Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [44]
In 1992, his hearing was held within hours of the first execution held in California for over a decade. Of course, Manson’s death sentence cannot be reinstated. Nevertheless, Manson did not do his chances of getting parole much good when he told the parole board: ‘There’s no one as bad as me. I am everywhere. I am down in San Diego Zoo. I am in your children. Someone had to be insane. We can’t all be good guys. They’ve tried to kill me thirty or forty times in prison. They’ve poured fire over me. They haven’t found anyone badder than me because there is no one as bad as me – and that’s a fact.’
The truth is, Manson will never be allowed out.
Chapter 7
The Moors Murderers
Name: Ian Brady
Accomplice: Myra Hindley
Nationality: English
Number of victims: 5 killed
Reign of terror: 1963–65
Favoured method of killing: torture, sexual perversion, strangulation
Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s bizarre and deviant sexual relationship drove them to torture and murder defenceless children for pleasure in a case that appalled the world.
When 19-year-old Myra Hindley met Ian Brady in January 1961 he was already deeply disturbed. He was 21 years old and worked as a stock clerk at Millwards, a chemical company in Manchester, but his mind was full of sadistic fantasies. He had a collection of Nazi memorabilia and recordings of Nazi rallies. In his lunch hour, he read Mein Kampf and studied German grammar. He believed in the rightness of the Nazi cause and regretted only that he could not join in its sadistic excesses.
Myra Hindley had problems of her own. When she was 15, her boyfriend had died. She could not sleep for days afterwards and eventually turned to the Catholic Church for consolation. She was known as a loner and a daydreamer although at school it was noted that she was tough, aggressive and rather masculine, enjoying contact sports and judo. But that hardly made her suited to working life in 1950s Britain. After a series of menial jobs, she became a typist at Millwards, where she met Brady. He impressed her immediately. Most of the men she knew she considered immature. But Brady was well-dressed and rode a motorbike. Everything about him fascinated her. ‘Ian wore a black shirt today and looked smashing… l love him,’ she confided to her diary.
For nearly a year Brady took no notice of her. ‘The pig. He didn’t even look at me today,’ she wrote more than once.
Finally, in December 1961, he asked her out. ‘Eureka!’ her diary says. ‘Today we have our first date. We are going to the cinema.’ The film was Judgment at Nuremberg.
Soon Hindley had surrendered her virginity to Brady. She was madly in love with him and was writing schoolgirlishly: ‘I hope Ian and I love each other all our lives and get married and are happy ever after.’
But their relationship was far more sophisticated than that. Hindley was Brady’s love slave. He talked to her of sexual perversions and lent her books on Nazi atrocities. They took pornographic photographs of each other and kept them in a scrapbook. Some showed the weals of a whip across her buttocks.
Hindley gave up babysitting and going to church. Within six months, Brady had moved in with Hindley who lived (with her dog) in her grandmother’s house on the outskirts of Manchester. A frail woman, Hindley’s grandmother spent most of her time in bed, giving them the run of the place. Brady persuaded Hindley to bleach her hair a Teutonic blonde and dressed her in leather skirts and high-heeled boots. He called her Myra Hess – or Hessie – after sadistic concentration camp guard Irma Grese.
Hindley became hard and cruel, doing anything Brady asked. She did not even balk at procuring children for him to abuse, torture and kill. The first victim was 16-year-old Pauline Reade