A serious warning before this article. The Moors Murders involved the abduction, sexual abuse, and killing of children. The youngest victim was ten years old. The trial included the playing in open court of an audio tape recording of one of those children being tortured. The case is, by any reasonable measure, the most psychologically disturbing in modern British criminal history. This article does not reproduce graphic detail beyond what the historical record requires, but the subject is unavoidably distressing. If you would prefer not to read about the abuse and murder of children, please stop here.
Contents
Part One: Manchester, 1961
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley met in January 1961 in the offices of Millwards Merchandise, a small chemical wholesaler in Gorton, on the south-east edge of Manchester. He was twenty-three. She was eighteen. He had been working there as a stock clerk for about a year. She had just started as a typist. He was thin, tall, well-dressed in the manner of a young man trying to seem older than he was, and was known among the other Millwards staff for the strangeness of his interests — German philosophy, books on torture, the published speeches of leading Nazis. She was quiet, blonde, recently broken off from an engagement, the sort of working-class Manchester girl who had left school at fifteen and was looking, at eighteen, for someone to fill the imaginative space her ordinary life had failed to fill.
The relationship that developed between them is one of the most studied criminal partnerships of the twentieth century, and yet remains, at its core, hard to fully understand from the outside. Brady had been born Ian Duncan Stewart in Glasgow on 2 January 1938 to a single mother named Margaret Stewart. He was given up to a foster family when he was small and grew up as Ian Sloan in the Gorbals, one of the worst slums in pre-war Britain. He was, by every contemporary account, a bright but profoundly disturbed child — bullied for his illegitimate birth, prone to extreme cruelty toward animals, occupied from a young age with fantasies of violence. He had moved to Manchester in his late teens to live with his birth mother, who had remarried and taken the surname Brady. He had a string of juvenile convictions for theft and other minor offences. By the time he started at Millwards he was twenty-two and had been, on his own account, building a private library of books on Nazism, sadism, and what he called “philosophy of crime” — including the works of the Marquis de Sade, which would become a particular touchstone.
Myra Hindley had been born in Crumpsall, north Manchester, on 23 July 1942. Her father Bob Hindley was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife and children. Her mother Hettie eventually arranged for the seven-year-old Myra to be sent to live with her grandmother nearby — partly to protect her from Bob’s violence, partly because a younger sister, Maureen, had been born and was occupying all the available care. The arrangement was meant to be temporary. It became, in effect, permanent. Myra grew up between two households, attached deeply to her grandmother, less so to her parents. She left school at fifteen, took a string of office jobs, became briefly engaged to a young man named Ronnie Sinclair, broke it off because she found him boring, and arrived at Millwards in January 1961 looking, by every available reading of the diaries she kept, for someone she could regard as exceptional.
Brady, by her own account, ignored her for the first year of their acquaintance. He had a girlfriend already, a German woman who was eventually deported. When he eventually noticed Hindley, he did so on his own terms — lent her books, took her to films he chose (he favoured German war cinema), taught her about the political and philosophical material he had been studying. Their first date, according to her diaries, was to see Trial at Nuremberg at the cinema. She began to read what he gave her. She gave up her Catholicism, of which she had been observant. She bleached her hair. She began, in increasing measure, to remake herself in the image of what she believed he wanted.
Whether what Hindley would later become was something Brady made out of her, or whether Brady simply unlocked something that had always been there, is the question that has occupied scholars and journalists ever since. The honest answer is that both are true in proportions that cannot now be reliably measured. What is not in dispute is what they did together starting in the summer of 1963.
Part Two: Pauline Reade
The first murder was carefully prepared. Brady had spent months, by Hindley’s later account, talking about what he called “the perfect murder” — the idea that with sufficient planning, two people working together could kill a stranger and leave no trace. Hindley had passed her driving test in November 1962 and had purchased a small Austin van. Brady did not drive. The van made possible something that without it would have been logistically impractical: the transport of a victim from the Manchester streets to the remote landscape of Saddleworth Moor, fifteen miles east of the city, where the killings would be done and the bodies left.
On the evening of Friday 12 July 1963, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade left her family home in Wiles Street, Gorton — a street directly opposite the one where Hindley was living with her grandmother — to walk to a dance at the British Rail Club a short distance away. She was wearing a pale pink party dress and a green coat. Pauline was the eldest of three children of Joan and Amos Reade. She worked as a confectioner at the Sharples bakery. She had been looking forward to the dance for several days.
