Debunking the media’s rumours surrounding Rose West and Myra Hindley’s “prison love affair”

The suggestion that Britain’s two most infamous women were “lesbian lovers” has never been backed up with hard evidence. Is there any legitimacy to the claim, or is it simply a product of overblown media sensationalism?

Rose West (left) and Myra Hindley (right)

In 2019, a former solicitor of the notorious English serial killer Rose West claimed that in 1995, West had a “short-lived lesbian relationship” with the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley.

Leo Goatley wrote in his book Understanding Fred and Rose West: Noose, Lamella and the Gilded Cage that while the then-41-year-old West was starting her sentence in HMP Durham, she first came into contact with Hindley on the prison’s hospital wing around November of 1995, where they began “a flowering, albeit short-lived, lesbian relationship”.

Hindley had arrived in the hospital section of Durham on April 19, 1995, after breaking her left femur in the prison yard. She would spend the next year in recovery after being diagnosed with the brittle bone disease osteoporosis. Rose was allegedly undergoing a series of examinations as part of the standard policy on newly-convicted “lifers.”.

Background

Days earlier, West had been convicted of the false imprisonment, rapes, and murders of at least ten girls over a two-decade span. She had cooperated with her husband, Fred West, who had hanged himself in a prison cell before the trial.

Meanwhile, Hindley was, at that time, Britain’s longest-serving female prisoner. She had partnered with her then-boyfriend Ian Brady to abduct and murder five children between 1963 and 1965, at least four of whom had been sexually assaulted and/or raped prior to their deaths.

Hindley died of natural causes in 2002 (at the age of 60), after suffering from a litany of other serious health issues during the last decade of her life. As of the time of writing this article, West is being held in HMP New Hall and will almost certainly spend the rest of her life behind bars. She does not respond to media requests.

“The Untold Story”

Goatley’s story was supported, at least in part, by a former inmate.

Linda Calvey, who became known as the “Black Widow Killer” after she was convicted of murdering a lover in 1991, was released on license in 2008 and has since made a name for herself as a crime fiction writer. In 2019, she recalled that Hindley and West “used to sit ­together and became very pally but then suddenly they stopped talking. I think Rose’s solicitor told her it doesn’t look good.”

2020 saw the release of Calvey’s autobiography, The Black Widow, and her appearance in the ITV documentary Rose West and Myra Hindley: The Untold Story with Trevor MacDonald. Though her book repeated her account that they were friends, in the documentary she expanded upon what she had claimed to witness and was now alleging that Hindley and West were romantically involved:

They’d go into each others cells and they became really, really close, and I think the majority of the wing all thought there was an affair of sorts going on between them. Everybody went ‘What a weird combination, they’ve become thick as thieves’.

She also made the previously unreported claim that when she discussed with Hindley why her association with West ended, Hindley’s reasoning was that “she killed her own children. Do I really want to mix with somebody like that?”

There are two crucial falsehoods in Calvey’s book: the first is that she claimed West had already been convicted of murder when she arrived in Durham in March 1995, which was not true; she was on remand for the charges and had arrived a month before. The second falsehood is the claim that Hindley was in Durham at the time of West’s arrival, when in reality Hindley did not arrive there until 25th March – weeks after West had arrived.

There were also some minor inaccuracies in Goatley’s account, namely, stating that Hindley (at the time of West’s arrival in the hospital) had been transferred to the hospital only a couple of weeks before, when she had been there for months in actuality. Goatley also mentions that Hindley was being held in F-wing, when in reality she was being held in H-wing.

“Holding hands”

Goatley and Calvey also neglected to mention that there had been reports dating back to November 1995 that detailed an alleged “friendship” between West and Hindley. The earliest report, detailed in The Sunday Mirror (sister to the tabloid The Daily Mirror), dates back to 7th May 1995, more than six months before Goatley claimed the two met.

The story, titled “You’re my best fiend”, details that “the women have become close friends since they were both transferred to Britain’s most secure women’s wing, H-Block, at Durham jail. Prison insiders say the pair meet every day, cook snacks for each other, and even watch television together.”

This story did not generate as much attention as the stories that came immediately after West’s conviction. On 22nd November of the same year, the jury in her case returned unanimous guilty verdicts for all ten murders, and she was sentenced by the judge to life imprisonment with the suggestion that she should never be released.

The story became front-page news the next day, and The Daily Mail used their cover page to repeat The Sunday Mirror’s earlier story, with some additional details alluding to the nature of their friendship:

The two most evil women in Britain – both openly bisexual – have been seen holding hands in Durham Prison.

They were drawn together by shared religion, and the 51-year-old Moors Murderess became West’s confidante and adviser. They have made unsupervised visits to each other’s cell, and prayed together in the jail chapel.

Hindley even sent a ‘Good Luck’ card before the start of the 31-day trial at Winchester Crown Court which has appalled the nation.

