IT feels like the same chilling stare that for many is the embodiment of pure evil. The peroxide hair and pallid skin are unmistakably that of Myra Hindley, the child killer. She is wearing the same woollen coat she wore for her 1965 mugshot.

But look again and there is glitter on the picture. The mouth is fuller than Hindley’s, the face prettier. Then it dawns. It’s Kate Moss, the supermodel.

Moss, who last week celebrated her 34th birthday with a party that was meant to last an hour for every year of her life, has been turned into one-half of the moors murderers by a Yorkshire-born artist.

Pete Doherty, the Babyshambles singer and her erstwhile lover, is shown as Ian Brady, Hindley’s partner in one of the 20th century’s most infamous murder sprees.

Images of the celebrity couple were superimposed on the original mugshots using computer technology and then printed on canvases with alternate gold and silver sheens.

Last week the pictures were exhibited at the London Art Fair in Islington, north London, where many onlookers were convinced they depicted the moors murderers. Now all four images have been sold by the Bankrobber gallery for what is thought to be £28,000.

The work is meant as a queasy observation on the self-destructive hedonism of some of Britain’s biggest celebrities. Both Moss and Doherty have been photographed taking cocaine.

Russell Young, 48, the artist who produced the images, said last week that he was interested in “double meanings and double standards”. He added that he was interested in seeing the effect that the Moss portrait had on people.

He said: “It seduces the viewer. Her face, the glitter on the canvas and the glossy black enamel paint are very appealing. People are drawn in and then suddenly, you can see them thinking, hang on a minute, isn’t that Myra Hindley . . .” But it’s Moss’s huge eyes, cheekbones and provocative attitude that stare out from the picture.

Young, who is married to the actress Finola Hughes, who appears in the television soap General Hospital, described the image as his “ultimate picture, the perfect storm, a perfect combination of fame and shame”.

The artist, a former celebrity photographer and music video director, has been producing Andy Warhol-style prints, many of them based on mugshots for the past seven years. He calls them “pig portraits”. He started the series after taking a picture of Mickey Rourke, the actor, only to see a much more revealing image of Rourke in a police picture when he was arrested a week later.

“I realised that that mugshot really captured for real what we had been trying to create,” he said. His previous works include pictures based on the mugshots of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ bassist, the actress Juliette Lewis and Snoop Dogg, the rapper.

Young added: “There are so many extraordinarily talented people I knew – musicians, actors – who didn’t make it to my age and whose lives spun out of control. Drugs are just one of the snakes. Kate Moss and Pete Doherty both seem to have this self-destructiveness. For good or for bad, together they seem to have this kind of electricity.”

Young produced his pictures after adapting thumbnail caricatures of the couple as the moors murderers created by Neil Hepburn, a satirist. Hepburn has been given two prints of Young’s work.

Louisa Buck, a former Turner prize judge and author of Owning Art, said she thought the pictures were “emptily provocative”. “It’s a cheap idea, utterly vacuous and ill-conceived,” she said. “What on earth has Kate Moss got to do with Myra Hindley?”

This weekend spokesmen for both Moss and Doherty refused to comment. Neither collaborated in any way.

Young now lives in Santa Barbara, California, and works in New York where his latest show – which includes an image of Snow White in bed with the Seven Dwarfs – opens this week.

His interpretation of Brady and Hindley mirrors changing attitudes in British society. As recently as 1997 a plan to exhibit a painting of Hindley by another Yorkshire artist, Marcus Harvey, at the Royal Academy led to the resignation of two members of the academy. Even Hindley, who died aged 60 in 2002, asked for it to be withdrawn. The painting was pelted with eggs and had to be protected by a screen.

Brady, who was 70 this month, is now incarcerated in the high-security Ashworth psychiatric hospital, Merseyside.

He and Hindley killed at least four children and a youth and buried all but one of the bodies along the Saddleworth Moor near Oldham in Lancashire. Last week it was claimed that Brady was about to name a sixth victim, a 14-year-old called Jenny Tighe.

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