Hindley drove past her on Gorton Lane. She knew Pauline by sight — the Reades and the Hindleys had been neighbours for years. She stopped the van and asked Pauline whether she would help her search for an expensive glove she had lost on the moors. Pauline, who had nothing better to do for an hour and who knew Hindley by face, agreed. She got into the van. Brady, on his motorcycle, met them at Saddleworth Moor approximately forty minutes later. While Hindley waited in the van, Brady took Pauline onto the moor on the pretext of helping with the search. He sexually assaulted her and then cut her throat. Hindley joined him on the moor to help bury the body. They returned to Manchester separately. Pauline’s family reported her missing the following morning. The case became one of many young female disappearances that the Lancashire Constabulary worked, without success, through the summer and autumn of 1963.
Pauline Reade’s body would not be found for twenty-four years. It was recovered from a grave on Saddleworth Moor in July 1987, after Hindley led police to the approximate location during an arranged visit from her prison cell. Her family had spent two and a half decades not knowing where she was.
Part Three: John Kilbride
Four months after Pauline Reade’s killing, on the afternoon of Saturday 23 November 1963, twelve-year-old John Kilbride went with friends to the marketplace in Ashton-under-Lyne, a town about six miles east of Manchester. He was hoping to earn a few shillings helping the stallholders pack up their stock at the end of the trading day. John was the eldest of seven children of Patrick and Sheila Kilbride. He attended St Damian’s Roman Catholic Secondary Modern School. He was a quiet, polite boy who had been planning, in the weeks before his disappearance, his coming First Communion.
At approximately 5:30 p.m., John separated from his friends. He was approached by a woman with bleached blonde hair who asked him for help finding a missing glove. He got into a van. He was never seen alive again. Brady met them, again, on Saddleworth Moor. John was sexually assaulted and then strangled — Brady would later claim that the ligature he had brought broke during the attack and that he completed the killing with a shoelace. He was buried in a shallow grave about a hundred yards from where Pauline Reade had been buried four months earlier.
The Kilbride family searched for John for days. His father walked the streets calling his name. The Ashton police took the case seriously — the disappearance of a twelve-year-old boy from a busy marketplace on a Saturday afternoon was not the kind of disappearance that could be readily explained by a runaway theory — but the available investigative tools were limited, and the case eventually faded into the file of unresolved missing children that every regional police force kept. John’s body was found in October 1965, after Brady and Hindley’s arrest, when Hindley’s collection of photographs — many of which showed her posing on locations on Saddleworth Moor, in ways that subsequent investigators recognised as documenting grave sites — led police to dig in the area she had marked.
Part Four: Keith Bennett
Six months later, on the evening of Tuesday 16 June 1964, twelve-year-old Keith Bennett left his home on Eston Street in Longsight, Manchester, to walk to his grandmother’s house on Morton Street, half a mile away. He was wearing a white striped shirt, blue jeans, and pumps. He had recently had spectacles fitted and was carrying them in their case. He was Winnie Johnson’s eldest son. He had been excited that evening because his birthday was four days away and he had been promised that his grandmother would let him stay over and that the family would go to the seaside at the weekend.
Keith never reached his grandmother’s house. He had to cross Stockport Road, a busy thoroughfare, to do so. At approximately 8 p.m., somewhere between his house and his grandmother’s, he was intercepted by Brady and Hindley. The pretext used to lure him into the van has never been definitively established. He was driven to Saddleworth Moor and killed there. Brady has confessed to the killing in general terms but has never, in any of his statements during fifty-two years of imprisonment, been willing to identify the specific location of the grave.
Keith Bennett’s body has never been found. Winnie Johnson, his mother, spent the next forty-eight years of her life searching for him.
That last sentence is the most important one in this article. The simple fact of a mother given no opportunity to bury her child, the simple fact that the killers refused — for reasons that no available account fully explains, but that some have read as a deliberate final cruelty — to provide the location, is the part of the Moors Murders case that even now, sixty years later, the British public has not been able to entirely process. Brady’s continued refusal to give up Keith’s grave, sustained until his death in 2017, was, in the assessment of every prison psychiatrist who ever evaluated him, the last expression of the psychopathic control he had over his crimes. He kept the location because the keeping of it was the only remaining act of power available to him.
Winnie Johnson died on 18 August 2012, aged seventy-eight, of cancer. She had spent her last decades writing to Brady — sometimes daily, sometimes weekly — begging for the information she needed to bring her son home. He never gave it to her.
