Sonic Youth: The Murders Behind One of the Coolest Album Covers of All Time

0:00 This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is the story of one of the coolest album covers of all time, an album by one of the coolest bands of all time, A band that was unaware of the true crime story behind that album art, a true crime involving a pair of serial killers and an unlikely hero, a hero obsessed with rock and roll music that taught this hero how to keep his cool and playing it cool allowed him to escape from and ultimately bring down two of England's most notorious murderers, in part because of great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of

0:58 the show. That wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my mellotron called Guided by the Fright MK one. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to it. Must have been love by Roxette. And why would I play you that specific slice of Swiss cheese pop? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on June twenty sixth, nineteen ninety and that was the day Sonic Youth released their major label debut album Goop, the one with the drawing of two teenage rock and rollers caught up in one of England's most violent and disturbing true crimes.

1:42 On this episode the wild true crime story behind Sonic Youth's Goop, the Moors murders in an unlikely rock and roll hero.

1:52 I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. I have to read these words straight off of this album cover to make sure that I get them right. I stole my sister's boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road. I still remember where I was when I read those words, standing in the Harvard Square Newberry Comics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, holding this album. I couldn't have been older than sixteen, and I was mesmerized. What did these words mean? And what was this album that they were written on seemingly and sharpie by some crazed punk kid. What was this album album all about goo? And who was this band, Sonic Youth. I'd heard of Sonic Youth by that point.

3:08 I'd probably seen their earlier albums on EPs, perhaps from the SST label listed in fanzine adverts, or maybe I spied their logo on a patch on the back of one of the cooler punk rock kids that used to hang outside the Rat in Boston's Kenmore Square, or maybe on a sticker on the bathroom wall at one of the hardcore matinees that had recently begun Frequenting. But I'd never heard Sonic Youth. I didn't yet know that what was in the grus of that record was as cool as the caption on its cover. I stole my sister's boyfriend.

3:38 It was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road. What the hell was this? Were these lyrics from one of Sonic Youth's songs? And who was this couple illustrated on the cover of this album next to this caption? I knew that Sonic Youth had a girl in the band? Was this her? Was the dude next to her in the illustration her boyfriend or something one of the others from the band? And what did this caption mean? These two killed the girl's parents? Was this what Sonic Youth's songs were about? Murder? By the year nineteen ninety, Sonic Youth was poised to break out of the underground music scene and into the mainstream. Their nineteen ninety album Goo was to be their major label debut for DGC, the David

4:27 Geffen Company. Up to this point, Sonic Youth had built a loyal fan base of punk's hardcore kids, arts, school and college students, music fans, mostly youth, who identified with the band's sonic assault on convention both musically and socially. Sonic Youth. When Sonic Youth began back in nineteen eighty one, they weren't punk. Punk was dead, and they weren't new wave.

4:56 They were no wave, and they weren't just loud. They were noise, and they weren't your typical rock and roll band set up. There was a girl in the band and her name was Kim Kim Gordon, and she was badass, not some cutesy ornament, not some sultry front woman. She was gorgeous, sure, but beyond stereotyping. Her beauty seemed to spring from strength, not polish. And she played her bass with power and in a conventional tuning which anchored the noisy chaos created by the squalling feedback of guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo, and by the year nineteen eighty five, when drummer Steve Shelley joined the band, Kim Gordon had helped create what was at once one of the most driving and danceable rhythm sections in popular music, and she

5:47 was married to Thurston More. Sonic Youth was not fronted by a groupie, hustling alpha duche as were other rock bands. Sonic Youth contemporaries on MTV and countless groups for music history. No Sonic use guitarist and co singer on most of their tracks. Their creative instigator the six foot eight inch guitar player who sometimes played a stringed instrument with a screwdriver in order to elicit the appropriate type of drone to compliment his compositions. This dude was not Nicky six for Motley Crue. He was an artist in love with a fellow artist who happened to play bass in the same band with him and his other artist friends. In nineteen ninety this was damn near revolutionary. Still kind of

6:33 is actually. Go ahead and try to think of another culture defining rock band with a married couple in it. I'll wait see the closest you're going to come is the White Stripes, but they're an anomaly. And there's also Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac, but they weren't married and that relationship was a romantic shit show.

