One of Your Own (41 page)

In a pre-Christmas letter to her mother, Myra asked her to take care of whatever had been left at Wardle Brook Avenue and to have items moved to Peggy Brady’s flat for safekeeping. Fitzpatrick attempted to have their ‘non-exhibit’ property, including the tartan album, returned. Myra and Ian were able to look through all their photographs and pick out those they particularly wanted to keep. They indicated a handful and Fitzpatrick promised to do his best to have the photographs returned to them.

Myra and Ian were able to spend Christmas Eve together. She described it in a letter to her mother: ‘Mrs Brady brought a meal in. We had half a chicken each, turkey sandwiches, half a bottle of Sandiman’s port wine, chocolate biscuits and Swiss rolls. I really enjoyed it, it was almost like being free again. My counsel, Mr Curtis, has written here asking permission to have my hair bleached because the dark roots are very much in evidence. But permission has been refused, so I’ll appear at the trial with streaky, lifeless hair. I can’t even have it trimmed or thinned. It’s a constant source of irritation.’
²⁸

They were each seen frequently by Dr Neustatter, a forensic psychiatrist whose notes on Ian were summarised by William Mars-Jones QC: ‘Brady had been extremely cagey and would give nothing away during a three-hour interview. Perhaps the most interesting feature had been his negative attitude. Brady had not been particularly suave, but he chatted away . . . Brady had admitted that he was illegitimate; this had seemed to cause him some embarrassment in that he had been embarrassed about giving the names of his parents. Asked whether he had any inferiority feelings, Brady said that everyone had them. Anything he felt afraid of doing, he said, made him feel inferior. If you were short-changed on a bus, even by only 4d, and you did not make a fuss about it, you felt weak . . . possibly Brady had the slight irrelevance that one found in a schizophrenic . . . The long letters he had written to Myra Hindley showed that in fact there was no difficulty in his thought processes normally . . . abnormality of mind could not be assumed.’
²⁹
Myra quite liked Neustatter until he commented how eloquent and well read she was. ‘What, for a murderess?’ she retorted, adding, ‘I don’t like being taken for a working-class idiot.’
³⁰
She refused to submit to an EEG to pick up any abnormalities in the brain.

Myra had no contact with Maureen or her father during her time on remand, but remained close – protesting her innocence – to her mother, aunts and Gran. Kath attempted to revive her interest in religion, but Myra told her mother: ‘I suppose she means well, but it means nothing to me.’
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Nana Hindley visited her in Risley; much later, when they met again, Myra asked, ‘Do you remember how we both thought I’d be out on probation in no time?’
³²
Before the trial, May Hill came forward to tell the police about the letter Myra had written about her fear of Ian. When the neighbours found out, a hate campaign was mounted against May until she withdrew her statement. The vitriol aimed at Dave and Maureen was ferocious. Dave’s temper snapped in March 1966, when he was on the balcony of a friend’s house in Hattersley and a group of teenagers goaded him for being ‘the third Moors Murderer’. One of the lads yelled, ‘You’re no bleedin’ good without that axe, Smith’, and Dave pelted down the stairwell and attacked him with a chain.
³³
Police, having witnessed the harassment he and Maureen had faced without respite, took no action.

At the end of March, Myra’s request to have her hair bleached was granted. She had her make-up sent in from her mother and borrowed a pair of size five stilettos from her, although her own feet were a seven. She set out everything in her cell: grey suit with dark piping, one yellow blouse and one blue. Then she sat down to write to her mother before the event every newspaper had dubbed the ‘Trial of the Century’: ‘Dear Mam, This is just a few lines before the “off” in case I don’t have any time during the week to drop you a line. I had my hair done on Saturday. It looks so nice that I’m sorry that I’m all dressed up and nowhere to go (joke).’
³⁴

‘We are in danger of creating an Affectless Society, in which nobody cares for anyone but himself, or for anything but instant self-gratification. We demand sex without love, violence for “kicks”. We are encouraging the blunting of sensibility: and this, let us remember, was not the way to an Earthly Paradise, but the way to Auschwitz. When the Nazis took on the government of Poland, they flooded the Polish bookstalls with pornography . . .’
¹

