In almost every culture and every period of history, a she-devil emerges as an example of all that is rotten in the female sex. This Medusa draws together the many forms of female perversion: a woman whose sexuality is debauched and foul, pornographic and possibly bisexual; a woman who knows none of the fine and noble instincts when it comes to men and children; a woman who lies and deceives, manipulates and corrupts. A woman who is clever and powerful. This is a woman who is far deadlier than any male, in fact not a woman at all.
The perversion of the human spirit that underlies crimes of desperate cruelty invokes an atavistic desire to punish till the end of time those who inflict such pain, not just on the victims, but on the scarred families who are left to mourn. It is tempting to characterise all women criminals as victims, because so many of those who go through the system have themselves been at the receiving end of criminal behaviour. There has been a tendency in fighting the women’s corner for feminists to go into denial about women’s capacity for cruelty and wickedness. However, there are women who commit crimes as terrible as any committed by men. They just happen to be the outliers. Men enter the pantheon of monsters more often than women; one thinks of John Christie, Peter Sutcliffe, Denis Nilsson. But those convicted of killing who do not belong to the dominant culture are more likely to be mythologised. The imprisonment of Myra Hindley has come to stand for more than simple punishment for an abhorrent crime; her long incarceration symbolised our fear of returning to a more primitive past. In an increasingly secular world, a woman like Myra Hindley is the vessel into which society pours its dark secrets; like a war criminal, such a ‘she-devil’ is a reminder of what is horribly possible.
Myra Hindley was and remains the embodiment of all that is unnatural in women. Yet if you ask people under 50 what she actually did, they are uncertain, apart from a hazy appreciation that children were killed and that the case had sadistic sexual overtones.
It is impossible to fathom what corruption or disturbance of the human spirit can account for the horrible crimes Ian Brady and Myra Hindley committed, and no lawyer is going to be able to provide the answers.
The investigation began in October 1965 when David Smith, the brother-in-law of Myra Hindley, informed Manchester Police that he had been witness to the savage murder by Ian Brady of a 17-year-old youth. On the information he provided, the police went immediately to the address of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and found the boy’s dead body cleaved by an axe. Brady maintained at his trial that the boy was homosexual and that he had picked him up with Smith to ‘queer roll’ him for money, and that the death resulted accidentally when the boy struggled.
In a notebook discovered in the house was a list of names, including that of John Kilbride, a 12-year-old boy who had gone missing two years before. The police sensed that they might be dealing with a complex investigation and scoured the couple’s property for information of John Kilbride’s whereabouts. They found a quantity of photographs taken on the nearby moors, and with the assistance of a neighbour’s child the location of a number of other photographs was identified. A search of Saddleworth Moor unearthed the body of another missing child, Lesley Ann Downey, who had disappeared the previous year.
The case began to come together when David Smith also recollected that he had seen Ian Brady remove two suitcases from the house which could not be found. They were discovered in the left-luggage office at the city’s central station and contained crucial evidence linking the pair to the body of the little girl. Days later, the body of John Kilbride was also found on the moors.
The contents of the cases included books on sexual perversion, coshes, photographs of Lesley Ann naked, and a tape-recording of her screams, pleading not to be subjected to whatever was happening. The voices of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are clearly audible, remonstrating with the little girl, telling her to shut up and to cooperate. The child is threatened and told to put something in her mouth. The playing of that tape in the court did more than any other piece of evidence to secure the convictions.
At their trial in 1965 at Chester, Myra Hindley was presented by both Brady himself and the prosecution as his faithful lieutenant. In the popular press she was described as his sex slave, and there was little doubt at the time that, while her role was criminal and appalling, she was not the prime mover in the murders. The trial judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, suggested she might be capable of reform. He said: ‘Though I believe that Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence.’ Yet as the years passed she moved centre stage. Brady’s psychosis became well established, and he ended up serving his sentence in a penal institution for the mentally insane until his death in 2016. The mad dog was safely caged; whatever power he once wielded, he became, we are told, a pathetic, demented specimen.
Not so Myra Hindley, whose survival and persistence in seeking parole right up to her death in November 2002 was seen as a testament against her. Her academic success and her support from prominent campaigners like Lord Longford and Lord Astor served only to compound public perceptions of her as a highly intelligent, scheming woman and put paid to any suggestion that we were dealing with a psychiatric case here.
I acted for her in 1974 when she pleaded guilty to plotting with a prison warder to escape from prison. The warder was a former nun called Pat Cairns, who had fallen in love with Myra. Their affair, which lasted three years, created a media-feeding frenzy of prurience about lesbianism, and the papers paid former inmates for stories about alleged sexual trysts in the chapel at Holloway Prison. Here, they inferred, was further proof of deviance. It has more recently come to light that senior police became fixated at the time of the escape plot with the possibility that this was an even wider and darker conspiracy than was made public, combining whole swathes of the most feared women in the system, including members of the Angry Brigade and the IRA. A detective chief superintendent at Scotland Yard called Frank McGuinness compiled a report making very tenuous connections between Pat Cairns and a couple of women who had spurious links to the Angry Brigade, who were in turn deemed supporters of the IRA. From this wild concoction of surmise, he suggested in a report recently opened by the National Archive that the prison escape was going to throw open the gates of Holloway also for the Price sisters, who had been convicted of the Old Bailey bombing in 1973. It was the stuff of misogynistic nightmares.
