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Child Killers

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Serial Killers

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Ian and Myra met while working for a chemical company in Hyde, Greater Manchester. She thought he was quite an intellectual as he sat in the canteen reading Mein Kampf in German.

As their love blossomed they became more obsessed with Nazi paraphernalia, pornography and sadism. At first they enjoyed shooting pictures of themselves naked and in S & M drag. They thought they could crack the local porn market with their pictures but failed.
Most of their victims were children whom they sexually molested before killing. They kept an extensive collection of photographs of their victims as well as a recording of the screams of one girl's torturous death.

12 July 1963 Their first victim was 16-year-old Pauline Reade, a neighbour of Hindley's. She got into a car with Hindley while Brady secretly followed behind on his motorbike. When the van reached Saddleworth Moor, Hindley stopped the van and got out before asking Pauline to help her find a missing glove in exchange for some records. They were busy looking on the moors when Brady pounced on Pauline and fractured her skull with a shovel. He then raped her before slitting her throat with a knife; her spinal cord was severed and she was almost decapitated. Brady then buried her body in a grave three feet deep. It was not discovered until 1 July 1987.

23rd November 1963, Brady and Hindley struck again. This time the victim was 12-year-old John Kilbride. Like many children, he had been warned not to go away with strange men but not about strange women. When he was approached by Hindley at a market in Ashton-under-Lyne, Kilbride agreed to go with her to help carry some boxes. Brady was sitting in the back of the car. When they reached the moors, he took the child with him while Hindley waited in the car. On the moor, Brady subjected John Kilbride to a sexual assault and attempted to slit his throat with a six inch serrated blade, but failed; Brady strangled him with a piece of string (possibly a shoelace) and buried his body in a shallow grave. His body was found there on 21 October 1965.

16th June 1964 The third victim was 12-year-old Keith Bennett who vanished on his way to his grandmother's house in Gorton. The boy accepted a lift from Hindley near Stockport Road in Longsight, and she drove to Saddleworth Moor and asked him to help search for a lost glove. Brady then lured Keith into a ravine. There he sexually assaulted the child, and strangled him with a piece of string before burying his body. Hindley stood above the ravine and watched the murder. Hindley later confessed that she had destroyed the photographs taken at the site of this particular murder, which had been kept at Brady's workplace at Millwards. Hindley had access to these photographs during the four days between Brady's arrest and her own in October 1965. Despite a renewed search effort in 1987, Keith Bennett's body has never been found.

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September 1964 Brady and Hindley moved in with Hindley's grandmother. It's at this time Brady was introduced to Myra's sister, Maureen, and her 17-year-old husband, David Smith.
Brady immediately wanted to impress Smith with his tales of thieving and criminal knowledge.

26th December 1964 The fourth victim, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, was abducted from a fairground in Ancoats and taken back to Hindley's home at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, located on an overspill council estate in Hattersley (Hindley and her grandmother had moved there from Myra's childhood home in Gorton only three months earlier). There the girl was undressed and forced to pose for pornographic photographs with a gag in her mouth, and in the last four of them with her hands bound - the last kneeling in an attitude of prayer. Brady took the nine obscene photographs of the girl, and either he or Hindley recorded the scene on a reel-to-reel audio tape.
The sixteen-minute tape contains the voices of Brady and Hindley relentlessly cajoling and threatening the child, who is heard crying, retching, screaming, and begging to be allowed to return home.  As with Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann was raped and strangled with a piece of string at some point thereafter, probably by Brady. However, during their trial in April 1966, Brady made a telling slip of the tongue while being cross-examined in the witness box, telling the prosecutor that "we all got dressed" after the tape had been made, which suggests that Hindley was also actively involved in the sexual molestation of the child, and perhaps the physical killing as well. The following morning, Brady and Hindley drove Lesley's body to Saddleworth Moor where it was buried in a shallow grave.

6 October 1965 To prove himself  to David Smith, Brady picked up 17-year-old homosexual Edward Evans, Brady tied Evans up in his home and invited Smith over. Brady then smashed Evans skull in with an axe in front of Smith who was horrified.
The next day Smith contacted the police who arrested Brady and Hindley.

