The modern notion of celebrity is fluid enough as a category to include sports stars, actors, politicians and serial killers. This chapter will examine serial killer as celebrity exploring the way that Brady and Hindley became the subject of such media scrutiny. The chapter will consider the ambiguous nature of the relationship between killers and celebrity culture.
In Frank Capra’s cult classic It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra 1946) the main protagonist, George Bailey, is visited by an angel sent down to earth to stop him from committing suicide. The angel, Clarence, sets out to show George all of the lives he has touched, his positive influence on people and the events that have happened because of his existence. This chapter will explore the way in which Brady and Hindley, through their own dark celebrity, impacted on the lives of many others, through visiting unwanted celebrity on their own families and the families of their victims and spawning a number of cultural artefacts ‘inspired’ by their actions and existence, a tangled web of celebrity as legacy. It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra 1946) has a happy ending in which George comes to realise that his wonderful life has been a force for good. Here, it is argued, that Brady and Hindley’s existence had the opposite effect, a kind of George Bailey ‘in reverse’ effect, and, through their actions, changed and disrupted many lives. Using the approach of bricolage the chapter will draw together academic work and products of the media and entertainment industry to examine this legacy.
Penfold-Mounce (2009:4) talks of ‘the joy of transgression’ drawing attention to the work of Ferrell (1998) and Katz (1988) in relation to the ways in which transgressive criminality leads to the celebrification of those who dare to cross boundaries. Ferrell (1998:38) states: ‘adrenaline and excitement, terror and pleasure seem to flow not just through the experience of criminality … but through the many capillaries connecting crime, crime victimisation and criminal justice’, while Katz (1988) suggests that crime is seductive.the figure of notoriety possesses colour, instant cache and may even in some circles be invested with heroism for daring to release the emotions of blocked aggression and sexuality that civilised society seeks to repress. (Rojek 2001:15)
This is interesting here in that, as will be explored within the chapter, this seems to describe the kind of celebrity sought by Brady, a celebrity based on ‘transgression, deviance and immortality’ (Rojek 2001:31). However, while Brady and Hindley’s long-term celebrity status has been based on public revulsion, the contrast with the Krays is stark. Despite being notorious gangland torturers and killers, they still seem to be regarded, 50 years on, with a kind of public benevolence. They have been celebrated in two feature films, of which the more recent Legend (Helgeland 2015) focuses on the style and glamour aspect of their 1960s working class hero celebrity status.
Serial killing, then, is shaped by cultural and institutional factors. Drawing on Bauman’s (1989) work on the Holocaust, Haggerty (2009) presents six preconditions for serial killings, namely: the mass media and use of celebrity culture; a society of strangers; a means/end rationality that is largely divorced from value considerations; cultural frameworks of designation; opportunity structures for victim’s action; the notion that society can be engineered.Serial killing is patterned in modernity’s own self image, modernity understood as a long term historical process … entailing a series of destructive changes in the nature of science, commence (the rise of capitalism), urbanism, the mass media and personal identity.
Here the focus is on the media and celebrity status in relation to the crimes of Brady and Hindley but the other preconditions, relevant to an understanding of the way in which the crimes were committed, will also be referenced. Gibson (2006) has argued that serial killing is predominantly a media event and the emergent concept of mediatised murder (Greer 2004) explores the way in which the public, via the mass media, became intimately involved with the details of serial killing, in terms of details of the crimes and perpetrators producing a celebrity culture around serial killing, reflecting Rojek’s (2001) notion of celebrity achieved through notoriety. The Moors Murders provide, it is argued, the perfect illustration of the symbiotic relationship between media and serial killers (Haggerty 2009) and provided the UK media with a template for the reporting of serial killing.
Gordon Burn, whose output includes Alma Cogan (1991), which features a narrative which imagines the 1950s star living a post-fame existence in a drunken haze rather than dying in the 1960s, paralleled with a narrative on the Moors killings, has stated that ‘Almost everything I have written … has been about celebrity, and how for most people celebrity is a kind of death’ (Addley 2008:1). According to Burn ‘the lustre of the tawdry is central to the appeal of celebrity culture’ (Lea 2012:95). Alma Cogan (1991) is, then, a text which draws on the celebrity of Hindley in particular, with the plot based on what Tait (2011:1) describes as ‘a psychic twinning between the anodyne 1950s pop singer … and Myra Hindley’. Lea (2014:769) argues ‘both Hindley and Cogan inhabit the same space of 1960s’ mass public consciousness, equal in their contribution to the contemporary structure of feeling but unequal in the seriousness of their social reverberation’.
