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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Why does a young woman lure teenagers into her car then participate in their horrific rape and torture? What makes a nurse lethally inject the healthy babies in her care? Women, statistically, aren`t a violent breed ... but the female of the species can be just as deadly as the male. From the mass poisoner to the sexual sadist, from profit killings to crimes committed just for twisted thrills, Carol Anne Davis sets out to explore the dark and disturbing world of the female serial killer. In depth analysis of individual cases, including new information from the minister who heard Myra Hindley`s confession, provides an invaluable insight into the psychology behind these atrocities.
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Seitenzahl: 476
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Women Who Kill
Profiles of Female Serial Killers
CAROL ANNE DAVIS
For Ian
Contents
Acknowledgements
Researching a book that involves so much suffering and death takes its toll - and there were times when I saw nothing but hatred and weakness in the world. But the many people who gave freely of their time and knowledge helped restore me to a more balanced view.
I’m very grateful to the Rev Peter Timms who agreed to meet me and answer my questions. Peter is a former prison governor and an experienced counsellor. He is also the man who Myra Hindley confessed to about her role in the murders of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade.
I’d also like to thank Robert Adams, Professor of Human Services Development at the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside for allowing me to interview him. Robert has been a prison officer and the deputy and acting governor of a young offenders institution. He also spent seven years as the director of a community programme keeping young offenders out of institutions and is the author of the compassionate and detailed book The Abuses Of Punishment.
It is easier to get detailed information on certain cases if you contact someone in the country where that crime occurred. To this end, thanks are due to true crime reviewer Lisa DuMond for providing additional information on several of the American cases. Lisa is a science fiction writer and author of the novel Darkers, but here she kept strictly to the facts. Thanks also to Australian policeman Ron McKay for giving me up to date information on the Catherine Birnie case.
Closer to home, thanks to Chameleon TV, the British producers of the Moors Murders programmes, for providing videotape and transcripts of this three part series. Thanks also to Channel 5 who aired the series and helped me obtain the information I required.
I’m equally grateful to EPOCH for sending me their materials. If they can help stop adults hitting children then we might grow into a society without violent adults. They are a small charity who deserve to make giant steps.
Finally, my grateful thanks to Allison & Busby’s Publishing Director David Shelley who suggested I write this book.
Preface
Why does a young woman lure teenagers into her car then participate in their extensive rape and torture? What makes a nurse lethally inject the healthy babies in her care? Women, statistically, aren’t a deadly breed -females comprise only two percent of the world’s serial killers. But when the distaff side does commit multiple murders, they can be as cruel and compassionless as the male.
Chapters one to thirteen profile such female serial killers, with each being given her own detailed chapter. Catherine Wood and Gwen Graham share a chapter - but have their early lives separately profiled - as they killed as a team.
Most crime books jump from past to present and back again but I’ve worked hard to put events into chronological order so that the reader can see how the woman changes in personality and in criminality as her life unfolds.
The first two profiles are historical ones, notably Anna Zwanziger the mass poisoner who was born in 1760 and Jeanne Weber the strangler who was born in 1875. They show many of the serial killing patterns we see today - the predatory targeting of a victim and a willingness to wait till the coast is clear before offering violence. These cases also show that female serial killers aren’t a modern phenomenon brought about by video nasties, violent computer games or television.
The other cases are much more contemporary, with the killers mainly active in the eighties. Though America produces many of the killers featured there are also cases from Britain, Australia and Canada plus those previously mentioned which are set respectively in Bavaria and France.
Chapter fourteen examines the classifications that female serial killers fall into - for example, the Profit Killer, the Revenge Killer or the whimsically-named Angel Of Death.
When selecting which female serial killers to profile, I concentrated mainly on the Thrill Killer cases as these are the most fascinating and also the hardest to understand. After all, most of us can empathise with a Profit Killer desiring wealth, even though we personally wouldn’t murder for it. Similarly, we can comprehend the motivation of a Revenge Killer, who wreaks suffering and death on her unfortunate foes. But the female Thrill Killer who lures innocent people to hours or even days of suffering is much more difficult for the layperson to fathom, especially when she commits these murders again and again.
Chapter fifteen looks at how these women are often erroneously regarded by the courts as helpless pawns who murdered for love or because they were terrorised into it. It also looks at those rare instances where women are more harshly treated because of their sex.
If these findings seem in part contradictory it’s because they are - one aspect of a case will depict the woman as the victim of her team killing partner, whilst in another instance she’ll demonstrate that she’s the sadistic one, the one in charge.
All too often, when the evidence is partially contradictory like this, the writer leaves out the facts which don’t suit his or her cause. This makes for a simplified read - and it may please the casual reader who can then say ‘oh, she was mad’ or ‘she was bad’ or ‘she was a clear victim.’ But he will be responding to a biased interpretation of the case rather than the truth.
The final chapter looks at theories about why women kill with such brutality and at how we might change our world to make it a non-violent and desirable place.
1 Candle in the wind
The nomadic misery of Anna Maria Zwanziger
Anna was born in Nuremberg in 1760 to a couple named Schonleben who ran an inn. In her formative years she had some security but both of her parents died by the time she was five, leaving her doubly orphaned. The pretty, intelligent child was then foisted on to various relatives.
It was doubtless an unhappy time - we know that, even today, stepchildren are often treated less well than natural children are, with all the attendant problems that abuse or a simple lack of love can bring.