In 1994 Myra Hindley published a letter, begging: ‘After 30 years in prison, I think I have paid my debt to society and atoned for my crimes. I ask people to judge me as I am now, and not as I was then.’ She claimed in 1998 that she had been abused by Brady, who had threatened to kill her mother and grandmother and sister if she did not participate in the killings. She applied again and again for parole but successive Home Secretaries refused to relent, knowing that the public would be enraged. Even when she was dying of cancer she remained in prison.
Dreadful crimes challenge belief in fundamental goodness, and if there is no understandable motive, such as jealousy or greed or a response to some form of provocation, we cannot comprehend them. We are disturbed at our failure to categorise the conduct, beyond accepting that it falls well beyond the bounds of moral acceptability. We are happier cataloguing the deed as a result of madness, because we do not then have to deal with the troubling concept of wickedness. Madness, for all its elusiveness, is a label which gives us comfort in the face of inexplicable behaviour. Yet there is ambivalence about how it is used. The public want murderers convicted as ‘murderers’ rather than madmen if they have killed in cruel and vicious ways; they want lunacy to be diagnosed after the magnitude of the crimes is recognised, not before. The catharsis of public condemnation has to be ritually experienced.
In the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, the judge felt that the issue of the accused’s sanity should be tried by a jury. It would have been wrong for a decision about the state of Sutcliffe’s mind to have been resolved by a cabal of lawyers and medical men, even if their opinions were completely sound. Public involvement in such decisions is crucial, because it maintains a balance between the vox populi and the law. If it had been decided that Peter Sutcliffe was not guilty by reason of insanity and he had been sent to Broadmoor, a secure hospital, under section 60 of the Mental Health Act, the public would have felt aggrieved. That a serial killer who had stalked women, attacked them, sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed them, and also put all women in fear of their lives, should not carry the label murderer would have seemed like an affront. In fact, the jury decided that he was not criminally insane, but since his initial incarceration he has been transferred to Broadmoor in recognition of his deep psychopathy.
Many lawyers in the Temple felt that the trial was a show put on for public consumption; they thought it was an abuse of the process, as Sutcliffe’s psychiatric state should have been recognised. Psychiatrists of considerable reputation were publicly undermined, and it was subsequently shown by his move to a mental institution that what they were saying was true. It is all too easy to be sceptical of a defendant’s descriptions of hallucinations or divine injunctions to commit crime, but psychiatrists with a wealth of experience do know when they are dealing with a psychopath. Although the jury had no hesitation in deciding that in their view Sutcliffe was not criminally insane, that does not necessarily mean they doubted his madness. What they wanted was the law to acknowledge his wickedness and they were unable to contemplate returning verdicts of not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter. The label of murder was important. I am sure, however, that the jurors who listened to the roll call of Sutcliffe’s violence ultimately found it reassuring that his crimes could be attributed to some deep-seated mental abnormality.
There is a conflict between seeking an explanation for the inexplicable in madness and an unwillingness to allow madness to become an excuse. When we ask ourselves, how could someone do that to another human being, to an innocent child? we want someone to make the behaviour intelligible to us. We hope that psychiatry might have all the answers and that evil might be rendered obsolete, but the medical profession is not as magical or all-powerful as we like to believe. Explanations for deliberate acts of criminality are sometimes not available; although these occasions are comparatively rare, there are motiveless crimes with no suggestion of diagnosed disease of the mind. And, of course, if they are denied by those charged with their commission, no insight comes from the offender.
Evil as a concept is resisted by some people, but the majority do accept the idea of evil and want punishment for its perpetrators. Sexual depravity as a component in killing heightens our revulsion, and our inability to understand becomes the more pressing if children are involved. However, countless men have been convicted of revolting crimes, beyond the imagination of most people – raping and mutilating, torturing and killing, severing and dismembering – in a nightmare of atrocities that make one long for the simple bullet in the head or the knife wound. These men fill the chambers of horrors, but few of them are remembered by name.
We feel differently about a woman doing something consciously cruel because of our expectations of women as the nurturing sex. The adage is that women who commit crime are mad, bad or sad. The bad may be few in number but once given the label there is no forgiving. It defies explanation that someone, especially a woman, stood by and allowed torture to take place, but it is important to remember that women did it in the concentration camps and evidence is emerging that women are doing it in Syria and Iraq with IS. Mary Bell, the 10-year-old girl who said she strangled two small children ‘for fun’, also perplexed and terrified the British public because her behaviour contradicted the sugar-and-spice make-up that little girls are expected to have. Yet in every child’s fairy story the delicate heroine is contrasted with a wicked woman who is there to put fear into the hearts of little boys (and girls), a reminder of corrupted womanhood. Wicked witches, old crones, evil stepmothers and ugly sisters leap from the pages in greater numbers even than the giants and ogres. Terror is a man, but wickedness is a woman. These women, who either have a cruel beauty like the stepmother of Snow White or are as ugly as sin, insinuate themselves into positions of power over children and grown men, luring them to danger, plumping them up for a final devouring, cutting them to pieces.
Most police mugshots are less than flattering, but the photograph of Myra Hindley which is forever used in the press is in a class of its own, and bears little resemblance to the woman I acted for in 1974. The female who looks out from that photograph with steely eyes has badly dyed, dishevelled hair and a heavy face. Her mouth is tight and mean. This is a woman to hate.
