Wednesday 12 January 2011

MYRA HINDLEY

The other of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady's girlfriend and accomplice who was involved in all five murders with Brady, with two murder convictions and one as an accessory, as well as later admitting the murder of two more children later, only one of whom was subsequently found on the Moor. Hindley was given a 25-year minimum term by the trial judge, which was endorsed in 1982 by the Lord Chief Justice. Reports suggested that Hindley was rehabilitating in prison and had found religion and rejected Brady and her past, but nevertheless a strong sense of public feeling - plus the admission of the two further murders, one of which has yet to result in the discovery of a body - helped prompt her tariff to be increased to 30 years in 1988 and, finally, to a whole life tariff two years later. Hindley subsequently made three appeals against the whole life tariff and launched a further bid for freedom in 1996 when she had served 30 years, but all her efforts were rejected and she died in jail at the age of 60 in November 2002, less than two weeks before a law lords' ruling would probably have secured her freedom. Her case prompted more debate than that of any other prisoner of notoriety, with some high profile backing from the House of Lords, but vitriol from the Press and the public, as well as the families of her victims. Her death left only Rosemary West as a confirmed female prisoner serving a whole life tariff.