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

David Smith and remarried, but ultimately died young of a brain haemorrhage. Myra’s parents divorced shortly after the trial. Her father never once visited her and is now dead.

Ian’s version of the story
    A friend of someone who I interviewed has visited Ian Brady for years. Brady has been diagnosed as schizophrenic and is locked up in a high security hospital . He is seriously underweight as he often refuses to eat for fear that the staff are trying to poison him. (Prisoners food is, indeed, often adulterated by other prisoners, either in the kitchens or enroute to the serving place.) At various periods he has refused sustenance altogether as he claims he wants to die.
    He is apparently enraged that he has lost his hold on Myra - and one of his visitors believes his one purpose for staying alive is to keep Myra in prison until she dies.
    For years Ian maintained that Myra played no part in the actual murders - and this seems likely, given his need to control every situation. He probably didn’t want a witness when he was sodomising the male children. He was high dominance and she was medium dominance, so he saw her as his inferior, expected her to do what she was told.
    But in the eighties he would tell a journalist that Myra helped carry out the sexual assault on Pauline and also inflicted injuries on the sixteen-year-old’s face. He would also add that Myra strangled Lesley with a length of nylon cord.
    However, Ian also told Detective Chief Superintendent Topping of another five murders of adults that he’dcommitted, and police investigation later found that one of those murders was the work of someone else and that another was more likely a suicide. His part in all five of the alleged murders proved unlikely. Either a mixture of time and mental illness had confused the solitary Scotsman or he simply invented his involvement in the hope of feeling in control of his life again.
    Detective Topping interviewed both Myra and Ian extensively and found her to be the more credible interviewee who genuinely wanted to help find the bodies. She was, indeed, willing to be hypnotised in case it would help her remember further details of the gravesites. She agreed to do it, her medical adviser agreed she could do it, and Detective Peter Topping found a skilled hypnotherapist who wanted to do it - but the Home Office repeatedly turned the request down.
    Ian, like Myra, went back up to the moors with the police and looked for familiar landmarks. He was less visibly distressed than she was during visits there, but also less helpful. He told Peter Topping that he felt ashamed of his actions and could not bear to think about what he’d done.

Denial
    Myra has also admitted to feelings of shame and remorse. She seems to have blocked out the pictureof the deaths: leastways when a relative died, Myra said that it was the first time she’d seen a dead body, forgetting that she’d seen the corpse of Pauline Reade. Freed from Brady’s influence, she returned to normal - and has apparently rebuilt her past vision of herself so that it resembles a more normal one.
    Though considered to have a hard side, Myra Hindley is not without her demons. She still opts to sleep with the light on, has occasionally been hospitalised for severe depression and is said to fear death. Yet for some years she has smoked forty cigarettes a day and refused to exercise , despite the fact that she has angina and brittle bones.
    In 1999 she was hospitalised after collapsing in her cell and asked doctors to let her die if she lapsed into a vegetative state. Prison visitors report that if she doesn ’t change to less destructive habits she is likely to die before her sixtieth year.
    The tabloids have suggested that this chainsmoking is either a death wish or a last desperate attempt to make herself seem so frail that she is released on compassionate grounds. Peter Timms sees it merely as a means of reducing boredom. ‘What else is there to do in prison?’ the