How did she become “the most evil woman in Britain”? A deep dive into Myra Hindley’s childhood and early life

The Moors Murderess has been labelled everything, from “a peroxide-haired Gorgon” and “the most evil woman who ever lived” to “at worst an infatuated accomplice.” Interestingly, Myra Hindley’s childhood was just as complicated as her public image.

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N.B. This article is a 47-minute read as it goes into immense detail. You can read a shorter, 6-minute version here.

Perhaps no murderer in modern British history has been as widely reviled as Myra Hindley – not even her partner-in-crime, Ian Brady.

Together, the couple were responsible for the murders of five children between 1963 and 1965. At least four of the children were either raped or sexually assaulted. Decades later, before he died in 2017, Brady himself would admit that he directly murdered most of their victims.

On a surface level, to many, it seems that the main reason why Hindley (who died in 2002) was more condemned than Brady in the press is that she sits in a tiny but infamous category of British female serial killers. The fact that she targeted children sets her apart even further, and even in 2024, it is incomprehensible to specific groups of people that women like Hindley could be complicit in such horrors. This attitude was also observed by those who knew her in childhood, who remembered her as an excellent babysitter who had a natural relatability and temperament with young children.

Another reason for the intense historical media hatred around her (specifically when compared to her co-defendant) was that almost nobody questioned who or what Brady was at his core. As far as the general public is concerned, Brady was the mastermind, the sadistic paedophile who – right up until his dying day – demonstrated zero remorse for the pain and suffering he inflicted upon so many innocent people.

Regarding Hindley, however, she had several sympathetic correspondents from her prison years. In her decades-long campaign for parole – only ending when she died in 2002 – her supporters did not deny her guilt. Still, they were adamant that she had since reformed, having broken up with Brady on calamitous terms six-and-a-half years into captivity. Several saw her as a product of abuse – not only at Brady’s hands but at the hands of her father, who seemed to normalise violence in the Hindley household. On the contrary, to quote Danny Kilbride (the late younger brother of Brady and Hindley’s second victim, 12-year-old John Kilbride):

“Look what happened to me when I was a kid. Why didn’t I become a maniac? Millions of people have had her childhood, and much worse, but they don’t then go on to murder children. There is nothing in her childhood that can account in any way for what she did.”

Though Hindley has been labelled terms like ‘psychopath’ and ‘maniac’ in the press, none of her psychiatric records – taken over more than 37 total years in captivity – ever diagnosed her with a behavioural or neurological disorder. There were no known signs of temporal lobe damage and few – if any – early ‘red flags’ or events of significance that could explain her participation in the brutal crimes that she later took part in.

Infancy

Myra Hindley was born on the F Wing of Crumpsall Hospital, Manchester, in the early hours of Thursday 23rd July 1942. Her father, 29-year-old Robert ‘Bob’ Hindley, served in the Parachute Regiment at the time of her birth (service number 3853894) – employed as an aircraft fitter within the 1st Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashires. Her mother, 22-year-old Nellie Hindley, had travelled to the hospital via a six-mile bus journey.

Bob was raised a Catholic, and Nellie a Protestant (albeit reasonably agnostic). The two met in 1938, and their relationship eventually proved to be as tumultuous as it was passionate. They married in the first half of 1940, only months into the war. Biographies written on the case have either implied or outright claimed that Bob was serving overseas at the time of Myra’s birth.

Historical records state that Bob’s battalion was first based in Aldershot, Hampshire, and then deployed to France at the start of the war. They were evacuated from Dunkirk in June 1940, meaning he and Nellie were married shortly after his return. The 1st Battalion would spend the next few years re-training and re-equipping and would not return to serving overseas until March 1943 – when they were called up to fight in the Tunisia campaign in North Africa. This would have meant that Bob Hindley was, at the very least, in the country at the time of his daughter’s birth – even if he was forced away from home.

Nellie and Bob’s opposing religious backgrounds were not much of a problem in the early days of their relationship. Neither were overly religious – Nellie even less so than Bob. But Nellie was scathing of the Catholic Church, and the couple had a fierce row over the subject of Myra’s baptism. They eventually reached a compromise, and Myra was given a traditional Catholic baptism at St Francis’ Monastery on 16th August 1942. But this was on Nellie’s condition that her daughter wouldn’t attend a faith school.

During Myra’s childhood – particularly during the first few years – Nellie relied heavily on her mother for support.

Ellen Maybury was 54 years old and twice widowed. Her life up until this point had been difficult and marred by tragedy. Her first husband She had two children by her first husband, Peter Burns – Mary Louisa – affectionately known as ‘Louie’ – and Jim. Peter was killed fighting in the Battle of the Somme on 28th March 1916, and even after remarrying to Bert Maybury in 1919, Ellen would always keep Peter’s photo on her mantlepiece. Ellen and Bert eventually had three children together – Nellie, Bert Jr. and Anne. Bert Sr. died in 1928, which devastated Ellen. Four years later, Louie died of peritonitis, aged just 24. Young Myra would eventually become fascinated to learn how her Gran’s hair had turned white overnight from grief.

At the time of Myra’s birth, Nellie lived at 24 Beasley Street – a tiny, old-fashioned back-to-back council house in Gorton – with Gran, Uncle Bert and his partner Kath (a young Catholic woman who would soon become Myra’s godmother). Situated just east of Manchester’s city centre, Myra described Gorton as “a tough but respectable working-class district. There was a lot of poverty but virtually no crime and a strong ethos of Victorian prudery.” The Gorton of the 1940s no longer exists due to the gentrification efforts of the 1960s, which would occur during the timespan that Hindley and Ian Brady were committing their murders.

Though the home was overcrowded and structurally unhygienic – like the rest of the houses in the neighbourhood – baby Myra was doted on dearly by everybody in the house. She always remained close to her maternal relatives (except Uncle Jim, who did not live locally) and retained a strong affection for her Uncle Bert – describing him as a “father figure. He was kindly and caring, unlike my dad, who was rough and ready.”

When Nellie returned to her machinist job after Myra’s birth, she entrusted her to Ellen’s care.

Bob’s return

Four days after Myra was born, a Luftwaffe bombing killed three people in nearby Beswick. During the wartime sirens, the Maybury household would safely retreat to the communal Anderson shelter at the end of Beasley Street.

On 25th August 1944, whilst he was stationed in Italy during the onset of the Gothic Line Offensive, Bob Hindley reported to the War Office Casualty Branch for an undisclosed injury. Myra later recalled that he had sustained a leg wound during the war – although it is unknown whether this was the same incident.

Bob’s regiment was deployed to Palestine after VE Day, and upon his discharge, he found it difficult to re-adjust to civilian life. The athletic young man that Nellie fell for, who had been a champion boxer in his regiment, returned to the slums of Manchester a morose alcoholic with a weak leg.

Bob took a labouring job at Gorton Foundry, and – much to little Myra’s dismay – the family moved into their own house, 20 Eaton Street. Though the new home was quite literally a minute’s walk from Gran’s house, it was a world away from what Myra was used to. She struggled to bond with her father as she had bonded with Gran, Uncle Bert and Auntie Kath (who were married by now and living a mile away in Clayton). She would later tell her one-time prison therapist, Joe Chapman, that Eaton Street was “damp and cold. I hated him for forcing us to move away from Gran’s.”

