Edward Evans

Background

Ian Brady

Ian Brady was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow as Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938 to Margaret "Peggy" Stewart, an unmarried tea room waitress. The identity of Brady's father has never been reliably ascertained, although his mother said he was a journalist working for a Glasgow newspaper who died three months before Brady was born. Brady's mother had little support and after a few months was forced to give her son into the care of Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own. Brady took their family name and became known as Ian Sloan. His mother continued to visit him throughout his childhood.

At age 9, Brady visited Loch Lomond with his family, where he reportedly discovered an affinity for the outdoors. A few months later, the family moved to a new council house on an overspill estate at Pollok. Various authors have stated that Brady tortured animals. It was reported, for example, that he boasted of killing his first cat when he was aged just ten years old, and then went on to burn another cat alive, stone dogs and cut off rabbits' heads. Brady, however, denied any accusations of animal abuse specifically.

Brady's behaviour worsened when he attended Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils. As a teenager, he twice appeared before a juvenile court for housebreaking. Brady left the academy aged 15 and took a job as a tea boy at a Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan. Nine months later, he began working as a butcher's messenger boy. Brady had a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, but their relationship ended when he threatened her with a flick knife after she visited a dance with another boy. He again appeared before the court, this time with nine charges against him, and shortly before his seventeenth birthday he was placed on probation on condition that he live with his mother. By then, Brady's mother had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Patrick Brady; Patrick got Ian a job as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market Hall, and Ian took Patrick's surname.

Within a year of moving to Manchester, Brady was caught with a sack full of lead seals he had stolen and was trying to smuggle out of the market. He was sent to Strangeways Prison for three months. As he was still under age 18, Brady was sentenced to two years in a borstal for "training". He was sent to Latchmere House in London, and then to Hatfield borstal in the West Riding of Yorkshire. After being discovered drunk on alcohol he had brewed, Brady was moved to the much tougher unit in Hull. Released on 14 November 1957, Brady returned to Manchester, where he took a labouring job which he hated, and was dismissed from another job in a brewery. Deciding to "better himself", he obtained a set of instruction manuals on bookkeeping from a local public library, with which he "astonished" his parents by studying alone in his room for hours.

Myra Hindley

Myra Hindley was born in Crumpsall on 23 July 1942 to Bob and Nellie Hindley, and raised in Gorton, then a working-class area of Manchester dominated by Victorian slum housing. Her father was an alcoholic who was frequently violent towards his wife and children. The family home was in poor condition, and Hindley was forced to sleep in a single bed next to her parents' double bed. Their living situation deteriorated further when Hindley's younger sister, Maureen, was born in August 1946. The following year, five-year-old Myra was sent to live nearby with her grandmother.

During the Second World War, Hindley's father had served with the Parachute Regiment and was stationed in North Africa, Cyprus and Italy. He had been known as a hard man while in the army and he expected his daughter to be equally tough; he taught her to fight and insisted that she stick up for herself. When Hindley was about eight years old, a local boy scratched her cheeks, drawing blood. She burst into tears and ran to her father, who threatened to "leather" her if she did not retaliate; Hindley found the boy and knocked him down with a series of punches. As she wrote later, "At eight years old I'd scored my first victory." Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, has written that Hindley's "relationship with her father brutalised her ... She was not only used to violence in the home but rewarded for it outside. When this happens at a young age, it can distort a person's reaction to such situations for life."

In June 1957, one of Hindley's closest friends, thirteen-year-old Michael Higgins, invited Hindley to go swimming with friends at a local disused reservoir, but she instead went out elsewhere with another friend. Higgins drowned in the reservoir; and Hindley – a good swimmer – was deeply upset and blamed herself. She took up a collection for a wreath; his funeral was held at St Francis's Monastery in Gorton Lane.

