by
Emsbabee
@ 2006-05-16 - 13:17:22
Don't know if anybody else watched that Myra Hindley programme last night, but this article about the case really makes you think:
The face of human evil
Nicci Gerrard
Sunday November 17, 2002
The Observer
When Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were found guilty at Chester Assizes - she of two murders, he of three - capital punishment had recently been abolished.
Only months earlier and they would have been put to death, and our image of Hindley would have been fixed into myth: the dyed blonde hair and staring eyes, implacable, unnatural, monstrous, with a name like something out of a blood-chilling playground chant. Instead, she remained behind bars for 36 years.
Alive, she has haunted us. Hatred for her, kept alive by her repeated applications for parole, never faded. Her bleached-out photograph became like a nightmarish inversion of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and one of the icons of the last century. When, five years ago, Marcus Harvey's massive portrait of her face, made out of child's hand-prints, was shown at the 'Sensation' show, it was pelted with egg and ink: it was a blasphemous image. Even now as she is lying dead in hospital in Suffolk, police guard her body as if it still has power to harm, like radioactive waste with an afterlife.
Brady and Hindley were the first modern serial killers. Hindley was the first woman. She was as much part of the Sixties as the Beatles and the Pill. She was the end of innocence.
But she also has the power to divide us still, for alongside all the terrifying images - that stony face, the tape played in court so that people heard a little girl being killed, the sight of police looking for shallow graves on the eerie moonscape of Saddleworth Moor - there's another image: a woman with dark brown hair and a thin calm face, growing older.
How could the pleasant-looking woman peaceful in the garden, the smiling woman receiving her Open University degree, be the one who had tortured and killed children, who had posed laughing on the moors beside a grave? Can you change so much that you are someone else entirely, struggling free from the ghastly wreckage of your past? Can you be reborn? Can you be forgiven? Can you forgive yourself? Can you be redeemed?
Hindley and her lover killed five children. They tortured them, took pictures of Lesley Anne Downey (gagged with a scarf and naked except for shoes and socks), they taped her crying ('Please, mummy, please!'). They did it for fun. Hindley's brother-in-law, who witnessed the couple's final savage murder - of 17-year-old Edward Evans - says they were nonchalant, full of laughter and good cheer, as if it were an exciting lark. They did it up the stairs from Hindley's grandmother, who briefly woke with the noise and called to ask what was going on. They drank tea afterwards, Hindley in her bloody slippers.
Yet later Hindley claimed she had been under Brady's thumb, a besotted young woman who would do anything he asked her. Before meeting him, she had been a well-behaved Catholic girl; after she escaped him she was Catholic and decent again. If she hadn't fallen in love with him, if she hadn't danced with him one Christmas Eve, today she would be a mother, a grandmother, unknown, 'good'. She liked his clean fingernails. She wanted to mother him. 'I hope he loves me and will marry me some day,' she wrote in her diary at the time, like a romantic schoolgirl. He was the ferocious moral bad luck in her life. Does this mean she was not responsible for what she did?
Like Rosemary West with her husband, Fred, Hindley met Brady when she was an impressionable teenager and he a dysfunctional youth. Brady had a history of torturing animals, a string of petty crimes behind him, a taste for Nazi literature and pornography. She became caught up in his theatrical and brutal fantasy world and somehow all the lines between sex and violence, fantasy and reality, unravelled into a Hieronymous Bosch canvas of horror.
She helped him to kill John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, Keith Bennett, Pauline Reade, Edward Evans. When they were arrested she said: 'Wherever he has been, I have been too' - meaning it literally, but also managing to express a psychological corruption, a descent into the moral abyss. And she was implacable in court, showing no guilt and no emotion. It took 21 years for her to help the police find the body of Pauline Reade, who was 16 when she disappeared in 1963. Keith Bennett's body has never been found; the case is still open, like a wound. His mother, Winnie Johnson, said: 'I hope she rots in hell... I always hoped she would be able to tell me, at least something of what I wanted to know... I want him buried in a proper grave.'