The next five years passed in this way and then ten-year-old Anna was rescued by one of her richer guardians. He ensured that she was well read and educated, and imbued her with a love of good literature that would last the rest of her increasingly harrowing life.
The teenager had some stability during the years of being educated in the merchant’s home but when she was just fifteen he introduced her to a man more than twice her age and insisted she marry him. Her new suitor was an alcoholic solicitor called Zwanziger who was over thirty years old. Anna pleaded with her guardian that she had no feelings for this man, but he was determined and the marriage went ahead.
Two suicide attempts
It was a disaster from the start. Her husband spent all of his time away from home - when he was there he was downing cheap wine by the bottle. Anna was left alone to read the heavily dramatised and often woeful novels and plays of the day. She gave birth to two children - and one of them, her daughter, would spend time in prison as an adult for swindling and theft.
Anna herself was given to periods of increasing melancholy and twice attempted to take her own life. Psychologists say that most people who attempt suicide really want to kill someone else, in Anna’s case probably her penurious husband or a relative who had abused her. But for now her aggression was simply turned in on herself.
When her suicide attempts failed, Anna regrouped her defences and searched for a means to survive. Her husband kept spending all of the family purse and begging her not to leave him, so she took to prostitution to support her brood. At this time she was still an attractive woman who looked and sounded genteel. It was important to her to maintain a sense of status so she only slept with refined gentlemen and maintained an air of discretion. Anna was one of the successful upmarket escort girls of her day.
When she was thirty-three, her husband died leaving her even more penniless. She had various jobs and at one stage gave birth to an illegitimate child which died in a children’s home. Increasingly unstable, she began to drift from one housekeeping and cooking job to the next. She became pregnant by another man who then left her. She had a miscarriage and thereafter attempted to drown herself. Her later life took on the pattern of men either ignoring her or leaving her and she flickered from one delusional relationship to another, as fragile as a candle in the wind.
Theft
Eventually at age forty-four Anna got a job as a domestic in Weimar but she ran off with one of her employer’s diamond rings, presumably an attempt to find financial refuge in a world that offered no social security. She then went to live with her grown up daughter and son-in-law. But her employer advertised her theft in the local paper, destroying any good name that Anna might have clung on to, and when the son-in-law saw the advert he threw her out.
Anna now determined to find herself a second husband who could offer her some stability. When a Bavarian judge, who was separated from his wife, took her on as a housekeeper/cook, she saw him as a potential candidate. Anna tempted the wife back into the marital home then duly poisoned her by putting large doses of arsenic - which was widely available at the time - into her drinks. Arsenic is a particularly cruel poison whose symptoms include severe stomach inflammation, vomiting, bloody diarrhoea and extreme weakness, occasionally including temporarily paralysis. The later stages can include convulsions and coma. Poor Mrs Glaser died within three days, suffering an agonizing death.
Many of the Glaser’s guests also suffered from stomach complaints after eating Anna’s meals. When the newly widowed Judge Glaser still showed no sexual interest in her and expressed concern at how ill his dinner guests were becoming, she left his employ and became the housekeeper of another legal professional instead.
But this new employer, Judge Grohmann, already had a fiancee and had no intention of replacing her with the thin and sallow Anna. Rebuffed again, the woman put arsenic in his tea. He too died in terrible pain but as he had suffered from gout his death was put down to natural causes and Anna was free to kill again. More sympathetic sources suggest that Anna genuinely liked Grohmann and believed the arsenic would help cure his illness, for it was used in small amounts for medicinal purposes. Other sources say that she killed him out of jealousy after his marriage banns were read out.
The latter is more likely, for poisoners seem to become addicted very quickly to their cruel powders, and she would later refer to arsenic as her truest friend. It’s also true that the poisoner takes a childish glee in administering her toxic substances and controlling the outcome. It would have pleased Anna to know that Grohmann would never live to consummate the marriage with his young fiancee. Criminologists believe that there is a psycho-sexual motive behind many poisonings, and it may well have aroused the reluctantly-celibate Anna to watch the man writhing in agony.
Her next choice of employer was a magistrate, Gebhard. It’s known that serial killers are often drawn to police and legal circles - Ted Bundy studied law, Ken Bianchi frequented police hangouts and pretended to be a policeman, Tim. Harris was a state trooper who carried out his fantasies of hanging women and Dennis Nilsen was a probationary policeman for almost a year. Female serial killers also share this interest. Karla Homolka, profiled later, wanted to be a detective and Myra Hindley, also profiled, actually applied to join the police.
Magistrate Gebhard wanted a nurse as his sick wife had just given birth. Anna again believed that the magistrate wanted a sexual relationship with her so she killed his wife with her beloved arsenic. As Mrs Gebhard’s health failed, she accused the new nurse of poisoning her, stating that her food tasted strange. Sadly no one believed her and she too died in terrible pain.
Once again Anna waited for signs of desire from her newly widowed employer - and once again she was disappointed. Now she went into an arsenic-fuelled frenzy, poisoning anyone who visited the Gebhard’s household. She also poisoned Gebhard’s servants who all disliked her and when she was questioned about the pain that everyone was in she said that she must have over-spiced the meals. When Gebhard found a white silt at the bottom of his brandy glass he asked her to leave, little realising the revenge she would exact.
