Myra Hindley: born 1942, convicted 1966, died yesterday, still a prisoner

Myra Hindley, Britain's most notorious female prisoner, has died aged 60. She received the last rites yesterday afternoon after a week in hospital with a chest infection. Her health had been failing for some years.

With her death, one of the most bitter controversies in British criminal justice also comes to a close. Jailed in 1966 for abetting her partner, Ian Brady, in the murder of three children, Hindley had served 36 years in prison, 11 more than the tariff set by the Lord Chief Justice in 1982. In 1987, Hindley finally confessed to the murders of two more children.

Many people, most notably the late Lord Longford, had campaigned for her release. But such was the public revulsion against the crimes committed by Brady and Hindley that no home secretary had ever given the smallest indication there might have been a case to be answered.

Most recently, David Blunkett joined that tradition and vowed that, for Hindley, life would mean life.

Hindley had made legal challenges against her sentence on several occasions. One challenge she had no involvement in is likely to bring to an end the practice by which politicians can override the tariffs set by judges. A case, brought by Edward Fitzgerald QC, is being examined by a specially convened panel of seven law lords who will present their findings next month.

There had been uproar about the prospect of change, more or less all of it centring on how unacceptable the release of Hindley would be. Now Hindley is dead, it is to be hoped this important issue can be looked at a little more dispassionately. Until now, the obsession with Hindley has dominated and skewed the debate.

Hindley's crimes were terrible, but they do not explain why her fate has remained darkly iconic for so many years.

Commentators suggested that her mugshot alone, reprinted countless times and even the subject of a controversial portrait by the artist Marcus Harvey, is so arrestingly cold, hard and ruthless-looking, that it ensured the memory of her crimes would never fade.

It did not help Hindley's cause that for years after the trial ended, uncertainty remained about two other missing children. Brady admitted to their murder in 1987, although it is usually reported that the confession was a joint one.

Nor did it reassure anyone that Hindley waited many years before suggesting that she might be able to locate unrecovered bodies on Saddleworth Moor, only for her brief tastes of press-monitored freedom to end in nothing but appalling disappointment for the families involved.

For many, it is the detail of the crimes that repulses most. Hindley had never been charged with taking part in the torture or killing of the victims, even though she aided Ian Brady faithfully

But she told Lesley Ann Downey to shut up when she called for her mother and pleaded for rescue. That struck most people as a denial of feminine instinct too complete to be forgiven.

Certainly, although her guilt was less by far than Brady's, revulsion against her involvement has been as great, if not greater, because of her gender. Although her own crimes were terrible, the judge at her trial in 1966, and almost all others who have been in contact with her during her imprisonment, agreed she was far less responsible than he.

Prior to meeting Brady, she had been a "normal sort of girl" and a devout Catholic. It is certain she fell under the influence of a powerfully psychopathic man and, in a sense, she can be viewed as one of his lesser victims herself.

Brady continues, even through his three-year hunger strike, to hate and despise Hindley. He claims that, when he has died, coded letters from her can be published that will confirm she was more complicit with him in the murders than she has claimed.

But even among those who believed a degree of mercy ought to have been shown to Hindley, who took part in the abductions and burials when she was 21, it was difficult to see how her release could be successfully achieved, in a media climate still so zealously insistent that for Hindley "life must mean life".

It may not be compassionate or humane to say it, but her death does bring a particularly shrill history of vengefulness and hatred to an end.

The controversy that surrounded Hindley's continuing incarceration is over now, and so is her punishment. Perhaps it is best it has ended in this way.