Of the many volumes written about the Moors case, Pamela Hansford Johnson’s
On Iniquity
(1967) may not have aged well, but it tapped succinctly into one of the much-discussed issues arising from the trial. Johnson covered the trial for the
Daily Telegraph
and out of that came her book, in which she investigated the correlation between the murders and the reading matter of the two accused. Simultaneously condemning pornography and the British Realist Theatre of Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan and Harold Pinter, she speculated that certain types of literature should not be accessible to ‘minds educationally and emotionally unprepared’.
²
Her argument echoed the
Lady Chatterley
trial of 1960, when prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked the jury, ‘Is this a book you would want your wife or servants to read?’ The influence of literature on malleable minds had also been raised by Richard Hoggart. In
The Uses of Literacy
(1957), he posited the theory that ‘sex-and-violence’ novels and films ‘give the working classes cheap, sensationalist entertainment, enervating, dulling and eventually destroying their sense of taste’.
³

The idea that specific books could prove damaging to the newly affluent young – even contributing to rising crime rates – was given serious consideration. As Britain moved forward into a very different age, the press picked up on the collective fear that society as a whole was becoming more violent in the aftermath of the Second World War. Crime rates
were
escalating: from 6,000 major incidents in 1955 to 12,000 in 1960, and four years after the Moors trial that figure had leapt to 21,000. Analysing the reasons behind the increase, one commentator lists the ‘wider anxieties [of] the decline of traditional authority, the instability of the family, the break-up of settled communities, the uneasiness of class identities . . . the impact of affluence, education and mobility on traditional customs and communities’.
⁴
At a time when so many advances were being made, some of which seemed to threaten the future of mankind, crime became a natural focus of anxiety, and none more so than the ‘beyond belief’ crimes of the Moors Murderers.
⁵

The issue of literature’s pernicious influence was raised immediately at the trial when, before the jury was sworn in, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson asked whether the books read by Myra and Ian might be used as evidence. The Attorney General replied that they were evidence only insofar that Brady had told David Smith to return the books before Edward Evans’s murder; he added that he intended to read aloud an extract from de Sade, to which Fenton Atkinson responded, ‘You are not asking the jury to read
Justine
?’ The Attorney General replied dryly, ‘No, my Lord, I have suffered the agony of having to read that myself.’
⁶
But inevitably, just as the
Chatterley
trial sent sales of D.H. Lawrence’s novel soaring, so the Moors trial provoked a surge of interest in de Sade; when William Mars-Jones QC and a colleague arrived afterwards at Brompton Air Terminal in London, they were amazed to find Marquis de Sade novels prominently on sale.

The trial opened on Tuesday, 19 April 1966 at Chester Assizes. The oak-panelled Castle Courtroom had been adapted to accommodate the particular needs of such a highly charged case under the glare of the media spotlight. Microphones were fitted in the witness box, carpet had been laid to reduce noise and press rooms were set up with telephones installed for those reporters who couldn’t get a seat in court. Otherwise, as Pamela Hansford Johnson commented, ‘it is clean, bright, has been newly decorated. Canopy and curtains of red velvet, braided with gold, frame the judge’s seat. The benches of the public auditorium and of the Distinguished Visitors’ gallery are upholstered in scarlet leather. Above the galleries are royal portraits . . . the dock has been shut in, on three sides, with splinter-proof glass.’
⁷
The other noticeable security feature was the police presence: 300 officers had been drafted in.

One hundred and fifty journalists arrived in Chester, bringing with them camera crews and technicians who largely ignored the Queen when she visited the races. The BBC originally intended to cover the trial, having accumulated more than 25,000 feet of filmed interviews, but on the second day of the hearing it was decided that the details of the case were too shocking for television – only the verdicts were given airtime. A number of authors turned up, including Mary Hayley Bell, the wife of actor John Mills, and Emlyn Williams, who had begun his book about the case at the end of 1965. In the courtyard, those wishing to enter the public gallery were carefully screened. Only 60 seats were available, and the queue of mostly women forming at dawn each day was never less than hundreds-strong. They were greeted by a downpour on the first day, followed later by a freak heatwave. The courtroom remained cool, but the odour of damp plastic mackintoshes hung about the wood-panelled walls.

The judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, presided over the court coolly and unobtrusively. Myra’s solicitor, Manchester-born Godfrey Heilpern QC, discovered on the first day of the trial that his sister-in-law, the manageress of a Salford dress shop, had been murdered (her death was not related to the case); in his absence, Philip Curtis took over. Ian was represented by Emlyn Hoosen QC, Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire. Sir Frederick Elwyn Jones QC, appointed Attorney General two years earlier, led the case against Myra and Ian; he had been a prosecution counsel at the Nuremberg War Trials.
⁸
His presence underlined the enormity of the case, since the Attorney General only prosecutes in the most serious murder cases and those involving national security. His occasional absences (due to the opening of Parliament and Cabinet discussions on the Rhodesia crisis) were filled by William Mars-Jones QC.

Before the trial began, despite the submission by the defence counsels, Fenton Atkinson decided that the two accused should be tried together. Ian had no doubt that he was facing a lengthy prison sentence but hoped to achieve an acquittal for Myra. She was now charged with all three murders, together with the secondary charge of harbouring Ian after the murder of John Kilbride. ‘I wanted to help the girl,’ Ian said in retrospect. ‘All my evidence was to get her off . . . I was reinforcing some things by saying, “Yes, that’s right”, and on other things I was going out of my way to be destructive with the prosecution.’
⁹
He clarified: ‘I also told her to adopt a distancing strategy when she went into the witness box, admitting to minor crimes whilst denying major.’
¹⁰

The couple arrived each day from Risley, sitting in separate compartments in the back of the van. As they entered court that first day, every member of the press and public craned their necks to stare. Myra was the one whom the women queuing for seats in the public gallery wanted ‘to get their hands on’ –
she
was the focus of national disbelief, hatred and curiosity, and there was a media scrum each day to snap her as she arrived and left Chester. How she looked became an obsession; for many, the concept of evil had put on a face and walked into a courtroom. Her freshly bleached blonde hair was tinted lilac and she wore her make-up like a mask. She dressed in a neat suit that first day, with a blue blouse. Pamela Hansford Johnson described her: ‘Hair styled into a huge puff-ball, with a fringe across her brows . . . the lines of this porcelained face are extraordinary. Brows, eyes, mouth are all quite straight, precisely parallel. The fine nose is straight too, except for a very faint downward turn at the tip, just as the chin turns very faintly upward. She will have a nutcracker face one day.’
¹¹
Ian, in his smart grey suit, white shirt and blue tie, looked ‘like a cross between Joseph Goebbels and a bird’, but Myra resembled Clytemnestra or ‘one of Fuseli’s nightmare women’, with the authority one expected to find ‘in a woman guard of a concentration camp’.
¹²

There exist two photographs of Myra and Ian, taken illegally at the trial, shot from the bench where the dignitaries sat. Clive Entwistle recalls: ‘Allegedly, it was a
Paris Match
photographer who managed it. He flew into an airstrip near Chester, was chauffeur-driven to town, slipped into court with a James Bond-type camera that clicked sideways, but was spotted by a court usher who started beckoning security, so dashed from the room, back to the waiting car, and off to the airstrip back to France.’
¹³

In response to the charges read out to them, Myra and Ian answered ‘Not guilty’ to each one. As the jury were sworn in, their solicitors objected to four women, resulting in a men-only jury. Proceedings were opened by the Attorney General, who outlined the crimes and their background. He warned those in court that they would have to listen to a harrowing tape recording and examine distressing photographs. After completing his speech, he presented the photographs Ian had taken of Lesley. Among the victims’ relatives who didn’t attend the trial was Winnie Johnson: ‘My mother wouldn’t let me, she knew it would be too much for me. We had come so close to solving Keith’s death, but we still didn’t know where his body was. I couldn’t have faced seeing the killers in the flesh.’
¹⁴
John Kilbride’s parents did not attend either, Danny recalls: ‘They stayed away, but I wanted to go. My dad wouldn’t let me though, no matter how hard I pleaded. I was an old 13, but I had to be. I was getting a lot of tormenting – “You’ll end up on the moors like your brother” – all that. Then you’d get some people who would cross the street so they didn’t have to speak. Perhaps it was embarrassment. But my dad flatly refused to let me go to the trial.’
¹⁵