Moors murderer Hindley’s twisted deathbed letters
Killer’s bid to play victim
Moors murderer Myra Hindley tried to win her freedom by claiming she was drugged, beaten and repeatedly raped by partner-in-crime Ian Brady.
And in a brazen bid for sympathy, evil Hindley said her former lover would have murdered her if she had not agreed to join his killing spree.
Her claims were set out in a series of letters and notes believed to have been handed to a member of staff at HMP Highpoint on the day she died in 2002, which have come to light 16 years later.
But her sob story was last night dismissed by the brother of one of the five children killed by the twisted pair.
Terry West, whose sister Lesley Ann Downey was tortured and murdered by the couple when she was just 10, called Hindley a liar for trying to shift the blame solely on to Brady.
He said: “What she is saying is a load of tripe. If she’d wanted to get out of it, she would have done.”
The late Winnie Johnson, mother of victim Keith Bennett, believed Hindley was fully responsible and lured the children into Brady’s clutches. Mrs John- son’s solicitor John Ainley said: “Winnie never accepted she was not culpable for all the deaths. She rejected Hindley’s assertion that in some way she was completely under his control.
“Winnie always thought she was the bait that attracted young children. They would not have been tempted to go in a vehicle or move away with a man but a female they were far more vulnerable to.”
Some of the papers detail Hindley’s efforts to win an early release from her life sentence. In them she painted herself as a “victim” of sexual deviant Brady.
Sick Hindley said that once she was indoctrinated, he said they could commit the perfect murder. She wrote:
I asked him why he kept strangling me. He told me he was practising MYRA HINDLEY ON THE LEAD-UP TO THE MURDERS
“It began as a joke, but slowly grew more serious. Ian would tell me how he was ‘special’, he was moved to do this because he was meant to do it.
“He was a fanatical Nazi, but despite that... I was completely besotted with him, which is why I put up with him and why his beliefs eventually rubbed off on me and caused me to accept and do things no one should ever do.”
She also claimed that after killing first victim Pauline Reade, 16, Brady warned her she could meet the same fate. She wrote: “As we were driving home, he told me that if I’d shown any signs of ‘backing out’ I would have finished up in the same grave as Pauline Reade did. I just said ‘I know’.”
She also claimed he had tried to strangle her, adding: “I used to ask him why he kept strangling me so much, so many times – this was before the offences took place – and he told me he was ‘practising’ on me.
“I said one of these days he was going to go too far and kill me but he just laughed and said he wouldn’t – he needed me.” She also detailed sex acts she said she was forced to endure. She wrote: “I was so humiliated when he did all the things I’ve mentioned to me. “I had no self-esteem or self-respect, whereas before I met him... before he first made a date with me, I was an attractive, confident and sociable teenager, never short of dates.” She added: “He often used to sit cleaning the rifle, and when I looked up, he was pointing it at me with his finger slowly pulling the catch back. I didn’t know if it was loaded or not, but it petrified me, until one day I said, ‘Shoot me and put me out of my misery’. He just laughed.”
She also wrote: “I couldn’t go to the police about him for there was no proof of anything, and whilst I feared and often hated him, I was so emotionally obsessed with him I just couldn’t change my feelings for him.”
She even claimed Brady drugged her grandmother by putting sleeping pill Nembutal in her tea and threatened to push the frail pensioner down a staircase to her death.
But Brady contradicted her claims in letters he wrote to then-Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1997 to stop her freedom bid.
Brady wrote: “[Myra] regarded periodic homicides as rituals of reciprocal innervation, marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer.” He added: “She is essentially a chameleon, adopting whatever camouflage will suit and voicing whatever she believes the individual wishes to hear.”
Brady and Hindley killed five children aged 10 to 17, between July 1963 and October 1965. They were convicted of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17, in 1966. Brady was also found guilty of the murder of John Kilbride, 12, with Hindley convicted of acting as an accessory.
In 1987 they also confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12. Four of their victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor, including Keith, whose body has never been found.
Brady, 79, died in Ashworth Hospital in May last year. Hindley, 60, died in December 2002. In her will, written in 2000, Hindley asked to be cremated and to have Adagio by Albinoni played at her funeral – it had been played at Princess Diana’s 1997 funeral.
The documents have been acquired by the Crime Through Time museum at Littledean Jail in Gloucestershire.
Curator and owner Andy Jones, 56, said: “Myra Hindley clearly sees herself as the victim. Brady and Hindley were as evil as each other. In the end, she deservedly served 36 years in prison.”