The public’s obsession with Brady and Hindley is demonstrated in one of the final scenes of the novel where Cogan visits an obsessive fan and collector of celebrity memorabilia. Among his prize possessions are a cassette recording of Hindley and Brady torturing Lesley Ann Downey with Cogan’s Little Drummer Boy playing in the background. Alma Cogan is a disturbing novel that explores the current obsession and interest in the perpetrators of violent crime, the way the media seeks to exploit the suffering of the victims of these events and the ways in which the perpetrators become celebrities with all the media interest that entails. It also explores the entangled relationship between the media, crime and killers. This theme is echoed in the work of Peace. Both writers force the reader to contemplate fundamental questions about the nature of violence. In so doing, they shift the disciplinary gaze (Lea 2014) from the individual or individuals who have committed these acts to those whose lives have been shattered by the loss of a loved one in such dreadful circumstances. In addition, Burn unpicks the formulaic media reporting of these events and the way that there is a meta-narrative that all but the families know will end in the finding of body and an arrest.
The cover of first paperback edition of Alma Cogan was an Andy Warhol screen print version of this image. The photograph has been reproduced over and over again in the 53 years since it was taken at Hyde Police Station. In the novel, Alma sees it on a TV report of Brady and Hindley’s return to the Moors. Burn makes the reader question the ways, in which this image has been essentially drained of its real meaning and context.She was shown into a tiled cell. At one end stood an old-fashioned modern camera on a tripod. Lights glared down from the ceiling. The photographer told her where to stand and, then draped a black cloth over his head and adjusted the focus of the lens. The lights flashed and an image of unparalleled British female notoriety was made. (Lee 2010:228)
The myriad of images of Princess Diana which accompanied reports of her death, from the naïve Sloane Ranger for the beautiful but troubled Princess, can be read in the same way; an image of beauty, a force for good in the world. The iconic image of Hindley has the complete opposite impact. The image of Hindley’s face has come to represent the opposite, again the ‘in reverse’ effect. If, as Barthes (2007) argues the beauty of humanity can be read through the face of one woman then what is read through ‘that’ photograph of Hindley is the polar opposite.Garbo still belongs to that moment when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image. (Barthes 2007:261)
Kemp (1998) explores this contrast in more depth in a discussion of public reaction to and use of photographs of Princess Diana in the days following her death to public reaction to Marcus Harvey’s infamous portrait of Myra Hindley (discussed further in Chap. 7). She argues that ‘pictures of Diana and Myra reveal the opposing extremes of our reaction to pictures of faces’ (Kemp 1998:46).
Both associated in some way with children, one for good, one for evil, ‘images of these women’s images have so secured themselves into the collective retina to become modern icons’ (Kemp 1998:46). Indeed, the pictures of Diana, placed among the flowers surrounding the London palaces in the period of mourning following her death, she argues ‘performed the ancient office of Saint’s life or icon … a kind of secular beautification’ (Kemp 1998:45). In contrast, ‘that’ photograph of Hindley, which forms the basis of Harvey’s work, has come to represent the opposite; a hard faced evil. The power of the image of the face cannot be denied and is central to the celebrity of both.
Their status as an enduring celebrity couple is based on a range of factors. Their enduring image based on the ever-present mugshots taken at Hyde Police Station in 1965 is one key factor. As previously discussed, those pictures would not be out of place in David Bailey’s Box of Pinups (Bailey 1965) in the middle of a decade when ‘image’ had become a byword for access to celebrity status (Sandbrook 2006). In a recent Channel Five documentary Brady is described as ‘looking like a pop star of the day’ (Flitcroft 2017) while discussion of Hindley’s image often referenced Dusty Springfield in terms of her beehive/eye shadow combination. Other pictures of the couple show an attention to style and appearance. In some they look strangely ahead of their time, as if they are heading for Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub in the mid-1980s. Williams (1967) notes their impeccably clean and pressed look on each day of the trial. He also describes Hindley as ‘building up an image’ (Williams 1967:363) as part of her interrogation process.the relationship was not based on the delusional concept of folie á deux but as a conscious/subconscious emotional and psychological affinity. She regarded periodic homicides as rituals … marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer. (Lee 2010:108–109)
The image, though, is not rooted in celebrity for celebrities’ sake but rather celebrity based on notoriety (Rojek 2001). Brady’s obsession with the work of the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler has been well documented (Harrison 1987; Lee 2010; Smith and Lee 2011). In Witness (Smith and Lee 2011) Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, describes Brady’s world view as ‘a world where people are worthless maggots and morons, where human life is less important than swatting a fly’ (Smith and Lee 2011:139).
Smith (Smith and Lee 2011:139) goes on to describe Brady as ‘searching for the ultimate kick’ and, as is now obvious, this was focused on ideas gleaned from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky 2003) in which the main character Raskolvnikov rationalises murder on the grounds that man has the ‘inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles’ (Dostoevsky 2003:77). Nietzsche’s (2014:22) notion of human beings being ‘attracted and stimulated by the excitement of challenging the norm of stepping into forbidden territory like a solitary explorer, consciously thirsty to experience that which the majority have not and dare not’ also provided a stimulus. The idea of superhuman status above the world of the ‘maggots’ was obviously influenced by his interest in Nazism (he and Hindley would spend evenings in listening to Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches) (Lee 2010).
