Hindley was, and still is, commonly referred to in the tabloid press as ‘the most evil woman in Britain’. This chapter will examine how representations of Hindley and her role in the crimes have shifted over time. Gender is a key issue here. Some writers such as Wilde (2016) argue that Hindley’s treatment was the result of deeply engrained patriarchal attitudes. It is suggested that Hindley is regarded as doubly deviant —a killer but also a female killer who transgresses feminine norms. The fact that a woman was involved in the abduction and murder of children is viewed as being doubly abhorrent, and a perversion of the female role as mother and nurturer.
Myra Hindley was born on 23 July 1942. She died on 15 November 2002. At the time of her death, she was Britain’s longest serving female prisoner. At that point, she had been in custody for 46 years (Lee 2010). Hindley thus spent most of her life in prison for her part in the abduction and murders of five children. The media seems to establish a rather bizarre hierarchy of serial killers and other infamous killers, with Hindley, along with Brady placed at the top. She was certainly the most notorious female offender in the country. This was not because she had committed the most murders. Rose West was convicted of ten murders (Burn 2011; Masters 2011). Hindley, more so than Brady, over the course of her time in prison, was the subject of sustained media coverage. This served to reinforce her status as the ‘most hated woman in Britain’. Hindley did have her supporters, most notably Lord Longford who argued that she was reformed and should be paroled. However, the reports of her life in prison tended to generate public opprobrium. This was also true of reports of Longford’s campaign on her behalf. The response to this campaign was often extremely vitriolic. The fact that Hindley was seeking parole was seen by many as evidence that she was manipulative and did not understand the magnitude of the offences that she had committed. Hindley was a constant feature of the news cycle from the time of her arrest to her death and beyond. For example, in September 2018 Hindley’s deathbed letters came to light prompting the Daily Mirror to feature the story, advertised on the front page accompanied by ‘that’ picture of Hindley and a two page spread inside under the headline ‘twisted last ploy of Moors Murderer Myra’ (Byrne 2018:10–11).
Many have sought to understand what it is about Hindley and her place in modern history that explains why she committed these crimes and why she continues to be the modern face of monstrosity (Clark 2011). One of the reasons for the public outrage is that there is no easy explanation for her involvement in the murders. Her own account of her involvement fluctuated over time and her explanation of her role in the crimes was inconsistent and often contradictory. Like Brady, she denied for 20 years that she had been involved in the abduction and murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. For a very long time she regarded herself and wanted others to regard her, as a ‘bit’ player in Brady’s game. At the trial, there was little to suggest she played a minor part in the killings. The murders were a joint enterprise. Hindley was a necessary and important accomplice. It would not have been possible for Brady to commit his perfect crime without her. Hindley had a role in the abductions enticing children into the car. In warning children of the potential dangers from strangers in cars, the stranger is always presented as a man. Brady could not drive so he would not have been able to bury the bodies on the Moors without Hindley.
All women are subject to the male gaze (Mulvey 1975). For women who kill, the gaze is intensified. The dominant image of Hindley is the iconic photograph, taken after her arrest. This is an image that haunts the public imagination. The photograph of Brady that was taken at the same time does not have similar status. The picture of Hindley—with her dyed blonde hair which is part of a tribute to her lover’s obsession with Nazi atrocities, has become one of the most reproduced images of modern times. It links Hindley to other ‘evil’ blondes such as Irma Grese and Ruth Ellis. The image is used as a cipher for evil. It appears on the front cover of books about Hindley, for example, Inside the Mind of a Murderess (Ritchie 1988) and One Of Your Own (Lee 2010). It is the face of a feminine but stony faced or ‘hard faced’ woman. It is this image of Hindley at the age of 23, taken in Hyde Police station in October 1965 that has come to define her. As previously noted, the arrest photograph of serial murders has come to play a key role in the construction of the serial killer narrative. The audience with their knowledge of the crimes that individuals have committed read evil into the image.
