One of Your Own (21 page)

On Tuesday, 26 November, the police appealed to the man who had accompanied John and his friends to the cinema to come forward; he did, immediately, and was eliminated from their enquiries. The following day, Myra and Ian returned to the moor for what Ian termed ‘a reconnaissance’, checking that the recently dug grave hadn’t been disturbed. On the same date, the
Manchester Evening News
drew attention to the search again, reporting that the police would welcome anyone over the age of 18 to join them in the hunt for John.

Patrick and Shelia Kilbride struggled valiantly to keep their anguish from their other children and to retain a semblance of normality while their world changed irrevocably. ‘John went missing on Saturday and I went back to school on the Wednesday,’ Danny recalls. ‘It was terrible. Until then, I’d enjoyed school, but every Monday morning there was an assembly when we’d all stand in the hall and the headmaster said – this was the following Monday – “Let’s say a prayer for John Kilbride.” And every single kid in school turned round and stared at me. It was just . . . terrible. But I also understood and appreciated what he was doing. The first time I went into the school canteen afterwards, the dinner lady who was dishing out puddings tried to give me double helpings – that was her way of doing something kind. But I said, “No, don’t do that.” I knew she was only doing it because of who I was and that was something I didn’t want – to be singled out from my mates. Most people were kind. The others were very few and far between. The kids at school . . . well, my true friends were fine with me, but I got one or two lads – one especially – pushing me about and saying, “You haven’t got your big brother to protect you now, have you?” I felt like ripping his head off.’
²³

The search widened. On 29 November, the
Ashton Reporter
devoted its front page to John: ‘Boy Vanishes Sixth Day’. The
Manchester Evening News
included a photograph of frogmen wading into the foaming River Tame, noting that the search was also being ‘concentrated east of Lees Road, an area of bleak moor lands, part of which has already been combed’.
²⁴
Lees Road was close to the A635 between Mossley and Greenfield. Years later, Myra told Peter Topping that she had been aghast to read how close the police were to finding the graves. On Sunday, 1 December, in a biting cold wind, 2,000 volunteers poured across crofts, derelict buildings and parks in the search for John.

When Shelia Kilbride was told that a boy resembling John had asked a news vendor in Bury about Ashton United’s progress, she caught the bus to Bury and went from door to door, holding out a photograph of her son. At home, she was unable to break the habit of including John at the table: ‘For a long time, I put an extra plate out, counting the seven children . . .’
²⁵
A businessman offered £100 as a reward to anyone who could offer information leading to John’s whereabouts.

In her memoirs, Myra recounted how one evening she and Ian were watching television at Bannock Street when
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
came on: ‘I can’t remember if the host was Bruce Forsyth or Norman someone, but whoever it was his catchphrase was: “I’m in charge.” Brady casually said to me: “What do you think I get out of doing what we’ve done?” And I immediately said because he was in charge. It was having the power over someone’s life and death. He smiled and said good, you know where I’m coming from now.’
²⁶

The ‘Mass Hunt for a Boy’, as
The Reporter
phrased it on 6 December, continued apace. The ‘biggest search ever mounted for a missing person’ meant that ‘owing to pressure of work the Police Dance at the Mecca ballroom is cancelled’.
²⁷

By mid December, the situation was desperate enough for the press to start interviewing clairvoyants. Dutchman Emile Croiset, a parapsychologist who had worked with the police in the Netherlands on missing persons cases, was called in. His information was too vague to be even remotely useful, but a psychic based in Ashton-under-Lyne gave an accurate description of John’s grave. Annie Lansley saw John ‘out in the open, some way down a slope, with the skyline completely barren, not a tree in sight, a road on the right and near a stream’.
²⁸
But her ‘vision’ remained no more than a talking point for the next two years.

