To begin with, the relationship between Ian Brady and Myra Hindley – the evil partnership that would lead to the Moors Murders and the brutal deaths of five innocent children – was a pretty tame affair, confined largely to a weekly one-night stand on Saturdays.
She didn’t know what he did on other nights of the week and didn’t like to ask. But Brady started coming round to Myra’s gran’s house of an evening and even spending the occasional night or weekend there.
Eventually, after 18 months of going out together, he effectively moved in. But even then he would disappear without explanation, leaving Myra guessing as to where he was going and what he was doing. She would do his cooking and ironing and provide sex when he wanted it. She was useful to him, and she did not ask questions when he didn’t come back for days.
Where did he go on those evenings? Brady admitted during his trial that he would often frequent gay bars in Manchester, particularly one called the Rembrandt.
Whether he went there to pick up men and have sex with them, ‘to watch their antics’ or, as he rationalised it, to ‘roll a queer’ – that is, to rob them – we simply don’t know. I suspect all three. Myra herself acknowledged that Brady was almost certainly bisexual.
She reported, too, that from their first date, he showed a sadistic side to his nature by biting her fiercely during kissing.
He soon began to talk to her about his violent fantasies and his desire to act them out. With her burning desire to please him she didn’t hesitate and encouraged him to indulge his tastes.
Ian Brady would often disappear without explanation, leaving Myra guessing as to where he was going and what he was doing
Brady pictured on Saddleworth Moor, where three of the victims’ bodies were discovered
Soon, their sexual relations began to take on elements of sado-masochism, beginning with light spankings, then graduating to full-scale whippings. Brady encouraged her to dress in bondage gear and she would. He generally preferred anal intercourse, which she put down to his semi-homosexuality.
Brady, a keen amateur photographer, took a range of pornographic photographs of both himself and Myra – but mainly of her. They showed her tied up, holding whips and naked with weals across her back. Apparently he sold these at a market in Manchester.
The police also found 30 pornographic photographs among the couple’s possessions. They showed them having sex, with Hindley whipped and pleasuring herself with various implements.
All the while, Brady was encouraging Myra to read sadistic literature – books with evocative titles such as The Kiss Of The Whip.
David Smith, who was married to Myra’s younger sister Maureen, got to know the couple extremely well and spent many hours at their house drinking with Brady long into the night. He described them to me as ‘a pair of bloody kinky b*****ds’.
Why did Hindley go along with this and allow herself to get caught up in it all? Brady said Myra entered into this world entirely voluntarily. He claimed he made sure she understood they were both still individuals, free to indulge as they wished.
S&M was no more, he told her, than the preference for a different kind of wine. He said they laughed together as they exchanged details of their excursions into ‘irregular’ sex.
Myra conceded that she had gone along with him because ‘he excited me in a way that no other man had before’. But many years later she found revelations about their ‘kinky’ sex deeply embarrassing and very unhelpful to her cause for being released on parole.
Brady took a series of pornographic photographs showing Hindley tied up, holding whips and naked with weals across her back
A photograph of Hindley gazing at a river on the Moors taken by Brady
She then claimed Brady had forced her into it and frequently beaten her violently without her consent. She said on one occasion he had been turned on by reading a book about S&M and wanted to have sex with her. When she demurred, he beat her with a sweeping brush until she was a bleeding bruised mess. She said she learned not to cry out when he was hitting her.
She claimed she was under duress and abuse before, after and during the murders, and through all the time she was with him. He used to threaten her, rape her, whip and cane her. She would be covered in bruises and bite marks. She had to fight him off strangling her, she said, but the more she did, the more the pressure increased. He threatened to kill her family.
On one occasion apparently he drugged her without her knowledge, and she was so frightened she actually composed a note to be read in the event of her death blaming Brady, and passed it to a friend for safekeeping, though she later withdrew it.
This is a tricky area. It is unquestionable that Brady inflicted violence on Hindley, but the question is whether she consented to it and enjoyed it, or was she beaten into submission and cowed into accepting a sexual regime she didn’t want.
Yet Myra was no shrinking violet but tough and, as a teenager, had been perfectly able to stand up to her own father when he flew into one of his violent rages.
Is it really credible that she just went along passively with Brady’s demands? And anyway, there’s no answer here as to how she evolved from unusual sexual activities into becoming a serial killer.
Alongside initiating Hindley into S&M, Brady also spent many hours encouraging her to share his view that there was no God and therefore no absolute moral code.