The public’s response to this image continues to elicit anger, even hatred. This is illustrated by, as witnessed by attempts to destroy the artist Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Hindley, Myra. This image has become part of a modern cultural lexicon of evil; it is a reference point, a cultural shorthand that the audience immediately understands. Harvey’s painting is a huge, 11 ft. by 9 ft. representation of the police photograph. As you get nearer, it becomes clear that the painting consists of handprints of children. The critics of the painting saw it as a cynical piece of media manipulation. The artist would have been acutely aware that any painting of Hindley, let alone one using children’s handprints to build up the image, would draw some strong criticism. In fact, the painting was vandalised and then removed. More considered criticism emphasised that the actual painting had the quality of an advertising hoarding so glamourised Hindley and by implication her appalling crimes. Supporters of Harvey argued that this was just the point that he was making. Far from glamourising Hindley, he was asking questions about the audience’s continued obsession with her and the Moors Murders. Walker (1998) suggests that a semiotic analysis would emphasise that the use of the plaster cast of a child’s palm print to make the painting is a way of indicating that Hindley will never escape her crimes.Is it possible to discern evil, as many have supposed, in the cavernous upturned eyes, the pasty planes, the heavy bones, the holed head of bleached blonde fringe, the fondant of deep shadow…
As usual Hindley looks like a composite, an identikit, a media emanation, a hypothetical who never existed in the flesh.
The mugshot is the, sometimes partial, image that appears on the front cover of Thomson’s 2007 novel Death of a Murderer. It is also the image, albeit with the face blanked out, that adorns the front cover of Jean Rafferty’s 2012 novel Myra, Beyond Saddleworth. In the novel, Hindley is released from prison with a new identity because she is dying from cancer. The image is also prominently placed on the front cover of the Sunday Times bestseller The Lost Boy (Staff 2013). There is not an equivalent series of work that uses Brady or the image of him at his time of arrest. Harvey chose Hindley not Brady or them as a couple to paint. There is this focus and fascination with Hindley over and above that on Brady. Gender is at the heart of this.
Birch (1993) argued there are several factors that explain why this case has been imprinted on the British public’s psyche. Hindley became the ‘arch-villain’ and the epitome of evil. Birch suggests that Brady largely ‘faded from view’ (Birch 1993:49). Brady never made any application for parole. He was transferred to Ashworth Special Hospital in 1985. There were stories about Brady at Ashworth and his MHRT hearing was a huge media event (Cummins et al. 2016). On the whole, he did not receive the same level of coverage. Brady also consistently stated that the murders were a joint enterprise. Hindley until 1986, minimised her part in the killings, sought to recast herself as a victim of Brady’s. Supported by prominent individuals such as David Astor, editor of The Observer, she argued her case for parole virtually up to her death. Unlike Brady, she wanted her freedom. Unlike Brady she was never viewed as being mentally ill. In essence, it was her continued sanity that reinforced the belief that she was untouched by the crimes she had committed; she did not bear any physical or psychological marks of suffering. She was articulate, made friends, many in high places, had relationships in prison, studied and got a degree. The continued prurient press interest in her ‘lesbian’ love affairs and ‘cushy’ prison life simply reinforced this lack of suffering. There was no visible sign of distress. Brady was transferred to forensic mental health services because of concerns about his physical and mental health. At the time of the MHRT, he was frail and thin from his hunger strike and forced feeding. Brady consistently stated that Hindley took an active part in the killings and that her attempts to suggest otherwise were not to be trusted. Ironically, it was her sanity, although there were clearly times when her mental health suffered (Ritchie 1988), strength of character and desire to live that contributed to the public belief that she was beyond redemption. It also added to the notion that she was evil. It was seen as evidence that she did not fully understand the magnitude of the pain and suffering that she, along with Brady, had inflicted on the victims, their families and the wider community. This is then reinforced by the reproduction of the iconic image of Ann West, mother of murdered Lesley Ann Downey, encapsulated this when she said ‘at least Brady had the decency to go mad’ (Birch 1993:55).
Seal (2014) in an exploration of letters sent to the Home Office in relation to capital cases in England and Wales in the mid-twentieth century notes ‘the role of structural sexism and socio-economic inequality in making it harder to win reprieve than others’ (Seal 2014:115). In one such letter a woman from Harrogate wrote of Ruth Ellis’ failure to avoid the death penalty, ‘I cannot help feeling that her somewhat dubious moral record may have helped to influence and alienate the jury’ (Seal 2014:122).