Further deaths
Going to the kitchen, she put large amounts of arsenic in the coffee, salt and sugar jars. (Some sources say that she just poisoned the salt - but the salient fact is that she poisoned a foodstuff she knew would be used daily by everyone in the household.) She also gave the baby a sweet or a biscuit as she left the house and it too became violently ill.
Realising that a mass poisoning had taken place, the magistrate had the kitchen ingredients tested and white arsenic was found, a substance that is conveniently almost tasteless. The law now wanted to talk to Anna Zwanziger but the cook from hell had disappeared…
For the next few weeks the murderess travelled around seeking a place to live and work. Her son-in-law, now separated from his wife, refused to accommodate her and she moved back to Nuremberg. In October 1809 she was arrested there with a packet of arsenic in her pocket. Still she continued to deny everything, even trying to blame Judge Glaser for his own wife’s death. She - like many of the other female killers featured in this book - was a plausible witness, able to answer all of the prosecutions questions convincingly. The trial dragged on for months.
Then the police exhumed the bodies of Fran Glaser and Judge Grohmann and found arsenic in their systems. (If arsenic has been used over some time it remains in parts of the victim’s body, including the hair and fingernails.) Anna then screamed out in court that she had killed them all and would have killed more if given the chance. When asked how she could cause such suffering to her acquaintances, she said that she couldn’t bear to look at their healthy, happy faces and wanted to see them writhe in pain. She added that if undetected she would have gone on poisoning men, women and children indiscriminately for many years, that she had a compulsion to kill. It was the law’s turn to take a life and she was beheaded by the sword in 1811.
Typology
Anna Zwanziger doesn’t qualify as a Black Widow style of killer because Black Widows mainly kill people with whom they have a strong personal relationship. Conversely, Anna deliberately poisoned many strangers who came to dine at her employer’s house.
She at first fits into the Profit typology, in that she hoped to profit from a first wife’s death by becoming the second wife.
Later, she moved into the Revenge category, injuring or killing those who refused to become sexually intimate with her or who simply enjoyed a zest for life that she herself now lacked. Her motivation seems similar to that of the spree killer who decides that he hates life but will injure and annihilate as many others as possible before he shoots himself. The only thing that distinguishes her from other Revenge Killers is that they usually claim their first victim in their twenties whereas Anna was twice as old.
Was she a Question Of Sanity case as some criminologists suggest? It seems doubtful. After all, she took care to hide her poison in substances where it wouldn’t be detected. She left the area after poisoning the salt canister. And when brought to trial she denied the crimes for six whole months, only admitting to them when incontrovertible evidence was found in the bodies. (She might not have known that such forensic tests were possible as the method had only been perfected four years before.)
When she at last admitted some of the poisonings - she was tried for the deaths of two women and a child - Anna was quite clear about her motives. She had hated the health and happiness of those around her, which contrasted starkly with her own faded looks. Misery likes company and Anna set about making everyone around her as miserable as she possibly could.
Anna Zwanziger was dealt a bad hand in life, losing her mother and father and then being passed around like a parcel between her indifferent relatives. Her route from educated teenager to young prostitute to menial housekeeper understandably engendered further distress and bitterness. But she lost the sympathy that she was entitled to when she turned that rage on innocent bystanders and made them die early and agonising deaths.
2 Lost in France
The dissolute life of Jeanne Weber
Jeanne was born in 1875 into a large impoverished family with the surname of Moulinet. Home was an overcrowded dwelling in a small fishing village in Northern France. Jeanne was plain, something which doubtless added to her childhood misery and she had no especial talents other than a native cunning and an innate acting ability.
Astrologers would later note that there was a complete absence of water in her birth chart, supposedly making her much harder and more ruthless than women born under a more balanced sign - but it’s more likely that the childhood struggle for food, clothing and affection is what made Jeanne hard.
Waterless signs apparently also find it easier to cut themselves off from their families, something that the teenage Jeanne certainly did. As soon as she turned fourteen she moved to the capital, Paris, hoping to gain her independence and to find work.
A bad marriage
In Paris, Jeanne drifted from job to job, each of them menial. She did this for four years, until she met an equally unhappy alcoholic called Weber. Soon she married him and started joining him in drinking large amounts of the local cheap red wine. Weber, a Parisian, had few prospects and even fewer ambitions, but Jeanne was glad to have him as she knew that she was a physically unattractive woman who held limited appeal for men.
The couple set up home in a tenement slum in the Passage de la Goutte d’Or in Montmartre. There Jeanne gave birth to three children. But two of them died whilst still babies, giving her a further excuse to down bottles of cheap drink. (She would eventually be suspected of killing both these children - only her son Marcel would live to age seven before she took his little life.)
Soon the persuasive Jeanne was babysitting for two children called Lucie Alexandre and Marcel Poyatos. Outwardly she looked like the ideal babysitter, always enquiring after her charges health. Yet both infants died suddenly in her care.
Meanwhile, her three brothers-in-law and their wives all lived in the same Montmartre passageway, for she had married into a family as large as the one she’d been born into. Her young relatives would provide perfect victims for her increasingly bloodthirsty bent.
In March 1905 she agreed to babysit for her eighteen-month-old niece Georgette and two-year-old niece Suzanne whilst their mother went out to do the laundry. Shortly afterwards, a neighbour passing the door heard choking noises and hurried to alert Georgette’s mother that her baby was ill. Madame Pierre raced home to find Jeanne massaging little Georgette’s chest whilst the child lay on the bed. The little girl had a blue-tinged pallor, foam around her mouth and a tell-tale red mark on her neck.
