Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The "winds of change" that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had forecast would blow through the African remnants of the British Empire where also being felt at home by the winter of 1963. Post-war lethargy had given way to Sixties Swing and a new generation was loudly asserting its identity. The killing of the dashing young American president on 22 November shocked the residents of Greater Manchester, many of them of Irish Catholic extraction whose modest red-brick homes were adorned with JFK pictures, but the events in Dallas were so grotesque as to be almost unreal and, besides, they had plenty worries of their own. There was the constant battle to make ends meet and then, on the following day, 23 November 1963, John Kilbride from Ashton-under-Lyne, aged twelve years, disappeared and was never seen alive again. A year later, his decomposed body was recovered from the bleak, deserted moorland in the hills above East Manchester. He had been brutally murdered.

The death last month of the so-called "Moors Murderer", Myra Hindley, compelled me to reopen Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams and read once again about the killing spree that Hindley and her lover Ian Brady engaged in 40 years ago. Their victims were 16-year old Pauline Reade, 12-year old John Kilbride, 13-year old Keith Bennett, 10-year old Lesley Ann Downey and 17-year old Edward Evans.

Along with the innocence of the victims, what made the joint crimes of Hindley and Brady so shocking was the casualness with which they took life and the role played by the accoutrements of upward mobility in the murdering. They wouldn't have been able to entrap their victims or dispose of their bodies without a car, a relative luxury for a stock control clerk and a shorthand typist in those days. That Hindley was the driver on each occasion turned out to be fatal for her later clemency appeals. And then there was the camera and the tape recorder.

Today, we take gadgets for granted but 40 years ago there was less disposable income. Still, Hindley and Brady bought a camera and a tape recorder and that they were enthusiastic technicians was proved when those in the courtroom at their 1966 trial in Chester were presented with both the audio and visual result of a session during which 10-year old Lesley Ann Downey was forced to pose undressed, while Brady photographed her and made a recording of her hysterical pleas for mercy. It was, the judge said, "beyond belief".

What Truman Capote did for American "crime" writing in 1965 with In Cold Blood, Emlyn Williams did for the British variant with Beyond Belief in 1967. Capote's brilliant "A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences" was matched in style and substance by Williams's "A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection". And this makes it all the more lamentable that Beyond Belief is no longer in print for it is an unforgettable book. Here is Williams recreating the callous scene in the couple's kitchen shortly after Brady has smashed the head of 17-year old Edward Evans in the front room with an axe:

"The girl — who was wearing a skirt with black nylons — sat in her grandmother's chair, holding cup and saucer and with her tartaned-slippered feet on the mantelpiece. Which was only just low enough for them to reach. There was blood on the tartan slippers. Stirring her tea in this pose, she said 'Ian, d'ye remember the time we went on the moors with a body in the back, and you were off burying it, and a police car stopped, and a copper came up to the car and leant over, an' said 'What's the trouble?' an' I said 'I'm waitin' to dry me sparkin' plugs' an' I was prayin' Ian wouldn't appear, then the feller drove off, dy'e want another cup, now what about tomorrow?' "

Beyond belief, indeed.