Public attitudes to Myra Hindley at the time and subsequently are tightly bound to gendered notions of how women should, and should not, behave. Women are perceived to be the ‘softer’ sex, biologically programmed to be ‘good’ mothers, to love and nurture children to be kind and gentle (Wilde 2016). Hindley violated these norms in the most brutal of ways by participating in the abduction of children with the full knowledge that they would be sexually abused and murdered. We may never know the exact extent of her participation in these crimes. However, what is not disputed is that she knowingly participated in the abductions, cleaned up and helped dispose of the evidence of their deaths and helped in disposing of their bodies. In doing so, she broke the ultimate taboo; she was the ‘bad’ mother incarnate. Women are far less likely to commit violent crimes than men and the crimes they commit are generally of a less serious nature, women who commit murder are statistically rare. They were rarer still when Hindley stood trial. Women who commit serious crimes step outside stereotyped gender roles. Those who are deemed to be bad not mad are regarded as doubly deviant. This influences not only sentencing but also public perceptions of them. There is some evidence to suggest that men and women who favour and feel positively about women who comply with gendered roles are more likely to regard Hindley as evil and less likely to believe her treatment was unjust (Tendayi Viki et al. 2005). In the 1960s, children and their parents would certainly not have regarded women as a threat. It was her sex and the gendered assumptions based on that, that made her appear trustworthy to the children and young people they abducted. The extent of these gendered views is apparent at the time of the murder of Edwards Evans. Even after finding his body at Wardle Brook Avenue, the police did not initially suspect that she was guilty of any crime. This was despite the testimony of her brother-in-law David Smith to the contrary.
The issue of gendered roles and the juxtaposition of the good/bad mother feature strongly in the Granada TV drama See No Evil (Menaul 2006). The film opens with a picture of Hindley’s sister Maureen, pushing her daughter in a pram to visit Auntie Myra and Brady at work. The power of this opening relies of course on our reading of the situation, our knowing that Hindley and Brady are child murderers and therefore this ordinary, domestic scene is set in direct opposition to the horror of their crimes. Later in the drama, Hindley and Brady asked David Smith to bring the same pram around to their house so they can carry the dead body of Edward Evans to the car for disposal. The horror lies in this common domestic object being used for these purposes. There is another layer to the domestic terror. The audience knows that Maureen and David’s baby has died. The pram is being used to move a body, the child of other parents—a child who has been brutally murdered. It is in this ordinary domestic space, the living room, that Edward Evans is attacked and killed. Hindley’s grandmother is asleep upstairs in her bed. It is also the ‘ordinary’, in the sense that the common existence of domestic abuse that means the neighbours do not respond to the noises they heard (the screams) of Edward Evans. They assume the noise of his being attacked and killed as another ‘domestic’. Hindley’s grandmother did hear a noise but was reassured by Hindley that there was nothing to worry about and she had only hurt her toe (Ritchie 1988). This house is the place, where Hindley and Brady tape-recorded the torture of Lesley Ann Downey. They had arranged for the grandmother to be out of the house. The tape, including as it does Lesley Ann Downey’s pleas for help and Myra Hindley’s harsh response to them, has a key role in reactions to Hindley. It is potent evidence of her transgression of the feminine/motherly role. This role is to comfort and nurse distressed children. Within this monstering of Hindley, Brady is given less attention (Wilde 2016). There is an implicit assumption, that it is understandable for men to commit such violence but inexplicable for women. Brady is not viewed in the same transgressive light.
Lee (2010) notes, it is easier for the public to perceive killers like Hindley as evil, as being different and separate from them. The truth is more complex. There is significant evidence that Hindley was very fond of children. As a teenager, she enjoyed babysitting (conjuring up images of that other stock horror motif of the ‘hand that rocked the cradle’) for neighbours. When she met Brady and stated she no longer liked children, she remained attached to Maureen’s first child. By all accounts, found her premature death devastating (Lee 2010). Moreover, she was not incapable of love or care, being devoted to her sister Maureen, her niece (Maureen’s second child), mother, friends, former partners (Lee 2010) and of course, Brady. Many have sought to identify the factors that contributed to ‘the making of a murderer’ but there is nothing particularly different or peculiarly unique in Hindley’s childhood or early adulthood that can explain her involvement in these crimes. It is the inability to fit her actions into traditional motifs of female killers as ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ that has contributed to her public perception as evil (Lee 2010).