Madame Pierre tended to the child and she quickly recovered. The woman then returned to her laundering - and when she came home she found the baby dead. No one suspected the distraught Jeanne Weber for a moment so nine days later she was asked to babysit the luckless survivor Suzanne. A few hours later the parents returned to find her dying in circumstances remarkably similar to those of her sibling. The doctor found the devastated Jeanne entirely plausible and put both cases down to convulsions. Jeanne carried on with her babysitting tasks.
The death toll continues
Just two weeks later a further of her charges died. Germaine was the seven-month-old daughter of another of her sisters-in-law. This time the red marks around her throat were credited to diphtheria - and three days later when Jeanne’s seven-year-old son Marcel died his death was ascribed as the very same explanation. Other sources suggest that Marcel’s death was put down to accidental choking, but the salient point is that foul play was not suspected and Jeanne Weber was able to continue her killing spree. A magistrate would later suggest that Jeanne killed her own son at this stage to take any suspicion away from herself as it made her look as bereaved as her grieving relatives.
Six days passed and then Weber tried to strangle one of her ten-month-old nephews, Maurice. Thankfully his mother came home at that moment, saw Jeanne choking her son, and called the police. The hospital doctor agreed it looked like someone had tried to strangle the baby so Weber went to trial at the Seine Assizes, but succeeded in acting the part of a wronged woman who’d been recently bereaved. More importantly, the most famous expert witness in France, Dr Leon Thoinot, stated that none of the exhumed children’s bodies appeared to show marks of strangulation. Thoinot would later co-write a medical journal article about why he believed she was innocent. Seen as a victim of misfortune at a time when children often died of childhood diseases, she was acquitted by a jury in February 1906.
But Weber’s own husband believed she was guilty - as did the general public - and he left her. Changing her surname back to Moulinet, she moved to the village of Chambron, setting up home with a man called Sylvain Bavouzet and his three motherless children. He knew of her crimes but was described as a ‘sympathetic farmer’, albeit one who wanted a housekeeper and a woman to warm his bed.
Released again
He paid a heavy price for inviting Jeanne into his life, for soon she reverted to type and strangled his nine-year-old son Auguste to death. At first - despite the clear bruises on the child’s neck - the local doctor recorded the death as being due to convulsions, but when Jeanne Weber’s history became known the doctor contacted the police and an autopsy was performed. The medical establishment decided that the boy had died of diphtheria and she was released again.
After a few months of casual employment Jeanne was offered a post at a children’s home by a doctor who felt sorry for her. Soon she was choking one of her young charges. Discovered by her employers, she managed to persuade them that there was an innocent explanation for her actions and they dismissed her without reporting her actions to the police. It seems more likely that they wanted to avoid being involved in a scandal - a hospital would let killing nurse Genene Jones, profiled later, leave with a reference rather than risk her suing them for unfair dismissal.
The prostitute
Homeless and jobless, Jeanne now returned to Paris and began to earn money as a prostitute. It was a demeaning and destitute existence that saw her occasionally arrested for vagrancy. Soon she met up with a lime-burner called Emile Bouchery and the two of them rented a room at an inexpensive inn. Neither of them made much money and Emile would beat her during their drunken arguments.
To make extra cash, Jeanne offered to babysit the owner’s children. He was a busy man so readily agreed to this. She would take the little ones into bed with her for warmth and for company whilst Emile was away. The innkeeper was glad of her services - after all, Jeanne just seemed like a woman down on her luck and he had no inkling of her childkilling history.
But all that was about to change. Alerted by screams one night, he caught her strangling his ten-year-old son with a handkerchief. Weber was so caught up in the murder that he had to hit her several times before she released her manic grasp - she was in the throes of a desire that psychologists would later suggest was psycho-sexual. The object of her sadism, the child, who had bitten through his own tongue during the struggle, was dead.
This time she’d been caught in the act and was charged with murder - and found guilty. Judged to be insane, she was sent to an asylum in 1908 and found dead there two years later, having died of convulsions, her hands locked around her own throat. One French source claims she died during a ‘crisis of madness’ and suggests she contributed to her own death by self-strangulation. But it’s hard to know the truth as two French novels were written about Weber’s life, causing fiction to fuse with fact.
A sexual motive
The fact that she spent her last years in an asylum has caused some criminologists to put Weber into the ‘Question Of Sanity’ typology - but it seems more likely that she was only insane towards the end of her killing spree. After all, she was sane enough to wait until the parents had left the house before she assaulted their children. And she stopped and pretended to be reviving the children if an unexpected witness appeared. Even with the last case, when the child’s father was elsewhere in the building, she took care to lock the door and isolate the child from its siblings. All of these actions suggest a rational and calculating mind.
Those criminologists who see her as a Question Of Sanity case state that there was no motive for her crimes. Others suggest that there may have been a sexual motive - witnesses reported that she was sometimes standing over the dying child in a frenzy. Sexual sadism does seem likely in many strangling cases, with killers half choking the victim, letting them breathe a little, then partly asphyxiating them again. In this way, the killer can play with her - or his - victim’s life whilst looking into their eyes for a cruelly long time.
A woman who just wanted to snuff out an infant’s life quickly, perhaps whilst denying the full implications of her own actions to herself, would suffocate their victim by pressing their head into a pillow. Strangling involves a much more intimate and overtly sadistic approach. It’s a power trip - and as an impoverished, unattractive and uneducated woman living in a slum area Jeanne Weber was a woman who would otherwise have had very little power.