6:52 It was completely cliche, one band member cheating on his female band member partner while she was exploring the wonders of cocaine Enemas with the group Roadies, it was all convention, as cliche as a rock star dying at the age of twenty seven. Sonic Youth didn't do convention. Sonic Youth didn't do cliche, not on record, not on stage, not off stage, not in Kim in Thurston's relationship. The band was as anti cliche as could be and cool in an entirely new kind of way. The way they sounded was cool the power of Sonic Youth shows, their East Coast no way of avant garde esthetic and their West Coast hardcore energy. The way they looked was cool Oxford shirts and velvet underground wrapped around shades with Kim's single

7:41 striped mod dresses. And like I said, in the way they seemed to live as a band with a married couple at the core of the group's artist collective vibe. All of it signaled cool in a way you hadn't thought about before, not unless you were living on New York's Lower East Side or in Greg Ginn's shack back in the year eighties. And even if you were What's up Henry Rowlinson, Oh hey, Glenn Bronca, you weren't thinking about all of these different layers of coolness and executing them at the same time, alchemizing some sort of new cool thing that was about to turn on a new generation.

8:14 Otherwise you would have been in Sonic Youth and you weren't. They were, and they were cooler than we were. But was Sonic Youth cooler than the couple on the cover of their album Goo, cool enough to escape the glare of the international paparazzi, cool enough to escape murder? David Smith was fifteen years old when Pauline Reid disappeared from the Gordon district of Manchester, a city one hundred and fifty miles north of London. Pauline Reid was only sixteen.

8:49 It was nineteen sixty three. David Smith wasn't concerned with his community's missing girl. As a member of the Taylor Street Boys gang. He was busy fighting off the Open Shops who had invaded David's gang's turf in Gordon's Housing estates low income terrorists living no money, no jobs, no future, just violence and rock and roll. David could still hear the Dwayne Eddie riff echoing in his head. When the first punch hit, the bit of blood in his mouth fueled him. He swung back wildly, connecting with the jaw one of the open shop boys. The brass knuckles David wore ensured that the open chow boy wouldn't be coming back for more. David fought his way through the melee on the street. His boys, the Taylor Street Gang, had

9:40 the situation under control. David could keep the knife in his pocket. He pushed through the street fight and up onto the sidewalk. David knew she was watching him from inside Savori's cafe, and he knew what type of Imagy cut. As he emerged from the brawling bodies on the street, a street walking cheetah perched on cuban kill cowboy boots, drain pipe, skinny black jeans cuffed high to reveal a shocking dash of his pink socks. Studded belt, buttoned down black shirt, crucifix for protection hanging over his chest, perfectly styled, greased pompadora, slick, wet with sweat, slightly bloodied, sixteen and dangerous.

10:22 David Smith pushed open the door of the cafe into the sounds of Elvis Presley's It's Now Are Never blasting from the jukebox and made immediate eye contact with the girl with the dusty springfield makeup, lacquered beehive hairdoo and poodled skirt, seventeen year old Maureen Henley. David b lined it to Marene, grabbed her by the hips, pulled her toward him, and confidently swayed to the sounds of the King.

10:47 Their union was as inevitable as rock and roll, and little did either know the murders they would get swept up in would soon make them infamous. Their images blasted across the covers of newspapers all over the world, sensationalized in true crime scandal racks, and eventually on the cover on one of the coolest albums of all time. The illustration on the cover of Sonic Yus Goo is a depiction of David Smith and Maureen Henley, the boy with the rock and roll street gang look and the girl with the dusty Springfield makeup. If they appear to be more mod looking on the cover of Goo, that's purely accidental.

