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

Reade. At the time Emlyn Williams wrote his book in 1967 he didn’t know for sure that Ian was responsible for the disappearance of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett so - though he mentions both children in the Appendix - his account begins with the murder of John Kilbride.
    Given the evidence that was to follow, there was no doubt that they were responsible for Lesley’s demise. The ten-year-old had been at the fun fair when sheaccepted a lift home from the friendly-seeming couple. They took her back to the house (Myra’s gran was visiting relatives) and told her to take off her clothes apart from her socks and shoes.
    Then they set up a tripod and began to take pornographic photographs of her. They ordered her to stand and sit in various sexually explicit poses, tied her hands together and gagged her with a man’s scarf. Ian hoped to sell the photographs on the black market - he had taken previous shots of himself and Myra wearing hoods in similar states of undress.
    Ian switched his taperecorder on and this seventeen minute tape would later be played back in court to a shocked jury. Serial killers often make audio or video recording of their victims during their ordeal, using the tapes afterwards as a masturbatory aid.
    The tape starts with a scream, unclear voices then another scream. Then Lesley says ‘Don’t… Please God, help me.’ Brady is heard telling her to do as she’s told. The little girl says that she has to go home as her mum is expecting her and Myra snaps ‘Don’t dally.’ Lesley says to Myra ‘Help me, will you?’ When the child refuses to be gagged Myra says ‘Shut up or I’ll forget myself and hit you one,’ then ‘Will you stop it? Stop it!’ She orders the girl to put the handkerchief back into her mouth.
    The child is heard to be retching because the handkerchief is being pushed down her throat. The jurorswould later be handed photograph albums of the crime scene to study. Some of the snapshots showed Lesley with a scarf tied tightly around her mouth and with what appears to be the corner of handkerchief sticking out from under it. An observer at the trial suggested that at another stage Ian or Myra had filled the little girl’s mouth with cotton wool and gagged her with tape.
    Myra says that she was out of the room when Lesley’s murder occurred - but Ian was earlier heard on the tape in Myra’s presence, threatening to slit the child’s throat, so she must have known that the child’s death was imminent. He apparently then told Myra to run a bath as he wanted to wash the child clean of any forensic evidence. When she returned to the bedroom the child was dead and had blood on her thighs, indicating that she’d been raped.
    Emlyn Williams, who has seen the photographs, said that the child looks subdued. He believes that the abuse heard on the tape took place first and that only then were the photographs taken. He adds that the poses are like ballet poses, only pornographic to the corrupt eye. The child had been told to stretch out her arms in one photograph - he believes that’s where the erroneous rumours about her crucifixion started. When the body was found the innards had been gnawed at by rats and this led to false suggestions that she’d been disembowelled whilst still alive. This misinformation has persisted over the years so that these murders arealmost invariably described as torture murders. But Detective Peter Topping said in his autobiography that there’s no proof that torture was involved - though, as he rightly adds, gagging and raping a child involves causing tortuous fear and suffering.
    With a captive child in the house, Myra couldn’t let her gran return at 9pm. It was after eleven before she turned up at her uncle’s house to find the old woman asleep in her chair. Myra appeared flushed and out of breath to her relatives. She told them that she couldn’t drive her gran home as the weather was too bad. They disagreed as there had only been a flurry of