HINDLEY: AN ICON OF EVIL: THE MYRA I KNEW

THERE was always a card at Christmas and one at Easter. Her letters were less regular - two or three close together then nothing for months. The signature in a tiny, neat hand said: "Yours, Myra".

As a journalist, I began writing to Myra Hindley in 1995 over a detail of European law and how it related to her detention.

I didn't expect a reply, but got one inside a Christmas card . There was little exceptional except for a few words. Suddenly, she was writing about her part in those terrible murders. "Of course I could have stopped," she said. "It might have been because I was in thrall of him (Ian Brady) but I cannot in truth blame that alone". This was the start of a frequent correspondence.

At the end, I know a lot about Myra Hindley, but still nothing of what motivated her to take part in the worst-ever crimes against children in this country.

I told her I could understand killing in the heat of anger, but not the slow, deliberate killing with sadistic torture (children, at that) that she and Brady had committed.

Her reply? "No, I do not think you understand killing although you may mean to try to. I don't think anyone who has not killed can understand killing." What I can say is that at the end Hindley WAS a reformed character with an absolute belief in God.

She did long to be released from prison, and often complained that she was being judged as the person she was in 1965, not "as I am now".

She hated it when the Press revived her case, but her vitriol was reserved as much for what she saw as the hounding of the victims' families. "If they must have a hate figure am I not enough?" she asked. "Surely it must hurt the relatives for it all to be dragged up again?"

Hindley became a Catholic in 1957 at the age of 15 after a young friend drowned - not, as is often reported, in jail. Michael Higgins was frail, always being picked on, and he had asked her to go swimming with him that day. She didn't go, and was so traumatised by grief and guilt that she adopted his family's faith as a way of staying close to him.

It blighted her life. She was a bright, popular girl, but from this point she ignored school work and became estranged from her family, who could not understand her grief.

When she met the warped Ian Brady the die was cast. "I did love him," she told me, "but I had no one else much to love."

Alan Watkins has asked that his fee for this article is donated to two children's charities.

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