“Wicked Beyond Belief”: The Story of the Moors Murders
WARNING – DISTRESSING CONTENT: How one couple’s twisted desires scarred Britain’s collective consciousness forever
“I saw senior detectives and legendary crime reporters—hard men who had been through the war and seen terrible things—dissolve into tears.”
These words were how one former police officer described the experience of having to listen to a 16-minute-long tape recording of the harrowing cries and pleas of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. She was the youngest victim of crimes that were eventually condemned to infamy as the “Moors Murders”.
The tape had been played at Chester Assizes Court on Tuesday, April 26, 1966. Six months earlier, the hideous artefact had been found stowed away in one of two suitcases in a left-luggage office, alongside books on Nazism, violence, sadistic erotica, and—distressingly—nine pornographic photos of the little girl. In the days preceding the discovery, her naked body had been carefully unearthed by police officers from a shallow grave on the moors.
During that time, a couple in their twenties from a Hyde council estate were being investigated in connection with the violent death of a 17-year-old boy named Edward Evans. Police had been considering their potential involvement in other child murders across neighbouring towns and cities that, in the present day, form the Greater Manchester area.
The discovery of this evidence greatly strengthened the case against them, and by the time the preliminary hearings began before their eventual trial, the world’s press had converged on Hyde. Soon, the names Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were synonymous with “pure evil”. The mere mention of their most infamous moniker, “The Moors Murderers” (bestowed upon them by the British press), conjures up images of their now-notorious mugshots, glaring haughtily down the barrel of the camera lens in stark monochrome.
Even in the months, years, and eventually decades after they had been imprisoned for murder (Brady on three counts, Hindley on two plus an additional accessory charge), interest in the case never subsided. Every tabloid newspaper editor in Great Britain would have their eyes and ears peeled for an opportunity for a salacious headline. Brady and Hindley were duly assigned plenty of other monikers too: “The Devil’s Disciples," “The Most Evil Couple in Britain," “The Monsters of the Moors," “Satan’s Children," and countless more. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the case’s enduring media sensationalism.
The following are the most basic facts as of the year 2024: 61 years after their first murder and 59 years after their last. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were responsible for the abductions and murders of five children around Manchester, England, in the 1960s. At least four of the children were sexually assaulted, and at least three had been buried in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor, a vast stretch of moorland in the Dark Peak. Their victims were:
- Pauline Reade (16)
- John Kilbride (12)
- Keith Bennett (12)
- Lesley Ann Downey (10)
- Edward Evans (17)
What exactly drove Brady and Hindley to commit these crimes, however, remains a subject of debate—one that is often not even rooted in the truth, or sometimes even a shred of scepticism at all.
The extensive sources that this overview drew upon are listed at the end of this article. The aim is to present the most accurate account of these crimes possible.
The beginning
Since Ian Brady was an unreliable narrator, his own detailed recollections of his youth should be regarded with scepticism, and there is little concrete information surrounding the true circumstances of his upbringing. What is known, however, is that he was born in Glasgow on 2nd January 1938, to a single mother who soon found herself unable to provide for him. He was taken in by a foster family at around four months old, and though by all accounts they provided him with the care and love that he needed, his relationship with his birth mother was somewhat strained.
After Brady and Hindley’s eventual trial, one reporter remarked that Brady “probably drew something sinister in the chromosomal lottery.” Some modern commentators have theorised that the less-than-ideal circumstances surrounding the first few months of Brady’s life may have had a traumatic effect upon his brain — specifically the parts that regulate bonding and emotional stability, sexual desire, the ability to identify the emotions of others, and the integration of emotion with perception.
Brady admitted to animal cruelty as a child (although would later retract this), and grew up a shy child with few friends. Supposedly, his documented fascination with the Nazis, horror fiction and true crime tales about gangsters began at a markedly early age. He claimed to have harboured resentment upon learning he was illegitimate at the age of thirteen, and his teenage years were marked by juvenile delinquency (with multiple charges of housebreaking, theft and attempted theft to his name).