The Daily Mirror, The Evening Standard, and other national tabloids reported similarly identical stories in their own reports on the conclusion of West’s trial. A day later, The Daily Mail repeated the story and claimed that the two “have spent hours unsupervised in one another’s cells cooking snacks for one another and watching TV”, adding that “Hindley is said to have helped protect her from jail bullies who taunt her and anyone who associates with her”.

Denials

Hindley denied the story and complained to the Press Complaints Committee. She wrote a letter to The Independent, which was published on 6th December 1995. She suspected that The Mail’s story was either a product of “cheque-book journalism” or it was simply “another opportunity to drag my name into the headlines to boost circulation”:

If this article is providing some light relief and entertainment at my expense from the heaviness of the Gloucester trial, it isn’t only, yet again, disseminating yet another strand of fabricated garbage to weave into myth, it is also causing acute distress to my mother and family, who had to cope with the headline horrors of following my own trial and who have had little respite from them since.

I read this nonsense more than a week ago and decided to ignore it and treat it with the contempt it deserves.

But since then it has been picked up and reported by other tabloids and repeated in the Dally Mail. I now have no option but to issue this statement to say I will be making a formal complaint to the PCC about the Mail in particular and the Evening Standard which copied almost word for word the Mail’s piece.

I will be refuting claims that Rosemary West and myself have formed a “macabre” friendship, that we have ever held hands, prayed together in the chapel or anywhere else, cooked snacks for each other, watched television together in each other’s cells and that I sent her a “Good Luck’ card before the start of the trial or at any other time. Nor was I “fascinated” by her when she arrived on H-wing. She was on H-wing before I arrived and was just one of 44 immates.

In the same Independent story, a “source” with access to the wing stated that “when there are only 44 people in a confined space, it is inevitable that almost everyone will spend some time with everyone else at some point. I’m sure Hindley has spoken to West, but there is no special relationship”.

It would take more than a year for West to directly acknowledge the rumors, which she did briefly in a leaked letter to her sister-in-law, Barbara Letts:

No! I’m not having an affair with Myra Hindly [sic], we know each other because we happen to be in the same nick together. That’s all! And NO! I haven’t got cancer either.

“Friends”

In 1996, Rose and Fred West’s adult son, Stephen West, gave a taped interview on the matter for The Daily Mail for which he received no payment. He made no mention of his mother and Hindley being romantically or sexually involved, but he did corroborate The Mail’s earlier account, recalling that his mother told him how the two women formed a friendship in jail, talking a lot and spending time together, and how Hindley sent a ‘Good Luck’ card before West’s trial:

Mum mentioned Myra sending her a card of some sort. Whether it had been bought in or whether Myra had made it, I ain’t sure, but she had sent her a good luck card and basically just wrote ‘Good Luck’ in it. When Mum was found guilty of all the murders, she went back to Durham Jail on the hospital wing, where Myra Hindley was after after falling and breaking her pelvis or hip or something.

He also remembers her telling him about how the two prayed together in the prison chapel and watched TV together. His account continued:

There were times when they would see each other, being on the same wing together – H wing. It sticks in my mind that they had been together in the chapel. They had begun to talk and form a friendship, they were making toys together and things like that. I know they watched TV together, because I know Mum mentioned she was sat there and something came on about Mum on the news and she felt funny being next to Myra while she was watching it.

He said his mother had told him and his sister Mae that the pair were friends and still spend a lot of time together: “Mum and Myra had made some soft toys and it was sent to Mae’s little ‘un when it was born.”

A grain of salt

The Mail’s original story was based on information from four “reputable but confidential” sources who could not be named and therefore could not testify. The PCC adjudication declared that because of this, they “reluctantly” had to uphold the initial complaint from Hindley back in 1995, since she had been supported by a statement from a deputy governor of the prison. The adjudication further stated that The Mail had acted in “good faith”.

Following Stephen West’s story coming to light, the original file was reopened, and in the end, Hindley’s initial complaint was not pursued – not because they deemed Stephen West’s story to be true, but because there had been considerable delays from Hindley’s legal team, which meant that they failed to meet deadlines set by the commission.

Another source, possibly the deputy governor of Durham at the time, claimed that the reports of Hindley’s and West’s alleged friendship were “completely untrue,” and another “jail insider” told The People (in an article published 24th March 1996):

There were a lot of reports at the start that said Rose had hit it off with Myra Hindley. But that’s absolute nonsense. For a start, Hindley is in the hospital section with the brittle bone disease osteoporosis. She wants nothing to do with Rose – and regards her with contempt. Her view is that she is very much intellectually inferior to her.

To support that last point, in that same article, either the same or another source was quoted as saying: “Hindley is in a lot of pain because of her condition and is worried she will never be able to have sex again.”

This article has not been monetised and I own no rights to any of the photos published. All rights belong to the respective copyright owners.

I have chosen to keep my real identity a secret for the sake of not taking the shine away from my account’s central mission, which is to ensure free access to accurate information around the Moors Murders case. Read the first three articles in the series here.