Part Five: Lesley Ann Downey
The fourth killing was the one that, when it eventually became known in court, broke the public’s capacity to comprehend the case in conventional criminal terms.
On the evening of Boxing Day, 26 December 1964, ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey went to a travelling funfair on Hulme Hall Lane, in the Miles Platting district of Manchester, with a small group of friends. She was the second of four children of Ann West (née Downey) and Terry West. Her father had left the family some years earlier. She was a happy, ordinary primary school child who had received new clothes and a sewing machine for Christmas the previous day. She had ten shillings of pocket money to spend at the fair.
Lesley became separated from her friends in the crowd around the fairground rides. At some point shortly after, she was approached by Brady and Hindley, who told her — by their later admission — that a parcel of theirs had fallen from a stall and that they needed help carrying it back to their car. She went with them. They drove her not to the moors but to Hindley’s grandmother’s house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley, a Manchester overspill estate that Hindley and Brady had been allocated public housing in some months earlier. Her grandmother was, for that evening, staying with a relative — Hindley had arranged it.
What Brady and Hindley did to Lesley Ann Downey in the bedroom of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue is documented in two pieces of physical evidence that were later found in their possession and produced at trial. The first is a series of photographs, taken on a tripod-mounted camera, showing Lesley naked and gagged in postures of clear distress. The second is a sixteen-minute audio tape recording, made on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, of the period of her abuse.
The Lesley Ann Downey tape is the single most disturbing piece of evidence in any British criminal case. It records the child crying for her mother. It records her asking to be allowed to leave. It records Brady and Hindley’s voices issuing instructions to her. It records her being forced to comply. It runs sixteen minutes. The full transcript has been published only in technical legal documents and never in the popular press. When the tape was played in open court at the Moors Murders trial in May 1966, the jury — eleven men and one woman — were observed to be in distress, and several reporters present left the courtroom in tears. The judge, Mr Justice Atkinson, ordered that the tape be played only once and that no further public hearings of it take place. The tape and the photographs were kept under restricted custody at the National Archives for decades. The audio recording has not, to the best public knowledge, ever been released in any form. This article will not attempt to describe its contents further. It is enough to know that it exists, that it was used to convict Brady and Hindley, and that its existence is one of the principal reasons that the question of whether Hindley was a meaningful participant in the killings — as opposed to a passive presence dominated by Brady — was answered, by the jury and by every subsequent assessment, in the affirmative. Her voice is on the tape. She gave orders to the child. She did not stop what was happening.
Lesley Ann Downey was killed at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue after the photographs and the recording were made. Her body was wrapped in a sheet, driven to Saddleworth Moor in the small hours of 27 December 1964, and buried in a shallow grave near the others. She was ten years old.
Part Six: Edward Evans
For the next ten months Brady and Hindley appeared, on the surface of their lives, to be settling. They moved into 16 Wardle Brook Avenue together as a couple in 1964. They worked their ordinary office jobs at Millwards. They photographed each other on Saddleworth Moor on weekend walks, often kneeling on the ground above the spots where they had buried children — photographs that, when later studied by investigators, served as macabre maps to the grave sites. They added to Brady’s library. They drank.
What Brady appears to have wanted, by his own subsequent account and by Hindley’s, was to expand the partnership. He began to talk to Hindley about recruiting a third participant — someone who could be brought into what he called the “method,” who could share what they had done and what they planned to do further. Hindley’s younger sister Maureen had recently married a seventeen-year-old labourer named David Smith. Smith was, by every contemporary account, a difficult young man with a chip on his shoulder and a string of minor convictions. Brady, in 1965, began grooming him — lending him books on Nazism and sadism, drinking with him, making remarks of escalating gravity about what he and Hindley had been involved in. Whether Brady intended Smith to eventually become an active accomplice, or whether the relationship was simply a kind of ideological recruitment that had not yet reached its operational phase, is something even the participants gave conflicting accounts of afterwards.
What is certain is what happened on the night of 6 October 1965.
At approximately 11:30 p.m. that night, Hindley arrived at the Smith household — a flat in Underwood Court, on the same Hattersley estate — and asked Maureen if she could borrow David to come over to Wardle Brook Avenue for a drink. David walked back with her. As they entered the house, Brady was in the kitchen. Smith heard a scream and was beckoned into the sitting room.
