One of Your Own Read online

  Lesley’s mother was desperate for news of her daughter. A magazine paid Emile Croiset to visit the area in the hope that he might sense something useful. Accompanied by Ann, Alan and the local police, the Dutch parapsychologist walked about the deserted recreation ground, where all traces of the fair had gone. Eventually, he pointed in an easterly direction and muttered, ‘There is a road . . . it divides at a fork . . . there is a cemetery . . . the people who have taken the little girl have gone on the low road.’12 He referred vaguely to a motorbike and Lesley’s body being either buried in a field with water nearby or burned in a factory furnace. He told Ann that four people were involved and that they had taken Lesley to Belle Vue before killing her in Philip’s Park. Ann couldn’t get his vision out of her head, but the police were unimpressed with Croiset.

  On 25 April, Maureen and Dave’s six-month-old baby, Angela Dawn, died of bronchitis. Dave was at work when he learned that Maureen was at Ancoats Hospital with the baby. His daughter, whom he had last seen that morning when he had played with her on the sofa in Wiles Street before leaving for work, was dead before he arrived at the hospital. Hysterical with grief, he destroyed the room in which he stood before returning to Wiles Street alone, where he packed a suitcase with her tiny clothes and threw it down the railway embankment. Myra remembered that she and Ian were watching Richard III on the BBC when her mother turned up with Maureen and Dave to tell her about the baby’s death. Ian was so annoyed at having his viewing interrupted that Myra ushered the three of them out to the car. Dave could barely speak in his anguish, while Maureen lost her girlishness overnight and followed her husband about everywhere like a ghost. Neither of them could bear to be in the house on Wiles Street. Dave returned to his grandfather’s house in Ardwick, while Maureen moved back in with her parents at Eaton Street.

  On the day of Angela Dawn’s funeral, Myra and Ian arrived at Dave’s childhood home in Aked Street, where the baby was laid out in her small coffin in the front room. Ian remained in the car while Myra went inside. She looked down on the little girl, then turned away to write on the card for her wreath: ‘Another flower in God’s garden’.13 Dave remembers: ‘We showed her into the parlour, and it was an open coffin, and I think that she wasn’t prepared for that, so – just for a few seconds – tears appeared in her eyes. That’s all. I’m not over-elaborating – it was seconds, but it had smudged the make-up under her eyes. She wore very Dusty Springfield type make-up under the eyes, very heavy black mascara . . . She had to dry her eyes and clean her eyes before she returned to the car.’14 Within days, she was telling her grieving sister to dry her own tears: ‘Don’t cry about it, buy yourself a dog.’15

  After the funeral, Maureen returned to work as a part-time machinist alongside her mother at a factory in Gorton. The giddiness that Dave loved about her had gone forever, and he had changed too, barely speaking to anyone for days at a time. Looking back, he believes that this was the point at which Ian decided to take advantage of the situation. Two days after Angela Dawn’s death, Ian and Myra called round. The foursome spent the day drinking morosely on the moor, then returned to Gorton, where Ian sulked after losing a game of cards. He suggested heading back to the moor. Myra parked the car by Hollin Brown Knoll in the usual spot and Ian asked Dave to take a stroll with him, leaving Myra and Maureen in the car. They had only gone a short distance when Ian suddenly pulled Dave to a standstill and told him to look at the moon shining on the reservoir. They remained there for ten minutes, Ian swaying slightly and silent, before returning to the car, where Myra and Maureen sat with the doors locked and the lights on. Six months later, when the body of John Kilbride was recovered from the moor, Dave realised that he had been standing directly on the child’s grave that night.

  Myra and Ian called on the couple frequently after that. ‘We’d go up to the moors with cheap bottles of wine,’ Dave remembers. ‘We’d go shooting up there with guns they had through a gun club. Brady seemed very sophisticated to me then. He wore three-piece suits and drank wine and showed me how to play chess. With hindsight, I can see that I was impressed by him. It was a bad time for me, having lost Angela, and Brady seemed to be there for me as a friend.’16 For target practice, they walked to the back of Hollin Brown Knoll, where Dave and Maureen unwittingly stood where Pauline and Lesley lay beneath the earth, and to another place opposite the Knoll, ten minutes from the road in a valley where an old railway sleeper rotted near an oil drum. Ian flew into a rage if he spotted hikers nearby; neither Dave nor Maureen could understand the possessiveness he and Myra felt towards the moor, but they were grateful to be able to escape their quiet house for a few hours. Their outings weren’t restricted to Saddleworth: they often travelled to Whaley Bridge and Taxal, and to a pine forest in Derbyshire, where they would climb over a low stone wall and down an embankment, then head through the forest to a clearing to picnic. Every other Saturday, Myra and Ian had to work at Millwards, but after lunch they called for Dave and Maureen and went off for the day, usually returning mid-evening.

