This chapter will examine the coverage of the trial and the initial responses to the sentencing of Brady and Hindley. The trial took place at a time when there was no 24-hour rolling news media. One imagines that a trial of this nature now would receive wall to wall coverage.
Seal (2014) outlines a shift at the beginning of the twentieth century from the spectacle of punishment, for example public hanging, to the spectacle of the trial itself and that, this was accompanied by public consumption, via the press, of ‘sensationalist trials—often those involving stories of murder and infidelity among the middle classes’ (Seal 2014:56). It is at this point, she argues that ‘murder became a staple of popular culture’ (Seal 2014:56) a feature of modernity that has not only persisted, but grown ever since. The trial of Hawley Crippen in 1910 provides an early example with The Times producing a series of editorials warning of sensationalising such events; an editorial in October 1910 stated ‘a Criminal Court is not a show room, nor is such a trial the nature of a matinee’ (Seal 2014:58), linking this emerging phenomenon to contemporary debates about the dangers of working class pleasures such as cinema and the music hall. However, alongside the rise of the spectacle of the trial, the decline of public executions did not stop crowds gathering outside the walls of prisons where prisoners were to be executed and Seal (2014) provides examples, including crowds of 5000 gathering for the executions of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters, with smaller crowds gathering for the executions of Richard Hetherington , Ruth Ellis, Louisa Mansfield and John Christie.
The trial of Brady and Hindley was, however, an important landmark, the first such spectacle in the new TV age. It raises many questions about the relationship between the media and the legal process. The crucial evidence of David Smith was seen by some as being tainted by the fact that he had a contract with the News of the World . One of the most notorious aspects of the Moors Murders case is that Brady and Hindley taped their torture of Lesley Ann Downey. This tape, which has come to be seen as a yardstick of brutality, was played in open court with Ann West, Lesley’s mother listening as her daughter called for her. The trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley took place at Chester Assizes in the UK. From the modern perspective, it seems a very short one. It began on 19 April 1966 and ended 14 days later on 6 May 1966. The presiding judge was Justice Fenton Atkinson with Sir Elwyn James QC leading for the Prosecution. Brady was represented by Mr. Emlyn Hooson QC, who later, as Liberal MP, led an inquiry into the allegations made by Norman Scott against the then leader Jeremy Thorpe. Hindley was represented by Mr. Godfrey Hailpern QC.
The verdicts were delivered on 6 May. The all male jury deliberated for only 2 hours and 14 minutes. Brady and Hindley had pleaded not guilty to the murders of Edward Evans (17), Lesley Ann Downey (10) and John Kilbride (12). Hindley also denied the charge of accessory in the case of John Kilbride. Brady was found guilty of all three murders, Hindley the first two but also of harbouring Brady in relation to the Kilbride murder. Each was sentenced to life imprisonment.
However, she also adds ‘there is no disguising the fact that a part of me was titillated: I wanted to know all the details, not solely because it was my job to do so, but because there was in them an element of repulsive stimulation’ (Hansford Johnson 1967:60). In these two statements it can be argued that she got to the heart of the way in which public fascination with serial killing focuses on the intersection between the ordinary and extraordinary. Peelo (2006:64) describes this as ‘the shock of ordinariness invaded by the brutal and corrupt’.In the galley for distinguished visitors, the women in flouncy hats struck a slightly incongruous note … the exhibits were on a large table packed in plastic bags, cardboard soap boxes. They looked very domestic. This might have been a stall at a jumble sale, with the vicar’s wife presiding. (Hansford Johnson 1967:69–70)
Once picked up by the Manchester Evening News the case became headline news with public interest in the case raised to a level where hundreds of people drove up to the Moors, some taking picnics, to observe the search, a bizarre incident captured by photographers, documented in the Manchester Evening News and described by one policeman present as ‘morbid curiosity at its worst. All we needed was a hot dog vendor’ (Lee 2010:246).The story just exploded. We had the world’s press coming to us; not just Britain but everywhere. New Zealand, America, Japan, Paris. Every night we went to the Queen’s Hotel in Hyde, where the police also congregated, to swap information. It was a colossal story. (Lee 2010:230)
The committal proceedings at Hyde Magistrates Court in December 1965 brought the world’s media and the case was established as headline news in the British media.