Hindley’s own narrative and explanation for events changed overtime. In her earlier accounts, she suggests that she played a minor role. This is at odds with the evidence presented during her trial, that she played a vital role. The explanations put forward initially and for a sustained period of time thereafter, was to explain her ‘minor’ role in the killings was to regard herself as a ‘victim’ of Brady, the charismatic, dominant older man. This was not a straightforward reading/recasting of events as she both claims to be under his thrall initially, but concedes this does not abdicate her responsibility for the crimes. Later when writing to support her appeal for parole, she claims that she was frightened of Brady, that he was violent and that he drugged and sexually abused her (Lee 2010). The idea that Brady would subject Hindley to such abuse and sexual assault is, of course, highly plausible. His interest in sadomasochism is well documented. The routine nature of domestic abuse that many women experienced at the hand of ‘their men’ is also now more widely recognised. If it is accepted that David Smith’s testimony of being in fear of Brady and his life then surely it is possible to accept that at points in their relationship, Hindley was too. The significant difference between Smith and Hindley being that he went to the police whereas she did not. Despite his softening attitudes to sexual violence depicted in the sadomasochistic novels Brady lent him, he drew the line at murder and Hindley did not. Brady denies he was violent towards Hindley and claims that she willingly participated in all they did. Whether the claims of violence are accepted or not it is difficult to accept them as a full explanation for her active participation in the abductions, killings and disposal of the bodies. Brady claims that she was an active and willing partner and certainly the evidence would suggest that they discussed killing children, getting away with the ‘perfect’ murder. Hindley admitted this to a prison therapist and said that Brady was sexually excited by sex with the children and their suffering (Lee 2010) and that they used her vehicles to stalk and watch children.
Hindley denied any sexual interest in children and there is no way of knowing the degree to which she was involved in the sexual abuse of children (Storrs 2004). She was involved in the production of pornographic images of children which are sexually abusive in themselves. Walker noted that the tape of Lesley Ann Downey, played in court is ambiguous with respect to Hindley’s role but there can be little doubt she played a role in the gagging and binding of Lesley Ann Downey. Brady told a journalist that Hindley had strangled Lesley Ann Downey (Hindley strenuously denied this) and also that she sexually assaulted Pauline Reade (Lee 2010). It may be that that she was sexually aroused and motivated by Brady’s enjoyment of the sexual abuse of children or it may be that she too was sexually aroused by the crimes themselves.
There is much to suggest that Hindley was aware that her reputation for liking and babysitting children and her gender made it less likely that the finger of suspicion would fall on them. Being a couple gave them a cloak of respectability, despite living in ‘sin’, and invisibility as potential murders. Another explanation put forward for her crimes is her father’s domestic abuse of her mother and of herself, and Lee (2010) suggests that Hindley’s mother also meted out violence to her daughter but this was minimised by her who retained a close relationship with her mother throughout her life. Hindley does also acknowledge that as she got older she met her father’s violence with violence, using his own walking stick as a weapon, which one uncle claims she used with excessive force (Lee 2010). Certainly, Hindley herself claims that this fact of her childhood toughened her up and stopped her from showing her emotions (The Guardian, 18.2.1995).
The picture of Hindley that emerges from accounts discussed above is one of an intelligent, aspirational young woman who wants to break from the feminine and class restrictions of her time. She was clear she did not want to end up like the women in her neighbourhood, in a dreary dead end marriage, struggling to manage children and households on a limited budget. There is plenty of evidence to suggest she was a ‘fighter’ able to stand up for herself physically and to more than hold her own verbally. The image is one of a confident and dominant young woman. Of course this does not mean she was dominant in every social encounter or that she was not open to physical and sexual victimisation by Brady. His influence alone cannot explain her participation in the murders of five children. She regarded herself as superior to (as did Brady) and separate from the masses around her. She wanted to ‘better herself’ and sought to lose her accent and dress smartly. It was Brady’s difference from the men she knew, his intelligence and interest in books and apparent superiority that she found so alluring. As the older and more dominant, at least initially, it was Brady who set the terms of their relationship and frequency of meeting up, who guided her reading and challenged her thinking. It was Brady who introduced Hindley to sadomasochistic sex as a means of transgressing the limitations of cultural norms on decency and morality. Such transgressions were gradually extended to include the sexual abuse and murder of children but Hindley was later to tell a therapist that her ‘predatory instinct’ existed prior to meeting Brady (Lee 2010:97). This would suggest that her relationship with Brady, gave her the permission and justification to act on this predatory instinct as a means of challenging and transcending social norms. Whereas, another woman would have been shocked and horrified by where this path would take her, Hindley was excited by the rule breaking, although not initially by murder (Lee 2010). The picture then suggests a more complex picture than simply regarding Hindley as a passive and unwilling partner to Brady’s crimes and her claims to have played a minor part in the crimes, implausible.
