Hindley: a life of evil

It is July 1963, and 16-year-old Pauline Reade sees a neighbour of hers in the street, a woman with dyed blonde hair called Myra Hindley. She knows Myra, so when the woman says to her: "I've lost my gloves up on the moor, will you come and help me look for them?" she readily agrees. They go up to Saddleworth Moor: Myra's friend Ian Brady follows them up on his motorcycle.

Pauline will never be seen alive again: she has been raped and murdered and her body buried beneath the black peaty soil.

That was how they began, the Moors Murders. Most of the facts are familiar now; the subsequent killing of John Kilbride and Keith Bennett, how Edward Evans was axed and strangled to death, how 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was tape-recorded as she pitifully pleaded for her life.

What will never be known is the why, what could drive an apparently normal person like Myra Hindley to commit such crimes. Brady was somehow easier to understand: he was strange, a man with an obsession with Adolf Hitler and the Marquis de Sade. But for a woman to take part in the murder of children marks her out as being possessed of an evil beyond our comprehension, an evil that will forever be associated with that famous police mugshot - the peroxide blonde hair, the small, tight mouth, the dark, hooded eyes.

There are few clues in Myra Hindley's early life. She was born in July 1942 in the Manchester suburb of Crumpsall, the first child of labourer Bob Hindley and his wife Hettie. When she was four another daughter was born, Maureen, and Myra went to live with her grandmother. It was only around the corner, and according to Hindley's biographer Jean Ritchie this should not be taken as evidence that Hindley came from a broken home or was unloved.

Hindley would later paint a harsher picture of her childhood. In an essay for the Guardian in December 1995 she described her father as a taciturn, bad-tempered man who went to the pub every night and almost always get into a fight, staggering home bruised and bleeding. "When my mother berated him he began knocking her about, and when I tried to prevent him I was hit too."

She said she had never sought to blame him for anything she did when she was older but added: "Through witnessing and being on the end of so much violence, I was given many lessons in dominance and control, which was probably the foundation stone on which I built my own personality."

Hindley narrowly failed the 11-plus and went to Ryder Brow secondary modern school, where she was always in the A-stream but had a poor attendance record. After leaving at 15 she had a succession of typing jobs before joining a small chemicals company on the outskirts of Manchester called Millwards Merchandising in January 1961, aged 18.

She was immediately struck by the stock clerk, a tall, taciturn Scot five years her senior named Ian Brady, who to her unsophisticated eyes seemed so mature. She would later describe that first meeting as "an immediate and fatal attraction".

She developed what was essentially a teenage crush. For months he ignored her: then just before Christmas 1961, he asked her out to see a film about the Nazi trials at Nuremberg. A few days later she yielded her virginity on the sofa of her grandmother's house.

"He didn't believe in marriage or having children, he was a fervent atheist, hated black people and Jews, and had a consuming passion for Nazism," she would recall later. "He had a powerful personality, a magnet-like charisma into which my own personality, my whole self, became altogether subsumed."

When Hindley found out Brady had been in trouble for a string of burglaries it did not put her off. They bought a home together in Hattersley, east of Manchester, and he would take her for rides on the back of his motorcycle to Saddleworth Moor where they would get drunk. She bought a revolver and joined a gun club and they would daydream about getting rich by robbing building societies. Her family disapproved but it was too late: Hindley was his slave and Brady enjoyed seeing how far he could make her do his will, getting her to pose for pornographic pictures with him.

When that day came in July 1963 when Brady told her he wanted her to help him kidnap and rape Pauline Reade, she agreed without hesitation. For weeks afterwards she carried on saying hello to Pauline's mother.

On 23 October 1963 they drove to the market at Ashton-under-Lyne, where 12-year-old John Kilbride was earning pocket money by doing odd jobs for stallholders. As it became dark and foggy, a "kind lady" asked if he wanted a lift. When his body was found two years later, strangled with a piece of string, his trousers were round his knees.

