One of Your Own (29 page)

After work one evening, Ian wanted to go to the cinema and Myra drove into town, expecting to accompany him, but as they neared the city centre, Ian told her that he was going alone. Myra was angry but dropped him at the Queen’s Hotel on London Road near Piccadilly Station as he asked, agreeing to collect him at eleven o’clock that night. She returned home and spent the evening with Maureen, who helped to set her hair in rollers. Realising she was going to be late collecting Ian, Myra quickly put on a headscarf and drove into Manchester. She parked in their usual meeting place – under a railway arch on Store Street – and waited. When Ian didn’t arrive, she climbed out of the car and went up the steps to the station approach, but there was no sign of him. She returned swiftly to the car, embarrassed by the rollers poking out beneath the headscarf. For two hours, she sat in the dank, derelict underpass, growing increasingly angry. Ian was steaming drunk when he rolled up at one o’clock that morning and the two of them had a blazing row. Myra questioned him about his evening and he flashed back that it was none of her business, then lapsed into silence as he flopped into the passenger seat. Fuming, Myra accelerated down a quiet road then slammed her foot on the brake, nearly sending Ian through the windscreen. He turned and struck her so forcefully that she felt as if the rollers had gone through her skull. He laughed then and began talking normally, as if nothing had happened. She accused him of treating her ‘just like a chauffeur. You arrange for me to pick you up and you’re hours late’, but Ian’s temper had passed and, with it, her own. By the time they reached home, the argument was all but forgotten.
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‘I felt old at 26. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest – nothing to hook myself onto. I had experienced everything. You either strike inwards or you strike outwards,’ Ian told journalist Fred Harrison by way of an explanation for the apparent departure from the known pattern of the murders.
³⁰
In
The Gates of Janus
, Ian writes of a spurious, paradoxical feeling among serial killers in which the actual act of murder ‘serves to slow down the cycle of homicidal compulsion . . . the killer yearns for a period of rest, wishing to enjoy the ordinary things of life like other people’.
³¹

There was no known murder that summer. Ian claims to have been standing on the edge of a precipice: ‘I felt that time was running out. Things kept coming into my mind that seemed exciting, they weren’t when I carried them out, and I got more and more outrageous until I got sucked into a death dive and lost control, I lost sight of reality.’
³²
Myra already suspected that the unwitting architect of his ‘death dive’ might be Dave Smith; and she knew that Ian’s destruction meant her own, giving her another reason to secretly loathe her brother-in-law.

During their nights that August at Underwood Court, when Myra and Maureen sloped off to bed, Ian raised the subject of robbery again. In the past, Dave had ignored Ian’s hints, but that month, while the news about the race riots in Los Angeles played in the background, he admits he ‘got interested in it. We agreed on robbing a bank, the three of us.’
³³
He agreed to keep watch on the Williams & Glyn’s bank on Ashton Old Road: ‘I had to take notes of certain things – of arrivals and departures for a good three hours – and then meet him again and tell him what I had taken down.’
³⁴
Ian said he and Myra would carry loaded guns during the raid. Dave later explained to a packed courtroom: ‘He called it a safeguard, an insurance, in case there was any obstruction, and then they would be used with the live ammunition in them . . . I did not object to the carrying of the guns, but I did object to the use of live ammunition. I said I preferred blanks. He waved it aside by just laughing.’
³⁵

On the Saturday following their first serious discussion about robbery, Myra drove Ian and Dave to the moor and remained in the car while the two men climbed out. Ian led the way past John Kilbride’s grave, down into the valley where they had been before, to practise their aim on the old oil drum. They unloosed several rounds of shot before returning to the car. Afterwards, at the Waggon and Horses in Gorton, they quietly discussed their plans. ‘We’re going to use the guns,’ Ian insisted, and Myra joked, ‘I wonder what would happen if we took Maureen along with us.’
³⁶
During their next conversation, Dave recalls: ‘[Ian] gave me instructions that whenever they decided to do the job at the bank, all writing materials, books and things like that, were to be moved; and if I had any, I was to let him have them so that he could dispose of them.’
³⁷