After breaking his probation, at sixteen years old he was ordered by the courts to move in with his birth mother — now living in Manchester, England, with her new husband. At the age of seventeen, he was sentenced to two years in “borstal training,” an old-fashioned form of juvenile detention, after being found guilty of being an accessory to robbery.
After his release from borstal, he worked a few menial jobs before eventually finding employment as a stock clerk for a chemical distribution firm called Millwards Merchandise when he was 21 years old. Though on paper – and to everybody around him – he seemed to have turned his life around, his fascination with violence and crime was growing and he became increasingly disturbed by sadistic fantasies.
In January 1961, 18-year-old Myra Hindley started working at the firm as a typist, and though he did not initially pay much attention to her, their mutual passion for poetry and literature altered everything by year’s end. This would pave the way for her slow but steady entry into his world.
On July 23, 1942, Myra Hindley was born to Nellie and Bob Hindley in Manchester. Nellie worked as a machinist and Bob was a paratrooper who did not return to Myra’s life until after the war ended in 1945. Their home in Gorton, Manchester, became a poisonous atmosphere after Nellie gave birth to her second daughter, Maureen, in 1946. This was largely due to Bob’s alcohol addiction and his aggressive temperament, which was either instigated or aggravated following his return from the war. Myra’s grandmother, Ellen Maybury (who lived on a nearby street), agreed to take her in so that her parents could focus on raising Maureen, and Myra would go on to live with Ellen up until the day of her eventual arrest. But Myra still saw her parents daily and ate every meal with her family.
Myra had a difficult relationship with her father, who had exposed her to violence at a very early age through her watching him beat her mother. (She also later alleged that both her mother and her father beat her, but she repeatedly contradicted details in her reiterations and so can also be considered an unreliable narrator.) Bob also encouraged Myra and Maureen to defend themselves from bullies with violence. At school, Myra was talented at physical education and English, but had a tendency to play truant and discovered that she could very easily manipulate her grandmother into writing “sick” notes for her.
Hindley had a small but close circle of friends – one of whom was a boy named Michael Higgins. When Hindley was fourteen, Michael accidentally drowned in a reservoir and she fell into a deep state of grief – blaming herself for not going along with him that day as she felt that she could have saved him somehow. Some of those close to her speculated that she was “hysterical”, and much later on in her life, a psychiatrist noticed that though she was not mentally ill in any way, she exhibited emotional lability (i.e. a tendency to shift rapidly and dramatically between different emotional states).
Hindley committed herself to the Catholic Church soon after Michael’s death, and when she eventually got into a relationship at sixteen years old she held her virginity sacred. Her boyfriend proposed to her on her 17th birthday, and though she initially accepted, she called off the engagement a few months later as she felt that she was bored with him, and dissatisfied with the idea of “settling down”. Her friends suspected that even though the couple were the same age, he was “too young” for her.
Hindley had several occupations before she ended up at Millwards, and not everyone had a good impression of her. At one workplace, she claimed to have lost her paycheck one day, and out of pity, her colleagues chipped in to help her make up for it. Her coworkers began to suspect she was trying to trick them out of money when, not long after, she asserted that the identical incident had occurred once more. Despite her modest upbringing, she seemed to look down on people anyway, and when she began dating Ian Brady, these characteristics became even more apparent, leading some to accuse her of being “spoiled” and a bit snobbish.
Memories of Hindley during this time were not all bad, but her most lauded positive trait was that she was a good babysitter who had an exceptional way with children – which in the context of the crimes she was later committed of, seems both unfathomable and yet highly disturbing since she would eventually admit to abusing this quality to gain her victims’ trust.
The relationship
Hindley claimed to have fallen in love with Brady on day one of meeting him in the office. She started writing in a diary halfway through the year, which detailed that she tried to pursue him for months before they eventually got together — even during the times when he was outright dismissive of her in the office.
They first got together at the Christmas office party of 1961 and remained on casual terms for months before beginning a romantic relationship that soon became sexual. Hindley believed that Brady, despite his denials, was sexually inexperienced like herself and remembered that their first efforts at intercourse were awkward and disjointed. They started to experiment by incorporating sadomasochistic pornography into sexual fantasies, which were strictly between themselves for the time being.