11:52 They weren't mods, they were rockers. The artist who depicted the couple on the newt Famous album is Raymond Petibone, brother of Black Flag guitarist at SST Records founder Greg Ginn. Prior to nineteen ninety, Sonic Youths had released two full length albums on SST, Evil and Sister. They then jumped ship to the Enigma label to release daydream Nation in nineteen eighty nine. At some point they became not just fans of, but friends with, Raymond Pettibone. Petibone, at the time was known for the album already created for Black Flag and other West Coast hardcore groups, stark, violent, anti authoritative illustrations and imagery that recontextualized images source from books, magazines, cartoons,

12:39 often accompanied by dark and quippi text that recontextualized the imagery into something unique. In a word, Petabone's work is punk. Here are some other words subversive, dangerous, larcenous, and again unique like real punk, no matter the context seventies eighties East West Coast, US UK. You know it when you hear it. With petobones art, you know it when you see it. Contextualization is at the heart of Raymond Petobone's work, or rather recontextualization, and the cover of Goo is no different that illustration of David Smith and Maureen Hinley. It's accompanied by those chilling words I stole my sister's boyfriend.

13:23 It was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road. Without those words, it's just a cool image, and with those words, the image is arresting. And that's how sonic youth Thurston Moore felt when he saw that piece of Petobone Aret arrested. Petobone took the image from an old true crime magazine called True Detective. There's still by my research anyway, no telling where those words came from. Did Petobone write them?

13:55 Did those words relate to the couple in the illustration, to David and Marene, to the crime and they were caught up in No? Did Thurston More draft those words in collaboration with the artist. He did not. Those words likely came from another true crime magazine or true crime article, some other bit of sensationalized history that the artists felt better fit this image. That recontextualization is in part what makes the image so cool. Recontextualization was also at the heart of Sonic Youth's art their music. Ever since their second studio album, Bad Moon Rising, released back in nineteen eighty five on the Homestead label, Sonic Youth began recontextualizing classic rock and American true crime and appropriating these elements

14:41 from the mainstream into underground culture. Bad Moon Rising was the title of a Creden's Clear Outer revival to a song by a band from the Bay Area that presented themselves as swamp creatures from the Bayou, and they wrote big, hook key radio hits designed to sell gazillions of albums to stone hippies for their corporate record label, Overlords. Sonic Youth was an experimental noise outfit from the East Coast who presented themselves as the antithesis of everything CCR stood for, and they wrote long, sometimes droney, sometimes driving sonic opuses that were designed to blow out your radio speakers. Bad Moon Rising may have nodded to CCR's swamps, but it sounded like the New York City Thurston Moore moved to

15:36 from the Connecticut suburbs in the seventies. Dissonant and extreme New York City at the time was a true crime. It was not entirely dissimilar from the creepy Crowley true crime cloud Kim Gordon grew up under in California a decade earlier. That was an American facade of normal ripped apart by Charles Manson's death Cult, a community living on the razor's edge of para rock stars and celebrities, fearing that the next home invasion making headlines might be their own young kids, tormented by thoughts of lunatic killers on the loose, prowling the streets, and sixty nine Mustangs for unsuspecting teenage hitchhikers to sacrifice in some hippie dippy occult blood ritual. That's what the song Death Valley sixty nine

16:22 from Bad Moon Rising was about, a dark true crime exploration of the American underbelly. It was more about Thurston Moor's and co writer No Wave collaborator Lyda Lunch's fascination with the Manson saga than it was about their own subjective fear fear, real fear, real, true crime paranoia that was reserved for the song Pacific Coast Highway, written by Kim Gordon for Sonic Youth's sister album. It's lyrics come on, get in the car, let's go for a ride somewhere.