  On one occasion, the four of them set out for Blackpool in the turquoise Mini-Countryman. As they travelled, they were overtaken by another car whose horn blew rudely as it passed, and from the rear window someone flicked them the V-sign. Ian’s temper snapped. He recalls: ‘I said, “Pass him.” We were cruising along at about 50, at the most. [Myra] started to overtake and as we came abreast I rolled down the window. In the pocket of the car there was a wine bottle. As we came abreast I put my arm right out of the car. I don’t know if they put the brake on, but the bottle missed them by an inch. I was astonished it didn’t hit them. There were about six people packed in this little car.’17 Temper spent, Ian realised that the occupants of the other car could have taken down the registration number of the Mini-Countryman and reported them to the police; he told Myra to forget about Blackpool and head back to Manchester instead.

  Whenever they were on the moor, Dave noticed that Ian often appeared to look for a certain spot before they sat down to picnic. Sometimes he would leave them for a while, seeming tense, then return calm and smiling. Dave was curious, but dismissed both habits as another of Ian’s many foibles. They picnicked mainly on Hollin Brown Knoll, where they could see across the jutting stones and heather thickets to the glass-like pool of Greenfield reservoir. Near the shore was Ashway Gap House, an abandoned Gothic mansion through whose empty rooms bats and owls flew.18 Ian liked to stand on the rocks on the knoll, his long coat billowing in the breeze, gazing across the moor to the water. He told Dave it brought him peace to be there, in that vast, bleak landscape, away from the ‘maggots’ wasting their lives down in the city.

  Myra was deeply distressed that summer when Puppet was run over. Ian sympathised; he loved the dog almost as much as she did and had wept when his own dog, Bruce, had died a while before. Kitty Roden from Wardle Brook Walk recalls: ‘Myra came into our front room. Her dog had been knocked down and Tom took it to Mrs Maybury’s. The next morning Myra came in here to say thank you and she gave our children money for sweets. Brady was outside on the path.’19 Elsie Masterton, with whom Myra was still friendly but not on such close terms as before, remembered: ‘Myra said to me, “I’d like to put my hands on that driver. I’d go to the police, but I’ve no dog licence.” She kept looking over there at the place in the road where the van had knocked the dog down. He had a badly injured leg. After she had gone to work, Gran came knocking on our back door. She said that Myra had made up the settee with pillows and sheets like a bed for Puppet to lie on. He kept staggering out of bed on three legs, trying to lie on the rug. That night Myra said to me, “No sleep for me tonight. I won’t go to bed. I’ll be up with the dog.” She gave it half of one of Gran’s sleeping tablets to soothe it.’20 Elsie knew how dedicated Myra and Ian were to their pets: ‘They thought the world of these dogs. I had to stand up while the dogs sat down in chairs.’21 When Myra took her weekly wash to the huge laundrette near Millwards and heard that a dog in Gorton had died of malnutrition
, she seethed: ‘I don’t know how people can be so cruel. They ought to be arrested.’22

  In June, Myra decided to decorate their front room. Dave helped Ian paint the walls a pale pink and pasted a wood-effect paper on one side of the room and a brick-effect paper on the chimney breast. Myra had the cigarette machine removed from the hall after the first anti-smoking campaign was launched amid reports linking tobacco to lung cancer in particular. She seemed to have a pronounced fear of dying: she gave up smoking instantly after the reports came out and panicked when a polio scare struck Manchester that summer; at the Plaza nightclub, DJ Jimmy Saville offered free polio inoculations with every entrance ticket and she was keen to ensure that she and Ian had their jabs at the local surgery in Hyde. When Ian and Dave had finished decorating, Gran invited Elsie and Patty in to see how it looked.23 Elsie recalled that Myra encouraged Patty to go upstairs to play Gene Pitney’s ‘Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa’, the record that ‘commemorated’ the killing of John Kilbride.24 Elsie admired the garden as well as the house; the patch on the left side of the front gate belonged to Myra and Ian, who were both gardening enthusiasts, while the patch to the right was mostly Gran’s, tended by her son Jim. Gran disliked Myra’s giant nasturtiums and wanted to pull them up, preferring her own smaller nasturtiums and dahlias. Myra’s garden was profuse with flowers nurtured on peat brought back from the moor.

