Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

back Ian was waiting for her. He accompanied her home where she told her mother and gran that she’d got the job, but they weren’t impressed at the prospects that this offered her. Instead they were very upset at the thought of her moving abroad and she loved them so much she decided to stay. She continued to date Ian, riding pillion on his motorbike. He took her away from the cramped streets of Manchester’s Gorton to enjoy picnics and wine on the moors.
    Soon she told May to destroy the letter - though May would testify to its content at the trial. By now Myra had clearly decided to comply with whatever this fascinating but very dangerous lover wanted her to do. Thisincluded dyeing her hair blonde and parading about in leather boots in the manner of the female Nazi Concentration Camp guard, Irma Grese.
    Forging our own identity is part of growing up, and the rage-filled philosophy Ian Brady fed Myra was a million miles away from the ‘meet a nice boy and have kids’ option spouted by those around her. But his handsome features, soft Scottish voice and autodidactism made him far more attractive than her unambitious family, so Myra started to remould herself as her lover wished.
    She had given him her virginity on their second date (she was nineteen) and soon agreed to have anal sex with him, despite the fact that it hurt her. Serial killers and power rapists often prefer forced sodomy and oral sex to vaginal sex as it demeans the victim more.
    On other occasions Brady told her to insert a candle into his anus and then to masturbate him. It may be that he was abused as a child - he certainly spent lots of time alone out of doors as a child feeling different and slighted, a demeanour which would have made him vulnerable to paedophile seduction. The candle incident with Myra might have been his way of trying to take control of such homo-erotic actions forced on him as a child or during his Borstal years. He was clearly concerned only with his own internal script, but couldn’t fail to note that she didn’t seem to mind.
    Before long Ian moved into Myra’s gran’s housepermanently, though they told the neighbours that he slept on the settee and was there to confront any burglars . (There had been many burglaries in the area.) In reality they slept together though Ian quickly tired of conventional sex.
    Myra would later describe him as ‘a powerful personality’ and write that she was ‘unworldly… a dreamer , a romantic.’ Whatever her true motive, she was letting herself be turned into a woman who would do whatever her lover wanted.
    Even at this stage she could have been saved. Many youths feel understandably alienated from the families they’re born into. Many want something different and temporarily seek it in the occult, in religion, in the music of alienation or in arcane philosophies. Later they move on to find fulfilment in a career, sport or other interest instead.
    Given her childhood experiences, we can perhaps understand why the teenage Myra agreed with Brady’s talk of killing for thrills - because the existentialism of it all made her feel superior to her peers who thought only of boyfriends and bingo. Her talking about murder also pleased Ian, something that she was desperate to do. She even allowed him to carry her about on the moors as practice for when he had a dead body to dispose of - and she took shooting lessons when he fantasized about them robbing a bank. But then she took the step that would cut her off from most humanunderstanding: she helped him realise his murderous plans.

The first victim
    The pair had talked for months about abducting someone for Ian to rape, with his insistence that rape was just a state of mind rather than a criminal act. He looked down on most of the uneducated people who surrounded him and wanted to crush them like ants.
    In July 1963 Ian asked twenty-one-year-old Myra to get him a child because a child would happily go off with a woman. Myra obligingly parked