16:55 I won't hurt you as much as you hurt me. Those lyrics trade the fear. Kim grew up in in southern California, in the shadow of Charles Manson's nihilistic True Crimes. Back in England in nineteen sixty six, nihilism was suddenly a concern of David Smith's. David Smith, the rock and roll street tough from Manchester, ended up marrying Mareen Hinley, the girl with the dusty Springfield makeup. He was just sixteen and she was eighteen. The two became fast friends with Maureene's sister Myra and Myra's husband, Ian Brady. Myra was twenty two, Ian was twenty six. It was August nineteen sixty four in the Gordon community of Manchester, another child had gone missing. Keith Bennett's parents joined Pauline Reid's

17:50 in despair. David Smith's precious rock and roll wasn't on the turntable or the radio. In Ian and Myra's home were the two couples hung out. Ian was decidedly not rock and roll. He had what he considered to be refined taste, preferring the sounds of Richard Wagner, the favorite composer of his hero Adolf Hitler. Ian had offensive tastes, and David hated him for it, but sixteen year old David tolerated his brother in law for the sake of his new wife. Ian was older than he was now family, and the two couples drank heavily together, and the drunker they got the weirder. Ian got Ian was a nihilist.

18:35 Ian believed life was meaningless and that the universe had no intrinsic purpose. Ian vibed on historical atrocities in his suit and tie. He affected the look of an intellectual who espoused the views of fellow nihilists like the Marquis de Sade and Frederic Nietzsche, and that morality was just a construct invented to protect the weak. Ian owned a copy of the Band Book just by the Marquis de Sade, and the book depicted extreme sexual violence and was widely viewed as an instrument of morals ab version. Ian made David read Justine, He made David provide notes on the band book. Ian wouldn't shut up about it, and David complied just to get Ian off his back. Ian and his wife Myra brought David and Myra's sister Mareene closer

19:23 into their twisted philosophy. David did his best to ignore Ian's eccentricities, and so did Maureen. But family is family, and the forsome picnicked out on the moors. The Moor's a bleak highland, a vast and isolated landscape, just a few miles outside Gordon, Manchester. It was the scene of one of Ian and Myra's sickest jokes, the older couple inviting the younger couple for a day out of wine and food out on the moors, picnicking on the precise patch of land where Ian and Myra had buried the body.

20:07 We'll be right back after this word word word chuck d from Public Enemy didn't want to hear the new song from Sonic Youth, which he was about to lay down a vocal for. He just wanted to get into the booth and cut it. He trusted Thurston More and he trusted Kim Gordon. The couple in their band, by nineteen ninety were synonymous with downtown cool. Chuck didn't even want to read Kim's lyrics. He just wanted to jump into the vocal booth and respond to whatever she sang and what Kim Gordon sang on What was to become the lead single off Sonic Youth's forthcoming major label debut, Goo was an empowerment manifesto cut from the cloth of a new kind of feminism. Her words were steeped in irony, intelligence,

21:04 and sex. It was a new decade, and Kim Gordon had some questions. I just want to know what are you going to do for me? I mean, are you going to liberate us girls from male, white corporate oppression? Chuck de responded with tell it like it is. Prior to this impromptu collab, Chuck had been recording down the Hall from Sonic Youth with his group Public Enemy. Thurston Moore was a massive hip hop fan and had been since the new genre exploded across the streets of New York and beyond over the past decade. Chuck didn't know that Sonic Youth knew somehow before anyone else the Public Enemy was going to call their new album Fear of a Black Planet. So when Chuck de sat in the vocal booth recording his guest spot on Sonic Youth's new tune,

22:00 a song he'd never heard before, he was mildly shocked when he heard Kim Gordon's vocal crackle in through his headphones with the lyrics don't be shy fear of a Female Planet. Chuck played it cool, grinning slightly while improvising his next lines, fear Baby. Let everybody know. That song was called cool Thing, and it's one of the coolest vocal duet performances you'll ever hear. Leave it to Thurston More to help orchestrate one of the coolest recordings to come out of the nineties, because for a decade and a half up to that point, Thurst and More have been burnishing his underground credentials and organically creating the undeniably cool aesthetic that his band would project. And this is because since the moment Thurston Moore arrived in New York

22:48 City in nineteen seventy six from his suburban hometown of Bethel, Connecticut, the dude was at almost every seminal rock and roll moment. The city had hosted all of that cool sprouting up from the cracks of the Lower East Side and throughout the Five Borrows, all the early punk, the New Wave explosion, the No Wave response, the early days of hip hop, the art pop exhibitions, the hardcore matinees, grunge, metal, college rock, avant garde, you name it. If it was cool, and if it had to do with music and was happening in New York, then Thurston Moore's record collection reflected that cool because Thurston Moore was there.

