One of Your Own Read online

  At the end of August, Ian’s mother and stepfather moved from Westmoreland Street – which had also been earmarked for demolition – to a council flat in Heywood. Ian seemed unsettled by the change of address and appeared to suddenly want to cling to the past. On 18 September, he and Myra travelled up to Scotland, picnicking just south of Carlisle, and Myra was relieved when his mood brightened as they reached Gretna Green. They stayed in a hotel that night and he visited his foster family alone to tell them he had brought his girlfriend on the trip. Myra made a good impression on the Sloans, despite an attack of nerves that left her tongue-tied. She perked up when they asked about Puppet, and showed them the photographs she always carried of her dog.

  From the Pollock estate, they travelled into central Glasgow, where Ian used a new camera to take endless snaps of his old childhood haunts. He found that he ‘couldn’t get enough of people, roaming the old bars and cafes, soaking up the atmosphere and delighting in overheard conversations. Each face I then observed seemed to radiate unique character. I felt truly alive, all criminal inclinations and ambitions forgotten . . .’41 There was one instance when Myra was left with his foster family while he explored Glasgow alone, and he claims to have killed a tramp that night. Police subsequently found nothing to indicate that he had committed a murder on Scottish soil, and when Peter Topping questioned Myra about the matter, she told him it was unlikely, citing an incident that occurred when the two of them were driving beyond Loch Lomond to camp. She admits to having asked Ian, after spotting a child walking alone, ‘Don’t you want to do another one?’ to which he replied – as he had once before – that he would never kill one of his own.42

  On the final leg of their trip, they visited St Monans, leaving the car near the cemetery and walking to the castle, where Ian photographed Myra sitting beside an archway. From there, they travelled to Dunning, but Ian was frustrated by their inability to find the cottage he had stayed in with the Sloans as a boy. As they left the village, Maggie Wall’s cross reared up at the roadside and they climbed out of the car to scrutinise it. Ian took his last photographs in Scotland there; he and Myra each took it in turns to sit on the witch’s monument. They stole one of the small boulders for their garden from the foot of the cross, pushing it into the car boot before driving off, the white-painted inscription ‘burnt . . . as a witch’ fading into the pale blue distance.

  15

  Our Mo was a fool for ever marrying that David Smith . . .

  Myra Hindley to Elsie Masterton, quoted in Jean Ritchie, Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess

  On the evening of 25 September 1965, Myra and Ian called at Underwood Court to find Dave lying in bed, white-faced from vomiting. He had been drinking heavily, agitated at the news that his father had arranged to have his dog, Peggy, put to sleep. ‘Ian walked into the bedroom and he asked me if I was all right. Then he turned round and he said, “It’s that bleeder who should have got the needle and not the dog” . . . Myra went out of her way to try and save the dog. She drove all the way down to the dogs’ home . . . She was just too late. The dog was in the house on its own because my father was working in London.’1 The four of them spent the evening together in the flat, and Dave momentarily forgot his troubles when Ian screamed hysterically for Myra to kill a daddy-long-legs that fluttered across the balcony to where he sat by the open door. Dave couldn’t stop laughing; he remembered when a spider had scuttled across the sitting-room floor in Wardle Brook Avenue and Ian had dashed out, shouting for Myra to get it. On both occasions, she dealt calmly with the cause of his panic.

  After the sisters had gone to bed, Ian began talking about the robbery. Dave recalled in court how Ian raised a new subject: ‘What would happen if someone obstructed us . . . the guns would be used to move them, stop the obstruction . . . He asked me what my reaction would be if this was to happen. We had been drinking for a good four or five hours, and I thought it was the drink talking, and I looked at him and waited for him to carry on. He asked me if I was capable of using a gun or of murder . . .’2

  Ian fixed Dave with his cool, grey eyes and gave the first broad intimation of the appalling secret he and Myra had kept to themselves for the past two years. ‘He went on to say that he had killed three or four people,’ Dave told the court. ‘This just convinced me that it was the beer talking. He leaned back and he said, “You don’t really believe me.” I must have smiled at him. Getting a bit tired, I was. And then he said, “It will be done,” and a matter of a quarter of an hour later we were both asleep.’3

