Opinions

What should we do about Myra?

Once again, Myra Hindley is in the news. Her partner in the Moors murders, 37 years ago, is also in the news. He wants to die. He is being force fed at the moment, and he is appealing to the courts for this to be stopped. For the past 30 years or more, Ian Brady has been kept in a secure mental hospital, as he is judged to be insane. For the past 30 years or more, Myra Hindley has been kept in prison for her crimes. She is not insane. According to most professionals who have seen her, she has come to terms with her misdeeds all that time ago, and poses no threat to children or society in general. Yet she is still inside prison. Where most murderers are freed on licence after between 12 - 15 years, she has been told that she should die in prison. This, despite the fact that the trial judge wrote that in his view, away from the influence of Brady, there was no reason why she should not be integrated back into society once she had served her tariff sentence, which was set at 20 years. When the 20 years were up, a home secretary added another 5 to her term, and when she had served those, another home secretary increased it again to 30 years. Then finally, another politician has set a whole life tariff for her. It would seem that she has become a political prisoner, in that no home secretary wants the responsibility for being the one who sets her free.

Why should this be? The murder of 5 children was horrific, and cannot be excused or forgotten. The suffering of the families of the victims has lasted as long as her sentence, and it does seem that they will never be able to live in peace while she is alive. BUT it is not Myra Hindley who is responsible for this. It is the tabloid press, baying for blood, who prevents the families from grieving and reducing their own suffering, by constantly reminding them about those times. It is the tabloid press who maintain the demonisation of Myra Hindley, making her an un-person, a monster - a woman who betrayed her sex by killing children, not raising them. We often hear the phrase 'No-one cares for the victims of crime', but here it borders on hypocrisy. The victims are the families of the dead children, and they have been treated appallingly. Now, they would receive victim counselling to allow them to come to terms with their grief; then they were ignored. The media ensured that this was impossible. and that is why the media is responsible for the victim's relatives plight. True, Ian Brady and to a lesser extent, Myra Hindley are ultimately responsible, as they were the people who perpetrated the deeds, but this does not excuse the attitude and posturing of the media.

I live about 5 miles from the gap in a housing estate where the house that they lived in and killed in was demolished. Feelings around this area are high, and every time her name is recalled by the media, the liberalism and humanity of the human race is shown in its true light by the baying for revenge from the ill-informed and non-thinking among us. I hate to sound classist, but to some extent it does seem that what was once termed the working classes do tend to live and think on the emotional level, and not on a more coldly logical level. Not that this is bad, but when people refuse to countenance any other viewpoint, it can be dangerous. The mob has always been told what to think, how to behave, and it is disgusting that our media are keeping this situation alive.

If we are to believe Hindley, she came from an abusive background - drunken father beating his wife - and she eventually left home to live with her grandmother. Otherwise, it seems that her early years were not much different to the majority of her contempories. She met Brady, and the rest is history. She appeared to find him dominating, fascinating, and, in her own words, would do anything for him to love her. Even to the point of procuring children for him to kill. She was there when the tape was made of Leslie Anne Downey, which was the one piece of concrete evidence against her, and the one thing from those days that even now she cannot comprehend. She tried to break away from Brady a couple of times during the relationship, but he caught up with her, humiliated her, beat her and threatened to kill her and her grandmother. So she continued this strange love/hate relationship, continued the killings until eventually they were caught. The rest is history. The first female serial killer in Britain was jailed for killing children. And that is where the problem lies in the eyes of many people. What sort of woman could kill children? Not a normal one, but an evil monster. Unfortunately, she does appear to be a normal woman, or at least as normal a woman who has to endure the life that she does. After a few years in prison, during which Brady still contacted her, and she was still under his aura, she managed the break from him. During the next decades, she seems to have come to terms with her crimes. She has made a full confession, she has tried to help the police to find the other missing bodies, and according to most 'authorities' has returned to her original Catholic faith. According to her critics, this is purely manipulation. They cannot conceive of the evil monster that they have turned her into ever being able to change, and therefore anything that she does has to be twisted to fit their preconceptions of evil.

So where do I stand on this matter? I believe that she should be released, given a new identity and, because of her infamy, allowed to start a new life in another country. I don't believe that any politician should keep people, however appalling their crimes, in prison for reasons of electibility. Sentencing should be left to the courts, and parole should also be left to them, without political interference. However, another part of my mind says that she is probably so institutionalised after 30 or more years in prison, that she might not be able to function outside of the system. For her own safety from the baying mob who would be threatening to kill her if she was released, maybe prison is the best place for her. I honestly do not know. But, I do know that I feel extremely uncomfortable about her treatment, and her blame for the evil deeds committed by Brady. She was as much one of his victims as the children, and that should be remembered. It reminds me too much of Adam telling his god that it was the woman who made me do it. And it saddens me that too many otherwise good people are prepared to let their gut feelings rule their minds, and let themselves be led and told what to think by a manipulative media. This is a topic that I think we shall return to at another time.