Though she always held an unfavourable view of her father, Myra would eventually cut him a bit of slack and acknowledged that despite his inner demons, Bob attempted to bond with her, and he (at least initially) doted on her dearly. He was fond of showing off her long blonde curls and took her for many days out at Belle Vue Zoological Gardens – Gorton’s world-famous (but now-defunct) entertainment complex.

The adult Myra would also recall that one time, the two were in a department store in the city when she needed the toilet but was scared to go into the ladies’ room on her own. Bob went to see the store manager to convince him to let her come into the men’s room with him and refused to take no for an answer. Myra conceded: “I suppose he cared about me in his own way.”

Violence

Bob and Nellie’s second daughter, Maureen, was born on 21st August 1946. Myra was always good with the baby – she seemingly idolised her little sister and would help whenever possible. The family’s pet names for Maureen – ’Mo’, ‘Mobee’ and ‘Mo-Baby’ – lasted into adulthood.

Bob took part in bare-knuckle boxing matches on Gorton’s “blood tubs” during the evenings to bring extra money in, but most evenings ended with him stumbling in from the pub.

Ultimately, neither Maureen’s birth – nor the extra income – did anything to rekindle the couple’s relationship. There were now four people sharing one small bedroom. Maureen proved to be a more difficult baby than Myra was, and her lengthy bouts of crying during the night exhausted Nellie in particular. Myra was often shouted at by her increasingly irritable mother for even being within the vague vicinity of ‘Dad’s chair’.

Drinking was Bob’s coping mechanism, and following Maureen’s birth, his alcoholism grew worse. Soon, he no longer confined his fighting to the boxing ring or the “blood tubs” – Bob was known to frequent The Steelworks Tavern (as well as two other local pubs, The Bessemer and The Shakespeare) and leave covered in blood and bruises. The neighbours often called Nellie out of the house at around 10 pm, who would alert her that Bob was fighting again, and she’d best intervene. Young Myra frequently witnessed Nellie dragging Bob back into the house, and the two would have fearful arguments that often culminated in Bob striking Nellie. To an impressionable young girl – yet to start school – she accepted this as routine:

“Although on the whole I was a “normal happy girl”, I grew up in what can be described as a tough working class district where Friday and Saturday nights were known as “wife-beating nights”; the men worked hard all week and many spent the weekends drinking.
“Pub closing times were dreaded, because we all knew what would happen. Women ran out into the street, trying to escape from being beaten. All the kids used to jump out of bed and rush outside to try to stop our fathers hurting our mothers, and we were often turned on too.”

Talking with Joe Chapman in the early 1990s, Myra recalled her father “beating my Mam and he was also violent towards me if I didn’t behave. He forced me to eat meals, especially fish, which I hated. I would eat it and be sick rather than get a good hiding.” Gran was her earliest role model when it came to defending herself and her mother from Bob’s violence. She laughed as she recalled how Gran would begin “bashing him with a rolled up newspaper while I tried to pull his legs from under him… concentrating on the leg with the war wound, which was the weakest one.”

In a letter to The Guardian in December 1995, Myra wrote:

“I disliked him intensely for his violence, drunkenness and the tyrannical way he dominated the household. We were in almost constant conflict, and with hindsight I can see that my sense of family values and relationships were seriously undermind by his influence on me as a child. I have never sought to blame him for anything I did when I was older (it devastated him that his daughter could possibly have done the things I did, and he disowned me) but he was far from being a good role model.”

In the UK, the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 recognises that exposure to such violence is a form of child abuse in and of itself. But the stories that Hindley told about the precise nature of the abuse she suffered at the hands of one or both parents were inconsistent – and seemed to change depending on her audience. According to Patricia Cairns, who would become Hindley’s lover in the 1970s whilst she was in the first decade of her life sentence at Holloway prison, Hindley’s mum “was cruel to her when she was little. She didn’t protect her and beat her herself. She hit her about the head. I remember Myra telling me that she made her ears bleed.”

It appears that Hindley never mentioned this to others who had gained her trust in her prison years, which likely means one of two things: she didn’t want to betray the loyalty her mother would go on to maintain for her after she and Ian Brady were arrested, or that Hindley was lying outright in an attempt to explain away her involvement in such horrific crimes to Cairns.

When autobiographer Duncan Staff asked Cairns why there was no mention of this in any of Hindley’s writings, she replied:

“I think when Myra wrote about that time, she made excuses for her mum. She wanted her to be something that she wasn’t. She wanted to have a good mum, so she portrayed her as she would have liked her to be.”

Either way, domestic violence was normalised – not just towards Myra and Maureen, but to millions of other children growing up in such environments in post-war Britain. Entire studies have been dedicated to the difficulties married women, in particular, faced during the post-war period and the stigmas that they were subject to if they reported their husband’s abuse to the police, their local authorities or even their closest friends. This is important to bring up because although the true extent of the violence in the Hindley household is unknown, or even who was and wasn’t culpable, the one indisputable fact is that Bob beat Nellie regularly – and Nellie couldn’t find her way out of the relationship for a long time (they did not divorce until 1965). At the time, there would have been no services for her to make the most of, nor refuges for her or her two children. The only person Nellie could turn to was her mother.

Now living alone at 24 Beasley Street, Ellen proposed a solution: for Myra to move in with her. That way, at least some of the household tension could be eased, and Nellie could focus most of her attention on working and caring for baby Maureen. Nellie saw this as reasonable – besides, Ellen lived only a hop, skip, and a jump away, and living arrangements like this were not unheard of then. Myra was thrilled at the prospect of returning to live with her beloved Gran and having her own bedroom. Bob didn’t like the idea but agreed, providing that Myra would still return home for meals.

Patricia Cairns believed that Myra’s parents sending her away “was the most hurtful thing that could have happened to her. It was the first time in her life that she was made to feel the outsider. That lasted for the rest of her life.” Yet nothing in Myra Hindley’s writings or confessions indicated that moving in with her Gran was ever an issue for her or that she ever felt her relationship with her mother, sister or any other family member was strained because of this.

Home life

The north-east side of Bannock Street, photographed in the 1960s

Myra started at Peacock Street Primary School in 1947, and around the same time, she and Gran moved into the house next door – 22 Beasley Street. Myra occupied the one relatively safe bedroom in the house while Gran slept downstairs by the stove. Though their means were modest, Gran was devoted to Myra, and she and Nellie always ensured that the little girl was neatly dressed, clean, and well-fed – even her dolls had lovely, neat braids.

It could be argued that Gran indulged Myra – perhaps to a fault. Though Myra was generally a well-liked girl, some of the children she grew up with recalled her as ‘spoilt’ and ‘bossy’; she could easily wrap her Gran around her little finger and would throw a fit if anybody tried to get in her way. As Myra grew older, she became more defensive towards both of her parents – increasingly staying at Gran’s for her meals and deliberately making derogatory comments about Nellie’s cooking. Maureen was not as strong-willed and was a more timid child – not daring to challenge her parents until she was old enough to leave home.

