment.

The Luftwaffe flew regular sorties over the streets of Gorton, targeting the foundry and damaging the schools adjacent to the monastery. The backyard of Gran’s house held an Anderson bomb shelter, but it was seldom used by Gran and her tenants, who felt safer in the communal shelter at the end of Beasley Street. Although Bob was at war, and Myra’s Aunt Annie and Uncle Jim had each left home after marrying, there were still five people living in Gran’s tiny house: Bert and his girlfriend Kath, Nellie, baby Myra and Gran herself. The family ran so often to the communal shelter that as soon as the air-raid sirens began to sound their ear-splitting wail, each person embarked on their individual task: Gran and Kath would dash straight out to join the neighbours flooding towards the shelter, while Nellie scooped Myra up from her cot, swaddled her in a blanket and handed her to Bert, who was a fast sprinter. In her autobiography, Myra records the story of how on one occasion Nellie leapt upstairs to retrieve her daughter and, in her panic to escape, flung the baby down to Uncle Bert, who was waiting to catch her at the foot of the stairs. He missed – and Myra flew through the air, landing safely in a thick pile of washing in a tub on the stairs. From then on, Nellie always clutched Myra in her arms as she hastily negotiated the stairs.

Life at Beasley Street was cosily populated by women, apart from Bert, who had inherited his parents’ gentleness and easy-going nature. ‘Like most families at this time, we made the best of what we had,’ Myra recalled. ‘I was strongly influenced by my uncle Bert, who was a father figure. He was kindly and caring.’⁵ She couldn’t recall him ever losing his temper and one of her earliest memories was of being thrown deftly into the air by Bert under the washing hung up in the parlour while she screamed with delight. ‘I always went to [him] for help and advice. I respected him,’ she mused, ‘but somehow I seem to have inherited my dad’s strength of character.’⁶

After VE Day, when Bob Hindley came home permanently, three-year-old Myra’s reaction to her father was cautious, even slightly fearful. He did his best to win her love and trust, but it rapidly degenerated into a formidable battle of wills: his, and those of his spirited daughter.

Bob persevered in building a relationship with Myra. Both he and Nellie were proud of her looks; the resemblance to her father grew more marked as Myra entered her teens, but as a toddler the determined Hindley chin was offset by large grey eyes and a heavy mop of blonde curls. Nellie always ensured that Myra left the house in clothes that were clean, neat and as pretty as their meagre income allowed. If Nellie tried to put a hat on Myra, Bob objected, enjoying the compliments his daughter’s curls drew. He was careful to spend time alone with her, visiting nearby Belle Vue, the huge entertainment complex where crowds flocked to the pleasure gardens, roller coasters, Speedway stadium, greyhound racing, pubs, dancing and zoo. Curiously, Myra remembered those visits with less emotion than a trip father and daughter took into the city centre, where in Lewis’s department store she suddenly needed the toilet but was too frightened to go into the Ladies alone. Sympathetic to his daughter, Bob asked to see the manager and insisted that Myra be permitted to go into the Gents with him. He refused to listen to objections and eventually the manager gave in.

Bob also took Myra to his relatives, who lived less than a mile away in Longsight. The little girl didn’t warm to her paternal grandmother, whom she addressed as Nana Hindley; Bob’s mother had dyed curls, wore garish make-up, liked to air her opinions and was a complete contrast to softly spoken, naturally pretty Gran. Her maternal aunts and uncles lived almost on the doorstep: Annie and her husband lived in Gorton’s Railway View, while Bert and Kath had married and lived a mile away in Clayton. Jim, to whom Myra was never close, lived in Dukinfield, four miles from Gorton.

Despite the sleeping arrangements at Eaton Street, on 21 August 1946, Nellie gave birth to a second daughter. Myra’s sister Maureen had a shock of dark hair and petite, birdlike features. There was no jealousy on Myra’s part at the new addition to the family; she worshipped her sister and called her by Bob’s nickname for the baby: Moby. Sometimes she called her Mo Baby or just Mo, pet names that lasted into adulthood. Like Myra, Maureen was baptised into the Catholic faith at Bob’s insistence. Unlike her, she was not a baby who slept well and most nights were splintered with her sudden wails and lengthy bouts of crying. Nellie found it increasingly hard to cope. Weekday mornings were the worst; Myra helped occupy the baby while Bob dressed and Nellie prepared breakfast.

Another mouth to feed stretched the warring parents’ resources to the limit and Bob started bare-knuckle fighting in the evenings to bring in extra money, even though he was disadvantaged by a war wound. Promoters sponsored the matches, which were held in local halls in ‘blood tubs’ – a moniker which suited the brutish nature of the fights, with their ill-matched contestants and dearth of fair rules. But after an accident at the foundry left him unable to walk without a pronounced limp, Bob retired from fighting and spent his days with other unemployed and elderly men in Gorton’s pubs. There were three pubs on adjacent corners of Gorton Lane, in the shadow of his old workplace: the Bessemer, the Shakespeare and, Bob’s preferred bolthole, the Steelworks Tavern (the Steelie). His transformation from brawny, newly demobbed breadwinner to jobless semi-invalid got to him most when he drank – his behaviour after last orders was a running thread in Myra’s post-trial writings and conversation.

She summarised Bob’s violence in an article she submitted to The Guardian in 1995: ‘[He] went off to the pub every night and being a taciturn, bad-tempered man, almost always got into a fight . . . and staggered home bruised and bleeding. I was often sent to the pub to retrieve his jacket which he’d taken off before fighting; it was the only “good” one he had. When my mother berated him for the state he was in, he began knocking her about and when I tried to prevent him, I was hit too.’⁹

Her parents began to row again fiercely at home, and Gran was Myra’s ally when the fights became physical: ‘Gran was protective of me and we would both protect Mam by attacking him, even before I started school . . . I remember Gran bashing him with a rolled-up newspaper while I tried to pull his legs from under him.’¹⁰ She laughed as she recounted the story to her prison therapist, explaining how she ‘concentrated on the leg with the war wound, which was the weakest one’.¹¹ Nellie was no cowering victim; as her daughters grew older, she would drink copiously in the Steelie’s lounge while Bob stayed in the vault with the men, and she was always as quick as her husband to launch into rows with a punch, but his build, strength and boxing skills made him a fearsome opponent.

Myra created a hostile picture of her father in her re-written autobiography and later conversations, incorporating everything from ‘his oily, greasy hands . . . clutching a piece of bread’ to an incident when he struck her after finding her smearing shaving foam on her face and scraping it off with a kitchen knife.¹²