A life behind bars: how the Moors Murderess paid for crimes that were 'evil beyond belief'

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It was the end of an age of innocence. The Britain of the mid-1960s, where parents were happy to leave their children to play unsupervised on the streets, was quite unprepared for the horror of the Moors murders. The nation was appalled by revelations that children had been abducted, sexually abused, tortured to death and buried in shallow graves.

In the words of Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, the judge presiding at the trial at Chester Assizes in 1966, the actions of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were "evil beyond belief".

Five Manchester children, aged between 10 and 17, were targeted and lured to their deaths over a period of 27 months.

Hindley, a 20-year-old typist at a small Manchester chemical firm, had begun a relationship with one of the stock clerks, a strange young man who had spent some time in Strangeways prison and developed an interest in Hitler and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. He used to like reading Mein Kampf in his lunch break.

But when the pair set out on their trail of murder, it was Hindley who entrapped their first victim, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, on 12 July 1963. The teenager was on her way to a discotheque in a pink and gold party dress when Hindley asked her to come to Saddleworth Moor outside Manchester to help her find her gloves.

Pauline's grave was not discovered for 24 years, when jail-cell confessions by Hindley and Brady led to trips to the Moor. The body was still clothed in the party dress but pathologists determined that she had been beaten about the head and her throat cut with such force her spinal cord was severed.

Four months after Pauline was murdered, Brady and Hindley struck again.

In today's climate, the abduction would have generated immediate concern. But on the day of President John F Kennedy's assassination – 23 November 1963 – the disappearance of Manchester schoolboy John Kilbride, 12, attracted little interest.

Again the killers dragged their victim to the Moors, where he was sexually assaulted and murdered. In a sign of the couple's increasing bravado, Hindley posed on the edge of the boy's grave holding her pet dog while Brady took a photograph as a trophy. It was a picture that would later lead police to discover the body.

But in the meantime, the abductions and murders continued. Keith Bennett, also 12, was snatched and killed after leaving his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester on 16 June 1964.

Hindley and Brady, who again only admitted to the murder in 1987, were later permitted to travel to the Moor to try to remember where they dumped the body but the remains have never been found.

Of all the killings, none so horrified the public as the murder of Lesley Ann Downey on Boxing Day in 1964. The 10-year-old was enticed from a fairground to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother in Hattersley outside Oldham.

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

Hindley's tape recording of the attack was later to be played to an appalled courtroom and captured the sounds of the young girl begging her tormentors for mercy, calling out for her mother and pleading to God. Detectives could not say exactly how Lesley Ann died. When her body was dug up it was naked except for shoes and socks.

The Moors Murderers were finally caught after they decided to involve Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, in their next killing. Smith was forced to watch as Brady attacked Edward Evans, 17, with an axe, smothered him with a cushion and strangled him with an electrical cable. Smith helped the pair to carry the trussed-up body into a bedroom but then fled and called the police.

When details of the killings emerged in court, Sixties Britain was appalled. At a time when a woman's role in the world was assumed to be that of a mother and a homemaker, it was the female half of the murderous partnership that attracted the most revulsion.

Ever since Brady and Hindley were jailed, the tabloid press has campaigned to ensure that the horror that followed their trial does not disappear from the public consciousness.

None of the 73,000 prisoners held in the jails of England and Wales, and the thousands of other dangerous criminals held in secure hospitals, was so despised as Myra Hindley. No multiple murderer who has come to light since has replaced her as the face that personified evil; neither the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, nor "Doctor Death" Harold Shipman, nor even the Cromwell Street killer Rosemary West, has provoked such a reaction.

But the relentless nature of the vilification has concerned those who believe that no human being is beyond redemption. The penal reformer Lord Longford was at the forefront of a campaign to challenge what he called the "evil Myra mythology".

Hindley, increasingly during her 36 years in custody, claimed she had been unfairly vilified and was the dupe of a boyfriend who was four years her senior. As the years passed in jail, she appeared to be working hard towards her rehabilitation. She declared herself a devout Roman Catholic and threw herself into education, achieving an honours degree in humanities.

