60 years ago, a boy named Keith Bennett vanished – and never came home
On 16th June 1964, the 12-year-old was walking to his grandmother’s house when the Moors Murderers lured him to his death
“Keith had little time for anything but laughter and nature.”
This is how 68-year-old Alan Bennett remembers his older brother Keith, who vanished from his Manchester home when he was just 12 years old. Yet to the British public, the name “Keith Bennett” is almost completely synonymous with one of the most infamous series of crimes in living memory; one that the tabloids dubbed “The Moors Murders.”
Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children. Keith was the third of the couple’s young victims, and as of 2024 he tragically remains the only one whose remains were never recovered from Saddleworth Moor.
60 years on, with every possible lead having been exhausted, Brady and Hindley both deceased (in 2017 and 2002 respectively) and no new reliable information coming to light in at least fifteen years, the case now sits with Greater Manchester Police’s Cold Case Unit.
A “happy-go-lucky” boy
Above: Keith (far left) photographed with his three youngest siblings: Alan (centre left), Margaret (centre right) and Ian (far right).
On 12th June 1964, Keith Bennett turned twelve years old. He celebrated the day with his heavily-pregnant mother Winnie, his stepfather Jimmy Johnson – whom Winnie had married in 1962 – and his younger siblings Susan, Sylvia, Alan, Ian and Margaret. Susan was Jimmy’s eleven-year-old daughter from a previous marriage who had been happily adopted into her new family, and with virtually no age difference between her and Keith, the two got on harmoniously. Margaret was, at that time, the youngest at only three years old. The family resided at 29 Eston Street in Chorlton-on-Medlock, just bordering the Longsight area.
At only four-foot-six, Keith was small for his age and short-sighted to the point where he was all but blind without his glasses, yet did not let that hinder his love of sports – particularly football and swimming. He was close to completing his first year at Victoria Park Secondary Modern School, and Winnie remembered her son as a boy with a “happy-go-lucky attitude and a cheeky grin.”
This sentiment was universal across those who knew the lad, and Alan has poignantly declared that his older brother was “an ordinary, uncomplicated child, with his head in the clouds most of the time.”
Keith was a habitual daydreamer to the point where his school performance suffered – particularly in reading – but a 1962 report card from Ravensbury Street Primary School acknowledged that he was a hard worker all the same, as well as “happy and cheerful.” He was good at art and also enjoyed trainspotting, as well as exploring the local park to collect leaves, twigs, caterpillars and coins. Alan’s tribute continues:
“Keith was undoubtedly one of life’s more sensitive souls. We kids were all upset when the tortoise we kept as a pet at our old house in Clayton died, but Keith was most affected. The two of us used to love lying in the grass in the garden, watching it lumber towards us, and we panicked whenever we couldn’t find it, but it was always about somewhere. When it died, at first we thought it was just hibernating. But then we found it had died. We buried it in the garden, marking its resting place with a lollypop stick cross. Keith worried about it even then, and wanted to dig it up in case it was only sleeping. But Gran eventually persuaded him that it had passed away.”
The Johnson family house was too small for all of the children to sleep there, and so Winnie and her widowed mother, Mrs. Gertrude Bennett, agreed that the children would alternate nights between the Johnson family home and their grandmother’s – usually the boys would go together and then the girls would, but this wasn’t always the case. Mrs. Bennett lived on Morton Street in Longsight, which backed onto the Hope Valley railway line and was about a fifteen-minute walk from 29 Eston Street.
Three days after turning twelve, Keith broke a lens in his glasses during a school swimming lesson at Victoria Baths on Hathersage Road, adjacent to Eston Street. Winnie retained them for the sake of getting them repaired in a few days’ time, but was keen to keep a watchful eye on her son in the meantime.
The next evening – Tuesday 16th June – Keith was due to stay at his gran’s with Alan, Ian and Margaret, and Winnie had made plans to go to the eight-o-clock bingo session at St. Aloysius School in Ardwick. She decided that she would watch her son cross the busy Stockport Road, and at around 7:45pm she and Keith left the house shortly after the other three children did. He was wearing a striped lilac t-shirt, blue jeans, black plastic shoes and a white leather jacket, and had only one shilling in his pocket.
