?Go to Hell?, ?Gone But Not Forgiven?, ?The Devil?: so the British tabloids heralded the death of Myra Hindley. A writer and broadcaster looks behind the headlines.

THE Devil has been in the limelight this week. Or rather, the late Myra Hindley has, but for some people they are apparently one and the same. ?THE DEVIL?, the Sun shouted from its headline on Saturday, ?At last, Myra is where she belongs ? HELL?. The Daily Express was more terse: ?GO TO HELL?, it proclaimed.

There is a curious irony here. The mainstream Churches have long been too nervous even to mention Satan or his lair, lest they sound medieval and superstitious in our shiny new secular and scientific age. Pope John Paul II in his many addresses and encyclicals has made only fleeting references to hell as ?separation from God?. No fire, no brimstone, no scaly-skinned overlord, all ideas once fine-tuned by the medieval Church. Anglicanism, meanwhile, has confined itself to the observation that what was once eternal torment would now be better regarded as akin to the holes in Swiss cheese.

Yet, at the same time as church leaders have taken a vow of silence on Old Nick, the very papers that have encouraged and applauded the debunking of organised religion and promoted secularisation have apparently had a sudden Damascus Road conversion. Confronted with the horror of Hindley?s role in the sadistic murders of five children, they have fallen back on biblical imagery as they struggle to put into words their horror.

Some, it should be added, have remained above the fray and stuck to their usual prejudices. The Guardian, habitually the most secular of the British dailies, did pause for a moment when I filed my obituary of Myra, whom I had known and visited for several years, using the word redemption to describe the progress she had made in her 36 years in prison. ?Isn?t that a bit religious??, the sub- editor pondered. ?Perhaps rehabilitation would be better.? To its credit, though, the Guardian had no problem with printing a piece that might have been construed as fair to Myra, or at least arguing that we had failed to judge her as she was at the time of her death rather than as she was 36 years ago. The tabloids, on the other hand, were in full fury against her and took to the pulpit to give their condemnations added moral weight.

Once religion provided the universal language when confronted with fear, suffering and what might be deemed evil. The Devil was in practice the face we put to what was for most the otherwise intangible reality of evil. We created a persona around that face with physical attributes, assistants and personality traits. We even gave the Devil a past ? his fall from grace in Heaven ? and from medieval times until the dawn of the Enlightenment we saw him everywhere. The Inquisition, in particular, found him a handy way of explaining away all that was wrong with the world.

It was partly the excesses of the Devil-fuelled Inquisition that discredited their anti-hero. Science, too, played a part. It became hard to blame epilepsy, for instance, on demonic possession as once we did. Yet today we seem to have thrown the baby out with the bath water. We do not talk about the Devil, but neither do we have any sort of coherent philosophy or theology of evil. Indeed, the very word evil has become a hollow condemnation. It tends to be used with a full stop after it by preening politicians playing to the gallery who seldom explain precisely what they mean by the word. Are they referring to some outside force for bad, something beyond human control? Or are they talking in Freudian terms of the innate human capacity for good and evil deeds which can grow distorted and disproportionate in some individuals? Or are they talking about random blows of fate? I suspect they do not really know. They just like the sound of the word.

But for many, including the editors and readers of Britain?s tabloid newspapers, the shortcomings of this empty, unspecific word evil are all too apparent. In Myra?s case, they thought they knew what they were dealing with (though, of course, few of them ever took the trouble to find out anything about her post-1966), they knew it was terrible, that it sent a chill down their spines and they knew that they could not even begin to unravel why someone should do something so inhumane as to tape-record the murder of a 10-year-old girl calling out in despair for her mother. And so, faced with the enormity of their disgust, they fell back on the Devil ? the face of evil. Myra became the Devil, a shorthand way to sum up evil. That 1966 snapshot of her, taken at the time of the trial and showing her, Medusa-like, staring out defiantly from underneath her peroxide hair, has become the modern face of Satan, an icon of crime in the twentieth century. If you make her iconic, you also make it impossible for any vote-chasing politician who talks tough on crime to release her.

This is not just a British phenomenon. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the perpetrator Timothy McVeigh (then only the chief suspect) appeared on the cover of American Time magazine under the headline ?The Face of Terror?. The whole cover was washed in red. The intention could not have been clearer had horns been drawn on the top of his head ? the Devil was at large.

In one sense, such a message is curiously comforting. The great advantage of devils and demons has always been that they effectively absolve individuals from responsibility. ?It wasn?t me, Father, it was the Devil or his demons that made me do it. I?m fundamentally a good boy.? Take this one step further and as a society we can point at Hindley and McVeigh, label them the Devil, and so separate ourselves entirely from them. They are not like us. They do not have the same human potential for good and bad. What they did is nothing to do with being human. They are not human. So when theDaily Mail front page on Saturday bemoaned the fact that Myra Hindley had had a peaceful death, it was simply reflecting the public view that she was some lower form of life than a human being.

At a much lower level we have begun to adopt this attitude to most prisoners. We lock them away from us for as long as possible in conditions that we would not think fit for our pet dog in order to emphasise that they are not humans like us. And once we have made that separation, we can cease to care what happens to them. Increasingly our prison system (despite the heroic efforts of the director general, Martin Narey, whom I believe to be a good and compassionate man working with an intransigent Home Secretary) is about punishment, separation of offenders from society and stigmatising them. Any suggestion that it should be about reform, rehabilitation and redemption ? I can get away with using that word in The Tablet ? is frowned upon. Myra Hindley?s treatment was just a very extreme example of this appalling and short-sighted trend.

And in stigmatising Myra Hindley as the Devil, perhaps we ought to pause for a moment to consider quite what sort of Devil we think she was, for they come in all shapes and sizes. Given our disgust at what she did, we are certainly not going to admit that she was the Devil of Dostoyevsky?s Brothers Karamazov, for as the writer was at pains to point out, ?if the Devil doesn?t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness?. Myra, the tabloid ghoul, was not like us. That was the point.

Neither can she be the Miltonian Devil of Paradise Lost, the basis for much of the imagery of the post-seventeenth-century Satan in the churches and beyond. For Milton?s Devil was magnificent but flawed:

he above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a Tow?r; his form had not yet lost
All her Original brightness, nor appear?d
Less than Arch Angel ruin?d and th?excess
Of glory obscured.

Myra Hindley may not have been magnificent. Face to face there was something oddly mundane about her in recent years, given her legend. But that legend certainly fascinated us. Newspaper editors realised long ago that her face ? particularly that picture ? on the front cover sold copies. They undeniably made sure that we never forgot that we were to hate her ? even in accounts of her taking part in a charity run her name had to be prefaced with the adjective ?evil? ? but they were only the messenger. They were giving us what we wanted. While other child murderers came and went ? who now, only months afterwards, can name the aunt who abused little Victoria Climbie, trussed her up in a bin bag and left her to die in a cold bathroom in Haringey? ? we remained focused on Myra Hindley to the exclusion of all others, including her co-murderer, Ian Brady.

For me the nearest Devil to Myra, if Devil she had to be in the public mind, should be the Lucifer of Dante?s Inferno, a once-terrible figure, whom Dante finally glimpses, caged in, desperately struggling to be free but rendered impotent and pitiable, yet someone whom he could not find it in his heart to pity. ?The king of the vast kingdom of all grief?, Dante wrote, ?stuck out with half his chest above the ice.? Powerless, immobile, flapping his wings but unable to escape from his ice-prison, ?he wept from his six eyes, and down three chins/were dripping tears all mixed with bloody slaver?.

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