About book One Of Your Own: The Life And Death Of Myra Hindley (2010)
Myra Hindley was Britain’s most hated woman ever. She died in 2002 aged 60 from bronchial pneumonia and had been in prison for 36 years, since she was 23, the third longest serving British prisoner of all time. (The second longest is her boyfriend, still in jail, still alive, aged 75.) If she had lived to be 100 they would never have released her.After she died they tore apart her hospital room, incinerated every article in it and redecorated. The funeral was kept as secret as possible. Between 1963 and 1965 she actively participated with her boyfriend Ian Brady in the murders of a 10 year old girl, two 12 year old boys, a 16 year old girl and a 17 year old boy.WE BECAME OUR OWN GODSBrady was a work colleague she fell in love with, and she had to put a lot of effort in to get him to notice her. He didn’t socialise. Like any Nazi-loving psycho, in the staff cafeteriahe was quiet, eating his egg-and-cheese sandwiches alone, reading Teach Yourself German or Mein KampfHe was a big reader. He had discovered Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment… “That’s me, that’s what I’m all about,” he declared 30 years later, telling the police that everything he had ever done was in Crime and PunishmentAnyway, patience paid off and they became an item. Instead of going to dancesthey borrowed books on philosophy and torture from local libraries…together they read Henry Miller, Harold Robbins and de SadeThey were working-class autodidacts!Brady wasn’t a very nice man. He despised ordinary people. The only thing they wanted to do was (he wrote later) to marry, breed, further burden themselves by mortgage… own a family car and live in excruciating moderation and boredom until death do they depart.This is the same thing Tom Ripley thinks in Patricia Highsmith’s novel. Come to think of it, the teenage John Lennon might have expressed similar contempt for straights, Cynthia or no Cynthia. Feeling a bohemian superiority over social conformity is de rigeur for great swathes of teenagers. I see no harm in it. And some of them even read de Sade. Brady, however, he wanted to prove to himself that he was never going to be part of the marching morons, the nine-to-fivers. And this is where the intellectual blends in with the psychosexual – the way he was going to prove it was that he was going to cross the line so that there was no coming back, demonstrating that there is no such thing as right and wrong, or that if there is, he’s above it AND he was going to weld himself and his girlfriend into this little cult-of-two AND he was going to prove his intellectual superiority by committing the perfect crime, AND he was going to get his paraphiliac jollies and do all this in one, by murdering children.They did four perfect crimes. The kids simply vanished, the police had no clue. They willingly got into the car with Myra because she was a woman – they’d all been warned about strange men. Then Brady seemed to go off the deep end with number 5, a 17 year old youth. For the first time, he deliberately involved a third party, Myra’s brother-in-law. But although Dave Smith was a thug with a record for violence, he was a normal human being, and after witnessing a murder, he went to the police as soon as he possibly could. LIKE A PUPPET ON A STRINGAfter they were jailed there was a strange intermittent public jousting match between the two, which didn’t stop until Myra died. It was a he-said she-said situation. Each would grant interviews or write letters to the newspapers or call the police in for further revelations (the cops only proved three of the 5 murders and were desperate to find the missing bodies – Brady had them dangling on his every word), and each time it was to further their own line. For the first 20 years, Myra peddled the line that she had been under duress and abuse before the offences, after and during them, and all the time I was with him… he used to threaten me and rape me and whip me and cane me. I would always be covered in bruises and bite marks. She was convinced that if she portrayed herself as Brady’s puppet she would eventually get paroled. In this she was entirely deluded. Brady’s line was, from 1966 until right now, was that she was nobody’s plaything, he never beat her or abused her, she was a full participant in every murder.She regarded periodic homicides as rituals…marriage ceremonies theoretically binding us ever closer… Existential philosophy melded with the spirituality of death and became predominant. The same argument turns up in every case like this (e.g. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka , Gerald and Charlene Gallego, Fred and Rosemary West, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate) – could a woman really willingly help her boyfriend to rape and kill women and children? Is that ever possible?Myra’s original abused-puppet argument is queered in the strangest way on p 125 of this book. This is the part where, after the first murder, a policeman comes knocking on her door, but he just wants to find out if her car is for sale. This was the car they used to spirit the first victim away to the moors. And she sells it to the policeman! When Brady hears about that he rolls on the floor laughing. But then - she has a casual affair with the policeman! And Brady fumes but apparently does nothing about it. Well, eventually, after decades had passed, Myra became able to admit her guilt :I didn’t have any traumas in my childhood as Ian may have done. I didn’t have a grudge against the world or society. I had no excuse for my actions…. For years people have assumed that Ian totally corrupted me but he didn’t. I have to own the part I played in things, to accept that I wanted some of the things to happen.“A reformed and dignified person” was how one of her string of posh supporters (which included Germaine Greer) described her. The British public, led by the rabid rancid tabloid newspapers, would have none of that. The vast majority of people did not believe that a person could do such crimes and then repent and be forgiven. It seemed like an insulting thing to them. And this is the heart of the story. Can people change? Seriously? Can serial killers turn to God and be forgiven? Or would such a thing be just another careful mask assumed for public consumption? What does Dostoyevsky have to say about that?This book is a great account of the whole horrible saga. I can’t imagine a better one. Carol Ann Lee orchestrates a large amount of material and deals with really loathsome stuff without editorialising and without the hysteria which always accompanies this case.4.5 stars - recommended.