The monastery where Hindley had been baptised a Catholic as an infant in 1942 had a lasting effect on her. Hindley's father had insisted she have a Catholic baptism; her mother agreed on the condition that she not be sent to a Catholic school, believing that "all the monks taught was the catechism". Hindley was increasingly drawn to the Roman Catholic Church after she started at Ryder Brow Secondary Modern and began taking instruction for formal reception into the Church soon after Higgins's funeral. She took the confirmation name of Veronica and received her First Communion in November 1958.

As a couple

In January 1961, the eighteen-year-old Hindley joined Millwards as a typist. She soon became infatuated with Brady. Hindley began a diary and, although she had dates with other men, some of the entries detail her fascination with Brady, to whom she eventually spoke for the first time on 27 July. Over the next few months she continued to make entries but grew increasingly disillusioned with Brady, until 22 December when he asked her on a date to the cinema.

Brady and Hindley's dates followed a regular pattern: a trip to the cinema – usually to watch an X-rated film – then back to Hindley's house to drink German wine. Brady gave Hindley reading material, and the pair spent their lunch breaks reading aloud to one another from accounts of Nazi atrocities. Hindley began to emulate an ideal of Aryan perfection, bleaching her hair blonde and applying thick crimson lipstick. She occasionally expressed concern at some aspects of Brady's character; in a letter to a childhood friend, she mentioned an incident where she had been drugged by Brady but also wrote of her obsession with him. A few months later, she asked her friend to destroy the letter. In her 30,000-word plea for parole submitted to Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, Hindley said:

Within months he [Brady] had convinced me that there was no God at all: he could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese, and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion.

Hindley began to change her appearance further, wearing high boots, short skirts and leather jackets – clothing considered risqué for the period. Both she and Brady became less sociable to their colleagues. The couple were regulars at the library, borrowing books on philosophy as well as crime and torture. They also read works by de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Although Hindley was not a qualified driver (she passed her test on 7 November 1963 after failing three times), she often hired a van, in which the couple planned bank robberies.

Hindley befriended George Clitheroe, the president of the Cheadle Rifle Club, and on several occasions visited two local shooting ranges. Clitheroe, although puzzled by her interest, arranged for her to buy a .22 rifle from a gun merchant in Manchester. She also asked to join a pistol club, but she was a poor shot and allegedly bad-tempered, so Clitheroe told her that she was unsuitable. She did, however, manage to purchase a Webley .45 and a Smith & Wesson .38 from other members of the club. Brady and Hindley's plans for robbery came to nothing, but they became interested in photography. Brady already owned a Box Brownie, which he used to take photographs of Hindley and her dog, Puppet, but he upgraded to a more sophisticated model, and also purchased lights and darkroom equipment. The pair took photographs of each other that, at the time, would have been considered explicit. For Hindley, this demonstrated a marked change from her earlier, more shy and prudish nature.

As murderers

Hindley later claimed that Brady began to talk about "committing the perfect murder" around the beginning of July 1963, and often spoke to her about Meyer Levin's Compulsion, published as a novel in 1956 and adapted for the cinema in 1959. The story tells a fictionalised account of the Leopold and Loeb case, two young men from wealthy families who attempt to commit the perfect murder of a twelve-year-old boy, and who escape the death penalty because of their age.

By this stage, Brady had moved in with Hindley at her grandmother's house in Bannock Street, Gorton, and on 12 July, the two murdered their first victim, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade. Reade had attended school with Hindley's younger sister Maureen and had also been in a short relationship with David Smith, a local teenager with three criminal convictions for minor crimes. Police found nobody who had seen Reade immediately before her disappearance, and although the fifteen-year-old Smith was among the people questioned by police, he was cleared of any involvement in her death. Brady and Hindley were not among the people questioned.

The couple's next victim, twelve-year-old John Kilbride, was lured away from a market in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne on 23 November and murdered on Saddleworth Moor, where his body was buried. A huge search was undertaken, with over 700 statements taken and 500 "missing" posters printed. Eight days after he failed to return home, 2,000 volunteers scoured waste ground and derelict buildings. Hindley hired a vehicle the week after Kilbride went missing, and again on 21 December, apparently to make sure the burial sites at Saddleworth Moor had not been disturbed. In February 1964, she bought a second-hand Austin Traveller but soon after traded it for a Mini Pick-up.