Murder would have provided incredibly stimulating moments in an otherwise depressingly drab and uneventful life. It’s clear that she sought out many babysitting opportunities to enjoy it. The fact that she killed her relative’s children (and her own) and was able to continue to live with them without betraying any guilt or remorse suggests that she was also a psychopath, a person without a conscience. Psychopaths can be ruthless professionals or brilliant embezzlers. Most of them don’t kill - but if they do they feel little or no remorse.
Psychopaths also tend to be of above average intelligence, and if they are criminals they plan their murders carefully. They are usually plausible liars, so much so that guilty psychopaths can effortlessly pass lie detector tests. Jeanne seemed to fit the bill as she originally persuaded France’s top legal experts that she was innocent and sane so that they protested strongly in her favour. She was also given second and third chances by doctors, relatives and even strangers who knew her history.
In conclusion, it’s clear that Jeanne Weber had a bad start in life - born into poverty and with too many siblings around for her to be nurtured. Given her later cruel actions, it’s also likely that she was physically abused throughout her miserable childhood. She took to drink very quickly - and it’s known that alcoholism is often hereditary, so perhaps there was also the added abuse or neglect that alcoholic parents bring to the home. She left as soon as she could and became involved with a male alcoholic, who clearly had his own problems. Life shrank to an endless round of drinking cheap wine in a squalid baby-filled tenement until…
Partaking in that first murder clearly gave Jeanne Weber a satisfaction she hadn’t known before, and she soon plotted to repeat it. A damaged life went on to damage many others, a theme that will rebound throughout this book.
3 Mad about the boy
Myra Hindley’s life altering lover
Myra Hindley was born on 23rd July 1942 to a working class couple in Manchester, England. Her mother, Hettie, was a machinist and her father, Bob, an aircraft fitter, often away from home because of the war. She was three years old before he came home permanently - and he would later admit that he never took to her. He wasn’t the kind of father who hugged his children or took part in any of their games.
After the war Bob worked as a labourer and would take part in boxing matches to bring in a few more pounds. He spent most of this money in the pub, often going there after work and staying there for the evening. Sometimes Hettie’s widowed mother would come round and keep her daughter company, though the two women weren’t particularly close.
Bob would sometimes hit Hettie when he came home drunk, and little Myra would cling to his legs in a vain bid to make him stop the violence. Myra’s gran would also hit her son-in-law in an effort to stop him hurting Hettie during these wife-beating acts. Bob would also hit Myra during his drunken rages - and as he often worked on building sites he was a powerfully built man.
When Myra’s sister Maureen was born in the summer of 1946, Myra was sent to stay with her gran who only lived a few minutes walk away. Strangely, her parents didn’t ever take her home again and she was to live with Gran until she was arrested at the age of twenty-three. She wasn’t ostracised as there was lots of contact between the two houses, but it must have made the four-year-old feel different from her peers.
From an early age she learned to hide her feelings, and would later write to a journalist: ‘I refused to cry when my father was hitting me or when I drove my mother to hit me too.’ But she added that she’d cry alone afterwards in her room. She would remain close to her mother throughout her life but despised her distant father. After he was involved in an industrial accident he became even more taciturn and apparently bordered on being a recluse.
At five Myra went to junior school, where one report said she was not very sociable - hardly surprising given that she was living with an older lady. She was also allowed to skip school often as company for her grandmother. Her widowed gran was only in her fifties yet didn’t work and apparently didn’t see education as important so at home Myra was lacking a positive influence. Her mother, who has been described as delicate and overworked, also abdicated responsibility when it came to giving the questioning child any guidance and it was hard for Myra to learn anything good by watching her parents together as their relationship was so poor.
Myra would later say that she felt like a ‘fish out of water’ during these primary school years. Superficially she seemed mature for her age - and very soon started to mother younger children in the neighbourhood. She thought her baby sister Maureen, whose name she soon shortened to Mo, was great.
Maureen was waif-like but Myra herself was stockily built, a tomboy who did well at netball and rounders. She also loved writing poetry and her school essays were often praised. But her lack of attendance took its toll and she failed her eleven plus, which prevented her from going on to the superior schools at this time referred to as grammar schools. Instead she went to a Secondary Modern.
Myra’s IQ at this stage was deemed to be 109, which is only slightly above average. She’d grown up in a home where education wasn’t encouraged, a home without books. Years later she would earn a university degree in prison, for which you normally need an IQ of 120 or more.
By the time she was a teenager, Myra had taken to babysitting the local children and her young charges loved her. She was good at bathing them, playing with them and even teaching the youngest ones how to walk so their parents felt safe leaving her at the helm. She even considered becoming a full time childminder or nursery nurse, either of which could have been her passport to working abroad.
Myra talked about emigrating, a brave step for a working class girl from an area where people rarely travelled - indeed, some of her father’s relatives lived within walking distance. And even when offered a new house in a better area, her mother - by then having an affair with a local bus driver - would refuse to move away.
Just before her fifteenth birthday, one of Myra’s younger friends, Michael, asked her to go swimming with him. She declined as she was spending the day with another friend so Michael went swimming in the local reservoir alone. He drowned - and when Myra heard of the accident she was desolate. She cried for days and fell into a deep depression that touched his grieving mother and other witnesses. The maternal teenager blamed herself for not going swimming with him. She even collected money for his funeral wreath.