Brady fancied himself an autocrat, and he was fond of the philosophical ideas of the Marquis de Sade. As far as he was concerned, people should be free to act on their base desires if they so desired, regardless of the consequences. It seems that Brady would eventually come to interpret Sade’s work as a justification for his own paedophilia, and his burgeoning desire to commit sexual assault and murder. This eventually crossed over into his and Hindley’s sex life, and they felt compelled by the idea of committing crimes.
The couple initially discussed the prospect of robbery, and even though it was most definitely in a fantastical sense, he suggested that she acquire a shotgun and some rifles (something he was unable to do because of his juvenile record).
They took many photos of themselves practising with their guns around the Peak District, as if they were the British equivalent of Bonnie and Clyde. Hindley also received shooting instruction from a coworker who served as president of a nearby rifle club; nevertheless, he would subsequently attest that she feared a “kick” whenever she discharged a weapon and would shoot with both eyes closed. During this time, she was also taking driving lessons at Brady’s urging because he couldn’t do this himself. Though they both enjoyed the freedoms this afforded them, it was largely in preparation for the abduction of their young victims.
Saddleworth Moor, a moorland landscape situated on the outskirts of the modern-day Greater Manchester area, was Brady and Hindley’s favourite spot to talk about their innermost desires. Though regeneration of the landscape has since taken place, at the time the landscape was scarce, brown in colour and foreboding, with its barbaric appearance attracting them.
By June of 1963, the couple were living together at Hindley’s grandmother’s home. They frequently annoyed their neighbours by playing loud music, such as Ravel’s Bolero, on purpose. At work, the couple were regarded as surly and unsociable by their colleagues. They would often giggle over pornographic books at their desk, and Hindley in particular would often be heard making explicitly racist and/or xenophobic remarks about various minorities. One time, she mortified her coworkers when she walked into the office with an open book containing a picture of Holocaust victims in a mass grave — laughing and declaring “just look at this lot!”
Brady’s and Hindley’s respective accounts of their private life differ substantially. Hindley claimed that Brady regularly abused and raped her, and one friend had told police that early on in their relationship, Hindley had written her a letter claiming that she feared for her safety after suspecting that Brady had drugged and sexually violated her one evening. Hindley later retrieved the letter and destroyed it for reasons unknown, and Brady denied that he was ever abusive towards her.
As the years went by after their 1966 trial, several journalists expressed the belief that Brady had “corrupted” Hindley by exposing her to literature that promoted violence. In time, both Brady and Hindley would deny this. Brady claimed that though he felt himself an influence upon Hindley abandoning her Christian principles and faith, he had “never seriously set out to corrupt anyone. I believe the seed of corruption is already within all, requiring only the right primal incentive, circumstance or utilitarian stimulus in which to blossom.”
Hindley, on the other hand, wrote in a 1978 parole plea that she had confused love for infatuation when it came to Brady, and that she felt totally under his domination and worshipped him blindly.
“I believed him because I thought I loved him, and his arguments were so convincing, he demolished my tiny precepts with a single word.”
She did not admit her guilt over her involvement in their eventual crimes until 1987, and in the years following this admission she admitted to a therapist that “I have to own the part that I played in things, to accept that I wanted some of the things to happen.” Despite police and victims’ families suspecting differently, she would continue to insist that her role in the murders was subordinate to Brady’s and that she had never physically or sexually harmed a child.
The first four murders
On 12th July 1963, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade was walking to a dance in nearby Openshaw when she was approached by a woman in a black Ford Prefect van on Froxmer Street, Gorton. Pauline was friends with Maureen Hindley, so immediately she recognised Maureen’s older sister as the driver of the van — though Myra Hindley claimed that she did not intentionally target Pauline and that she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Hindley asked Pauline if she would help her look for a lost glove on Saddleworth Moor, around a thirty-minute drive from Gorton. Pauline accepted, and they were trailed by Ian Brady on his motorbike on the long drive to the moor. Brady and Hindley each gave different accounts of her murder (as they did with the other four murders) but what is certain is that Pauline was hit in the face and raped before having her throat cut twice. Her body was buried in a shallow grave around 150 yards away from the road.
