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

she saw Pauline’s body she became hysterical and Brady slapped her twice and told her to calm down or ‘you’ll go into the grave with her.’ He was clearly terrified that she’d go to the police and stayed by her side watching her closely for the two days after the girl’s death. They lived together, went to work together and spent their days together, so he had many hours in which to influence her. During this time she allegedly convinced herself that Pauline’s murder was an aberration, that it would never happen again.
    Myra admitted to Peter Timms that she was terrified that Ian would finish with her. After one argument he’d roared away on his motorbike leaving her miles from home on a lonely roadside, and she’d been desolate.
    The Sloans, Ian’s foster family, also witnessed how lost she was without him. Ian had taken her to Glasgow to meet them all and they thought that she looked hard and awkward. Yet at the same time it was clear that she was desperate to be liked. At night she and Ian went to the cinema and when they returned it was obvious that they’d been arguing. Myra was shaking and red in the face. Ian went out again on his own, and the family felt sorry for the sad-eyed young girl who was so totally in his thrall and so completely in love with him.
    For Ian gave her status, a kind of love, grandiosedreams beyond the dull repetitiveness of a typing job. Without this, Peter Timms believes Myra saw herself as ‘a non person.’ She had wanted marriage - but due to Ian’s influence she had now renounced marriage. She had wanted children - but had given her heart to a man who clearly wasn’t capable of showing compassion to kids. The first man in her life, her father, had alternately rejected and beat her - and now she was desperate to hold on to this long term relationship with Ian, this kind of love.
    It seems that her desire to help find Pauline and Keith’s bodies was now genuine. ‘Myra was prepared to be hypnotised… anything to help. That’s why she visited the moors,’ Peter Timms says. There, despite becoming very distraught and at times disorientated, she was able to remember geographical landmarks that helped the police locate Pauline’s body, but Keith’s body has never been found.
    Asked if there was torture involved in the murders, Peter Timms says no, adding that the tape recording of Lesley’s ordeal was indistinct because the tape was hidden under the bed. Myra claims she didn’t know it was there. Lesley screams when asked to strip and again when Ian Brady grabs her by the neck to make her take her coat off. The abuse is verbal and sexual. Someone incarcerated with Ian Brady would later say that the girl’s fingers had been cut off with lawn shears - and this also fuelled the rumours of gross abuses. But noneof the bodies showed signs of torture and all of the fingers were intact.
    Peter Timms explains that after their arrests Ian and Myra made a pact to look coldly at the police camera, to show no sign of emotion. It was important to Ian that they seem to be above society, filled with disdain. Later, when he was photographed without his knowledge looking thoughtful in the back of a police car, he was furious and wanted to kill the photographer.
    Asked about his initial impression of Myra, Peter says he was surprised at ‘how normal she was.’ He had also met her mother ‘a nice old lady, worn down by the burden of what happened.’ Everyone who knows Myra’s mother has referred to her as a hard worker. Unlike most people involved in the case, Hettie Hindley has never gone to the press and sold her story. She could have made a great deal of money but instead resides in an old folks home in relative penury.
    Myra has remained close to her mother and Peter Timms says Myra sees her as ‘an anchor to her selfhood - to her being.’ Her mother has supported her since the trial and has often visited her in prison. Her sister Maureen visited a couple of times, divorced