Life Means Life Page 13

  When told of the weight of evidence against him, he burst into tears and blurted to detectives: ‘I didn’t mean to harm her. It all went horribly wrong, it’s like a nightmare.’ He said he saw Michelle crying on the towpath close to her aunt’s house and went over to comfort her. Entwistle, who police believe may have attacked upwards of 20 lone women at night, said he was worried about the girl because she was alone in the dark.

  At his trial at Preston Crown Court the following March, he said from the dock: ‘She was in a secluded area. I felt she was in danger of being harmed by someone or herself.’ He said he asked Michelle if she wanted a lift home but she declined his offer and asked him to leave her alone. Entwistle was unable to do so. He admitted to the court: ‘I could not get her out of my mind, so I went back.’

  Entwistle then spun a story that appalled the police and members of Michelle’s family, who sat in the gallery. He said that when he approached the upset girl a second time, she willingly went with him to his car. He claimed she ‘needed loving’ and they agreed to drive to a ‘quiet place’ in the nearby hills. Once there, he alleged, they climbed into the back seat of his car, took off their clothes and had consensual sex.

  Prosecution counsel Richard Henriques asked him how Michelle ended up dead as a result of this apparently shared passion. Entwistle claimed that as Michelle got dressed, he told her he had to take her home. He said this made her ‘hysterical’, adding: ‘She started crying and screaming, and trying to get out of the car. I was trying to do two things at once – starting the car and holding her back.’

  Entwistle recounted that as there were courting couples nearby, he tried to shut Michelle up and in panic put her T-shirt around her face and twisted the ends to hold her firm. He explained to the hushed court: ‘I remember putting my hand over her mouth and then around her throat. I had the T-shirt and put it round her neck. She was unconscious and I realised something was seriously wrong with her: she just went still.’

  He said he tried to rouse her and when he realised Michelle was dead, he stripped her naked and drove her a short way to the spot where she was found the following morning. Then he drove home and went to bed, but he could not sleep so he washed his car and went to a late-night garage to buy petrol. He said he then panicked and drove to a secluded spot nearby known as Pickup Bank, where he burned Michelle’s clothes.

  Prosecution counsel told the court that when charged with the murder, Entwistle said to police: ‘I did not mean to harm the girl – it was a complete accident.’ The barrister then turned to the jury and said: ‘This was no accident.’ Next, he listed the accused’s damning list of previous convictions including how, in October 1973, he attacked a woman who was walking along a canal towpath. He threw her to the ground and raped her while tightening a knotted stocking around her neck. Two months later, he raped a 15-year old girl, who he choked with a cravat.

  For those crimes, Entwistle was sentenced to 10 years in jail by a judge who branded him ‘an appalling danger’ to any woman found alone on the streets at night. The court heard that within weeks of his release for that crime, in March 1980, the accused attacked another woman. He dragged her from the street and over barbed wire into fields, where he indecently assaulted her while tightening a rope around her neck.

  In May of that year he jumped on a girl from behind, put a rope about her neck and dragged her into an alleyway behind a pub. The victim’s cries alerted passers-by and he fled without going further.

  Nine days later he attacked another girl from behind, putting his hand over her mouth and again placing a rope around her neck. A taxi driver saw him standing over the girl with his trousers around his ankles, and Entwistle fled.

  On another occasion a 48-year-old woman opened her front door to find Entwistle, wearing a stocking mask and brandishing a piece of broken glass. He rushed into her home, but the woman screamed and he fled. That same night, his perverted desires unsatisfied, he pounced on a 24-year-old housewife on her way home from her supermarket job. Again, her screams saved her.

  Days after that assault, he attacked the babysitter of his two young children as she slept in the spare bedroom of the family home. He repeatedly raped the teenager as he chatted to her about his marriage problems.

  Another victim was a nurse who was on her way home from a hospital in Blackburn. He put a ligature around her neck and dragged her into bushes before assaulting her. Unlike his previous crimes, he threatened to kill the young woman if she dared scream.