Keith Bennett, also aged 12, disappeared in the Longsight district of Manchester on 16 June 1964. His stepfather, Jimmy Johnson, became a suspect; in the two years following Bennett's disappearance, Johnson was taken for questioning on four occasions. Detectives searched under the floorboards of the family home, and on discovering that the houses in the row were connected, extended the search to the entire street.

Maureen Hindley married David Smith on 15 August 1964. The marriage was hastily arranged and performed at a register office. None of Maureen's family attended. Hindley did not approve of the marriage, and her mother was embarrassed, as eighteen-year-old Maureen was then seven months pregnant and was marrying the sixteen-year-old Smith. The younger couple then moved into Smith's father's house in the Ancoats district, although they were soon rehoused in a tower block flat on the new Hattersley overspill housing estate.

Murders

Pauline Reade

On 12 July 1963, Brady told Hindley that he wanted to commit the "perfect murder". After work he instructed her to drive a borrowed van around the area while he followed on his motorcycle; when he spotted a likely victim he would flash his headlight. Driving down Gorton Lane, Brady saw a young girl and signalled Hindley, who did not stop because she recognised the girl as an eight-year-old neighbour of her mother. Sometime after 7:30 p.m., Brady signalled Hindley to stop for sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, a schoolmate of Hindley's sister Maureen, who was on Froxmer Street on her way to a dance; Hindley offered Reade a lift. At various times, Hindley gave conflicting statements about the extent to which she, versus Brady, was responsible for Reade being selected as their first victim, but said she felt that there would be less attention given to the disappearance of a teenager than of a young child.

Once Reade was in the van, Hindley asked her to help in searching Saddleworth Moor for an expensive lost glove; Reade agreed and they drove there. When Brady arrived on his motorcycle, Hindley told Reade he would be helping in the search. Hindley later claimed that she waited in the van while Brady took Reade onto the moor. Brady returned alone after about thirty minutes, and took Hindley to the spot where Reade lay dying; Reade's clothes were in disarray and she had been nearly decapitated by two cuts to the throat, including a four-inch incision across her voice box "inflicted with considerable force" and into which the collar of her coat and a throat chain had been pushed. When Hindley asked Brady whether he had raped Reade, Brady replied, "Of course I did." Hindley stayed with Reade while Brady retrieved a spade he had hidden nearby on a previous visit, then returned to the van while Brady buried Reade. In Brady's account, Hindley was not only present for the attack, but participated in the sexual assault.

John Kilbride

In the early evening of 23 November 1963, at a market in Ashton-under-Lyne, Brady and Hindley offered twelve-year-old John Kilbride a lift home, also promising him a bottle of sherry. Once Kilbride was inside Hindley's hired Ford Anglia car, Brady said they would have to make a detour to their home for the sherry. Brady then suggested another detour, this time to search for a glove Hindley had lost on Saddleworth Moor. When they reached the moor, Brady took Kilbride with him while Hindley waited in the car. Brady sexually assaulted Kilbride and tried to slit his throat with a six-inch serrated blade before strangling him with a shoelace or string. He then buried Kilbride's body in a shallow grave and, at some point afterwards, photographed Hindley and her pet dog standing atop the recently disturbed ground.

Keith Bennett

Early in the evening of 16 June 1964, Hindley asked twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, who was on his way to his grandmother's house in Longsight, for help in loading some boxes into her Mini, after which she said she would drive him home. Brady was in the back of the van. Hindley drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor and Brady went off with Bennett, supposedly looking for a lost glove. After about thirty minutes Brady returned alone, carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier, and, in response to Hindley's questions, said that he had sexually assaulted Bennett and strangled him with a piece of string.

