One of Your Own (52 page)

He didn’t doubt that her Catholicism was genuine: ‘I spend a lot of time around religious people and there didn’t seem any dissemblance there. In one of our chats she told me that she listened to
Thought for the Day
on Radio 4. She said, “I’d be very good on that programme.” I said, “You should do it,” and she replied, “I would if they’d let me.” I approached Reverend Ernie Ray, head of religious broadcasting at the time, but he said it was more than his job was worth. But there again, I suppose our letters and conversations were very religious because she thought that’s what I was interested in. She played the part with whoever was her latest saviour. Frank Longford was 50 years out of date with public opinion; David Astor was 20 years out of date. Basically, Frank believed that if you said it often enough people would agree with you in the end and David thought that you could drip feed these things and change opinions that way. Dear old Frank didn’t do her cause any good in the end, and he didn’t do himself any good either. It’s true what the victims’ families suspected: Frank
wasn’t
interested in victims. That’s the bottom line.’
⁸⁴

He discussed her crimes with her but not in great depth: ‘I didn’t want to know. She talked a lot about her remorse, but it’s difficult to reconcile with her not telling the truth about the other two children for so long, although I can understand how she got herself into that fix. Frank started visiting her in the late 1960s, and very soon was talking about parole and release and she got carried away with that, and she believed it was going to happen. I don’t excuse her in any way at all, and if I was the parent of those children I would hate her for it. And it was a strange thing between her and Ian Brady, even then. Whenever he came up in conversation, she was very hostile towards him, but in an oddly competitive way. In relation to that, there was a very uncomfortable moment when I was visiting her at Cookham Wood. I’d bought Myra a bar of chocolate. Children were running round the table where we were sitting, and she picked up the chocolate bar, smiled at this little boy and waved the chocolate bar at him. I just sat there and thought, “Oh God . . .
this
is how you did it.” It was extremely sinister. The overtones . . . I sat there horrified, and she must have picked up on that, but it didn’t stop her, she went on waving this chocolate bar at the little boy. There was something in the way she did it that made me think there was a knowingness in it. There
were
things that made me uneasy. In the early days I took everything more at face value, but perhaps when you have children you look at things differently.’
⁸⁵

On one occasion, Stanford was accompanied on a visit to Myra by Bernard Black, who had written to her at the request of his friend John Trevelyan. Myra described Black, who was also Catholic, as ‘kind and caring and with such integrity and a first-class brain’.
⁸⁶
He recalls: ‘I saw her several times, always with other people, and most of the conversations were about trying to get her case heard again. I never got involved with that but nothing I saw or read from her indicated she might be a danger to the public. I found it hard to understand how the person I got to know could have been responsible for the crimes she had committed. Her letters were exceptionally lucid, but in person she was rather miserable, which you might expect from someone who had been all that time in prison. I felt sorry for her, but she didn’t help herself by keeping quiet for so many years about the extent of her involvement.’
⁸⁷
Bernard Black’s wife, Margaret, never met her: ‘No, I didn’t want to. I’m a mum and perhaps we have slightly different feelings to men.’
⁸⁸

Writing was Myra’s main concern for much of 1988; she was scathing when she heard that Ian had asked Lord Longford to edit his prison letters, writing to Astor that it was ‘rather a coincidence that Elizabeth is advising me, and Brady wants Frank to edit the letters he urged Frank to destroy after he’d sent them’.
⁸⁹
On 2 June, she sent a delighted letter to the Revd Peter Timms about having been approached by barrister Helena Kennedy (who acted as junior counsel for Myra during her 1974 trial) to write an afterword for a book Kennedy was planning to edit about the role of women in child-connected crimes.
⁹⁰
In addition, André Deutsch had agreed to publish Myra’s autobiography and she was writing assiduously, mostly about her relationship with Ian, which gave her ‘a succession of most unpleasant dreams, which I really can’t handle’.
⁹¹

She was distressed the following month when she learned that her stepfather had died of a heart attack; although she had disliked him, she worried about the effect on her mother: ‘He died on July 8, the day before my sister’s anniversary, and I felt so sorry for my mother because she, like me, has never got over Maureen’s death. He was buried on the 14th, the day before Maureen’s funeral.’
⁹²
Her immediate concern was her mother’s precarious financial situation and she queried whether her publisher might advance her some funds, but David Astor came to the rescue with money from his own pocket.

