Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers by Carol Anne Davis

former prison governor says with disarming honesty.

Personality
    So what kind of personality starts off caring for children but is eventually persuaded to lure them into a car so that her lover can murder them? Some journalists have called her a psychopath but psychopathy seems unlikely in a woman who loved her mother and gran and the children she babysat. Psychopaths cannot form strong and lasting bonds with anyone.
    Psychologists claimed at the time of the murders that she had a hysterical personality - the term used nowadays is histrionic. That is, someone who is over-emotional yet emotionally shallow, who is gullible and very susceptible to suggestion, a human sponge. This makes more sense as Myra presented herself as anti-social to Ian Brady when he wanted to use another anti-social personality. He wanted to dominate so she pleased him by pointing out the terror in the victim’s eyes. But no one acts wholly to please another person so she must have derived satisfaction from the acts herself . It’s been said that the female serial killer kills a version of herself, a version she wishes to disassociate from - and Myra helped kill impoverished working class children who were on their own.
    The theory of violentization (for more on this please see chapter sixteen’s theories of why women kill) suggests that violent people have either suffered strong physical abuse or seen other people close to themsuffering from it. Myra fits into both these categories, as her father beat both her and her mother. Myra’s mother also hit her, even striking the teenager across the face in the street one day after she’d missed the last bus home and been away all night.
    One of the other stages of violentization is when someone coaches the initially normal person to be violent - and when she met Ian Brady he spent years encouraging her into violent ways. For many months he took her to see the films of violence and gave her books filled with violence. He spoke of bank robberies, Nazism and murder night and day. Then came the fantasized rehearsals, prowling the streets looking for potential victims and prowling the moors talking about what he’d do to them there. Only when he was sure that she was completely enthralled by his vision of superiority did he ask her to help him carry out his first murderous act.

Myra today
    Even now she doesn’t talk about certain aspects of what she did, writing about the other murders to a journalist - as broadcast in the BBC2 programme Modern Times - but in the case of Lesley Ann Downey saying ‘I’m finding it very difficult… It just hurts so much to think that I could have been such a cruelbastard.’ She was quoted in the programme saying that she ‘chose to sacrifice Pauline so that my own family would be safe.’ But if she’d wanted nothing to do with the abductions, Myra could have simply reported Ian’s threats to the police.
    If Myra was to admit that her own childhood rejection and her father’s abuse had left her with suppressed rage, and that Ian Brady brought that rage into the open, she would sound more plausible. Certainly, the trial judge thought her redeemable if removed from Brady’s influence - and even her harshest opponents don’t actually believe that she’d kill again.
    It’s true that if Myra Hindley hadn’t met Ian Brady her life would have been very different. She would probably have married and become a mother - she was distraught when her sister Maureen’s first baby died and she has been kind to the children of friends and relatives who have visited her in prison. Under Ian’s influence she became a very dangerous young woman but there’s no evidence to suggest that she’s a dangerous older woman now.

Searching for the truth
    It’s unlikely that Myra Hindley would have told the truth to psychiatrists during her first six years in prison when she still saw herself as the love of Ian Brady’s life,when he was all she cared about. But after that, surely much