One of Your Own (37 page)

‘I didn’t know it was Lesley Ann Downey until I heard it on the news,’ Robert Spiers recalls. ‘I didn’t sleep much that night. I couldn’t get the sight of the hill and the protruding bone out of my mind. I couldn’t forget the smell. Once we’d drained the hollow . . . Death has a smell, and on the moor it was distinct. You can’t forget. That’s why you’d see people lighting up cigarettes, just to try and get rid of the smell.’
¹³

The post-mortem examination on Lesley’s body, conducted by Dr Gee, Professor Polson and Home Office pathologist Dr Manning, casts doubt on Ian’s accusation that Myra killed Lesley with a silk cord. Violent injury was ruled out, but Gee’s examination of the body ‘excluded strangulation by ligature [but not] other forms of mechanical asphyxia, notably smothering’.
¹⁴
None of that was any comfort to Lesley’s mother, who arrived at Uppermill to identify her daughter’s body. She had to endure the procedure alone; because he wasn’t a blood relative, her partner Alan wasn’t permitted into the mortuary. Inspector Chaddock was at her side as she identified Lesley’s clothing and was ‘led deeper into the place. There were more doors. There was a new smell to assault the senses, a smell of rubber and formaldehyde. The room was cold even for October . . . A green sheet covered the little body from stomach to feet. For some reason the sheet had been drawn up to hide the right-hand side of her torso and face . . . She looked beautiful. She seemed to be asleep. Her dark, curly hair spilled out over the protective sheet. I winced as I saw the swelling round her lips. It was as if she had bitten hard on them . . . Lesley lay so silently. She had always been a quiet girl, but this silent stillness was something I had not experienced before. This was the absolute and final stillness of death. My Lesley was dead. I knew it now. I knew it but could not accept it.’
¹⁵
Ann was not allowed to touch her daughter or take a lock of her hair. When she returned home, her house was under siege from the press.

‘Anonymity is a luxury much undervalued until you lose it,’ Ian Brady wrote years later.
¹⁶
On the morning of Monday, 18 October, he and Myra made separate remand appearances before magistrates. The driver of the van ferrying Myra to the courtroom didn’t address a single word to her, but, as they neared the town, the accompanying prison officer advised her to put a scarf over her hair. Myra was puzzled by the suggestion, until they arrived at the back entrance of the court, where yelling crowds jostled the van and flashbulbs exploded in bursts of blinding light. She stooped to avoid the distorted faces at the glass, pushed her chin into the collar of her cherry-red coat and kept close to the guards as they shuffled her into the building.

Ian appeared first, in his grey suit, charged with Edward’s murder. He said nothing as he was remanded for a further three days. Then Myra entered the dock, charged with ‘well knowing’ that Ian Brady had murdered Edward Evans on 6 October and had thereafter received, comforted, harboured, assisted and maintained him. She and Ian met in the canteen of Hyde police station immediately afterwards with solicitor Robert Fitzpatrick. After a brief discussion about legal visits and their defence, Fitzpatrick left them alone in the canteen. In her autobiography, Myra records that she told Ian she loved him and he replied that he loved her too.

In the afternoon, they were each taken in for questioning. At half past two, Benfield threw Lesley’s shoes and socks and the soiled plastic beads on the desk in front of Ian. ‘These garments were recovered from the moor near Greenfield late Saturday night,’ he said. ‘This clothing has been identified as Lesley Ann Downey’s, whose body was recovered at the same time and place. I’ve reason to believe that the photographs of the naked girl which were found in your suitcase are of Lesley Ann Downey. Would you like to say anything about these photographs?’
¹⁷

‘Not at present.’

Benfield glanced at Talbot, then said, ‘I’d like you now to listen to a tape recording. Two tapes were found in the blue suitcase belonging to you—’

‘—I know the tape,’ Ian interrupted, but the tape had already begun to play. He bowed his head and sat with his face averted until it finished.

‘You say you know the tape,’ Benfield said. ‘The voices appear to be those of yourself and Myra and Lesley Ann Downey.’

