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The Smiths: “Suffer Little Children” (1984)

Morrissey in the studio in 1985
(screen cap; YouTube)

“Suffer Little Children” closes the album. A gentle ballad, mostly for voice and guitar – part lullaby / part prayer / part ode by Keats – “Suffer” was inspired by the Moors Murders and by lyricist Morrissey’s memories of their desolate facts and iconography (the fixation remains: in 2009 the singer published “The Bleak Moor Lies” – an account of a ghostly figure he says he encountered on the Yorkshire moors in 1989, later incorporated into his autobiography). One of the first songs written for The Smiths, “Suffer” is understated and unsensational – its music lovely and suffused with echo like the landscape it describes, its lyrics spare and delicate despite the grim subject matter (“But fresh lilaced moorland fields / cannot hide the stolid stench of death”). Victims are mentioned by name (“Lesley Ann and your pretty white beads / Oh, John, you’ll never be a man”) but the crimes are never described. Point of view shifts fluidly from a singer/narrator (presumably Morrissey), to the ghostly voices of the children, to a still-living (as she was in 1984) Myra Hindley, who confesses her primary role in the slayings despite her (alleged) brutalization by Brady (“Oh, whatever he has done, I have done”).

Police search Saddleworth Moor; upright stakes (right front) mark the burial site of victim Lesley Ann Downey (1965) (unsourced news photo; murderpedia.org)

While both killers proclaimed their innocence at trial, by 1987 (and two decades into life sentences) each had confessed to all five murders. Brady remained largely aloof and remorseless, but Hindley increasingly expressed sorrow and regret for her actions. Cynics suggested there was integrity, at least, in Brady’s consistent psychopathology and accused Hindley of shedding crocodile tears in hopes of reducing her sentence. She confirmed her desire for release, but insisted her remorse was real, admitting her complicity while insisting that Brady had terrorized, threatened, and raped her into submitting to his deviant desires. By the ‘90s her confession seemed unequivocal: “I ought to have been hanged,” she told her attorney. “My crime was worse than Brady’s because I enticed the children and they would never have entered the car without my role.” But “Suffer” was written when she was still defiant, and in the song’s most chilling turn, the children themselves pledge to haunt her forever …

Makeshift memorial by mother of Moors victim, Keith Bennett (2014) (unsourced news photo; mirror.co.uk)

We may be dead and we may be gone
But we will be, we will be

We will be right by your side

Until the day you die

This is no easy ride



… and condemn her to a life of dreamless sleep:

We will haunt you when you laugh

Yes, you could say we’re a team

You might sleep, you might sleep

You might sleep

But, oh, you will never dream

Hindley died in prison in 2002. Brady was officially diagnosed a psychopath in 1985 and, in accordance with British law, transferred from prison to a hospital for the criminally insane. He says he never wants to be released and has repeatedly begged to be allowed to die.

So much to answer for

In her depiction as grotesque, Hindley’s mugshot becomes suffused with the horror of perverted femininity.
— Claire Valier: Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture (2014)

Myra Hindley is to be hung in the Royal Academy. Sadly it is only a painting of her.
— The Sun (1997)

Myra Hindley in prison with dogs (unsourced news photo; dailymail.co.uk)

Five decades worth of books, articles, and TV programs – some good, some bad, some awful – have chronicled the Moors Murders, creating a composite portrait of the killers that’s compelling but incomplete. In it, Brady is the surface weirdo: an illegitimate loner and Nazi obsessive – domineering, alcoholic, sexually sadistic – inspired by a misreading of Nietzsche to commit a series of Leopold and Loeb-style “perfect murders.” Hindley is, by comparison, a cypher: outwardly “normal” – gregarious, socially adept, well-liked – yet drawn ineluctably by some inner pathology to Brady, for whom she was soon donning fetish boots, miniskirts, and dying her bouffant hair “Aryan” blonde. Beaten and terrorized as a child by an alcoholic father, the trauma seems to have left her acutely vulnerable to brutal nihilists like Brady – her psyche an impossibly confused nexus of alternately cruel and compliant psychosexual urges. An earnest Catholic convert at 17, “within months” of meeting him (at 18), she later wrote, “he had convinced me that there was no God at all.”

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