Hindley began to argue more and more strongly that she had been an unwilling accomplice in the murders. She claimed in 1998 that she had been abused by Brady, who had threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and sister if she did not participate in the killings. Hindley said Brady took pornographic photographs of her to blackmail her.

Her supporters pointed to the words in 1966 of Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson who suggested Hindley might be capable of reform. He said: "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."

In 1994 Hindley published a letter, begging: "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."

But successive home secretaries have refused to relent. After Michael Howard said that she would never be freed, Hindley said in 1997: "What I was involved in is etched into my heart and mind and my conscience will follow me to my dying day." No one has been more sceptical of Hindley's claims than her co-accused Ian Brady, who is held at the Ashworth secure hospital in Merseyside and is fighting a legal battle to be allowed the right to starve himself to death. Brady, now 64, wrote to ministers in 1997 claiming Hindley was as committed to murder as he was and dismissing suggestions that she was an unwilling accomplice.

In the end, it was Hindley's own state of health that prevented the possibility of what would have been the most controversial walk to freedom in modern penal history. She suffered from angina, high blood pressure and osteoporosis, and had suffered at least one suspected stroke and heart attack in the past two years.

On Tuesday her condition had deteriorated again and staff at Highpoint prison, near Bury St Edmunds, decided she should be admitted to the nearby West Suffolk hospital. She died yesterday afternoon from respiratory failure.

Biography of a killer

2 January 1938 Ian Brady born in Glasgow.

23 July 1942 Myra Hindley born in Crumpsall, a north Manchester suburb.

July 12 1963 Pauline Reade, 16, disappeared on her way to a disco.

November 23 1963 John Kilbride, 12 vanished.

June 16 1964 Keith Bennett, 12, disappeared.

December 26 1964 Lesley Ann Downey, 10, lured away from a funfair to her fate.

October 6 1965 Edward Evans, 17, died in a hail of axe blows, a murder witnessed by Hindley's brother-in-law, who tips off police, triggering the investigation that leads to the discovery of John and Lesley Ann buried in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester.

May 6 1966 Brady given life for the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans at Chester Assizes. Hindley convicted of killing Downey and Evans and shielding Brady after Kilbride's murder, for which she received life and an additional seven years.

1972 Relations between Hindley and Brady sour.

1974 Hindley given another year's sentence after being convicted of plotting to escape from Holloway prison with the help of an officer said to have fallen in love with her.

1978 Hindley attacked so viciously in Holloway that she needed plastic surgery to rebuild her face.

1987 Hindley and Brady confess to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. After a series of separate visits to Saddleworth Moor by the pair, the body of Pauline is uncovered. Keith's body is never found and the search is eventually called off.

1990 Home Secretary, David Waddington, rules life will mean life for Myra Hindley.

1994 Hindley is informed of the decision.

1997 Successive Home Secretaries Michael Howard and Jack Straw confirm full life tariff. A portrait of Hindley made from children's handprints is attacked at the Royal Academy Sensation Exhibition.

1998 Appeal Court upholds Home Secretary's ruling. Hindley moved from top-security H Wing in Durham to medium-secure Highpoint prison in Suffolk and makes claims that she was blackmailed by Brady into taking part in the murders.

1999 Ann West, mother of Lesley Ann Downey, dies of liver cancer in February. In December Hindley is taken to hospital after being found collapsed in her cell.

2000 Hindley, diagnosed as suffering from a cerebral aneurysm, instructs her solicitors not to keep her alive artificially if an operation on her brain goes wrong and to refuse permission for any of her organs to be transplanted.

October 2002 Lawyers acting for three convicted killers launch House of Lords appeal that could pave for Hindley to seek her freedom.

November 2002 Chain-smoker Hindley admitted to West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds after suspected heart attack. 15 November, Hindley dies

Jason Bennetto