It’s almost impossible to believe, but the girl in this photo grew up to become one of the most evil serial killers in history.
She may have seemed like any ‘normal’ child growing up, but the cruelty, torture, and suffering the girl would go on to inflict as a woman was unspeakably cruel.
When the crimes of the girl in the photo are explored in-depth, this childhood picture soon takes on a more sinister tone, knowing the monster the girl would go onto become.
A regular childhood
Ordinarily, when serial killers are explored and investigated, their childhoods are put under a microscope. Abusive relationships, trauma, suffering, and death are often regular telltale signs of how an innocent mind was warped into something monstrous in later years.
However, while the girl did witness an abusive relationship between her parents due to her father’s alcoholism, it is said such a situation was quite commonplace at the time and no different to what a lot of children would have experienced.
The girl’s childhood began with her birth on 23rd July, 1942, in the Gorton area of Manchester. Her mother, Nellie, was a laborer, while her father, Bob, was an aircraft fitter during the Second World War and was understandably absent for the first few years of her life as he aided the war effort for Britain.
After her father returned from the war, he quickly sunk into depression and began drinking heavily. Becoming both verbally and physically abusive towards the girl’s mother meant that the girl was soon moved away to live with her maternal grandmother, Ellen.
The girl would still spend mealtimes with her parents, but would leave if things ever turned violent or abusive, which they often could. However, it is said these sorts of arrangements were quite standard in 1940s Manchester.
In the years that would follow, the girl grew to despise her father, but would eventually credit him with teaching her how to fight back against bullies and stand up for her and her sister, Maureen.
Bob had been a champion boxer during the war and passed on some training to his daughters. However, the violence he displayed towards Nellie was unforgivable for the girl, who would display her own sadistic form of violence later in life.
The death of a friend and turning to the church
As she became a teenager, the girl befriended a local neighborhood boy named Michael. The girl said she became ‘very protective’ of Michael as their friendship blossomed in the mid-late 1950’s.
However, tragedy would strike during the summer of 1957. Michael would ask the girl if she wanted to head to the local reservoir for a swim. The girl, having already made plans, informed Michael she could not make it. Later that evening, she heard the news that Michael had drowned after an accident in the reservoir.
The girl blamed herself for Michael’s death and, distraught with grief, turned to Catholicism for help. Just over a year after leaving secondary school, the girl took her first Holy Communion in 1958.
Much like many teenagers her age, the girl went out dancing, to the cinema and to play bingo. However, this northern normality was beginning to be tarnished by other acts that aroused suspicion.
The good Catholic girl, it turned out, was developing a dark side. Although no one could have forseen just how darkly it would develop.
A ‘fatal attraction’
Having worked several different jobs, the girl was suspected of conning some of her co-workers out of money after claiming she had lost her pay packet. Her colleagues duly replaced her lost wages with their own money, but then grew suspicious when she quickly said the same thing had happened again shortly after.
Around this time, the girl also took judo lessons, where she gained a reputation for being notoriously slow to release her grip.
In late 1958 the girl received a marriage proposal from her then boyfriend, a 16-year-old by the name of Ronnie Sinclair.
The proposal came on the girl’s seventeenth birthday and although she initially said yes, the girl would break the engagement off after only a few months, claiming that Ronnie was too immature for her.
Another man would soon enter the girl’s life as she became a woman, however. A man with whom she would become synonymous for the horrific murders and r***s they committed together.
A little over a year later, the girl, while interviewing for a job as a typist for a small chemical distribution firm in her hometown of Gorton, met a man with whom she had a ‘fatal attraction.’
The man was Ian Brady.
The girl, now a woman, was Myra Hindley. The pair would go on to become known as The Moors Murderers, committing a series of murders that would shock and appall the British public over the course of several decades as more and more terrifying details were discovered.
The Moors Murders
While Hindley and Brady striking up a relationship over their shared admiration of William Wordsworth and William Blake may seem wholesome and romantic, it was anything but. The couple believed they were above the rest of their colleagues, feeling they were more cultured and not belong to the working class.
Brady studied nihilistic philosophers as well as the French libertine and pornographer, Marquis de Sade, who had championed the philosophy that, regardless of repercussions, people should be allowed to act on their most basic impulses.
Disturbingly, Brady’s impulses involved p****philic fantasies and a willingness to commit crimes. This soon began crossing over into the couple’s own s** life, with Hindley’s recounting of their s**ual encounters reading like a series of r***s. Hindley also claimed that Brady would beat and humiliate her.
In addition to his studies of nihilism, Brady also attempted to indoctrinate Hindley into hating Black and Jewish people, scorning her for attending church and believing in God and Catholicism.
Having acquired guns to commit robberies, Hindley and Brady soon lost interest in the idea of such crimes and instead turned to something far more depraved.
Brady presented Hindley with a book called ‘Compulsion’ in which a 12-year-old is abducted and murdered. One of the characters is even called Myra.
On 12th July 1963, Hindley listened to Brady as he informed her that he wanted to commit the ‘perfect murder.’
Hindley would borrow a van from work and drive while Brady followed on his motorcycle, flashing his headlight to alert Hindley as to when he had identified a potential victim.
