Myra Hindley was born in Gorton, Manchester, on July 23, 1942, and largely raised by her grandmother. She left school at fifteen, was engaged at seventeen, and in 1961 took a job as a typist at Millwards Merchandising, where she met the stock clerk Ian Brady and kept a diary of her infatuation with him for a year before he spoke to her properly.
Her part in the killings was the part that made them possible. She learned to drive and bought a van. She approached the children, because a young woman was not frightening: she asked Pauline Reade to help her look for a lost glove on the moor, and she got John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey into the car. She was present when Lesley Ann Downey was tortured, and her voice is on the tape. She helped bury four bodies on Saddleworth Moor and photographed Brady at the graves. She and Ian Brady became known as the Moors Murderers, and the British press for decades called her the most evil woman in Britain.
She was convicted at Chester Assizes on May 6, 1966, of the murders of Downey and Evans and of harbouring Brady after the murder of Kilbride, and given two life sentences. She admitted her part in the Reade and Bennett murders in 1987 and returned to the moor to help search for Keith Bennett, without result.
She campaigned for release for three decades, converted to Catholicism, took an Open University degree, and gathered a set of prominent supporters including Lord Longford, which enraged the public each time it surfaced. Successive Home Secretaries raised her tariff, from twenty-five years to thirty to whole life, and the House of Lords ruled in 2002 that politicians could not set tariffs, weeks after she died. She had a stroke and died of respiratory failure at West Suffolk Hospital on November 15, 2002, aged sixty. Twenty undertakers refused the funeral.
She occupies a place in British public life out of proportion even to what she did, and the reason usually given is that she was a woman who helped kill children, which the country found harder to hold than the fact of Brady. Both were guilty. Only one of them became a national symbol.