He claimed to have been religious until the age of 12 when he prayed to God to save his sick pet dog. When the dog still died, he shouted obscenities into the night and was consumed by a foaming, mad fury against whatever malignant being might be lurking in the sky.
Police searching Saddleworth Moor. Four of the five victims’ bodies were recovered, with only Keith Bennett’s body remaining undiscovered
Everything fell into place for him once he realised that God was a projection, a human fantasy when we cannot face the horrific prospect of a meaningless, purposeless universe. He embraced nihilism as a philosophy which left him free to reject society’s values, norms, ideals and morals.
He said he found his first taste of nihilism intoxicating. It made him feel omnipotent. Murder, he concluded, could be perfectly justified as ‘an existential experiment’.
His reading gave him the intellectual justification for what was already developing in his personal tastes and inclinations. He read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the arch philosopher of nihilism, and delved into the writings of the Marquis de Sade, who extolled the virtues of inflicting pain as a source of pleasure. Though the multitude of people who might be called nihilists don’t go around murdering people, the writers that Brady chose to read show he was attracted by those who put an emphasis on death, and especially murder.
Among his possessions the police found books with titles including Uses Of The Torture Chamber and Sexual Anomalies And Perversions. At some point, those fantasies became extended and began to turn into contemplating murder and killing. And once he started thinking about that, when superimposed on his sadism and sexual attraction to children, the idea of murdering them was simply a further step.
As for Hindley, she clearly bought into his world view. Only a few months into the relationship, she started wearing more daring outfits with bondage resonances. She stopped going to church and rejected the idea of marriage – all of which reflected Brady’s ideas. She said she hated babies and she hated people.
Brady said that Myra was never coerced into his philosophy and ideas, and that she had no qualms about sharing them. He said it had never been a case of master and slave. It was more like teacher and student. Bit by bit their relationship became almost telepathic.
He said Myra was surprisingly in tune with him from the beginning. She was as ruthless as he was.
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All the evidence suggests that what Brady said about Myra willingly buying into his philosophy was true. She was fascinated by his apparent mysteriousness and found herself in a cabal of just two, thinking of themselves as more cultured than the people around them and initiated into a covert exclusive club of their own making.
It became their exciting secret, which only they knew about and which bound them together.
For her, it was a way of cementing him to her. Brady made it clear to her that what he was really interested in was raping and murdering children. Hindley admitted that their sexual encounters were permeated with discussion about these fantasies. She later denied sharing his paedophilia but admitted it was part of their sex lives.
Brady encouraged her to read Compulsion, a novel based on the true case of two college students in the US who abducted a boy and killed him with the aim of committing the ‘perfect crime’. They were caught, but Brady was eager to go one up on them and carry out that perfect crime. He discussed with Hindley the mistakes the two college boys had made and explained how if he and she were to commit a murder, he would make sure it couldn’t be traced back to them.
Thus, by degrees, he habituated her to his fantasy of committing a murder. They even drove up to Saddleworth Moor where he ‘practised’ hoisting her over his shoulder and carrying her like a dead body on to the moorland. They also began to drive around spotting children, then parking up and watching them.
Brady would discuss how he would execute his murder plan on likely looking subjects. Found among Myra’s possessions after her death was a raft of negatives of photos Brady had taken crouching low down in the van as Myra drove him around. They included shots of schoolboys playing football.
He also sent Myra out on her own to spot likely children and to visualise whether she would actually be able to go through with an abduction and murder. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Hindley became fully conversant with Brady’s desire to abduct a child, rape and then murder them, and that not only did she not try to discourage Brady but she went along with this as it developed into a full-blown active plan.
And so it was that by degrees they came to the point where they finally agreed to carry out the actual deed.
The first murder happened only a month after Brady moved in full-time to live with Myra and her granny. A couple of days before, they cleared out anything incriminating in the house, put it into suitcases and took them to be locked away in a left luggage compartment at Manchester Central railway station.
Then on the night of Friday July 12, 1963, they set off to carry out the plan. On his motorbike Brady followed Hindley in her van and flashed his lights at her when he spotted an eight-year-old girl walking along a street.
Myra didn’t stop to pick her up and Brady was furious at the missed opportunity until she explained the girl was a near neighbour of theirs and suspicion would be bound to fall on them.