Although the book was 400+ pages of small print, I read it all in a day, more or less in one sitting. It was gripping, to say the least. I'd never read a book on the Moors Murders though I'd read plenty about it online and shorter pieces in other true crime books. I think this is the only book anyone would have to read to get a thorough review of the case. Myra is quite impenetrable but I think this author comes about as close as it's possible to go, to pull back all the masks and show her for who she really was. Ian Brady is much easier to understand as a typical serial child-killer, and one with a diagnosed mental illness.To use a comparison from the book, Myra reminds me a lot of the Nazi war criminals. If she had never met Ian Brady, she probably would have become an ordinary housewife and never committed any violent crimes at all. Most of the Nazi war criminals who weren't immediately arrested went on to lead ordinary, nonviolent postwar lives, and I'm sure that if Myra had been released from prison at some point after she got out from under Brady's spell, she wouldn't have committed any more crimes like the atrocities she and Brady had done together. Yet she was fully responsible for what she did. I think she genuinely TRIED to feel remorseful, if only because everyone demanded it, but she seems to have been incapable of the depth of feeling, the empathy, necessary for that. The nasty things she said about her victims' parents behind their backs is proof positive of that. It's like she was just defective, like some wiring was missing inside her.To use another comparison, the case kinds of reminds me of the situation in In Cold Blood: two people who might neither have been terribly dangerous by themselves come together and feed off each other and commit far greater crimes than either of them would have been capable of alone. Ian Brady needed Myra to do what he did. To begin with he needed a woman's help to lure the children into the car, but he also needed someone to confide in, and someone who would worship him and egg him on.Way to go, Carol Ann Lee. This book meets the gold standard for true crime: thoroughly researched, accurate, insightful and not sensationalized a bit. You achieved what you set out to do.
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Easily one of the best true crime books i've ever read. Carol Ann Lee gives a hugely detailed account of Myra Hindley's life and crimes which is second to none as far as an account of this case goes. The book concerns itself with all stages of Myra Hindley's life: her childhood, her troubled teen years, her meeting with Brady, the crimes they committed together and the years of incarceration that followed. Not only is this book wonderfully detailed (even down to the colour of the clothes that Hindley wore on particular nights) but it also gives a truly unbiased and even account of the crimes and the years that follows. It also reads like a novel which for me added an extra dimension to the book making it more than another run of the mill true crime book.Many accounts of the Moors Murders, Hindley in particular, are completely damning of the crimes. Making no attempt to understand the Folie à deux that was Brady and Hindley. This book however is far more balanced and goes further to try and understand why these two took innocent children to the moors to their deaths. The main aim of this book is purely to educate about Hindley and her part in the crimes, whether or not the crimes could have taken place without her and whether or not she was truly repentant in the years that followed. Despite what one may think, the book in no way tries to 'let her off the hook' or to try and pardon her parts in the crime but it does make an attempt to understand Hindley more than other books have tried.This book was wonderful, engaging and a fantastic piece of criminological work. Carol Ann Lee has a gift for crime writing and I will definitely make an effort to read more of her work.
