Wilde - The Monstering of Myra Hindley

Nina Wilde

Foreword by Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell

Criminologist Nina Wilde was born in Holland and first met Myra Hindley in Cookham Wood Prison, Kent in 1993, where she was engaged in research. She was shocked when the Governor told her that Hindley had already been in prison for almost 30 years, thinking that because sentences of this length are unknown in much of Europe there must have been some kind of mistake. Then she discovered the power of the media which was also at various times directed at Nina once her close friendship with Hindley became public.

Some of those people I need to thank did not wish to be mentioned by name but they know who they are and my appreciation is due to them. I would particularly like to thank Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell for agreeing to write a Foreword; Dr Gwen Adshead for her kind contribution below; and Peter Kirker for kind permission to use his letter (Chapter 4).

I approached forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead and explained to her the project I was working on. I asked her if she would be willing to contribute to it with her views. Based on a late draft of the manuscript I sent her, she replied to me, and described my work as, A very sad story of how fear and hatred allows injustice to flourish. She continued:

Your book demonstrates how Ms Hindley was treated in a qualitatively different way from other people who have committed similar offences against children, and others like her convicted under joint enterprise; it also offers a perspective on how politics influences the exercise of law. It also raises the issue of how and whether people change over time; and whether anyone can be said to be the same person after 34 years of life, however lived.

Im not sure I can say anything much about how [Myra] came to involve herself; and how/why she felt unable to break away. As you say, she was a young woman living at a time and in a culture when women did what they were told and men were expected to be masters and were always right. If I knew more about her upbringing I might speculate about her attachment style; children exposed to violence in the home are at risk of developing an insecure attachment style, which affects later attachments to partners. She describes an intense attachment to Brady as well as a fear of him; and this is a common picture that we see in women who have helped or failed to prevent a man hurting others. But whether it explains anything is much harder to say; in fact I am not sure that anything could explain her failure to act. I think you are describing a real existential issue; namely that you met a different person to the person who was involved with Ian Brady all those years ago; a person who had been profoundly changed by her experience. She wasnt able to say much about what happened; and so Im not sure that others can, or should. In my experience it is for the offender to tell their story, and as she said it may be a horror story that (unlike the movies) does not have a neat or satisfying ending.

For what its worth, I think she became a national scapegoat for that part of the social mind that is cruel and has contempt for vulnerability.

I would also like to thank Bryan Gibson, of Waterside Press, for enabling the book to see the light of day, having said that although he may not agree with every line of what I have written it thoroughly deserved to be published, especially as it will be available in libraries and on the internet for a very long time. Even if it meets with resistance now, it may be quite different when people come to look back on how one case above all others came to symbolise attitudes to penal affairs, how one prisoner was singled out for special treatment, even into the 21 st century.

Nina Wilde

September 2016

We were schoolchildren when the Moors Murders splashed in black and white on Granada reports and the front page of the Manchester Evening News. And so it began, the cultural and we now realise political appropriation of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady as the worst of humanity, locked-up. Our betters promised that we were kept safe, physically and morally, from these people until either they or we died, whichever came first.

In 1999 we collaborated with the great late theatre director Annie Castledine to draw on our long professional experience in the field of violence against women and children, to discover whether themes which, we had already discovered, were largely untellable in the news media, could perhaps be tolerated in the theatre.