The film begins during the late 1960s (during the first premiership of Harold Wilson) at the House of Lords, with Lord Longford, a regular prison visitor, presiding over a reception for a number of ex-convicts whom he had visited and corresponded with when they were incarcerated. He receives a letter from one of the most notorious criminals in Britain, the Moors murders Myra Hindley, who is several years into her Life imprisonment for taking part in the murder of three children with her boyfriend, Ian Brady.