By the time of the trial the public were well versed in the shocking details of the case and their role as mediatised observers had been established. The trial was observed by over 150 journalists and five authors and 300 extra police officers were drafted to ensure public safety due to the large crowds which gathered outside each day (Bingham 2011). In this sense parallels can be drawn with the public spectacles of previous centuries; images of Madame Defarge knitting next to the guillotine, public hangings, both state sanctioned or vigilante led, or families taking a Sunday afternoon walk to observe the inmates of mental asylums all spring to mind and conjure up the atmosphere in which the trial took place . Machado and Santos (2009:146) state: ‘high profile mediatised criminal cases have the potential to linger in the public memory and become cultural references which may affect long-term public representation of crime and justice’. One of the key themes of this book is the way in which the crimes of Brady and Hindley have become a reference point, an ‘awful celebrity template’ (King and Cummins 2016) for the way in which serial killing is reported in the UK and presented for public consumption. The themes which emerge from a consideration of the trial will provide examples of this.
The 1960s as a period of rapid social change has been well documented (Marwick 1998; Sandbrook 2006; King 2013). The 1960s is a contested decade (King 2013) with competing discourses about levels of social and cultural change and the implications both for that and the following decades. Marwick (1998), for example, sees the 1960s as a site of cultural revolution and the place where unresolved debates about society, class, gender, race and sexuality began. In contrast, Sandbrook’s Never Had it to Good (2005) and White Heat (2006) have a key theme of continuity which runs counter to the social revolution discourse (King 2013:19). Together with Haggerty’s (2009) and Bauman’s (1989) work on modernity and serial killing, these competing discourses around the ordinary versus extraordinary social conditions of the period provide a context for the trial and the crimes under consideration here.
One factor which partly explains the public attention afforded to the case and the way in which it was reported was ‘the widespread suspicion that the accused were a product of the “permissive” mores of modern society’ (Bingham 2011:229). Hansford Johnson’s (1967) account is interesting in that it takes what would be termed, in modern parlance, a neoliberal perspective on the ‘permissive’ sixties leaning towards Marwick’s (1998) conceptualisation of the sixties as social revolution. The pornographic elements of Brady and Hindley’s activities, publicly revealed in the trial, lead her to cover what many would consider ‘the usual suspects’; a rise in pornography, lack of censorship, the rise of the permissive arts in the theatre, TV and cinema, birth control, changing attitudes to marriage and ‘Swinging London’ as famously depicted in a 1966 Time magazine article. This she conceptualises as ‘the Affectless State’ with Brady and Hindley as ‘victims of fallout’ (Hansford Johnson 1967:37).
In concluding her discussions she states, ‘… it is, to me, the purest self-deception to pretend that our Ugly Society played no part whatsoever in what happened on the housing estate at Hattersley, Cheshire’ (Hansford Johnson 1967:136).
One of her key arguments is that Brady’s well-publicised pornographic and fascist reading material had influenced his actions, appealing for a restriction on mass circulation of certain types of books, an argument that echoes the widely reported question posed by Mervyn Griffiths-Jones at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial of 1960, in which it was asked whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was one ‘that you would wish your servants to read?’ (Carr 2018:2). Hansford Johnson also directly attacked her friend, the novelist Anthony Burgess , for ‘indulging in aesthetic responses to literature while ignoring its effects in the real world’ (Carr 2018:2). Burgess responded in an article in the Spectator, in 1967, arguing that Brady had a predisposition to commit a crime and arguing the ‘reasonable catharsis’ role of literature and fantasy as a release valve, putting forward an anti-censorship case, arguing that ‘all novelists should be uneasy of the expression of illiberal instincts by the establishment’ (Carr 2018:3). Burgess was to fall victim himself to such illiberal instincts, upon moving to Malta in 1968 when his library was seized by the authorities on the grounds of subversive and blasphemous content (Carr 2018). In many ways, this exchange provides a focus for one of the key elements of the debate around the contested nature of the 1960s (Marwick 1998; King 2013) and the relationship between the arts and ‘the establishment’, and sees Brady and Hindley as providing a focus for this element via the work of Hansford Johnson (1967).
It is easy to dismiss her analysis as the product of a particular ideology, one that gained a higher profile in the Thatcherite 1980s, where the ills of modern urban society were blamed on the over-liberal policies and cultural products of the 1960s leading to a drawing back of state intervention and a rise in the notion of a return to individual responsibility. It is worth noting, though, that the identification of the societal and cultural structures which lead to serial killing has become a recognised area of the academic field of criminology (Wilson and Seaman 1991; Wilson 2009; Haggerty 2009).