23:35 Yeah, Thurston was there. Thurston Moore, the tall kid who came up from behind from Connecticut, from the coachman with the kids.

24:02 From Risney in south of Houston. But Thurston was there.

24:11 He was there in nineteen seventy eight, he was there at the first SID show at Maxis, But Thurston was there.

24:34 He was there because he was there. But Thurston was there.

24:43 He was there in nineteen seventy six when the pumps over Kablondi.

24:48 At Sebbe Genis, he was vibing on.

24:52 The keyboard sounds without irony. He was the first guy playing Madonna to the punk kids.

25:00 He heard it at dance Materia. Everybody thought he was crazy, so they don't know. But Thurston was there.

25:11 With the better looking people with better ideas and more talent. They were actually.

25:18 Really, really nice.

25:23 I heard Thurston press the seven inch of every live song ever done by Venom at City.

25:30 Gardens, but with no music we shall.

25:32 See on stage rants none of the black metal tracks. I heard.

25:38 Thurston was on the guest list for the Richard ll show at the Saint Mark's Poetry Project.

25:44 When Elvis Costello sagd he wants to make a noise record. I hear that Thurston and his band has sold their guitar picks and bought screwdrivers. I hear that Thurston and his band has so the screwdrivers at bod Guitar Picks. I hear everybody that Thurston knows is more relevant than.

26:09 Everybody I know. But have you seen Thurston.

26:13 Record Johnson and Ma'am I'm dam Love of the Terror Calls, Swans, Kingsman, The Black Flag, Glenn Branco, The Germs, the.

26:21 Gray Recording, Henry and Nita double Nicholas on the game.

26:26 That's Klein, Ma'am Pussy Galora seven inches before they wrote it. Who's could do Agnostic Front, the Weirdo's Red Cross, Sunny Shak X.

26:34 Nirvana, or that Cole Birthday party on the raincoat, I screamed, Derek b and Rakim kleenex CHACONI Youth, the Young, alber Riches, saque chart Alas Kochhe, the X, Race, FECs, Faith Boyd, Split, the Slit SAgs, Philip Glass, She did, Jesus and the Jerks, the Jills, the Obsessed.

26:56 The botoms, the bottoms, the bottoms, the bottoms. Thurston Moore was very much there in his apartment in nineteen ninety, rifling through some handmade Raymond Pettobone magazines zines, hunting for an image to use for his band's next album's cover art. He and the rest of the band wanted to use a petabone illustration of Joan Crawford with their lips puckered out, and to call their major label debut album, Blowjob. There's a question mark the end of Blowjob. The subversiveness of such a move is so thick that I'm not going to ruin it here with an explanation, but I will say that this idea did not go over well with Gary Gersh Their a and r Man at DGC, Thurston played it cool. There was plenty more subversiveness to mine. Instead,

28:26 he landed upon a petobone image of a teenage looking couple in wrap around shades, one smoking a cigarette and the other looking down. The caption read, I stole my sister's boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat in flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road. What it all meant, Thurston didn't know or care. All he knew was that it was, in a word, cool.

28:54 The crime at the core of that image was a mystery, just as the crime of the missing children in Manchester back in nineteen sixty five was a mystery, a mystery that David Smith was about to unintentionally solve. By the fall of nineteen sixty five, a total of four children had been reported missing in Manchester, going back as far as July nineteen sixty three. They included, in order of their disappearance, Pauline Reid sixteen, John Kilbride twelve, Keith Bennett twelve, and Leslie Anne Downey, aged ten. On the night of October seventh, nineteen sixty five, David Smith left his wife Maureen at home and went by his brother and sister in laws place, Ian Brady and Myra Henley had summoned David.