The only outward signs of a desire for control at this stage are reported in Jean Ritchie’s detailed book Myra Hindley: Inside The Mind Of A Murderess. Ritchie notes that Myra took judo lessons and would hold her opponents down after they begged her to stop. As a result some girls allegedly refused to practice the sport with her.
This unsportsmanlike trait aside, she was like many other teenagers, becoming passionate about religion, trying out the latest fashions, going to dances and dying her hair. She also dated boys, breaking off an engagement to one on the grounds that he was too immature for her. She continued to love children and animals, but felt increasingly, and understandably, bored. She changed her place of employment four times - being sacked from one typing job for poor attendance - and the man that she met at her fourth place of work would forever change her life.
A change of philosophy
By her late teens she was dissatisfied with living in the same drab area, doing the same type of uncreative work, socialising with the same unambitious people. She therefore began to daydream about Ian Brady, the clerk at her new workplace, writing in her diary that she wanted to look after him and that she was in love with him.
The other people who worked at Millwards Ltd, a chemical firm, were friendly but unexceptional. In contrast, Ian spoke German and dressed exotically in black and was well read. Admittedly his taste ran to studies of Nazism but Myra was more interested in nurturing him or marrying him than in more intellectual pursuits. She was an impressionable eighteen-year-old with love to give whilst he was an ostensibly more mature twenty-three.
The fact that she and her father were so estranged may explain her attraction to Ian Brady, at first impressions an aloof and distant man who alternately spoke to her and ignored her. Adults often recreate unsatisfactory childhood patterns, perhaps in the subconscious hope of improving them this time round. Ian was five years older than Myra - and Myra’s father had been seven years older than her mother. Ian was also very good looking, and slightly resembled Elvis Presley who Myra adored.
The lover
Ian’s father is unknown - his unmarried mother said that he was a Glasgow journalist who died when she was six months pregnant. Ian would later see his illegitimacy as a source of shame, for it was considered a stigma in those unenlightened days.
For the first three months of his life he lived with his mother Maggie (who would later change her name to Peggy) in a slum tenement in the Glasgow Gorbals, being left with whoever she could find whilst she waitressed nights in a tearoom. It was an exhausting life, and when she could no longer cope she placed an advert describing herself as a working widow who needed someone to adopt her child.
A Mrs Sloan took three-month-old Ian on and took him back to the house she shared with her husband, two sons and two daughters. She was a nice woman who suffered from slight deafness - a deafness that would increase over the years and make her relationship with Ian increasingly difficult. Even as a young baby he was much less outgoing than her other children had been.
As a child Ian was intelligent and dominant and - like many working class schoolchildren before him - very bored. He took to burglary whilst still at primary school, presumably as a means to obtain funds (the Sloans were kind and respectable but poor), to feel stimulated and to have status. At sixteen he was put on probation and ordered to rejoin his natural mother Peggy who had remarried and now lived in Manchester.
This was the first time he’d been told that Peggy was his mother - throughout his childhood he’d been told that she was a close family friend. Due to her move from Glasgow to Manchester he had had only sporadic contact with her for the previous four years.
In Manchester the locals laughed at his Scottish accent and his stepfather threatened to hit him if he got into any more trouble. The man also found him a labouring job in a market. Once again, he felt like an outsider and spent much of his spare time reading in his room. After loading some stolen lead onto a lorry he was charged again and given the harsh sentence of two years in Borstal. By now he was filled with resentment at society and wanted to make others suffer as he had done.
Myra studied the sullenly handsome youth as he gave her dictation in the office they shared together and was exalted every time he took a sly look at her.
The solitary Brady remained alternatively embarrassed and aloof for month after month but eventually kissed her after an office night out then asked her on a date to see a film. One source states that they went to see TrialAtNuremberg. Another suggests it was a movie about the life of Jesus but this seems unlikely as the free-thinking Ian had been an atheist from the age of twelve. A third source says that the film was ElCid. Whatever his preferred choice, one thing is certain - Myra wildly enthused about it. She had been infatuated with Brady for almost a year and this was her chance to win his love.
Myra had been looking for something to fill her largely pointless life - and now she had found it. She soaked up Ian’s philosophy (which was often racist, violent and simplistic) as if she were a sponge. She read every book he gave her, including the true murder story Compulsion and other texts about the strong overcoming the weak.
At one stage he literally overcame her by drugging her drink. Semi-conscious, she could remember intense pain and flashing lights. When she came to he admitted that he had put some of her grandmother’s sleeping pills in her wine to see how long she’d be sedated. He added that he was thinking of disposing of his sick dog in this way.
Shocked and frightened, Myra went to her friend May Hill and told her some of the details. She was too embarrassed to talk openly about the entire incident so wrote it down for her friend, adding that if something bad happened to her then May was to take the letter to the police. She added that Ian had threatened harm to three other people she knew - probably her mother, her gran, and Ronnie Sinclair, the boy to whom she had previously been engaged.
Deciding that she had to get away, Myra applied to the NAAFI for a clerical job in Germany. She took the train to London for the interview - and when she came back Ian was waiting for her. He accompanied her home where she told her mother and gran that she’d got the job, but they weren’t impressed at the prospects that this offered her. Instead they were very upset at the thought of her moving abroad and she loved them so much she decided to stay. She continued to date Ian, riding pillion on his motorbike. He took her away from the cramped streets of Manchester’s Gorton to enjoy picnics and wine on the moors.