Whilst Hindley may have been an active and willing partner in these crimes, their roles were not entirely the same. There is no evidence to suggest that she murdered any of the children but she did abduct them, help dispose of their bodies and cover for Brady. She participated in the sexual assault of Lesley Ann Downey, the extent of her participation is unclear, but she did gag her, threaten her and help in the production of pornographic images of her. Her role in the death of Edward Evans is ambivalent, with David Smith initially informing the police that she was present in the room while he was killed (although she did not participate in this), and then later saying she was in the kitchen. Regardless, she was aware of the plan to murder him, went to collect David Smith and either watched or listened to it happening and helped clean up after the event and helped to wrap his body up. Had they not been caught at this stage, she would have also driven the body up to the Moors for burial. In David Smith’s account of the killing and the aftermath, the horror you feel as a reader lies not just in the act of murder but in the normalisation and domesticity of it. Hindley making tea for them all, putting her feet up, having cleaned Edwards Evans blood and brains off the floor. Hindley laughing at Brady’s joke that Edward Evans was a ‘dead weight’ (Ritchie 1988:80).
Despite difference in their respective roles and culpability, it is Myra Hindley who has ‘borne the burden of the responsibility for the crimes for which they have been found guilty’ (Storrs 2004:9). There has not been a similar focus and debate about the exact nature of Brady’s contribution. It is, in some senses, marginal, at least in the public’s imagination. When crimes are committed jointly, by men and women, as Gavin (2009:13) notes ‘it is the women who fascinate and repel us’. The media and public treatment of Myra Hindley is an extreme example of this. Gavin and Porter (2014:6) argues that dubbing of Hindley as ‘the most evil women in Britain’ is ‘an astonishing epithet for someone who never actually killed anyone’. Of course, as mentioned previously, part of the fascination lies in the fact that it is unusual for women to be complicit in such crimes, to offend against what is considered to be the biological essence of women’s nature, to love and nurture children. Committing such offences challenges notions of female passivity and nurturing, such women challenge patriarchal notions of the essential goodness of women and offend against God, the Father (Storrs 2004). Even amongst the rare numbers of women who kill, it remains hard to understand why a ‘normal happy girl’ (Hindley 1994:18) should commit such offences.
In Hindley’s article for The Guardian published in 1995, she struggles to explain the motivation for her part in the murders. She writes of the routine violence meted out to women by men on Friday and Saturday’s nights after drinking, her father was no exception and of the lessons this gave her in ‘dominance and control’, never letting your feelings or vulnerability show and developing ‘a strength of character’ to minimise emotional harm. She reminds the reader that she was 18 when she met Brady. It was shortly before her 21st birthday when the first offence was committed. She writes I have no excuses or explanations to absolve me for my behaviour after the first offence but of course she does try to explain her behaviour both in terms of her fatal attraction to Brady, as well as her fear of him because of his threats to kill her and her family and because of his violence towards her. For his part, Brady has always denied Myra Hindley’s claims of his sexual violence. He stated that all their sexual behaviour was consensual. Hindley reminds the reader that even the trial judge at the time, pronounced Brady as ‘wicked beyond belief’ but did not share that view of her. The judge indicated that if she could be removed from Brady’s influence, then there was hope that Hindley could be rehabilitated. These comments reflect the stereotypical gendered assumptions of the time. It seems too difficult to contemplate that a woman would willingly be involved in such offences. These comments were used by Hindley and others such as Lord Longford to reinforce her claims that these crimes were more the result of Brady’s influence than her own volition.