The way to achieve this, it seemed to Brady, was to commit the perfect crime. Brady was interested, perhaps obsessed, with the Leopold and Loeb case. In 1924 two wealthy Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche, abducted and killed a 14-year-old boy, meticulously planning the perfect crime, burning theirs and their victim’s clothes and cleaning the vehicle that they had used to abduct the boy. However, Leopold’s glasses were found at the scene. Brady had accessed the case via the film Compulsion (1959) [the case also provided the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948)] which opens with the line ‘to the perfect crime’. Brady’s favourite actor Orsen Welles plays defence attorney Clarence Darrow in the film. In the real-life case Darrow had pleaded for the defendants to be spared the death sentence on the grounds that they had engaged in the murder as a philosophical exercise. One commentator noted that what amazed most in the case was that the hero killers met and fitted each other’s needs ‘like a jigsaw puzzle’ (Lee 2010:100). Brady, like Leopold and Loeb, saw the key to success as meticulous planning and a willing accomplice.
Detective Peter Topping describes Hindley’s interrogation and eventual confession as ‘a great performance rather than a genuine confession’ (Ritchie 1988:202–203). Those who observed and wrote about the trial see their actions as performance and a self-conscious attempt to maintain image and celebrity status (Hansford Johnson 1967; Williams 1967) and this was further enhanced by the publication of an illegally taken photograph of them in the dock, taken by a Paris Match photographer (Williams 1967). While Brady can be seen as the architect of their eventual status as ‘Britain’s most notorious serial killers’ (Flitcroft 2017), it is Hindley’s image as the face of evil (Clark 2011) that seems to have endured in the public imagination and, it can be argued, as the face of their enduring celebrity. In Chap. 7, the idea of the monstrous femininity and Hindley’s role in the crimes being seen as somehow worse, because she was a woman, is discussed in more depth. It is worth noting here, though, that cultural legacy products ranging from factual accounts, such as Carol Ann Lee’s One of Your Own (Lee 2010) or works of fiction such as Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan (Burn 1991), Jean Rafferty’s Myra Beyond Saddleworth (Rafferty 2012) and Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer (Thomson 2007) all feature pictures of Hindley on the cover. Hindley’s high profile campaigns for parole in the 1980s and 1990s means that it was her face which featured in newspaper coverage and her celebrity status which was predominant in the public domain, a manifestation of a disturbance of the symbolic order which highlights the limits of the law (Lea 2014). Hindley’s comment in an early letter to Brady following their imprisonment also suggests that, even at that stage, she was conscious of their celebrity status and the significance of their ‘nickname’, writing ‘I didn’t murder any Moors, did you?’ (Lee 2010:285).How did it feel as it snapped around your wrist, Ian? Did the curtain fall slowly or did the entire stage disintegrate beneath you? (Smith and Lee 2011:28)
The Smiths’ Suffer Little Children (Morrissey and Marr 1984) is an interesting example of a cultural product inspired by the legacy of the Moors Murders. Released as the B side of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (Morrissey and Marr 1984) in 1984, 18 years after Brady and Hindley’s conviction, it caused controversy because of the mention of three of the victims by name, with the Manchester Evening News reporting that relatives were unhappy with the lyrics. The cover photo of ‘Spend Spend Spend’ pools winner, Viv Nicholson, bleached blonde in an unidentified but clearly Northern setting provided a reference to Hindley (Vincent 2017). Sensibilities around the case were still running high in Manchester with Hindley’s ongoing parole debate still part of the news cycle and victims’ mothers, Ann West and Winnie Johnson, featuring frequently in the local press. The lyrics were inspired by and used quotes from Emlyn Williams’ Beyond Belief (1967) and it has been suggested that The Smiths’ name referred to David and Maureen Smith. Post controversy, Morrissey established a friendship with Ann West, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother (Vincent 2017).
A montage to accompany the track, posted on YouTube in 2011 by David Lewin, is worth considering here as it provides visual representation of many of the themes covered in this chapter and will be used as a framework in which to discuss those upon whom unwanted celebrity was visited as a result of the crimes, the George Bailey in reverse effect. The opening shots of the Moors and of Manchester, which accompany the opening lyrics ‘over the Moors, take me to the Moors’ and the song’s refrain ‘Oh Manchester, so much to answer for’ are an illustration of King and Cummins’ (2013) concept of lieux d’horreur, places which have become imbued with evil due to the events that have taken place there.