Plans for Myra’s autobiography continued apace. Diana Athill, one of Britain’s finest literary editors and writers, was approached to work on the book, but wanted to meet Myra before she would commit to the project. Athill visited her with Peter Timms, and found her ‘intelligent, responsive, human, dignified. And if someone had then informed me that this unknown woman had been in prison for twenty-two years I would have been amazed: how could a person of whom that was true appear to have been so little institutionalised?’
⁹³
Myra discussed her OU degree, Catholicism and the press. Athill recalls: ‘She was flippant rather than grateful about what she called “my old men” – Lord Longford, David Astor and Timms.’
⁹⁴
Ultimately, Athill turned down the role of editor for Myra’s autobiography, doubting its worth both for the public and as a means of purging Myra of her own past: ‘When she did what she did she was not mad – as Brady was – and although she was young, she was an adult, and an intelligent one. It seems to me that there are strands of moral deformity which cannot be pardoned: that Stangl was right when, having faced the truth about himself, he said, “I ought to be dead.”’
⁹⁵

A new solicitor was secured for Myra: Andrew McCooey, who also happened to be a close friend of Lord Longford. ‘Peter Timms asked me if I would be willing to act for her,’ McCooey recalls. ‘I discussed it with my wife and she said that if I felt I should do it, then to go ahead. I never regretted it, although there were some family members who thought I was mad to take this particular case on – my brother, for instance. Of course Myra came with a huge amount of baggage and was a Medusa figure as far as the press were concerned. The tabloids would ring me at midnight and ask the most preposterous questions: “Is it true that Myra’s getting married?” I would respond wearily, “Do you know what time it is?” “Yes, but now you’re awake, can you just reply to the question?” And I would say sarcastically, “Well, of course it’s true. She has
so
much choice in an all-female prison.” They would then report that the next day as my having confirmed the rumour. My phone lines were constantly engaged and journalists and photographers were always at my door. John Kay of
The Sun
said to me, “Anything you can give us about Myra, I will guarantee you a front-page spread.” She was as lucrative to them as Princess Diana.

‘I was lambasted too, of course, as her solicitor; they said she was manipulating me and so forth. I certainly don’t think she manipulated me and I saw her more often than anyone. She was an extremely quietly spoken woman and very genuine in her desire to help the victims’ families achieve resolution. She did her absolute utmost to aid the police during the 1980s search of the moor and her remorse was deep-seated and true. I certainly had far worse clients than her. She believed that God had forgiven her and she drew comfort from that, but men wouldn’t extend her the same compassion. Despite all the hassle, working with Myra brought me many rewards in the way of wonderful friendships and learning a great deal. I never worried about the controversy; you have to be true to what you think is the right thing or else live your life looking over your shoulder the entire time.’
⁹⁶

If Myra was upset that Athill had withdrawn from her literary project, she didn’t allow it to discourage her from writing, confiding in Peter Stanford that she was thoroughly absorbed by the process, and admitted to the Revd Peter Timms: ‘I’m glad I’m not publishing this year, with the Krays’ book coming out, and the film about the Great Train Robbers – I don’t want to be part of a bunch of ’60s East End villains!’
⁹⁷
On 4 November 1988 she reported her progress to David Astor, buoyed by a recent visit from a friend and one of her many godchildren: ‘I’ve written 640-odd pages, and have just reached the third crime [Keith Bennett], but when I get to the actual crime itself, as opposed to how it came about, I’ll do as I did with the first two and say that reference to this offence is to be made later.’
⁹⁸
Later that month, another book occupied her thoughts; she was outraged by the publication of Jean Ritchie’s ‘diabolical’ biography,
Inside the Mind of a Murderess
.
⁹⁹
Ritchie, an ex-
Sun
journalist, had approached Myra to ask her whether she would be willing to cooperate with the book. Myra forwarded Ritchie’s letter to David Astor, with a few comments of her own; she was sure Ritchie meant well, and appreciated being informed about the book, but had no wish to be interviewed, and hoped the same was true of her family and friends.

