No living murderer has been subject to, or collaborated in, a more intrusive scrutiny of her psychic story than Hindley received on television last night and, for that matter, in the Guardian on Tuesday. This imperishable notoriety comes out of an era when child-murder was a unique obscenity and paedophilia a term that never needed to be uttered on the BBC news. Since then, there have been murders as bad or worse, if such things can ever be compared. The boy-killers of James Bulger made a similar fiendish mark. But Harold Shipman, another gruesome resident of Hythe, is by contrast talked about with puzzlement rather than hatred.
Times seem to have half- normalised the multiple murder of old ladies.
But nothing extinguishes the Moors murders, and nothing changes the assessment of those who committed them. Hindley and Brady are icons fit only for granitic social revenge. The longer they're inside, the longer they need to stay. The more they expose their tortured souls, as Hindley did this week, the further they surely are from getting what they want. Their whining, self-exploratory, confessional words only validate society's unfairness towards them.