Granada TV’s See No Evil (Menaul 2006) in which the Moors and the urban settings of Manchester, Gorton, in particular, are foregrounded as sites of celebrity, is a dramatisation of Brady and Hindley’s crimes, trial and conviction made in 2006 by Granada TV in the UK. Researchers worked for two years with the families of the victims, who were supportive of the project. Brady, however, wrote a letter to Granada TV to try and block the drama, stating ‘your profit motivated drama ignores the effects on the victims’ (Anon 2006:1). It is a text which, perhaps, represents the antithesis of the ideas addressed by Nora (1989) and Rejinders (2010). Lieux de memoire (Nora 1989), with its focus on space as a place for remembering specific locations with the horrors of the past removed in order to reclaim a stained history and lieux d’imagination (Rejinders 2010), with its emphasis on space as physical point of reference for an imagined world. Both draw on Dyer’s (1993) concept of utopian pleasures achieved via consumption of particular texts. In the work of Nora (1989) and Rejinders (2010) place is read as a pleasurable text. By contrast, See No Evil (2006) is a good example of the TV crime drama as a dystopian world (Bolton 2005). Drawing on the work of Nora (1989) and Rejinders (2010), King and Cummins’ (2013) concept of lieux d’horreur, encompassing a relationship between the monstrous and geographic location, is well illustrated by the role of the Moors in See No Evil (Menaul 2006). The Moors, wild, bleak, unforgiving and holding terrible secrets have long been a key feature of the Gothic terror narrative of the reporting of the case. While See No Evil (Menaul 2006) uses the images of the Moors to create atmosphere and places a visual emphasis on the lieux d’horreur (King and Cummins 2013), it also reveals the importance of the role of the Moors in Brady and Hindley’s relationship and their centrality to the eventual solving of the case.
The film opens with a shot of the Moors, wild, dark, yet beautiful and the sound of a howling wind. The Moors are thus foregrounded, even before the narrative of the film begins. Four captions appear over this backdrop: This is a True Story; Some scenes have been created for the purposes of dramatisation but what follows is based on extensive research; Between 1963 and 1965 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murdered at least five young people; they buried four of them on the Moors.
These captions function to establish the drama as based on fact, the Moors again foregrounded in the final caption. By contrast, the film then cuts to early 1960s Gorton in Manchester, smoking chimneys and a rock and roll soundtrack representing a vibrant urban environment. The first person to appear is Hindley’s sister, Maureen, pushing her baby daughter in a pram on the way to visit Myra at her workplace. As with the Gothic Moors imagery, for viewers with prior knowledge of the story, the next scene in which Hindley holds the baby and Brady appears will draw attention to these events as part of mediatised murder (Greer 2004) while for others it provides a piece in a jigsaw which will be completed as the story unfolds. Both the opening shots of the Moors and the smoking chimneys and cobbled streets of Gorton establish the film as a Northern text. Although set on the other side of the Pennines, David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, filmed as the Red Riding Trilogy in 2009 (Jarrold 2009; Marsh 2009; Tucker 2009) also uses the Moors Murders (and the Moors) as a reference point in creating a story of violence, darkness and evil, Yorkshire Noir (King and Cummins 2013) as it has been termed. The first half of the film is structured around the four main protagonists gathering together in an urban space and then heading out to the Moors and focuses on the eventual entangling of their relationships. In the first of such scenes, set in Brady and Hindley’s house, Maxine Peake appears in a black dress with bleached blonde hair, looking strikingly similar to the ‘classic’ Hindley image which has become the epitome of evil (Rafferty 2012). Brady refers to her as Hessy (a reference to classical pianist Myra Hess but her ‘jawohl’ responses suggest something darker, linked to Brady’s obsession with Nazi atrocities) while he is ‘Neddy’ (a reference to the Goon Show, popular on UK radio at that time). His strangeness is illustrated by a long diatribe on the theme of ‘does a dog have a soul?’ and we learn of his interest in the Marquis de Sade, something which he eventually encourages David Smith to explore.
They then adjourn to Brady’s beloved Moors—‘I don’t get it’, says David Smith of his obsession with the place. ‘This place owns my soul’ he tells him. Again there are shots of rustling grass, a howling wind and an atmosphere of darkness and secrecy. Brady takes a picture of Hindley smoking, sitting on a rock. Again, some viewers will know that this s a photograph of a grave, intertexts about the text having been available for nearly 50 years. Brady dances shirtless. Other viewers will be unsure as to why the Moors own Brady’s soul at this point but, as the plot unfolds, it transpires that Pauline Reade, a girl who lived near to Brady and Hindley in Gorton has been missing for two years and the next visit to the Moors takes place in Myra’s Mini Traveller; ‘you never know when you might need the extra baggage capacity’, she tells them.