We believe what we want to about Hindley. We believe what feeds our own sense of the world and humanity. Hindley's supporters, chief of whom was Lord Longford, make many claims on her behalf. They say she was not fully responsible for her actions, that she was not 'herself' when she did the murders. They say that because she is a woman she is judged far more harshly. They say she was fully contrite. They say she had served her time, and more, and should walk free; only public opinion kept her behind bars. A Home Secretary could never, ever, sign her release though legally he should do so. Longford called her 'a good woman' and urged us to forgive the sinner; her priest says that she was a 'truly spiritual woman'.
Their opponents say she was an equal partner in murder. Her voice - hard and flat - is on the Lesley Ann Downey tape, telling the little girl to 'shut up or I'll forget myself and hit you one'. Her contrition was late-coming and self-serving, a ploy to gain parole. For them, her sorrow rings false, a touch too theatrical and grandiose in its expression: she wrote later of the murder of Pauline Reade: 'I stood and looked at the dark outline of the rocks against the horizon of the dark sky and three people died that night: Pauline, my soul and God'.
They point out that Hindley variously says she is sorry, says she wasn't responsible because she was a coerced weaker woman and says that because of her gender she is unfairly treated: having it every which way and somehow trying to wriggle clear of absolute guilt. They say that she could never walk free. (Of course, many also said she should be put to death, death's too good for her... ). Life should mean life.
Is what you do separate from what you are? Are we the sum of our actions, or are we more than that? Is evil an action or something lodged inside us? Can you begin again? Hindley went to confession. Her priest kept vigil beside her bed the night before she died. She received the last rites on Friday. Her soul was shriven. The Catholic religion teaches us that redemption is possible, that even the greatest sinner - even someone who has tortured and killed children for the obscene pleasure of it - can be washed clean of their guilt. Evil is a noun, something like dirt inside you.
But for most of us, evil is more like a verb: something you do, not something you are. This is the more modern and more terrifying view of our moral universe - because, instead of regarding Hindley as simply monstrous or aberrant, 'possessed', as it were, by evil, we have to start seeing her as not so very different from all of us, just someone who made different choices.
She is not alien, but human. This is what humans can do, if they take the hellish road and step by step go down it. This is what the Holocaust should have taught us, the awful lesson of the twentieth century. Our history is full of the vast terror of possibility.
Hindley always wanted to gain her freedom - although she knew too that freedom would be impossible and as soon as she was released she would be hounded. Successive Home Secretaries turned her down, fearful of public opinion and the tabloid press that rose up in fury at the mere mention of it.
There were rare occasions when she left prison. She went with the police to Saddleworth moor to search for bodies. How strange that must have been for her. And, once, the governor of Holloway took her for a walk on Hampstead Heath. She wrote later: 'It was as though I had never been inside. Everything came back to me. It was the smells - of grass and trees, and throwing a ball for the governor's dog. There were children playing.'
But in a way her desire for freedom is like the ultimate catch-22. If she was truly sorry for what she had done, how could she wish for freedom? How could she not go mad with the roar of guilt and be consumed by the memories of what she did? To want forgiveness for crimes that decades later have not lost their fresh horror somehow makes her less deserving of it. Anyway, who should forgive her? Is it for us, the public? But the public is an unforgiving creature, ferocious and self-righteous. The victims are all dead and nothing could make that better again.
Well, all that's over now. David Blunkett can heave a sigh of relief. Her supporters can stop their fight. Her enemies can cheer. The rest of us are left in moral bewilderment, a profound conflict of emotions and beliefs. Of course, she should have been released, and of course she should have stayed in prison for life. Of course we should feel sorry for her and her wretched wasted life - but of course that pity is swamped by the knowledge of what she did and pity for her victims. Of course she should have been allowed to find a kind of peace - but how can she feel peace when the parents of the children who died are trapped in the past, forever replaying the moments of their death? Of course, she wasn't evil. But she did evil, great evil.
She is now beyond anger and hatred, beyond forgiveness. She will be cremated and her ashes scattered to the winds. Yet she will haunt us still, a memory of horror that will not go away.
