I spent a wonderful day with Margaret Mounsey and want to thank her for that and our contact since, and for sharing with me memories of her husband, the redoubtable Joe Mounsey. To Mike Massheder, I offer my thanks for his insights and friendship, and extend the same to Ian Fairley, Tom McVittie and Bob Spiers, all of whom are exceptional men. I’d also like to thank Maureen Spiers for the lunch she provided when I interviewed her husband.
Anthony Ainsworth talked to me about the geography of the moor and provided the introduction to Norie Miles, Winnie Johnson’s close friend; sadly, he died a few months after this book was published. Norie Miles has studied the photographs taken by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and also facilitated an interview with Winnie Johnson. I thank them both, and Elizabeth Bond who looks after Winnie.
Although David Smith did not wish to be interviewed for a book about Myra Hindley, I am very grateful to him for agreeing to an informal chat, and for his and his wife Mary’s hospitality. Thank you, too, to their son David and his wife Diane, for providing initial contact.
Together with my son River, I spent two wonderful days at the splendid National Library of Wales, where the papers of Emlyn Williams are kept. The staff there – Manon Foster, Anwen Pierce, Glyn Parry, Caronwen Samuel and others – were unfailingly kind and helpful, and I’d like to thank them not only for their assistance with the Williams’ archive, but also for making my son so welcome. I only wish the staff of every archive were as thoughtful and knowledgeable. Thanks, too, to the staff of the National Archive in Kew for their assistance with Myra Hindley’s prison files, and National Image Library Manager Paul Johnson especially for his kindness and patience in dealing with the photographs. I’d also like to thank the staff at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull for providing copies of Myra Hindley’s letters held there.
Many literary sources have informed this book, and I am grateful to the authors and publishers for allowing me permission to quote from their works.
Closer to home, I must thank my agent, Jan Michael, and her agent, Jane Judd, for supporting the project from the start. Jan’s suggestions on the text were incisive and made a difference to the manuscript generally, and Jane and her husband Brian very kindly let me stay with them while I worked in London. At Mainstream, I offer sincere thanks to Bill Campbell, Peter MacKenzie, Deborah Warner, Ailsa Morrison, Graeme Blaikie, Karyn Millar and all the staff for their hard work and faith in the book.
And literally
closest
to home, I have to thank my friend Tricia Room especially, for ferrying me around various places and discussing ideas. I’m also grateful to my family and other friends for putting up with me while I wrote the book, and to my mother, for listening as I talked about it every day and for looking after River when I needed more time to write. And to River, who knew only the most basic facts of the book, I offer the deepest thanks, for keeping me grounded and bringing joy into my life while I worked on a complex and distressing subject.
I corresponded, briefly, with Ian Brady, and would like to echo Danny Kilbride’s words: ‘Tell us where Keith is. Stop being a coward. There’s a little boy out there on the moor who should be brought home to his family. It can’t end like this.’
Finally, there is one other person I would like to acknowledge, whom I did not meet whilst working on this book, but who contacted me after publication. That person is now my partner, Keith’s brother Alan Bennett. His support, courage and love mean everything to me and I want to thank him for it all from my heart, with love.
I
Pariah: 20 November 2002
1
A radio station that ran a £500 sweepstake asking listeners to predict the time of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley’s death has been branded irresponsible and insensitive by the radio watchdog. The Manchester station Key 103 asked listeners to ring in with the time Hindley would ‘meet her maker’ . . . The item followed an afternoon news bulletin announcing Hindley had received the last rites.
The Guardian
, 17 January 2003
Her funeral was held at night.
Rain slanted in from the Fens, as it had all day, beating with a thin, hollow sound on the roof of the small 1930s-built chapel. The gardens of remembrance were pitch-black, but the gravel courtyard burned with light and the white draughts of breath issuing from the multitude of journalists who represented every broadsheet, tabloid and TV news company in the country. Closer to the chapel, and guarding the gates, were the legions of police drafted in to search the grounds for intruders, the luminous bands on their uniforms a glare of brilliant yellow among the black trees.