  Myra was absent again when Ian made the same claim to Dave a few nights later, in the flat and drinking into the early hours. This time, he went further, Dave recalls: ‘He said the ages of the people were between 15 and 21, and the reason he gave was because when the police received missing person reports between those ages they did not pay all that much attention. And he went on to say that he waited in the car until somebody came along, and then he just got out and did it. And another way he mentioned, the way he preferred, was to go out in the car, wait in a place and pick somebody up, and take them back to the house and do it in the house. He preferred that way because any evidence against him was in the house and he could get rid of it in his own time . . . All his clothes would be brushed and cleaned and inspected, everything would be listed that he had on, and he said he took a drug, Pro-Plus, as a stimulant . . . He mentioned that he had photographic proof of his killings . . . He said they were buried on the moors.’4 Ian’s description of his ‘method’ failed to convince Dave that he was telling the truth. In the mundane surroundings of the Hattersley flat, with the two women asleep and Maureen’s beloved cats curled up nearby, it seemed so implausible. Dave changed the subject, returning to the robbery, which they now agreed would centre on an Electricity Board showroom and settled on 8 October as the date for the crime.

  Myra and Ian had to work on Saturday, 2 October. During a break, Myra bumped into Anne Murdoch, her former Ryder Brow rounders teammate. Anne recalls: ‘I hadn’t seen Myra for a long time. Then I heard from a lad she used to hang about with at school that she was working at Millwards. It was a rotten, scruffy-looking place near the big laundrette. On this particular Saturday, I put my two-year-old daughter Sharon in her pram and went shopping at Gorton Cross. I met up with two other lasses I knew from school, Mary and Marge. They had tots as well. When we were walking home, I spotted Myra coming out of Millwards, on the other side of the road. She saw the three of us with our toddlers and shouted sarcastically, “By God, you’ve all ended up with good jobs.” I shouted back, “You’ve got an even better one there.” She snorted at me, “You do my job then and I’ll take the babies for a walk.” I didn’t answer. She went off, clicking down the street in her high heels. The following week I heard she’d been arrested.’5

  That night, Myra and Ian walked over to Underwood Court, where Dave introduced them to Bobbie, the dog he had bought despite the tenancy rules. After the sisters had gone to bed, Ian’s conversation again turned to murder. Dave played a tape recording of himself reciting from The Last Days of Hermann Goering, and Ian asked again why he didn’t believe that he was capable of murder. Dave ignored him, even when Ian leaned over and said in his soft voice, ‘I’ve killed three or four and I’ll do another one, but I’m not due one for three months. But it will be done and it won’t count.’6

  On Tuesday evening, Dave called at Wardle Brook Avenue with a heavy parcel. Myra opened the door and mentioned that Gran was visiting friends nearby. She placed the parcel on the coffee table in the front room. ‘Ian came downstairs,’ Dave recalls. ‘Myra told him that I had brought [the parcel] round and he just took it upstairs. After about two minutes he came down with two suitcases . . .’7 The parcel contained the books Ian had asked him to return that afternoon: Mein Kampf, Tropic of Cancer, Kiss of the Whip, The Life and Ideals of the Marquis de Sade, Justine, Orgies of Torture and Brutality and The Perfumed Garden. Dave assumed Ian wanted the books as part of the process they had
discussed leading up to the robbery. He watched Ian carrying the suitcases – one brown, one blue – outside. ‘I picked one of them up,’ Dave remembers, ‘and as I handed it over the wall to Myra, Ian said, “Whatever you do, don’t drop it, or it will blow us all up.”’8 Myra pushed the suitcases into the boot of the turquoise Mini-Countryman, then climbed into the seat next to Ian. Dave watched as they sped off, in the evening sunlight, towards the city.

  Two suitcases, deposited for a shilling each, in the grey lockers of Central Station.

  Little is known about the last victim of the Moors Murders. Edward Evans’s parents never spoke to the press, devastated first and foremost by his horrifying death but also by the rumours surrounding their son.

