TODAY'S front page picture of Myra Hindley is one of the most notorious in the country's history. One glance at it and her eyes drag you back - you know you are staring into the face of evil.

For a younger generation which has grown up on a diet of despicable crimes - Jamie Bulger, Rosie Palmer, Soham, Sarah Payne - it may seem a little strange that this face from so long ago still haunts us so. After all, the instantly recognisable Hindley killed five times nearly 30 years ago - can you name without thinking the gunman at Dunblane who killed 16 children only six years ago?

There are many reasons why she is so etched into the nation's psyche. After the horrors of the Second World War and the starkness of the austerity years, Britain was at last relaxing into the Swinging Sixties. The Moors Murders came as a horrible jolt.

Back then, it was a more innocent age. Children did play on the streets without parents worrying too much. The murders ushered in an era where children could be snatched from streets and fairgrounds to gratify the perverted lust of their elders.

Very importantly, the murders were a media age first. It was the first time that the papers had crawled all over such a gruesome case. Nowadays, as Soham showed, police investigations seem to be run for the benefit of the cameras - a person seems to learn of their arrest by watching it on TV. Back then, it was a horribly fascinating novelty.

It was television that captured the grimness of those dank moors which added to the reputation of Hindley. These were sinister places that had previously only been found in a Bronte novel. Now anyone taking the M62 over Saddleworth shudders as they drive.

Hindley was part of this new media age: she made a 16-minute 21-second long audio tape of the last desperate moments of ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. All who heard Lesley cry for her mother and then appeal to God before her voice was stifled realised, possibly for the first time in history, what it was like to be in on an act of real evil.

But Ian Brady - Hindley's accomplice, lest we forget - is not reviled in such a way. This is partly because most people, even at the time, accepted that he needed help.

The biggest reason, though, is that Hindley was a woman. Although we conveniently overlook someone like West Auckland's poisoner Mary Ann Cotton, who did away with 11 of her own children, women are supposed to mother children, not kill them.

So Hindley has been demonised. There will be few who mourn her passing. And Home Secretary David Blunkett will be the most relieved man in the country as he has escaped entering history as the man who released the icon of evil from jail.