Moors Case To The Jury

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31053, 7 May 1966, Page 15

Moors Case To The Jury

(N Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) CHESTER (Cheshire), May G.

The all-male jury will today retire to decide whether lan Brady and his blonde girl friend Myra Hindley murdered two children and a 17-year-old youth.

From his high-backed chair in the panelled courtroom of Chester Castle, the grey-wig-ged, red-robed judge, Mr Jus-

tice Fenton Atkinson, will complete the summing up of what he described as “this horrible case.”

The judge spoke for more than an hour yesterday after the defence counsel had completed their submissions on behalf of the two accused. He is expected to speak for another two hours today before the jury retire to decide whether 28-year-old stock clerk and his 23-year-old typist murdered Lesley Anne Downey, aged 10, John Kilbride, aged 12, and Edward Evans, aged 17. Evan’s body was found wrapped in sheets and plastic in the house where Brady and Hindley lived together. The

bodies of the two children were discovered in shallow graves on the Pennine moors above the town of Hyde Cheshire, where the accused live. “Not Abnormal” The judge rejected any idea that the two accused were not sane. “From first to last in this case there has not been the smallest suggestion that either of these two are mentally abnormal or not fully and completely responsible for their actions,” he said. “If—and I underline the word ‘if’—what the prosecution says is right, you are dealing here, are you not, with two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity?” Normal people would say, “Could anybody be as wicked as that?” But that was what the prosecution were setting out to prove, said the judge. Mr Godfrey Heilpern, Q.C., defending Myra Hindley, earlier told - the jury in his final address that the relationship between Brady and Hindley was that of master and servant who “became dictator and dictatee which spilled over into their private affairs.”