Chris Duffin, who served as Myra’s governor at Cookham Wood Prison during the 1990s, has her suspicions surrounding Maureen’s upbringing:

“You get quite shrewd when you work with prisoners with complicated backgrounds, and I got the feeling the reason the grandma was constantly trying to keep Myra away from home was because of her knowledge [that] her sister was [sexually] abused.”

It must be clarified that there is no evidence of Maureen ever being molested by either parent or subjected to any other kind of abuse than what Myra was arguably also experiencing – this is merely a feeling Duffin had following her work. There is no further information about it. Duffin does not believe that Myra was ever a victim of sexual abuse as a child.

Regardless, Myra was incredibly close to and protective of her younger sister. In a 1977 letter to a friend, she wrote that Maureen was a target of bullies, and when she learned that another girl had been picking on her little sister for weeks without anybody else noticing, she chased her home across a field and beat the hell out of her. That is not to say that Maureen could not hold her own – Bob went out of his way to ensure that both of his daughters could defend themselves, and Myra credited him for teaching her how to protect herself through basic boxing moves. Pat Jepson, who knew Myra at the time and later became her best friend in secondary school, recalled that:

“Myra would not let herself be pushed around by any of the boys. She was so tough she frightened some of them off. She was so much a tomboy that I sometimes thought that she wanted to be a boy.”

One day, a boy named Kenny Holden scratched her face, leaving her bloodied and crying. Myra later recalled that when she ran to her father to show him what Kenny had done, he grabbed her by the wrist, opened the door and demanded her to “go and punch him, because if you don’t, I’ll leather you. It’s either him or you!” In her unpublished autobiography, she wrote:

“I set off up the street to meet my persecutor, and I quickly concentrated on the things Dad had told me and shown me. As Kenny’s hands came up, I shot out my left hand, fist bunched, towards his head. As I had predicted both hands went up to protect his face and I lifted my right hand and slammed it into his tummy, hitting his tummy. With a gasp, Kenny Holden’s knees crumpled and, before he could recover, I slammed my left fist into the side of his head. Kenny was so shocked he sat down heavily on the floor and burst into tears. I stood looking down at him, triumphantly.”

Early warning signs

In her autobiography, Myra also recalled several instances of death she claimed she was witness to as a child. These included seeing a decapitated Jack Russell near a railway line, a boy she saw bleed to death after being crushed by a lorry on Hyde Road and a cat torn in half by two dogs. Still, despite these likely traumatic experiences, on the surface, there was nothing unusual or pitiful about Myra Hindley before she went on to meet Ian Brady. It appears that there were few (if any) missed warning signs, and she was not an outsider in the way that her future partner-in-crime might have been.

Myra was a bright child academically, possessing an above-average IQ of 109. She was a passionate reader and particularly loved The Secret Garden, Swallows and Amazons and the work of Enid Blyton. But she failed to win a place at grammar school after taking her eleven-plus exam – likely due to her abysmal attendance at school due to playing truant.

Myra started at Ryder Brow Secondary School when she was eleven years old; it was on Nellie’s insistence – she had made her deal with Bob that their children would be secularly educated, even though Myra was keen to join some of her friends who were going to St. Francis. She was fascinated by the Catholic Church and often paused on the walk to school just to admire the Sacred Heart Church on Levenshulme Road with its three statuettes above the door: Christ, the Virgin Mary and one of the disciples.

To try and sway Nellie the other way, Bob invited Father Roderick – an old school friend of his – back to the house to discuss the matter. The discussion ended up becoming a confrontation – according to a letter Myra later wrote when she was on remand, Father Roderick declared that because Bob and Nellie had married in a registry office rather than a church, Myra and Maureen were both “bastards”, and she watched as Bob intimidated him out of the house. She begged Nellie not to send her to Ryder Brow, but it didn’t work.

At secondary school, Myra showed an aptitude for English – particularly when it came to writing poetry – and her teachers often singled out her work. Pat Jepson recalled that “she was in the top class for [the entire] five years. She was very intelligent and could hold her own on any subject.” The only subject where she significantly lacked was homemaking. She was a talented athlete and made the school’s netball, rounders, and swimming teams. She also showed skill in javelin, discus, and playing football with the local lads.

Another friend, Pauline Clapton, said that “she could run very fast and have a go at any game. She was always the best in the gym class. She was in the school rounders team and I remember she made up a song that started, ‘How would you like to be, in Ryder rounders team with me?’ We sang it to the tune of [Under the Bridges of] Paris, I think.”

Myra reportedly liked school, but her unwillingness to participate in most lessons and her tendency to play truant likely hindered her true potential across all areas. Her school record card reads, “Progress and conduct: satisfactory. Personality: not very sociable. Attendance: consistently unsatisfactory.” Her attendance was allegedly so poor that Mr Lloyd-Jones – the headteacher – once told her class to give her a round of applause for attending school five whole days in a row. Nellie and Gran would give in to her demands to write ‘sick notes’ for her, with excuses such as headaches, the flu or bad periods. When they refused, Myra would forge their handwriting and write the notes herself.

Even though none of Myra’s peers considered her a particularly unusual child, the stories about her early behaviours are diverse and sometimes contradictory.

Maureen idolised her older sister, and as younger siblings often do, she began copying her style and demeanour. Linda Maguire, head girl during Myra’s final year at secondary, remembered Myra as “funny and always singing, with long, lanky hair.” She was considered mature and sensible for her age. On the contrary, some of her peers recalled her as mischievous and perhaps somewhat of a daredevil because of her smoking habit – even on the bus that would take Ryder Brow pupils to the swimming baths. Anne Murdoch – one of her rounders teammates – recalled:

“I didn’t like Myra one bit. She hung around with a gang of girls and was dead cocky. We got off to a bad start: during an early rounders match, I hit the ball and pelted down the field and could hear her screaming at me, ‘Run faster, go on, faster than that, bloody RUN!’ I was fuming and faced up to her, ‘If I’d run any faster, I’d have ended up on my head.’ She didn’t like being challenged. ‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ she said. ‘I’ll hit you with my bat if you’re not careful.’ I walked off. After a while, we got on all right, but we were never friends. She was still a terror during rounders, though – if Myra stumped you out, you didn’t dare argue. She’d fix you with that glare of hers.”

Like most other girls her age, Myra was fond of boys. When she was eleven, she had a brief romance with a boy her age named Ronnie Sinclair, who she had met at the cinema:

“It was short lived but I felt devastated by it. He was my first love, really special.”

With this in mind, boys usually overlooked her — most local lads saw her as one of them or completely unattractive altogether. She had been bullied as a child and branded with nicknames such as ‘Nitty Nora’, ‘Beanstalk’ (due to her taller-than-average, slim frame) and – as puberty crept in – ’Square Arse’ due to the width of her hips. Everybody knew not to mess with Myra Hindley, so boys likely picked on her just to rile her up. Patricia Cairns, who grew up in a similar Manchester working-class district, remembered:

“That’s how it was on the streets in those days: you either stuck up for yourself or you got picked on.”