In 1986 the moors murders case was reopened when Ian Brady was said in the press to have confessed to reporters that he had also killed two other young people, Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade. In the prison interviews with the police which followed this disclosure, Ian Brady refused to help, but Myra Hindley admitted that they had been murdered. She described the unbearable pain of confessing to crimes of such enormity, but wanted the whole thing to be laid to rest for herself and for the families. Her years of imprisonment had provided ample opportunity for self-analysis and introspection, and she was able to describe the fierceness of her passion for Ian Brady, who had such a powerful hold upon her at the time, but her attempts at explanation only fuelled the cynicism of police and public. The lucid explanation that Myra Hindley herself put forward to explain (but not excuse) her involvement in the killings – that she was then a naive young girl totally in the thrall of a complex, experienced man – missed its mark because of the very coherence with which it was expressed. From the knowledge of her as the woman she had become, the public found it hard to extract a sense of the woman that she was then.
An obsessional quality, which she continued to possess, was clearly revealed in the personal diary that Myra Hindley kept when she first met Ian Brady at their place of work. The entries are a catalogue of childish desperation for him to show some interest in her, and since they were not written for public consumption and were penned before the spiral of degradation was under way, they support her contention that she was deeply immature. But it is hard to see beyond the strength of character and force of will which she came to exude in middle age. Her all-too-late confessions of guilt in relation to the original charges and the further admissions of two additional murders were hard to interpret as genuine repentance, and appeared rather as part of calculated machinations to get herself released. Press revelations of her lesbian relationships in prison, in an era of deeply ingrained hostility to anyone who was gay never mind a convicted felon, had further stoked the fires of abhorrence.
There are very few female serial killers, by which I mean people who murder strangers successively. The closest we have seen in the UK is Joanna Dennehy, who pleaded guilty to the Peterborough ditch murders in November 2013. She had stabbed three men to death and dumped their bodies in ditches outside the city. She was assisted in the disposal by two male friends. She also pleaded guilty to attempted murder of two other male victims, having on her own account to a psychiatrist for the Crown got the taste for killing and found it ‘more-ish’. She would not give those prosecuting her the satisfaction of a trial and her sister claimed Joanna Dennehy’s plea of guilty to all charges was to control the situation, as she liked people to know she was boss.
One of the men she killed was her lover, a man called Lee; the others were his housemates. So these were not the killings of strangers. The dead body of Lee had been clothed in a sequin dress by the accused. The attempted murders, which followed soon after this killing spree, were also of men known to her. She had a star tattooed on her face and self-harmed while in prison before her appearance in court. She had told psychiatrists that she would not kill any woman, especially the mother of children. While the Crown produced psychiatric reports, diagnosing her as a psychopath, the defence did not seem to get very far in finding out what dark matter lay behind her conduct. Despite her plea of guilty no motive was offered for her crimes. Even murderous psychopaths usually have some distorted rationale for their killings but none was forthcoming from Joanna Dennehy. As she was sentenced for the murders at the Old Bailey, she also pleaded guilty to further charges of preventing the lawful burial of her victims and said in challenge to the judge: ‘I’ve pleaded guilty and that’s that. I’m not coming down here again just to say the same stuff. It’s a long way to come to say the same thing I’ve just said.’
Joanna Dennehy was a spree killer and undoubtedly a psychopath but not a serial murderer as they are normally understood. I am aware of no case where the killer is a lone female operator, who stalks successive prey with whom she has no connection whatsoever. Despite efforts by Hollywood to create movies along those lines, there seems to be no female Boston Strangler or Yorkshire Ripper. The one woman who has come closest to this systematic taking of life was the American prostitute Aileen Wuornos whose pathetic life was immortalised in the film Monster. Wuornos was severely abused as a child and as an adult sex worker killed a succession of male clients, though the evidence was that she committed the murders in the company of her girlfriend. There are other bizarre instances of multiple killing like Mary Beth Tinning, an American, who gave birth to nine babies in fourteen years and killed them all, year after year, or when women carers, such as nurses or keepers of old people’s homes, kill their charges. When the nurse Beverly Allitt stood trial in 1991 for the killing of babies and young children the public were horrified. She was diagnosed as suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy in which women use the ostensibly caring role of mother, nurse or nanny to inflict harm on children. While she was clearly shown to be highly disturbed and dangerous, the degree to which her offences were treated with disbelief and then moral panic reflected the extent to which she, as a nurse caring for children, had shattered the image of womanhood held most sacred by the general public.
Men who commit multiple homicides against women are usually involved in a misogynistic power-play deriving from a deep-rooted anger against the opposite sex, often directing their perverse rage at women they perceive as bad. The blame for the criminality of the serial killer is frequently put on his maternal relationship or lack of one. Powerless women do not seem to seek indiscriminate vengeance against men in the same way.
On the few occasions when women have played a role in serial killings, as in the moors and Manson murders, they have functioned as handmaidens to a master. This is not the same dynamic as the battered wife who submits or colludes because of her own passivity in the face of violence. These are women in the power of strong-willed men who kill to express their scorn for humanity, men who see themselves as superior and are empowered by exacting the ultimate price from their victims. Some women feel perversely flattered at being chosen by such men, as though they had been singled out from the ordinary run of womankind.
There are people whose sexual make-up seems to require a relinquishing of personal will; it implies never having to face moral responsibility for sexual indiscretion or having to accept guilt if your deviance becomes criminal. It may be that at that time in her life Myra Hindley needed Brady’s sexual control just as much as he needed a witness to his atrocities, and that they then became welded together by their mutual knowledge.
No one should be surprised at Myra Hindley’s reconstructing of the past. We all do it, and the enormity of her shame must require some delusion. But every attempt she made to explain her acts only fed the view of her as a devious, manipulative woman. Her own gender is especially repulsed by her crimes.
