Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Brady became my God
FOR THE FIRST TIME: MYRA IN HER OWN WORDS » Police files record how she tried to pin the blame on him » Call for new probe after bullet shells found on moor
MYRA Hindley’s extraordinary confessions over the Moors Murders are today revealed in her words for the first time.
Evil Hindley admitted she was involved in the killings but tried to pin the blame on lover Ian Brady, telling cops: “He became my God, my idol, my object of worship. I worshiped him blindly.”
She claimed Brady spiked her drink, took pornographic pictures and then blackmailed her into committing crimes which shocked 1960s Britain.
The incredible new account comes from Hindley’s interviews with former detective Peter Topping, who took her back to the Moors in 1987 to search for the missing bodies.
Her evidence is detailed in over 700 pages of interviews split into four volumes, taken while she served her sentence at Cookham Wood Prison, Kent. They have been uncovered by Moors Murders expert Darren Rae and for the first time detail what Hindley told cops when she finally confessed.
Yesterday, the Daily Mirror revealed bullet shells matching a Smith and Wesson revolver owned by Brady had been uncovered on Saddleworth
Moor, Gtr Manchester.
Darren is convinced
Brady shot Keith Bennett.
He hopes the revelations will result in a fresh search for the body – a full 51 years after Hindley and
Brady were jailed.
In the interviews Hindley blamed Brady – yet admitted she was “as guilty if not more so” because she appeared trustworthy to the children they lured to their deaths.
LIMBO
She told police Brady spiked her wine with sleeping pills before taking the porn photos.
The killer said: “After two or three glasses I don’t remember anything except a sensation of not consciousness, it was kind of limbo. I remember flashing lights and movement and pain. Next thing I remember is waking the next morning and feeling absolutely dreadful.”
Hindley said Brady called on her the next night and said he drugged her “as an experiment. She added: “He told me he drugged me with granny’s sleeping pills because I had a dog that was old and quite blind and he didn’t want to take her to a vet to have her put down, he was going to do it himself.
“He wanted to know how much of the drug he needed to put the dog to sleep without suffering any ill effects. He said he had no intention of killing me, he said it was an experiment.”
But the significance of the drug episode became apparent in July 1963 when, Hindley claimed, Brady said he wanted to commit the “perfect murder”. She told police: “He said he had no respect for people. He talked about the perfect murder and I was appalled.
“He intended to do it and needed my help. He showed me pornographic photos taken the night he drugged me. He said if I didn’t comply he’d let my family see them.”
Hindley also said Brady threatened her gran. She said: “He said it would be no problem to push granny down the stairs. I believed he was capable of anything.”
Within days the couple killed
their first victim – Pauline Reade, 16. Brady and Hindley were jailed for life in May 1966 over the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, John Kilbride, 12, and 17-year-old Edward Evans.
In 1985 Brady confessed to murdering Pauline and Keith Bennett, 12. That led Topping to interview them in prison prior to taking them back to the Moors to try to find the bodies.
During the interviews Hindley said she would have ended up married with a family had she never met Brady.
Speaking about the grip he held over her, she said: “I know people find it difficult to understand how I could feel what I did feel for a man who did such things and who involved me in them – and I did things – and who subjected me to that lifestyle.
MYSTERY
“I had this obsession about him, this infatuation, I believed it to be love. I think it stemmed from the fact Brady was so different to anyone I had met.
“He seemed cloaked in an aura of mystery I could never quite penetrate, never quite solve and this unknowability intrigued me and continued to enhance his attraction to me.”
But after 20 years in jail her feelings towards Brady had changed. She told Topping: “I placed Brady on a pedestal, he had always been aloof, out of reach and I loved him blindly, long after I had come to prison. I’d been reluctant to strip away the veneer from my emotions and examine what was beneath.
“I said we should never touch our idols because the gilt always rubbed off. One day I gained the courage to touch and the gilt did rub off. Gilt as opposed to guilt. I crashed from his pedestal and the dust and ashes of a dead love float around my feet and I step from it shaking the last remaining speck from my whole self. It was unbearably painful, it always is when one’s prepared to face reality squarely.”
Hindley told police she had psychiatric and psychological evaluations in prison, adding: “This is where I must make the point that, unlike Brady, I have no excuse for my actions.”
She said she believed she had been forgiven by God and hoped “in some way” the families could forgive too.
The interviews took place as Hindley was attempting to convince the authorities to grant her parole.
And Darren Roe believes she would have said anything in order to get it.
He said: “She was trying to portray a picture of compliance and co-operation, that she was sorry for her crimes. But if she was truly sorry she would have told where the bodies are. She was a serial killer, evil, dishonest, saying anything to get parole.”
Hindley died in prison in 2002 aged 60. Brady, 79, is still held in Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside.
Darren has pinpointed three “hot spots” on Saddleworth Moor where he believes Keith’s remains may lie. He also believes another two victims could be buried in the same area.
He said: “There is a matrix of information I have spent years piecing together, cross referencing everything. It is a really sad and tragic case, but I know I am very close to solving it.”