Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers by Carol Anne Davis Read Free Book Online

moors, did you?’ Though Brady had been anti-marriage and had talked Myra around to this view, she now hoped that they would be allowed to marry in jail as married prisoners are allowed more access to each other than those who are single. She wrote to him ‘Freedom without you means nothing. I’ve got one interest in life, and that’s you.’
    In letters to a journalist she would say it was six years before his hold over her weakened and she told him to stop writing to her. Thereafter she reverted to her pre-Brady normal frame of mind.

Confession
    For the next twenty years, Myra kept quiet about her and Ian’s part in the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, though the police were convinced she and Ian were responsible. Then she received a letter from Keith Bennett’s mother which clearly touched her. Keith’s mother wanted to know where her son was buried so that she could put her mind at rest and give her son a regular funeral.
    In the same time frame, Myra was receivingcounselling from the Reverend Peter Timms, the man whom she would finally confess to. I interviewed Peter Timms in May 2000 whilst researching the case.
    Peter Timms trained as a marriage guidance councillor in 1963. When he was twenty-two he joined the prison service and later helped run a young offenders establishment. He was Governor of Maidstone Prison between 1975 and 1981. During his last three years there he was also training to be a Methodist minister, a position he still holds. He had extensive experience of counselling outside prisons prior to Myra and has worked with vulnerable groups within the community.
    He also has comprehensive experience of lifers, as when he was governor of Maidstone over a hundred of the prisoners were serving a life sentence. In total he has spent twenty-nine years in the prison service and is a kind and altruistic man.
    He started to take an interest in Myra’s case in the autumn of 1983 and later went to visit her in Cookham Wood prison at the suggestion of her chaplain. Peter lived near the prison at this time so visited her often and slowly she began to open up. Between 1985 and 1986 he counselled her extensively - and finally she admitted that she’d procured Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett for Ian Brady to rape and kill. For twenty years she and Ian had denied playing any part in these deaths but now she told Peter Timms that she wanted to go on the record and make a public confession.
    Many books on the Moors Murders report that Myra initially confessed to Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping - but this isn’t true. She confessed to Peter Timms and then instructed her solicitor, Michael Fisher, to bring in the police. At this stage Detective Topping was called in and several days of talks took place. The three men listened to Myra’s confession, and Peter Timms held her hand whilst she cried. Detective Topping admitted in his frank book on the subject that Myra became deeply distraught at remembering the children’s deaths and that at times she had to be tranquillised .
    The Reverend Timms says Ian Brady’s power over Myra was absolute. ‘He had authority, was articulate. She’d grown up in a home where education wasn’t important yet was suddenly being noticed by this knowledgeable assured man.’ For the first time there was a world outside local dances and bingo halls. He was also very good looking, similar to James Dean who most young girls were infatuated with at that time.
    Peter Timms adds that ‘there was a competitive element with the other women in the office,’ and ‘she became special for the first time in her life because he asked her out.’ Ian read Dostoevsky as his daily diet and she had probably been challenged by nothing more taxing than a beauty magazine before.
    Peter is honest enough to admit that there must havebeen a ‘psycho-sexual element’ in the murders for her, that it appealed to something latent in her personality. Nevertheless, he adds that when