Rosemary West has now replaced Myra Hindley as the female monster within our jails. She is still an enigma because she failed to testify at her trial and has withdrawn into silence. Frederick and Rosemary West were arrested in February 1994 after their garden was dug up during a search for their daughter, Heather, who had gone missing seven years previously. The police unearthed more than one body. In interview, Fred West admitted having killed his daughter and two other young women but insisted that Rose knew nothing at all. However, in the excavations of the house which followed, six other bodies were found. Fred was not a novice at murder when he met Rose; he had killed before they ever met. He admitted murdering his first wife and a previous lover and hinted that other bodies were buried in shallow graves but it was in his relationship with Rose that a campaign of sexual depravity reached its apotheosis. Together they would lure hitchhikers into their car – young women reassured by the presence of a woman. Then they would abduct their victims, violate them sexually and then kill them. The vile torture to which the women were subjected was so terrible that the press felt inhibited about printing all the details. Rosemary West may have been drawn into killing because of her infatuation with Fred but she could not claim immaturity as Myra Hindley did. Rose took part in serial killing over many years. There was direct evidence that she herself was a sexual abuser and not just an aider and abetter. On New Year’s Day 1995 Fred West committed suicide in prison leaving Rose to stand trial alone in October 1995. She was convicted on 10 counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The idea of contemporary witches may seem laughable, but women who murder summon up a special revulsion, especially if they do not present in a sympathetic way. Ruth Ellis did not cry in court. Myra Hindley did not cry. Joanna Dennehy actually laughed. Real women cry. Yet even when they do, it can be met with scepticism. When Ian Huntley stood trial in 2003 for the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, two 10-year-old girls, his girlfriend Maxine Carr was also in the dock, charged with providing him with a false alibi. Carr’s account to the police was that she was upstairs in the bath when the little girls came to the house asking for her. She claimed that she heard Ian speak to them outside but that they then left without anything untoward happening. She was in fact 100 miles away in Grimsby. In the week before being arrested she helped Ian Huntley clean the whole house from top to bottom, which meant that possible forensic evidence was unavailable.
At her trial Maxine Carr admitted lying but described her relationship with Ian as one in which he was controlling, jealous and at times violent. She said that she had provided an alibi for Huntley at his insistence because he had been falsely accused of rape in the past and said he might face the finger of unjust blame again because of that history. She said she could not let herself believe that he had killed the girls. However, Detective Chief Inspector Hebb, number two in the inquiry team, was unimpressed by Carr’s tearful performance in the witness box, still convinced that she must have had her suspicions about what Huntley had done. ‘Rather cynically is how I view it,’ he told the Observer in December 2003. His view so publicly expressed fed into the general vilification of Maxine Carr in the press. Public vitriol was such that she had to be given a fresh identity and placed in a safe house on her release from prison.
This outrage reaches fever pitch when women commit crimes against their own children. On 19 February 2008, Karen Matthews reported her nine-year-old daughter missing from her home in Yorkshire. A huge search operation was mounted by the police and local community, during which Matthews made televised pleas for her daughter’s safe return. Widespread public sympathy turned immediately to vitriol when it was discovered that Matthews herself had drugged her daughter and was hiding her at the house of an accomplice called Michael Donovan. Both Matthews and Donovan were sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for their horrific hoax. Yet while Donovan was portrayed in the media as a loner and an oddball, the real vilification was reserved for Matthews. It was ‘Britain’s most hated mum’ who had committed that additional crime seemingly reserved only for women, and which we’ve seen over and over again in this book, that of failing to display the natural maternal instinct supposedly innate in the female sex.
One of the cases which dominated the news in the last decade and which created a new she-devil in criminal iconography was that of Amanda Knox, who was initially convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007. Ultimately she had her conviction definitively quashed in 2016 by the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation but not before every detail of her sex life had been minutely examined and laid before the public via the Internet and the tabloids.
Meredith Kercher, a British student of politics and Italian at Leeds University, was undertaking a year of study abroad as part of her degree. She was brutally murdered. Her throat was cut with such ferocity her head was almost severed. She was found semi-naked in her bed in a house she shared with Amanda Knox.
Knox, an American, and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were interrogated and eventually charged with the murder. A man called Rudy Guede was also charged with murder and tried in parallel proceedings.
However, it was Knox who captured the salacious fascination of the media when her diary was leaked from the prison to a journalist and her sex life was revealed in lurid detail. She said she had recorded her relationships because she was wrongly informed by the Italian prison authorities that she was HIV-positive and she was cataloguing those with whom she had had sex. The Italian prosecutor claimed that Amanda Knox’s motive for killing her housemate was Knox’s ‘lack of morality’. She was filled with a desire ‘for pleasure at any cost’ and marks on Meredith showed the knife had been wielded ‘teasingly’ with the point piercing the neck before being plunged into the young woman whom he alleged was Amanda Knox’s victim.
Rudy Guede was convicted of murdering Meredith and of sexually assaulting her. Guede was a known burglar and his bloodstained fingerprints were found on Meredith’s possessions.
When Amanda Knox was filmed after her eventual reprieve, she spoke about how she came to be perceived. ‘I was some heinous whore – bestial, sex-obsessed and unnatural.’ She pointed out that she had had sex with seven men – not a world record. There is no doubt that her sexual desire as a young woman was used to implicate her in the murder. She was asked on prime-time television whether she was into deviant sex. Throughout the case, judgements about Amanda Knox were being based on how we perceive female sexuality and what it says about a woman if she has multiple lovers. It is these extraneous factors which make justice processes for women so much more fraught with risk and injustice.