In Chap. 6 which focuses on Brady and Hindley’s celebrity through notoriety, the idea of their crimes as being rooted in the modernity of the 1960s is discussed. Much of the evidence presented in court reflects this. Photographs, developed at home, of Lesley Ann Downey bound and gagged and of the murderers on the Moors standing on the locations of graves of the victims, receipts from a car hire firm which corresponded with the dates of the murders, part of a new business idea which brought the pleasures of the elite to the masses, and a home tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s torture, technology that, again, had only just become widely available; all of these artefacts provided vital evidence for conviction. In Hindley’s case, the fact that she had a driving licence and Brady didn’t and the fact that she hired the cars was crucial to the prosecution’s case. Again, these ordinary artefacts being put to shocking use disrupts the familiar and adds to public unease, and then outrage: ‘knowledge is warped, has been turned into something mocking and terrible. It is in these small ways that crime threatens society as much as the larger ways’ (Peelo 2006:165). Peelo (2006) cites investigating officer Peter Topping’s recollections, while interviewing Brady, of the shock of realising that he had hired a white Ford Anglia, the same vehicle used by Brady and Hindley in the murder of Pauline Reade, from the same car hire firm to take his young family on holiday and is struck by the two different uses of the same artefact.
Again, this event needs to be put into its 1960s context, a society still under the control of censorship, however hotly debated, a world before social media giving access to a variety of images which would not at this time have entered the public domain. In 1966, Zapruder’s moving images of the Kennedy assassination, for example, were still hidden from public view.in the course of murder trials, for centuries dreadful things have had to come to light, not only visually but mumbled by unwitting witnesses. Never before, however, has the modern phenomenon of preserved sound been put to such grisly use as was ‘the Moors tape’.
It has to be remembered that the defendants pleaded not guilty and, as Clark (2011) notes, had they pleaded guilty the photographs and tape recording may not have made it into the public domain. They are, however, both key in drawing attention to the ghoulish and sexual nature of the crimes and, in the case of Hindley, who initially denied being present when Lesley Ann Downey was tortured and murdered, a central element in proving her guilt as her voice could be heard on the tape. Goodman (1973) discusses the salacious nature of the reporting of the case and the fact that Manchester Evening News and The Times chose to publish a transcript of the tape. Clark (2011:11) argues that the power of these artefacts, the result of a democratisation of access to technology, is that ‘they provided a voyeuristic glimpse of real-life crime as it happened’. Of the photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, Sunday Mirror journalist, Paul Donavan, stated ‘the pictures scalded me and still haunt me now. I have never mentioned them to anyone: some nightmares one does not wish to share’ (Clark 2011:11). In Granada TV’s See No Evil (Menaul 2006) there is a powerful recreation of the scene where police officers first hear the tape recording and the impact that it has on them. An article in The Sun in 2017, under the headlines linked to the reporting of Brady’s death, reported ‘Echoes of Evil: Ex cop haunted by sick tape recording of Ian Brady’s youngest victim Lesley Ann Downey pleading for her life with Little Drummer Boy playing in the background’; ex Police Chief, John Stalker, states ‘nothing in criminal behaviour has penetrated my heart with quite the same paralysing intensity’ (Christie 2017:2). He goes on to state that the tune Little Drummer Boy which plays in the background still sends a chill down his spine and recalls the horror of hearing the recording for the first time. These artefacts are prime examples of shocking evidence which makes the public a mediated witness as Peelo (2006) has described. Clark (2011) also argues that the playing of the tape in court and the publication of the transcripts are key events in the construction of Hindley as an icon of evil and this is further explored in Chap. 7.there is a question where this piece of evidence should be heard in camera or not. There has been so much talk, that in my opinion we have no right to exclude the public. Anyone who wishes not to listen should leave now. During it I request complete silence. The Attorney-General will beforehand read out the transcript, at dictation speed. (Williams 1967:344)
It can also, perhaps, be argued that this somewhat bizarre and shocking event forms part of what King and Cummins (2016) have described as the ‘awful celebrity template’ laid down by the crimes and trial of Brady and Hindley and provides a good example of the symbiotic relationship between serial killers and the media as described by Haggerty (2009). The trial can certainly be seen as a media circus on one level, on another as a mediated event with the press playing a central role. It can also be seen as an event which pushes the boundaries of acceptability in terms of what kind of material was allowed to enter the public domain, paving the way for a pushing of boundaries of tabloid journalism.