Whatever the truth of Hindley’s claims and Brady’s counter claims, her prison letters reveal an intelligent woman who is aware of tabloid depictions of her as the monster, medusa, icon of evil. She is clearly aware of how the tabloids over the years have bought into and perpetuated the nation’s hatred of her. The tabloids have turned me into an industry, she said. Stories about her increase circulation figures. She continued to serve the useful function of the nation’s scapegoat. Living ‘proof’ of successive home secretaries’ stance of being tough on crime. In short, she argues she has become a political prisoner who can never be freed as it would not be politically expedient to do so; the public would not accept it. She is equally aware that her crime relates not just to what she did with Brady but also to the fact that it cannot be explained away by madness. There is no obvious explanatory trope, other than a notion of evil, for why she did what she did. Ultimately, her complaint is that her 30 years in the prison system has changed her, she is not, and does not want to be the same person who committed those crimes. Hindley puts forward the claim that her years undergoing therapy in prison have enabled her to discard her protective shield, to examine her wounds and face up to her crimes. In the letter, she is angry that an article in The Observer portrayed her as not simply a willing accomplice but instigator and perpetrator. The article states that she sexually abused and tortured five children and strangled Lesley Ann Downey. Her response clearly implies that she did not do any of these things. Ultimately, she is appalled that some have labelled her a psychopath and is clearly opposed to this as an explanation for her actions.
It is inescapable that public opinion and opposition to her release was a hugely significant factor in Hindley’s continued incarceration. It cannot be denied that she was held hostage to public opinion (Stanford 2006), that she was essentially evil, placing her beyond any possibility of redemption. Particularly in the later stages of her life, there is no real evidence that any of the authorities considered Hindley a future potential risk to children. Brady, on the other hand, appears to have never shown any remorse. He made it clear that he took satisfaction in committing his crimes and would offend again if given the opportunity. Clark (2011), makes the interesting point that although undoubtedly the labelling of Hindley as ‘evil’ was linked to her gender, this was compounded by cultural circumstance, making her effectively the ‘poster girl’ for two moral panics that surfaced over her lifetime in prison. Firstly, Myra Hindley’s crimes were committed before the ‘discovery’ of the serial killer and subsequent commodification by media interests (newspaper stories, films and novels), and the continuous blurring of fact and fiction in popular accounts of their crimes. At this time, Myra Hindley became the ‘figure-head for a sub-cultural form that was squarely located within the discourse of evil, to understand ‘Hindley’’ (Clark 2011:8). The ‘Moors Murders’ became part of British cultural identity (Clark 2011). Secondly, the 1980s and 1990s saw a recurrent interest in paedophiles, again rooted in the narrative of ‘evil’ and the ‘predatory’ outsider. Of course, Hindley sits squarely outside of the stereotype of the dirty old man in a raincoat. She regularly looked after neighbours’ children, could see Pauline Reade’s house from where she lived. Pauline was a friend of her sisters; she was the girl next door, who you let into your home to look after your children. In stark contrast to the evil predatory male outsider, she was the evil predatory female insider. Hindley was subsumed into two distinct but overlapping discourses—serial killer and paedophile. Both used a notion of evil as a central means to both explain and condemn sexual crimes. These combined with her gender to cement her extreme deviant status (Clark, 2011).