  Edward was 17 in the summer of 1965. Tall and slim, with light-brown hair and an engaging smile, he lived with his parents Edith and John, brother Allan and sister Edith. Their home at 55 Addison Street, Ardwick, was due to be swept away by bulldozers the following year. Edward’s father worked as a lift attendant; Edward had found himself a better-paid job, employed since May as a junior machine operator at Associated Electrical Industries Limited on the vast Trafford Park industrial estate. He worked hard and liked to relax at night in the city bars with friends or at football – he supported Manchester United and was a regular face in the stands at Old Trafford. His friend Jeff Grimsdale described him as a sociable lad who dressed smartly. Whenever his parents expressed concern about his nights out, he reassured them with a smile, ‘I can handle any trouble.’9

  In the aftermath of Edward’s murder, when Ian Brady was scratching around for a motive to throw detectives off the ‘Moors’ trail, he told police that he knew Edward vaguely from the homosexual bars on Canal Street. Ian hoped that would lend credence to his invention that the murder was the result of a fight that got out of hand following his and David Smith’s plan to blackmail a homosexual for money. The term Ian used was ‘rolling a queer’.10 Homosexuality was not only illegal at that time, but also viewed as a perversion. Hostility intensified sharply in the 1950s as a reaction both to the Cambridge Five spy circle, three of whom were homosexual or bisexual, and as a result of the post-war emphasis on ‘the health and sanctity of marriage and family life’.11 A 1952 issue of the Sunday Pictorial ran a series on ‘Evil Men’, focusing on homosexuality and promising an end to the ‘freaks and rarities’, while the same newspaper, renamed the Sunday Mirror, published a guide for its readers in April 1963 entitled ‘How to Spot a Homo’, listing ‘shifty glances’, ‘dropped eyes’ and ‘a fondness for the theatre’ as ‘unmistakable signs of dangerous and deviant intentions’.12 Under these unenlightened circumstances, Edward’s family were dealt a cruel blow by rumours surrounding their dead son’s sexuality. The fact remains that Ian Brady was the only person to claim Edward was homosexual – and he did so merely as a means of deflecting police interest.

  The morning of Wednesday, 6 October 1965 was crisply autumnal and slightly warmer than average. Sun slanted across the moor from the upper windows of the house on Wardle Brook Avenue. Over breakfast, Ian handed Myra a record to mark the murder that lay ahead: Joan Baez’s single ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.13 The song was written by Dave’s favourite musician, Bob Dylan, and concerns the replacement of one lover with another. Myra had faded into the background somewhat as the friendship between Ian and Dave had intensified; she told Peter Topping that it had crossed her mind to wonder in recent weeks whether it was her own life that hung in the balance. The last verse of the record Ian gave her that morning could be read as a direct salvo about Dave Smith replacing her as his partner in crime: ‘Leave your stepping stones behind you, something calls for you/Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you./The vagabond who’s rapping at your door/Is standing in the clothes that you once wore./Strike another match, go start anew/And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.’

  The two of them departed for work at the usual hour and left Millwards that evening at five o’clock. The skies were a clear, brilliant blue as they drove back to Hattersley, where Ian walked the dogs before calling Myra out to have her photograph taken with Patty, Puppet and Lassie. The photographs – the last Ian would ever take – show Patty looking into the camera with a shuttered, inscrutable expression. Myra, wearing a red V-neck sweater and white beads, casts her gaze down and smiles faintly.

  In Ardwick, Edward Evans returned home from work and told his parents he was meeting Mike Mahone at a pub in town, then going off to watch the match between Manchester United and Helsinki. He ate his tea, then went up to his bedroom to change into white shirt, best jeans and favourite jacket, and a pair of brown suede shoes. He came downstairs just after six o’clock and picked up his keys. ‘Edward went out between 6.15 and 6.30 p.m.,’ his mother remembered. ‘I didn’t see him alive again . . .’14

  It was a beautiful Indian summer’s evening; the last red Victorian buildings to survive the modernisation of Manchester seemed to glow a soft ruby. By half past seven, Edward was in sight of the familiar cream-coloured tiles and frosted windows of Aunty’s Bar on Oxford Road. Inside were two rooms, both plainly furnished and with a telly. Edward had a drink and chat with the landlord, George Smith, who recalled: ‘It was very unusual for him to come in on his own. When I last saw him that night, he was on his own.’15 Thirty-one-year-old Mike Mahone had no idea Edward was expecting him: ‘On the previous Sunday, he was at our house for tea. His last words were, “I’ll see you on Monday or Tuesday.” As he never came, and therefore we had made no proper arrangements to go to the game, I never turned up to meet him. I wasn’t feeling too well at the time – I had my leg in plaster – and wasn’t sure that he would turn up anyway.’16 Edward drank up and bid George goodnight, then headed outside into the blowsy air of the city night.