Soon she told May to destroy the letter - though May would testify to its content at the trial. By now Myra had clearly decided to comply with whatever this fascinating but very dangerous lover wanted her to do. This included dyeing her hair blonde and parading about in leather boots in the manner of the female Nazi Concentration Camp guard, Irma Grese.
Forging our own identity is part of growing up, and the rage-filled philosophy Ian Brady fed Myra was a million miles away from the ‘meet a nice boy and have kids’ option spouted by those around her. But his handsome features, soft Scottish voice and autodidactism made him far more attractive than her unambitious family, so Myra started to remould herself as her lover wished.
She had given him her virginity on their second date (she was nineteen) and soon agreed to have anal sex with him, despite the fact that it hurt her. Serial killers and power rapists often prefer forced sodomy and oral sex to vaginal sex as it demeans the victim more.
On other occasions Brady told her to insert a candle into his anus and then to masturbate him. It may be that he was abused as a child - he certainly spent lots of time alone out of doors as a child feeling different and slighted, a demeanour which would have made him vulnerable to paedophile seduction. The candle incident with Myra might have been his way of trying to take control of such homo-erotic actions forced on him as a child or during his Borstal years. He was clearly concerned only with his own internal script, but couldn’t fail to note that she didn’t seem to mind.
Before long Ian moved into Myra’s gran’s house permanently, though they told the neighbours that he slept on the settee and was there to confront any burglars. (There had been many burglaries in the area.) In reality they slept together though Ian quickly tired of conventional sex.
Myra would later describe him as ‘a powerful personality’ and write that she was ‘unworldly… a dreamer, a romantic.’ Whatever her true motive, she was letting herself be turned into a woman who would do whatever her lover wanted.
Even at this stage she could have been saved. Many youths feel understandably alienated from the families they’re born into. Many want something different and temporarily seek it in the occult, in religion, in the music of alienation or in arcane philosophies. Later they move on to find fulfilment in a career, sport or other interest instead.
Given her childhood experiences, we can perhaps understand why the teenage Myra agreed with Brady’s talk of killing for thrills - because the existentialism of it all made her feel superior to her peers who thought only of boyfriends and bingo. Her talking about murder also pleased Ian, something that she was desperate to do. She even allowed him to carry her about on the moors as practice for when he had a dead body to dispose of - and she took shooting lessons when he fantasized about them robbing a bank. But then she took the step that would cut her off from most human understanding: she helped him realise his murderous plans.
The first victim
The pair had talked for months about abducting someone for Ian to rape, with his insistence that rape was just a state of mind rather than a criminal act. He looked down on most of the uneducated people who surrounded him and wanted to crush them like ants.
In July 1963 Ian asked twenty-one-year-old Myra to get him a child because a child would happily go off with a woman. Myra obligingly parked her van and waited for a likely victim to walk past. Soon she saw sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, who lived just two doors away from Myra’s brother-in-law, David. The teenage David had recently married Myra’s little sister Maureen and they would soon produce their first child. Pauline was on her way to a dance a mere half mile away from the home she shared with her mum and dad.
Myra called to Pauline and asked if she’d accompany her on a drive to the moors to look for an expensive lost glove. She promised Pauline some gramophone records as a reward for helping in the search, saying that she had them in the boot of the car. It was a lovely summer night - and Pauline wasn’t sure that her friends would be at the dance - so she said she was in no hurry and happily agreed to the change of plan. Myra drove the unsuspecting girl to Saddleworth Moor and Ian followed a discreet distance behind on his motorbike.
We will never know exactly what was said and done to the frightened teenager when the threesome met up - but by the end of the evening she had been raped by Ian Brady and had her throat cut by him. She struggled so hard that he found her difficult to control and would request that Myra procure him a younger and smaller victim next time.
Now he fetched Myra and a spade from the van and led her back to the body. (Her variously reported reactions to this are detailed later in this chapter.) They buried the still warm corpse in a shallow grave. Myra then drove them home and Ian burned his clothes and shoes to destroy any forensic evidence.
Like many criminals, Myra was fascinated by police work - and would now apply to join the force. She went for an interview, which she passed, and was given forms to fill in. Ian joked that it would be useful to have inside information and it was then, she said, that she decided not to take her application further. But she would later date a policeman who came to buy her van, seeing him on nights when Ian was otherwise engaged. Ian went to see his birth mother Peggy every week, but wouldn’t let Myra meet her. Even if she drove him to Peggy’s house, she had to wait outside in the car. It was yet another subtle form of his sadism, making it clear to her that she wasn’t special enough to be introduced as his girlfriend.
The second victim
Four months later Ian decided it was time to kill again. Myra bought the knife. The pair then offered twelve-year-old John Kilbride a lift home from the cinema. He knew not to accept lifts from strangers but thought he was safe because Myra was driving. He, too, was taken to a desolate part of the moor and raped by Ian Brady, who also admitted slapping the boy’s buttocks before strangling him. Myra stayed, acting as look-out, in the van.
Brady later told her that he’d wanted to cut the child’s throat but that the knife wasn’t sharp enough so he strangled him with a thin piece of string. The boy’s remains were found in October 1965, two years after his death.
The third victim
Seven months passed before the third death, that of another twelve-year-old, Keith Bennett. He’d gone to spend the night with his grandmother, a regular occurrence. Myra and Ian encountered him before he reached his gran’s house, offered him a lift and drove him to the moors. He too was raped by Brady before being strangled. Despite extensive police searches with tracker dogs and specialist equipment, his body has never been found.