Off they went again to find another victim. Pauline Reade was on her way to a dance and had intended to go with a friend but at the last moment the friend cried off. When Hindley stopped and offered a lift, she readily accepted.
Once in the van, Myra told her she had lost a glove up on Saddleworth Moor and asked Pauline to go with her to look for it in exchange for some records. Hindley said the unsuspecting Pauline was happy to agree.
Once they got to Saddleworth, Brady turned up on his motorbike. Myra said Brady and Pauline had then gone up onto the darkened moor and claimed she had driven further along the road, parked and waited. She admitted she knew Brady intended to kill the girl but she herself did not actually take part in it.
Hindley said Brady returned and asked her to accompany him to where Pauline lay dying with her throat cut. She was in a state of undress and Hindley guessed Brady had sexually assaulted her.
Brady supposedly then went off to fetch a spade he had previously hidden on the moor while Hindley watched the girl in her bloody death throes. Brady then returned and apparently sent Hindley back to the van to wait until he finally returned, having buried Pauline.
In short, Hindley claimed that although she’d had foreknowledge of the murder and had assisted in luring and transporting the girl to the site of the crime, she was essentially a non-participant in the actual deed.
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Her account, though, was markedly at odds with Brady’s. He said they planned Pauline’s murder, and when he pressed her to double check she was still up for it, she said she was with him, that she knew this wasn’t just idle talk and she was just waiting for the word ‘go’.
He said he led the way on to the moor while Myra and Pauline followed him. Once they reached a site pre-agreed with Myra, he grabbed Pauline in a stranglehold and pushed her to the ground.
Brady said Pauline appealed to Myra to make Brady stop but Hindley had an expression on her face which was taunting and pitiless. She had just snapped at Pauline to keep quiet.
Brady said it was Myra who then undressed Pauline and that they both then assaulted her. He said he left Pauline with Myra while he went back to the van to get his camera to take photographic souvenirs. When he returned, he said Myra was sitting astride Pauline who was trying to break free, and he then cut Pauline’s throat with a sheath knife. After she was dead, he sent Myra back to the van to return the camera because it was now too dark to take pictures, and to return with the spade. They buried Pauline together, he said.
Of the two accounts, I find Brady’s the more plausible. Myra’s story of her minimal involvement has too many inconsistencies to be entirely credible.
It doesn’t make sense that Brady would come back to the van, invite Myra to see what he’d done to Pauline, then send her back while he buried the body. Nor that Brady had driven to the moor on his motorbike wielding a spade. The more credible explanation is that they took the spade in the van, Myra knowing full well what it was going to be used for.
As her years in prison racked up and she was increasingly desperate for parole, Myra took to presenting herself as a victim, a bystander in the killings rather than an active participant.
This doesn’t stack up. Hindley led the children to their deaths, helped to overpower and subdue them, was at least present and probably actively involved when they were raped and murdered. She then helped to bury the bodies.
In short, she was a participant, not a reluctant, coerced party.
Hindley argued it was fear that drove her to join in committing acts she participated in. But the truth seems to be that Brady unlocked in her a taste for sadistic sexual excitement which she enjoyed and didn’t shrink from, and that she was not only prepared to go along with the hideous terror he inflicted on the children but gave every appearance of enjoying it.
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How can we discount the photos of her smiling and petting her dog lovingly as she posed over the graves of their victims? Or how she and Brady deliberately took relatives and neighbours’ children to picnic over the graves, without our thinking she must have derived some sick satisfaction from doing so?
And however much one is in thrall to someone else, how gruesome would it be for any normal person to witness the cold-blooded murder of children, but which Hindley appeared to countenance with equanimity? In the end the evidence points to one simple conclusion: she enjoyed it all.
The brunt of Hindley’s case for parole was that she had been a vulnerable young woman lured into totally uncharacteristic behaviour by a dominant older man, rather than someone who had willingly and with complete commitment joined in the crimes. And this was also the argument used by those who supported her bid for release.
In the end, parole officials were spared having to wrestle with the questions of whether and how much Myra had been groomed, what was her culpability and whether, in the interests of justice, she should be given parole after so long in prison. Public opinion decided the matter for them, and the public thought Hindley was at least as guilty as Brady.
And it was this that made sure she would get the same punishment as him. She would never be released.
Adapted from The Moors Murders by Michael Attwell (HarperElement, £10.99) to be published June 4. © Michael Attwell 2026. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid until May 30) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.
