Myra and me

It was a good question. The 41-year-old author, who lives in Wilberfoss, has carved out a successful writing career: but it has been a career in which she has delved deep into the dark side.

Five of her books – two for adults, three for children – have dealt with the holocaust. They focused on Anne Frank and her family, as a way of examining the treatment of innocents in a time of evil.

But her latest book is possibly the darkest of all: a detailed, in-depth, horribly intimate study of the life and crimes of Myra Hindley.

Hindley’s photograph stares back at you from the front cover: that familiar police mugshot, with the improbably big hair, expressionless face and those black, dead eyes peering deep into your soul.

Carol fought hard with her publisher to try to persuade them not to use that photo, she admits, because it is such a powerful image she feared it would affect the way people read her book. “Even if you weren’t aware of her crimes, you would still look at that and think….”

What? That Hindley was evil?

“Yes.”

It is not that she doesn’t think Hindley was evil: more that she wanted readers to make up their own minds based on the story she told, rather than being too strongly influenced by that photograph.

In the end, however, she was persuaded to go with it. “It is such an iconic photo.”

It seems odd to be talking about a monster like Hindley with a woman like Carol. She is neat and clean and beautifully turned out – every inch the successful woman-about-town. She is, in fact – believe it or not – the president of Wilberfoss WI. What on earth got her interested in someone like the Moors Murderer?

It all sprang out of her earlier interest in Anne Frank, who she has been fascinated by since reading a book about her as a six-year-old girl growing up in Cornwall.

She wrote a series of books about the Franks – Roses From The Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank, which has been translated into 13 languages; The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, and three books for children. But then she wanted a change of direction. Instead of looking at the innocent victims of evil, she wanted to look at a person who had themselves committed evil. Hindley was, she says, the “ultimate case”.

There have been countless books and press articles written about the Moors Murderers. But Carol felt there was more to say. There were too many mistakes in the accounts that had been written: and too much material that had been ignored. “I felt it was important the story should be properly put together,” she says.

Her book – One Of Your Own: The Life And Death Of Myra Hindley – sets out to tell that story; from Hindley’s working class childhood in Gorton, Manchester, through her relationship with Brady, to the murders themselves, the trial, and her subsequent lifelong imprisonment.

Carol travelled up and down the country interviewing people who knew Hindley, meeting the families of victims, and getting access to reams of previously unpublished case files. She also got hold of some photographs rarely seen before in public – including two of Hindley and Brady sitting together in the dock at their trial.

The story she tells is, inevitably, gruesome. The Hindley who emerges from these pages is no victim of the manipulative Brady, as she has been portrayed by some: she is a cold, controlled, emotionally detached woman who was an accomplice in these gruesome murders because she wanted to be.

“She admitted that the rape and murder of children was something that they (Hindley and Brady) discussed as part of their sex lives,” Carol says. “She admitted she got a kick out of the murders. It wasn’t a sexual thing for her: it was a power thing. Everybody was talking about these missing children, and only she and Brady knew.”

Lord Longford famously campaigned for Hindley’s release from prison before her death in 2002, once describing her as a “delightful” person.

“You could loathe what people did but should not loathe what they were because human personality was sacred even though human behaviour was very often appalling”, he said.

Carol agrees that simply labelling someone evil is meaningless. But delightful? That, Hindley certainly was not, she says.

She was capable of love and kindness towards children – she demonstrated that with some of her family and friends. “But that makes her actions even worse. She was fully aware of what she was doing. She wasn’t insane. She was fully in control.”

Brady’s life philosophy, Carol says, was that “people were maggots”. He and Hindley thought they were above everyday morality. “She says in her writing that ‘we became our own Gods’. They wanted to be above their working class background, to be different.”

They didn’t even have the excuse the Nazis had in the holocaust, that they were only following orders.

Towards the end of her life, shortly before she died, Hindley came close to being released from prison. Should she have been?

Carol thinks not. She wouldn’t have been a danger to the public, she believes. But she never showed true remorse for what she and Brady did. She once referred to Lesley Ann Downey’s mother as a ‘pain in the neck’, and described the process of taking pornographic photos of the little girl before she was murdered as an “unsavoury business.”

Carol can hardly keep the indignation out of her voice. “MPs faking expenses is unsavoury. The rape and murder of a child is entirely different. There are certain crimes that are beyond the pale.”

Brady’s and Hindley’s were certainly among them.

*One Of Your Own: The Life And Death Of Myra Hindley by Carol Ann Lee is published by Mainstream on April 8, priced £11.99.

*Carol will be giving a talk about her book to the Wilberfoss WI at Wilberfoss Community Centre at 8pm on April 8. All welcome. Non WI members will be asked to pay a £3 entrance fee.