If Hindley doesn't deserve to die in jail, who does?'

MYRA HINDLEY became one of the few female icons of evil to haunt Britain.

Her part in the Moors Murders gave her an infamy which has remained undimmed by her 36 years in jail,

fuelled partly by shock that a woman could have carried out such horrific crimes against children.

Hindley, 60, has always claimed that her role in the murders was to abduct the children, and that she did not take part in the killings or sex attacks.

She increasingly heaped the blame for the crimes on Ian Brady, claiming she was infatuated with her perverted lover who beat and blackmailed her into going along with his demonic plans.

Hindley, prisoner 964055, was declared a reformed character, a devout Roman Catholic who had found her God, turned to education and who was suffering for her sins.

But the public remained unconvinced and the families of her victims vowed to kill her if she was ever set free.

Her supporters argue that crucial mitigating factors about Brady's stranglehold over her were not taken into account at the time of her trial.

In 1998 Hindley claimed that she had been sadistically abused by Brady, who had threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and sister if she did not participate in the murders.

She said he took pornographic photographs of her to blackmail her with and claimed there were pictures which showed her body naked and bruised.

But Brady, with whom she severed relations several years into their sentences, and who by contrast made no efforts to secure parole, seemed determined to thwart Hindley's own bid for freedom.

He wrote to ministers in 1997 claiming she was as committed to murder as he was and dismissing suggestions that she was an unwilling accomplice.

After their trial, in his recommendations to the Home Office, the presiding judge Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson drew a distinction between the two defendants, giving Hindley grounds for hoping she would receive more favourable treatment than her co-accused.

He said: "Though I believe that Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence.

"I hope Brady will not be released in any foreseeable future and that Hindley will be kept in prison for a very long time."

Hindley, who attained an honours degree in humanities during her time in prison, continues to insist that she no longer poses a risk to society.

In 1994 she published a letter, begging: "After 30 years in prison, I think I have paid my debt to society and atoned for my crimes.

"I ask people to judge me as I am now, and not as I was then."

And when the then Home Secretary Michael Howard confirmed her life tariff in 1997, she responded: "Nobody but myself can be fully aware of (my crimes') heinousness.

"What I was involved in is etched into my heart and mind and my conscience will follow me to my dying day."

Before an operation for a brain aneurysm two years ago, Hindley is understood to have given orders to her lawyers that she was not to be kept alive artificially if she lapsed into a

coma. She also ordered that none of her organs should be offered for transplant if she died. Instructions were given for a cremation and for her ashes to be scattered at a secret location, it was reported.

Earlier this month it was said that Hindley was being given free nicotine patches, worth £20-a-week, on the NHS in an attempt to stop her smoking. She was reportedly taken to hospital for heart tests last month and specialists ordered her to give up the habit.

Mark Leech, editor of the Prisons Handbook and the inmates' newspaper ConVerse, spent three hours with Hindley in her cell at Durham jail in 1997.

He said: "I had been on a TV programme talking about life sentence prisoners and said that in a small minority of cases life must mean life, and that Myra Hindley was one of them.

"She invited me to see her because she wanted me to change my views.

"I came away not with an alternative opinion but with an entrenched one."

He added: "She just spent the three hours that I was there lying on her bed chain-smoking.

"She struck me as a very emotionless, very cold person perhaps that's inevitable after 30-odd years in jail. There were no signs of remorse. I recognise she changed, become a Christian and got a degree. But what she did was horrific and if someone who tortured children doesn't deserve to die in jail, who does?"