One of Your Own (34 page)

On Friday, 8 October 1965, the
Manchester Evening News
ran a few lines about that morning’s activity at Hyde Magistrate’s Court: ‘At a three-minute hearing at 10 a.m., a man was charged with the murder of Edward Evans. As he left the dock, he nodded at a blonde woman friend.’
¹

Standing outside the court in the autumn sun was Clive Entwistle, a young journalist from Rochdale who had set up a freelance agency with a colleague in Ashton-under-Lyne that September. Coming out of the court was a detective whom he knew well, and after speaking to him about the Evans case, Entwistle climbed into his car and drove up to Hattersley. A policeman standing guard at Wardle Brook Avenue told him the girlfriend of the murder suspect was in a neighbour’s house on the street behind. ‘There was a policewoman on the door,’ Entwistle recalls. ‘I was smartly dressed, in a suit, collar and tie, said good afternoon and just walked straight past her, as if I was meant to be there. I went into the kitchen. The owner of the house was there with Myra’s grandmother and another woman. I said that I was looking for the young lady from the house at the front and one of the women said, “Oh, Myra’s in through there.” I asked if it was all right for me to talk to her and she said, “Would you like a cup of tea?” I suppose she thought I was from the police. I said yes and she asked, “Will you take one to Myra as well?” She poured two teas into fine china cups, put a couple of biscuits on the saucers and I carried them through to the front room. Sitting by the window to the left was this young blonde woman. She wore a floral dress and a cardigan. She didn’t have her hair in that familiar bouffant style, though. I sat down and said, “I’ve brought you a cup of tea.” I told her who I was and what I knew. She just looked blankly at me, then turned to the window again. All I could get out of her was that her name was Myra and her boyfriend was Ian. That was it. I’d no idea of the volcano that was about to erupt.’
²

After her first encounter with a journalist, Myra returned to Hyde police station with Puppet in tow and asked to see Ian. When she was told that was impossible, she asked if she could have her car back but was informed that it was undergoing forensic tests. Then she asked for her driving licence, which had also been seized. She wanted to hire a car instead of relying on buses but, after a short search, was told it couldn’t be found. Finally, she said that she couldn’t stay at her mother’s house any more and would be staying with her uncle Bert and auntie Kath. The desk sergeant made a note and Myra left the station.

Talbot and Benfield ran through what they knew about the case. Edward’s mother had given them the names of her son’s friends; they contacted Jeff Grimsdale, who didn’t recognise Ian when he was shown a photo of him. Nor did Mike Mahone: ‘I blamed myself for a long time afterwards for what happened.’
³
He spent three weeks in hospital being treated for a perforated ulcer caused by stress.

Fairley recalls: ‘I was at Millwards on the Friday. I spoke to staff and searched the place, then went on to Brady’s mother’s house in Heywood. She lived in a block of flats and was a well-mannered woman, quite timid, refined. I told her Ian had been arrested for murder and she couldn’t believe it.’
⁴
In the afternoon, while Ian’s ankle was examined by a doctor, Detective Chief Inspector John Tyrrell of Manchester City Police arrived at Hyde police station to talk about Lesley, Pauline and Keith.

Fairley recalls: ‘There was a feeling they were linked, but no evidence. Lesley, Keith and Pauline fell under the jurisdiction of Manchester and John Kilbride, who was from Ashton-under-Lyne, was under Lancashire. We had more affinity as a force with Lancashire than we did with Manchester. That may seem strange when you’re talking about seven miles, but you’ve got to go back to the ’60s and see that people were very parochial. Lancashire Constabulary were a rich force because of the size of the county. We were Cheshire, a rural force, and our budget was tight. Manchester were a bit richer than us. Once it started to filter through that we’d got Brady for the murder of a 17-year-old boy, and that he’d boasted about other murders, other constabularies began to show an interest.’
⁵

The following morning, when Myra arrived at the station, Benfield asked her into an office to answer a few questions. She still hadn’t been able to see Ian and was in no mood to cooperate, repeating to Benfield, ‘Ian didn’t do it and I didn’t do it.’

‘Then who did?’

