For those who don’t know who Ian Brady and Myra Hindleyare: The Moors murderers: a pair of British serial killers who preyed on children and adolescents of both sexes. They remain high profile figures of hate in Britain. Hindley, now dead, because she used her gender to reassure victims even as she lured them to their death, both of them because of the horrid nature of their crimes and because they made a chilling tape of the death of one of their victims. Research further at your own risk.
They were originally convicted, in 1965, of the deaths of three children, two of whose bodies were found, buried on the bleak Saddleworth Moors near Manchester. In 1985 Brady confessed to a visitor that there were two more killings, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Hindley corroberated this. In 1987 the killers retuned to the moors with police to help search for the bodies. After exhaustive searching only one was found, Pauline Reade. Information given by Hindley was said to have been helpful.
The motives for Brady and Hindley’s helpfulness are generally thought to involve bettering their public image. Brady has been judged insane and has been in the high-security Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital since 1985, he says he does not wish for release and has undertaken hunger strikes. It has been said that he likes to play mind games with police and press. Until her death Hindley, an undoubted publicity seeker, insisted she was reformed, citing her assistance to the police as evidence. She was never gained parole.
Despite a further visit to the moor by Brady Keith Bennett’s remained undiscovered. This was a cause of great distress to his mother, Winifred, who made both public and private appeals to the killers. Hindley professed to be moved by this, that the body was never found was apparent evidence of her insincerity.
Coming to recent events: Brady, apparently responding to another of poor Winifred Bennett’s appeals has told police the location of the body. This has not yet been confirmed. However in a detail that leaves me frankly gobsmacked police have arrested a woman of* forty nine* *from Wales over preventing a burial. If the age is correct that would make her three years old at the time of the arrests. One can only conclude that she has been involved in moving the body sometime in the years since and has been quite unmoved by Pauline Bennett’s distress. What kind of person… oh yeah one of those women with a hard on for killers. Words fail.
Finally it looks as though Hindley may not have been able to locate the body because it was no longer there. I don’t think she should have been released but was Brady purposefully sabotaging her attempts to get it?
*Several sources give this as her age.
I’m not quite following you here. Did Brady describe a new location for the body? What exactly is involved in “preventing a burial”; did that forty-nine-year-old woman move the body from where Brady had buried it? How did she know where it was (was she known to have visited Brady in private), and why would authorities ask Brady the location again if they believed the body had been moved?
Taking these out of order: Apparently Brady told a long term visitor that he was finally going to say where the body was – and right now I’m merely assuming that it wasn’t where he claimed before. Under British law when a person dies it must be notified to the coroner and the body must be disposed of legally. To prevent (legal) burial a person might do a Norman Bates and keep a corpse concealed at home or they might dispose of a body another way. It’s an unusual charge. For someone of the accused’s age (an infant when the murder took place) to face this charge certainly implies that she knows where the body is – and that she learned of it’s location from either Brady or Hindley. Hindley enjoyed free association wth other prisoners. Brady does recieve visitors and has contact with prisoners/fellow detainees and staff so either could have passed the information on. I am betting it was Brady because of how the information has come to light.
In attempting to make sense of this I have come up with the theory that this forty nine year old not only knows where the body is but has been involved in keeping it hidden – hence the charge of preventing burial. Then we have the fact that the police worked exhaustively with Hindley and used notes she provided to find Pauline but couldn’t find Keith by the same method. It is a leap, but a plausible one to think that the body was no longer where Hindley believed it to be and to put this woman in the frame.
I’m quite prepared to be wrong, answering your questions has made me realise the flaws in my logic and lack of pertinant information However given Brady’s propensity for mind games it seems believable.
You are wrong, at least partly. Or at least, the BBC disagrees with your assumptions!
The woman in question is Brady’s legal advocate, appointed in regard to mental health legislation, and apparently in that position for a number of years. She is also the executor of his will. According to the reports today, she has been given (presumably by Brady), and managed to remove from the hospital where he is held, a letter which may or may not be intended for Keith Bennett’s mother, Winnie Johnson. The letter appears to have been intended to be given to Winnie after Brady’s death, although of course since she has cancer herself there is no guarantee she would have outlived him.