What he saw was Brady, in the sitting room of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, in the process of killing a young man with a hatchet. The young man was Edward Evans, seventeen, an apprentice engineer at the AEI works in Trafford Park. He had been picked up by Brady earlier that evening at Manchester Central railway station, where Edward — who was, by available evidence, homosexual — had been frequenting bars known to be meeting places for gay men. Brady had brought him back to Wardle Brook Avenue under a pretence and had begun the attack moments before Smith’s arrival. Smith would later testify that he had seen Brady deliver fourteen separate blows with the hatchet, that he had been so frozen by what he was witnessing that he had been unable to intervene, that Brady had then handed him the hatchet and asked him to “feel the weight” of it, and that Brady and Hindley had subsequently asked him to help clean up the blood. He had complied, he said, because he believed if he did not he would be killed himself.
Smith and his wife agreed, after Smith returned home in the early hours of 7 October, that they had to go to the police. They left Underwood Court with a kitchen knife and a screwdriver in their pockets in case Brady came after them. They walked to a public phone box and called Hyde Police Station. Officers met them and listened to what Smith had to say. By 8:40 a.m. on 7 October, plainclothes officers were at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. Brady was arrested in the upstairs bedroom, sitting on the bed next to a wrapped bundle that turned out to be Edward Evans’ body. Hindley was arrested four days later, on 11 October, after the police had completed initial searches of the house.
What the police found in the days that followed — in the house, in two left-luggage suitcases at Manchester Central station that Brady had stored there, in Hindley’s photograph albums, and on Saddleworth Moor itself once the photographs were correlated with map references — established the full pattern. The photographs of Lesley Ann Downey. The audio tape. The pictures of Hindley posing on the moor at grave sites. The body of John Kilbride, found buried where Hindley’s photographs had indicated, on 21 October. The body of Lesley Ann Downey, found ten days later in a separate grave.
Part Seven: The Trial
The trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley opened at Chester Assizes on Tuesday 19 April 1966 before Mr Justice Atkinson. It lasted fourteen working days. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones — an unusually senior law officer for an assize trial, reflecting the political prominence the case had already achieved. Brady was defended by Emlyn Hooson QC. Hindley by Godfrey Heilpern QC.
The two defendants were charged only with the three murders for which evidence was at that point conclusive: Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride, and Edward Evans. The disappearances of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett were known to the police as possible additional cases, but the lack of recovered bodies meant that no charges could be brought. The decision to limit the prosecution to three murders would, in retrospect, have profound consequences. It meant that the Reade and Bennett families spent the next twenty years without legal acknowledgement that their children had been killed by Brady and Hindley, and it meant that the public account of what Brady and Hindley had done, when it crystallised in 1966, was incomplete by exactly the cases that — particularly in Keith Bennett’s case — would haunt the British public most.
The prosecution case rested on three things: David Smith’s eyewitness testimony to the killing of Edward Evans, the physical evidence found at the house and in the left-luggage suitcases, and the photographic and audio evidence relating to Lesley Ann Downey. Smith was a difficult witness — he had himself benefited from a financial deal with a newspaper before testifying, his criminal record could be put to him, and his marriage to Maureen Hindley meant he was open to the suggestion that he was implicating Hindley to protect himself — but the physical evidence was overwhelming, and his account of the Evans killing was consistent with the forensic record.
Brady gave evidence in his own defence and was on the witness stand for over eight hours. He attempted to construct an account in which he was a serious-minded student of Sadean philosophy who had been engaged in role-play rather than literal killing, but the answers he gave under Sir Elwyn Jones’s cross-examination steadily collapsed. By the time he left the stand he had effectively conceded the killing of Edward Evans and had given the jury a portrait of his own personality from which they would draw their own conclusions about his capacity for the other murders.
Hindley also gave evidence. She maintained throughout that she had been dominated by Brady, that her presence at the murders had been peripheral, that she had been afraid of him, and that she had been ignorant of much of what he had been doing. The tape of Lesley Ann Downey, in which her own voice could be heard giving instructions to the child, comprehensively destroyed this account. The jury rejected it. They rejected it within two and a quarter hours of retiring on 6 May 1966.
Brady was convicted of all three murders. Hindley was convicted of the murders of Downey and Evans and of being an accessory after the fact in the murder of Kilbride. The death penalty for murder had been formally abolished by the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, which had received royal assent on 8 November 1965 — five weeks after Brady and Hindley’s arrest. They were sentenced, under the new statute, to life imprisonment with whole-life tariffs.