Hindley failed to stop for the first identified victim, as she recognized the girl, who was only eight years old, as one of her mother’s neighbors.
Shortly after, however, Hindley would pick up 16-year-old Pauline Reade. Reade was a schoolmate of Hindley’s younger sister, Maureen, and was on her way to a dance when Hindley offered her a lift.
Reade agreed to help Hindley when she suggested they head to Saddleworth Moor in an attempt to retrieve an expensive lost glove.
Brady arrived on the Moors shortly after Hindley and Reade. He would walk with Reade onto the Moors as Hindley returned to the van. Around 30 minutes later, Brady returned, alone, and took Hindley back to where he had left Read.
The 16-year-old girl had nearly been decapitated when Hindley saw her. Two deep cuts across her throat, one a four-inch incision across her voicebox had been carried out with ‘considerable force.’
When Hindley asked Brady if he had r**ed Reade, he chillingly replied: “Of course I did.”
Brady buried Reade on the moor and, in his account of the murder, would later claim that Hindley herself had participated in the s**ual assault.
Over the next two years, Brady and Hindley would lure John Kilbride (12), Keith Bennett (12), Lesley Ann Downey (10), and Edward Evans (17) into various situations, often involving the search for a glove on Saddleworth Moor, but also to their home on Wardle Brook Avenue.
Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans were murdered at Wardle Brook, with Downey being buried on the Moors with the other child victims.
The arrest and undiscovered victim
The murder of Evans also involved Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith. Smith was married to Hindley’s sister Maureen and was brought to Wardle Brook Avenue by Hindley at Brady’s insistence on the night of Evans’ murder.
Smith was waiting in the kitchen, waiting for miniature wine bottles that Brady said he was going to collect. As he waited, Smith heard a piercing scream, before Hindley cried out: “Dave, help him.”
Smith entered the living room to discover Brady bringing a hatchet down onto Evans’ head before strangling him with a length of electrical cord.
During the struggle, Brady sprained his ankle. Evans’ body was too heavy for Smith to carry to the car on his own, so Evans’ body was wrapped in plastic and placed in the spare bedroom to dispose of later.
At 3 a.m. the following morning, Smith returned home, drank a cup of tea Maureen made him, before promptly vomiting and revealing what he had witnessed. A few hours later, Smith, armed with a knife and a screwdriver (out of fear Brady may try and intercept him), rang the police from a phonebox and told them what had happened.
Two officers from Stalybridge police division, disguised in bread delivery man’s overalls on top of their uniforms, visited Wardle Brook Avenue and eventually made their way inside after identifying themselves to Hindley.
Initially, they said to Brady they were investigating ‘an act of violence involving guns.’ They would eventually discover Evans’ body in the spare bedroom, to which Brady explained that ‘Eddie and I had a row and the situation got out of hand.’
While Hindley was not originally arrested, police became convinced during their investigations that she was actively involved in the murder of Evans and other potential victims, who were yet to be discovered at that time.
On October 11, 1965, Hindley was arrested and charged as an accessory to Evans’ murder.
A police search of Wardle Brook Avenue uncovered a notebook with the name John Kilbride written in it, which tipped them off to Hindley and Brady’s roles in the unsolved disappearances of other children in the area.
The police investigations eventually led them to Saddleworth Moor, with Hindley and Brady’s 11-year-old neighbor Patricia Hodges informing the authorities that the couple had taken her there on several occasions to point out some of their favorite sites.
The couple decided to never harm Hodges as she lived on their street, which they believed would have made it easier for the police to solve her disappearance.
Police discovered the arm bone of Lesley Ann Downey protruding from the ground on October 16. Her mother identified her body and clothing, which were all still identifiable. Five days later, the badly decomposed body of John Kilbride was discovered.
While the bodies of Hindley and Brady’s victims were eventually discovered, 12-year-old Keith Bennett was never located.
Brady and Hindley were not charged with the murders of Bennett or Pauline Reade when they were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1966 (neither could be tried for the death penalty as it had been abolished in England six months before their trial). However, in 1985, Brady admitted to the two murders.
Despite Brady’s admission, Bennett’s body has remained undiscovered, even after years of searches being conducted by police across Saddleworth Moor. The last visible search was conducted in 2022, with an investigation team continuing to work on finding Bennett’s body.
Bennett’s mother, the late Winnie Johnson, who died in 2012, had written to Hindley for help in discovering her son’s body, but to no avail.
Imprisonment and death
Hindley would spend the rest of her life in jail, serving her time in several different prisons, including HMP Cookham Wood, HMP Holloway and HMP Durham.
She was held in maximum security and died in Cookham Wood in 2002. Brady would die 15 years later, in 2017, having also spent the rest of his life incarcerated, following the couple’s sentencing in 1966.
Hindley died of bronchial pneumonia, aged 60, at West Suffolk Hospital.
Her bleached blonde photograph became a regular fixture in the British press for over 35 years, and still to this day, is discussed and documented.
Her and Brady’s crimes still sicken the British public and are considered the most shocking and disturbing in recent British history.