Babysitter

One thing that might have set Myra apart from other girls her age was her strong affinity for children. There were no presumptions that she had ever been inappropriate with them before the Moors Murders, and after her arrest, her peers were utterly shocked. Myra babysat several of the neighbourhood children with Pat Jepson, who recalled that:

“Myra was a strong character. If we were going anywhere, she picked the place to go to. We went baby-sitting together, and she got on with kids. She was not a violent person, but if she said something, it was taken that it was done.”

The two were remembered as “a grand pair of lasses” by Mrs Joan Phillips – a neighbour with young children of her own at the time:

“They were often around the house drinking tea and talking about clothes and boys. They never used to take a penny for babysitting – they wouldn’t hear of it – but I used to take the two of them to the pictures now and again as a treat.”

Of Myra, Mrs. Phillips said that:

“She was a real treat with the kids. When she was about fifteen, she used to babysit a lot for us. My husband used to say he liked Myra to baby-sit because we could go out in peace, knowing everything would be all right if she was there. The boys loved her because she spoiled them; she used to bring them chocolate and let them stay up late and, when it was light in the evenings, she used to play football with them on the little bit of waste ground near the house.

“In her last year at school she and her friend Pat Jepson used to play wag [i.e. truant] and come round to our house to hide. They used to say it was time they had a holiday. She was wonderful with our Denis – he was only a year old then. She used to turn a kitchen chair on its side and put him in between the legs to teach him to stand up and then to walk. She used to take Gordon, who was about six or seven, to see the cowboys at the children’s matinée on a Saturday at the Cosmo or the Essoldo [cinemas]. Often I would come in and find she had Gordon all scrubbed clean and in his pyjamas ready for bed – I think it was the only time Gordon liked being washed because Myra made such a game of it. She was like that, Myra, always full of fun and if she wasn’t chattering on about boys or records she would be singing the latest tune. You never saw her depressed.”

Death

Myra Hindley photographed with her childhood dog, Duke

There were a few reminders of loss and mortality in Myra’s early life. One was when hers and Gran’s beloved border collie, Duke, went missing. Myra was devastated and became ill with worry. A Manchester evening newspaper put out a notice, and the dog was eventually found unharmed.

When Myra was twelve, she experienced one of her most vivid recollections of death. A friend of her Gran’s, ‘Old Pebby’, had died without a penny to his name, and Gran cashed in on part of her own funeral insurance to buy him a coffin. When Myra returned home, she was overwhelmed by the smell of embalming fluid and saw Gran and another friend, the neighbour Hettie Rafferty, perched by the coffin.

Myra was alarmed by this until Gran reassured her. She asked how long the body was going to stay in the living room, to which Gran replied that it was only going to be for the night – he couldn’t be left “without a home to be sent off from.” Gran encouraged Myra to look inside the coffin to ease her nerves and see how peaceful Old Pebby looked. She peered inside, reached out, and touched his hand.

Another instance occurred around the same time when Louie’s widower, Jim, visited Gran for the first time in years. She was welcoming and invited him in to stay for tea – glancing over at the sepia-tinted, smiling photo of her and little Louie on the mantlepiece. After he left, Gran broke down in tears. Her vision was blurry, and she couldn’t clearly see the photograph. She blamed it on her eyesight rather than her crying, and Myra told her to go to the doctor’s. It turned out to be the early stages of cataracts.

As Gran’s operation date drew nearer, Myra grew increasingly frightened. She had never known anybody to have an operation before, only that there was always a risk of fatal complications. When Gran was admitted, Myra was supposed to stay with her parents but returned to her new home at 7 Beasley Street (now renamed ‘Bannock Street’) after dark. She spent the evening curled up in the living room, wrapped in Gran’s coat. The next day, she begged Nellie to let her come along to the hospital to visit, but children were not allowed to go up. Nellie combed her hair, put some makeup on her and dressed her up in stockings and a low heel.

Myra was allowed onto the ward without incident but burst into tears when she saw Gran sitting up in her hospital bed with her head swathed in bandages. Gran reassured her that the operation had been a success. When Myra left, she persuaded Nellie and Auntie Annie to redecorate the new living room and grandly prepare the house for Gran’s return. To include this extract from biographer Duncan Staff’s book The Lost Boy:

“I asked Professor Malcolm MacCulloch [a forensic psychologist who had worked with Ian Brady during the 1980s] what he thought about Myra Hindley’s extreme reaction to her Gran’s illness. He paused before replying: ‘There are a lot of mentions of death, or the proximity of death, in her recollections.’
“’Is that significant?’ I asked.
“’It can be the sign of a personality which has been altered by circumstances,’ he replied. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’
“’Have you seen it before?’
“’In adult serial killers, certainly. But what is special about this material is that it offers an insight into the formation of Myra Hindley’s mind as a child. It’s quite unprecedented in cases of this kind.’”

Mischief

Around fourteen, Myra befriended a boy named Michael Higgins, who lived nearby on Taylor Street (the same street where Pat Jepson lived). He was a couple of years younger than her and was small for his age. He was regularly bullied, and Myra would stick up for him – later recalling that she felt “very protective” of him. This didn’t stop the two of them from getting up to mischief, though – in fact, the sturdy presence of Myra was the catalyst for shy Michael to emerge out of his shell. They couldn’t afford to go to Belle Vue often, so they would sneak into the world-famous Speedway by climbing various walls and fences and crossing the railway line.

Along with another local boy named Eddie (the boy who coined the ‘Nitty Nora’ slur but had long since been forgiven by Myra), Michael and Myra used to steal sweets. Though Myra was not a frequent shoplifter, this was not the first time she had done it:

“I once stole some potatoes from a local green grocer to roast on a bonfire we had made and on another occasion I ran off with some Christmas cards. I was waiting to pay for them, but I kept getting ignored, so I ran off. I also remember stealing some alleys [marbles] from Woolworth’s… {laughing} this was the sum total of my criminal apprenticeship.”

And despite what she said, it wouldn’t be the last time she would attempt to steal before meeting Ian Brady, either.

The group’s method was simple but effective – Myra would chat with the shopkeeper while the boys filled their pockets and ran out. More dangerously, Myra and Michael would trespass. ‘Over the loco’, a.k.a. the railway yard at Gorton Tank, was a particularly fond spot – the two would excitedly climb the boards and wander about amongst the trains.

One day, Michael was messing about with the controls in one of the train cabs when the two heard a loud voice shouting at them.

Two railway workers were hurrying towards them.

Laughing, they scrambled away from the scene as quickly as they could. All of a sudden, Myra was brought to a standstill. A searing pain shot up her leg. She looked down to notice that her ankle had been caught within the teeth of a ‘man-trap’.

Michael helped her to her feet, but the pain was too much for her to bear. She lay on the ground and profusely bled as Michael ran for help.

