How Myra Hindley changed our world; The moors murders shattered a

IAN Brady was never in any doubt that his two-year murder spree with Myra Hindley would change the face of the society he loathed so intensely. Last year, in his own book, The Gates of Janus, which studied the minds of psychopaths, he said: "Serial killers are very much like writers, pursuing the quest for immortality in solitary fashion, using a knife rather than a pen, skin rather than paper."

He wanted his crimes to live on: he fully intended to deliver a punch to the face of Britain that the country would never recover from. But he would never have been able to wound the nation's psyche quite so badly had not his willing assistant, Myra Hindley, been by his side.

If Brady had acted alone, the memories of a lone man who raped and butchered five children in the 1960s would only be dimly remembered today. Without Hindley, we couldn't name the victims or the investigating officer and Saddleworth Moor would not be a place-name ranked alongside Hungerford or Dunblane for horror and suffering. Without Hindley, it is unlikely that Brady would ever have become the immortal killer he always wanted to be. After all, how much do the crimes of Cannock Chase killer Raymond Morris stick in the public mind today? In 1968 he was jailed for life for murdering a seven- year-old girl. Police always suspected he had killed two other little girls. The murders caused a media circus almost rivalling the trial of Brady and Hindley two years before, yet they are all but forgotten today.

Without Hindley, there would have been no Brady. He would have remained a borstal boy with a grudge against society who would probably have ended up in prison for a single sadistic killing. Without a willing woman to lure children, he could never have claimed the lives of Pauline Reade, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey, Edward Evans and John Kilbride. Without her, there would have been no tapes of dying children - no voice of a girl begging her mummy and God for her life as Christmas carols played in the background.

With Hindley at his side, Brady was able to debunk the innocence of the swinging 60s and wake Britain up to the truth about the human capacity for hatred, violence and sickness. Here were two young lovers, both fairly attractive, but bonded by obsessions about Nazis and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Today, we are inured to killers having strange literary tastes. It is almost de rigueur to find a book by de Sade on their bedside tables, but Brady and Hindley were the pioneers of a new type of intellectual evil - Hindley was a willing convert to Brady's existential fantasies that they were both "beyond good and evil". They gave us an insight into the kinds of minds that created the gas chambers. They terrified and angered us because they were human and seemed just like the couple across the road, yet their souls didn't seem to belong on Earth.

Together, they rewrote how Britain perceived evil. Evil wasn't confined any longer to the battlefields of Europe - it came now from the suburbs of our cities. Hindley taught Britain that women could kill, that women could be driven by brutal sexual urges that were once thought of as the realm of delinquent, disturbed men. And Brady and Hindley continued to challenge us even from prison. Their trial took place just months after the abolition of the death penalty, so their continued presence seemed forever to taunt a Britain asking "how do we deal adequately with people like this?" Hindley drove us to debate for the first time whether or not the very worst killers could be rehabilitated. These two changed the lives of five families in Manchester; they changed the city in which they lived; and they changed the country too.

Say the words "moors murders" to anyone over 16 - even though the crimes happened so long ago - and they think of bleak heaths, shallow graves, abused children dragged to their deaths, a bleached blonde, a pouting angry, rebellious young man, tapes, knives, and unending sorrow. Say "10 Rillington Place", where John Christie killed at least eight women in the 1940s and 50s and perhaps only a handful will appreciate its awful history. Brady and Hindley have burned themselves in the nation's collective mind as the epitome of evil. Colin Wilson, Britain's foremost criminologist and the author of books such as A Criminal History Of Mankind, spent years corresponding with Brady and studying Hindley. He believes that no crime since the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 has had such a profound effect on the soul of Britain as those committed by them.

"Before the moors murders, we had little or no concept of women as evil," says Wilson. "She ushered in a new era - think of Rose West." Wilson also believes Brady and Hindley showed us that love can also have a dreadful nature. "Here was a high-dominance man and a medium- dominance women," he says. "He was a sadist who seduced her. One New Year's Eve he finally took her virginity. She thought a deity had descended from heaven - that she'd given herself to God. She would now do anything for him. She studied the Nazis, shared his hatred of society, procured guns for him. She swallowed his anti-society philosophy and soon became just as anti-social as he was. Her own sister said she changed from a girl who loved children and animals to a woman who hated children and animals through her relationship with him.

"It was like David Koresh or Charles Manson - she had been converted by a messiah. It was this relationship which allowed the mass killings to take place, and until 1966 the public had no idea of serial murders such as these. Not since the Ripper has a crime changed a society so much. The Ripper made the Victorians rethink their sentimental view of life. London wasn't a genteel, charming place anymore. There was poverty, prostitution and malevolent evil."