Mr Justice Atkinson, in his sentencing remarks, called them “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity.” The phrase was widely quoted in the press over the following days and would eventually pass into the standard formulary by which the case was described for the next sixty years.
Part Eight: The Confessions and the Search for Pauline and Keith
For nineteen years after the trial, Brady and Hindley maintained — Brady with greater consistency, Hindley with increasing hesitation as the decades passed — that the three murders for which they had been convicted were the only murders they had committed. The Reade family. The Bennett family. The newspapers, periodically. The Greater Manchester Police, who never closed the files. Brady and Hindley said nothing.
The pressure on Hindley to confess increased through the 1980s. By 1985 she had become the focus of a long-running media campaign by the prison reform advocate Lord Longford, who had visited her in Holloway and Cookham Wood prisons over many years and who had become convinced — wrongly, in the eventual assessment of almost every other party who interacted with her — that she had been genuinely rehabilitated and that her continued imprisonment was unjust. Hindley, by this point, was also conducting a long correspondence with Ann West, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, and with Topsy Jay, Pauline Reade’s mother, attempting to construct relationships that, in retrospect, were probably instrumental to her parole strategy.
In November 1985, Brady — by this point detained in the Park Lane Hospital secure psychiatric unit at Maghull (later Ashworth Hospital), having been diagnosed in 1985 with severe paranoid schizophrenia — gave a series of interviews to a reporter named Fred Harrison of the Sunday People. In these interviews Brady confessed, for the first time, to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. The confessions made the front pages on 24 November 1985. They created an immediate operational crisis for the Greater Manchester Police, who had been carrying the unsolved disappearances of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett on their books for more than twenty years and who now had a confession but no bodies.
Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, who took over the reopened investigation, began a process of attempting to extract from both Brady and Hindley the locations of the additional graves. Hindley, after months of negotiation through her lawyers, eventually agreed to talk. In November 1986 she made a long taped confession to Topping in which she admitted her role in all five killings — including, for the first time, the explicit acknowledgement that she had been an active participant in the abductions and not merely a passive presence. She was taken to Saddleworth Moor in December 1986 by helicopter, in a controlled operation, to indicate the approximate locations of the Reade and Bennett graves. Brady was taken separately in July 1987.
The body of Pauline Reade was recovered on 1 July 1987 from a grave approximately 100 yards from where Lesley Ann Downey had been buried. She was identified by her pink party dress and green coat, which had been preserved in the peaty soil. Her funeral was held at St Francis’s Monastery in Gorton, the same church where she had been due to attend mass as a girl, on 7 August 1987.
The body of Keith Bennett was not found. Despite the helicopter visits, despite extensive ground-penetrating radar searches, despite the use of cadaver dogs and forensic archaeologists, despite repeated efforts over the next three decades by both Greater Manchester Police and by amateur searchers, Brady’s grave for Keith has never been located. Brady continued to claim, in subsequent statements over the next thirty years, that he could not remember exactly where he had buried Keith. Almost no-one believed him.
Part Nine: The Long Imprisonment
Ian Brady was held at HMP Durham, HMP Parkhurst, and HMP Wormwood Scrubs through the 1970s before being declared criminally insane and transferred to Park Lane Hospital (later Ashworth Hospital) in November 1985. He remained at Ashworth until his death on 15 May 2017, aged seventy-nine. He had been on a hunger strike, force-fed by court order, since 1999. He had repeatedly applied to be transferred back to ordinary prison so that he could be allowed to starve himself to death — applications all denied. In his final years he spent extended periods in the hospital’s high-security unit and was, by every available assessment, in a state of profound psychological deterioration. He nonetheless retained, until his death, the one piece of information that mattered most to the remaining victim’s family: the location of Keith Bennett’s grave. He took it with him.
Myra Hindley was held at HMP Holloway, HMP Cookham Wood, HMP Durham, and HMP Highpoint in turn. Through the 1980s and 1990s she made repeated applications for parole, supported by Lord Longford and by a small coterie of priests, academics, and lawyers who had become convinced of her rehabilitation. Each application was rejected, in part because the Home Secretary of the day — particularly Michael Howard in 1994 — refused to recommend release in the face of overwhelming public opposition. She became, in the language of one of the tabloid headlines that followed her case for decades, “the most hated woman in Britain.” Her famous police mugshot from 1965, with its bleached blonde hair and unsmiling face, became one of the most reproduced images in British cultural history — used and reused so often that the artist Marcus Harvey created a 1995 portrait, called Myra, made up of children’s handprints, which when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1997 was twice defaced by visitors.