Lesley Ann Downey

Brady and Hindley visited a funfair in Ancoats on 26 December 1964 and noticed that ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was apparently alone. They approached her and deliberately dropped some shopping they were carrying, then asked her for help in taking the packages to their car, and then to Wardle Brook Avenue. At the house, Downey was undressed, gagged and forcibly posed for photographs before being raped and killed, perhaps strangled with a piece of string. The attack was recorded on a reel-to-reel audio tape, with both Brady and Hindley's voices appearing, as their victim screamed and begged for mercy. Hindley later maintained that she went to run a bath for Downey and found the victim dead when she returned; Brady claimed that Hindley committed the murder. The following morning Brady and Hindley drove Downey's body to Saddleworth Moor and buried her – naked with her clothes at her feet – in a shallow grave.

Edward Evans

On the evening of 6 October 1965, Hindley drove Brady to Manchester Central railway station, where she waited outside in the car while he selected a victim. After a few minutes Brady reappeared in the company of seventeen-year-old Edward Evans, an apprentice engineer who lived in Ardwick, to whom he introduced Hindley as his sister. Brady later claimed that he had picked up Evans for a sexual encounter. They drove to Brady and Hindley's home at Wardle Brook Avenue, where they relaxed over a bottle of wine.

At some point Brady sent Hindley to fetch David Smith, her brother-in-law. Although Hindley's family had not approved of Maureen's marriage to Smith, Brady had been cultivating a friendship with his brother-in-law, which increasingly worried Hindley as she felt it compromised their safety. Hindley returned with Smith and told him to wait outside for her signal, a flashing light. When the signal came, Smith knocked on the door and was met by Brady, who asked if he had come for "the miniature wine bottles" and left him in the kitchen, saying that he was going to collect the wine. Smith later told the police:

I waited about a minute or two then suddenly I heard a hell of a scream; it sounded like a woman, really high-pitched. Then the screams carried on, one after another really loud. Then I heard Myra shout, "Dave, help him," very loud. When I ran in I just stood inside the living room and I saw a young lad. He was lying with his head and shoulders on the couch and his legs were on the floor. He was facing upwards. Ian was standing over him, facing him, with his legs on either side of the young lad's legs. The lad was still screaming ... Ian had a hatchet in his hand ... he was holding it above his head and he hit the lad on the left side of his head with the hatchet. I heard the blow, it was a terrible hard blow, it sounded horrible.

Smith then watched Brady throttle Evans with a length of electrical cord. Brady sprained his ankle in the struggle, and Evans' body was too heavy for Smith to carry to the car on his own, so they wrapped it in plastic sheeting and put it in the spare bedroom with the intention of disposing of it later.

Investigation

Arrest

After the murder of Evans, Smith agreed to return the following morning to help transport the body to the car before disposing of it on Saddleworth Moor. He arrived home around 3:00 a.m. and asked his wife to make a cup of tea, which he drank before vomiting and telling her what he had witnessed. At 6:10 a.m., having waited for daylight and armed himself with a screwdriver and bread knife – in case Brady was planning to intercept him – Smith called police from a phone box on the estate. He was picked up from the phone box by a police car and taken to Hyde police station, where he told officers what he had witnessed the previous night.

Police Superintendent Bob Talbot of Stalybridge police division went to Wardle Brook Avenue, accompanied by a detective sergeant. Wearing a bread deliveryman's overall on top of his uniform, he asked Hindley at the back door if her husband was home. When she denied that she had a husband or that a man was in the house, Talbot identified himself. Hindley led him into the living room, where Brady was lying on a divan, writing to his employer about his ankle injury. Talbot explained that he was investigating "an act of violence involving guns" that was reported to have taken place the previous evening. Hindley denied there had been any violence, and allowed police to look around the house. When police asked for the key to the locked spare bedroom, she said it was at her workplace; but after police offered to take her to retrieve it, Brady told her to hand it over. Evans' body was discovered in the bedroom, and Brady was arrested on suspicion of murder. As Brady was getting dressed, he said, "Eddie and I had a row and the situation got out of hand."

