There have been enough monsters after them — Denis Nielsen, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Fred West — but the 1960s Moors Murderers still arouse the greatest revulsion. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley didn’t murder as many people as those other serial killers: their victims were only five. But they were all children, sexually abused, tortured and then killed with unspeakable cruelty. The case of the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey is the most dreadful. Brady, with Hindley’s collusion, not only undressed her, gagged her, forced her to pose for pornographic photographs, raped her and killed her, probably by strangling her with a piece of string; he also made a 13-minute tape recording of her screaming and pleading for help, a tape to which her mother had to listen to confirm to the police that the voice was hers.
These are events that are still painful to think about almost half a century after they occurred. But every now and then one is forced against one’s will to think about them. The late Lord Longford bears some responsibility for this by conducting a long campaign for the release of Myra Hindley after she was received in prison into the Roman Catholic Church. His efforts were doomed from the start, for the families of her victims and public opinion in general would never have tolerated any reduction in her life sentence. But he was also misguided to think that repentance and religious conversion could in themselves be reasons for setting her free. If they were, prisoners throughout the land would be queuing up to convert.
Hindley’s record in prison had not been good. She had even attempted to escape with the assistance of a female prison officer with whom she had fallen in love.
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