But no one uninvited came. The warning to the public to stay away proved unnecessary, for in a curiously medieval display of suspicion the woman was shunned in death. There were none of the incendiary scenes of rage and hatred predicted by jittery government officials. In life, all that she said and did met with widespread revilement; the ferocity of feeling she evoked gave rise to seething statements by those who could not reach her and physical violence by fellow women prisoners. The few who sought to defend her found themselves attacked. But in death, it was as if her power to terrify and repulse was multiplied – as if mere nearness to her corpse would contaminate the bystander.
Against that backdrop, the burning of her body was not simply a funeral rite. It was an act of ancient justice. The woman herself had sensed that no resting place on earth could contain her bones peacefully; she left instructions in her will that her remains be cremated and her ashes scattered in secrecy.
‘I know people would have liked for me to be chucked into a pond three times to discover if I sank or swam,’ she wrote, five years before her death.
1
It was a shrewd observation. The nature of her crimes and their unfathomable source tapped into old, unspoken fears.
Whilst she was free and still young, she and her lover visited the Perthshire village of Dunning, where they climbed through a gap in a wall to reach the cross-capped stone cairn that marks the execution place of an obscure witch. A grainy black-and-white photograph captures the woman perched on the monument, grimacing, staring at nothing. The stones behind her are daubed in white paint: ‘Maggie Wall, burnt here 1657 as a witch’.
A few weeks later, detectives searching the house the woman shared with her lover dug deep into the garden, uprooting plants and destroying the little rockery where a boulder stolen from Maggie Wall’s grave sat, squat as a toad.
No one wanted to drive the hearse carrying Myra Hindley. Discreet enquiries had been made by the Prison Service more than a year before, when her health was already in steep decline. The authorities had anticipated a problem, but the volume of refusals took them by surprise; in Suffolk, within whose boundaries Highpoint Prison lies, every firm of funeral directors declined to handle the body. Their response was echoed by larger companies nationwide. Finally, after months of negotiations, a firm was found in a town 200 miles away who reluctantly agreed, its identity protected by the Prison Service and Home Office officials, who would divulge no more than that the firm was located somewhere in the North. Police then approached West Suffolk crematorium, with a view to holding the funeral service there, but were turned down. An internal prison memo noted: ‘Ipswich crematorium also refused to cremate Myra . . . I will make further enquiries regarding costs and funding and try to find out how the funeral of Fred West was managed, as this is the closest parallel I can think of.’
2
Eventually, Cambridge City crematorium consented to the service, providing strict conditions were met.
In her will, Myra had requested the presence of 12 close family and friends, though the chapel secured for her funeral could accommodate 60 mourners. Her mother, brother-in-law and 27-year-old niece informed the authorities that they wouldn’t be attending. A couple of invited friends were also expected to avoid the ceremony, which, like all the funeral arrangements, was funded by Myra’s estate (reports that she had willed other monies to charities, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, were refuted; the NSPCC said it had no record of her as a benefactor and that donations from her estate, if offered, would be returned immediately). Another memo, strictly confidential, posited a question: ‘Will Ian Brady be allowed to attend the funeral? For guidance: he is not related to Myra Hindley and has had no continuing contact with her.’
3
Myra’s death from natural causes – bronchial pneumonia brought on by hypertension and coronary heart disease – occurred on Friday, 15 November 2002 in a remote corner of West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards, Room J on Ward G2 was torn apart by staff with instructions to incinerate every article, from the bed linen to Myra’s clothing. A spokesman told the press that the hospital administration was sensitive to future patients and therefore ‘the room has been cleared of everything that was used during her care and has been redecorated’.
4
The smell of fresh paint drifted down the corridor, but not as far as the mortuary, where Myra lay isolated from the other dead and under constant police guard.
