Moors murders
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The Moors murders were committed around the Greater Manchester area in England between 1963 and 1965 by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. The Moors murders are named as such because four of the victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor near Oldham in Lancashire. Their five victims were children.
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[edit] Victims
[edit] Pauline Reade
Their first victim was 16-year-old Pauline Reade, a neighbour of Hindley's, who disappeared on her way to a dance in the Crumpsall district on 12 July, 1963. She got into a car with Hindley while Brady secretly followed behind on his motorbike.When the van reached Saddleworth Moor, Hindley stopped the van and got out before asking Pauline to help her find a missing glove in exchange for some records. They were busy "searching" the moors when Brady pounced upon Pauline and smashed her skull in with a shovel. He then subjected her to a savage rape before slitting her throat with a knife; her spinal cord was severed and she was almost decapitated. Brady then buried her body in a grave three feet deep, it was not discovered until 1 July, 1987.
[edit] John Kilbride
On November 23, 1963, Brady and Hindley struck again. This time the victim was 12-year-old John Kilbride. Like many children, he had been warned not to go away with strange men but not about strange women. When he was approached by Hindley at a market in Ashton under Lyne, the youngster agreed to go with her to help carry some boxes.
Brady was sitting in the back of the car. When they reached the moors, he took the child with him while Hindley waited in the car. On the moor, Brady subjected John Kilbride to a sexual assault and attempted to slit his neck with a knife with a six inch serrated blade, but it didn't work, so Brady strangled him to death with a piece of string, possibly a shoelace, and buried his body in a shallow grave. His body was found there on 21 October 1965. The body was clothed but the jeans and underpants that he had been wearing were pulled down to mid-thigh and the underpants appeared to be knotted at the back.
[edit] Keith Bennett
The third victim was 12-year-old Keith Bennett who vanished on his way to his grandmother's house in Gorton on June 16, 1964— four days after his 12th birthday. The fair haired youngster accepted a lift from Hindley near Stockport Road in Longsight, and she drove to Saddleworth Moor and asked him to help search for a lost glove. Brady then lured Keith into a ravine. There he sexually assaulted the child, and strangled him with a piece of string before burying his body. Hindley stood above the ravine and watched the murder.
Hindley later confessed that she had destroyed the photographs taken at the site of this particular murder, which had been kept at Brady's workplace at Millwards. Hindley had access to these photographs during the four days between Brady's arrest and her own in October 1965. Despite a renewed search effort in 1987, Keith Bennett's body has never been found.
[edit] Lesley Ann Downey
The fourth victim, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, was abducted from a fairground in Ancoats on Boxing Day, 1964, and taken back to Hindley's home at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, located on an overspill council estate in Hattersley (Hindley and her grandmother had moved there from Myra's childhood home in Gorton only three months earlier). There the girl was undressed and forced to pose for pornographic photographs with a gag in her mouth, and in the last four of them with her hands bound - the last kneeling in an attitude of prayer. Brady took the nine obscene photographs of the little girl, and either he or Hindley recorded the scene on a reel-to-reel audio tape for posterity.The sixteen-minute tape contains the voices of Brady and Hindley relentlessly cajoling and threatening the child, who is heard crying, retching, screaming, and begging to be allowed to return home safe to her mother.
As with Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann was raped and strangled with a piece of string at some point thereafter, probably by Brady. However, during their trial in April 1966, Brady made a telling slip of the tongue while being cross-examined in the witness box, telling the prosecutor that "we all got dressed" after the tape had been made, which suggests that Hindley was also actively involved in the sexual molestation of the child, and perhaps the physical killing as well. The following morning, Brady and Hindley drove Lesley's body to Saddleworth Moor where it was buried in a shallow grave.
[edit] Edward Evans
The fifth and final victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans on October 6, 1965, who was lured to 16 Wardlebrook Avenue and hacked brutally with an axe before dying from strangulation. According to Brady, Evans was a homosexual whom he had accosted at Manchester Central Railway Station and invited him to come home with him on the pretext of offering casual sex.
It remains uncertain whether Evans was actually a homosexual or if Brady was merely trying to make a slur on the young man's character (homosexuality was still illegal in Britain at the time). However, the forensic examiner did find hair from Myra Hindley's dog on the inside of Evans' trousers, indicating that he may have engaged in some kind of sexual activity before being killed.
The crime was witnessed by Myra Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, who had married Myra's younger sister Maureen in August 1964, and who was himself around the same age as Evans. Brady and Hindley had apparently staged the murder as part of Smith's initiation into their killing confederacy.
