16/05/04

Myra Hindley Is Dearly Missed by Carr's Persecutors 

Jenny McCartney

Telegraph

In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the all-powerful Party orchestrates a daily event known as the Two Minutes Hate. It is directed at an "enemy of the people" whose face is beamed up on a huge screen for the purpose of mass vilification by the roaring crowd. The point about the Hate is not only that it is communal, but also that it is perversely enjoyable for the participants.

We now have our own version of the Two Minutes Hate, diligently orchestrated by elements of the British tabloid press against Maxine Carr, who was released from prison last Friday under complicated, costly arrangements to protect her from a possible public lynching. Carr will be given a new identity and appearance, and a court injunction will prevent her whereabouts from being revealed by the media. That this highly unusual level of protection should be required is extraordinary, given that when Carr's boyfriend Ian Huntley murdered the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, an oblivious Carr was 100 miles away in Grimsby with her mother.

The crime for which she was convicted was to pervert the course of justice by supplying Huntley with a false alibi on the grounds that - as he told her - he had been falsely accused of sex crimes before and would thus be "fitted up" by the police. The jury accepted that she lied to protect Huntley while believing him to be innocent: she was therefore acquitted of the charge of assisting an offender.

Carr emerged from the trial as a rather dim, foolish and pychologically troubled young woman in thrall to her dominant lover: she knowingly misled the police investigation and was rightly punished. And yet, in tabloid reports, she is now an incarnation of evil to be ranked alongside willing participants in multiple murder such as Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. In her own inarticulate way, Carr evidently saw this coming when she pointed at Huntley in the dock and protested: "I'm not going to be blamed for what that thing done to me and those children." Yet she has been comprehensively blamed for it, and by journalists who should and do know better.

When Carr told the court that some Holloway inmates had dubbed her as "Myra Hindley Mark II" The Sun and The Daily Express seized their chance: the front pages of both newspapers carried pictures of Carr and Hindley side by side. Ever since, endless tabloid articles have been devoted to bolstering the sly impression that these two women belong in the same moral arena.

An article in the Express in December 2003, bore the headline "Sex-Mad Maxine, The Myra of Soham" and confidently alleged that "everything suggests that at 26 she was a Myra in the making". The Sun crowed to its readers, after David Blunkett refused Carr early release last February: "Maxine stays caged, and you helped do it." In tabloid-speak, the word "caged" is more usually applied to rapists and serial killers.

Tabloid accounts of Carr's life in prison burst with contradictions, yet all observations are subtly steered towards the same conclusion: that Carr is a smug, remorseless monster who is correctly loathed even by hardened criminals. The News of the World, on April 25, glibly described "the pampered prison life of Maxine Carr, the woman who might have saved murdered 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman". Yet there was no suggestion whatsoever at the trial that Carr "might have saved" the two girls, or that she had any prior inkling of Huntley's appetite for killing.

Readers have been invited to savour the tasty prospect of Carr as the victim of vigilante violence, while paradoxically resenting her "cushy" life in prison. The same News of the World piece goes on to quote a former inmate of Foston Hall prison, where Carr was held, describing how "some of the girls threatened to throw boiling water in her face. They melt sugar into it so it sticks to flesh and scalds more of the skin . . . but the whole place is like a holiday camp."

Another former inmate piously told The Sun that: "Everyone in there hates Carr. They throw their dinners over her." Of course, the readers' letters are an enthusiastic response to the newspapers' cues. When the News of the World recently published pictures of Carr sitting in the sun reading a hairstyles magazine, the fury duly flooded in. One reader suggested that Carr's hair be "shaved short with the word LIAR etched into the back"; another advocated keeping her locked up "until the day she dies". A reader named Dean Hoggard, of Hull - upon reading approvingly in The Sun of an attack upon Carr - noted with satisfaction: "It was good to read that Huntley and Maxine Carr were given a bashing within days of each other."

It is absurdly hypocritical of the tabloid newspapers, now, to rail against the amount that must be spent on protecting Carr, for it is they who have systematically incited the public into a violent frenzy against her. It is - and will remain - Carr's particular bad luck to have come to public attention at roughly the same time as Myra Hindley died: there was a gaping, Hindley-shaped hole in the tabloids' Two Minutes Hate slot, and they have simply used her to plug it.