Inside the Mind of a Murderess
was serialised in
The Sun
, with television adverts featuring the arrest photograph and the tagline ‘Sex Romps with an Ex-Nun on E Wing’. If Myra could take comfort from Ritchie’s blanket assertion that had she not met Ian, ‘Myra might have done anything with her life . . . she would not have killed children,’ there was little else to hearten her; Ritchie’s incisive research was lost under the volume of stories about Myra’s prison lesbianism.
¹⁰⁰
‘I want to sue both
The Sun
and especially Jean Ritchie,’ Myra raged in a long letter on the subject to David Astor. ‘She has no integrity, no scruples and, in the case of the book, no moral conscience. David, I must do something about all this.’
¹⁰¹
In another letter, she described her battle with
The Sun
as ‘like a Sherman tank bristling with modern weapons confronting a civilian with a plastic water pistol!’
¹⁰²
Her anger deepened when she discovered that Ritchie had ghostwritten another book – Peter Topping’s autobiography, which revolved almost entirely around his interviews with Myra and Ian. He had retired before starting work on the book, but was issued with a writ by Greater Manchester Police for breach of confidentiality. David Astor financed Myra’s legal action against Topping, which she abandoned upon learning that GMP had begun theirs. Her supporters were appalled by the book and Keith Bennett’s family were deeply distressed by details that hadn’t been revealed to them beforehand by Topping or his team.

There was more upset for Myra in December. She had joined the lay Franciscans in May, but seven months later her membership was revoked. Peter Stanford recalls: ‘Myra was distraught. She had been the ultimate outcast and that feeling of acceptance meant the world to her. They rescinded on the grounds that a lay Franciscan should be a person in good standing with the community – I think that’s the exact wording they used.’
¹⁰³
He and Longford spoke to the head of the Franciscan Order in London, but without success; Stanford then approached Cardinal Hume: ‘He agreed with me and said he would write to the head of the Franciscan Order himself. I thought, “That’s sorted then, they’ll have to give in if the Cardinal tells them,” but they ignored him as well.’
¹⁰⁴
Myra attempted to console herself, writing to Stanford: ‘I believe this is God’s way of saying that my salvation – which I’m convinced is secured – lies in other directions to fulfilment . . . I feel very close to God – heaven is within us all.’
¹⁰⁵
She hoped writing would distract her but found it difficult to continue: ‘The sequence I was writing about reopened wounds and made me even more painfully aware that there are some memories which will never heal and I don’t mean just my own. Those of the people I was partly responsible for cause me just as much pain. I’ve decided to go on to a totally different subject . . . the first 500 pages just flowed and felt fulfilled and productive; it was excellent therapy, and I know that when I finally manage to confront the traumatic subjects, however painful it will be at the time, it will, in the end, be a tremendous catharsis.’
¹⁰⁶
She wrote in similar vein to David Astor about the sections that dealt with her relationship with Ian: ‘Not one memory had healed at all. I knew they never would, but the scabs on the wounds were more fragile than I thought they were . . .’
¹⁰⁷
She declared that she hated herself for having ‘encouraged [Ian], motivated him even’.
¹⁰⁸

In April 1989, Myra wrote to David Astor about Keith Bennett’s brother Alan, with whom she had been corresponding since the end of the official moor search; he had written to ask her if she could help his family in their own explorations of the area where Keith was said to be buried. Realising that he had no intention of publishing her letters in the media and was acting purely out of desperation to find his brother, she invited him to meet her. He accepted, finding the courage and strength to quell his own emotions in order to discuss the maps and photographs of the moor with her. He then contacted Professor John Hunter, founder of the Forensic Search Advisory Group, who agreed to assist free of charge. Myra informed Astor that she had received a letter from another member of the Bennett family’s team, asking her if she would look at other maps. She remained in contact with Detective Inspector Geoff Knupfer, who was present both during her confession and the exhumation of Pauline Reade, and Myra claimed he advised her not to reply to the letter, ‘saying it would be unwise of me to do so myself, and adding that these amateur searchers are only going over ground that the police have already searched’.
¹⁰⁹
She told Astor that Knupfer had promised to ‘have a word’ with Alan about ending the search.
¹¹⁰
Despite having informed the authorities that she did not wish to be considered for parole, she confided in Astor that Knupfer had agreed to write positively to the prison governor about her conduct, honouring a promise made during her interviews with him and Topping. ‘This can only help in the future,’ she wrote. ‘It will be the first time there’ll be anything favourable on my record from the police. So really, there’s no justification at all for them to refuse parole now.’
¹¹¹