The Hindley family had not approved of Maureen's marriage to Smith, since he was known to many in Gorton as a thug and ne'er-do-well and had already acquired several convictions for violent offenses in the juvenile courts. For the past year, Brady had been cultivating a friendship with Smith, who appeared to have been brainwashed by Brady, and was noting in his own diary: "Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind. Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure". Yet in reality he was simply mouthing phrases because he admired the older man and wanted to be his friend. However, Smith told Brady he was talking rubbish when he claimed he had committed murder several times.
Hindley had invited Smith to the house one night in early October 1965 on the pretext that Brady had wanted to give him some miniature wine bottles. Smith was waiting in the kitchen when he suddenly heard a loud scream from the adjacent living room as Myra shouted for him to go and "help Ian". Smith entered the room to find Brady in a murderous frenzy, repeatedly driving an axe into Evans' head before stifling the lad's final desperate gurgling with a length of electrical cord. Smith was then asked to help clean up the blood and bits of bone and brain matter in the living room, and help carry the body to the spare room upstairs and wrap it in a polythene bag trussed up with rope. Fearing for his life, Smith made an effort to maintain his composure as best as possible and complied. Afterwards, Brady asked Smith "Do you believe me now?".
[edit] Arrest
After agreeing to meet Brady the following afternoon to help dispose of Evans' body, Smith promptly left the house. He frantically ran home and vomited in the toilet, sick with fear and disgust. He then woke his sleeping wife and told her of the brutal murder he had just witnessed. Maureen burst into tears and eventually told him that the only thing to do was to call the police.
Three hours later at six o'clock on the morning of October 7, David and Maureen carefully made their way to a public phone box on the street below. Before leaving their flat, David armed himself with a screwdriver and a kitchen knife in order to defend the two of them in the event that Brady might suddenly appear and confront them. Smith made a 999 call to the police station in nearby Hyde and related his story to the officer on duty.
Shortly after, Police Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived to knock on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue while wearing an inconspicuous breadman's coat over his policeman's uniform.
Talbot was met by Hindley, who answered the door, and found Brady inside, lying naked on a divan and writing a note to his employer claiming he had suffered an ankle injury. Talbot explained that he was investigating an act of violence that was reported to have taken place the previous night and proceeded to search the house. When he came to the spare room upstairs, Talbot found the door locked. He demanded the key to the room and after arguing with Hindley for several minutes, Brady eventually told her to comply with the policeman's request.
Upon discovering Evans' body in the polythene bag, Talbot then arrested Brady. During questioning Brady immediately admitted to the murder of Evans but insisted that David Smith had also participated in the killing and Myra had been in no way involved and didn't even know about it. Officers ransacked the house and four days later Myra Hindley was also arrested and taken in for questioning when police found a ticket in her prayer book which lead them to a locker at Manchester Central Station where they found two suitcases packed with incriminating evidence.
Apart from the photographs and tape recording of Lesley's torture, there was also a notebook in which John Kilbride's name was found as well as a photograph of Hindley with her dog, Puppet, staring down at what appeared to be a grave on a site on Saddleworth Moor. Based on this new evidence, the bodies of John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey were soon unearthed, and both Brady and Hindley were charged with three counts of murder.
[edit] Verdict
The Moors trial was held during two weeks in April 1966 at Chester Assize Crown Court. Both Brady and Hindley denied some of the murders and tried to blame Smith for them. A Police protection had to hold back crowds from getting at the police cars carrying Brady and Hindley. Jeers rung out when these cars appeared from the crowds.
On May 6, 1966, Brady was found guilty of the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans, and was sentenced to three concurrent terms of life imprisonment since the death penalty had been abolished a year earlier. Hindley was found guilty of the murders of Downey and Evans and given two concurrent life sentences, plus seven years for harboring Brady knowing that he had murdered John Kilbride.
The judge presiding was Mr. Justice, Fenton Atkinson, who called the Moors trial "a truly horrible case" and condemned the accused as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity". He recommended that both Brady and Hindley spend "a very long time" in prison before being considered for parole but did not stipulate a tariff. He also stated his opinion that Brady was "wicked beyond belief" and there was no reasonable possibility of him ever reforming. However, he did not think that the same was necessarily true of Hindley "once she is removed from [Brady's] influence".
[edit] Brady's imprisonment
Ian Brady spent nineteen years in mainstream prisons before he was declared insane in 1985 and sent to a mental hospital. He subsequently confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett in 1986 and has since made it clear that he never wants to be released from prison.
