The truth about UK's most twisted women killers, from Myra Hindley to Rose West

A slight, unassuming elderly woman with skinny legs and a noticeable tummy gave a fellow inmate heartfelt advice the night before her release from New Hall Prison. “If you end up with a bad man, then run away from that man and run to the police,” she told her. “Wherever you’re going, whatever you do, I hope you don’t come back here.” The woman giving her counsel in the west Yorkshire jail was serial killer Rose West. Stunned, the inmate up for release, said: “It was surreal.” This extraordinary revelation comes in a new book, Inside: Women Behind Bars, by BAFTA-nominated documentary filmmaker Jonathan Levi and his wife, fellow bestselling author Dr Emma French. Jonathan says: “It’s almost admitting to regretting her whole relationship with Fred and what a terrible impact it had on her life. It also illustrates the gap between the public perception of these people as monsters and the underwhelming reality of that person after decades inside.” Granted unprecedented access to former prison staff, governors and prisoners, the authors gained astonishing insight into the private personalities of notorious female felons including West, Myra Hindley, Joanna Dennehy, Lucy Letby and Beverley Allitt. Former governor Vanessa Frake Harris recalled running HMP Holloway’s segregation unit in north London - which has now closed - where West was initially held. Vanessa says: “The media portrays Rose West as this very violent, very evil, psychopathic, narcissistic personality, but she was very quiet; a thinker.” Recalling the prison governor telling West, 72, who uses a pseudonym inside, that her husband was dead, she says: “The governor said ‘Rose, I’m really sorry to tell you that Fred has committed suicide.’ All she said was, ‘Oh, okay then.’ They say psychopaths have no emotion. There was an absolute blankness there.” Eleanor Brown, the former New Hall inmate who West advised about men, describes her as ‘mumsy,’ saying: “She wears leggings. She shuffles around. She does cookery.” Of her advice, she tells the authors: “I was stunned. She came to my door and said, ‘you don’t want to spend the rest of your life the way I did; don’t make the [same] mistakes.” Inside: Women Behind Bars is the fourth in a series of books about life inside UK prisons. The first three examined men’s institutions. Until now, mum-of-three Emma says the experiences of incarcerated women hadn’t been fully explored. She says: “The world of women’s prisons is small and hidden. There are only 12 in England, yet they can be doing the work of a hospital, a detox unit, and a refuge all at once. Women come into custody by different routes and for different reasons to men, yet it’s a system built for men. It’s also a system in crisis, beset by self-harm and scarce resources.” High profile inmates like West are the exception, according to the authors. Jonathan says: “Female serial killers are statistically rare. The rarity itself lends them a quality of the abhorrent.” Few names spark more revulsion than Myra Hindley. She and her lover Ian Brady abducted, sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered five children. Convicted in 1966, Hindley spent 36 years behind bars in prisons including HMP Durham. There she befriended Rose West, but the authors claim they later became ‘sworn enemies’. Hindley’s police mugshot after her 1965 arrest - straw-blonde hair, flat expression and dead cold eyes - is one of the most recognised images in British crime history. Debbie James, a retired prison officer recalls: ”I actually met Myra Hindley. You wouldn’t have recognised her in the street. Very agreeable, mild and inoffensive. “People used to say, ‘Oh, when you see her, you’ll know, because her eyes are really evil.’ But they weren’t. They were just ordinary eyes. She worked as a hospital orderly. A trusted job. All the notorious prisoners tend to have a lot of friends, because people like to be associated with them. They tag on because of the fame.” Meanwhile, Vanessa Frake Harris recalls: “Myra Hindley was working on reception. She had a job. Keeping someone separate costs money and also isn’t good long-term for someone’s mental state.” Hindley was 60 when she died in West Suffolk Hospital in 2002, still serving life at HMP Highpoint prison. Emma says: “Her name remains a shorthand for a particular category of evil.” The depth of public hatred for her meant, according to Emma, she became “the prisoner who could never be freed.” Joanna Dennehy, 43, became only the third woman in British legal history to receive a whole life order, after Hindley and West. Convicted in 2013 of murdering three men in the Peterborough area, two of them strangers, and attacking two more, her trial judge described her as ‘cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative.’ She later told police she had intended to kill nine. While on remand, prison staff discovered a detailed escape plot in her diary, which involved murdering a female prison officer, severing one of their fingers and using it to fool the biometric security system. Former inmate Neah Tuohy was in HMP Bronzefield with Dennehy and tells the authors: “I didn’t find her scary at all. She’s got a little Mohican, like a skinhead, absolute machine in the gym. Really, really petite. But rock-solid.” Suzy Dymond-White, who has governed three prisons, cites Dennehy as a prisoner whose notoriety elevates her status in prison. She says in the book: “If you’ve got your face in the newspapers and everyone knows your name, that’s one way of being at the top of the pecking order. She [Dennehy] said herself before she went in that she was obsessed by her publicity, her profile, her notoriety.” Alongside tales about infamous female felons, Jonathan says the book also examines every day life for all women behind bars. He says: “Of course readers will always be interested in notorious prisoners. But actually, it was the unspoken stories, the everyday, that was just as compelling.” Incarceration, for example, doesn’t mean women stop being mums. Emma says : “Being a mother, even from prison, means women still have some sort of responsibility over birthdays and homework and school uniforms. One story which stays with me is that of Yvonne Simpson. Her account of giving birth in custody, and of the months that followed, is one of the most moving in this book.” Yvonne, who had run her own business before being jailed, spent part of her sentence on a mother and baby unit with two babies. She had post natal depression, but didn’t show it, fearing her child would be taken away. She was released from HMP Askham Grange in Yorkshire with her belongings piled on top of a double pushchair and no one there to collect her. In the book she recalls: “When I got on the train . . . it was just so silent. I was not used to silence. Women’s prisons are incredibly noisy.” With approximately 3,600 women behind bars in England and Wales - more than three quarters convicted of non-violent offences - Emma says: “Most of the prison population are not Rose West or Joanna Dennehy. They are women who stole to feed an addiction, who were present when a partner committed a crime, who fought back against violence, whose mental illness was never diagnosed.” She warns: “We're all one bad decision, one bad relationship away from potentially being in that situation.” *Inside: Women Behind Bars - Behind Closed Doors of Notorious Women's Prisons by Emma French and Jonathan Levi is published by Blink Publishing (Out 18th June 2026, £10.99)