29:44 They had some wine they wanted to give him. When David arrived, Myra quickly ushered him inside and closed the door. Things were very wrong in the living room. Before he could even react, David saw Ian standing over a young man lying on a piece of furniture. In a split second, David saw an axe in Ian's hands rise up above his head, and in another instant, before David could say or do anything, Ian's axe came down hard into the young man. The young man fell off the furniture, screaming bloody murder as he made a feeble attempt to crawl away.

30:22 David stood and shot. Ian brought the axe down again. That stopped the young man from moving. All of a sudden there was blood everywhere on the walls, on Ian's face, all over the axe, running across the living room's hardwood floor, covering it in black. Again, Ian brought down the axe, more blood, a final screen, and then the axe again, more blood. Ian through the axe and then straddled the young man and began strangling him. The white snow from the television was the room's only light, and the sound of the TV's speaker's white noise overtook the fading gurgle of the strangled young man, and then the gurgling stopped completely.

31:08 Ian let go of his neck and Myra shut off the television. There was just silence. David was frozen in fear. Myra broke the tension, saying, that's it, that's the messiest one. Yet David snapped too. He knew, he knew in that moment who he was with, the murderers behind Manchester's missing children. Fear overtook him. He was next. He was certain Ian and Myra were going to kill him. But Ian had other plans. He wanted David in on his murderous, nihilistic action.

31:44 He wanted another serial killer, a third partner in crime. This murder that Ian and Myra had staged in front of David was designed to entrap David, to make him complicit, to pull him into their crime along with his wife. But that wasn't all. Now the scene needed cleaning up. Disposing of dead bodies was hard work. Three sets of hands were better than two. David played it cool. He did what Ian and Myra said. He was afraid that that axe would be brought down on his skull. Next, he swallowed whatever fear he had in him, tamped down the revolting feeling in his stomach, and went to work with Ian and Myra. They trust the body a victim whose name was Edward Evans, and they carried Edward's body into an upstairs bedroom. And then they got on their

32:32 knees and sopped up the spilled blood with rags, removed the bits of brains from the walls, and when it was all done, the three of them sat in the rising morning sunlight and drank tea. David played along. It was the only thing he could do. It was the only way of escaping, of getting out of this house alive.

32:53 Go along, do what they said, get it all over with and get out with your life like Elvis and King Creole. Play it cool, and that's exactly what he did. Ian and Myra were confident in David's complicity. They made plans to see each other later in the day to dispose of the body. David walked out of their apartment away from the murder scene, went straight home, told his wife, Myra's sister Maureen, exactly what happened, and then they called the cops. In nineteen eighty six, Thurston Moore sang the words We're going to kill the California Girls in the song Expressway to Your Skull also known as Madonna Sean in Me from the band's third studio album Evil. A year later, Kim Gordon saying come on, get in the car,

34:11 Let's go for a drive somewhere. I won't hurt you as much as you'll hurt me. In the song Pacific Coast Highway from Sonic Youth's next album, Sister. In one, lyric Thurston Moore personifies the deepest fear Kim Gordon had as a teenager growing up in California being abducted and murdered by a West Coast sociopath, being a victim of the Manson family. We're gonna kill the California Girls. In the other Kim puts herself on the side of the road with that killer as he manipulates her into his grip.

34:45 Come on, get in the car, Let's go for a drive somewhere. I won't hurt you as much as you'll hurt me. Both songs Expressway to Your Skull and Pacific Coast Highway continued the Sonic Youth tradition of subverting class to rock cliche. The We're Gonna Kill the California Girls lyric takes direct aim at the heart of the Beach Boys American dream, while Pacific Coast Highway indirectly crawls its way into the American prime of the century, the one that was supposedly inspired by a Beatles song Helter Skelter.