He eventually returned with her Uncle Bert, who picked her up and carried her back to Bannock Street. Hindley later recalled that whilst she was lying in agony on the living room sofa, waiting for the doctor to arrive, she woefully asked Michael if he thought she might die. “Course not!” he laughed. “You’re too young.”

Another dangerous spot was a disused reservoir near the old Levenshulme Works on Mount Road. Several metres deep, overgrown with weeds and notorious as a ‘suicide spot’, Michael, Myra and some of the more ambitious local children would happily spend hours at a time swimming down there, looking out for each other and knowing that they were ‘safe’ from adults finding them.

Tragedy

The second week of June 1957 was Whitsun week, and Michael walked in the annual ‘Whit Parades’ on Friday, the 14th. These parades were quite a special event across Manchester, and he and Eddie had been given the honour of carrying one of the embroidered banners. The city was in the middle of a heatwave, and Myra, Pat Jepson, and her younger sister Barbara waved at the boys as they fervently marched through the streets.

Afterwards, the Jepson girls took the bus into Reddish to have afternoon tea, and Myra went with them. She had turned down Michael’s suggestion to go and cool down in the reservoir earlier in the day. The girls got the bus back home afterwards and sat on the breeziest part of the bus – the open rear platform.

As they approached the outskirts of Gorton, a boy on a bike frantically pedalled up towards the bus – screaming and shouting for them.

The girls got off at the next stop. The boy, another neighbour of the Jepsons, breathlessly told them that there had been an accident at the reservoir.

Michael had been playing there with Eddie and a younger boy, Walt. Eddie was resting on the nearby grassy bank when Michael got into difficulties. Walt initially presumed he was messing around, but then Michael grabbed onto him – pulling him under the surface along with him. Walt struggled free and resurfaced, but there was no sign of his friend in the still water.

Eddie was watching in bewilderment, also presuming that the boys were messing around. When he realised that Michael hadn’t resurfaced, he dived in after him to help Walt look – but there was no sign.

Within minutes, police were on the scene. At around ten to seven that evening, divers found Michael’s lifeless body lying face downwards at the cold bottom of the murky reservoir. A boy named Laurence Jordan horrifyingly watched from the bank, later recalling seeing the police “bringing out this chalk-white body [from the water]. You could see the whiteness of the body against the blue uniform of the police. His arms were outstretched… they hurriedly put him in the mortuary van.”

The pathologist established that Michael had gotten cramps from the cold water, and an inquest concluded that his death was accidental.

Accounts of how Myra learned about her friend’s death differ – some accounts state that she was at the scene when the police removed Michael’s body from the water. This scenario is improbable. Aside from a few brief statements that were made public, it seems apparent that Myra herself scarcely spoke on the matter to others – and when she did, there were almost always contradictions. Interestingly, she claimed to be disgusted at the journalists, psychiatrists, commentators and others who scapegoated the tragedy:

“Some fools have said that Michael’s death made me start to hate the world we live in, to hate society. Those cretins just need to find one reason for my crimes.”

She claimed not to blame herself for Michael’s death and that while it “did affect me greatly and [leave me] quite depressed”, she “didn’t feel guilty.” Yet other statements, such as “sometimes I can still see him in that murky water, reaching out for me”, somewhat contradict that – as well as accounts from friends she made in prison who stated that when talking about the tragedy, she would declare that “if I’d have been there, I might have saved him.”

Patricia Cairns remembers that:

“She didn’t like to talk about it. She felt very distressed about his death and said she was to blame… she was a very strong swimmer and would have been able to save him. But she didn’t talk about it at length. You know what Myra’s like when she’s upset. She just pulls the shutters down and blocks everything out. You can’t get through. She couldn’t cope with what happened to Mike.”

“Hysterical”

About the incident, Pat Jepson recalled that “when we got back home, we found out that Mike had drowned. That was the only time I saw Myra cry.” In addition, several of Gorton’s locals recalled that Myra was exceptionally distraught. She had decided to collect for a funeral wreath, wearing a black armband as she went door to door around the neighbourhood. But it was all too much for her to bear.

Mrs Higgins worried about her son’s death’s effect on Myra, and she gifted her his comb and Speedway programmes. The family invited all of his friends to the wake, and Myra later recalled how Mike appeared in his little coffin in great detail in her autobiography – how his lips were parted slightly and how his eyes were not fully closed. She could see a tiny bit of blue reflecting in the light off them. She also claimed that Mrs Higgins gave him the rosary that he was holding.

Perhaps Hindley’s reaction can be explained psychologically. A 1987 psychiatric report conducted by Giali Hannes Gudjonsson indicated that she was emotionally labile – i.e. prone to frequent and rapid changes in mood, with bouts of emotion extreme enough that others may perceive them to be melodramatic. Both genetics and environmental influences are considered contributing factors, and negative childhood experiences are believed to account for higher rates of emotional lability. The most recent iteration of the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describes emotional lability not as a disorder in and of itself but as a trait-like characteristic.

This psychiatric observation may explain Myra’s intense reaction to Mike’s death, but only if she was demonstrating such traits in her personality at the time. What is undebatable is that she struggled to come to terms with her grief. There had to be a reason, something that she couldn’t comprehend. Was his drowning her fault, and if it wasn’t her doing, then who or what was responsible?

“My faith was being seriously tested by this. I wanted some kind of sign to tell me it wasn’t just the end of everything.”

Psychiatrists had also described Myra’s personality as “hysteric.” The term is now outdated in psychiatric circles (and even considered somewhat misogynistic depending on the context), but this observation could – although it should be stressed that she was never diagnosed with it – indicate the possibility of histrionic personality disorder (HPD). This disorder exists along a continuum of severity – ranging from an appearance of simply being “melodramatic” to that of the manic or hypomanic phases of bipolar disorder. In her 1995 letter to The Guardian, she wrote that:

“I was inconsolable for weeks after his death, until I was told [by my family] there was something wrong with me: l was abnormal; I’d be ill; I had to pull myself together; I’d become ‘soft in the head’. Well-meaning words, no doubt, but they only served my need and ability to bury my emotions as deep as I could.”

If her words were true, then clearly, she was perceived as being irrational by her family rather than showing symptoms of a possible larger psychological impairment.

Solace

Mrs. Higgins had inspired Myra to seek solace in Roman Catholicism. Myra accompanied her to St. Francis’ Monastery to pray, but she didn’t go to the funeral:

“I was frightened. His [Michael’s] death was hard to come to terms with. It made me realise how final death is. He was the first person who had gone from my life for good.”

There is reason to believe that, perhaps more than anything else, Myra was looking for repentance and forgiveness. If she did feel guilty about what happened to Michael, then the pursuit of this could indicate why she turned back to Catholicism specifically. But despite what some reports imply, she didn’t immediately immerse herself in the faith – it would take more than a year for her to celebrate her first communion, and even after that point, she continued to question religion. But life went on all the same.

Of this time, Myra said:

“I couldn’t wait to leave school and start work, which I did days after my 15th birthday. [They] were the happiest days of my life, except for those of my childhood when I didn’t have to go to school. I had a wide circle of friends with whom I went dancing, swimming and roller-skating and also spent a lot of time in local libraries, where I could browse and read in peace and quiet.”