The revelation of the deal only increased public outrage around the Smiths but, more importantly, the judge, Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson , questioned whether the situation represented ‘a gross interference with the course of justice’ (Bingham 2011:230) describing it, in his summing up, as an extraordinary arrangement. However, he decided that the arrangement had not altered Smith’s testimony but the event led to questions being raised in Parliament and the outcome was a Press Council ban on the payment of witnesses in advance of their testimony.I was hated for selling out to the News of the World but I didn’t set up the deal, although admittedly I went along with it. Dad and Uncle Bert threw me to the lions—until they climbed aboard the publicity bandwagon.
Bingham (2011) argues that this is a milestone event, made all the more pertinent since the closure of the News of the World in 2011, due to phone hacking allegations, where journalistic ethics once again came under the spotlight. The paper had a long history of reporting salacious crime and sex stories. The arrival of the new editor, Stafford Somerfield, in 1960 with a ‘more aggressive and intrusive style of journalism’ (Bingham 2011:233) brought the paper into conflict with the Press Council over the serialisation of the life story of Diana Dors, including descriptions of celebrity orgies held at her home, for which Dors was paid £36,000. In 1963, Christine Keeler was paid £23,000 for ‘the confessions of Christine’ as the Profumo scandal came to light (Bingham 2011). As the Moors Murders became national news, the paper moved to secure an exclusive from the key witness in ‘the trial of the century’ with the intention of following its policy of reporting the more macabre and titillating aspects of the case, a sharp contrast to the Daily Mirror, for example, which had a policy of non-sensationalised reporting of the trial (Bingham 2011). Once the witness payment had been revealed, this became part of the reporting of the trial with the public becoming mediated witnesses to debates about press ethics and the possible impact on the outcome of the case. In the end Smiths’ conversations with journalists from the News of the World were not used but the way in which the trial was reported conformed to the paper’s reputation for salacious detail. Bingham (2011:238) states: ‘the language of ‘peaks and sloughs’ betrayed the paper’s view that courtroom drama was entertainment for the masses’, an argument that has subsequently explored by the Academy’s interest in the true crime genre (Biressi 2001; Seltzer 2006). The newspaper was not charged over its ‘interference’ but what emerged was a debate about ‘chequebook journalism’ with the Government concluding that a Press Council ‘Declaration of Principle’ published on 27 November 1966, would suffice, thus going down the route of press self-regulation, a debate that would re-emerge over the coming years and particularly attract public attention around the phone hacking scandal of 2011.
Subsequently the weakness of the declaration has been exposed by witnesses continuing to be approached and offered financial gain in crimes and trials of a sexual nature, notably the Jeremy Thorpe case in 1979 and that of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe in 1981, another example of the narrative structure established by the reporting of the Moors Murderers (Cummins and King 2016).David and Maureen Smith were left to fend for themselves in a community bitter about the way they had exploited their circumstances for financial gain. Both were physically and verbally abused almost every time they left their house and spent years struggling to deal with the vicious legacy of the case.