35:19 Both songs Ooh's paranoid weirdness, that feeling you get when the moment you're in turns surreal when you see yourself in the movie you never wanted to be in. It was the same feeling David Smith had when he arrived at Ian and Myra's home the night Edward Evans was murdered. The feeling David Smith now once again had sitting in the backseat of a police car with his wife Maureen, both feeling the harsh glare of the public spotlight for David's part and what had come to be known as the Moore's murders. After he escaped from the murder scene, David Smith, along with Maureen Henley, his wife, armed themselves with a knife and a screwdriver and went to the nearest phone booth, called the police and turned Ian Brady

36:06 and Myra Henley In. David accompanied the police to Ian and Myra's home, where the body of Edward Evans was quickly discovered. So were two luggage tickets from the Manchester Central Railway station. Ian's luggage at the station was located and searched. In it and audio tape on it the horrifying sounds of ten year old Leslian Downey being murdered and pleading for her life. Also in the luggage photographs of Ian and Myra posing out on the moors in different locations. The investigators realized that Ian and Myra's photos were markers. It was their sick way of remembering where they'd buried the bodies, remembering so they could bring David and Maureen out to picnic on top of the buried bodies.

36:59 In the weeks to come, the bodies of Lesliean Downey and John Kilbride were disinterred. Pauline Reid's remains were not found until twenty years later. To this day, the remains of Keith Bennett have never been found. With Ian and eventually Myra under arrest, a trial was set. Both pleaded not guilty. Incredibly, both strategically lied on the stand to implicate David Smith as the driving force behind the murder of Edward Evans. Their lies were widely believed to be true.

37:32 From the minute the news broke, the public suspected David Smith of being a child murderer. The Moore's murders were instantly international news. A global press corps in snarled Manchester, and the need for storylines surrounding the murder was set. Over one hundred and fifty journalists secured press credentials for the trial. They all needed an angle. Some approached David Smith with intellectual laziness. Looked like a punk with that greasy rock and roll pompadour, clad and all black. He must be guilty. He had a juvenile delinquent passed, he was part of a street gang. Of course, he's a murderer.

38:12 He was seventeen years old and clearly part of all that was wrong with this generation. Lock him up, and David did himself no favors when he accepted payments from News of the World to tell his side of the story. David was broke, and yes, he was seventeen, and now he was internationally known as a rock and roll sociopath.

38:34 His job prospects were less than zero. The money for his story was the only way to survive, as he saw it, but the public didn't see it that way. The newspapers and the news programs covered two trials, the official trial of Ian Brady and Myra Henley and the unofficial public opinion trial of the Rock and Roll juvenile delinquent David Smith and his wife. David and Maureene were vilified, slurred, dragged in the press. Their lives threatened. David was under attack everywhere he went, verbally and physically. Many in Manchester and across the globe wanted him dead. The story was front page news in the New York Times. The trial was widely anticipated, and the guilt of David and Maureen hotly debated. On the way to the courthouse, the two

39:30 sat in the back seat of a police car as they were being escorted to the proceedings through a massive crowd on the street, not just journalists and photographers and news program cameramen, but ordinary onlookers, all trying to sneak a peek at the now infamous juvenile delinquents, whom many believed to be guilty of murder. The crowd screamed for David.

39:53 It reminded him of the Beatlemanian newsreels he'd seen. The crowd swarmed the police car, which was moving at a snail's pace. David and Maureen were terrified. The crowd beat their fists on the car, screaming bloody murder at the petrified couple. Maureen fingered her pack of cigarettes. David adjusted the sunglasses. The cop behind the wheel managed to quiten the pace a bit, and the panda car slowly parted the sea of people, and they continued moving slowly, careful not to run anyone over. David spotted a journalist jogging alongside the car. Photographers are stapping picks mid chase. He pushed his bangs from his forehead. He was sweating profusely, so much so that no amount of hair grease was

40:37 going to hold that pompadoor in place. Maureen lit her cigarette to calmer nerves. Their car stopped at a red light. The courthouse was almost in sight just around the corner. The cop in the passenger seat turned to the couple in the back and they were almost relieved for a second, and then the cop said, prepare yourself for a bumpy ride.