The arrest is, as you say, because this woman is believed therefore to have knowledge of the location of a body, but hasn’t passed this information on, and thereby by her inaction has prevented the lawful burial of a body. Apparently she doesn’t have legal protection in her role as advocate in the way that a true legal representative would have.
The suggestion is, of course, that this reinforces the idea that, when Brady and Hindley were taken to the Moors from prison in 1987, Brady at least was not being helpful and just unable to find the last burial site. Rather, he was having a rare old time revisiting his old haunts.
This information is based on an item on the Today programme on Radio 4, about 10 minutes ago, which I happened to be listening to at the time I read your post :). Haven’t found anything this detailed online yet.
The hopeful part of me wants to believe this is the concluding chapter, maybe bringing some kind of closure for the surviving relatives.
The cynical part of me suspects this is just Brady taking the opportunity to exert a few last shreds of control over the whole thing, with no higher motive than to manipulate the emotions of the relatives and onlookers.
Yeah, how much would you bet that the location will be specific enough to sound credible but just vague enough to frustrate a search team (or to require Brady’s onsite presence).
arrested woman is Brady’s legal advocate. She (and presumably everyone else) doesn’t know what is in the sealed letter she received from Brady. The article doesn’t even make clear that the letter is in police hands, only that it allegedly exists. All else is conjecture and assumptions.
Generally, I’d agree with you, but there are a couple of things that might contribute to muddying the waters a little. First, this woman hasn’t been charged, just arrested on suspicion. The Guardian article says she’s been bailed for three months, so it doesn’t look likely that she’ll be charged in the immediate future (I know they’re not necessarily going to wait the whole three months to see her again, but it’s clearly not a fast-moving situation at the moment). It also seems that the whole thing came to light only when she spoke to a documentary film crew and told them herself. If that’s true she’s either very naiive, incredibly stupid or something worse I don’t want to think about.
Secondly, without wishing to start any sort of conspiracy rumblings, this is not a normal case, and not a normal situation. It’s difficult to explain how much of a hold this case has over this country, and more particularly over Manchester and the Greater Manchester Police. The murders, trial and conviction all took place several years before I was born. However, I, and I’m pretty sure the majority of my contemporaries, particularly in Manchester, grew up with the details of the murders. It was a very real part of the social landscape. I’m not sure the police would have taken this sort of action, this quickly over any other case. However this now plays out, it’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference to Brady or his legal position. He’s not going to be tried for the murder of Keith Bennett. The GMP aren’t going to get anything out of this, apart from final closure of the case files. Winnie Johnson may finally get the peace she’s waited for her whole life, which I’m not suggesting is an insignificant result. I just can’t really imagine this amount of action for any other forty-year old, essentially-solved case.
I guess what I’m saying is that in this instance specifically, I’m not at all surprised that these police would have taken this action based potentially on a flimsy piece of supposition.
Ah, okay, I didn’t realise the police could arrest on suspicion alone in your neck of the woods. From what you say, i wouldn’t like this person as an advocate if she told those trustworthy souls of a film crew.
BTW- the murders were/ are still very big news in Australia. They were horrific. (I hope that fat bitch is roasting in hell if there is one.)
However, due to the publicity that the case would attract I thought the police may be a little circumspect about doing anything that may be seen as rash, given that there will be coverage.
Oh, yeah - I didn’t mean to suggest that they weren’t big news internationally. It’s just that they seem to be one of the defining moments for Manchester in particular. It’s like - Peterloo Massacre, the Industrial Revolution, the Pankhursts, the Moors Murders, music stuff, the Hacienda, Ernest Rutherford, Coronation Street, the Arndale Centre etc. etc. It’s one of the things Manchester knows about itself.
Hence there’s enormous pressure on the local police to be seen to be responding to every thing that comes up.
See reference above to “uninformed speculation”, I concluded that the preventionn of burial thing must have referred to some concrete action rather than just witholding information.
However given Brady’s propensity for mind games it seems believable.