The anonymous firm of undertakers came for her on the evening of 20 November. Her 5 ft 8 in. ‘heavily built’ body was laid out in a light beech coffin with gold handles.
5
Once the lid had been secured, they covered it with white lilies and orange gerberas, then carried the coffin through to the waiting hearse, driven up to one of the rear exits. Cellophane-wrapped chrysanthemums and bouquets of carnations filled the glass compartment where the coffin would rest. After a few minor security checks, the hearse departed under police escort.
A reporter noted that a doctor standing at the exit doors muttered ‘good riddance’ before returning to his rounds.
6
One of the attendant policemen told the reporter that the floral tributes would be destroyed, although the cards were to be kept for Myra’s ailing mother, living in sheltered accommodation in Manchester under an assumed name. In the courtyard where the two men stood hunched against the rain, the glorious flowers were momentarily visible as the hearse turned onto the road for the crematorium. In a low voice, the policeman said, ‘There should have been thorns.’
7
The mourners arrived in two cars shortly before half past seven, directed to the back of the crematorium to escape the media’s probing questions and cameras. Myra’s mother was too frail to make the journey, but Andrew McCooey, Myra’s steadfast solicitor, was there, as was her barrister, Edward Fitzgerald QC, the leading human rights lawyer who married a granddaughter of Lord Longford, Myra’s most vocal campaigner.
Among the other mourners was Bridget Astor, widow of
Observer
editor David Astor, whom Myra regarded as her adoptive father. Bridget recalls, ‘It was a very quiet affair. There were only about eight or ten people in all. Tricia, a former partner of Myra’s and still a close friend, didn’t go either, despite what the press said. She rang me up afterwards and said, “Tell me every detail.” I went with my daughter Lucy, who had once visited Myra with me. We travelled to Suffolk by train with the two lawyers, Andrew McCooey and Edward Fitzgerald. There were two other people at the chapel who looked as if they didn’t want to talk to us, but they were definitely among the mourners. An elderly lady and another woman. I just felt they were hostile in some way. I remember thinking, “What have the police done with the crowds of troublemakers?” There weren’t any. That was interesting. I saw the barriers, those cattle-fence things. The funeral was very dignified.’
8
Three members of the crematorium staff were brought in for the service. The mourners sat talking quietly, listening to the persistent drumming of the rain on the chapel roof. Outside, where camera crews stood rank and file behind the steel barriers, exhaust fumes from vehicles passing on the main road coiled and vanished in the beam of generators. In lay-bys, long-distance truck drivers settled down in their cabs for the night, while others woke from their naps and continued on their journeys. Most had no knowledge of the funeral about to occur; those who did sounded their horns or shouted as they passed the crematorium gates. But that was all.
A set of headlights swung onto the driveway of the chapel, followed by a second, and the press threw down their cigarettes, stamped the numbness from their feet and began jostling for an uninterrupted view of the black Volvo carrying Myra’s coffin. The tyres of the police escort vehicle ground over the gravel, then waited to let the hearse pass. Flashguns lit up the clock tower of the crematorium and the stark rows of winter trees lining the path. The hearse drew up to the chapel porch and the pallbearers stepped out, clutching their coats against the wind and rain.
Father Michael Teader, Myra’s priest and close friend, appeared from inside the chapel, his white cassock billowing in the wind. A solitary lamp hung creaking in the porch, and the priest stooped below its flickering light to sprinkle holy water on Myra’s coffin before the pallbearers raised it onto their shoulders. They entered the chapel beneath a stone arch engraved with the Latin text:
Mors Janua Vitae – Death is the Gateway to Life
. The doors of the chapel silently closed; the press had had their last encounter with Myra Hindley.
Afterwards, Andrew McCooey described his former client’s funeral as ‘very quiet, in the sense that there weren’t too many people . . . The priest did give a very proper service for the people who were there. His theme was basically the parable of the prodigal son returning home and that really was it.’
9