The Moors as lieux d’horreur (King and Cummins 2013) also provide the central clues to the case. In searching Brady and Hindley’s house, the police find pictures of the Moors and the now infamous pictures of Hindley sitting on and looking down at what are possibly graves and, as Smith recounts their trips to the Moors to the detectives, they realise that Hindley drives and Brady does not, thus implicating her in the movement of bodies. The officer leading the investigation takes David Smith up to the Moors to try and identify the places where the photographs were taken. ‘You don’t really think there are bodies up here?’ asks Smith.
The discovery of a suitcase in a left luggage locker containing pictures and audio tapes of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey plus further pictures of Brady and Hindley on the Moors result in a number of scenes in which officers and volunteers scour the Moors using long sticks to poke the ground looking for human remains, initially searching in the wrong place until further photographs help the police to identify Saddleworth Moor as the possible burial site. These are iconic images recreated for the TV drama from news footage and pictures from the 1960s, events referenced in The Beatles’ A Day in the Life (Lennon and McCartney 1967) as Four Thousand Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. These scenes and those which follow documenting the discovery of the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride draw attention to the Moors as a bleak environment and the howling wind creating an atmosphere of darkness and death.
The choice of cast for See No Evil (Menaul 2006) similarly reflects the Northern-ness of the text. Sean Harris plays Brady, and also appeared in the cast of Red Riding (Jarrold et al. 2009) and prior to that Ian Curtis, as the dark and troubled lead singer of Manchester band Joy Division in Michael Winterbottom’s (2002) 24 Hour Party People. Hindley is played by Maxine Peake, fresh from Manchester urban drama Shameless (Abbot 2004–2013), Joanne Froggat as Maureen, previously known for her work on long running Granada soap Coronation Street (Warren 1960–present day) and Matthew McNulty as David Smith: pre See No Evil (Menaul 2006) work includes Ken Loach’s Manchester based Looking for Eric (Loach 2009) and after this he has appeared as a flawed Northern hero Joe Lampton in a TV remake, opposite Maxine Peake, of John Braine’s Room at the Top (Braine 1957). The drama itself and the use of current day ‘celebrity’ actors to play the characters in the film, then represent further celebrification of Brady and Hindley, 50 years on from their crimes.
Following the initial shots of the Moors, Lewin’s YouTube montage continues with a picture of Lesley Ann Downey accompanying the lyric, ‘Lesley Ann with your pretty white beads’, followed by John Kilbride ‘oh John you’ll never be a man and you’ll never see your home again’. The use of pictures of the child victims, frozen in time has been used in much media coverage of the case, innocence and evil juxtaposed. A picture of teenage victim, Edward Evans, then appears: ‘Edward see those alluring lights, tonight will be your very last night’. The next picture is of Winnie Johnson, with a picture of son Keith Bennett standing on the Moors: ‘a woman said I know my son is dead, his sacred head. I’ll never rest my hands on’; the religious overtones of the song’s title reflected in the lyric, the picture drawing on the search for Keith narrative, the only one of the known victims not to be found. The later ‘find me, find me’ lyric, also accompanied by a picture of Keith Bennett also references this and of the discovery of Lesley Ann Downey’s body on the Moors, the dramatic accounts of which have an arm protruding from the ground as if to say ‘find me, find me’ (Williams 1967; Lee 2010).
Those touched by Brady and Hindley’s crimes obviously include the parents and siblings of the victims. In his works on celebrity and death, Gordon Burn has coined the term para-celebrity (Addley 2008) to describe those have become celebrities via association and this term seems to be a perfect fit for those touched by the crimes of Brady and Hindley. As previously stated both Winne Johnson and Ann West retained a form of celebrity status throughout their lives, particularly through regular appearances in the Manchester Evening News. West was frequently interviewed in relation to Hindley’s applications for parole, often repeating the ‘I will kill her’ phrase which she had stuck to since the trial in 1966. She also published an account of her experiences in 1989 (West 1989). Winnie Johnson was always approached by journalists whenever further attempts to locate Keith Bennett’s body took place, providing a chance for the media to draw attention to the crimes once again.
Others, both relatives of victims and those self-identified as potential near-miss victims, have also been drawn into Brady and Hindley’s celebrity web, touched by and suffering from their proximity to the killers. Channel Five’s The Moors Murderers left me for dead (Flitcroft 2017) is an interesting legacy product which provides a good illustration. The one-hour documentary brings together John Kilbride’s brother, Terry Kilbride, Bernard King, a witness to the abduction of Lesley Ann Downey and David Gray and Tommy Rhattigan, both of whom claim to have been ‘near-misses’ as victims. Rhattigan’s celebrity status has resulted from a number of TV appearances linked to the publication of a book in which he recounts escaping from a house where he had been taken by Brady and Hindley (Rhattigan 2017). Rhattigan and Gray are the most high profile of ‘near-miss’ victims. Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer (Thomson 2007), features an old school friend of the novel’s main protagonist who reveals in a chance meeting years after the event, that he was a ‘near-miss’ victim. The character obviously references Rhattigan and others and the protagonist questions whether he has made the story up. The author goes on to question whether it is real survivor guilt or a feature of the impact of the crimes on a local community, part of the ‘it could be us’ syndrome which Jewkes (2004) has discussed in relation to the way in which the media handles the reporting of serial killing.
