Last rites for 'dying' Myra Hindley

Moors murderer Myra Hindley was believed to be near death today after a priest administered the last rites at her hospital bedside, a prisons source said.

Hindley was admitted to the West Suffolk hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England, on Tuesday with severe respiratory problems, the source added.

Her condition was said to have deteriorated in the last 24 hours.

Hindley, 60, spent several nights at the hospital with a suspected heart attack earlier this month.

She also suffers from angina and osteoporosis, although the Prison Service has refused to comment on her condition.

The serial killer has been serving her 36th year behind bars at nearby Highpoint Prison, Suffolk.

A legal bid for freedom by chain-smoker Hindley may now be defeated by her ill-health.

Commentators believe moves to strip the Home Secretary of his power to keep prisoners in jail could have led to her walking free.

A crucial ruling by Law Lords on another case is due in December and some legal commentators believe Hindley could have been freed within months.

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.

Hindley and Ian Brady, 64, were jailed for life in 1966 for the sexual abuse, torture and murder of three youngsters.

In 1987 they confessed to two more child killings.

Pauline Read was the first child to suffer the consequences of Brady and Hindley’s sadistic and warped minds.

The 16-year-old vanished on July 12, 1963, on her way to a disco near her home in Gorton, Manchester.

It was not until 1987 that her body was found in a shallow grave on Saddleworth Moor after Hindley and Brady’s jail-cell confessions.

John Kilbride vanished four months after Pauline – the day after President John F Kennedy’s assassination in the United States.

He was lured up on to the moor, sexually assaulted and murdered.

A photograph taken by Brady of Hindley posing on the edge of John’s grave holding her pet dog would later lead police to the young boy’s resting place.

The body of the murderers’ next victim, 12-year-old Keith Bennett, has never been discovered.

He vanished after leaving his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester on June 16 1964.

Lesley Ann Downey was murdered on Boxing Day, 1964.

The 10-year-old – the youngest victim of the evil pair – was enticed from a fairground to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother in Hattersley.

In Hindley’s bedroom, she was stripped, sexually abused and tortured as they forced her to pose for pornographic photographs.

The harrowing attack was recorded on audio tape by Hindley. The tape lasted 16 minutes 21 seconds.

Their fifth victim was Edward Evans, 17, who died in a hail of axe blows.

The murder was witnessed by Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith, who tipped off police.

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.

“And they were tailor-made ones, not roll-ups like everyone else was smoking.

“She struck me as a very emotionless, very cold person – perhaps that’s inevitable after 30-odd years in jail.

“But she was very adept at telling you what she thought you wanted to hear, if she thought it would bring her closer to release.

“I don’t believe for a minute that she actually meant what she said.

“There were no really genuine signs of remorse.

“I recognise that she’s changed, become a Christian and got a degree.

“But what she did over a two-year period was horrific and if someone who tortured and murdered five children doesn’t deserve to die in jail, who does?”

Mr Leech added that Hindley had her own cell in HMP Durham’s hospital wing at the time.

“She also had her own television at a time when no other prisoner in England and Wales had one.

“She was being treated differently even then.”

Home Secretary David Blunkett is expected to lose a crucial case later this year on his powers to set inmates’ sentences.

Convicted killer Anthony Anderson went to the House of Lords last month because the 15-year minimum term his trial judge said he would serve as a minimum was increased to 20 years by the Home Secretary of the day.

The minister lost the right to set sentences for child criminals after a European court ruling on James Bulger’s killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

However, Mr Blunkett has vowed to pass a new law to keep high-profile killers such as Hindley in jail even if Strasbourg rules the current system illegal.

The results of the Anderson case are due in December. If he won, Hindley was expected to apply to Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf for a new minimum sentence.