Twelve-year-old John Kilbride was Brady and Hindley’s next victim on Saturday 23rd November 1963. He was abducted from Ashton Market, Ashton-under-Lyne, under the same pretences as Pauline Reade had been— that they were looking for a lost glove. It was a cold, dark and foggy evening, and once they reached the moor and walked out of sight from the road, John was ambushed, sexually assaulted and then killed. His cause of death was never reliably ascertained — Hindley asserted that Brady informed her that he had strangled him using a ligature, while Brady asserted that he had strangled him manually. Because his body was buried in a shallow grave with a stream running through it, when his remains were eventually discovered two years later, they were so badly decomposed that his mother was forced to identify her son through solely his clothing.
On Tuesday 16th June 1964, twelve-year-old Keith Bennett was walking to his grandmother’s house in Longsight, Manchester (the area where Brady’s mother and stepfather lived), when he was approached by Myra Hindley in a white Morris minivan that she had recently purchased. Hindley claimed that Brady was in the back of the van, but Brady denied this and said Hindley picked him up a short while later before heading to the moor. What happened next is uncertain — Hindley claimed that like with their two previous victims, she was not with Brady at the time of the sexual assault or murder. This time, she said, she waited on a plateau with binoculars, and she saw Keith disappear with Brady into a gully “like a little lamb to the slaughter”. She claimed to have neither heard nor seen anything, despite the fact that sound carried easily across the vast and empty moors. Brady allegedly returned some time later carrying only a spade, and the couple’s accounts of how Keith died were the same as their accounts of how John Kilbride had died.
Tragically, despite repeated and widespread searches across the Saddleworth Moor area, Keith’s body was never found and is presumed lost.
In September 1964, Brady, Hindley, and Hindley’s grandmother were relocated from their Gorton council house to the new Hattersley overspill development in Hyde, Cheshire. By that time, Maureen — now eighteen — had married her boyfriend, 16-year-old David Smith, and welcomed a daughter named Angela Dawn into the world. David himself was a former juvenile delinquent with a difficult upbringing and home life, and he had an extensive court history of housebreaking, theft and violence — much to the dismay of Myra and the rest of Maureen’s family. Yet by all accounts, despite his and Maureen’s relationship being tumultuous, to say the least, he was a natural and caring father to Angela.
During this time, Brady bonded with David, as Myra and Maureen also started to spend more time together — though neither Myra nor Brady particularly cared about the new baby. Though this annoyed David and Maureen, they saw nothing sinister about it at the time and ultimately attributed this to Brady being an eccentric introvert, and Myra being concerned about how her younger sister might have been coping with motherhood at such a young age.
On Saturday 26th December 1964 (Boxing Day in the UK), ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was abducted from a fairground in Miles Platting, Manchester. She was not brought directly to the moor this time, but was instead brought to Brady’s and Hindley’s new house — 16 Wardle Brook Avenue — where her torture was captured on audiotape in the spare bedroom. Specifically, Brady and Hindley were heard trying to force a gag into Lesley’s mouth and undress her, and the tape — as previously mentioned — ran on for sixteen minutes as the little girl frantically begged for her mother.
The recording apparently ended so that Brady could plug in his photography light, and he then took multiple pornographic photos of the child. Hindley claimed that after the tape had ended, she went into the bathroom to run a bath for Lesley, and when she came back in, Lesley was lying deceased on the bed with an injury to her neck, and other injuries that indicated that she had been raped. Years later, Brady contested this version of events and claimed that Hindley strangled Lesley with a silk cord, though Lesley’s autopsy had already proven this story to be blatantly false. Strangulation by ligature was excluded and there was no clear injury to Lesley’s neck either — and like John Kilbride, her cause of death remains unknown to this day.
David Smith, and the murder of Edward Evans
On 25th April 1965, David Smith — now seventeen years old — went to work as Maureen stayed home to look after six-month-old Angela Dawn. At one point in the day, she went upstairs to check on her sleeping baby and found that Angela wasn’t breathing. Maureen wasted no time in rushing Angela to the hospital, but sadly no amount of care or attention could save her. Her untimely death was eventually determined to have been caused by bronchitis.