  The prosecutor explained that it was while on parole for the latest in a long list of sex crimes that Entwistle picked out Michelle to rape and murder. Obvious parallels between his previous crimes and the evidence against him meant that the jury of seven women and five men took just 90 minutes to reach their unanimous guilty verdict after the three-day trial. Sentencing him, Judge Mr Justice Rose recommended a minimum of 25 years behind bars. He warned him: ‘Don’t assume you will be released at the end of that time.’ At those words, Entwistle, dressed in a brown pinstriped suit, rolled his eyes upwards. The judge added: ‘I have no doubt that you killed Michelle in the course of, or the furtherance of rape. It is the most horrifying event in an appalling catalogue of attacks on young women you carried out during the brief time you were at liberty in 15 years. You are now 38. It seems to me that you are likely to be a menace to young women for many years to come.’ Home Secretary Douglas Hurd later ordered Entwistle to die in jail.

  Outside court, Michelle’s mother, Annette Dean, told how she was unable to sit through Entwistle’s lies. ‘I walked out. I was sick to my stomach’, she said. ‘It was important for me to be there for my own peace of mind and to see him get as much as they could give him, but Entwistle will still get out again one day. They should bring back hanging for blokes like him, who can do that to a young girl of 16. It has been horrible for us during the trial. We have still got to piece our lives together again. Life will never be the same for any of us.’

  Fighting back tears, she continued: ‘Michelle was the best daughter I could have wished for. I am heartbroken, and always will be.’

  ‘THE MOORS MURDERER’

  ‘Do you believe me now?’

  Ian Brady (after his final killing)

  Name: Ian Brady

  Crime: Serial murder

  Date of Conviction: 6 May 1966

  Age at Conviction: 28

  The tape recording heard at Chester Assizes in 1966 was arguably the most harrowing any British jury has been subjected to. Ten-year-old Lesley-Ann Downey pleaded for her life, calling for her mother as the taunts of her killers rang in the background. She was stripped, gagged and finally strangled with a piece of string.

  Hardened reporters wept openly on the press bench in the courtroom. Several needed time off work with stress following what they had heard. One journalist’s first act on his return home from court that day was to burn the shoes he wore at Saddleworth Moor as he covered the earlier parts of the case. He figured the once peat-caked shoes would always remind him of that harrowing recording.

  The case had become the most notorious in British history: the Moors Murders.

  Ian Brady and Myra Hindley met at the office of a small firm called Millwards Merchandising near Manchester, in 1961. Their first date was to watch the film, Trial At Nuremburg, which was about the prosecution of Nazi leaders following World War II. Hindley was an 18-year-old secretary and Brady, then 21, was a clerk. Up to that time, the bleached-blonde teenager had been described as a normal Catholic girl, who left school at 15 to train as a typist. The impressionable youngster soon became fascinated by Brady’s obsession with fascism and the violent pornographic writings of the French aristocrat, the Marquis de Sade. Soon they became lovers and by 1963, they were killers.

  Their first victim was 16-year-old Pauline Reade, a neighbour of Hindley’s. Pauline had been on her way to a dance in the Crumpsall suburb of Manchester on 12 July 1963. As she walked along the road, Hindley pulled up in a battered car and offered
her a lift. Pauline knew the peroxide blonde to be the sister of a girl called Maureen who lived next-door-but-one.

  Once Pauline was in the car, Hindley asked if she’d mind helping her to look for a lost glove. She promised she would drive her to the dance afterwards and pointed to a pile of pop records she could choose from as a reward if they found the glove. Pauline agreed – unaware Ian Brady was following them on a motorbike.

  The car pulled to a stop on Saddleworth Moor, where Hindley claimed to have mislaid the glove. It was, of course, a trap and Brady pounced, smashing his young victim’s skull with a shovel. The Nazicrazed fiend then raped the girl before slitting her throat with a knife, almost decapitating her. Pauline was buried in a 3ft deep grave on the Moors, where her body remained undiscovered for 24 years.

