While searching the Internet for rock-n-roll tee shirts for our family of four, my wife had the inspiration to find shirts for the defunct UK pop band The Smiths – just the name, our name, The Smiths. The only styles we found reproduced covers of various Smiths records. The plainest of these featured the profile of a trashy-looking blonde which appeared originally on the single “Sheila Take a Bow.” The shirt was understated and classic – perfect but for one thing. “That’s Myra Hindley,” I said. “We can’t put her face on our kids.”

Barbara had never heard of Myra Hindley or the ‘Moors Murders’ of five children that plagued Manchester, England, forty years ago and for which killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were arrested, tried and imprisoned for life. Hindley’s 1965 mugshot became one of the most iconic images of the 1960s. The longest-detained female prisoner in the history of the English penal system, Hindley was also perhaps the most-hated woman in British history, period – even more despised than her partner-in-crime (who confessed to being the sole killer). When the Royal Academy of Art exhibited artist Marcus Harvey’s 1997 reproduction “Myra,” the piece was so often vandalized that the exhibitors had to protect it behind Plexiglas.

Turns out I was wrong about the peroxide blonde used on the Smiths record cover. It wasn’t Myra Hindley but rather Candy Darling, the transsexual actor from Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt (1971). My confusion stemmed from the superficial resemblance and the fact that the Smiths (who hailed from Manchester) once recorded a song inspired by the murders, “Suffer Little Children.” I had read about the Moors Murders as a kid in both a British crime encyclopedia and in Emlyn Williams’ 1968 bestseller Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection. I’ve lived most of my life with the facts of the case burned into my brain but it’s only now that I’m a father that I feel something like the real weight of those crimes. I’ve never heard the 16-minute audio recording that Brady and Hindley made of their protracted sexual abuse and strangulation of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey but the mere fact that there exists such a thing has given me more than a few sleepless nights lately.

Tom Hooper’s Longford is one of two films dealing with the Moors Murders produced last year in the United Kingdom by Granada Television. While Christopher Menaul’s See No Evil: The Moors Murders focuses on the crimes and trial, Longford jumps ahead to Myra Hindley’s thirty year association with controversial prison reformer Frank Packenham, the 7^th Lord of Longford. Coproduced with HBO and Channel 4 Films and written by Peter Morgan (The Queen), the film looks afresh at the case and the public outcry that lasted from the 1966 trial up to and even beyond Myra Hindley’s death in 2002 from the complications of emphysema.

As told in Longford, Frank Packenham’s conviction that Myra Hindley was deserving of forgiveness if not eventual parole stemmed from his own devout Catholicism and a distinction made by trial judge Fenton Atkinson that, while he believed Brady to be “wicked beyond belief,” there might be hope for Hindley once removed from Brady’s influence. True, Ian Brady had in large part fabricated the hateful image that Myra Hindley presented at the time of their arrest. A Nazi sympathizer, Brady commanded Hindley to dye her hair Valkyrie blonde and dressed her in German fashions to complete the image. That Brady dominated Hindley and bent her to his will was the story Hindley presented to Longford during their initial meetings at Holloway Prison, along with her wish to reenter the Catholic Church. Devoted to hating the sin but loving the sinner, Longford spent decades lobbying for Hindley’s release. It never happened. In 1986, Hindley accepted greater complicity in the murders than she had confessed to in 1966 and pointed police toward the bodies of two long-missing children on desolate Saddleworth Moor. The admission didn’t help Hindley’s case and Lord Longford was disgraced and humiliated by the development. His efforts on her behalf went no further. Frank Packenham died in 2001 at the age of 95.

If subscriber comments at the Netflix website are an indication, most people seem to take from Longford the very beliefs they have brought to it: those who consider Myra Hindley a monster nonpareil consider their opinions vindicated while those who believed Hindley paid a greater price for being a female child murderer aver the movie supports this view. My own reaction is somewhere in the middle. The film doesn’t try to rewrite history nor claim a miscarriage of justice was carried out. It doesn’t try to make of Lord Longford a hero or a martyr of Myra Hindley. Rather, it puts across a minority opinion, one that bears hearing out.

While I oppose the death penalty (less in theory than in practice), I understand the need for societies to deem certain crimes unforgivable and to punish those crimes in an ultimate way. As I am not a Christian, I’m unable to meet Lord Longford on a theological level and I never would have supported his attempts to free Myra Hindley… and yet this story of his campaign nonetheless allowed me to understand in some small way Longford’s childlike refusal to condemn another human being, no matter how heinous their sins, and his grief over the seeming hypocrisy of Christians who more readily embrace God’s righteous ire than His endless capacity for forgiveness.

Longford is available on DVD from HBO Home Video.