  On 11 June, Elsie gave birth to a daughter, Martine. When Myra looked in on her a few days later, she peeped at the new arrival and offered: ‘Not bad, for a baby.’25 She was less abrasive the following month, when Elsie’s ten-year-old daughter Elsa was knocked down by a car and rushed into hospital. Myra expressed concern about the little girl and gave Elsie lifts into Hyde to visit Elsa, who soon recovered. Myra was then in so much debt that she told Gran she couldn’t afford July’s rent or food (Gran usually bought her own groceries, while Myra shopped for herself and Ian). The rent man came round on Wednesdays, much to the annoyance of most residents, who didn’t get paid until Thursday. Gran paid him Myra’s share that month. The neighbours had become accustomed to hearing her complain about Myra, whom she said was too bossy and no support. Gran asked friends to visit during the day, while Myra and Ian were at work, and told Lily Yates, one of her old neighbours from Gorton: ‘These people are no good to me now. They never speak to me. I go to bed at seven o’clock to get out of the way. They seem unfeeling.’26

  On 23 July 1965 – Myra’s 23rd birthday – Maureen and Dave moved to Hattersley. Dave had refused to live at Wiles Street after his daughter’s death but was upset at having to leave his beloved retriever, Peggy, behind with his father – dogs weren’t permitted in Hattersley’s tower blocks. He and Maureen were allocated the flat at 18 Underwood Court, on the third floor of a skyscraper facing Wardle Brook Avenue, 300 yards away. Myra observed how the friendship between Ian and Dave intensified following the move; Dave called in on Ian most days, and sometimes visited the Mastertons, making a fuss of Patty’s dog, Duke. Myra often refused to let him in, claiming that Ian was busy, or else she would tell him to wait over the road while she checked with Ian and if he saw the landing light flick on and off, then he knew it was fine to return. Once, when the Smiths popped their heads around the front door, she and Ian rose in silence and walked out, remaining upstairs until their guests had gone. Maureen told the court that on a couple of occasions when they called unannounced, ‘Myra would do a lot of moaning and shouting and Brady would go upstairs.’27 She remembered another incident: ‘I had been working on some cushion covers for my sister . . . I took them round to Wardle Brook Avenue. It was about 9 p.m. I knocked and could get no answer. As I began to walk away, Brady opened the door. I told him about the cushion covers and he barred the way. He put his arms around the door and said they had company. I gave the cushion cover to him and went home.’28

  After work one evening, Ian wanted to go to the cinema and Myra drove into town, expecting to accompany him, but as they neared the city centre, Ian told her that he was going alone. Myra was angry but dropped him at the Queen’s Hotel on London Road near Piccadilly Station as he asked, agreeing to collect him at eleven o’clock that night. She returned home and spent the evening with Maureen, who helped to set her hair in rollers. Realising she was going to be late collecting Ian, Myra quickly put on a headscarf and drove into Manchester. She parked in their usual meeting place – under a railway arch on Store Street – and waited. When Ian didn’t arrive, she climbed out of the car and went up the steps to the station approach, but there was no sign of him. She returned swiftly to the car, embarrassed by the rollers poking out beneath the headscarf. For two hours, she sat in the dank, derelict underpass, growing increasingly angry. Ian was steaming drunk when he rolled up at one o’clock that morning and the two of them had a blazing row. Myra questioned him about his evening and he flashed back that it was none of her business, then lapsed into silence as he flopped into the passenger seat. Fuming, Myra accelerated down a quiet road then slammed her foot on the brake, nearly sending Ian through the windscreen. He turned and struck her so forcefully that she felt as if the rollers had gone through her skull. He laughed then and began talking normally, as if nothing had happened. She accused him of treating her ‘just like a chauffeur. You arrange for me to pick you up and you’re hours late’, but Ian’s temper had passed and, with it, her own. By the time they reached home, the argument was all but forgotten.29