In her authoritative book Women Who Kill, Ann Jones suggests that moral panics about women and crime coincide with the periods when women make strides towards equality, and that such panics may be a crude and perhaps even unconscious attempt at controlling these advances. She cites the cases of two 20th-century American examples of the female criminal, Ruth Snyder and Alice Crimmins, in support of this view, placing both historically in times of dynamic change for women. Ruth Snyder was tried with her lover Judd Gray in 1927 for the killing of her husband, who had been bludgeoned to death with a sash weight. Alice Crimmins was tried in the late sixties for the murder of her two children.
Ruth Snyder was described as having no heart, being a bad woman, a bad wife, a bad mother, who did not even look like a woman. Comment was made on her dyed blonde hair, her ‘masculine’ jaw and her mouth, which was ‘as cold, hard and unsympathetic as a crack in a dried lemon’. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray went to the electric chair.
Again, Alice Crimmins did not look like a decent woman, let alone a proper mother; she was described as a ‘sexy swinger’ who wore tight trousers and had affairs and, like Ruth Ellis, had been a nightclub hostess. The police officer in the case took one look at her and decided he had his murderess. He escorted her to the scene where her little girl’s body had been found and showed her the corpse. She failed the test because she didn’t cry, although she did faint. It took him two years to put together a case against her, and it later came to light that this had involved bribing and suborning witnesses. After two trials and an appeal she ended up being sentenced for manslaughter.
It is difficult to assess accurately whether Ann Jones’s theory about moral backlashes against female advances holds true in Britain. Serious crime by women here is still sufficiently rare to invoke horror whenever it happens, and it is hard to link the outrage to specific periods in history, but a number of notorious cases are remarkably similar in their facts and in the response they evoked to the ones cited by Ann Jones.
Edith Thompson was hanged at Holloway Prison in January 1923 at precisely the time when women were being admitted to the professions, having successfully secured the vote. She had been convicted of murdering her husband.
The Crown alleged that the Thompsons were walking home on a dark road in Ilford, Essex, in October 1922, when a figure emerged from the shadows and stabbed Mr Thompson to death. The assailant was later proved to be Frederick Bywaters, a young ship’s purser and Edith’s lover, once a lodger at her house. From the moment of her arrest, Edith Thompson denied all complicity in the killing and insisted that she had no idea that Bywaters was anywhere in the vicinity or had any intention of harming her husband. Bywaters himself confirmed this. However, the core of the evidence against her at her trial at the Old Bailey was her correspondence to the man she loved while he was at sea. The love letters seemed to indicate that she was learning about poisons and wanted him to send her something to do away with her husband. The defence was able to show that much of the contents were fanciful, that she was merely using the letters as a means of indulging her fantasies of being free to share a life with Freddy. The autopsy report from a celebrated pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, proved that her claim to be adding broken glass to her husband’s food was a nonsense, wholly unsupported by the findings at the post-mortem. The picture that comes clearly across today is of a woman apped in a loveless marriage to a less than admirable man who physically abused her, but she received little understanding from the trial judge, Mr Justice Shearman, and his bias against her repeatedly filtered into his summing-up. The same old judicial formula was used whereby judges absolve themselves from any responsibility for prejudicing a jury when they indicate their own interpretation of the evidence. Mr Justice Shearman invoked this when he chose to assert his view, and followed it with the rider that the final decision was, of course, in the hands of the jury: ‘That is for you and not for me.’ He was clearly convinced that Edith Thompson was culpable of inciting Frederick Bywaters to murder. Even if she was not privy to the fine detail of the ultimate plan or its execution, it was she, as an older woman, who had to be held responsible. His moral outrage on behalf of husbands was obvious, and he was particularly offended by the descriptions of the defendants’ great love.
At the end of one of Edith’s letters to Freddy, she referred to her husband as having ‘the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love’. Mr Justice Shearman vented his spleen:
Gentlemen, if that nonsense means anything it means that the love of a husband for his wife is something improper because marriage is acknowledged by the law, and that the love of a woman for her lover, illicit and clandestine, is something great and noble. I am certain that you like any other right-minded persons will be filled with disgust at such a notion.
His Lordship also suggested that some strange chivalry, rather than an expression of the truth, might account for Freddy’s exculpating Edith.
In the press, Edith Thompson was portrayed in a covert way as the New Woman; she earned her own living as a supervisor in a clothing manufacturer’s, taking home more than her husband, who was a city clerk. She was portrayed as a flapper, who liked to go to a show in the West End and have a port and lemon with her girlfriends. She showed little interest in having children. Was this the kind of woman society wanted?
Poor Edith went to the scaffold amid some public concern about her conviction. Horrible stories were told in the press alleging that she disintegrated emotionally at the point of hanging, that she fought, kicked, screamed and protested her innocence to the last, and that five warders had to hold her down as she was carried to the gallows. It was even suggested that ‘her insides fell out’. As late as 1956, during the death penalty debate, the then Home Secretary denied these accounts, but accepted that she had to be given sedatives before the hanging. Recent investigations into the case suggest she may have been pregnant at the time of the hanging, but her Home Office file has been withdrawn without reason and is no longer available to the public.
As we have seen, the trial of Ruth Ellis took place in 1955, when women were being shooed back into domesticity after the war. But where Ann Jones’s theory perhaps has most potency is in the legal response to women who are involved in political crusades or are fighting for equality. The women who have most seriously confronted the male authority of the court are those whose offences emanate from their political beliefs. In the 1970s and 80s we saw many waves of political women coming before the courts, involved in anti-nuclear campaigns like the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, or feminist demonstrations such as Reclaiming the Night and Women’s Right to Choose on abortion. These public campaigns echoed the suffragette campaigns of the beginning of the century. The response of the court had changed remarkably little, and women voiced very similar criticisms of the patronising and paternalistic nature of the system as the suffragettes did.