Whilst the three younger children all safely reached their gran’s home before 8pm, Winnie and Keith were several minutes behind due to how slowly the heavily-pregnant Winnie was walking, and after turning past the primary school on Plymouth Grove West, Keith saw a few female school-friends and crossed the street to meet them. They shared some banter, with Keith teasing and threatening to thump them. Winnie shouted over to him “to be careful”. She remembered:
“He just give me one of them big grins of his, as much to say don’t worry, mam. And them’s the last words I spoke to him.”
They soon reached the crossing at the junction at Stockport Road, and Winnie waved Keith goodbye at about 7:55pm, watching him disappear down the usual path of Upper Plymouth Grove, a side street near the Daisy Works.
This was the last time Keith Bennett was seen alive.
The murder
Along Upper Plymouth Grove was the junction at Dryden Street, which led directly into Westmoreland Street. Myra Hindley often parked her mini-van along that street when she was visiting the Brady home.
Hindley’s and Brady’s respective accounts – given to police two decades later - of both Keith’s abduction and murder differ, but what his killers did agree on is that Keith was lured into Hindley’s van, driven to an area of Saddleworth Moor called Wessenden Head Moss (more specifically, according to Hindey, the area around Hoe Grain and Shiny Brook) before being ambushed, sexually assaulted and strangled to death by Brady. Brady claimed that Hindley was present at the scene of the murder, but Hindley claimed that she waited on a nearby plateau of land for Brady to return without Keith and saw nothing of either the attack, assualt or murder.
But because Keith’s body has never been found, and because there is no surviving evidence around his abduction and murder, there is absolutely nothing concrete to indicate exactly what Keith went through in his final moments. There is no autopsy to confirm Keith’s cause of death; there is no indication as to whether he was or wasn’t buried in the same area as the other children on the moor were, and with the Wessenden Head Moss area having been fully searched by police, both Brady and Hindley have now taken the truth – whatever the truth may be – to their graves.
All that is known are the immense efforts that both police and Keith’s family went to in the days, weeks, months, years and eventually decades after he went missing that ruled out certain locations, both on and off the moor, as to where his remains may have been buried. This article explains more around the later searches in the Wessenden Head Moss area.
Immediate aftermath
Winnie Johnson (left) and her daughter Margaret talking to Sheila Kilbride (mother of then-missing boy John Kilbride) on 24th June 1964. Neither were yet aware that their children had been killed by Brady and Hindley.
The immediate police searches – beginning on 18th June – concentrated within a mile’s radius of Longsight. There was an extensive search of the local railway sidings due to Keith’s love of trainspotting, in case a serious accident had occurred or perhaps he had wandered off distracted and gotten himself lost. Particular care and attention was drawn to the fact that he was very short-sighted without his glasses.
Within four days of Keith’s disappearance, fifty police officers – many with tracker dogs – were searching derelict buildings, empty homes, parks, open spaces and school buildings within a mile’s radius of Keith’s home; mostly the Victoria Park area. The search area soon widened as far as Reddish in Stockport. House-to-house inquiries were conducted across the Longsight area, and hundreds of leaflets carrying Keith’s photograph and description were handed out.
One especially tragic detail in all of this is that Winnie had not even realised her son was missing until the next morning. Neither she nor her mother had a telephone in her home, and so Winnie had understandably assumed that Keith had made it safely to his grandmother’s house – as he had done hundreds of times before:
“My mam came up to our house [that morning] and I said, ‘Where’s Keith?’ because normally she brought him up with her on her way to her job. She was a cleaner at Toc H in Victoria Park in them days, so she’d bring the kiddie back early.
“She said he hadn’t come to her last night. She said she’d been expecting him, but then she thought I must have made some other arrangements.”