Initial analysis

Though Hindley was not initially arrested, she demanded to go with Brady to the police station, taking her dog. She refused to make any statement about Evans' death beyond claiming it had been an accident, and was allowed to go home on the condition that she return the next day. Over the next four days Hindley visited her employer and asked to be dismissed so that she would be eligible for unemployment benefits. On one of these occasions, she found an envelope belonging to Brady which she burned in an ashtray; she claimed she did not open it but believed it contained plans for bank robberies.

In the meantime, police were uncovering more evidence and became convinced that Hindley was actively involved in the murder of Evans and other possible victims. On 11 October, she too was arrested and taken into custody. She was charged as an accessory to the murder of Evans and remanded at Risley Prison.

Police searching Wardle Brook Avenue found an old exercise book with the name "John Kilbride", which made them suspect that Brady and Hindley had been involved in the unsolved disappearances of other children and teenagers. Brady told police that he and Evans had fought, but insisted that he and Smith had murdered Evans and that Hindley had "only done what she had been told".

Smith said that Brady had asked him to return anything incriminating, such as "dodgy books", which Brady then packed into suitcases; he had no idea what else the suitcases contained or where they might be, though he mentioned that Brady "had a thing about railway stations". A search of left-luggage offices turned up the suitcases at Manchester Central station on 15 October; the claim ticket was later found in Hindley's prayer book. Inside one of the cases were – among an assortment of costumes, notes, photographs and negatives – nine pornographic photographs of a young girl, soon identified as Downey, naked and with a scarf tied across her mouth, and a sixteen-minute audiotape recording of a girl identifying herself as "Lesley Ann Weston" screaming, crying and pleading to be allowed to return home to her mother. Downey's mother was asked by police to look at the two photographs which were deemed appropriate in order to identify her daughter, and also to verify that the voice from the recording, too, was of her daughter.

Officers making inquiries at neighbouring houses spoke to Hodges, who had on several occasions been taken to Saddleworth Moor by Brady and Hindley, and was able to point out their favourite sites along the A635 road. Police immediately began to search the area, and on 16 October found an arm bone protruding from the peat, which was presumed at first to be that of Kilbride, but which the next day was identified as that of Downey, whose body was still visually identifiable; her mother was able to identify the clothing, which had also been buried in the grave.

Trial

The fourteen-day trial began in a specially-prepared court room at Chester Assizes before Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, on 19 April 1966. The dock was fitted with bulletproof glass to protect Brady and Hindley because it was feared that someone might try to kill them, such was the public outrage at the crimes. Other elaborate security precautions included a public address system costing £2,500 and telephone equipment costing £500. National and international journalists covering the trial booked up most of the city's hotel rooms. Onlookers – some travelling for hours – would stand outside Chester Assizes every day during the trial.

Brady and Hindley were charged with murdering Evans, Downey and Kilbride. The Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, led the prosecution, assisted by William Mars-Jones. Brady was defended by Emlyn Hooson QC, the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP), and Hindley was defended by Godfrey Heilpern QC, recorder of Salford from 1964; both were experienced Queen's Counsel.

Smith was the chief prosecution witness. Before the trial, the News of the World newspaper offered £1,000 to Smith for the rights to his story; the American People magazine made a competing offer of £6,000 (equivalent to about £20,000 and £100,000 respectively in 2025). When Smith accepted the News of the World's offer – its editors had promised additional future payments for syndication and serialisation – he agreed to be paid £15 weekly until the trial, and £1,000 in a lump sum if Brady and Hindley were convicted. During the trial, the judge and defence barristers repeatedly questioned Smith and his wife about the nature of the arrangement. At first, Smith refused to name the newspaper, risking contempt of court; when he eventually identified the News of the World, Jones, as Attorney General, immediately promised an investigation. Comparing Smith's testimony with his initial statements to police, Atkinson – though describing the paper's actions as "gross interference with the course of justice" – concluded it was not "substantially affected" by the financial incentive. Jones decided not to charge the News of the World on similar grounds.

