2 cases tagged “UK true 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: Mary Flora Bell
The morning after Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown to death, she broke into a nursery school and left four handwritten notes claiming responsibility for the killing. Police dismissed them as a prank. The author was ten years old. What followed over the summer of 1968 in Scotswood, Newcastle, was one of the most disturbing chapters in British criminal history: a child killer operating in plain sight, in broad daylight, returning to mutilate a victim's body with broken scissors, and sitting with the grieving families of her victims as though nothing had happened. Mary Flora Bell was not a monster who emerged from nowhere. She was a product of almost incomprehensible abuse, a girl whose own mother allegedly tried to poison her with sleeping pills and drop her from a first-floor window. That context explains nothing and excuses nothing, but it haunts everything. She would become Britain's youngest female killer on record, a title she still holds. This is her story.