In a strange way, Hindley’s strong and very public desire for release added to the perceived sense that she was essentially evil. The argument that she was a reformed individual was never widely accepted. This argument was, perhaps, fatally undermined by the fact that she did not confess to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett until the mid-1980s. An earlier confession would have, perhaps, increased the possibility of finding Keith Bennett’s body. It might have reduced the anguish and torment that the Reade and Bennett families endured. Hindley was well aware that in some ways, hanging would have been the better option. She said to an interviewer with the Sunday Times, ‘I think it would have solved a lot of problems for everybody if I’d been hung for what I did. But I did not, and now I cling to life and I believe I deserve another chance at it’. Hanging was not a sentence available to the court. It was abolished whilst she and Brady were on remand. Throughout the history of the reporting of the case, there is a feeling that the British public believe they had been cheated out of the hanging of Brady and Hindley. An article in The Times reports her disappointment at not being considered for parole. She states that she knows she should be punished. However, she has witnessed other child murderers being released. At this point she still sees herself in a secondary role. She only ‘lured’ children to their deaths, while those who actually inflicted violence leading to death have been released. Following Hindley’s death, the journalist Carole Malone, not a noted liberal, wrote that it was political expediency that kept Myra Hindley in jail; quite simply no home secretary wanted to be the one who freed her. ‘Myra Hindley was not kept in jail for the severity or the repulsiveness of her crimes, but because successive governments were too worried about their survival to consider parole. And that’s no way to run a judicial system’ (Malone 2002:35). Up until the point it was made obvious to her that she would never be released however much she petitioned for this, Hindley fought for her right to parole and challenged the whole life tariff on the grounds that it was unfair. Her fight for freedom did little, incited rather than dampened public antipathy to her. False claims that she was on the brink of being released stoked up public hatred towards her. Anne West campaigned against Hindley’s potential release. In essence, despite various prison authorities’ statements that Hindley was a ‘model prisoner’, at low risk of offending on release and had benefitted from what the prison system could offer, it was unacceptable to the British public to whom the only acceptable version was that of a manipulative evil monster. It was ‘The combination of gender, sexualised murder, and child victims, in the public mind, placed Hindley beyond any notion of rehabilitation, beyond anything that could make her comprehensible’ (Pettigrew 2016:99).
Hindley was a victim of timing (Pettigrew 2016). She and Brady escaped execution. When the death penalty was abolished, the life sentence was introduced. It was unclear at that time if life meant a whole life sentence. Prior to the establishment of the whole life tariff, judges in murder cases sentenced those found guilty and imposed a tariff. Once the prisoner had served the tariff, they would be eligible to apply for release on what became known as life licence, in effect parole for the rest of the life. Brady and Hindley were amongst the first high profile murderers to be convicted following the abolition of the death penalty. At the time of their conviction the whole life sentence was in its infancy and as yet untested (Schone 2000). At the trial the judge did not specify how long Hindley and Brady could expect to serve in jail. As noted above, the judge did make it clear that he felt Hindley had been corrupted by Brady and was not beyond redemption. Ironically, it was in response to Hindley’s challenges to the whole life sentence that successive governments were forced to clarify the basis on which whole life sentences should be managed, making her the ‘unwitting architect of the whole life prison term in England and Wales’ (Pettigrew 2016:97). At the time of her conviction, it was usual for Parole Board to consider if a lifer was suitable for release after seven years. In Hindley’s case, this process of review was scuppered by her unsuccessful attempt at escaping from Holloway Prison in 1972. She was subsequently charged and given additional one year’s sentence to run concurrently. Her appeal against conviction was dismissed in 1978. At that time the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery indicated that a life sentence could extend to a whole life term. However, as Pettigrew (2016) notes women under current sentencing processes, generally receive a shorter sentence than men. This was never the case with Hindley. In the public imagination, she was held as, if not more accountable than Brady and public attitudes towards her hardened rather than softened over the course of her lifetime.
Despite repeated appeals to the Home Secretary to confirm how long she could expect to spend in prison before being considered for release, this was not communicated to her until 1994. She had confessed in 1987 to her involvement in two more murders, that of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. These confessions after over 20 years of minimising her involvement in the murders reinforced and reinvigorated her status as evil. The interest in the case had been reignited by the confessions and by the return of Brady and Hindley to the Moors in an attempt to find the missing bodies of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Importantly, the Home Secretary’s decision to convert the whole life tariff to a determinate period would only be made on the basis of retribution and deterrence, not the overall progress of a prisoner. In effect, this excludes anything that happens after the conviction. This placed Hindley at significant disadvantage. It meant that the Home Secretary would not take into consideration her behaviour and achievements whilst she was incarcerated. After