On 21 December 1963, Myra again hired a car from Warren’s Autos for a reconnaissance trip to the moor. She disputed the accusation, made by journalist Fred Harrison, that she and Ian called at the Kilbride home in the weeks after John’s murder, posing as detectives and taking away some of his clothing while Ian promised John’s mother, ‘I’ll see you next week. Johnny will be with you.’
²⁹
She did, however, admit that Ian had a compulsion to visit Smallshaw Lane, and that the two of them would sit for a long time on the Tiger Cub, watching the Kilbride house. On other occasions they drove up to the moor, sitting in the lay-by at Hollin Brown Knoll and gazing across the rolling hills to John’s grave. There, Myra claimed, Ian found a measure of peace, while in Smallshaw Lane, John’s family were striving to get through each day.

‘My mum and dad let me stay whenever the police called,’ Danny recalls. ‘I was allowed to read the papers as well, whereas the other kids weren’t. I was the eldest, plus I’d got a good brain on me. My mum would talk to me about John’s disappearance, but my dad didn’t. I don’t think he handled it very well. If anybody said anything to him about it, he’d thump them. If he heard someone whispering behind his back, he just snapped. The police had him in twice, to question him about John, and he fought them: “They won’t bloody well accuse
me
 . . .” But he
did
snap and I can’t blame him for that, because the police would come and drag him out of the house. They had to get a firm hold of him because he wasn’t going otherwise. He got locked up for battering some bloke in a pub for insinuating something.’
³⁰

For other families, apart from the usual seasonal festivities, Christmas 1963 was dominated by the Beatles, whose music and merchandise were everywhere. Christmas audiences gathered around the TV set to watch Ian’s favourite shows –
TW3
, the
Hitchcock Hour
– and two new programmes, which proved immediate hits:
The Avengers
and
Doctor Who
, the latter’s fame rising steeply ever since the first episode aired on the night John Kilbride went missing. On 27 December 1963, a photograph appeared in the local press, demonstrating the stark contrast in the Kilbrides’ Christmas: it showed Shelia and Patrick sitting around the decorated table with all their children but one, and a gap in the chairs where John should have sat.

‘My mum laid a place for John and bought him presents that Christmas and the next,’ Danny confirms. ‘She bought him birthday presents and cards as well. But she just used to cry all the time until they found him. She couldn’t help herself. No matter who was there, she’d collapse. My dad felt the same, but he hid himself away. I caught him a couple of times sobbing on the back step. I talked about everything to my brother Pat, because he was nine and a half when John went missing, but the others were too young. I kept trying to work out what had happened. I knew John wouldn’t run away because he had so many friends and was a happy kid. He was going out with a young girl at the time; she was upset. They were only just getting into their teens; it was light, innocent stuff. But after two or three months, I knew our John wasn’t ever coming home again.’
³¹

On New Year’s Eve 1963, Ian and Myra climbed on the Tiger Cub and drove to the moor. In the lay-by at Hollin Brown Knoll, Ian held his whisky bottle aloft until it glittered in the soft light from the full moon and shouted, ‘To John!’
³²

Britain was almost halfway through the 1960s, but despite the much-vaunted social and cultural changes taking place ‘there was no such thing as a single national experience . . . the soundtracks to
The Sound of Music
and
South Pacific
comfortably outsold any Beatles albums of the decade . . . more people attended church than went to football matches [and], far from turning against a supposedly repressive Establishment, most people were content to vote for socially conservative, Oxford-educated politicians’.
¹
John Lennon spoke of the absence of an actual revolution: ‘The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same . . . nothing happened except that we all dressed up.’
²

The North was fast falling into industrial decline, and the cinema reflected the geographical shift in focus from Liverpool and Leeds to London in the last authentic new-wave film,
Billy Liar
. Critic Alexander Walker commented, ‘With Julie Christie, the British cinema caught the train south.’
³
In the same way that they used literature to make their sexual preferences more palatable, Myra and Ian took their discontent with the stagnation of life in Manchester’s suburbs to an incomprehensible end. They spent hours on the moor, ruminating on how the murders had enabled them to rise high above the limitations of their working-class backgrounds, telling themselves that social dissatisfaction justified their crimes, which Ian described as ‘merely an existential exercise’.
⁴