Once again, her words are contradictory to the narratives that she was consumed by grief, that she was emotionally labile, and that she “behaved like a mother whose child has died and who can never bear another.” The death of Michael Higgins has become a footnote in the legend of Myra Hindley, the ‘murderer’, but the extent of the effect that it ultimately had on Myra Hindley, the ‘person’, is unknown due to these contradictions.

On 19th July 1957, shortly before she finished school, her name appeared in a local newspaper. She had excelled at the Ryder Brow sports day , winning ten awards and being the overall winner amongst the senior girls.

As for her school record, her tendency to play truant was the only real concern, and Ryder Brow’s headmaster – Mr Lloyd-Jones – gave her an excellent reference. She was considered a suitable candidate to continue her education at a College for Further Education (in modern-day Britain, the equivalent is sixth-form), but she was sceptical. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life stuck in some dead-end job, and certainly not as a housewife. Further education tempted her, but ultimately, she decided she needed money, so she headed straight to work and went from there.

She rejected a place at a teacher training college in Didsbury; instead, she accepted a job as a junior clerk at Lawrence Scott and Electrometers – an electrical engineering firm in nearby Openshaw. (She couldn’t start there right away as she was still only fourteen, so in the meantime, Auntie Kath found her a two-week stint running errands for a catalogue company.) It wasn’t a particularly well-paid job, but it came with prospects of promotion and was close enough to home to be able to walk back for her lunch.

Even though it was as ideal a first job as she could get, she didn’t exactly get off to a great start with her colleagues. She had told them that she had lost her first week’s wages, and the girls had no problem arranging a collection for her – they raised more than the two pounds and ten shillings she had lost. But a few weeks later, the same thing had supposedly happened again. If the first instance wasn’t a con, then to them, this one certainly was. Although they continued to be courteous and kind towards Myra, this had somewhat soured their opinions of her.

Longing

Myra also thoroughly enjoyed the freedom that comes with financial independence. She began taking weekly judo classes at Gresham Street School for Girls, but many girls soon refused to fight her. She was notoriously slow to release her grip, and reportedly, her partners had to slap the floor several times until she finally accepted their submission.

She also started taking jive lessons at Stan’s Dancing School (just off Knutsford Road) with Pat as regularly as they could afford to – classes cost 1s 6d a time and took place on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The two girls went dancing at one of Manchester’s various ballrooms twice a week – frequenting the Alhambra most often. There was one instance where the two ventured out to Ashton-under-Lyne (five miles east of Gorton) for a dance, but they missed the last bus home and had to stay at a girlfriend’s house for the night. Mrs Jepson and Nellie were both worried sick, and when the girls returned home the next morning, they were simultaneously angry and relieved. Pat recalled:

“I got a clout [a slap] but Myra’s mother batted her in the street and she wasn’t allowed out for a week.”

When she wasn’t out dancing, Myra could be found playing bingo, at the cinema – happiest whenever the latest Elvis Presley film was out – or lounging around one of Gorton’s cafés with her friends. She always had a cigarette in her mouth and dressed maturely for her years: pencil skirts (she wasn’t one for petticoats), tight knits, charcoal eye makeup, red lipstick and cone bras. But as daring as she may have appeared, she was modest in equal measure. She was still entertaining the notion of subscribing fully to her Catholic faith, but even so. These were the days when if your back-to-back council house in the city slums didn’t have a bathroom, a tin bath would be brought into the kitchen. Privacy would have been a luxury, yet Myra wouldn’t let anybody enter the kitchen when she was washing – not even Maureen.

On her first night out with her new colleagues – at the Levenshulme Palais dance hall – Myra met a welder named Ray. The two spent the evening dancing and kissing, and a string of dates followed. He would take her out on his motorbike and even with his mates. He was keen on sleeping with her, but when Myra refused (due to the fear of falling pregnant, like a friend of hers recently had), the two split up.

1957 saw another loss – her dog Duke was run over and killed. Myra was devastated, and a few months later, she and Gran soon acquired another collie, a tan-and-white female puppy they called Lassie. They would go on to retain the dog right up until Myra was eventually arrested for murder in 1965.

Myra’s work colleagues remembered her spending a great deal of time smoking in the lavatories. Some other girls there had side hustles, namely buying and selling everyday products from catalogue firms (the modern-day equivalent of this is multi-level marketing). Whenever they were trading in the lavatories, Myra would play lookout.

It was sometime during her time working at Lawrence Scott that Myra first bleached her naturally brown hair. This is contrary to what many biographies on the Moors Murders case have incorrectly stated – that Myra became a blonde because of Ian Brady’s influence and his supposedly Aryan beauty ideals.

Photographs confirm that she had been bleach-blonde long before she met Ian – actually, it resulted from an impulsive decision one night. She had been spending the evening at a colleague named Margie’s flat with some of the other girls from the factory, and she mentioned that she was thinking about changing her hair colour. Margie immediately offered to bleach it, and Myra let her do it over the sink with a bottle of L’Oréal. She knew her new look would cause a stir at home, but this didn’t stop her. Bob told her that she looked like a whore, and Nellie was incessant with rage – Myra later recalled that she whaled her and told her she looked cheap. Nellie did later contend, however, and often bleached her stubborn daughter’s roots for her.

Myra slept with rollers in every night and teased and sprayed her bouffant into oblivion every morning – as a matter of fact, and in keeping with the evolving fashions of the time, her hair got bigger as the years progressed. Whenever she could afford to treat herself, she started getting her hair coloured at Mrs. Laurette Howells’ salon – Maison Laurette – on Taylor Street. She experimented with different shades of blonde over the next seven or eight years (only returning to her natural brown colour when she eventually went to prison), ranging from honey to peroxide-blonde and even the occasional pastel-coloured rinse.

Myra’s now-infamous blonde hair seemed to have boosted her self-esteem immensely:

“I thought I was fairly attractive to men, although some might argue, and I had a series of short-term relationships, but none that really satisfied me.”

She wanted something completely different – even if she didn’t know what.

Myra identified as heterosexual at this time, and there is no record of her even mentioning being attracted to another woman before her relationship with Ian Brady. Perhaps she had repressed her feelings due to shame and social stigma, ignored them due to her religious beliefs, or simply had never experienced them at this age (or even until she went to prison, for that matter). But speculations around her sexuality aside, she simply may not have known what she wanted out of either a relationship or a romantic partner. Pat Jepson offered her insight:

“Myra never bothered much with boys. Of course she used to go out with them but not a lot. Myra looked very grown-up; she always wore straight skirts and blouses. You would never see her in a flared skirt or a dress, and I think she thought the boys around our way were too young for her.”

Unsurprisingly, she felt discontented at work – and unlike at school, she couldn’t exactly get away with playing truant. She and Margie got evening jobs at Robertson’s jam factory to bring in that extra income, and they managed to save enough up for a holiday at Butlin’s in Ayr, Scotland. However, it was a tedious job, and she left as soon as possible.