  In Hattersley at eight o’clock, Dave knocked on the door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. Ian let him in and read the note left at Dave’s flat by the rent man, Mr Johnson: ‘Mr Smith, I want £14 12s 6d at the Town Hall on Saturday or I shall take legal proceedings. Mr Page is doing his job and if that dog is not out of the building by tonight I shall have you evicted. If there are any more complaints of Teddy boys and noise, I shall take further action.’17 Ian studied the note for a while, then gave it back, shrugging, ‘There’s nothing you can do about it.’18 Dave explained that he was less worried about the money – which he knew he could borrow from his father – than about the possibility of losing another dog, Bobbie. Ian fastened his cufflinks and straightened the waistcoat of his grey suit, saying nothing. Dave looked beyond him to where Myra stood, primping her blonde hair into a puffball in the mirror. Her make-up had been freshly applied and she wore a tight, leopard-skin dress. Ian told their visitor he’d have to go; they were on their way out for the evening. Dave followed them down the slope to the car and was still talking to Ian when Myra turned the keys in the ignition. After a minute or two, he took a step back and Myra put her foot down on the accelerator. He watched the car drive off towards Manchester, then took the short cut home, passing the back garden where the boulder stolen from the foot of Maggie Wall’s cross sat among the stones in the little rockery.

  Myra’s and Ian’s drive into town was cut short when the car in front of them hit a dog. The owners of the animal screamed and Myra pulled over the Mini-Countryman and leapt out. She ran along the street and found the dog whimpering in an alleyway. As far as she could tell, it seemed miraculously unharmed. When the couple reached her, breathless with shock, she offered to take the dog to the vet. They thanked her profoundly but told her there was no need – they would take care of it. She returned shakily to the car and drove on to Central Station but refused to pay the extortionate parking fees, so stopped on a double-yellow line instead. Ian got out, telling her he wouldn’t be long. She glanced up at the huge clock on the arched facade of the station: it was almost half past ten. Then she jumped as a policeman tapped on her window. She rolled it down and explained that she was only waiting for her boyfriend to nip into the
buffet; he told her that if she wasn’t gone when he returned from his round, he’d have to book her. She nodded and watched him walk away.

  Inside the station, Ian approached the buffet bar. It was shut. In his statement to the police, he recalled: ‘Evans was standing at a milk vending machine. I knew Evans; I had met him on several occasions previously. As I went to try the [buffet] door, he said it was closed, but I tried the door anyway. Then we got into conversation. He kept saying there was no place to get a drink . . . I invited him back to the car.’19 Ian promised Edward a drink at his home in Hattersley, where he said he lived with his sister – Myra. She said hello as Ian introduced ‘Eddie’ and mentioned the visit from the policeman as they drove back to Hattersley, parking the car in the amber glow of the streetlamp, below the house.

  In her interview with Peter Topping, Myra said that Ian asked her to call on Dave as she was locking the car. Yet she didn’t go straight to Underwood Court. She must have accompanied Ian and Edward into the house because when she did arrive at the flats, ringing the intercom sometime after eleven o’clock, she was wearing a different set of clothes. Maureen answered the buzzer, getting out of bed while Dave pulled on his jeans. When his wife opened the door, Dave was struck by the change in Myra’s appearance. Earlier that evening, her make-up and hair had been immaculate and she had been wearing the leopard-skin dress, but now she was clad in an old jumper and skirt with the hem hanging down, a pair of shabby tartan pumps on her feet. Her make-up was smudged and her hair was tousled. Maureen told the courtroom: ‘She said she wanted to give me a message to give to my mother. To tell her she would see her at the weekend and she could not get up there before . . . I asked her why she’d come round so late and she said it was because she’d forgotten earlier on and she had just remembered. I asked her why she had not got the car and she said because she had locked it up . . . She asked David would he walk her round to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue because all the lights were out . . . David said he would, and he got ready.’20 Dave picked up what he called his dog-stick, a walking stick he had fashioned for himself with string wound tightly round the end as a grip. Myra asked him what he was bringing it for and when he told her he always carried it if he went out at night, she eyed him and said, ‘You’re in the frame, you are.’21