David in particular was plunged into a deep state of grief, and he and Maureen sought consolation in Myra and Brady. The group often went to Saddleworth Moor together, where David and Maureen unknowingly sat on top of the graves of other deceased children, presumably to the amusement of Brady and Myra.
David became increasingly sceptical about the existence of a god, and Brady took this new opportunity in stride. He started to encourage David to read the same pornographic literature he had already introduced to Myra. It needs to be noted that Brady was a whole decade older than his new “friend”, and looking back years later, David would come to see that he was a victim of attempted grooming by Brady (though that word meant nothing to him at the time, as it was an alien concept in the 1960s). The two would often drink in the living room whilst Myra spent time with Maureen, and Brady used this as an opportunity to discuss the prospects of robbery and murder with David. He naïvely went along with this, as he didn’t trust that Brady was in any way serious about it.
As the prosecution’s lead witness in the trial that took place months later, David told the court that one evening, in around September of 1965, they had been drinking for four or five hours when Brady asked him what he would do if he had to shoot somebody during a robbery, and would he consider using marked bullets. “I thought it was the drink talking,” David relaid, “and I looked at him and waited for him to carry on. He went on to say — he asked me if I was capable of using a gun or of murder.” When he was then asked by one of the prosecutors to explain what his reaction to that was, David responded:
“He was the listening party, he held the stage, he was doing the talking. He went on to say that he had killed three or four people. This just convinced me that it was the beer talking. He leaned back and he said: ‘You don’t really believe me.’ I must have smiled at him. Getting a bit tired, I was. And then he said: ‘It will be done,’ and a matter of a quarter of an hour later we were both asleep.”
On a different occasion, Brady had told David that his victims were buried on the moors and that he had photographic evidence of his crimes. David didn’t believe him and believed it was the alcohol talking again. Brady also discussed with him how he prepared for each murder, with David explaining to the court that “all his clothes would be brushed and cleaned and inspected, everything would be listed that he had on, and he said he took a drug, Pro-Plus, as a stimulant.”
David was convinced that Brady was leading up to committing a robbery and later admitted that on Tuesday 5th October, he gave the books and pornography he had been reading back to Brady in order to clear his home of any incriminating material. Brady and Myra put them in suitcases, and David watched as they then drove off with them in Myra’s car. It was later revealed that they had deposited them in the left-luggage office of Manchester Central railway station.
Myra woke David and Maureen up the following evening by pressing the buzzer to their flat. When she came upstairs, she and Maureen had a brief conversation before Myra asked David if she could walk her back home. David agreed, and when they reached the house Brady called in David to ask him if he wanted to collect some miniature alcohol bottles from the kitchen. He then left David in there, and seconds later, David heard a couple of ear-piercing screams. He ran into the living room to see Brady hitting a young man around the head and neck with a hatchet.
The young man in question was seventeen-year-old Edward Evans from Ardwick, Manchester. He was approached at Manchester Central railway station by Brady and asked if he would like to come back to his house for drinks, and claimed to have introduced Myra as his “sister” when he reached the car. Brady claimed that Edward was a familiar face to him from Manchester’s gay scene, but it is unknown as to whether this was the truth, or whether Brady was deliberately alleging that Edward was “a homosexual” in order to paint his victim in a damaging light and deflect some of the accountability from himself unto Edward. As a result of the careless repetition of Brady’s claims in the press, Edward’s family endured enormous suffering in 1960s Britain, when homosexuality was still regarded as both a crime and a perversion. Furthermore, forensics and the police were unable to ascertain if Brady or Myra had engaged in any form of sexual activity with Edward that night before David Smith showed there, whether it had been consenting or not.
One lesser-reported detail of this murder is that an affectionate letter from a female friend of Edward’s was found by police upon his deceased body (though both her identity and the nature of her relationship with Edward is unknown) stained in blood.