The police searched the house and found a dead boy in the bathroom and also found evidence of other murders.
With this evidence the police dug up the Moors north of Manchester and discovered the bodies of two children.

21 April 1966 The trial begins at Chester court,

6 May 1966, Brady & Hindley convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Brady was convicted of three murders,

Hindley was convicted of murdering Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey and received two life sentences. She further received a concurrent seven-year sentence for being an accessory in the John Kilbride murder

December 1995, Hindley, who was in the same jail in northern England as fellow serial killer Rosemary West, gave her first public account of her crime spree, admitting she had been wicked and corrupt but claiming she was now a changed woman. Hindley described herself as a political prisoner who was being used as a scapegoat by politicians and the media. Hindley said,: "The majority of people don't want to accept that people like myself can change, They prefer to keep me frozen in time together with that awful mug shot so that their attitudes, beliefs and perceptions can remain intact."

February 1997, her lawyers made a plea to win her release. However, a London Superior Court decreed that Myra will spend the rest of her life behind bars with no possibility of parole.

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21 May the High Court announced a judicial review of their 1990 decision of imposing a "whole-life" sentence on the aging convicted killer. Hindley's lawyers argue that the decision did not reflect the views of the judge in the case, Mr. Justice Fenton, who recommended only that she serve "a very long time." According to her lawyers the "whole-life" sentence represented an "irrational leap" from the 30-year period fixed by the Home Office in 1985.

21st November supporters of Myra called for a review of sentencing procedures after Jack Straw reaffirmed the decision of his predecessor, Michael Howard, of never releasing Myra from prison. The ruling came under immediate attack from penal reformers and civil liberties campaigners.
Lord Longford, who has lobbied for Hindley's release, expressed "total disgust and contempt" and described her as a "good woman". He told BBC Radio 4's Today show: "I am very sorry indeed that a high-minded man, a Christian socialist like Jack Straw should have taken that decision. Of course it's all as a result of the horrifying pressure exerted by the tabloids." Lord Longford said that Hindley had been a good young woman "until she began to work under a very gifted, but mentally disturbed man, Ian Brady. She was an infatuated accomplice 31 years ago".
 

7th October 1998  In a new attempt at overturning her life sentence and win the right to a parole hearing, Hindley claimed that she can prove that she took part in the Moors murders only because Brady abused her, and threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and younger sister.

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This latest court action represents the third strategy Hindley has adopted since conviction. At first she stayed silent, and then later revealed evidence of other murders in a fruitless bid to convince the public that she had reformed. Now she is claiming that she took part in the crimes unwillingly.
Brady has condemned Hindley's attempt to blame him for the killings and released a six-page letter he sent to the Home Secretary. Brady wrote: "Hindley, in her usual Barbara Cartland prose, has created a Victorian melodrama in which she portrays herself as being forced to murder serially, by being drugged, blackmailed, whipped, raped, battered, having her family threatened with slaughter, bitten, strangled etc, etc.
"At first I was staggered and appalled, then as the catalogue of feverish crimes mounted to stultification level, I slowly realised that desperation had finally driven her over the top. It appears that the neurosis bred by her own pathological machinations has developed into psychosis. She appears to be suffering from a histrionic personality disorder, adopting manipulative attention seeking behaviour . . . an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, concealing a strong tendency towards rebellion and acting on impulse."

March 2000, Ian Brady On Hunger Strike
Brady goes to court to appeal that the Staff at the secure unit, Ashworth Hospital, where he is serving life, do not have the right to force feed him. The appeal is refused, he is fed.
 

21st September 2001  Ian Brady has been given permission to publish his book on serial killers by the hospital for the criminally insane where his is serving his sentence. On 11th September, the hospital was granted a court order to obtain a copy of the manuscript and block its publication. After determining that the book, "The Gates of Janus," contained no references to the hospital or Brady's own crimes, a lawyer representing the hospital announced that they were not opposed to the publication of the book.
 

15th November 2002
Myra Hindley has died in prison of a chest infection aged 60. She died  at Highpoint Prison in Suffolk. An inquest into her death will be held, this is normal when a prisoner dies in custody. She will be cremated and her ashes scattered at a secret location. Just 24 years old when sentenced to life in 1966, she severed 36 years behind bats, and was only weeks away from a possible release date being set.

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