The operation of the criminal justice system in public order cases always produces feelings of anger. The mass processing involved in dealing with so many cases arising out of the exercise of political freedom inevitably creates a sense of injustice. In most circumstances the response of the court is no different whether you are male or female, but some other component does come into operation when the demonstration is actively organised by women for women.
In the early days at Newbury Magistrates’ Court, where the Greenham campaign cases were tried, the celebratory atmosphere of women coming together demanding peace penetrated the courtroom. The magistrates were perplexed and unsettled by the motley collection of women who appeared before them: women of all classes, ages and marital status, gay women, nuns, mothers. I always remember being instructed to appear for a group of peace women. After making the legal argument in relation to the right of way and not succeeding, we had agreed that I would withdraw and no longer act so that the women could make their own political statements. I stayed to watch, and it was quite extraordinary to see the way in which the traditional regimented courtroom procedure was changed. One after another, the women gave forceful explanations of why they were involved. Their large numbers together in the dock meant that they were not intimidated and were able to express themselves freely in what is normally an inhibiting male theatre. They gave each other encouragement and support.
Apart from the male magistrates and a few police officers, the only other man in the court was the court interpreter, who was there to translate the incantation of the Japanese Buddhist nuns. He had learned his Japanese in a prisoner-of-war camp and he entered into the spirit of the event as few interpreters do. Instead of sounding like the speaking clock, he charged his translation with some emotion and enthusiasm, and spoke with deep feeling about the horror of war. The women were all found guilty, but my last memory of the courtroom was of a great festival of kissing and hugging, with the interpreter getting his fair share of the affection.
However, this female insurrection had to be contained, and a decision was made to separate the women so that only one or two were tried at any one time. The variety of the women involved was soon homogenised by the popular press into the 1970s stereotype of the political woman in dungarees, spiked hair, non-matching earrings and no trace of lipstick. The legend was created that this or that woman was a man-hater, an iconoclast with no respect for the institutions, a woman who abandoned her responsibilities of home, hearth and children to haunt the perimeters of legitimate male activity in defending the realm. The antagonism towards the Greenham women was soon tangible in the courtrooms; in the most minimal of obstruction cases, questions would be asked about whether the women had children and who had been caring for them at the time of their arrest. No miner on a picket line would ever be asked to account for himself in this way.
Greenham moved from being portrayed in the press as legitimate peace campaigning to a side show, and eventually a freak show. This process of marginalisation was completed in the courts. However, contemporary politics threw up a different kind of political she-devil.
The trial of the Price sisters in 1973 for bombing the Old Bailey court was the first of a number of cases against women involved in Irish republicanism. The surprise and sense of horror that women were playing a prominent role ran right through the trial and the publicity which surrounded it. The headlines on 11 September 1973 blazoned the significance of their leading roles: DOLOURS BOSSED THE IRA BOMB SQUAD (The Times); THE TERROR GANG WAS LED BY A GIRL CLAIMS QC (Daily Mirror) – and she was ‘a pretty 23-year-old redhead’ to boot, according to the Sun.
The terrorist woman is a different category of female offender, in that she challenges the pathos of so much female crime. Her attack upon the state is dual, assaulting the institutions both directly, in bombing attacks, and indirectly, by confronting the traditional role of woman as a cornerstone of established society.
There seems to be a sexiness about the combination of young women and power; the words ‘cold’, ‘calculating’ and ‘ruthless’ are often juxtaposed with ‘attractive’, ‘vivacious’ and ‘pretty’. The men involved in these cases – police, lawyers, judges and reporters – were titillated by images of the Armalite rifle in feminine hands, but they were also fearful of its implications. Running through most of the cases of IRA activity involving women is a sense of horror that women should use the very attributes which make them so appealing to men to undermine their guard.
The rush to judgement on people who may be linked to terrorism always risks getting it wrong. In 1974 Judith Ward was convicted of the M62 motorway coach bombing, an explosion which killed Corporal Clifford Houghton, his wife and two young children, as well as eight other British soldiers. She was given 12 sentences of life imprisonment plus 30 years for that and two other bombings. Her father disowned her after her trial. The press had a field day about her wickedness. Until her release by the Court of Appeal at the end of April 1992, she was the longest serving woman prisoner in Britain or Ireland for offences connected with the Irish conflict. Like the Guildford Four, the Maguire family and the Birmingham Six, she had never been acknowledged by the IRA as one of its adherents. For years people hardly knew her name, and while serving her sentence she received little media attention or campaigning interest over the 18 years of incarceration. Judith Ward did not campaign or write letters over the years but quietly maintained her innocence. Prison officers and probation officers involved with her had deep misgivings about her conviction, but felt that she became resigned to a course of biding her time in hope of eventual release on parole. She had to settle for a fate she felt she had brought on her own head.
The evidence against Judith Ward was paralleled by that in the Birmingham Six case. She made confessions which were deeply flawed and in significant respects unreliable and fantastical. At trial her defence lawyers described her as a ‘Walter Mitty’ character who made claims which were manifestly untrue. Forensic evidence was supposed to show that she had been in contact with explosives. However, the expert was Dr Frank Skuse, also of the Birmingham case, who was forced to resign in 1985 because of his ‘limited efficiency’. He used the infamous Griess test for detecting the presence of the explosive nitroglycerine on swabs taken from Judith Ward’s hands. This simple presumptive test was called into serious doubt in the Birmingham case because positive reactions can also be obtained from innocent material such as soap, Formica and the coating on cigarette packets. It is usually followed by a more sensitive procedure called thin-layer chromatography. When the more sophisticated process was applied to Judith Ward’s swabs, the results were negative.