In February 1964, Myra bought a second-hand Austin A40. At Millwards, her new acquisition caused a stir; Tom Craig recalled, ‘Everyone thought she’d gone ambitious.’
⁵
Only 37 per cent of households owned a car by 1965; it was the apex of all affluent symbols and indicated not merely a certain level of prosperity but status as well. One of the first trips Myra and Ian took in the Austin was a reconnaissance visit to the moor. It had snowed, but the steep road up to Hollin Brown Knoll was still open to traffic. In the car with them was a small black-and-white puppy, one of a litter that Lassie had given birth to in January. Myra loved the little dog with a passion and called him Puppet or Pekadese. Ian had bought him a tartan collar and held the inquisitive animal on his knee as they parked in their usual place, the ice on the road making the turn hazardous. In warm clothing, they walked across the moor with Puppet tucked inside Myra’s coat, heading to the high ground where Pauline was buried. Ian took a photograph of Myra standing nearby, cuddling Puppet. Then they returned to the road and made their way carefully down the slope to John’s grave. There, in the watery sunlight, with the snow melting on the moor, Myra crouched on the sludgy ground above John’s body. In the photograph Ian developed a few days later, Puppet peeks out from inside Myra’s coat while she stares intently at the flat stones at her feet, an eerie half-smile playing about her lips.

In prison therapy sessions, Myra discussed how they collected ‘souvenirs’ of their crimes but attempted to distance herself from the practice: ‘[Ian] would have liked the victims to have suffered for the rest of their lives after he had abused them. He could only savour past experiences through the items that he kept under lock and key. Returning at a later date to rekindle the excitement . . . Some of the photographs that we took on the Moors were constructed with the location of the graves taken into consideration, [but] Ian did not need a camera’s image, he could reproduce the image in his own head.’
⁶
They slotted the photographs he had taken of their victims’ graves among holiday snaps and family pictures in a tartan album.

That Easter, Myra and Ian drove to Scotland; they slept in the back of the Austin and toured the sites of Ian’s 1949 holiday to Dunning with the Sloans. They visited St Andrews and St Monans, and walked from the small village of Comrie through beech woods to the Devil’s Cauldron, a sheer drop of rushing white water that surged from a cavern into a wide pool. On the journey home, they paused in Glasgow, and Myra discovered Dali’s
Christ of St John of the Cross
; in her letters, she mentions visiting Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with Ian and falling in love with the painting.

On 6 May, Myra part-exchanged the Austin for a white Morris Mini-Traveller. A two-door estate car, the rear bench seat folded flat to convert the back into a load-carrying area. On the moor, she and Ian took photographs of each other standing like sentinels on the high boulders at Hollin Brown Knoll, with the car parked in the lay-by below. In one picture, Ian wears dark glasses and turns his head towards Pauline’s grave, smiling faintly. In another, Myra stands on the same boulder, grinning broadly at the camera, her body angled towards the opposite side of the road, where John Kilbride lay buried. A transistor radio sits at her unsuitably clad feet; she remembered later that Mary Wells’ Motown hit ‘My Guy’ was playing at the time. They also photographed the Mini-Traveller on its own, with the tumbling boulders behind.

John Kilbride would have celebrated his 13th birthday on 15 May 1964. His mother bought him presents and wrote on his card: ‘For John, if he is found by today, May 15
^th
1964, All my love.’ She kept all John’s belongings safe, including his guitar and toy submarine, and the Flintstones annual he’d received with such pleasure the Christmas before his disappearance. She prayed regularly at St Christopher’s Catholic Church and continued to scour the streets for him. Likewise in Gorton, Pauline Reade’s parents carried on their search for their missing daughter.