legal representations to Michael Howard , and arguing for a determinate sentence failed, Hindley sought a judicial review to challenge both the tariff and the basis for converting the whole tariff to a determinate sentence. Hindley was to lose on the first point but win on the second (Schone 2000). Ultimately she would fail to gain from this decision because the failure to take into account other factors had subsequently been rectified by changes in policy announced by the new Home Secretary Jack Straw. These changes made it clear that exceptional progress made by a prisoner would be taken into account when considering changes to the tariff (Pettigrew 2016). It was simultaneously acknowledged that Michael Howards’ treatment of Hindley had been unlawful, as she should have been informed of her tariff and the grounds for deciding this, but that situation had now been rectified. Ironically, Straw was to agree with Howard’s whole life tariff, leaving open the possibility that Hindley’s solicitors could make representations on exceptional progress grounds. Hindley’s appeals against the whole life tariff were considered again by the Court of Appeal the following year but again the whole life tariff was considered to be lawful, in terms of decision making, but the concept was troubling (Schone 2000). In rejecting Hindley’s application for a judicial review of the whole life tariff, one argument put forward by Judge Steyn of the Divisional Court was that Hindley and Brady’s crimes were ‘uniquely evil’. Gurnham (2003) noted that this was simply not true. There had been other cases where there have been more victims, which also included sexual torture and violence. In response to Hindley’s application, the Lord Chief Justice acknowledged that the crimes and media coverage of them had ‘aroused deep public enmity’ (Schone 2000:27). When Jack Straw’s policy opened up the possibility that a prisoner’s progress could be taken into account in exceptional circumstances this was never extended to Hindley. She appealed twice against the decision not to give her whole life tariff but lost her case on this as it was deemed to be lawful. Her successive attempts to overturn the whole life sentence have failed because they turned on whether or not a mandatory life sentence was unlawful. Clearly, respective judges have acknowledged that in Hindley’s case, the issue is really one of whether she should be released or not and that falls outside the remit of their powers. Lord Bingham LCJ (Divisional Court) did acknowledge that in Myra Hindley’s case the issue of whether that decision should be made by the judiciary or the executive ‘is in large measure, a political and constitutional question’ (Schone 2000:284). As Schone (2000) argued, Hindley has been unfairly treated, it is wrong to ignore the fact that she received a provisional tariff just because this was not communicated to her. She has been effectively re-sentenced with the whole life tariff construct that post-dated her original sentence by two decades. ‘Furthermore she is held hostage to public opinion. With the Hindley case, the hardest of hard cases, there is an abdication of the rule of law’ (Schone 2000:287). Given the political context of decision making and the weight of public opprobrium, it was inevitable and eventually accepted by Hindley that she would remain in prison.
By the time of her death on 15 November 2002, Hindley had become the longest serving female prisoner who was deemed by prison officials as low risk and as an exemplary prisoner who had achieved a degree from the Open University. In photographs from prison you see a smiling brunette who looks far removed from the police mugshot that she so hated. In life as in death, she had friends who believed she had been redeemed and was a very different woman to the one who was involved in the murders of five children. To the general public at large, she remains the feminine icon of evil. So much so that funeral service providers simply refused to dispose of the dead body. It is impossible to know if this was due to the nature of her crimes, fears of contamination and pollution or simply the pragmatic realisation that the public would target their business. Her funeral service was shrouded in secrecy and the police guarded the church for fear of public attack. She was an ordinary working class girl, who met a charismatic man who she adored but who she said dominated, abused and threatened her. Together, over a two-year period they committed five abductions and murders of children. It was shortly before her 21st birthday that they lured Pauline Reade to her death. At the time and subsequently, it is Hindley rather than Brady who took the full force of public hatred. Brady fits into the cultural image of the serial killer, an unrepentant male psychopath who kills for his own pleasure and sexual satisfaction. It is something of a paradox that this seemed to offer some protection to Brady. The media knew that he was trying to play games with them. Calling Brady ‘the most evil man in Britain’ was unlikely to have any impact. It is something he might well have embraced; almost the complete opposite applies to Hindley. Her sanity and desire for freedom made her crimes even more incomprehensible. Ultimately it was her gender that ensured her persistent vilification. She was a marked deviant from the traditional female nurturing mother role. Deviant because she acted like a man, participating in the killings, trying to blame them on others and not demonstrating any remorse for her crimes in court. Deviant because willingly or not, she was involved in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship and was not ashamed of it, although she regarded it as a corrupting influence. She was a young woman who alongside Brady committed terrible crimes for which she could never atone and for which she would never be forgiven. Any attempts to show remorse or demonstrate she had changed were met with scorn and accusations of manipulation. Ultimately, she was a victim of the Criminal Justice System, a hostage to the public desire to see her rot in jail and the desire of successive Home Secretaries to avoid political suicide by releasing her.