The subsequent reporting of their deaths bears out this assessment of the longevity of their celebrity status. The context of child sex murder , the involvement of a woman, the debate about the permissive society and its impact and the recent abolition of the death penalty explains its newsworthiness. Jewkes (2004) has suggested a list of the criteria for news values for the new millennium and the case includes many of these: significance to a national audience, human interest, risk, as in ‘it could happen to us’, sexual violence and a female portrayed as a sexual predator, spectacle and graphic imagery, children as victims and a threat or disruption to the ‘British way of Life’. The trial itself provided a showcase, a stepping stone to what can be seen as Brady’s trajectory to a desired long-lasting fame, with performance as a central component.No one at the time could have predicted, however, the extent to which the case would continue to haunt the public imagination, and be played out in the pages of the popular newspapers in subsequent decades. A study of the Press in 1985 found that the ‘Moors Murderers’ featured more prominently than all other ‘sex criminals’ in custody put together. (Bingham 2011:229)
Their composed nature during the playing of the tape was also noted as was their seeming indifference to what was going on around them throughout the trial, passing notes to each other and to their solicitors, exchanging words and glances, sucking sweets. The illegal photographs taken by Paris Match and reproduced in Lee’s One of Your Own (Lee 2010) show them looking relaxed. In one, Hindley points towards her solicitor as Brady leans in, in the second they seem preoccupied, looking down at the papers they kept to hand and occasionally made notes on throughout the proceedings. Emlyn Williams can be seen seated behind.She’s moody, he resigned. And in court the look will never change: continuously they will resemble a couple sitting in a register office who have come to be married, are being subjected to endless delay and are keeping their tempers with dignity. (Williams 1967:364)
Hindley demonstrates this awareness of presentation of self (Goffman 1967) in a letter written to her mother before the trial: ‘Dear mam, as you know the trial begins three weeks on Tuesday … could you bring me a bottle of make-up, it’s Pond’s Angel Face, shade Golden Rose. If you can’t get Golden Rose, Tawny will do’ (Lee 2010:219).How she looked became an obsession; for many the concept of evil had a face and walked into a courtroom. Her freshly bleached blonde hair was tinted lilac and she wore her make-up like a mask.
She then goes on to describe her outfit and hairstyle in some detail. The language is florid and journalistic and the reference points a little obvious, but the detail with the minutiae of appearance is reminiscent of modern day celebrity focused magazines or the reporting of Royalty.he is a cross between Joseph Goebbels and a bird … He is dressed in a grey suit, a natty white handkerchief in his breast pocket. On the whole he looks ordinary. Myra Hindley does not … she could have served a nineteenth century Academy painter as a model for Clytemnestra: but sometimes she looks more terrible, like one of Fuesli’ nightmare women drawn giant sized, elaborately coiffed.
The prosecution evidence at the trial focused on Hindley as sexually aggressive, attempting to sexualise all of her relationships and her shared interest in pornography with Brady. However, in his summing up, the judge, while not denying or playing down Hindley’s involvement in the murders, emphasises Hindley’s handmaiden role as Brady’s mistress.the scope for discretion allows the summing up to be used to shape up or undermine the narratives presented to the court and that in the case of women on trial, particularly for murder, the complexity of gendered narratives of work throughout the trial are open to examination and interpretation.
This, perhaps, should not be surprising, given that in 1966 challenges to the idea of gender norms were in their infancy and only beginning to make their way into the public domain (Ehrenreich 1983). Thus the Svengali-like quality of Brady’s dominance over Hindley, a narrative which had been advanced by her defence lawyers, emerged as a dominant discourse in the summing up of the trial. This was seen as further evidence to those who, at the time and subsequently, attempted to understand the offences in terms of Brady and Hindley’s relationship and attribute different levels of guilt. This debate increased in importance, it can be argued, over subsequent years in the context of Hindley’s quest for parole.Myra Hindley’s motives lay not in her perverse sexuality but in her (feminine) devotion to Brady. Rather than enduring the prosecution’s construction of Hindley’s sexuality the judge referred to the traditional binary construction of male and female. (Winter 2002:356)
This is well illustrated by the fact that in the 1966 General Election, Sidney Silverman , whose backbench bill had been responsible for the abolition of hanging, was challenged in his Nelson and Colne constituency by Lesley Ann Downey’s uncle, Patrick Downey, who stood on a pro-hanging platform and received 14 per cent of the vote, with public and media interest obviously high. The following 20 years saw a series of attempts to reintroduce capital punishment with Brady and Hindley ‘regularly front and centre of every press and parliamentary campaign to bring back the rope’ (Kettle 2017:17). Hindley, therefore, narrowly avoided inheriting the title of the last woman to be hanged in Britain from Ruth Ellis.the importance of the intimacy between the Moors Murders and the abolition of the death penalty is hard to overstate. Even before the trial, the killings become the focus of a campaign to bring back hanging. (Kettle 2017:17)
This view seems to have been widely shared as a mediated response because the verdict unfolded in the public domain; and the fact that they avoided a biblical ‘eye for an eye’ reckoning is a theme which re-emerged throughout the news cycle of the following 50 plus years.when the Moors trial ended we did feel a lack of catharsis. Something violent should have happened to put an end to violence. Throughout we were missing the Shadow of the rope (italics in original). The end was, in fact, unaesthetic.
