“I worshipped him blindly”: Was Myra Hindley groomed by Ian Brady?
WARNING – DISTRESSING CONTENT AND DISCUSSION OF GROOMING: The nature of the relationship between Britain’s most notorious killer couple has long been a subject of forum debate. But for the most part, it depends whose account you decide to believe – Brady’s, Hindley’s, or neither.
“She used to go to church, liked dancing, she was quite normal, she liked the normal way of life and had many girlfriends. She liked children. She also liked swimming and reading.”
This was how Myra Hindley was remembered by her younger sister, Maureen. At the time of saying this, Maureen – and the rest of the world – were yet to learn that Myra and her boyfriend, Ian Brady, were responsible for the abductions and murders of five children around Manchester (at least four of whom had been sexually assaulted and/or raped), chronologically:
- Pauline Reade (16)
- John Kilbride (12)
- Keith Bennett (12)
- Lesley Ann Downey (10)
- Edward Evans (17)
Maureen and her then-husband, David Smith, were ultimately responsible for bringing the so-called “Moors Murderers” to justice. On the morning of 7th October 1965, they turned their in-laws in to the police after David had been made to witness Brady batter Edward Evans to death with an axe the night before. Upon investigation, police discovered the horrifying truth that Brady, then 27, and Hindley, then 23, had been responsible for a spate of other child abductions and murders over the past two years. (I summarised the entire history of the Moors Murders case in an article published a few days ago, which also goes into more detail about Edward’s murder, and what exactly David saw.)
Relaying her account nervously on Friday 10th December 1965 at the preliminary hearings that took place four months before the trial, Maureen maintained that her sister “changed” when she started going out with Brady. Her account continued:
“She stopped going to church. She said she didn’t believe in it. She didn’t believe in marriage. She said she hated babies and she hated people. She never used to keep her things under lock and key, but she started after she met Brady. She kept books, her tape recorder, all her tape recordings and all her clothes locked up in the wardrobe.”
For Maureen – as well as others who knew Myra Hindley during her early life - there was no other explanation as to how this “normal” young woman could have willingly participated in the abductions, sexual assaults and murders of children. There were no justifications for her casual posing for photographs near (and in one case, directly over) the graves of children she knew Brady had murdered, nor the ice-cold manner of her responses under interrogation. Even less excusable was the audio recording of her cruel torment of, and threats towards, a 10-year-old girl begging not to be undressed.
What is “grooming”?
Though it was initially argued by early reporters on the case that Myra Hindley was in Ian Brady’s thrall and that she was – in turn - “corrupted” by him, a few modern commentators have theorised that Hindley, was in fact, groomed by Brady. This is a word that is often used to describe an adult’s coercive control of a child, particularly when a sexual element belies this behaviour.
In the 1960s, the term did not exist in the lexicon of psychology. To quote the 2017 Journal of Interpersonal Violence:
Over 40 years ago, professionals used the terms sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual misuse, and sexual molestation interchangeably, they still do today. The concept of grooming has gained significant popularity in the last two decades.
Myra Hindley was not a child when she met Ian Brady in January 1961 – she was eighteen-and-a-half years old, and he had just turned twenty-three, with their relationship not even beginning until a year later. Though this is an important distinction to keep in mind, adults are also capable of being groomed – particularly where, according to SurvivorsUK.org, “there is a power differential within a relationship” that the abuser is able to exploit for their own gratification.
Within the context of their employment, Brady was a stock clerk on a higher wage than Hindley, and who was technically her senior. She was a typist, and he dictated letters to her. But what about in the context of their eventual romance? There was still a relatively substantial age gap, as well as the fact that Brady presented himself as being intellectual, worldly and mysterious.
Despite Hindley having actively pursued Brady for months while they worked together in the same office, Brady showed little interest in her at first. This all changed in December 1961 when he spotted her reading a book of poetry by William Wordsworth one day on their lunch break. Pleased with his reaction to this, Hindley did the same thing a few days later with a poetry anthology by William Blake, and discovered that Brady was a keen admirer of his work. They started to bond over a love of literature and classical music, and considered themselves far more cultured than their other working-class peers. By all accounts, these passions were mutual and not necessarily Brady feigning interest in certain hobbies in order to get closer to Hindley – although he was withholding about his own personal life to her.
Based on the warning signs listed out in this blog for the Ann Craft Trust, Maureen’s quote about the changes in her older sister’s behaviour can read as a textbook indicator that Hindley was groomed – with her becoming more withdrawn from social activities, her own religion, and more secretive about her activities and possessions. But the latter may also be attributed to the fact that she and Brady were keeping evidence of their horrendous murders in their home. This included photographic pornography of, as well as an infamous audiotape recording of the torment of, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey.
Despite all of this, the extent to which Hindley was groomed into committing murder – more specifically, the murders of young children – needs to be questioned. Not only that, but both Hindley and Brady give conflicting accounts of the nature of their relationship – and though Hindley’s reveals some particularly harrowing details (as will shortly be discussed), her motivations for telling her story have been called into question by the families of hers and Brady’s victims who believe that she was motivated entirely in pursuit of her own parole.
