‘Brady Very Calm Indeed’-Smith

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 17

‘Brady Very Calm Indeed’-Smith

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

CHESTER (England), April 22.

Eighteen-year-old David Smith, brother-in-law of Myra Hindley, will go back into the witness box at the bodies-on-the-moors trial at Chester today to face the cross-examination of defence counsel.

Smith gave a bloodchilling eye-witness account yesterday of the murder of Edward Evans, aged 17, whom lan Brady, he said, axed to death.

“I have seen butchers at work in shops showing as much emotion as he did when they were cutting up sheep’s ribs.” said Smith.

“He was very calm indeed. He was not in a frenzy, no frenzy at all.” EXPECTING BABY

Brady, aged 27, and Hindley, aged 23, are charged with the murder of Evans, the

murder of Lesley Ann Downey, aged 10, and the

murder of John Kilbride, aged 12. The bodies of the two children were found in lonely moorland graves.

Under cross-examination yesterday Smith’s 19-year-old wife Maureen, who is expecting a baby at the week-end, said that since Evans’s murder on October 6 last year a newspaper had been paying the couple between £lO and £2O a week.

There was, Mrs Smith said, the chance of quite a large lump-sum payment. It depended on syndication. Smith gave evidence of plans he, Brady and Hindley made to rob a bank. He

i watched a bank and took notes on certain things, he said. LIVE AMMUNITION But he said he objected when Brady insisted the guns they would use should be loaded with live ammunition. He, Smith, preferred blanks. He also told the Court of Brady’s interest in the Marquis de Sade. A book called “The Life and Times of the Marquis de Sade” was produced in Court and an extract read to the jury. In part it said: “The only punishment which a murderer should be condemned to is that which he risks from the friends or family of the man he has killed. I “ ‘I pardon you,’ said Louis XV to Charolais, who had just killed a man for his own amusement, ‘but I also pardon him who will kill you’ “A GOOD BOOK” “In a word, murder is a horror, but a horror often necessary, never criminal and essential to tolerate in a re-

public. Above all it should never be punished by murder.” Brady referred to the book as “a good book,” said Smith. After the hearing yesterday a decoy van was used to mislead anyone waiting outside the Court for Brady and

Hindley to be driven to the remand centre. While they drank tea in the cells, the van was driven through the front gate of the courtyard. Ninety minutes later the accused were taken out in a second van.