The documentary also features Lesley Ann Downey’s brother, Terry West, who was too ill to accompany her to the fair from which she was abducted in 1964. Terry West also suffered a further tragedy related to the case in 2001 when his brother, Tommy West, and his eight-year-old daughter, Kimberley, were killed in a fire at their home by Caz Telfor, a woman obsessed by the Moors Murders. A report on the incident in the Independent in 2001 included a quote from Winnie Johnson ‘it’s hard to believe so much tragedy can strike one family’. The stated aim of the documentary is to bring the participants together ‘to share experiences and try and heal … after 50 years of suffering and guilt’ and states that they are ‘meeting to see if they can lay the past to rest’. Despite its tabloid approach, beginning as it does with a redocumenting of the exploits of ‘Britain’s most infamous serial killer couple’, it is an interesting document in that it pulls together, via individual interviews, a number of themes which feature in this book; the nature of evil, the contested Svengali-like influence of Brady on Hindley, Hindley as woman, the long-term impact on Manchester and the ever-present shadows of the Moors that surround it.
The second half of the piece brings together the participants in what could be described as a Jeremy Kyle-like attempt at resolution but the pain, suffering and impact on their lives are apparent, statements such as ‘a trauma that can never be dealt with’, ‘anger wound’ and ‘it wrecked our lives’ illustrate the impact of the Moors Murders.
It can be argued that the documentary is a cultural legacy product dreamed up by TV executives with the same approach as the journalist in Gordon Burn’s novel Fullalove (1995), the anti-hero of the novel who carries a child’s teddy bear around to photograph at scenes of carnage for added pathos or to start the modern floral tribute that is a feature of the post-Diana world. Interestingly, he began to work on the novel whilst covering the trial of Rosemary West. Writing his book about the Wests, left Burn in a state of psychological exhaustion, drained by the material he had confronted. The documentary does provide interesting insights into the George Bailey in reverse effect of Brady and Hindley and the way in which para-celebrity is formed.
Other pictures in the Lewin montage which accompanies Suffer Little Children (Morrissey and Marr 1984) feature Brady and Hindley in ‘ordinary’ situations, drinking, relaxing at home or linked to their ‘extraordinary’ activities on the Moors. The last one is accompanied by the lyric ‘whatever he has done, I have done’ a direct quote from Hindley’s initial interrogation (Lee 2010) and restated at the trial (Williams 1967).
The longevity of the public memory of Brady and Hindley’s crimes is foregrounded in a montage of all five known victims with the accompanying lyric ‘we will be right by your side, until the day you die, this is no easy ride’ a theme explored in other chapters of this collection. Similarly ‘we will haunt you when you laugh’ is accompanied by a picture of David Smith, initially regarded by police and public as the third Moors murderer (Lee 2010; Smith and Lee 2011) while the lyric ‘you will sleep but you will never dream’ features a picture of Hindley and Brady with Maureen Smith, David’s wife and Myra’s sister.
David Smith’s journey to unwanted celebrity status begins with the incident described where he became an unwitting witness to Brady and Hindley’s final murder, that of Edward Evans at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley on the night of 6 October 1965. His initial celebrity status was predicated on his possible involvement in the murder of Evans, given that he was present and helped to clear up afterwards. Smith’s rationale for this, as stated to the police in his initial interviews with the police, was that he was afraid to leave and that if he didn’t do as he was told, he may have become the next victim. However, as part of her initial questioning, Hindley implied that Smith had killed Evans and also been involved in the murder of Lesley Ann Downey, stating that Smith had brought her to the house where she was tortured, also claiming that Smith had taken her away from the house afterwards still alive (Lee 2010). This led to a conceptualisation of Smith as ‘the third Moors murderer’ and as word got out to the public that Hindley’s brother-in-law was also being questioned and, this initially, became his enforced celebrity status. This kind of epithet is a well-known part of media reporting (see Kim Philby as ‘the third man’, George Best as ‘the fifth Beatle’ etc.).