One evening, after Myra and Maureen had gone to bed, Ian suggested to Dave that they play Russian roulette. He knocked out all but one of the bullets from a pistol and spun the chamber, then pointed the gun at Dave and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud click, and Ian started to laugh: ‘There would have been an awful mess behind you if the bullet had hit you.’
³⁸
When Dave had recovered from the shock, Ian asked him if there was anyone whom he truly hated. After a while, Dave told him about some trouble he’d had earlier in the year with Sammy Jepson and Tony Latham. Jepson had been heard boasting that he had slept with Maureen; Dave twice attempted to confront him but then discovered that Latham, with whom he had fought at school, was spreading the same rumour. Although Dave didn’t believe them, he was furious enough to question Maureen and threaten Jepson, though had forgotten everything when Angela Dawn died. Ian’s question stoked his anger anew.

Ian was more interested in Latham than Jepson, and asked, ‘Is it real? Has it got to you?’
³⁹
Then he told Dave that he needed a photograph of Latham and proposed that Dave should take a Polaroid snap of him in his favourite pub, the Dolphin on Hyde Road: ‘We’ll take you down. Keep him talking, make him nice and friendly. Set him up good and proper . . .’
⁴⁰
Dave’s attempt at photographing Latham went wrong. Although Myra drove him to the pub and Dave found his old rival inside, he had forgotten to load the camera with film. To his surprise, Ian seemed to shrug off his mistake and dropped the idea of ‘setting up’ Latham. But to Myra, Ian admitted that, as far as he was concerned, Dave had screwed up and presented a risk. On the hills above Buxton, sipping from a bottle of wine, he debated with her whether or not to murder her brother-in-law. He was concerned about Dave’s reliability and tired of his domestic problems, but Myra talked him round, albeit grudgingly, not wanting to hurt Maureen.

At the end of August, Ian’s mother and stepfather moved from Westmoreland Street – which had also been earmarked for demolition – to a council flat in Heywood. Ian seemed unsettled by the change of address and appeared to suddenly want to cling to the past. On 18 September, he and Myra travelled up to Scotland, picnicking just south of Carlisle, and Myra was relieved when his mood brightened as they reached Gretna Green. They stayed in a hotel that night and he visited his foster family alone to tell them he had brought his girlfriend on the trip. Myra made a good impression on the Sloans, despite an attack of nerves that left her tongue-tied. She perked up when they asked about Puppet, and showed them the photographs she always carried of her dog.

From the Pollock estate, they travelled into central Glasgow, where Ian used a new camera to take endless snaps of his old childhood haunts. He found that he ‘couldn’t get enough of people, roaming the old bars and cafes, soaking up the atmosphere and delighting in overheard conversations. Each face I then observed seemed to radiate unique character. I felt truly
alive
, all criminal inclinations and ambitions forgotten . . .’
⁴¹
There was one instance when Myra was left with his foster family while he explored Glasgow alone, and he claims to have killed a tramp that night. Police subsequently found nothing to indicate that he had committed a murder on Scottish soil, and when Peter Topping questioned Myra about the matter, she told him it was unlikely, citing an incident that occurred when the two of them were driving beyond Loch Lomond to camp. She admits to having asked Ian, after spotting a child walking alone, ‘Don’t you want to do another one?’ to which he replied – as he had once before – that he would never kill one of his own.
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On the final leg of their trip, they visited St Monans, leaving the car near the cemetery and walking to the castle, where Ian photographed Myra sitting beside an archway. From there, they travelled to Dunning, but Ian was frustrated by their inability to find the cottage he had stayed in with the Sloans as a boy. As they left the village, Maggie Wall’s cross reared up at the roadside and they climbed out of the car to scrutinise it. Ian took his last photographs in Scotland there; he and Myra each took it in turns to sit on the witch’s monument. They stole one of the small boulders for their garden from the foot of the cross, pushing it into the car boot before driving off, the white-painted inscription ‘burnt . . . as a witch’ fading into the pale blue distance.