Wilson says that throughout his relationship with Brady the killer always showed a twisted sense of personal morality - never lying, because he considered it beneath him to do so. "Hindley deserves as equal a portion of the blame as Brady. He told me she took a very active part in the sexual assault of Pauline Reade (their first victim, aged 16). He also maintained that she strangled Lesley Ann Downey (the 10-year-old heard on the tape) and later played in public with the cord used to kill the child. They stripped away our innocence. They've made us brood on how such monsters can be created. They've made us question what exists in our society - and in us - that can allow these people to become what they are." Brady told Wilson the pair were so close they were "almost telepathic".

"He responded to claims that she only took part in the crimes as she was terrified of him by saying they were 'absolute shit'," Wilson added. In his book, Brady scoffs at her allegations that he coerced her into murder, writing: "It is human nature that, if caught, the pupil will blame the master for criminal conduct. But should the criminal enterprises succeed, I can assure you, from wide personal experience, the pupil's zeal and devotion to criminal activities can outdo that of the master."

This wasn't some one-off act that Hindley committed at Brady's side. Her career as a criminal lasted two years, she stood by him during the trial and even in prison still asserted she wanted to marry him.

Although Hindley and Brady had long been suspected of killing Reade and 12-year-old Bennett, their bodies have never been recovered and the pair never stood trial for their murders. It was only in 1987, when Brady confessed to these killings that Hindley agreed to speak to the police about them. It made a mockery of her conversion to Christianity and supposed remorse.

Peter Topping, the former CID chief who led the moors murders inquiry, believes Hindley's crimes redefined how our society viewed women. "This investigation was played out in front of a new type of media where TV cameras could capture everything. This helped cause the huge emotional impact that these crimes had on society," he said.

"Fear of crime became greater than crime itself. The tape made us for the first time understand the suffering that victims of crime suffer at the hands of a killer - we heard it happen. A young child was pleading for her life and two very callous people ignored her pleas and killed her. Hindley was an evil woman. When I took her confession to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett in 1987, she showed remorse but I never felt it was genuine. She wanted parole and so had to confess her guilt and show sorrow. Until then, she'd done neither.

"Her legacy is that she left Britain with a feeling that evil has no end, that anything is possible. She made us lose our trust in each other. But she also had powerful friends who supported her and it was this that amazed me. There were a lot of people who saw good in her and wanted her released. I could never come to understand this. There are many good causes, but Myra Hindley was never one of them.

"This chapter is closed now, but the story is not over. I'm pleased for the victims and their families now that she's dead. They never wanted her to leave jail and now she never will. She's completed her life sentence and justice has been done."

The Rev Peter Timm, a Methodist minister, was a close friend and supporter of Hindley for many years. He believes her crimes tapped into darkness in the British psyche. "Society needed someone to project its own evil onto and she was it," he says.

Timm blames the muscle of the press for Hindley becoming "the most hated woman in Britain". Her life allowed Britain to seal in an anger and anxiety about our society that we have never recovered from. In the 1960s we were obsessed with the new role of women. Women were going to work and leaving children alone at home.

"We unconsciously saw her as the ultimate in child rejection. The way society has reacted to her shows just how corrupting fear can be. The state was unable to deal with her objectively. She was sentenced to 25 years and then consecutive home secretaries resentenced her over and over again. The idea that any citizen, any human, any woman could be treated like this is a sad reflection on our criminal justice system. It is extremely corrupt. We haven't learned as a society how to deal with everyone equally in the law.

"The fear of tabloids disabled politicians and churchmen from doing what was right. We were never able to get over our primitive reaction to the idea of a mother figure destroying the lives of children. Our attitude to her is a terrifying concept - it tilted the scales of justice on the basis of gender."

Other stalwart campaigners for Hindley, such as the late Lord Longford, always seemed conveniently to forget two points. Firstly, Brady never sought release and nobody campaigned for him. More importantly, they often side-stepped the fact that Hindley was still untried for the murders of Reade and Bennett. Ironically, she died just before a ruling, expected soon in the House of Lords, could have freed her. Anthony Anderson, a double killer, is to challenge the home secretary's powers to fix the length of sentence killers serve - and he is expected to win. Greater Manchester police, however, planned to arrest Hindley for the Reade and Bennett murders the moment she left prison.

To Timm, Hindley possessed the ultimate Christian virtue - hope. "Hope is a remarkable quality. She really did believe she'd one day be free. It is one of the great gifts - after all, where there is hope there is life," he said.

Copyright 2002 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.