While the mental state of women is usually leapt at to explain their aberrations, at her trial the emotional vulnerability of Judith Ward was never allowed to explain her behaviour. This was terrorism, where different rules seem to apply. She was questioned extensively by police over many days without a solicitor or outside contact. Sixty-three interviews took place, an unbelievable number, and outside the experience of any lawyer I know. Thirty-four of those interviews were not disclosed to those who defended her at her trial, and the jury heard nothing about them. The failure of the Crown to disclose this evidence was quite extraordinary.
Dr James MacKeith testified at Judith Ward’s appeal that she was at the time of her confessions suffering from a personality disorder which had developed into mental illness by the time she was charged. The disorder manifested itself in attention-seeking, memory problems, mood swings and depression – a condition of ‘hysteria’ making her removed from reality. His assessment was based on interviews with her, her family, and people who knew her, but also on police and prison records and all the documentation which had subsequently come to light.
The medical officer at Risley Prison, where she was held on remand, prepared a pre-trial report (which juries do not see). It said: ‘Ward cannot be described as a very truthful person in that she has changed her story to me several times … She is a most difficult person to evaluate. At times she is feminine and well-mannered. At other times she is rough, foul-mouthed and coarse.’ In the months just before trial Judith Ward was so mentally ill she attempted suicide twice; the defence lawyers were never informed.
When giving evidence at the appeal, Dr MacKeith said that it would not have been reasonable to expect the jurors in her trial to be conscious of Ms Ward’s mental state. The full body of interviews showed clearly how disturbed she was, but the jury and defence were never availed of that information, having heard less than half the possible evidence. The lawyers were putting together a jigsaw with most of the pieces missing.
On 4 June 1992 Judith Ward’s convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal as unsafe and unsatisfactory; the judges, in an excoriating judgment, made clear their disgust at the non-disclosure of important evidence by the Crown, a doctor in the prison service and the scientists in the case. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the willingness to cut corners was all the greater because she was seen as an outlier, a thoroughly bad and dangerous woman.
Women like Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, who led the German Baader–Meinhof group of urban guerrillas, Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin of the American Weather Underground, Anna Mendleson and Hilary Creek of the Angry Brigade, or Patty Hearst, have all provoked more interest and speculation than their male comrades. All were educated, middle-class women who became involved at the extreme end of the radical politics which grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement. However, it was their sexual liberation, rather than their class analysis, that seemed to interest the male voyeur.
This response may have been influenced by some of the cultural images which were prevalent at that time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, images of leather-clad Diana Rigg in The Avengers or ‘Pussy Galore’ in the James Bond films, physically able to floor men without losing any of their sexual charms. These women also functioned alongside men, introducing exciting possibilities about what they got up to sexually, in contrast to women-only politics like Greenham Common, which were at best boring and at worst involved sexual activity that few wanted to hear about.
The theatrical convention, from Jean Genet to Monty Python, in which the judge indulges his fetish for sadomasochism with some beautiful, scantily clad dominatrix spanking him in the wings of the court, has its roots in the complicated relationship between sex and guilt, punishment and power. These elements charge the atmosphere at the trials of political, independent women, and as a result subtle and insidious inferences undermine the proceedings. There is no difference in the way women are sentenced – the courts cannot be criticised for inequality on that score – but the sense of alarm that they should be involved in such warlike activity infects the rhetoric of the courtroom.
Although the IRA women invoked complicated responses, their commitment to their cause was understood, even at the time. The calculated nature of their offences means they acquired the ‘bad’ rather than ‘mad’ label, but their motive was appreciable. The support they received from their own community helped them maintain dignity and self-esteem, and they were acknowledged as a special category of prisoner within the penal population itself. They may have been perceived as a monstrous regiment, but they do not fill the nightmares of the public in the way that Myra Hindley, Rose West and female child abusers do.
The women striking terror into hearts now are those involved with IS and other extreme Islamist groups. The most prominent is the ‘White Widow’, Samantha Lewthwaite, the daughter of a former soldier who was born and brought up in County Down, Northern Ireland, but came to London to do her degree and converted to Islam. She was the wife of Germaine Lindsay, who blew himself up on a Piccadilly Line train between King’s Cross and Russell Square stations, one of the four 7/7 suicide bombers who caused multiple explosions in London on 7 July 2005, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700 others.
Samantha Lewthwaite and her children were at the receiving end of a revenge arson attack on their home when her identity as a terrorist’s wife became known. She disappeared soon after and is believed to be in Somalia, where she married the warlord Habib Wahid. She is now designated the most wanted woman in the world and subject to a global manhunt because of her own terrorist activity. There is an Interpol Red Notice warrant for her arrest in existence. She is said to have been the mastermind of many terrorist attacks including the bombing of a bar in Mombasa in 2012, where tourists and locals were watching a Euro cup football match. It is claimed she ordered the assassination of two Muslim clerics and two Protestant preachers. She was also linked to the bombing of the Westfield Mall in Nairobi in 2013 and the massacre at Garissa University College in Kenya, where 148 were killed. In September 2016 three women jihadists stormed a police station in Mombasa and after one attacked a police officer with a knife, a petrol bomb was launched. All three women were shot dead. One had with her an unexploded suicide vest. Laptops and emails belonging to the three women were found at their homes, which indicated they had been in communication with Samanatha Lewthwaite, also known as Umm Sherafiyah or the Mother of Holy War. Security services claim that she is involved in the grooming and training of large numbers of women using the Internet, encouraging many to leave their families and travel to places like Syria or Somalia to participate in the struggle and creation of Islamic states. Al Shabaab, the group she is associated with, is based in Somalia and was linked to al-Qaeda and the Boko Haram, but recent outrages in the region have been claimed by IS. There is now speculation that she may be dead.