  ‘I felt old at 26. Everything was ashes. I felt there was nothing of interest – nothing to hook myself onto. I had experienced everything. You either strike inwards or you strike outwards,’ Ian told journalist Fred Harrison by way of an explanation for the apparent departure from the known pattern of the murders.30 In The Gates of Janus, Ian writes of a spurious, paradoxical feeling among serial killers in which the actual act of murder ‘serves to slow down the cycle of homicidal compulsion . . . the killer yearns for a period of rest, wishing to enjoy the ordinary things of life like other people’.31

  There was no known murder that summer. Ian claims to have been standing on the edge of a precipice: ‘I felt that time was running out. Things kept coming into my mind that seemed exciting, they weren’t when I carried them out, and I got more and more outrageous until I got sucked into a death dive and lost control, I lost sight of reality.’32 Myra already suspected that the unwitting architect of his ‘death dive’ might be Dave Smith; and she knew that Ian’s destruction meant her own, giving her another reason to secretly loathe her brother-in-law.

  During their nights that August at Underwood Court, when Myra and Maureen sloped off to bed, Ian raised the subject of robbery again. In the past, Dave had ignored Ian’s hints, but that month, while the news about the race riots in Los Angeles played in the background, he admits he ‘got interested in it. We agreed on robbing a bank, the three of us.’33 He agreed to keep watch on the Williams & Glyn’s bank on Ashton Old Road: ‘I had to take notes of certain things – of arrivals and departures for a good three hours – and then meet him again and tell him what I had taken down.’34 Ian said he and Myra would carry loaded guns during the raid. Dave later explained to a packed courtroom: ‘He called it a safeguard, an insurance, in case there was any obstruction, and then they would be used with the live ammunition in them . . . I did not object to the carrying of the guns, but I did object to the use of live ammunition. I said I preferred blanks. He waved it aside by just laughing.’35

  On the Saturday following their first serious discussion about robbery, Myra drove Ian and Dave to the moor and remained in the car while the two men climbed out. Ian led the way past John Kilbride’s grave, down into the valley where they had been before, to practise their aim on the old oil drum. They unloosed several rounds of shot before returning to the car. Afterwards, at the Waggon and Horses in Gorton, they quietly discussed their plans. ‘We’re going to use the guns,’ Ian insisted, and Myra joked, ‘I wonder what would happen if we took Maureen along with us.’36 During their next conversation, Dave
recalls: ‘[Ian] gave me instructions that whenever they decided to do the job at the bank, all writing materials, books and things like that, were to be moved; and if I had any, I was to let him have them so that he could dispose of them.’37

  One evening, after Myra and Maureen had gone to bed, Ian suggested to Dave that they play Russian roulette. He knocked out all but one of the bullets from a pistol and spun the chamber, then pointed the gun at Dave and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud click, and Ian started to laugh: ‘There would have been an awful mess behind you if the bullet had hit you.’38 When Dave had recovered from the shock, Ian asked him if there was anyone whom he truly hated. After a while, Dave told him about some trouble he’d had earlier in the year with Sammy Jepson and Tony Latham. Jepson had been heard boasting that he had slept with Maureen; Dave twice attempted to confront him but then discovered that Latham, with whom he had fought at school, was spreading the same rumour. Although Dave didn’t believe them, he was furious enough to question Maureen and threaten Jepson, though had forgotten everything when Angela Dawn died. Ian’s question stoked his anger anew.

  Ian was more interested in Latham than Jepson, and asked, ‘Is it real? Has it got to you?’39 Then he told Dave that he needed a photograph of Latham and proposed that Dave should take a Polaroid snap of him in his favourite pub, the Dolphin on Hyde Road: ‘We’ll take you down. Keep him talking, make him nice and friendly. Set him up good and proper . . .’40 Dave’s attempt at photographing Latham went wrong. Although Myra drove him to the pub and Dave found his old rival inside, he had forgotten to load the camera with film. To his surprise, Ian seemed to shrug off his mistake and dropped the idea of ‘setting up’ Latham. But to Myra, Ian admitted that, as far as he was concerned, Dave had screwed up and presented a risk. On the hills above Buxton, sipping from a bottle of wine, he debated with her whether or not to murder her brother-in-law. He was concerned about Dave’s reliability and tired of his domestic problems, but Myra talked him round, albeit grudgingly, not wanting to hurt Maureen.