They panicked. Winnie went to Keith’s school to check if he had shown up there, and when she learned that he hadn’t, she phoned the police. Gertrude inevitably, yet needlessly, blamed herself over her grandson’s disappearance, and she would spend the next two years searching derelict buildings in vain.
On 24th June, eight days after Keith disappeared, Winnie and little Margaret were photographed on the doorstep of the Kilbride home, talking to missing boy John Kilbride’s mother Sheila. It had now been seven months since John – also aged 12 - had vanished (it was later discovered that Brady and Hindley had abducted him from Ashton Market before murdering him and burying him on Saddleworth Moor), and the Manchester Evening News covered the meeting and made note of the other similarities between his and Keith’s cases: both were the first-born children of big families, and both had gone missing without a trace. Sheila warned Winnie to be wary of all of those who come knocking on their door, and that her family had become all too familiar with hoaxers and lunatics.
A week after the meeting, Winnie went into premature labour and gave birth to a healthy boy named David. He was the first of three brothers Keith would never meet. Amidst coping with a new baby and Keith being missing, a fresh nightmare started for the family when Jimmy was hauled into the police station for questioning over Keith’s disappearance. He recalled:
“They accused me of killing him, because I was his stepfather. I don’t blame them, I’m glad they explored every possibility, they had a job to do. But it was terrible at the time. I was very fond of the lad, and to be accused of doing away with him was too much, what with all the other upset.
“Every time I spent the day at the police station I’d come home and all the neighbours would be hanging over their gates, ever so friendly like, dying to know what was happening. They’d seen me being driven off in a cop car, and I’m sure that was enough to make half of them think I was guilty.”
Detectives tore up the floorboards of the home, which enabled them to access underneath the entire terraced row. They inspected the concrete in the family’s back garden to ensure that none of it had been freshly set, and they even combed out the garden of the retirement home that backed onto the Johnson household. But the worst time was on a Sunday morning when the family were in bed, and the police hauled Jimmy away. Winnie remembered that he “didn’t come back all day. Apparently someone had told the police that Jimmy had been drinking in the town and talking about what he’d done to Keith.” Even though this was blatantly false and Jimmy was released later in the evening, it caused even more friction within the household. Winnie explained:
“Jimmy was getting really sick of it. He started blaming me. It was beginning to affect our marriage. In the end I went down to Bootle Street police station and said to the head of CID, ‘Do you think I’d have stayed with my husband if I thought he had anything to do with Keith? You’re splitting my family up. And if that happens you’ll have my death and the death of four kiddies on your conscience, because I’ll kill myself and take them with me.”
Eventually, the police laid off the family. But as time passed with no sign of Keith, with all hope shrinking, the Johnson family were subjugated to even more cruelty from strangers. One day, as Winnie was walking along Stockport Road with two of her children and Gertrude, a woman stopped her to remark:
“You’re Keith’s mum aren’t you? Do you want to know what’s happened to him? He’s been chopped up and fed to pigs.”
Though this comment obviously upset Winnie, she continued to cling onto the faint hope that her son was alive somewhere. Meanwhile, the family grieved in their own ways. Susan – the oldest child in the home at that time – was particularly affected by Keith disappearing, and would cry in her sleep. Alan, Sylvia and Ian would all talk about Keith as if he was there, and then they would remember that he wasn’t. Margaret, meanwhile, would constantly ask where Keith was, and was too young to understand when her mum and dad told her that he wasn’t coming home.
Winnie started depending on pills and sleeping tablets to help her calm down and sleep at night, and would open a drawer in her bedroom to look at Keith’s broken glasses every night before she went to bed. She would dream about her lost boy every night, and sobbed as she spoke to the author John Deane Potter two years later:
“Sometimes I hear his voice calling ‘Mam’ to me just as if he were in the room. I wake up with a jerk but he is not there. Only God knows what goes on in my mind! But you can cry only so much. Then you cannot cry any more…”
Winnie Johnson died of cancer in 2012, having never had her wish of finding and burying her son fulfilled.
