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Crimes that shocked a nation

Hindley was Britain's longest serving female prisoner
Hindley was Britain's longest serving female prisoner

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1942: Myra Hindley born in a Manchester suburb, four years after Ian Brady.

1963: Pauline Reade, 16, disappears (July), followed by John Kilbride, 12 (Nov).

1964: Keith Bennett, 12, disappears (June) and then Lesley Ann Downey, 10, (Dec).

1965: Edward Evans, 17, murdered (Oct). Kilbride and Downey?s bodies found in shallow graves.

May 6 1966: Brady gets life for murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans. Hindley gets life for killing Downey and Evans and shielding Brady after Kilbride's murder.

1974: Hindley gets a year's sentence over a plot to escape from prison.

1978: She is attacked in prison and needs plastic surgery to rebuild her face.

1987: Hindley and Brady confess to murdering Reade and Bennett. Reade?s body is uncovered. Bennett?s body has never been found.

1990 -- 1998: Successive British home secretaries confirm ?life means life? for Hindley.

1994: Hindley says: "After 30 years in prison, I think I have paid my debt to society and atoned for my crimes. I ask people to judge me as I am now, and not as I was then."


2002:
In November she is admitted to hospital after suspected heart attack. She dies on 15th.

LONDON, England -- The crimes of 'Moors murderers' Myra Hindley and Ian Brady appalled and stunned 1960s Britain.

The pair tortured and sexually abused their five victims before burying the bodies on the moors.

But Hindley's involvement -- as a woman -- in the murders of children ensured she became an icon of evil and the most reviled female in Britain. (Profile)

Her death, on Friday, at the age of 60 will be mourned by few. (Story)

Hindley and Brady, who is now 64, were jailed for life in 1966 for the sexual abuse, torture and murder of three children -- John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17.

In 1987 they confessed to two more child killings -- those of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.

Reade vanished in July 1963 on her way to a disco near her home in Gorton, Manchester.

Her body was found in a shallow grave on the bleak and desolate Saddleworth Moor, outside Manchester, in 1987 after Hindley and Brady's confessions.

Still wearing her pink and gold party dress and blue coat, she had been beaten about the head and her throat cut with such force her spinal cord was severed.

Kilbride vanished in 1963 four months after Pauline -- the day after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in the United States. He was lured up on to the moor, sexually assaulted and murdered.

A photograph taken by Brady of Hindley posing on the edge of his grave holding her pet dog would later lead police to the young boy's resting place.

The body of the pair's next victim, Bennett, who vanished after leaving his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester in June 1964, has never been discovered.

Police mounted an intensive search of the moor in 1986 amid reports that the pair had confessed to his murder.

But even though Hindley and Brady were both permitted to travel to the moor to try to remember where the boy's remains were, his body was never found.

Hindley offered to undergo hypnotherapy to try to jog her fading memory, but the move was blocked by the then home secretary.

Downey was murdered the day after Christmas Day 1964 after been enticed from a fairground to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother.

In Hindley's bedroom, she was stripped, sexually abused and tortured as they forced her to pose for pornographic photographs.

The harrowing attack was recorded on audio tape by Hindley.

Her last desperate cries for mercy were taped by the pair -- a recording that would be replayed at Hindley and Brady's trial and would secure their sadistic place in history.

On the 16 minute 21 second tape the terrified girl could be heard begging for mercy, calling out for her mother and appealing to God, in vain, for help, before her voice was stifled for ever.

John Stalker, former deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester, who was then a detective sergeant, said: "Nothing in criminal behaviour before or since has penetrated my heart with quite the same paralysing intensity."

Evans was murdered in October 1965 in a hail of axe blows. It was witnessed by Hindley's brother-in-law, David Smith, who was summoned to the house by a phone call on a false pretext.

He was then forced to watch as Brady attacked Evans with an axe, smothered him with a cushion and completed his grim task with an electrical cable.

Shocked, Smith helped the pair carry the trussed up body into a bedroom. He then fled terrified and called the police.

The next morning police searched the house, and began unravelling the gruesome evidence of crimes which were to send shockwaves through the country.

Hindley has always said her role in the murders was to abduct the children, and that she did not take part in the killings or sex attacks.

After their 1966 trial, presiding judge Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson drew a distinction between the two defendants, giving Hindley grounds for hoping she would receive more favourable treatment than Brady.

Atkinson wrote to the Home Office: "Though I believe that Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence.

"I hope Brady will not be released in any foreseeable future and that Hindley will be kept in prison for a very long time."

While Hindley never gave up hope of freedom her partner in crime is resigned to dying in captivity.

Brady, who was force fed after going on a hunger strike at the end 1999, has said that he is "not remotely" interested in living for another 20 or 30 years behind bars and would rather die than "rot slowly" in prison.

Peter Topping, a former investigating officer in the Hindley case, told Sky News on Friday: "The feeling of people in the area over the murders was very strong then and it remains very strong today.

"The murders will never be forgotten in the area of Manchester where the children were abducted from.

"There is a sense of rage towards Hindley. It is particularly Hindley because a lot of people felt Brady needed treatment.

"Hindley remained a controlled figure and was responsible for what she did."



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