‘I’m saying nothing till I’ve seen Ian’s solicitor.’
⁶

She was allowed to leave the station after agreeing to return on Monday, when she had a meeting with solicitor Robert Fitzpatrick, who was acting on behalf of Ian. From Hyde, she travelled to her mother’s house and the two of them carried a large bag of washing to the laundrette near Millwards. Myra went on alone to her old workplace.
⁷
According to her confession, she opened a cupboard near the fireplace, where some old records were stacked, and found an envelope containing evidence of some kind. She burned the envelope.
⁸
Shortly afterwards, Tom Craig arrived. He had read about the murder in the
Manchester Evening News
and at first imagined it was Ian who had been killed. Having learned the truth, he told Myra that Ian was never to set foot in Millwards again, but that he would keep her job open – even though she asked him to sack her so that she could claim dole. He handed over their wages and she left to join her mother at the laundrette again.

A small item in the
Manchester Evening News
noted: ‘A piece of paper bearing the name of a person who vanished two years ago has come into [police] possession.’
⁹
Just a short, innocuous sentence, but the piece of paper in question blew open the entire investigation.

Ian Fairley found the piece of paper, although Dixie Dean claimed the credit.

The items taken from the house on Wardle Brook Avenue were deposited at Hyde police station and it was while Fairley was sitting at his desk, idly flicking through an exercise book belonging to Ian Brady, that his attention was caught by a particular page. ‘I found a list of names,’ he recalls, ‘scrawled absent-mindedly around two doodles, rough sketches of gangster types. Most were the names of film stars, but there were others too. Ian Brady, John Sloan, Jim Idiot, Alec Guineas, John Kilbride, J. Thompson, John Gilbert – John Kilbride!
John Kilbride
. The lad who had gone missing from Ashton market in November 1963.’
¹⁰

A call was put through to Joe Mounsey at Ashton-under-Lyne police station. He arrived at Hyde with Detective Policewoman Pat Clayton and studied the notebook in silence. He spoke to David Smith and trusted what he was told. Then he asked for the photographs that had been found in the house on Wardle Brook Avenue. A few stood out because they were eerily devoid of purpose: landscapes shot as if the photographer was crouching down to include the ground rather than the scenery. Mounsey was intrigued by the picture of Myra’s white car against molar-shaped black rocks. He remembered David Smith’s statement about bodies buried on the moor and told his superiors, ‘We’ll do what Brady did. Bloody well dig.’
¹¹
Harold Prescott, Mounsey’s superior, agreed, but Benfield was less certain; it looked like a needle-in-a-haystack job to him.

Nonetheless, on Sunday, 10 October, a team of police headed up to the moor. The enormity of the task wasn’t lost on anyone: 400 square miles of peat and bog and furze, with the steep streams known by the old Lancashire name ‘clough’ and green cliffs 2,000 feet high that fell away to deep, fathomless valleys and reservoirs. At half past one, Mounsey and Talbot collected Dave and Maureen from Underwood Court and drove, under Dave’s direction, east along the Snake Pass towards Woodhead (a contender for the W/H of the disposal plan). Mounsey handed Dave several photographs and asked if he recognised any of the locations. Dave went through them carefully, passing them on to Maureen, but shook his head dismally, leaving the police to trudge around at random.

The Kilbrides had been informed about the notebook and Mounsey had no intention of letting them down.
¹²
Pat Clayton recalls: ‘He spent hours and hours on the moor with Ray Gelder, Mike Massheder, various other officers, trying to trace the exact location of these photographs.’
¹³
Margaret Mounsey hardly saw her husband when the search began: ‘He was off all day every day; I was busy with our children – our daughter was born in 1965 and our two sons were still very young. Nowadays if they sent a bunch of blokes up to the moors they’d be kitted up left, right and centre. Joe was up there in his suit and trilby hat. It looked like an impossible task at first. “Surface of the moon”, Joe used to call it.’
¹⁴

On Sunday afternoon, Myra visited Gran, who still didn’t know the truth behind Ian’s arrest. Bert and Kath were there, and Jim Masterton and his wife Anita arrived shortly afterwards. Arrangements were made for Gran to move in with her daughter Annie, in Gorton’s Railway View. Eventually, she ended up living with Nellie and Bill in Clayton, after Nellie split from Bob, who wanted nothing to do with either of his daughters, not because of Myra’s crimes but because she and Maureen had kept him in the dark about their mother’s affair. Lassie was given a permanent home with Myra’s uncle Jim, and Myra asked Elsie Masterton if she would look after Puppet for the time being. Later that day, she took food and books into the police station for Ian. When he glimpsed her walking between two policewomen, he wrongly assumed that she’d been charged. A policeman made a record of his mistake and passed it on to his boss.

