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- FIRST
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- MURDERER'S
IMAGE
The
Sunday Times (London) October 29 1989
Moves
to secure the release of Myra Hindley forget that she
is a serial killer writes BRIAN DEER
Myra Hindley used to be a sadistic child-killer,
but she is all right now. True, in the early 1960s
she and her then-boyfriend Ian Brady tortured and
murdered at least five young people, aged 10 to 17,
then buried their bodies on the Yorkshire moors. But
Hindley has done her time and, thanks to the British
penal system, her life has been turned around.
It is
this broad thesis that last week caused the Rev Peter
Timms, a former prison governor, to launch a
publicity crusade for the all-new Myra Hindley. In
syndicated pictures released through an agency,
Hindley is shown as a matronly scholar, receiving an
Open University degree in a specially staged Cookham
Wood jail ceremony - and petting the governor's dogs.
For
the tabloid press, the pictures were the first piece
of news about the Moors murderers since the row last
month over the controversial autobiography of Chief
Superintendant Peter Topping. This book reports on
confidential police interviews with Hindley and
Brady, and has prompted legal action by the
Manchester police committee.
But
the latest story brings a sharper point to our
understanding of Hindley. She is currently working on
her own book about her crimes and though she is
unlikely to find a home secretary willing to let her
gain from publication, Hindley clearly now believes
that she is on the road to rehabilitation. It may
take years, but she has plenty of time on her hands.
Although
her solicitor, Andrew McCooey, claims she is not
seeking release and Timms bluntly denies that he is
co-ordinating a campaign for her parole, the message
both are pushing to the public is that the Moors
murderess has changed.
"I
hoped the pictures would get wide publication, so
people could look at her as she is now and see how
she was 25 years ago and see how she has
changed," says Timms, one of a group of
influential Hindley supporters who attended her
degree award. "The evidence of these photographs
speaks for itself."
Others
at the ceremony (which curiously took place a decade
after she actually obtained her BA humanities degree)
included Lord Longford - who has long been Hindley's
most eloquent apologist - and David Astor, formerly
the owner of the Observer newspaper.
"She
is very intelligent and sensible and has a sense of
humour," says Astor, who has visited Hindley in
prison about a dozen times. "She has something
about her that makes you feel that she has been
through a great tragedy. She is a brave woman who
stands the pressure very well."
Such
sentiments find little support in the ordinary public
mind. On Friday, viewers of BBC television's Kilroy
discussion programme voted by a margin of about 50 to
1 against Hindley being released, in spite of the
presence on the show of McCooey, Timms and Longford.
The peer denounced his angry critics as being
"ignoramuses".
But
Longford's support for Hindley and Brady has always
been rather odd. In December 1969, he told an
astonished House of Lords that Brady was an example
of the "redeemability of man" and urged
that social visits between the pair should be allowed
under prison rules. "On ethics we are now more
or less in agreement," he said of Brady, after
corresponding with him at length.
Twenty
years later, those words appear bizarre. The nature
of the pair's repeated and premeditated crimes
against children - which involved kidnapping,
torturing, photographing, sexually assaulting,
tape-recording and strangling or hacking them to
death - are much better understood. In America, such
crimes had acquired the serial killer tag and
patterns among offenders have emerged.
In
the United States, there have been scores of such
murderers-without-motive since the 1966 Moors trial -
and each case has added to a frightening picture into
which the revamped Hindley fits. One of the most
celebrated and typical was Ted Bundy, who was
executed for killing about 60 women. He was an
intelligent, college-educated, good-looking person
whose only real quirk was to kill.
Diagnosable
mental illness is rarely to be found in these
killers. They are commonly ordinary, but devious
people who do not waiver under pressure or feel any
guilt about their crimes. Since there is no
explanation for their compulsive behaviour in the
first place, those who have studied them believe that
no matter how many years elapse, they always keep
their power to kill.
"Usually
these crimes are carried out by sociopaths who cannot
at an advanced age gain a conscience," says Jack
Levin, professor of sociology at Northeastern
University, Boston, who has studied hundreds of such
killers. "A conscience develops early in life
and you don't acquire it at, say, 43, or 52.
Intelligence and education have nothing to do with
it."
He
also rejects assumptions being circulated by
Hindley's supporters that she was never as bad as
Brady. Although they have not challenged the murder
verdicts handed down by Chester Assizes in May 1966,
the supporters suggest she was just a simple,
23-year-old typist who was "led on" by her
sinister lover. "That's just typical of what
everyone always says whenever there is a sexual
killing involving a man and a woman," Levin
retorts.
There
is no shortage of evidence to support the points he
makes. When Hindley was arrested, charged and brought
to court, she remained unco-operative and unrepentant
throughout. And in spite of her recent protestations
of remorse, it was almost two decades before she
offered information to the police - and then only
when guided by the Rev Timms.
Her
miraculous conversion by the Methodist minister
provokes wry mirth from the police. "We spent a
lot of time together and I have to say she was an
evil girl and I cannot see how she could
change," says retired Detective Chief
Superintendant Arthur Benfield, who arrested and
charged the pair. "If you ask me who was most
responsible for what they did I'd say it was six of
one and half a dozen of the other."
Brady,
now 50, is undoubtedly mad and is likely to remain
for the rest of his life at Park Lane special
hospital. But the campaign for Hindley gathers pace,
with even hard-nosed observers of the Moors murder
trial joining her graduation ceremony guests in
arguing that prison life has helped her to mature and
that she could soon be safely set free.
"Theirs
have to be the vilest crimes ever committed, but you
have got to believe that prisons are not just about
vengeance, but about reform," says Jim Davies, a
Daily Express writer, who still thinks of the day
when the recording of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey
was played to the Chester court. "It has to be
time seriously to consider releasing her. But I think
if I heard those tapes again, I might think
otherwise."
Copyright,
Times Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved. No portion
of this article on Myra Hindley, moors murderer, may
be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated or
otherwise used without the express written approval
of the copyright owner. Responses, information and
other feedback are appreciated - via Brian Deer's
homepage.