—Chris Meigh
Many readers have described this book as something they read quite quickly. I on the other hand found it took me a long time to read. It was quite harrowing. Like other literature I've read on this subject, I found in parts, it almost easy to be fooled or manipulated by Hindley and forget just how dramatic a role she played in the murders. I'm sure I won't be the first person to admit that on occasion I found myself feeling sorry for her and then quickly having to remind myself who this woman was and why she was so infamous. This book overall is a very comprehensive, yet objective assessment of the Moors Murders. It is focused from Myra's point of view however also encompasses details about Brady. It is referenced throughout to various other sources and it is clear that the author has gone into painstaking detail to pull all available information on the subject together.This is a brilliant read for someone who wants to know more than just the media hype.
—Joanna
Rather than submit a straight-laced review of the book, to spice things up a bit I thought I'd post an exchange that took place on another review website. The author/colleague of the most atrocious book related to the Moors case ('Face to Face with Evil') criticised 'One of Your Own', which ironically is the best book available. This diatribe contains my appraisals of the book, so may have some review properties. I must point out that there is a backstory to my outburst; the author of FTFWE labels all those who dislike his book as members of the 'Brady Fanclub', even the brother of one of the victims who was infuriated by his cash-in attempt. Moreover, as documented by his comments, his ego has been stoked that the great Ian Brady 'chose' him to disclose his views to, when everybody knows Brady only talks to insignificant people because anything more of a threat would only result in revealing where Keith Bennett is buried, his only secret remaining. "Brady would never agree to speak to you!" crowed Cowley to the victim's relative, even though they did conduct a lengthy correspondence in his effort to find Keith and to understand why he killed his brother. See the reviews on amazon.co.uk for details. Anyway, enjoy, or not.ckc (aka Chris Cowley): "As frequently happens with notorious cases, the author never met Hindley and does not offer new research, they just reword information that has already been published. If you have already read Duncan Staff's 'lost boy' book and the Robert Wilson book (which detailed Hindley's escape fiasco over 30 years ago) this offers nothing new, although I guess it is reasonably well written if you are looking for a superficial overview."('ckc' then claimed someone else he knew had written this under his account.)Me: "Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. And very ironic that the best book's author is being criticised by the worst book's people. Who is 'NBX' and why are you so lax as to permit her access to your personal account, if you do not endorse her views?Well, CKC, 'NBX', whoever: Perhaps it's just as well that Carol Ann Lee never met Hindley. Otherwise her book may have turned out as useless as Face to Face With Evil, all tip-toeing without any real observations being made. I still find it incredible that with a direct line, so to speak, with Brady, that book was the output of the supposed years of research. Lee never met Myra because she was, well, you know, dead at the time of writing. As such, there can be little 'new' research to add, unless a seance is held or new physical evidence comes to light. (The author did, by the way, conduct her own interviews in 2009 with various people related to the case, if you bothered to read the references. Surely, as an academic, this would not escape your notice?) This is in contrast to Brady, with whom you interacted with personally, and yet you still managed to say nothing. Does having met someone mean your book's better? Given these facts, I don't think so. I will go on to say that I suspect the author would refuse to meet Brady if the offer was made to her; 1) Because it is fairly obvious after over four decades that his testimony is worthless if we truly want to know anything of value, and 2) the author intended this to be a sensible, neutral account that shirks sensationalism.Lee's book is NOT, as you say, an overview. An overview would be your book, where you can't even get dates right. This book is not clouded with worry that its subject might decide to give her the boot and spoil her chances of writing it. Yes, it references other books, and much more besides. It references, from what I can see, every possible source to the case in all forms of media. That, in my opinion, makes it definitive. Nobody wants to hear the ramblings of manipulative, unhinged men; those that do have probably finished the absolute trash that was 'The Gates of Janus' and want to find more soundbites from his own mouth. To that end 'Face to Face with Evil' was probably a sore disappointment when they saw there wasn't much anyway. No, most people reading about the case want to know the concrete facts. This book has them all, and I can't see how it could be bettered in the longterm future.Now, I know it was 'NBX' who wrote this, but I expect her views reflect ckc's; I would really love to know what institution you lecture in, Doctor, because I'm going to be applying for post-graduate forensic psychology soon and I certainly hope it isn't there." I hope you all had as much fun reading this rant as I did writing it. Anyway, this is an excellent book. True crime usually leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but this, along with Gitta Sereny's Mary Bell books, is one of the examples of how it can be successfully done.
—Alina