Those hours were Myra’s last in freedom.

On Monday, 11 October, Myra met Ian’s solicitor, Robert Fitz-patrick. She told him that she went along with whatever Ian had to say. The police tried to question her again, but she sat in stony silence. A short distance away, the inquest into Edward Evans’s death was being held at Hyde town court. His mother spoke almost inaudibly to confirm that she had identified her son’s body. The coroner, upon hearing that Ian had been charged with his murder, adjourned the inquest for three months.

On the moor, the police had begun to highlight areas of interest with circles of yellow dye. Mounsey was scrutinising five of the negatives: Ian on rocks with white vehicle below; Myra on rocks with white vehicle below; similar view without figures; white vehicle with rocks behind; and an empty moorland scene overlooking a road. Inspector John Chaddock of Uppermill, the largest village in the district of Saddleworth, was brought on board; he knew the area better than any other policeman. Plans were formulated for a mass search, integrating neighbouring police forces.

At quarter-past twelve that Monday, Detective Chief Inspector John Tyrrell joined Mounsey to question Ian about the disappearances of John Kilbride and Keith Bennett. In response to their queries about the missing Ashton schoolboy, Ian told them, ‘I’ve read about him, I think, but don’t know anything of him.’
¹⁵
When they pressed him about the disposal plan with regard to the reference ‘periodically unmoved’, asking, ‘Is this a reminder to check that graves are still intact?’, Ian shrugged, ‘It’s only to do with Evans.’
¹⁶
At three o’clock, he was given a break for half an hour.

At that same hour, in another room within the station, Arthur Benfield was standing in front of Myra, who sat between her mother and uncle Bert. He told her that they had all the evidence they needed to charge her. Detective Sergeant Carr read out the formal charge: an accessory to the murder of Edward Evans. Detective Policewoman Margaret Campion witnessed Myra’s response: ‘Nothing to say until I see Mr Fitzpatrick.’
¹⁷
She would never be free again.

With a policewoman on either side of her and a plain-clothes detective in front, Myra was led out of the room. In her autobiography, she recalls: ‘I was tired and frightened. When we left the room, they led me down what seemed like endless flights of stone stairs, dimly lit with 60W bulbs. I thought I was being taken to a dungeon somewhere. Then we came to some doors and a policeman kicked one of them open. I immediately thought they were going to interrogate me, so I clenched my teeth, hard.’
¹⁸

She was shown into a tiled cell. At one end stood an old-fashioned wooden camera on a tripod. Lights glared down from the ceiling. The photographer told her where to stand, then draped a black cloth over his head and adjusted the focus of the lens.
¹⁹
The lights flashed and an image of unparalleled British female notoriety was made.

Afterwards, as she was led upstairs, one of the policewomen tried to convince her to confess, telling her it wasn’t worth sacrificing herself for a man. Myra said nothing. She had her fingerprints taken and was ushered back to her mother and Bert, unaware that the photograph she had posed for that afternoon would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Throughout the day, Ian’s interrogation continued, with Benfield present in the evening. Questions were asked in court about the way in which the interview was conducted; Ian claimed that Mounsey, Tyrrell, Detective Inspector Norman Mattin and Detective Inspector Jeffrey Leach bawled at him incessantly and that he was never left alone: ‘When Mounsey and Tyrrell stopped questioning, Mattin and Leach came in. They continued to question during the meals . . . The interview was Mounsey on one side, Tyrrell at the other, Mattin and Leach at the front . . . They were shouting a foot from each ear from both sides.’
²⁰
He added: ‘There were threats . . . At one point [Mounsey] said, “I don’t think you have any feelings at all. The only feelings you have got are for your dog. We’ll destroy your dog, and maybe you’ll realise what it’s like to lose something you love.”’
²¹
At eight o’clock, the interview was terminated. Ian told the court: ‘It ended with Mounsey grabbing hold of the door and saying, “Bastard”, and banging the door shut . . .’
²²