Both Brady and Hindley entered pleas of not guilty; Brady testified for over eight hours, Hindley for six. Brady admitted to striking Evans with the axe, but claimed that someone else had killed Evans, pointing to the pathologist's statement that his death had been "accelerated by strangulation" despite being the one accused of strangling him; Brady's "calm, undisguised arrogance did not endear him to the jury [and] neither did his pedantry", wrote Duncan Staff. Hindley denied any knowledge that the photographs of Saddleworth Moor found by police had been taken near the graves of their victims.

Later investigation

Since the initial search of the moors began in October 1965, the national media had been keen to name missing children and teenagers from the region as possible victims of Brady and Hindley. These included Stephen Jennings, a three-year-old West Yorkshire boy who was last seen alive in December 1962; his body was found buried in a field in 1988, but the following year his father, William Jennings, was found guilty of his murder. Jennifer Tighe, a fourteen-year-old girl who disappeared from an Oldham children's home in December 1964, was mentioned in the press more than forty years later as a possible victim, but in April 2010 it was confirmed by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) that she was still alive. This followed claims in 2004 that Hindley had told another inmate that she and Brady had murdered a sixth victim, a teenage girl.

In 1985, Brady allegedly told Fred Harrison, a journalist working for The Sunday People, that he had killed Reade and Bennett, something police already suspected as both lived near Brady and Hindley and had disappeared during the first half of the 1960s. Greater Manchester Police reopened the investigation, now to be headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, head of GMP's Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

On 3 July 1985, DCS Topping visited Brady, then being held at Gartree Prison in Leicestershire, but found him "scornful of any suggestion that he had confessed to more murders". Police nevertheless decided to resume their search of Saddleworth Moor, once more using the photographs taken by Brady and Hindley to help them identify possible burial sites. In November 1986, Bennett's mother wrote to Hindley begging to know what had happened to her son, a letter that Hindley seemed to be "genuinely moved" by. It ended: "I am a simple woman, I work in the kitchens of Christie's Hospital. It has taken me five weeks labour to write this letter because it is so important to me that it is understood by you for what it is, a plea for help. Please, Miss Hindley, help me."

Police visited Hindley – then being held at Cookham Wood Prison in Kent – a few days after she received the letter, and although she refused to admit any involvement in the killings, she agreed to help by looking at photographs and maps to try to identify spots she had visited with Brady. She showed particular interest in photos of the area around Hollin Brown Knoll and Shiny Brook, but said that it was impossible to be sure of the locations without visiting the moor. Home Secretary Douglas Hurd agreed with Topping that a visit would be worth risking despite security problems presented by threats against Hindley. Writing in 1989, Topping said that he felt "quite cynical" about Hindley's motivation in helping police. Although Winnie Johnson's letter may have played a part, he believed that Hindley, knowing of Brady's "precarious" mental state, was concerned he might co-operate with police and reap any available public-approval benefit.

Incarceration

Brady

Following his conviction, Brady was moved to Durham Prison, where he asked to live in solitary confinement. He spent nineteen years in mainstream prisons before being diagnosed as a psychopath in November 1985 and sent to the high-security Park Lane Hospital, now Ashworth Hospital, in Maghull, Merseyside; he made it clear that he never wanted to be released.

The trial judge recommended that Brady's life sentence should mean life, and successive Home Secretaries agreed with that decision. In 1982, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane said of Brady: "This is the case if ever there is to be one when a man should stay in prison till he dies." The November 2007 death of John Straffen, who had spent fifty-five years in prison for murdering three children, meant that Brady became the longest-serving prisoner in England and Wales.

