Convicted child killer Myra Hindley was dubbed "the most evil woman in Britain." Now a stack of recently-discovered jailhouse letters reveal that she became a raging Valium addict in her later years, making weirder and weirder demands of the government.
Hindley, half of the notorious "Moors Murders" couple (Hindley and former boyfriend Ian Brady killed at least five children between 1963-1965) wrote to politician Douglas Hurd during his time as Britian's Home Secretary in 1989, requesting to keep her Valium supply flowing. The letters were discovered in London's National Archives by academic Tom Clark, who's writing a book on the case.
"I have used it many times into my sentence, particularly when there have been major crises," she wrote, 23 years into her life term. "Since I'm not asking to be released there's no particular point in preserving my body for a healthy and ripe old age in prison." She goes on to describe how Valium is the only thing that kept her going in jail.
Creepy till the end, Hindley also requested that she be hypnotized in order to recall the location of the never-found body of 12-year-old murder victim Keith Bennett. The request was denied, though as the Daily Mail points out, "later the government went back on the decision — but by that point Hindley was too ill for any form of therapy."
Of the letters, Clark notes:
They give a fascinating insight into Hindley's last few years and her reliance on Valium. At no stage does she show remorse — quite the opposite. Like many of Hindley's writings, the the letter totally ignores the gravity of what she did. The tone is quite strange. It is quite self-righteous, as if someone else has committed the murders and she was helping solve them.
Hindley died in prison at age 60 in 2002. Brady, age 77, was declared criminally insane in 1985 and has spent the last several decades in a high-security psychiatric hospital.
Image via Murderpedia.