  The killer pair struck again on 23 November 1963, when their victim was 12-year-old John Kilbride. Hindley asked for the youngster’s help in carrying some boxes. When he got into the car, Brady was sitting in the back. Terrified, John was driven up to the Moors, where Brady led him away from the road and attempted to slit his throat. He failed, but completed the murder with a shoelace.

  Another 12-year-old, Keith Bennett, became the killers’ third victim on 16 June 1964. He too was lured into the car and driven up to the Moors. Led into a ravine by Brady, he was strangled with a piece of string while Hindley took photographs from above.

  Victim number four was 10-year-old Lesley-Ann Downey, who was lured away from a fair in the Ancoats district of Manchester on Boxing Day, 1964. The little girl was taken to the home that Hindley shared with her grandmother in Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley. Brady had recently moved into the house.

  Inside, Lesley-Ann was forced to strip and pose for obscene photographs – sometimes bound, sometimes gagged, at one time in a kneeling position of prayer. Throughout the torments, her piteous cries for mercy and pleas to be released were recorded by Hindley on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was this recording that so horrified the courtroom less than two years later.

  Lesley-Ann was raped and killed. The next day, Brady drove her body to Saddleworth Moor and buried it. Ten months later, her remains were discovered.

  The final killing was that of 17-year-old Edward Evans, who was lured to the couple’s house and hacked to death with an axe while Hindley’s grandmother slept upstairs. Brady later claimed that Edward was gay and had been tempted back with the promise of sex, but this was never proved.

  Crucially, the killing was witnessed by Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith, husband of Myra’s younger sister, Maureen. For a year, Brady had been ‘grooming’ Smith, a notorious local thug, to become the third person in the murderous gang. Smith was in the kitchen when he heard screams and was ordered by Hindley to ‘run upstairs and help Ian’.

  He watched in horror as Brady, in a murderous frenzy, smashed Edward’s skull with an axe before strangling him with electrical flex. Smith insisted it was fear for his own life that made him follow the orders to clear the room of the grisly remains and carry the body to an upstairs room wrapped in polythene.

  Smith had always dismissed Brady’s boasts of earlier murders. When the task was complete and Edward was wrapped tightly in polythene, Brady turned to his accomplice and asked: ‘Do you believe me now?’

  After agreeing to meet Brady the next afternoon to dispose of the body, Smith sprinted home, where his first act was to be sick in the bathroom. Waking his sleeping wife, he told her of the killing he had just witnessed. Three hours later Smith called the police station at Hyde – a town later made notorious as the base of serial killer Dr Harold Shipman – and reported what he had seen to the duty officer.

  The next day Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived at Hindley’s home. The sullen blonde answered the door and the senior policeman explained to the pair that he was investigating a violent act that had taken place the previous night and asked to see the upstairs room. Eventually Hindley and Brady relented, and on entering the spare bedroom Talbot and his colleagues found the body of Edward Evans. Brady was immediately arrested. During questioning he insisted that Hindley had nothing to do with the killing and said his sole accomplice had been David Smith.

  Hindley’s involvement was exposed when a ticket found in her prayer book led officers to a left-luggage locker in a Manchester railway station. Inside were two suitcases crammed with evidence implicating Hindley and her lover. She was arrested and charged. A police search for evidence uncovered photographs, the recording of Lesley-Ann Downey and a photograph of Hindley with her dog, Puppet. The dog was staring into what appeared to be a freshly dug gravesite, which local officers recognised to be Saddleworth Moor. A grim search of the bleak upland area began and within two weeks the bodies of Lesley-Ann Downey and John Kilbride had been found.

  On 6 May 1966, after a 15-day trial, Brady was found guilty of the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley-Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and handed down three life sentences. He would have hanged, but just five months earlier Parliament had abolished the death penalty, to the dismay of the furious crowds outside the courthouse who had to be restrained by a police cordon throughout the trial.

  Hindley was given two life sentences for the murders of Lesley-Ann Downey and Edward Evans.

