A mum wrongly charged with murdering her six-year-old son has revealed how she was jailed with genuine child-killers Myra Hindley and Rose West.
Ruth Neave was cleared of killing son Rikki. His body had been found naked and laid out in a star shape in 1994.
But the 53-year-old was jailed for seven years in 1995 after admitting child cruelty in relation to Rikki and two of his sisters.
Supported by husband Gary, she welcomed the conviction this week of James Watson, who was 13 when he lured Rikki to his death in woods.
It can now be revealed that Neave met Hindley and West while serving her sentence on the notorious H Wing at HMP Durham.
She said: “I was sat on a bed and Myra said: ‘You are not a murderer’.
“I replied: ‘What do you mean?’ and she said: ‘You never murdered Rikki’.
“I took it as a compliment but a weird one coming from her.”
Moors murderer Hindley killed five children during the 1960s alongside her evil lover Ian Brady. West was found guilty of 10 murders between 1971 and 1987 alongside husband Fred West.
Ruth said life in the prison alongside many of Britain’s worst female prisoners, including IRA terrorists and sex offenders, had been “awful”.
Watson, 41, thought he had got away with the murder in Peterborough, Cambs, after police became convinced Ruth was the killer despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.
When cross-examined by Watson’s barrister at his Old Bailey trial, Ruth had to deny murdering her son.
She also had to deny an interest in black magic and bragging about being a “priestess of the occult”.
Former assistant chief constable Paul Fullwood, who was in charge of the cold case investigation that eventually led to Watson’s arrest in 2020, said the original hypothesis of how Ruth had killed her son was “fanciful”.
He added: “As a new team, we can’t say why some evidence was not used originally but we know that this would not happen now and our re-investigation has resulted in the person responsible for Rikki’s death finally being found and dealt with.”
