Myra Hindley and Ian Brady: A Notorious, 20th-Century Crime Partnership

Myra Hindley and Ian Brady became 20th-century icons of evil, and their names would be synonymous not just with murder, but with everything that was held to be perverted and wrong.

Hindley was born to working class parents, on July 23rd 1942, In Manchester, England. Her father being absent from the family home for three years because of the Second World War. Bob Hindley, her father, was a bully who regularly hit his wife and children and spent most of his earnings down at the local pub.

During her school years Hindley was considered to be a bright, mature girl but was often missing from class which meant that she did not get the best schooling and education. On entering her secondary modern school (she failed her entrance exams to go to a grammar school) Hindley showed an aptitude for creative writing and poetry as well as enjoying athletics and swimming. She was also very much in demand as a babysitter and showed genuine affection for children.

At the age of 15 Hindley made friends with a boy by the name of Michael Higgins and was inconsolable when he drowned in a local reservoir. She cried for weeks. Soon after her friends death Myra Hindley left school with no qualifications.

Her first job was as a junior clerk and Hindley found the work to be uninspiring, repetitive and monotonous but Hindley made up for this by dating boys, going to dances, smoking and drinking.

Hindley changed jobs four or five times before and even thought about enlisting in the armed forces when in January 1961, she would meet the man who would inspire her like no other. His name was Ian Brady.

Ian Brady worked for Millwards (an old fashioned chemical firm) in Manchester, England) and was an aloof young man who seldom smiled and kept himself to himself. He loved to read but what his tastes in reading were questionable as he was obsessed with Nazism. His library included Hitler's Mein Kampf, as well as various existentialist texts and books on sex and torture, the Marquis de Sade being one of his favorite authors.

Born in the Gorbals, one of the roughest slum areas of Glasgow, to an unmarried mother Ian Brady was adopted into the Sloane family.