Myra Hindley was the reason the children got into the car. A young man alone on a street in 1963 could not have persuaded Pauline Reade to go to the moor, or John Kilbride to accept a lift, or Lesley Ann Downey to carry shopping. A woman of twenty-one with bleached hair, a friendly manner and a van could and did. The tape recorder captured what she said next. Her voice on the sixteen-minute recording, telling a ten-year-old to shut up, to put it in, to be quiet or she would get a slap, was played at Chester Assizes on April 26, 1966, and the country that heard it described never gave her back. She spent thirty-six years in prison, more than half of them insisting she was a reformed woman held for politics, and died there. Brady was the sadist; Hindley was the one Britain could not forgive.
She was born in Crumpsall, Manchester, on July 23, 1942, and raised in Gorton, a district of Victorian terraces near the railway works. Her father, Bob, a paratrooper in the war, drank and beat his wife and taught his daughter to fight; when a boy scratched her face he sent her out to hit him back. Her mother, Nellie, worked as a machinist. When her sister Maureen was born in August 1946, Myra, then four, was sent to live mainly with her grandmother, Ellen Maybury, a few doors from her parents. She was a strong swimmer, a babysitter the neighbors trusted, and for a time a devout convert to Catholicism, a faith she took up in 1958 after the drowning of a thirteen-year-old friend, Michael Higgins, whose death she blamed herself for because she had declined to swim with him. She left school at fifteen, was engaged at seventeen and broke it off as too dull, and on January 16, 1961, started as a typist at Millwards Merchandising, where the stock clerk was Ian Brady. Her diary for that year records his moods day by day. He asked her out on December 22, and she wrote that she had been to the pictures with him and that he was going to marry her.
Within two years she was driving. She took lessons in 1963, failed her test twice, passed on the third attempt, and hired the vans and cars that made the abductions possible; she never owned one until after the Kilbride murder, when she bought a Mini pickup. By her own later account, Brady had first suggested a killing on the moor in the spring of 1963. In 1964 the council moved her grandmother out of Gorton to a new house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue on the Hattersley estate, and Hindley and Brady went with her; by then three of the children were already buried on the moor. At least four of the five were sexually assaulted. Her part in each of the five was the approach, the drive and the burial, and in the Downey case the house, the bedroom, the photographs and the tape. She denied the rest to her last day, and there is no independent account of what happened on the moor once the children left the road.
Pauline Reade, sixteen, had been at school with her sister Maureen, and Hindley stopped for her on Froxmer Street in Gorton on July 12, 1963, as she walked alone to a dance in a party dress; the story was a lost glove on the moor. John Kilbride, twelve, was helping stallholders pack up at Ashton market on November 23, 1963, when she offered him a lift and a bottle of sherry. Keith Bennett, twelve, was crossing Stockport Road in Longsight to reach his grandmother's on June 16, 1964, without his glasses, when she asked him to help load boxes; his mother had walked him to the road and gone to bingo. Lesley Ann Downey, ten, was at the Boxing Day fair on Hulme Hall Lane in 1964 with sixpence when she was asked to help carry shopping. Edward Evans, seventeen, was killed with a hatchet in the living room of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue on the night of October 6, 1965, in front of Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, whom Brady was recruiting, and Hindley fetched Smith to the house and afterward, by his account, chatted over a cup of tea while the body lay in the spare room. Her grandmother was asleep upstairs throughout.
Smith called the police at dawn on October 7. Brady was arrested at the house; Hindley refused to give up the key to her car, said what had happened was an accident and that Evans had come home with the two men, and was left free for four days, during which she went to work and asked her employer to sack Brady. She was arrested on October 11 and charged first with harboring him. The two suitcases at Manchester Central left-luggage office, found through a ticket hidden in her prayer book, contained the photographs of Downey and the tape. The bodies of Downey and Kilbride were dug out of Saddleworth Moor on October 16 and 21.
At Chester Assizes, before Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson, she was charged with the murders of Downey, Evans and Kilbride, tried alongside Brady behind bulletproof glass, and gave evidence for six hours. She said she had been in the bathroom with the radio on when Downey died, that Brady had shown her the tape afterward, and that she had gone along because she was in love. The Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, played her the recording and asked her about her own voice on it; she said she was ashamed of it. On May 6, 1966, the jury convicted her of the Downey and Evans murders and acquitted her of Kilbride's, convicting her instead of harboring Brady knowing he had killed the boy, for which she was given seven years alongside two life sentences. The judge said he did not think she was a danger apart from Brady, and the tariff, when it was eventually set, reflected that: Lord Lane, the Lord Chief Justice, recommended twenty-five years in 1982, and the Home Secretary Leon Brittan raised it to thirty in 1985.
She kept up with Brady for four years and then stopped. In prison at Holloway she began a relationship with a warder, Patricia Cairns, a former nun, who in 1973 was jailed for six years for a plot to break her out; the escape kit had been made from soap impressions of the prison keys. She read for an Open University degree in humanities, returned to the Church, learned German, and from the mid-1970s cultivated Lord Longford, the Labour peer and penal reformer, who visited her for the rest of his life and told the press she was a good woman and should be released. Each of those interventions produced a front page and a fresh petition against her. The investigation was reopened in 1985 after Brady was reported to have told a journalist about Reade and Bennett. Hindley was flown to the moor by helicopter, in disguise, in December 1986 to look for the graves, and in 1987 she stopped claiming innocence and confessed to Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping to a part in all five deaths. Pauline Reade was found in July 1987, in a spot Brady had indicated; Keith Bennett was not. Hindley's confession was seventeen hours long and put every act of violence on Brady, and Topping, who wrote the book on the case, did not believe all of it.
In 1990 the Home Secretary David Waddington told her, in a decision not made public until 1994, that she would never be released, and in 1997 the High Court and then the House of Lords upheld a Home Secretary's right to set a whole-life tariff for a prisoner sentenced to life. She campaigned against it through the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords, in judicial review and at Strasbourg, arguing that she had been a battered and dominated twenty-year-old and had become somebody else; the tabloids reprinted the 1965 arrest photograph with the bleached hair and the stare each time. On November 25, 2002, the House of Lords ruled in the case of another prisoner, Anthony Anderson, that a politician could not set the tariff of a life sentence at all, and lawyers had expected her to be first in line to apply. She had died ten days earlier.
She had a chest infection and a heart attack in November 2002 at Highpoint prison in Suffolk, where she had been since 1998, and died of bronchial pneumonia at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St. Edmunds on November 15, aged sixty. The prison service could not find an undertaker willing to take the body; twenty refused. She was cremated at Cambridge on November 20 in a service attended by a dozen people, with police in riot gear at the gates, and the ashes were scattered in secret by Patricia Cairns, said to be at Stalybridge Country Park at the edge of the moor. The crematorium's ovens were reported to have been cleaned before their next use, at the request of local families. Ann West, Lesley Ann Downey's mother, had spent thirty-four years saying she would dance on the grave, and had died three years before there was one.
Winnie Johnson said that Hindley had been the one adult who could have told her where Keith was and chose the helicopter and the disguise instead. That, rather than the tape, is what the family of the boy who is still on the moor remembers her for.