According to Smith (Smith and Lee 2011) it was Joe Mounsey, the detective who had led the initial investigation into the disappearance of John Kilbride, who finally believed him and the other detectives soon followed suit (Lee 2010). Smith then became the chief prosecution witness at the remand and committal hearings in Hyde in 1965 and then at the trial at Chester Assizes in 1966. However, by that time, his unwanted celebrity status had taken hold in the public imagination, particularly in the Manchester area. The hearings provided a setting for the venting of public outrage and because of Smith’s suspected involvement in the case and the fact that he and Maureen had been taken up to the Moors as part of the search for bodies, he became a public focus, given that he and Maureen were accessible. They were pushed by angry crowds as they left the remand hearings in Hyde and this public aggression would continue to play out with crowds gathering outside their flat in Underwood Court, Hattersley, as they left for court, graffiti messages on their flat and the smearing of dog faeces on the property (Smith and Lee 2011).a seven day-a-week circus, held in the Big Top of every police station in the Greater Manchester area. Ringmasters change on a daily basis; Talbot, Benfield, Nimmo, Mattin, Tyrell, Mounsey, Carr, Cunningham. Different days in different stations with different detectives, all still asking the same fucking questions…. At Hyde I am a suspect, at Manchester, I am a murderer, no two ways about it.
Their celebrity status also grew among journalists. As Smith (Smith and Lee 2011:190) describes in Witness: ‘reporters kept pushing cards through our letterbox wrapped up in fivers with scribbled invitations. “If you fancy a drink and a chat give us a ring”. By evening there would be a small pile of cards in the hallway floor. The car park at Underwood Court swarmed with reporters and photographers’ lenses were trained on our balcony and the main door downstairs’.
Smith claims to have ignored initial approaches but a deal to tell his story to the News of the World, now common practice but rare in those days, was arranged via his father and his uncle. This proved to be a major concern at the subsequent trial (see Chap. 3) but knowledge of the deal added to public outrage and David and Maureen Smith became subject to verbal and physical abuse on a regular basis wherever they went in Manchester. Smith eventually served a prison sentence for an incident in which he reacted violently to one such attack (Lee 2010).
Witness (Smith and Lee 2011) also contains a contested account of a visit of Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, Ann West, her partner, and another relative to the Smiths’ flat in Underwood Court which ends up with the Smiths being attacked. Indeed, Witness (Smith and Lee 2011) is an account of the impact of Brady and Hindley as George Bailey in reverse, an account of a lifelong attempt to break free from celebrity status by association, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and the continued impact of media attention long after the initial case was closed. This by itself is a feature of the story of Brady and Hindley’s celebrity and its far reaching effects and is the way in which the news cycle has operated around the story for over 50 years. This is well illustrated by the return of Brady and Hindley to the Moors in the mid-1980s in an attempt to locate the remaining two bodies, the result of which was the discovery of Pauline Reade’s body (British University Film 1987). Hindley finally confessed to the murder of Reade and Keith Bennett, but not without persisting in her attempts to implicate Smith. Smith was taken to the Moors to help with the search. Smith talks of expecting ‘trouble to start brewing’ (Smith and Lee 2011:329) when the search was announced and was horrified at hearing on the radio ‘Chief Prosecution witness at the Moors trial, David Smith, is on the way back to the Moors to meet police’.
In her preface to Witness, Carol Ann Lee Smith describes a public encounter in Manchester when she was asked what she thought of David Smith. Winnie Johnson was in the audience and made it clear, that in her view Smith was as guilty as Brady and Hindley. Lee notes how this view was shared by the rest of the audience and noted how the hatred and vilification of David Smith remained, 45 years later, as strong as it did at the trial (Smith and Lee 2011:5).
Myra Hindley’s younger sister Maureen was to suffer in the aftermath of this trial and conviction. It is apparent that she was totally unaware of the fact that her sister and Brady had been committed such crimes. She was 19 years of age at the time of Edward Evans’s murder. The Smiths’ actions stopped further killings but they continued to be vilified, harassed, assaulted and threatened from the trial and for many years after. Smith (Smith and Lee 2011:227) provided a detailed account of the regular targeting of their flat, the graffiti—child killers live here and murdering bastards, the lack of job and friends and the smallness of their world. Maureen’s only ‘crime’ was being the sister of Myra Hindley, at the trial and afterwards, she was a virtual prisoner in the house, only leaving to go to the shops when she had to. Going outside, she was subject to other women’s hostility and aggression, they pushed, spat at, and taunted Maureen for being a Hindley bitch. Maureen’s children were also subjected to spits, hatred and threats. This had a devastating impact on the young couple’s relationship and mental health. Maureen was subject to domestic abuse from Smith within the home and in public. He does not shy away from it in his book although he does blame it on the pressure they were living under at the time. Although the domestic abuse preceded the trial, it may have escalated after it. The reality for Maureen was that she gave evidence in court against her sister and as a result for a number of years was ostracised by her mother, who sided with Myra, and had no contact with her sister (Ritchie 1988). As a Hindley by birth, women on the street abused her and as a