It
was the Swinging Sixties and everyone was into a wild fashion, weird cults and
The Beatles. But it wasn’t long before Britain was stunned by what were
labeled the most blooded killings of the century. Even 20 years later, the
horror was still etched in peoples’ minds. A country could not forget Myra
Hindley and Ian Brady, perpetrators of the notorious Moors Murderers.
The 27-year-old stock clerk and 22-year old
typist committed some of the most macabre crimes ever recounted before a
British jury. Britain
of the sixties was hypnotized by the couple’s blood lust, of how they enticed
young children back to their home, sadistically tortured them, murdered them
and then buried their bodies on the desolate Pennine moors.
The couple’s terrible crimes were committed
while capital punishment was still in force but they were found guilty after
its abolition. A short year separated them from the gallows sentenced to a life
behind bars.
Many years later, reformers, such as Lord
Longford, were to argue for Hindley’s release. The brassy blonde, once
infatuated by her lover was said to have undergone a startling change. In her
20 years in Holloway prison she had turned to religion and taken and passed an
Open University degree in humanities. She had said Longford and his supporters,
reached the point where she was no longer a danger to the public.
In 1973, Hindley was given her first
taste of freedom since her life sentence-life’ in Britain normally being 10
years with the possibility of release on license prison officers, she was taken
on early morning excursion to a London Park, but her bouts of freedom raised
the howl of protest from the public who could neither forgive or forget the
killings of the innocents.
It was Myra Hindley’s brother in law,
David Smith, who eventually gave away the perverted couple’s secret. On 7
October, 1965 at 6:20 am, he contacted the police. The realization of what’s
going on at number 16, Wardle
Brook Avenue on the Hattersley council estate, Manchester, was too strong
for him to bear. Shaking, he walked to a public telephone kiosk and rang nearby
Stalybridge police station. Within minutes, a young patrol car officer found
Smith quaking beside the telephone box. He was agitated that he could hardly
wait to bundle himself into the officer’s car.
As David Smith blurted out his tales of
horror, one of the biggest searches ever seen in Britain was begun. Hundreds of
police spent weeks scouring the desolate moors for the graves of the
10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and 12 year old John Kilbride. John had vanished
on 23 November 1963 and Lesley had disappeared a year later, on Boxing Day,
1964.
But first the police had to gain entry to
the house in Wardle Brook Avenue
where the children had met their deaths. A police superintendent borrowed a
white coat and basket from a bread rounds man and approached the house, which
belonged to Hindley’s grandmother. He knocked on the door which opened by
Hindley.
Brady was lying on a divan bed writing a
letter. The note was to his employers saying he wouldn’t be at work that day
because he had injured his leg. At his trial it was revealed he had planned to
spend the back on the moors- digging another grave.
With Brady and Hindley separated and
safely behind bars, police concentrated all efforts on the moorland search.
There they found the grave of 12 year old Kilbride. A few yards away, on the
other side of the road which split the wild moorland in two, they found the
remains of tiny Lesley Ann Downey. They were helped in their search by
‘souvenir’ photographs, taken by couple, of Hindley standing over the two
graves. Then came the trial at Chester Assizes- and a courtroom and country
shaken by tales of horror and torture. Brady and Hindley, it was revealed, kept
vile photographs of their mutilated victims.
But nothing shocked the courtroom more
than the playing of a tape. On it were the pleadings, the screams and last
dying moments of Lesley Ann Downey.
It took the jury all male 18 days to
listen to the most horrific evidence ever put before a British court. All
seemed to lower their heads when prosecutor Sir Elwyn Jones, the Attorney
General, played the tape of young Lesley Ann Downey’s last moments. People
swayed with disgust and onlookers buried faces in their hands.
Brady, quizzed in the witness box, could
only say that he was embarrassed when he heard the tape. Hindley did not have
her partner in crime’s arrogance, but she still held her poise and confidence
in the witness box. As her part in the killing became clear she kept uttering I
was cruel. I was cruel.
At precisely 2:40 pm on Friday 6 May,
the jury retired. For two hours and 20 minutes, they considered the verdict in
‘the trial of century’. Brady was given concurrent life sentences for ‘these
calculated, cruel, cold-blooded murders’. Then came the final words that put
Brady behind bars: ‘Put him down’. Myra Hindley, for the first time, stood
alone in the dock as the judge turned to her. She swayed, as if to faint as she
too, was given life- sentences.