Although Brady refused to work with Ashworth's psychiatrists, he occasionally corresponded with people outside the hospital – subject to prison authorities' censorship – including Lord Longford, writer Colin Wilson and various journalists. In one letter, written in 2005, Brady claimed that the murders were "merely an existential exercise of just over a year, which was concluded in December 1964". By then, he claimed, he and Hindley had turned their attention to armed robbery, for which they had begun to prepare by acquiring guns and vehicles.

During several years of interactions with forensic psychologist Chris Cowley, including face-to-face meetings, Brady told him of an "aesthetic fascination [he had] with guns", despite his never having used one to kill. He complained bitterly about conditions at Ashworth, which he hated. In 1999, his right wrist was broken in what he claimed was an "hour-long, unprovoked attack" by staff. Brady subsequently went on hunger strike, but while English law allows patients to refuse treatment, those being treated for mental disorders under the Mental Health Act 1983 have no such right if the treatment is for their mental disorder. He was therefore force-fed and transferred to another hospital for tests after he fell ill. Brady recovered and in March 2000 asked for a judicial review of the legality of the decision to force-feed him, but was refused permission.

Myra gets the potentially fatal brain condition, whilst I have to fight simply to die. I have had enough. I want nothing, my objective is to die and release myself from this once and for all. So you see my death strike is rational and pragmatic. I'm only sorry I didn't do it decades ago, and I'm eager to leave this cesspit in a coffin.

Hindley

Hindley lodged an unsuccessful appeal against her conviction immediately after the trial. She corresponded with Brady by letter until 1971, when she ended their relationship. The two remained in sporadic contact for several months, but Hindley had fallen in love with one of her prison warders, Patricia Cairns. A former assistant governor claimed that such relationships were not unusual in Holloway at that time, as "many of the officers were gay, and involved in relationships either with one another or with inmates".

Hindley successfully petitioned to have her status as a Category A prisoner changed to Category B, which enabled Governor Dorothy Wing to take her on a walk around Hampstead Heath, part of her unofficial policy of reintroducing her charges to the outside world when she felt they were ready. The excursion caused a furore in the national press and earned Wing an official rebuke from the then-Home Secretary Robert Carr. With help from Cairns, and the outside contacts of another prisoner, Maxine Croft, Hindley planned a prison escape but it was thwarted when impressions of the prison keys were intercepted by an off-duty policeman. Cairns was sentenced to six years in jail for her part in the plot.

Hindley was told that she should spend twenty-five years in prison before being considered for parole. The Lord Chief Justice agreed with that recommendation in 1982, but in January 1985 Home Secretary Leon Brittan increased her tariff to thirty years. By that time Hindley claimed to be a reformed Catholic. Downey's mother was at the centre of a campaign to ensure that Hindley was never released from prison, and until her death in February 1999, she regularly gave television and newspaper interviews whenever Hindley's release was rumoured. In February 1985, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told Brittan that his proposed minimum sentences of thirty years for Hindley and forty years for Brady were too short, saying, "I do not think that either of these prisoners should ever be released from custody. Their crime was the most hideous and cruel in modern times."

In 1987, Hindley admitted that the plea for parole she had submitted to the Home Secretary eight years earlier was "on the whole ... a pack of lies", and to some reporters her co-operation in the searches on Saddleworth Moor "appeared a cynical gesture aimed at ingratiating herself to the parole authorities". Then-Home Secretary David Waddington imposed a whole life order on Hindley in July 1990, after she confessed to having been more involved in the murders than she had admitted. Hindley was not informed of the decision until 1994, when a Law Lords ruling obliged the Prison Service to inform all life sentence prisoners of the minimum period they must serve in prison before being considered for parole.