If one thing was certain about Myra, she was ambitious – particularly for a girl of Gorton in the 1950s. She spoke about travelling a lot – perhaps as a nanny abroad or working as a ‘Redcoat’ entertainer at a Butlin’s holiday resort. Laurette Howells could recall a few of their conversations in the salon chair, such as how she wanted to learn to drive and travel. One time, she confided in her, “I am a bit sick and fed up with it all. I think I’ll emigrate.”

It was also around this time that Bob Hindley was involved in a nasty accident at the foundry and suffered such a severe fracture to his leg that he was left disabled. Despite all he had done to make her family life difficult, Myra would assist him because she felt sorry for him. One allegation made by her future brother-in-law, David Smith, highlights the contrary – that whenever Bob had been drinking, her attitude towards him would shift from doting and “maternal” to aggressive and outright violent – ironically, the same way that she alleged her father had treated her. Smith detailed an incident where Myra intervened after Bob had hit Nellie in a drunken stupor:

“The front door flies open with a resounding bang, and Myra strides into the room, cursing Bob to the heavens. She stands quivering with fury before him as he struggles up from the chair.
“’Come on, you bastard!’ she screams. ‘Get up, fucking stand up, you fucking useless piece of shit!’
“But Bob can’t. He’s too drunk and unsteady on his feet at the best of times. […] With both hands, she grabs Bob by the hair, lifting him clean out of the chair. He makes a clumsy attempt to grab her throat, but Myra is quick and strong; she throws him to the floor like a rag, smashing the coffee table. Then she snatches up his walking stick from the side of his chair.
“I turn my face away, having learned a long time ago that no one thanks you for intervening in a Hindley brawl. Head averted, I listen unwillingly as Myra brings the walking stick down on her father’s spine, again and again, whack after sickening whack.
“Then Nellie arrives home [having left to go to Ellen’s shortly after the incident]. She doesn’t interfere either, but stands by the door with her arms folded, watching.”

It is not entirely clear in Smith’s account when this incident happened – only that it was sometime between 1961 and the first half of 1963. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady first became a couple in early 1962, but David’s words – ”having learned a long time ago that no one thanks you for intervening in a Hindley brawl” – imply that there is a chance that Myra was aggressive towards her father before she and Brady got together.

Faith

Myra Hindley photographed on holiday in Blackpool, c. July/August 1958.

Myra turned sixteen in July 1958 and went on holiday to Blackpool with the Jepsons for a week that summer. The famous comedian Ken Dodd was in his prime, headlining the season at the White Pavilion on Central Pier with the Irish singer Josef Locke guest-starring. Above is a smiling photo of Myra posing south of the pier; her bleach-blonde curls swept up into a backcombed up-do. She is dressed modestly , with a white blouse with a proudly visible crucifix chain clasped around the collar.

Having taken instruction in the Roman Catholic faith from Father Theodore for some time, on 16th November of the same year, she was finally anointed at St. Francis’ Monastery. Her family was present for the ceremony – even her disapproving mother. Auntie Kath was particularly delighted, having always guided Myra’s interest in the church, and she and Uncle Bert gifted Myra with an expensive prayer book.

Around the same time, the Higgins family asked Myra to be a godmother to their grandson, Anthony. Thirteen years later, she wrote to a relative and claimed:

“I often think of him. Michael was Anthony’s age when he was drowned: a nephew he never knew. Hope I don’t sound morbid.”

Myra would also recall how fond she was of the visual aspects of the monastery in letters to her cousin. She asked her to recall the church’s interior for her, and she seemed delighted when she received a detailed description, which included the inscription on one of the statues. She claimed to have remembered praying vehemently in front of that particular one:

“When I used to pray in front of the pieta, I used to touch the hand of Our Lord, which hung from Our Lady’s sorrow-wracked embrace, and although slightly scared because the church was only dimly lighted by candleglow and was empty, which awed me just a little, I used to quickly kiss His hand before leaving the church.
“I’ll probably bore you to tears writing about it all in future letters, but it’s something very dear to me, and part of me is there, constantly drawing my spirit into the blessed peace and tranquility [sic].”

Yet despite this, other accounts have stated that Myra wasn’t as committed to the church as she tried to claim she was later on. Jean Ritchie writes that she stopped attending mass a few months after her communion. Emlyn Williams added that not long after, she bumped into Father Theodore in the street (who, I should add, apparently didn’t even remember giving her instruction). He asked her why she hadn’t been coming to church. She bowed her head in embarrassment and mumbled some excuse. On the contrary, Maureen recalled that her sister stopped attending church when she started going out with Ian Brady. Whether she had been going regularly before that is uncertain, though.

By the time she and Ian Brady had started going out, she may have still considered herself a Catholic – even if she was agnostic. Brady later gave his own account of this that defies the assumption that he was the one to turn her away from religion; he said that Myra had told him that she just woke up one morning and realised that she “just didn’t believe it all any more.” Keep in mind, this is the author, Dr. Alan Keightley, paraphrasing Brady ‘reiterating’ of Myra’s words:

“I looked around me and none of it made any sense – a heavenly Father up there and the Devil down below. It was all tosh. We are all just grains on the sand. Of no significance whatsoever. And that priest was a bloody pest and a bore. He kept creeping to the house to ask mother, Gran and me why we didn’t go to confession, why we didn’t go to mass any more. I used to dodge out of the way when I saw him coming.”

By Myra’s account, her mother would never have worshipped in a Catholic church.

The return of Ronnie Sinclair

Myra and Margie were two of several employees made redundant from Lawrence Scott in early 1959. Myra soon took on a junior typist job at Clydesdale’s Furniture shop in Gorton, but it didn’t pay much. Though Myra had never really bonded with Bob’s widowed mother, Sarah (a.k.a. “Nanna Hindley”), she was delighted when she managed to find Myra, Margie and a few of the other girls weekend jobs in the catering department at Belle Vue. Myra hated the smell of fish and chips on her clothing, and she was more content when she and her friend Irene were eventually moved into the serving staff at the park’s ‘bierkeller’. As well as this being Myra’s first documented experience with German culture (which would later manifest into her sharing Ian Brady’s fondness for the Third Reich), she claimed that the head barmaid would often bribe her and Irene with cigarettes to steal from the more drunk patrons of the bar by short-serving them.

By this time, Pat Jepson had become engaged to a lad named Frank Clark (who she would go on to marry in the summer of 1960), and Myra had recently been re-introduced to her first love – Ronnie Sinclair. Tall and fresh-faced, he was now working as a tea blender at the local Co-op, and the two began a relationship. Pat remembered that on the nights she and Myra were not going dancing or to the pictures, they used to meet all the other teenagers on some spare ground, and then Myra and Ronnie would go off on their own together.

It seemed that her life was laid out at this point, and there were no obvious signs that Myra was looking for something more – if she dreamed about it, she was certainly repressing it. She took over the running of the household for whatever reason – possibly because Gran was now in her seventies and less able to do so, or possibly in preparation for running her own home one day. Myra became house-proud, and 7 Bannock Street was always spotless. She was also still focusing on saving money wherever she could. She would pay two shillings a week into a Christmas club, and another two shillings would buy ‘bottom-drawer’ items such as kitchenware. She still took on evening or weekend jobs for that little bit extra to save, but it seemed like Ronnie wasn’t interested in doing the same. He was making the most out of being a teenager.