On 16 June 1964, Keith Bennett vanished on the way to visit his grandmother in Manchester. His body was never found. They picked up Lesley Ann Downey at a fairground on Boxing Day 1964 and offered her a lift home. They took her to their house where she was forced to undress. Brady took pictures of her gagged while Hindley ordered her to stop screaming. She was strangled with cord.

A 16-minute tape recording was made of Lesley's last moments. It was played at the trial, and no one who heard it will ever forget it. She pleaded "Please, God, help me" and "I want to see my mummy." Later she says: "I have to go home for eight o'clock or I'll get killed if I don't ... honest to God."

Then Brady tried to entrap Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, who hero-worshipped him, into becoming an accomplice. They lured a 17-year-old, Edward Evans, to the house and attacked him with a hatchet in front of Smith, who pretended he would help them dispose of the body. Instead, he told his wife and together they went to the police.

Throughout the 15-day trial at Chester Assizes, Brady and Hindley grimly refused to admit their guilt. Evans had been killed in a brawl. Lesley Ann Downey had been alive when she left with two men. They knew nothing of John Kilbride.

The jury found Hindley guilty of the murders of Lesley and Edward, and Brady guilty of the murders of Lesley, Edward and John Kilbride. On 6 May 1966 they were both sentenced to life.

Initially Hindley continued to be obsessed with Brady - whom she called her "god" at the trial - and would write him long letters from Holloway, but by the early Seventies she had started to drift away from him and back towards the Catholicism of her childhood. Later they would indulge in bitter mutual recriminations, fuelled by her attempts to obtain parole while he resolved to remain in prison for the rest of his days.

Hindley's attitudes to her crimes also changed significantly. For years she would claim Brady had drugged her and taken pornographic pictures of her as blackmail, threatening that if she did not help, her little sister would be next. She said she knew nothing of the tape of Lesley's death until the trial, and said she was out of the room when he killed her. Brady, however, claimed she was only too happy to join in and that it was Hindley who strangled Lesley.

By the mid-Eighties her story had changed: she was now a willing accomplice who had since repented. What motivated the change will forever be the subject of debate: Hindley said it was remorse, while her critics argued that it was a cynical attempt to gain freedom.

Hindley went in 1986 to show police where Pauline and Keith were buried on Saddleworth Moor but the area had changed so much she could not find what she was looking for. Pauline's body was not recovered until August 1987 and Keith's was never found.

In 1987 Hindley was ready to confess her part in the murders of Pauline and Keith.

As the years went by her confessions became fuller and more public. In her 1995 Guardian article she wrote: "I was wicked and evil and had behaved monstrously ... My greatest regret is that Ian Brady and I ever met."

Hindley had a string of lesbian affairs and made an escape bid with the help of one lover. That aside, she was a model prisoner, studying for an Open University degree in humanities, reading, listening to music and working on a tapestry. What kept her in the public eye was her repeated attempts to gain freedom. Unlike most lifers, she was never allotted a "tariff date" - an indication from the Home Secretary as to when she might expect parole.

In her own eyes she was a political prisoner, a victim of press hysteria kept in prison because no politician would ever dare let her out. The more she tried to argue her way to freedom, the more her opponents built up a barrier of public outrage. The families of her victims promised they would kill her if she ever got out.

Brady wrote a letter in April 1996 in which he accused his former lover of making "self-serving confessions" but also made this perceptive comment: "Until she tells the truth, she will never be released. But if she tells the truth, she will never be released anyway."

In 1997 Home Secretary Michael Howard said she would stay in jail for the rest of her life, backed by his successor Jack Straw. Hindley went to the High Court and then the Appeal Court but was rejected. One of the Appeal Court judges said her 1987 confession revealed a much greater involvement than previously admitted and a whole life tariff was now justified.

The debate over the length of life sentences for murderers has intensified in the past year. Three test cases are being mounted by convicted lifers which challenge the Home Secretary's right to set sentences for killers. If successful, they could open the way for more than 250 murderers to seek early release. But for Hindley, it could come too late.