The trial judge had recommended that his life sentence should mean life, and successive Home Secretaries have agreed with that decision. The only person to make a different judgment was Lord Chief Justice Lane who set a 40-year minimum term in 1982. A House of Lords ruling which stripped the Home Secretary of his power to set tariffs on life sentences could lead to Brady being released in 2006.
Since 1985, Brady has been incarcerated in the high-security Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital, and began a hunger strike in 1999 he was subsequently force fed. Brady fell ill and was transported to another hospital for tests. He eventually recovered and was considering suing the hospitals for force-feeding him. In early 2006, prison authorities intercepted a package, addressed to Brady from a female friend, containing 50 paracetamol pills hidden within a hollowed out crime novel.
Brady has also written a controversial book on serial killing titled The Gates of Janus.
[edit] Hindley's imprisonment
Hindley was told that she should spend 25 years behind bars before being considered for parole. The Lord Chief Justice agreed with that recommendation in 1982, meaning that Hindley could be considered for parole beginning in October 1990. However, after she and Brady admitted in 1986 to additional murders (Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett), Home Secretary Leon Brittan increased her tariff to 30 years, ruling out parole until at least October 1995.
By that time, Hindley claimed to be a reformed Roman Catholic woman. She explained that she had acted under the influence of Brady and that she had only carried out murder because Brady had abused her and threatened to kill her family if she did not.
Although some supported the idea that Hindley should be released, the majority of the British public was strongly opposed. In 1990, then Home Secretary David Waddington imposed a whole life tariff on both Brady and Hindley, which meant that neither would ever be released. Hindley was not informed of the decision until 1994, when a Law Lords ruling obliged the Prison Service to inform all life sentence prisoners of the minimum period they must serve in prison before being considered for parole.
In 1997, the Parole Board had ruled that Hindley was low risk and should be moved to an open prison. She had rejected the idea and had moved to a medium security prison instead, but the House of Lords ruling seemed to give her a good chance of freedom.
In December 1997, November 1998, and March 2000, Hindley made appeals against the whole life tariff, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger, but the High Court rejected each one. Hindley's best chance of parole came in May 2002, The House of Lords stripped the Home Secretary of his powers to overrule the Parole Board's recommendations that a life sentence prisoner should be released.
Jock Carr, one of the police officers who brought Hindley to justice, said that if Hindley were ever released, the chances were that she would be murdered herself, meaning that somebody else would have suffer—go to prison—because of her crimes. Carr also feared that Hindley could go on and become a TV celebrity who would earn more than he did throughout his entire working life, something that he felt was 'very wrong'.
Then, another life sentence prisoner challenged the Home Secretary's power to set minimum terms. Hindley, and 70 other life sentence prisoners whose tariffs had been increased by politicians, looked certain to be released from prison if the ruling was made. Hindley's release seemed imminent. Plans were already underway for her to be given a new identity.
On November 15, 2002, Myra Hindley died in a West Suffolk Hospital from a myocardial infarction. She was 60 years old. Less than two weeks later, on November 26, 2002, the Law Lords and the European Court of Human Rights agreed that judges, not politicians, should decide how long a criminal spends behind bars, and thus stripped of the power to set minimum sentences.
It is an indication of Hindley's notoriety that dozens of crematoria refused to take her body and the company that finally did so insisted on anonymity as a condition of performing the service.
Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, more commonly referred to as Lord Longford, campaigned heavily to secure the release of 'celebrated' criminals, in particular the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, a cause of constant derision in the public and the press. He described Hindley as a "delightful" person and said "you could loathe what people did but should not loathe what they were because human personality was sacred even though human behaviour was very often appalling."
[edit] Other media
- The Moors murders served partly as the inspiration for Edward Gorey's chilling short story The Loathsome Couple.
- The real-life disappearances of Pauline Reade and John Kilbride form the backdrop for the ficticious child abduction plot of Val McDermid's 1999 novel "A Place of Execution", which is set in late 1963.
- The Edward Evans murder is recounted in detail in the Throbbing Gristle song, "Very Friendly".
- The Sex Pistols have a line in their song, "No-one Is Innocent", which goes "God save Myra Hindley, god save Ian Brady./Even though he's 'orrible and she aint what ya'd call a lady".
- Manchester band the Smiths recorded a tribute to the victims on their first album in a song called "Suffer Little Children", and singer Morrissey has since written a number of other songs inspired by the Moors murders (without making explicit reference to them) such as "Michael's Bones" and "Ambitious Outsiders".
- The Manic Street Preachers make reference to Myra Hindley in their song "Archives Of Pain"
- The satirical program Brass Eye depicts a love song to Hindley by the fictional band Blouse (a clear parody of Pulp).
