2 cases tagged “1960s crime”
Convicted: Myra Hindley
On the morning of October 7, 1965, eighteen-year-old David Smith walked to a public telephone box in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, hands shaking, and dialed 999. The night before, he had watched his brother-in-law bludgeon a seventeen-year-old to death with an axe. The brother-in-law was Ian Brady. The woman who had invited him to witness it was Myra Hindley. What that phone call exposed would redefine evil in the British imagination for generations. Between 1963 and 1965, Brady and Hindley abducted five children and teenagers from the streets of Greater Manchester, sexually assaulted them, and buried four in shallow graves on the desolate expanse of Saddleworth Moor. The fifth was killed in Hindley's living room. The evidence police found inside that house was staggering in its horror: photographs of a ten-year-old girl bound and gagged in Hindley's bedroom, and sixteen minutes of audio tape capturing that same child's final, agonized moments. A luggage ticket for the suitcase containing these materials was found hidden inside the spine of Hindley's Catholic prayer book. Myra Hindley would spend thirty-six years in prison, applying repeatedly for parole, insisting she had changed. The British public never believed her. One of her victims, Keith Bennett, has never been found. His mother died in 2012, still waiting. This is the story of how an ordinary girl from Gorton became the most reviled woman in British criminal history.
Convicted: Magdalena Solís
On a May night in 1963, a fourteen-year-old boy named Sebastián Guerrero crept close enough to a limestone cave in rural Tamaulipas, Mexico, to see what was happening inside. What he witnessed sent him sprinting more than twenty-five kilometers through scrubland and darkness to the nearest police station, his lungs burning, his story so horrific that the officer on duty refused to believe him. That decision cost two people their lives. The officer who eventually agreed to escort Guerrero back to the caves was found the next day with his heart cut from his chest. At the center of it all was Magdalena Solís, a former prostitute from the slums of Tamaulipas who had, in the span of a few months, transformed herself into a goddess. Or, more precisely, allowed herself to be transformed, then seized the role entirely. Known as 'The High Priestess of Blood,' Solís presided over at least eight confirmed murders in the isolated village of Yerbabuena, orchestrating rituals so brutal that investigators who arrived at the scene struggled to process what they found. The true death toll, authorities suspected, reached fifteen or sixteen victims. Solís would serve fifty years in prison; whether she lived to see her release remains, to this day, unconfirmed.
