Hindley friends say 'confession' was not a stunt

STEVE BOGGAN

Chief Reporter

A letter written to a newspaper by the Moors murderer Myra Hindley, taking "full responsibility" for the part she played in the killings, in the 1960s, was condemned yesterday as a publicity stunt and as a forerunner to a parole application.

But her friends denied claims that the admissions were designed to prepare the public for an application for release.

In a 5,000-word article written in her prison cell, Hindley confessed to being "corrupt, wicked and evil" and said that she was "more culpable" than her fellow Moors murderer, Ian Brady. But there was little welcome for her frankness, as MPs and relatives of her victims described it as a publicity stunt.

While one MP called on Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, to restrict prisoners' access to the media, friends of Hindley said her confessions were "from the heart".

Hindley, 53, wrote the article in the Guardian in response to an earlier article which described her as a psychopath. She wrote to the newspaper and denied having psychopathic tendencies, a denial which resulted in an invitation to explain why, if she was not mentally ill, she had taken part in the murders of five children.

During an astonishingly frank confession, she explains how she met Brady, became besotted by him and how she was slowly overwhelmed by his personality. She describes a miserable early life in which her father regularly beat her mother, but she does not try to shift blame for the murders on to Brady.

"I wasn't mad, so I must have been bad, became bad by a slow process of corruption," she wrote. "I never attempted to justify my actions either to myself or Ian Brady. I was the more culpable of the two. If we had not met there would have been no murders, no crime at all. I would probably have got married, had children and would now be a grandmother."

Roger Gale, chairman of the Conservative backbench media committee, criticised the Guardian for publishing the article and said he would ask Mr Howard to examine media access to prisoners. "I am becoming increasingly and very genuinely concerned at the manner in which convicted criminals are given access to a media desperate for salacious stories to assist them in their circulation war. What has been published today is in fact a 5,000- word publicity stunt on behalf of a murderess," he said.

Peter Topping, the former detective who took Hindley on to the Moors in 1987 to find more bodies, said: "She has one ambition, one aim, and that is to obtain parole, and there will be, in this letter, a build-up to that sort of application, I feel."

But Joe Chapman, Hindley's former counsellor, said the article was from the heart. "This has been boiling up for some time now. I don't think any legal moves are close, although there will be an application for a judicial review of the Home Secretary's full life sentence."

One of Hindley's closest friends, who does not wish to be named, said: "This is not a stunt. Myra was accused of being a psychopath, yet throughout the years it has been accepted by all those who examined here that she was not mentally ill. This is her way of setting the record straight."

Andrew McCooey, Hindley's former solicitor, said: "I don't think this is part of any sort of concerted campaign to win the public over. For years, she listened to advisers who told her to say nothing while the world threw all it could at her. Recently, she has decided to go it alone and have her say . . . ."

Hindley was jailed for life in 1966, with Brady, for killing Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. Brady was also convicted of murdering John Kilbride, 12. They later admitted killing Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.