A Criminal History of Mankind Read Online Free PDF

took her back to their house - they had now moved to Hattersley, where Gran had been assigned a council house - made her strip, and took various photographs of her. They also recorded her screams and pleas to be released on tape. Then she was killed and buried on the moor near the body of John Kilbride. Later, they took blankets and slept on the graves. It was part of the fantasy of being Enemies of Society, dangerous revolutionaries.
    Nine months later, Brady made the mistake that led to his arrest. A sixteen-year-old named David Smith had become a sort of disciple. He had married Myra’s younger sister Maureen when she became pregnant. Like Myra, David Smith was easy to convert; he had also had his troubles with the police, and was eager to swallow the gospel of revolution and self-assertion. Smith was an apt pupil, and wrote in his diary: ‘Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind. Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure.’/’God is a superstition, a cancer that eats into the brain.’/’People are like maggots, small, blind and worthless.’ Smith also listened with admiration as Brady talked about his plans for bank robbery. Brady told him that he had killed three or four people, whose bodies were buried on the moor, and that he had once stopped the car in a deserted street and shot a passer-by at random. On 6 October 1965, Brady decided it was time for Smith’s initiation. In a pub in Manchester he and Myra picked up a seventeen-year-old youth, Edward Evans, and drove him back lo the house in Hattersley. At 11.30, Myra went to fetch David Smith. As he was in the kitchen, he heard a loud scream and a shout of ‘Dave, help him.’ He found Brady striking Evans with an axe. When Evans lay still, Brady strangled him with a cord. He handed Smith the hatchet - ‘Feel the weight of it’ - and took it back with Smith’s fingerprints on the bloodstained handle. The three of them cleaned the room and wrapped the corpse in polythene - as they lifted it, Brady joked ‘Eddie’s a dead weight.’ They drank tea, and Myra reminisced about the time a policeman had stopped to talk to her as she sat in the car while Brady was burying a body. Then Smith went home, promising to return with a pram to transport the body to the car. At home, he was violently sick, and told his wife what had happened. She called the police. At 8.40 the next morning a man dressed as a baker’s roundsman knocked at Brady’s door, and when he opened it - wearing only a vest - identified himself as a police officer. In a locked bedroom, the police found the body of Edward Evans. Brady was arrested and charged with murder.
    There was no confession. Brady stonewalled every inch of the way. He insisted that Lesley had been brought to the house by two men, who also took her away. The tape was played in court, and provided the most horrifying moment of the trial. Myra later said she felt ashamed of what they had done to Lesley (although she would only confess to helping to take pornographic photographs); Brady remained indifferent. He explained at one point that he knew he would be condemned anyway. On 6 May 1966, he was sentenced lo three concurrent terms of life imprisonment; Myra Hindley was sentenced to two. Since then, there has been occasional talk of releasing Myra from prison; but the public outcry reveals that the case still arouses unusual revulsion. No one has even suggested that Brady should ever be released.
    The central mystery of the case remains: how a perfectly normal girl like Myra Hindley could have participated with a certain enthusiasm in the murders. At the time I was studying the case (for a book called Order of Assassins ’) I had long discussions with Dr Rachel Pinney, who had met Myra in jail and had become convinced of her innocence. In her view, Myra had been ‘framed’. ‘I still think Myra had no part in the killings or torture,’ she wrote in a letter to me, ‘and the end result of my work will be a fuller study of