Reporting on the sentencing at the end of the trial Whiteley (1966:1) writes:In spite of its outrageous material coupled with sumptuous formality, this ‘ sensational trial’ seemed to have a hollow centre where the accused should have been. It was almost as though they were being tried by proxy, ghostly presences in an empty dock, as dead as their victims on the Moors. (Hansford Johnson 1967:74–75)
Brady and Hindley’s seeming lack of remorse, their self-control and self-awareness in their playing out of their celebrity status and the atmosphere of a passive acceptance of events at the trial contributed to this seeming public disgruntlement and, perhaps, provides some explanation as to why their life sentences came to mean actual life sentences.the judge told Brady he would pass the only sentence the law now allowed. Brady who seemed unmoved, walked down the dock steps flanked by two prison officers. Hindley left the dock fully composed.
In passing judgment on Hindley’s 1997, judicial review application the Lord Chief Justice stated: ‘these crimes, and the ensuing trial, received intense publicity, and aroused deep public enmity towards Brady and the Applicant’ (Schone 2000:277). Schone (2000) regards the social context of the crimes which are reflected in this statement as being key to Hindley’s inability to gain parole (Brady never made an application), citing press coverage, particularly the ‘evil monster’ discourse, the constant reappearance of ‘that’ photograph of Hindley, cultural artefacts such as the Smiths’ Suffer Little Children (Morrissey and Marr 1984), the handprint painting controversy and the volume of websites and chat pages devoted to the crimes and trial, all of which are key themes of this book. While other high profile cases, such as that of the killers of Jamie Bulger , have moved the debate on and resulted in a clarification around sentencing, significantly resulting in the whole life tariff being established in 1994, with review being dependent on ‘the requirements of retribution and deterrence’ (Schone 2000:281). Hindley’s lawyers only learned of her tariff at this point, being told that in July 1990 a decision to detain her for life had been taken following a 1985 decision to set her tariff ‘initially’ at 30 years. It can be argued then that Hindley’s case is unique in British law and provides a stark example of the fallout of mediatised murder (Peelo 2006), and represents public vengeance disguised as a regard for prisoner safety.no way, can they let them out. If they do I’ll be going in because she’ll be dead … I will willingly do that woman in and take my punishment.
Thus, one outcome of the trial has been a contribution to ongoing debates about the law, in particular, the meaning of the life sentences, but more pertinently, to a book on the legacy of the Moors Murders, it has raised questions about the role of the media in influencing and reflecting public opinion around a series of events, shocking both at the time and in retrospect (Wilson et al. 2010; Peelo 2006; Bingham 2011), and the role of mob rule and the concept of public vengeance and retribution. The force feeding of Brady could be seen as another example; the suffragettes were force fed in what has been interpreted by some as vengeance for gender transgression (Atkinson 2017). These debates have been heightened by the advent of social media and present day ‘folk devils’ (Cohen 1972:2), ranging from politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair to terrorists, refugees, asylum seekers and paedophiles.
This chapter has provided a discussion of the cultural legacy of Brady and Hindley’s trial and its aftermath in which the public are still entangled. The trial as spectacle provides a prime example of the ‘symbiotic relationship’ (Haggerty 2009:174) between the media and serial killers. The reporting of the trial has subsequently influenced the reporting of similar events involving serial killers (Cummins and King 2016). It also provides a key example of mediatised murder (Greer 2004) and an early example of the intrusion of chequebook journalism. Additional themes have been explored; the conduct of the trial proceedings, particularly the playing of the tape recording in court and the key role of advancing modernity as the decisive factor to the verdict, the contested nature of the 1960s as context and the trial as a showcase for Brady and Hindley’s burgeoning notorious celebrity status are all important elements of the legacy.
The trial provides a sharp focus for debates about gender and crime which have emerged over the subsequent years with discourses around women who kill—the monstrous feminine and the male Svengali still under discussion. The shadow of the rope over the trial was important in re-politicising the debate around the death penalty with Brady and Hindley as a constant reference point. The outcome of the trial fed into an ongoing debate about life sentencing and suitability for parole which continued up to and beyond Hindley’s death in 2002. It is interesting to note, then, that while they have always been seen, particularly in the UK, as a yardstick of evil and monstrosity, this chapter has identified a number of areas of cultural, social and legal domains for which their case also provides a yardstick.