Another woman flagged on the most wanted terrorist list until 2017 was Sally Jones, otherwise known as Umm Hussein al-Britani. She was a single mother of two living in Kent when she began communicating online with a young Muslim hacker, Junaid Hussein. He drew her into Islam and when he decided to go to Syria he urged her to join him there. During the 2013 Christmas school holidays, she left the country with her nine-year-old son Joe, leaving behind her older son who was 18 and chose to remain in the UK. Sally Jones married Hussein the day she arrived in Syria, converting to Islam. Joe’s name was changed to Hamza. They then travelled to Raqqa where Junaid Hussein embarked on military training and Sally Jones was inducted into Islam and the Islamic State’s extreme interpretation of sharia law.
Soon after, Hussein took for his second wife a young Syrian woman half Sally’s age. Most of the fighters had more than one wife but they usually took and enslaved Yazidi, Christian or Shiite women. On social media Sally Jones boasted of her wonderful life under the Caliphate. Intelligence reports claimed she had recruited dozens of young women before her accounts were shut down and according to defectors who have been providing intelligence to the West she quickly rose to a prominent position because of her success in encouraging followers to carry out attacks against the West. Whether there is substance in these claims is unknown and untested.
Junaid Hussein was suspected of being behind some of IS’s notorious hacking attacks as well as being the recruiter of sympathisers in the West to carry out lone-wolf attacks. It is believed that it was he who installed IS radar technology. As a result he was high profile and at the top of American hit lists. In August 2015 he was killed in a US drone attack.
Sally Jones did not remarry but it is claimed she moved into a high-level training role as a jihadi widow. She is believed to have trained a special unit of European female recruits in the use of firearms and bomb-making and showed them how to plan and execute suicide attacks on the West. French intelligence linked her to the arrests of a cell of three women led by Ines Madani, who were found in possession of gas canisters and other material in central Paris in 2016.
Sally Jones and her son were killed in a US drone strike close to the Iraqi border on 12 October 2017.
Reports in May 2017 estimated that 50 British women headed for Syria and Iraq in the preceding year, some travelling with husbands and even children but others travelling alone or with friends, drawn by the heady mix of romance, adventure and piety. Others believe that the numbers are greatly underestimated. The call to women to come and help build a new Islamic State captured the imaginations of many jihadi brides. A CCTV camera captured three girls from a Bethnal Green school in London setting off for Syria via Istanbul and the image is seared in the memories of the British public. They remain missing or are presumed dead according to press reports in August 2017.
Undoubtedly, some of the women are as politically committed as the men but very many were brainwashed into believing they were going to create an ideal Islamic state; this may well include these three girls. They must have been psychologically scarred by what they found awaiting them and may have had second thoughts but had no way out. Within IS, women are commonly bought, sold or traded. They are used as tools to retain disillusioned troops, made to police the women in local populations, forced to produce children for the cause, and made to accept their place as one of several wives. Evidence being taken from Yazidi women in refugee camps and in asylum refuges in Germany describes the horrors of watching their fathers and brothers massacred and then they themselves being multiply raped by their captors. Sadly, they recount also being ill-treated by IS women.
As Islamic State has been slowly beaten back, many of the IS women are now being held in prison camps in the area of Syria controlled by the Syrian Kurds. Government ministers in the UK would prefer that the fighters, including the women, never return, or that they are prosecuted for war crimes and terrorist activities in the countries where they were captured. But the latter is hard to pull off given that European countries like the UK are opposed to the death penalty and are not confident that countries like Syria and Iraq can hold fair trials. A Kurdish state does not exist so there is no justice system by which the women can be tried. If they do return to their families in the UK, though they can be prosecuted for giving support to terrorist groups, it would be difficult to prosecute them for the serious crimes many of them have committed while in Syria or Iraq. There is unlikely to be much sympathy for jihadist women when they return but the struggle is to make the system rise above such visceral responses. Travelling to join a terrorist organisation is in and of itself a crime, and some girls were stopped by the authorities at airports before leaving the country. Careful decisions were made as to whether prosecution was necessary and usually it was not. But when women return and there is evidence of complicity in terror, recruitment, cruelty to enslaved women, or other criminal actions, the women will face trial and if convicted they will rightly receive long prison sentences.
The Home Secretary decided to remove the citizenship of some of the women to prevent their return. It is contrary to international law to render someone stateless but the UK has sought to remove citizenship from people who may be entitled to a passport from another country, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh or Somalia. Shamima Begum, one of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls, is contesting the removal of her citizenship, as she was born in the UK and Bangladesh has refused to consider any application by her. She went to Syria aged fifteen, married a Dutch jihadist and has given birth to three babies, all of whom have died. She is now nineteen and wants to return to her parents in the UK, face any charges and rebuild her life. Public sentiment has been very mixed with many insisting she be refused entry, whatever the legal position.
However, being part of the Irish trials over a couple of decades and seeing the human cost when legal standards are lowered and wrongful convictions follow has taught me the imperative of keeping the bar high. The profound misogyny of IS means that some of these women will themselves have been victims of terrible abuse and will have been subjected to duress and coercion. The legal system will have the difficult role of charting a course through uncorroborated accounts, fragile evidence and strong public hostility to determine where real guilt lies. This is the complex terrain of justice and it requires our utmost vigilance.