41:02 Just then the car turned onto the street with the courthouse, and an ocean of people rushed toward them. The car was engulfed. They were moving once again the snail space. The screams outside got louder, and the pounding on the windows got more intense. The flashbulbs brighter, the fear inside the car white hot. David and Maureene were dripping in sweat, but chill into the unfocused eye, keeping their cool outside, David spied a photographer breaking through the crowd beyond Marene's window to her right. He looked ahead, careful not to give the vulture anything. Mareen ignored the photographer too. She dragged from her smoke, played a coolerself, stared ahead, and the picture was taken. The picture that would later bring

41:53 even more cool to what was already one of the coolest bands of all time. The couple immortalized in one shot. They weren't captured for all time looking scared. They weren't captured for all time looking like victims, and they weren't captured for all time looking like villains either. Instead, David and Maureen were captured looking cool, like Dwayne Eddie and Dusty Springfield, not like two kids being scared to death by a Hornet's nest of public judgment. David and Maureen made it through the trial. Ian Brady was convicted of murdering Edward Evans, Leslie Anne Downey, and John Kilbride. Myra was convicted of murdering Leslie Ann Edward and as an accessory after the fact in the John Kilbrad murder, the

42:45 two later confessed to the murders of Pauline Reid and Keith Bennett. Ian was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences. He died in prison at age seventy nine in twenty seventeen. Myra was sentenced to life, and she also died in at the age of sixty in two thousand and two. David and Maureen barely survived the public scrutiny after the trial.

43:08 They divorced in nineteen seventy three. David Smith lived under constant suspicion and threat. Part of the public always blamed him for not stopping Ian Brady from murdering Edward Evans, but the reality was that David survived Ian Brady's murder of Edward Evans and lived to help bring Ian and Myra to justice. Most importantly, he prevented the killing of more children and brought an end to the Moore's murders.

43:36 David Smith was a hero, He just looked like a juvenile delinquent. That type of superficial judgment David Smith fell under. It's a cliche, the dangerous looking rock and roll youth. It was one of many classic rock and roll cliches that Sonic Youth subverted. There was no glossy imagery on the cover of their major label debut album Goo. There was a black and white illustration of two mysterious teenagers who unknowingly got caught up with some serial killers. And there were no type liner notes espousing the virtues of the musicians who played on Goo. There was sharp eyed texts that said, I stole my sister's boyfriend. It was all whirlwind, heat and flash. Within a week, we killed my parents and hit the road. Sonic Youth didn't sing

44:24 songs about cliched unrequited rock and roll love. They sang about Death Valley in nineteen sixty nine, killing the California girls on an expressway to your Skull, and spree killers on the Pacific Coast Highway. They didn't affect your typical rock and roll image either. They took the stage and called Oxford shirts and with a quote unquote girl in the band. But for all their subversiveness, Sonic Youth did become the victim of one rock and roll cliche, the twenty seventh Club. In October twenty eleven, twenty seven years after they were married, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, announced they were separating. Thirst and Moore, after avoiding the cliche trappings of the chick shagging rock and roll front man,

45:13 have been discovered having an affair with another woman. His marriage was dead at just twenty seven years old, and his band was dead too. Sonic Youth played their last show on November twenty fourth, twenty eleven. But like that image of David Smith and his wife Maureen on the cover of Goo Sonic Youth, the band remains eternally cool despite any connection to Disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace Land.

46:10 All right, guys, thanks for checking out this episode on Sonic Youth. Hope you doug it listen. Question of the Week This week coolest.

46:15 Album cover of all time?

46:16 What is it?

46:17 Let Me Know? Six one seven nine O six six six three eight is it Goo?

46:20 By Sonic Youth is it something else I want to hear from y'all at Disgrace sampod, on thesocials, disgrace lampod.

46:26 At gmail dot com, on email.

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46:34 Here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network in iHeart Podcasts. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelamdpod dot com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it, and if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgrace lampod dot com slash. Membership members can listen to every episode of disgracelan ad free, rate and review the show, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at Disgrace lampod and on YouTube at YouTube dot com slash at disgracelampod rock a rolla, He's a

47:21 bad don Man