  Trial judge Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson described the Moors Murderers as ‘two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity.’ He singled out Brady as ‘wicked beyond belief.’

  In 1982, Lord Chief Justice Lane imposed a 40-year minimum tariff on Brady and Hindley, making them eligible for parole in 2005. This was increased to a whole life tariff by Home Secretary David Waddington in 1990, a decision confirmed by his successor, Michael Howard, in 1994. Hindley made successive attempts to have her whole life ruling overturned but failed every time.

  Part of one bid for freedom, in 1987, was coming clean over the killing of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade. After months of digging on the Moors, Pauline’s body was found but still there was no trace of Keith.

  On 15 November 2002, Hindley died of a heart attack, less than two weeks before the House of Lords stripped the Home Secretary of the power to set tariffs on prisoners.

  Ian Brady spent 19 years in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight before being declared criminally insane in November 1985. He was sent to Broadmoor secure mental hospital and then to Ashworth on Merseyside, where he currently resides.

  In contrast to his accomplice, Brady has indicated that he does not want to be released and insists on the right to be left to die in jail. He has now been on hunger strike for nine years and is force-fed three times a day.

  Ian Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart at Rottenrow Hospital in Glasgow, on 2 January 1938. Unable to cope with her new arrival, his mother Peggy gave him up for adoption to a couple called John and Mary Sloane. Little is known about the Sloanes, who lived in the tough Gorbals district in the Scottish city. John was a 39-year-old grain storeman, while his wife worked in a cotton mill. They already had four children and the newly-extended family was crammed into a two-room flat with outside toilets. His natural mother made frequent visits and although she was referred to as ‘Aunty’ Peggy, Brady claims he knew her real relationship to him from an early age.

  In an exchange of letters with News of the World journalists in 2005, Brady recalled: ‘I was brought up as a member of the family and also had many weekly visits from my mother, thus illustrating it was possible to have a happy life in the Gorbals, as well as an exciting one during the War.’

  Aged 11, he won a place at Shawlands Academy, where he was described as ‘Bright, but lazy’. Two years later, in 1951, he was given five months’ probation for housebreaking. During this time he developed his obsession with the Nazis.

  His brushes with the law continued, and in November 1954 a sheriff ordered that he should leave Glasgow and live with his natural mother, who had moved to Manchester and married an Irish labourer called Patrick Brady. The young Ian took the name of his stepfather and secured several jobs, including one at Manchester’s fam
ous Boddington’s Brewery. But the stealing continued and several spells in borstal followed. Eventually he served a three-year sentence in the city’s tough Strangeways Prison.

  In 1959, Brady found work as a clerk at Millwards Merchandising, where he met Hindley two years later.

  Behind hospital bars, Brady has not served his time quietly, almost taunting the families of his victims. Now in his seventies and weighing seven stone, he is campaigning to be moved to a regular prison, where it would be illegal to force-feed him. He spends his time watching TV documentaries (albeit with fading sight) and smoking up to 70 roll-ups a day. As he is being force-fed, saliva has rotted the enamel from his teeth and he is half-crippled by a degenerative back condition. Without the force-feeding – a process that involves inserting a tube into his stomach via his nose – doctors say he would be dead within 10 days.

  It would have been impossible to forget Ian Brady because of his crimes, but to ensure continued notoriety, the killer has cultivated contacts with journalists, through whom he issues personal appeals. One, in 2006, read: ‘The Home Office has made it clear I will never be released. Therefore I should not be held in a hospital.’

  He added: ‘In 1998 I chose to stop all social phone calls and visits when Ashworth commenced taping phones and monitoring visits.

  ‘I have had untreated cataracts for seven years as Ashworth considers outside hospital treatment would attract unwarranted public attention to my condition. So my reading is negligible and is added by clip magnification sent by a friend.’

  Since 2006, the killer has been advised by controversial and colourful lawyer, the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ Giovanni de Stefano. He consults with his client in Ashworth via video link from his Rome office, while two hospital staff look on.