Ian raised his head: ‘She didn’t give the name Downey. It was something else.’

Benfield and Talbot were taken aback by his flat response. Ian admitted he had photographed Lesley but claimed that she was brought to his house by two men who dropped her at Belle Vue afterwards, matching the press reports of parapsychologist Emile Croiset’s ‘vision’ of Lesley. When the interview ended at five past eight, Ian refused to sign the deposition notes.

Benfield and Talbot moved on to Myra, questioning her in the presence of Margaret Campion and Detective Chief Inspector Clifford Haigh of Manchester Police.

Benfield threw the black wig on the table. ‘What’s this?’

Myra stared and said nothing.

He pushed the photographs Ian had taken of Lesley across the table. A muscle moved in Myra’s jaw. Then she bent her head.

Benfield dropped the discoloured beads onto the table, together with Lesley’s socks and shoes. Myra raised her hands and pressed them against her skull. She put her elbows on the edge of the table, holding a handkerchief to her face.

‘This little girl was reported missing from home on Boxing Day last year and these photographs were taken on the same day.’ Benfield paused to give Myra the opportunity to speak, but she went on staring down at her lap. ‘Brady told us the girl was brought to your home by two men. One of them came into the house and remained downstairs while Brady took the photographs in your presence.’

‘I’m saying nothing.’

‘There’s a tape recording, too. I believe the voices are those of yourself, Brady and Lesley Ann Downey.’ He paused again. ‘I’m going to play it.’
¹⁸

He flicked the switch on the machine and the spools began to revolve.

Myra took her elbows off the table. She kept her head bowed and shut her eyes. A pulse throbbed rapidly in her throat. As the tape played on, she began to sob. When the music faded and the footsteps died away, Benfield turned off the machine.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.

She nodded, then whispered, ‘I’m ashamed.’

But if the detectives were hoping Myra’s tears marked a change in her demeanour, they were mistaken. DCI Haigh later testified that her weeping ‘lasted for a very short time. And then she said again, “I’m saying nothing.”’
¹⁹
The interview ended at quarter to ten. Myra told Peter Topping that she had been terrified of the police, whose methods ‘left a lot to be desired . . . they frightened me to death’.
²⁰
She claimed that her silence was a defence mechanism and that she ‘took refuge behind the mists that swirled in my mind . . . my instinctive reaction to escape the unbearable reality was construed as arrogance and hard defiance’.
²¹
She used the same phrase in her parole plea, maintaining her ignorance of everything but the photographing of Lesley and the murder of Edward, insisting that during the police interrogation her mind was fogged with fear and shame, leading her to construct a front behind which she could hide. The veneer, she insisted, had enabled her to bear the condemnation that came her way during the trial, and in time became second nature to her: ‘Such is how one part of my reputation evolved.’
²²

Hyde police station was transformed following the discovery of Lesley’s body on the Knoll – the canteen became the press room and was inundated with inquiries – while over 200 journalists descended on the moor itself. A press conference was given daily, filmed by Granada – the first of its kind to be televised. The case was permanently in the headlines, and the
Manchester Evening News
frequently referred to the disappearances of John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Pauline Reade and a 16-year-old girl named Susan Ormrod who had ‘vanished 15 weeks earlier from her home in Gibbon Avenue, Woodhouse Park, Wythenshawe’.
¹
But with nothing specific to link Myra and Ian to those cases, there was very little the police could do to gain information from them.

In the days following Lesley’s discovery, searchers swarmed over Hollin Brown Knoll on Mounsey’s instructions. He paced about the place, marking sites of interest on his map, wearing what was known as his ‘Dunkirk look’ beneath the tilted trilby. Several members of the public had come forward with sightings of Ian and Myra, ranging from Saddleworth to Thurlston Moor; some were highly detailed, others less so. Mounsey wanted each one investigated, with a view to linking them with the photographs found at Wardle Brook Avenue. Detective Constable Ray Gelder, a police photographer, took comparison shots on Hollin Brown Knoll and was satisfied that four of Ian’s pictures were taken within fifty yards of Lesley’s grave.