There is another consideration to keep in mind. Whereas Hindley’s supporters saw her as being dominated by Brady into committing such horrendous crimes against children, most of those who knew the couple prior to their arrest (most significantly, David Smith) did not notice that there was any stark power imbalance in their relationship. Hindley may have been a victim of abuse at Brady’s hands to a degree, but it might not necessarily mean that she was groomed into committing murder – to argue that outright without keeping all of the facts around the case in mind risks removing some of the culpability from a woman who admitted, years later, that she knew what she was doing was wicked and cruel – even at that time.
But how exactly did Brady and Hindley perceive their relationship – and what were the events that led up to the first murder? Was it an extreme case of grooming, or was Hindley on a similar wavelength to Brady all along?
“Unknowability”
Myra Hindley photographed on holiday in Blackpool, aged sixteen. This was two-and-a-half years before she first met Ian Brady.
To some, Hindley’s return to Catholicism – a few years into her (at the time) two life sentences - was emblematic that she had shed herself of the influence that Brady had seemingly once held over her, and was now ready to be reintroduced into common society. This was a wish Hindley was never granted, and she eventually died in captivity in 2002. In a 1978 plea for parole, she had written to the then-Home Secretary Merlyn Rees that:
“I cannot hope to express fully and adequately how totally obsessed and besotted I was with Ian Brady. He seemed to be cloaked in an aura of mystery which I could never quite penetrate, never quite solve and this ‘unknowability’ intrigued me. Within months he had convinced me that there was no God at all. (He could have told me the earth was flat, that the moon was made of green cheese, that the sun rose in the west and I would have believed him). His lofty convincing manner of speech fascinated me because I could never fully comprehend, only grasp at the odd sentence, here and there and believed it to be the gospel truth.”
These were carefully chosen words. Her argument was not that Brady had “corrupted” her – to admit such would have meant that she would have been admitting to her involvement in the crimes that she had been convicted of. She may not have even considered the “corruption” angle to be entirely true, if not at that time, then never. Rather, she was arguing that her only crimes were her “love and loyalty” towards him – labelling them as “sins for which I have paid dearly by anybody’s reckoning”.
Nine years after this statement was written, she would finally confess to police that she had not only harboured, maintained and assisted Brady knowing that he had murdered five children, but that it was she who had abducted the children and lured them into a false sense of security. She would still deny that Brady had completely corrupted her, and told her one-time prison therapist, Joe Chapman, that:
“It’s not easy for me to talk about our relationship without feeling angry with myself. For years’ people have assumed that Ian totally corrupted me but he didn’t. I have to own the part that I played in things, to accept that I wanted some of the things to happen.”
In time, the public image she would try and project in her continuing pursuit for parole was one of a woman who had spent years reflecting on her actions. Contrary to what she had previously stated, she wrote in a 1995 letter to The Guardian newspaper that “I was corrupt; I was wicked and evil and had behaved monstrously” in reference to her self-confessed role in the murders:
“I’ve so often wished that I had suffered from some affective disorder and been diagnosed accordingly. This would have provided some kind of explanation for my actions. As it is, what I was involved in is indefensible. I wasn’t mad, so I must have been bad, became bad by a slow process of corruption (certainly there was a strong element of fear) which eroded many of the values I’d held and my latent strength of character obviously enabled me to resolutely cast aside my beliefs in order to identify myself completely with a man who had become my god, who I both feared and worshipped.”
Brady would also deny that he had corrupted Hindley, telling a correspondent named Dr. Alan Keightley in the 1990s that “Myra was surprisingly in tune with me from the very beginning. She was as ruthless as I was. I had no need to force her intellectually, and she didn’t have to pretend she was being forced.” In a letter to Keightley in January 1993, he explained:
“It was more a process of mutual-osmosis, but I had a head start as it were. It wasn’t master and slave. It was more like teacher and student. Bit by bit we were moving towards an almost telepathic relationship. I was never conscious of having to exert myself to coerce Myra into accepting my belief in relativist morality. I aired my views for open discussion, nothing more. They were on the table to be rejected or accepted. The universe is boundless. Why shouldn’t the individual be the same?”
“A world above”
Brady and Hindley photographed on Saddleworth Moor circa 1964–1965 – the backdrop for their notorious crimes.
These conversations between Brady and Hindley began relatively early on in their relationship, but it was quite a long time before the subjects of murder and sexual offences against children entered the discussion. Hindley explained:
“One thing which we both shared was a dissatisfaction with belonging to the working class and being trapped in it. We could have risen above that; at Millwards [their workplace] he had the prospects of promotion. I could have studied and gained the qualifications necessary for a career climb. But it wasn’t to be.”