Hindley, she was the target of physical and verbal violence from her husband who also blamed her for the family connection she could not change. Ultimately and not surprisingly, the toll on Maureen was too great; she neglected her children and effectively lost them when they went into care. They eventually returned to live with their father. The stigma that Maureen and other family members experienced, because of their family connection with the Moors Murders was intense. Maureen suffered this stigma throughout her life. Maureen did eventually repair her relationship with her family and she married Bill Scott and had another daughter but even this daughter had to live with the legacy of her connection to the Moors Murders. Maureen died at the age of 34 of a brain haemorrhage but her funeral was disrupted by a public fracas between the mourners and the friends and family of the Moors victims. Patrick Kilbride launched himself at Bill Scott’s daughter, believing her to be Myra Hindley. The police had to intervene to calm the situation down (Ritchie 1988). Maureen and Myra’s mother Hettie Moulton was also subjected to abuse and consequently ended up living a reclusive life, refusing to venture out at all when stories of Hindley dominated the news. Ironically, whereas Hindley throughout her life in prison found people, often well connected, to support her and champion her cause, her family was not similarly supported by others. Just as the families of the victims suffered each time there were stories of Hindley in the news, so too did the other blood relatives of Hindley and David Smith. In comparison, Brady’s mother, Peggy Stewart does not appear in the media to any great extent. There are newspaper reports about arrangements made so that Brady could visit her when she was dying in hospital. The story of the Smiths illustrates well both the notion of para-celebrity and the impact of Brady and Hindley’s crimes on those who were within their orbit.
The next sequence in Lewin’s Suffer Little Children (Morrissey and Marr 1984) montage features an illegally taken picture from the trial by a Paris Match photographer, a signifier of the international celebrity of the case, a Daily Mirror cover documenting their crimes and a pixilated censored section which one assumes contained the one picture of Lesley Ann Downey, bound and gagged before her murder, which is in the public domain (the picture is reproduced, rather bizarrely, in an article written in 1968 by Detective Superintendent Arthur Benfield who led the investigation [Benfield 1968]).
The detectives involved in the case also achieved para-celebrity status. Peter Topping, in particular, who led the investigation published his own autobiography (Topping 1989) and made TV appearances. Years later the deaths of many of the detectives involved would be reported, once again bringing the case back into the news cycle.
The return of the song’s ‘over the Moors, take me to the Moors’ refrain sees a return to the search for the bodies, with a map of the Moors and the line ‘a child is on the Moors’ is accompanied by pictures of the dig. The song’s fade out features a montage of images, including ‘the’ picture of Hindley, a Daily Mirror ‘Brady and Hindley go to jail for life’ headline, a return to the pictures of the known victims and ends with the statement ‘Keith Bennett’s body has never been found after repeated searches of Saddleworth Moor.’ His mother, Winnie Johnson, died in 2012 and, at the time of writing this, Keith Bennett’s body has still not been found.
The narrative of the missing child, its place in the public imagination and its relationship to celebrity is discussed in Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday (Burn 1997) and by Machado and Santos (2009) in relation to the Madelaine McCann case. A more emotional example for the authors occurred at the end of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) event on the topic of the Moors Murders held in 2017 when a participant who stated that his reason for attending was that he was the same age and from the same area as Keith Bennett broke down after stating ‘I just wish they would find Keith’, an anecdotal yet powerful example of the longevity and impact of a 50-year-old crime, a public desire for closure and Bennett’s continuing para-celebrity status.
This chapter has explored the notorious celebrity status of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley using the approach of bricolage; rooted in academic works on celebrity, serial killing and its symbiotic relationship with the mass media, it has drawn academic and non-academic publications on the crime, newspaper articles, TV drama and documentary, popular music products and an extensive range of YouTube material which itself is a reflection of the cultural impact and longevity of the case. Gordon Burn’s notion of ‘the glittering mask of celebrity culture and the deathly void it conceals’ (Tait 2008:5) has provided an underlying theme as has the idea of Brady and Hindley as a kind of George Bailey in reverse, their lives touching many others, not for better, but for worse, changing lives forever and inflicting unwanted para-celebrity status on many. Their celebrity status remains intact and the way in which this continues to play out is discussed in Chap. 8 which looks at the reporting of their deaths and the associated works. The complex issues raised by the case, even the notion that they are celebrities, have been explored via a number of works from different cultural spheres and the role of the mass media and its relationship to serial killers remains a central feature. In Richard Ford’s short story collection A Multitude of Sins (Ford 2002) a journalist attempts to make sense of the aftermath of another mediatised event in UK history, the death of Princess Diana, pondering his role in it all. In the end he writes ‘someone has to tell us what’s important because we no longer know’ (Ford 2002:25). There have been many attempts to explain Brady and Hindley’s enduring celebrity and notoriety and it is hoped that this chapter has provided a useful addition to the ongoing debate.