Of his attacking of Edward with the hatchet, Brady would later maintain that “it should have taken only one hit” to kill him — meaning that the intent was for David to run into the room, see the bloodied corpse on the floor and then immediately react to it. Instead, it took fourteen clumsy hits, and David ended up watching the gruesome murder in its near entirety as he stood in shock in the doorway. Edward was still not deceased after this, so Brady proceeded to strangle him with an electrical cord in order to accelerate his death — likely to minimise the risk of either a neighbour hearing or Myra’s grandmother, who was upstairs asleep in bed. Inevitably, she woke up to the noise, but Myra reassured her that Brady had just dropped the tape recorder on his foot and so she went back to sleep, none-the-wiser.
Throughout the murder, Myra stood watching Brady attack Edward – even though she later claimed that she was in the kitchen with her hands over her ears during the ordeal. This was not only contested by David Smith (and later Brady in the years after he had confessed in 1985), but forensic evidence also confirmed this due to arterial blood spurts on the outside of her shoes – meaning that not only was she in the room, but she was stood close to Edward.
David had to force himself to think straight in the aftermath of the horror, fearing that if he did not comply, Brady and Myra would kill him next. He assisted the couple with cleaning up the house, tying up Edward’s body and moving it into the spare room so that they could bury him on the moor with the other four children the next day. After around three hours, the house was clear of any visible trace of the murder, and David returned home to his flat – completely shaken and sickened by what he had unwillingly witnessed and taken part in.
David blurted out the traumatic events of the evening to Maureen, and the two decided to wait a few hours before reporting it to police in case they were ambushed by Brady and Myra on their way to the phone box. Their terrified call was eventually logged at 6:07 am on the morning of Thursday 7th October 1965.
Ian Brady was arrested in his home by police two hours later. Myra Hindley had four days left of freedom before police had enough evidence to charge her.
The trial
By the time of the trial in April 1966, three bodies had been recovered – the body of Edward Evans from Brady’s and Hindley’s spare bedroom, and the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride from Saddleworth Moor.
Brady had initially admitted to hitting Edward with the hatchet, but claimed that he did it in self-defence during a confrontation and said that David Smith was the one to strangle him afterwards. He absolved Hindley of all accountability. Both denied all knowledge of the murder of John Kilbride, despite Brady having taken a photograph of Hindley and her dog, Puppet, standing directly above the shallow grave and looking down.
Regarding the murder of Lesley Ann Downey, they claimed that Brady had agreed to photograph the child for David Smith, but had assumed that he was bringing them a girl much older than ten years old and that their behaviour — as heard on the tape — was merely them trying to placate her. They claimed that afterwards, David removed her from their home, with Brady explaining that “after completion, we all got dressed and went downstairs”. Little did he know that his blunderous choice of phrasing would hint at both his and Hindley’s involvement in sexually assaulting Lesley.
On 6th May 1966, Brady was found guilty of the murders of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride and handed three life sentences. Hindley was handed two life sentences after being convicted of the murders of Edward and Lesley, plus an additional seven years for harbouring, assisting and maintaining Brady knowing that he had killed John Kilbride. The trial judge, Justice Fenton Atkinson, described the couple in his closing remarks as “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity”, and made a point that he was passing the only sentences that the law now allowed — referencing the fact that the death penalty had been outlawed only months before the trial.
Aftermath
The British public were outraged not only by the unspeakable sadism of Brady’s and Hindley’s crimes, but also the fact that they did not receive the death penalty. However, at this time the families of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett were still left without answers as to what had happened to their missing relatives. Pauline’s mother, Joan Reade, recalled:
“I never thought that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady was to do with it all [until their arrest], because her sister was a near neighbour, lived next door but one – Maureen. She went visiting there. Myra Hindley was talking to me normally and saying she was sorry about Pauline – knowing she had done that. I didn’t think till after. It all came back to me, what was what.”
Hindley notably spent the rest of her life campaigning for parole. After six-and-a-half years of corresponding behind bars, she broke up with Brady in 1972 and rediscovered her Catholicism. She maintained that she knew nothing of any of the murders, but directly implicated Brady in them, which left him feeling betrayed by her.