There was a mutual desire for them to rise above not just their peers, but above the rest of humanity too. Formerly a juvenile delinquent and having served two years in “borstal training” (an extinct form of youth detention in the UK that served to deliver a “short, sharp shock” to young offenders), Brady now saw himself as both an autocrat and a libertine. His and Hindley’s co-workers recalled a catchphrase they frequently repeated when they saw each other (which Hindley had even written on the wall behind a picture in the office): “Money and food is all I want, all I want is money and food.”
Brady had zero professional ambitions, and the only way he desired to make money was through crime – although his claims of being a “career thief” can not be backed up and there is no evidence that he had committed any robberies since being caught as a teenager. He actively fantasised about a world where people were free to act on their base desires if they so desired, regardless of the consequences.
These principles aligned with the work of the French philosopher and pornographic writer, the Marquis de Sade, though Brady would later claim that he was “bored rigid” by Sade’s pornography and related merely to his philosophies of relativism, existentialism and nihilism. They also appealed to Hindley’s innermost wants and desires, at least – at that time – in regards to breaking free of the confines of what was expected of her as a young woman growing up in post-war, working-class Britain. Many of her friends were already getting married and having children, and were – as she put it – “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”.
Hindley told Chapman that:
“I just don’t know how much but I have always wanted something different, more exciting. I have never been satisfied with any situation for long. The excitement that I sought, away from dreary domestic bliss and the norm, was provided by Ian. He awakened in me an urge to kick against social or moral convention. It was exciting to swim against the tide, to do things that others would never dream of.”
Brady and Hindley’s sex life was also in line with these themes, being experimental in nature. Role-play and BDSM were two recurring themes, at least early on, and Hindley remembered that alcohol was heavily involved. Brady was normally the dominant, but this was not always the case and Hindley admitted she enjoyed taking on that role too – so by all accounts, this was a relationship consisting of two dominant parties.
It soon became clear to Hindley – at least by her account – that Brady was gratified when inflicting violence and seeing people suffer. In 1998, she wrote a letter to her solicitor, Jim Nichol, detailing alleged instances of sexual abuse Brady inflicted onto her – including how he had allegedly raped her, urinated inside of her, threatened to harm her family if she did not co-operate with him and how he would threaten to kill her himself if she ever left him. Brady obviously denied all of these claims.
According to a friend named May Hill – who gave a statement to police in 1965 after Hindley’s arrest – there was one genuine instance early on within their relationship where Hindley thought she had been drugged by Brady one evening, and was worried she had been taken advantage of while unconscious. She wrote May a letter detailing the incident, but later retrieved the letter from her and destroyed it for reasons not entirely certain (later telling Nichol that she was “frightened” about what she had done).
It is unclear when or how exactly Brady’s paedophilia became apparent to Hindley, or at what point the couple decided they wanted to turn their fantasies into realities, but it would be some time before the preparations for the murders themselves began to materialise. Hindley eventually admitted to Joe Chapman that she and Brady discussed having sex with children as part of their pillow talk, but that these were initially just arousal fantasies intended to stimulate him. It seems that Brady eventually saw the ideas of the Marquis de Sade and other existentialist thinkers as justifications for acting on his own desires, and he was additionally fond of how Adolf Hitler put his dangerous beliefs into practise to exercise brutality on an enormous scale during the Holocaust.
Brady and Hindley initially discussed committing robberies, with Hindley purchasing multiple firearms and attending shooting practice on Brady’s insistence. They started to shift focus into learning how to blend into their surroundings – to exist in one plane as a normal young couple and on another plane as cold-hearted criminals. To do this, they had to be in complete control of their façades, and not let situations, inconveniences or doubts faze them. “He taught me how to conquer my emotions; to do things on autopilot and disregard the consequences,” Hindley remembered. “I was a willing apprentice.” She stated that they each shared the ability to shut down their emotions, control their subconscious impulses and disguise from the world what it was that they were thinking at any given moment.
Hindley alleged that Brady soon started to talk about wanting to commit “the perfect murder”, which Brady would deny and label as an irrelevant cliché “best left to writers of detective fiction”. He also denied Hindley’s claims that he blackmailed her into her involvement by drugging her grandmother and threatening to do the same to Maureen and their mother. He remembered:
“When we were together, there was a third entity; something intangible that possessed a power beyond both of us. We were both conscious of the joint momentum developing into an intoxicating, unified force.”
Fantasy was beginning to merge into reality, and they were certainly making their “own world” – for all that Brady claimed it was “mutual osmosis” and all that Hindley claimed she was coerced into murdering, this was one of the relatively few points they both agreed on. She told a correspondent, the filmmaker and author Duncan Staff, that she felt that the two of them were “separated by a chasm from the rest of the world”, and that they were god-like creatures residing in their own domain above the masses. Brady similarly commented to a correspondent, a woman named Christine Hart, that he and Myra were “residing not in the ordinary world but with ‘demons and angels’.”
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.
This article was originally titled “I worshipped him blindly”: Was Myra Hindley truly in Ian Brady’s thrall?. It was updated on 17th May 2024 to include the mentions, and definitions, of “grooming” – as well as expanding upon Hindley’s account of sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of Brady. The original article text can be accessed here.