Mounsey gave a bundle of negatives to Mike Massheder and told him: ‘Get more enlargements. Are we absolutely sure it’s the same rock outcrop as in the album – there must be dozens like it. We’re concentrating on this north side of the road. But could it be on the other side?’
²

Massheder recalls, ‘I was handed them in a big envelope and told, “There you are, get cracking on that.” They were all 2¼ sq. negatives. When you printed them off, the problem was that they were square and the format of a photo is oblong, so the skyline and other details would be missing. There were other people working on the photos and they cropped bits off at will under the impression that the middle section was the point of interest. But they missed vital clues by doing that . . .’
³

Massheder’s enlargements were passed to the CID, who searched a spot Patty Hodges had pointed out below Hollin Brown Knoll on the other side of the road. Ordnance survey maps identified it as Sail Bark Moss. Massheder recalls: ‘They were out by about a hundred yards. And by this point, the assistant chief constable, Harold Prescott, had begun to waver in his support for Joe’s mission. Four days after Lesley was found, Prescott rang Joe and said, “What you doing buggering about on the moors? Come on, it’s time you got back to work.” The search took a large amount of manpower and a lot of money. It wasn’t looking very productive.’ In a press conference on 20 October, Benfield was similarly dour, telling reporters, ‘I don’t believe there are any more bodies on the moor.’
⁴

Even as he spoke, searchers were spreading out across the moor in the bitter wind. Their method had been improved with the use of a new probing rod to which particles of earth stuck; it was the invention of local mill engineer Victor Hird, developed with the cooperation of the War Graves Commission years before. The
Manchester Evening News
ran a front-page article: ‘Boys Take Police to Moors Spot’, which described how Mounsey and another senior detective had been taken by two hikers to a spot two miles from Hollin Brown Knoll: ‘A police car stopped at Shiny Brook, Wessenden Head . . .’
⁵
Mounsey and the detective followed the hikers down a small valley to a bluff beneath a rock face about a mile from the road. They returned some time later, with Mounsey ‘perspiring and with shoes muddy after the long walk’. He told the press, ‘The two hikers have given us certain information and we have been making a survey of the spot.’
⁶
The newspaper also mentioned Susan Ormrod and highlighted public interest in the case under the headline ‘Hundreds Flock to Watch Moor Hunt’: ‘. . . in small family cars and executive limousines . . . sensation seekers have rolled up in their hundreds . . . Some stayed for only a few minutes. Others parked their cars by the roadside and settled down with vacuum flasks and sandwiches.’
⁷
A policeman called it ‘morbid curiosity at its worst. All we needed was a hotdog vendor.’
⁸

Later that day, Tyrrell decided to have another stroll about the house on Wardle Brook Avenue. Home Office pathologist Dr Manning was there, and the curtains had been drawn against the crowds outside. Tyrrell ran his fingers along the bookshelf and pulled out a few books, fanning the pages of
Forever Amber
,
Goldfinger
,
Return to Peyton Place
,
Frankenstein
and
Fanny Hill
. He came to one book smaller than the rest and held it in his hands for a moment. A white prayer book, it was inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘To Myra from Auntie Kath and Uncle Bert, 16 Nov 1958, souvenir of your first Holy Communion’. He flicked through the pages, and the spine gave a small creak. He lifted the book and saw that something had been pushed inside the spine: a tightly rolled slip of paper. He unfolded it carefully: counterfoil number 74843 – two suitcases, deposited at Manchester Central Station on 5 October 1965 for one shilling each. The disposal plan flashed before his eyes: P/B and TICK.
Prayer Book
and
Ticket
. He drew in his breath.
⁹

Myra was charged with the murder of Lesley Ann Downey, at 9.40 a.m. on Thursday, 21 October 1965. Fifteen minutes later, Ian was charged with the same offence. At Hyde Magistrate’s Court, the couple appeared separately to face the charges laid before them. Myra, in her cherry-red coat, passed Ian on the steps into the dock. Like Ian, she pleaded not guilty and was granted Legal Aid, then returned to Risley.