Brady publicly admitted his involvement in the killings for the first time in 1985, to the journalist Fred Harrison. This was an effort to keep Hindley behind bars for good, but when police reopened their investigation into the case after the resulting Sunday People articles, Brady was “scornful of any suggestion that he had confessed to more murders”, and clearly mentally unwell. He was diagnosed with acute paranoia and schizophrenia later that year and was transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Despite this, the police decided to continue searching Saddleworth Moor.
On Thursday 31st October 1986, Winnie Johnson — the bereaved mother of Keith Bennett — wrote a letter to Myra Hindley in a direct appeal for her to tell her where her son is buried, and what had happened to him. She wrote:
“As a woman I am sure you can envisage the nightmare I have lived with day and night, 24 hours a day since then. Not knowing whether my son is alive or dead, whether he ran away or was taken away is literally a living hell, something which you no doubt have experienced during your many, many years locked in prison. […] Please I beg of you, tell me what happened to Keith. My heart tells me you know and I am on bended knees begging you to end this torture and finally put my mind at rest.”
According to a staff member at Cookham Wood Prison, Hindley appeared genuinely moved by the letter, but then firmly declared “I wish I did know something — I could at least then put the poor woman out of her misery.”
Police visited Hindley, and although she refused to admit any involvement in the killings, she agreed to help by looking at photographs and maps to try to identify spots that she had visited with Brady. After weeks of co-operation with police – including a visit to Saddleworth Moor in an unsuccessful attempt to allegedly trigger her memories – Hindley made a formal confession to her involvement with the murders in February 1987. She admitted to abducting the children and to harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had sexually assaulted and murdered them. Although she was positively reinforced by both police and her own counsel, Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping and his team ultimately felt that they had witnessed “a great performance rather than a genuine confession”.
Based on Hindley’s account of the murder of Pauline Reade, police were able to narrow down their search focus on the moor, and her body was finally recovered on Wednesday 1st July 1987. Two days later, police took Ian Brady to visit the moor in the hopes he had any information that would result in the discovery of Keith Bennett’s body, but these efforts were unsuccessful as Brady appeared confused and disillusioned on the day. The search would eventually be called off in August after police felt they had exhausted every possible lead.
Hindley died in prison in 2002, and Brady died in a high-security hospital in 2017 — both of natural causes due to prolonged health complications. The BBC reported on Wednesday 1st July 2009 that Greater Manchester Police had officially given up the search for Keith Bennett, saying that “only a major scientific breakthrough or fresh evidence would see the hunt for his body restart”.
At around 11.25am on Thursday 29th September 2022, Greater Manchester Police was contacted by the representative of an author who had been researching Moors Murders case, claiming that suspected human remains had been found on Saddleworth Moor. This proved to be a false alarm, and it has since been alleged by Alan Bennett — Keith Bennett’s brother — that this was nothing more than an attempted promotional stunt to assign some credibility to the author in question. The suspected human remains were confirmed to be “plant material.”
Information sources
- The papers (and the part transcript) of the Moors Murders trial, The National Archives at Kew, ASSI 84/425–430
- Dr. Alan Keightley: “Ian Brady: The Untold Story of the Moors Murders” (2017)
- Antonella Gambotto-Burke: “Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine” (2022)
- Carol Ann Lee: “One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley” (2010)
- David Smith with Carol Ann Lee: “Evil Relations: The Man Who Bore Witness Against the Moors Murderers” (2012)
- Fred Harrison’s The Sunday People series on Ian Brady’s “confessions” (issues 23/06/1985 through to 21/07/1985)
- Joe Chapman: “Out of the Frying Pan” (2009)
- Peter Topping with Jean Ritchie: “Topping” (1989)
- Information on the 2022 search on Saddleworth Moor courtesy of public statements from Alan Bennett and Greater Manchester Police
- Information on Myra Hindley’s mental health obtained from the archive of David Astor at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
This article has not been monetised and I own no rights to any of the photos published. All rights belong to the respective copyright owners.
I have chosen to keep my real identity a secret for the sake of not taking the shine away from my account’s central mission, which is to ensure free access to accurate information around the Moors Murders case. This is the first article in the series. Thank you for reading.