The fourth victim
Ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey died six months later, on Boxing Day 1964. In BeyondBelief, his book on the subject, author Emlyn Williams suggests that the day before, Ian had suggested he wanted to commit another murder but that Myra had refused to take part in it. He then packed his suitcase, suggesting the relationship was over, and she relented as she couldn’t live without him. He had become her life.
In truth, it’s more likely that this incident took place some time after the first murder, that of Pauline Reade. At the time Emlyn Williams wrote his book in 1967 he didn’t know for sure that Ian was responsible for the disappearance of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett so - though he mentions both children in the Appendix - his account begins with the murder of John Kilbride.
Given the evidence that was to follow, there was no doubt that they were responsible for Lesley’s demise. The ten-year-old had been at the fun fair when she accepted a lift home from the friendly-seeming couple. They took her back to the house (Myra’s gran was visiting relatives) and told her to take off her clothes apart from her socks and shoes.
Then they set up a tripod and began to take pornographic photographs of her. They ordered her to stand and sit in various sexually explicit poses, tied her hands together and gagged her with a man’s scarf. Ian hoped to sell the photographs on the black market - he had taken previous shots of himself and Myra wearing hoods in similar states of undress.
Ian switched his taperecorder on and this seventeen minute tape would later be played back in court to a shocked jury. Serial killers often make audio or video recording of their victims during their ordeal, using the tapes afterwards as a masturbatory aid.
The tape starts with a scream, unclear voices then another scream. Then Lesley says ‘Don’t… Please God, help me.’ Brady is heard telling her to do as she’s told. The little girl says that she has to go home as her mum is expecting her and Myra snaps ‘Don’t dally.’ Lesley says to Myra ‘Help me, will you?’ When the child refuses to be gagged Myra says ‘Shut up or I’ll forget myself and hit you one,’ then ‘Will you stop it? Stop it!’ She orders the girl to put the handkerchief back into her mouth.
The child is heard to be retching because the handkerchief is being pushed down her throat. The jurors would later be handed photograph albums of the crime scene to study. Some of the snapshots showed Lesley with a scarf tied tightly around her mouth and with what appears to be the corner of handkerchief sticking out from under it. An observer at the trial suggested that at another stage Ian or Myra had filled the little girl’s mouth with cotton wool and gagged her with tape.
Myra says that she was out of the room when Lesley’s murder occurred - but Ian was earlier heard on the tape in Myra’s presence, threatening to slit the child’s throat, so she must have known that the child’s death was imminent. He apparently then told Myra to run a bath as he wanted to wash the child clean of any forensic evidence. When she returned to the bedroom the child was dead and had blood on her thighs, indicating that she’d been raped.
Emlyn Williams, who has seen the photographs, said that the child looks subdued. He believes that the abuse heard on the tape took place first and that only then were the photographs taken. He adds that the poses are like ballet poses, only pornographic to the corrupt eye. The child had been told to stretch out her arms in one photograph - he believes that’s where the erroneous rumours about her crucifixion started. When the body was found the innards had been gnawed at by rats and this led to false suggestions that she’d been disembowelled whilst still alive. This misinformation has persisted over the years so that these murders are almost invariably described as torture murders. But Detective Peter Topping said in his autobiography that there’s no proof that torture was involved - though, as he rightly adds, gagging and raping a child involves causing tortuous fear and suffering.
With a captive child in the house, Myra couldn’t let her gran return at 9pm. It was after eleven before she turned up at her uncle’s house to find the old woman asleep in her chair. Myra appeared flushed and out of breath to her relatives. She told them that she couldn’t drive her gran home as the weather was too bad. They disagreed as there had only been a flurry of snow but Myra was insistent that they put the old lady up on the bed settee and she’d return for her tomorrow if the roads were clear.
The next day Ian and Myra took Lesley’s body to the moor and buried it alongside her clothes and the string of white plastic beads that her brother had given her for Christmas. Ten months later, in October 1965, the body was found by the police who saw an arm sticking eerily through the soil.
The last victim
Edward Evans was Myra and Ian’s last victim simply because Ian became arrogant and decided to involve a third party. Like most serial killers he had increased in confidence as his killing spree progressed and may have started to feel above the law, invincible. The unwilling voyeur was Myra’s brother-in-law, seventeen-year-old David Smith.
David was enamoured of Ian’s talk about robbing banks - and loved to drink and smoke all night with him. He too had been starved of love and education so was hugely interested in the daytrips to the moors offered by his new friend and by the books by the Marquis de Sade that Ian lent him. The two men became close and Ian clearly thought that David could become another Myra, helping him lure more victims to their deaths.
Myra was totally against bringing David Smith in. She didn’t like him and didn’t particularly trust him. And she hadn’t wanted her little sister Maureen to marry him.
Maureen, for her part, was noticing that her adoring older sister Myra had changed. Outwardly she’d grown harder, agreeing with Ian that marriage was meaningless and that motherhood was for fools. But Myra had also become nervous and insisted on sleeping with the lights on when it got too late to go home and she had to share her sister’s bed. She also anxiously told a neighbour not to talk about pregnancy in front of Ian as he’d become enraged.
Ian’s rage was about to intensify for the very last time. He and Myra went out looking for a victim and eventually met seventeen-year-old Edward Evans
