Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners by Stephen Wade

Author:Stephen Wade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: TRU000000
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781844685189
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Published: 2011-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Ian Brady: Keeping Shtum

Before telling the story of Ian Brady in jail, I have my own experience on the Moors murders, something that happened to me quite by chance one day as I took some books out of my local library. It was the first time I had listened to a tale about Brady and Hindley from someone’s mouth, rather than from the pages of a book.

At the issuing desk was Sandra, and we both started to chat about our interest in crime writing. I went to interview her after she said that she had been present during the investigations into those murders, based in Hyde.

Sandra has a good stock of scrapbooks about her involvement in one of the major murder enquiries in the history of crime. As we looked through them and she pointed out locations on the Saddleworth moors, or talked about a woman detective she knew, I felt as if I was revisiting a dark place in history. She showed me her photograph, as in the Daily Mirror at the time when Brady and Hindley were tried at Chester Assizes. Here was a woman with a story to tell, and it had been a long time since she showed these cuttings to anyone.

We met by chance. I write about true crime and spend hours in libraries and archives. Most of this work is about old newsprint and fading photos you find on a blurry microfilm image. But here was that rare thing, a chance to talk about a period in modern history when police work was just emerging from its Blue Lamp image and was being given to us as something close to the ‘new documentary’. Not that it was being glamorised in the writing of the 1960s. Quiet heroism and career problems seemed to be the order of the day, and a PC was very non-PC by today’s standards.

Sandra stepped into this world of mean streets and macho talk, and her photos show her wearing the stylish dark cape designed by no less a fashion guru than Norman Hartnall. But the impression she gives is that it wasn’t macho at all – more gentlemanly. After all, this is the time in which it was considered unacceptable to swear on the football terraces if a woman was present. At the time, she was just taking up duties in Birkenhead. Her days as a secretary to the team of detectives who combed the wilds of Saddleworth were behind her. The Sandra of these images is every inch the professional, standing by a Panda car, or looking firm and controlled outside a police station. She displays the virtues of the British police as I recall them, in my teenage life in Leeds in the sixties: strong, visible, reliable, demanding respect.

The training course for this new life was at Padgate, Warrington. Sandra remembers this with real affection. ‘It was the best time of my life … I wept buckets when we had to leave’, she says. Sandra knows the date as soon as she is asked: 6 October 1968.

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