Aftermath

David Smith became "reviled by the people of Manchester" for financially profiting from the murders, and with public suspicion that he had been directly involved in the murders. During the trial, Maureen – eight months pregnant – was attacked in the lift of the building in which both she and Smith lived. Their home was vandalised, they regularly received hate mail and Maureen wrote that she could not let her children out of her sight when they were small. After declining to prosecute the News of the World, Attorney General Sir Elwyn Jones came under political pressure to impose new regulations on the press, but was reluctant to legislate on "chequebook journalism". Instead, he accepted the offer of the Press Council to produce a "declaration of principle" which was published in November 1966 and included rules forbidding criminal witnesses being paid or interviewed – but the News of the World promptly rejected the declaration and the council had no power to enforce its provisions.

After stabbing another man during a fight, in an attack he claimed was triggered by the abuse he had suffered since the trial, Smith was sentenced to three years in prison in 1969. That same year his children were taken into the care of the local authority. Maureen moved from Underwood Court to a bedsit in another district and found work in a department store. Subjected to whispering campaigns and petitions to remove her from the estate where she lived, Maureen received no support from her family – her mother had supported Myra during the trial and did not contact Maureen again until the early 1970s.

On his release from prison, Smith moved in with a fifteen-year-old girl who became his second wife and won custody of his three sons. Maureen managed to repair the relationship with her mother and moved into a council property in Gorton. She divorced Smith in 1973, and married a lorry driver, Bill Scott, with whom she had a daughter.

In 1980, Maureen suffered a brain haemorrhage; Hindley was allowed to visit her in hospital, but arrived an hour after her death. Sheila and Patrick Kilbride, who were by then divorced, attended Maureen's funeral thinking that Hindley might be there; Patrick mistook Bill Scott's daughter from his first marriage for Hindley and tried to attack her. Shortly before her death at the age of 70, Sheila said: "If she [Hindley] ever comes out of jail I'll kill her." It was a threat repeated by her son Danny.

Lasting notoriety

The photographs and tape recording of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey exhibited in court, and the nonchalant responses of Brady and Hindley, helped to ensure their lasting notoriety. Brady, who said that he did not want to be released, was rarely mentioned in the news, but Hindley's insistent desire to be released contributed to her continuing status as a figure of public hate–especially as she failed to confess to involvement in the Reade and Bennett murders for twenty years. Hindley's role in the crimes also violated gender norms: her betrayal of the maternal role fed public perceptions of her "inherent evil", and made her a "poster girl" for moral panics about serial murder and paedophilia in subsequent decades. Her often reprinted mugshot, taken shortly after she was arrested, is described by some commentators as similar to the mythical Medusa and, according to author Helen Birch, has become "synonymous with the idea of feminine evil".

At the 1997 Sensation art exhibition, the painting Myra caused controversy, as it was a reproduction of Hindley's mugshot, shortly after she was arrested, composed of children's handprints. Given Hindley's status as co-defendant in the first serial murder trial held since the abolition of the death penalty, retribution was a common theme among those who were determined that she should not be released from prison. Even Hindley's mother insisted that she should die in prison, partly for fear for Hindley's safety. Some commentators expressed the view that of the two, Hindley was the "more evil".

Lord Longford, a Catholic convert, campaigned to secure the release of "celebrated" criminals, and Hindley in particular, which earned him constant derision from the public and the tabloid media. He described Hindley as a "delightful" person and said "you could loathe what people did but should not loathe what they were because human personality was sacred even though human behaviour was very often appalling." Tabloid newspapers branded him a "loony" and a "do-gooder" for supporting Hindley, whom they described as evil. Hindley became a long-running source of material for the press, which printed embellished tales of her "cushy" life at the "5-star" Cookham Wood Prison and her liaisons with prison staff and other inmates.

The book The Loathsome Couple by Edward Gorey (Mead, 1977) was inspired by the Moors murders. Manchester band the Smiths' song "Suffer Little Children", from their 1984 self-titled debut album, was also inspired by the case. The case featured in two television dramas in 2006, See No Evil: The Moors Murders and Longford. The episode "White Bear", from the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror (then owned and broadcast on the British network, Channel 4), was partially inspired by the murders.