On the evening of 25 September 1965, Myra and Ian called at Underwood Court to find Dave lying in bed, white-faced from vomiting. He had been drinking heavily, agitated at the news that his father had arranged to have his dog, Peggy, put to sleep. ‘Ian walked into the bedroom and he asked me if I was all right. Then he turned round and he said, “It’s that bleeder who should have got the needle and not the dog” . . . Myra went out of her way to try and save the dog. She drove all the way down to the dogs’ home . . . She was just too late. The dog was in the house on its own because my father was working in London.’
¹
The four of them spent the evening together in the flat, and Dave momentarily forgot his troubles when Ian screamed hysterically for Myra to kill a daddy-long-legs that fluttered across the balcony to where he sat by the open door. Dave couldn’t stop laughing; he remembered when a spider had scuttled across the sitting-room floor in Wardle Brook Avenue and Ian had dashed out, shouting for Myra to get it. On both occasions, she dealt calmly with the cause of his panic.

After the sisters had gone to bed, Ian began talking about the robbery. Dave recalled in court how Ian raised a new subject: ‘What would happen if someone obstructed us . . . the guns would be used to move them, stop the obstruction . . . He asked me what my reaction would be if this was to happen. We had been drinking for a good four or five hours, and I thought it was the drink talking, and I looked at him and waited for him to carry on. He asked me if I was capable of using a gun or of murder . . .’
²

Ian fixed Dave with his cool, grey eyes and gave the first broad intimation of the appalling secret he and Myra had kept to themselves for the past two years. ‘He went on to say that he had killed three or four people,’ Dave told the court. ‘This just convinced me that it was the beer talking. He leaned back and he said, “You don’t really believe me.” I must have smiled at him. Getting a bit tired, I was. And then he said, “It will be done,” and a matter of a quarter of an hour later we were both asleep.’
³

Myra was absent again when Ian made the same claim to Dave a few nights later, in the flat and drinking into the early hours. This time, he went further, Dave recalls: ‘He said the ages of the people were between 15 and 21, and the reason he gave was because when the police received missing person reports between those ages they did not pay all that much attention. And he went on to say that he waited in the car until somebody came along, and then he just got out and did it. And another way he mentioned, the way he preferred, was to go out in the car, wait in a place and pick somebody up, and take them back to the house and do it in the house. He preferred that way because any evidence against him was in the house and he could get rid of it in his own time . . . All his clothes would be brushed and cleaned and inspected, everything would be listed that he had on, and he said he took a drug, Pro-Plus, as a stimulant . . . He mentioned that he had photographic proof of his killings . . . He said they were buried on the moors.’
⁴
Ian’s description of his ‘method’ failed to convince Dave that he was telling the truth. In the mundane surroundings of the Hattersley flat, with the two women asleep and Maureen’s beloved cats curled up nearby, it seemed so implausible. Dave changed the subject, returning to the robbery, which they now agreed would centre on an Electricity Board showroom and settled on 8 October as the date for the crime.

Myra and Ian had to work on Saturday, 2 October. During a break, Myra bumped into Anne Murdoch, her former Ryder Brow rounders teammate. Anne recalls: ‘I hadn’t seen Myra for a long time. Then I heard from a lad she used to hang about with at school that she was working at Millwards. It was a rotten, scruffy-looking place near the big laundrette. On this particular Saturday, I put my two-year-old daughter Sharon in her pram and went shopping at Gorton Cross. I met up with two other lasses I knew from school, Mary and Marge. They had tots as well. When we were walking home, I spotted Myra coming out of Millwards, on the other side of the road. She saw the three of us with our toddlers and shouted sarcastically, “By God, you’ve all ended up with good jobs.” I shouted back, “You’ve got an even better one there.” She snorted at me, “You do my job then and I’ll take the babies for a walk.” I didn’t answer. She went off, clicking down the street in her high heels. The following week I heard she’d been arrested.’
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