Ronnie was the type of lad who enjoyed nothing more than going out for a drink with his mates after work and making out with his girlfriend in secret whenever he could. Myra had told herself that she was going to remain a virgin until she got married, and by all accounts, Ronnie respected her wishes. He proposed to her on the 23rd July of that year , Myra’s seventeenth birthday.

Myra was proud to show off her engagement ring, adorned with three small diamonds (although she wouldn’t mention that it was second-hand). Bob promised to put towards the wedding with the injury compensation he had received from work. Nellie wasn’t so thrilled – the way she saw it, her bright young daughter had her whole life ahead of her, and she shouldn’t just settle down with the first lad who pulled out all the stops. (She was likely drawing from personal experience.) And deep down, Myra agreed with her.

When she reflected on her brief engagement to Ronnie, she was particularly critical of him as a person. She told Pat Jepson that she thought he was “too immature”; she told somebody else, “we’re not saving enough money for marriage.” Four decades later, she would tell her one-time prison therapist, Joe Chapman, that:

“He was boring and mundane. He cared a lot about me, which mattered but he didn’t like dancing and we spent most of our time at stock car races, which was his hobby.”

She added that the grease underneath his fingernails repulsed her, as it reminded him of her father. She was more self-reflective when it mattered, though. In her 1995 letter to The Guardian, she stated:

“The things I wanted in life were not unusual. I got engaged at 17 to a boy I first met when I was 11 and he pulled the ribbon out of my hair at the pictures.
“But when I began to witness many of my friends and neighbours, some of whom “had to get married”, having baby after baby, almost tied to the kitchen sink and struggling to make ends meet while their husbands went out every night, drinking and betting away their wages just as my father had done, I began to feel uncomfortable and restless.
“I wanted a career, to better myself, to travel and struggle to break free of the confines of what was expected of me. Although so much was unattainable, I still dreamed and made plans and kept everything to myself. I didn’t want to leave home, because I loved my family, but I wanted more scope and space, and they would think I was ‘getting above myself’ if I confided in them.”

9-til-5

Millwards Merchandising, the workplace where Myra Hindley and Ian Brady would meet – they remained employed there until their 1965 arrests for murder.

Myra lasted scarcely a year at Clydesdale’s and left her job at the beginning of 1960. Her next job was another typist role – at Bratby and Hinchcliffe Engineers and Automatic Bottling Manufacturers (also in Gorton). Some reports state she was sacked from this job after only six months due to absenteeism, and others state that she left after she secured her next job – a short-hand typist at a chemical firm on Levenshulme Road – in the winter. But whatever the case, Myra hated working there.

Her boss was incredibly strict – he would not let his employees talk with each other during working hours, and Myra also claimed that he was a bully. According to Duncan Staff:

“They [the typist pool] sat “facing his glass-fronted office, in a line, with their heads down, pummelling their heavy machines from nine till five. If they looked up or started chatting, he would storm out and shout at them. His greatest pleasure lay in finding a mistake in their work. He would sit with his head bent over a large wooden desk and pore over every line, his balding head moving from side to side as he read. They would work away, pretending to ignore him, and wait for the inevitable, triumphant, ‘Aha!’ He would come out of the door smirking, waving the offending document before him, to humiliate whoever was responsible.”

John Deane Potter wrote that around this time, Myra had obtained an application for a job in Germany within the women’s unit of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (the NAAFI), but she had never followed through. Meanwhile, a colleague at Bratby and Hinchcliffe, Mary, was the first to spot the advertised vacancy in the Manchester Evening News. It was for a typist role and came ‘with prospects’. Mary had previously worked there, and she suggested that Myra phone them.

Nobody could have provided a more vivid description of her first meeting with Ian Brady than Myra Hindley herself (even if there was a chance that it was coloured by hindsight or exaggerated):

“She [Mary] told me something about the firm and mentioned some of the people I’d be working with if I got the job. She told me about Ian, describing him as tall and good-looking, very quiet and shy, smartly dressed, an ‘intriguing man’ who had appealed to her. When I was given the job after an interview, I was introduced to the others in the office, and before his name was mentioned, I already knew it was him.
“I can only describe my reaction to him as an immediate and fatal attraction, although I had no inkling then of just how fatal it would turn out to be.”

Read about Ian Brady’s early life in detail in another of my free articles here.

Additionally, you can recap the full story of the Moors Murders here.

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. This is the second article in the series. Thank you for reading.

Sources

The National Archive, Myra Hindley Home Office files, H0336/110.
Photos credit to Duncan Staff and The Manchester Libraries.

Additional sources

“The Loyal Regiment (North Lancashire).” National Army Museum, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/loyal-regiment-north-lancashire. Accessed 27th June 2022.
Carol Ann Lee. One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley, Mainstream Publishing (an imprint of Transworld Publishers), 2012 (originally published 2010).
David Marchbanks. The Moor Murders, Leslie Frewin, 1966.
David Smith with Carol Ann Lee. Evil Relations: The Man Who Bore Witness Against the Moors Murderers, Mainstream Publishing, 2012 (first published 2011 as Witness).
Dr. Alan Keightley. Ian Brady: The Untold Story of the Moors Murders, Robson Books, 2017.
Duncan Staff. The Lost Boy, Bantam Press (an imprint of Transworld Publishers), 2013 (originally published 2007).
Emlyn Williams. Beyond Belief, Parragon, 1995 (first published 1967).
Fred Harrison. Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders, Open Road Integrated Media, 2016 (first published 1986).
Guardian News and Media. (1995, 18th December). Myra Hindley: My life, my guilt, my weakness | David Rowan and Duncan Campbell; including a letter written to the newspaper by Myra Hindley. The Guardian.
Guardian News and Media. (2000, 29th February). A journey into darkness | Duncan Staff. The Guardian. Retrieved 29th August 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/feb/29/ukcrime.features11
Howard Sounes. This Woman: Myra Hindley’s Prison Love Affair and Escape Attempt. Seven Dials, 2022.
Jean Ritchie. Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess, Angus & Robertson, 1988.
Joe Chapman. Out of the Frying Pan, Chipmunkapublishing, 2009.
John Deane Potter. The Monsters on the Moors, Elek Books Limited, 1966.
Jonathan Goodman. The Moors Murders: The Trial of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, Magpie Books, 1994 (first published 1973).
Record Details for Robert Hindley (Loyal North Lancashire Regiment). Forces War Records, https://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/records/27164134/private-r-hindley-british-army-loyal-north-lancashire-regiment/. Accessed 27th June 2022.
Record Details for Robert Hindley (Loyal North Lancashire Regiment).” Forces War Records, https://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/records/27164134/private-r-hindley-british-army-loyal-north-lancashire-regiment/. Accessed 27th June 2022.
The Times. (1965, 11th December). Police chief tells of body in blanket | Anon. Page 3.