- The poet Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem entitled "The Devil's Wife" about Hindley in her collection The World's Wife.
- A dramatisation of the crimes and conviction of the Moors murderers was aired on ITV (May 14 & 15th) 2006 called See No Evil: The Moors Murders, which recounts the events from the perspective of Maureen Hindley.
- The house where Hindley and Brady lived was eventually demolished after the local council were unable to find another tenant who was willing to move in, but the site of the house still attracts sight-seers, much to the dismay of the local community.
[edit] Films
Due to the notoriety of the case, it was inevitable that films dramatising the events would be proposed, however but each time the idea was mooted the victims' families objected. Though several documentaries were produced it was several decades before a dramatisation was produced.
[edit] See No Evil: The Moors Murders
In the summer of 2005, ITV1 announced they were planning to make a two-part drama about the Moors Murders. The first known dramatization of the killings starred Sean Harris as Ian Brady, Maxine Peake as Myra Hindley, Joanne Froggatt as Myra's sister, Maureen, and Michael McNulty as Maureen's teenage husband, David Smith. The victims families had been consulted about the film, and they approved of it. Ian Brady tried to stop the production, but he was ignored. None of the murders were shown, except that of Edward Evans for which there was the third-party corroboration of witness David Smith.
The film reveals how Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were brought to justice as seen from Maureen's perspective. The film goes five years beyond the trial, leading to a scene where Maureen visits Myra in prison. By this stage, Myra is claiming to be a reformed person; she expresses guilt for the pain she has brought the families of her victims, blaming herself and Brady, and she tells Maureen she's been going to confession, and she is clutching a rosary in her hand. Myra also tells Maureen about how their father used to beat her, and Maureen says he used to do it to her as well. Myra gives Maureen some of Ian Brady's photographs, including one almost identical to the one taken on the grave of John Kilbride, and tells Maureen she never wants to see them again.
The last scene shows Maureen walking down a street, followed by an epilogue: Maureen died of a brain haemorrhage in 1980 at age 34; David Smith has since remarried and had another child; Ian Brady is being held in Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool; and Myra Hindley died in 2002 after 36 years in prison, she was 60.
The epilogue also reveals that Brady and Hindley confessed to two other murders in 1987; those of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. The two killers were taken back to Saddleworth Moor separately to help look for the bodies; though Pauline Reade's body was subsequently found, Keith Bennett's remains never have. The drama concludes with a tribute to the victims.
See No Evil was shown on ITV1 on May 14th and 15th, 2006.
[edit] Longford
Around the time that production on See No Evil began, Channel 4 announced their own Moors Murder story, Longford. The victims families objected to this film, saying that it only prolongs their agony [citation needed]. This film focuses on Myra Hindley's relationship with the politician, Lord Longford, who died in 2001. Longford, who visited Hindley in prison many times, saw her as a reformed character, and spent years campaining for Hindley's release. The cast includes Andy Serkis as Ian Brady, Samantha Morton as Myra Hindley, and Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford.
The movie begins with a 1987 radio interview in which two callers attack Lord Longford over his relationship with Myra Hindley. We then go two decades back in time to 1967, one year after Hindley and Ian Brady's trial, and Longford is informed that Hindley wants him to visit her in Holloway Prison. Longford's wife is none too pleased.
When Longford first goes to Holloway to visit Hindley, he expects her to be the blonde woman the entire nation knows about. In the visiting room, he approaches a blonde woman from behind, but it's not Hindley. As he continues searching, a woman with jet black hair stands up and says "I think it's me you're looking for". Myra explains that she got rid of the peroxide before the trial, that her hair was blue at the trial, and red when she was sentenced.
The rest of the film focuses mainly on Longford's campaign to gain parole for Hindley, one that would keep his name in the papers until the end of his life, and even Hindley's rediscovering her faith in Roman Catholicism. He even visits Ian Brady at one point, and Brady tries to convince him that Hindley will destroy him. Longford ignores Brady, and leaves.
During Longford's 1971 tour of Danish sex clubs (which earned him the nickname "Lord Porn"), Hindley, aided by a female prison guard, fails at an escape attempt, and is transferred to another prison. Later, Hindley and Brady confess to two more murders; those of Pauline Reade, who became the couples first victim in July 1963, and Keith Bennett, who was last seen alive in June 1964. With Hindley's help, Pauline's body is eventually exhumed, but Keith Bennett's body has never been found.
The last scene of the movie shows Longford and Hindley sitting on a bench under a foggy sky while Hindley smokes a cigarette, followed by an epilogue.
The film was screened on October 26, 2006.