Hindley died at West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, on 15 November 2002, aged sixty. The cause of death was pneumonia and heart disease. Her funeral was held privately. The crematorium at which she was cremated had to be kept secret to prevent disruption. Her ashes, by her instruction, were scattered at an undisclosed location.
Whether Myra Hindley experienced genuine remorse or merely the strategic performance of remorse calibrated for parole is a question that has been debated for decades and that no available evidence definitively settles. She wrote, in a series of statements over the years, things that read as if they were sincere. She also wrote, in those same documents, things that read as careful constructions designed to mitigate her role and to position Brady as the sole locus of agency in the partnership. In one of her late prison letters she wrote: “I ought to have been hanged. I deserved it. My crime was worse than Brady’s because I enticed the children.” It is one of the few statements she made in fifty-five years of post-arrest life that almost everyone who has studied the case considers to have been straightforwardly true.
Part Ten: The Question of Hindley
The most disputed element of the Moors Murders case, after Keith Bennett’s missing grave, is what to make of Myra Hindley.
The case for treating her as a fully culpable equal partner is overwhelming. Her voice is on the Lesley Ann Downey tape, giving instructions to the child. Her photographs of herself on the moor mark the grave sites. She drove the van that took each of the victims to their deaths. She was the person who made the initial contact with at least three of the children — Reade, Kilbride, and Lesley Ann Downey. She lived for two years with Brady at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue while bodies of children she had helped to abduct lay in graves on a moor she visited repeatedly. She had every opportunity, across those two years and the months before, to leave Brady, to go to the police, to refuse the next abduction. She did not. She participated, with documented enthusiasm, in the photography that recorded what they were doing.
The case for treating her as a subordinate figure whose agency was severely compromised by her relationship with Brady is the case her defenders have made for sixty years. She was eighteen when she met him. He was a fully formed psychopath with a developed ideology of cruelty before she ever entered his life. The personality changes she underwent in the first two years of the relationship — the change in her dress, her reading, her religion, her behaviour — are consistent with the kind of psychological domination that long-term coercive control produces. She had no prior history of violent crime before meeting him and committed no further violence after his removal from her physical proximity. The forensic psychologist Janie Jones, who knew Hindley well in prison, argued for years that what Hindley exemplified was not psychopathy in the Brady sense but rather a profound dependence that had been weaponised by a more disordered partner.
The honest reading is probably that both accounts contain real elements of truth. Hindley was certainly more than a passive victim of Brady’s coercion — the tape evidence settles that. She was also, certainly, not a free agent operating on her own initiative in the absence of his framing. The relationship was a partnership in which two people’s psychological deficits combined to produce something that, by all available evidence, neither would have produced alone. It is the same dynamic that emerged at 25 Cromwell Street with Fred and Rose West twenty years later, and indeed in a long series of folie à deux murder partnerships before and since.
What is harder to argue, however much weight is given to the coercion thesis, is that Hindley deserved to be released. The whole-life order under which she was held was, in 1966, the correct legal disposal for what she had done. The British state’s continued refusal to release her over thirty-six years was the correct public policy. She died in prison because she should have died in prison. Whatever the proportions of guilt between her and Brady, the proportion of her guilt was sufficient that no honest reckoning could place her back in the community.
Part Eleven: The Names That Matter
The murdered were children. They were:
Pauline Reade, sixteen, killed on 12 July 1963 on her way to a dance. She was a confectionery worker who had been excited about the dance for several days and was wearing a new pale pink dress. Her body lay on Saddleworth Moor for twenty-four years before it was recovered.
John Kilbride, twelve, killed on 23 November 1963 after going to help stallholders at Ashton-under-Lyne market. He had been preparing for his First Communion. He was the eldest of seven children.
Keith Bennett, twelve, killed on 16 June 1964 on the way to his grandmother’s house. He had been four days short of his thirteenth birthday and had recently received new spectacles. His body has never been found.
Lesley Ann Downey, ten, killed on 26 December 1964 after being lured from a Boxing Day funfair. She had received a sewing machine for Christmas the previous day. The tape recording of the period of her death is preserved in the National Archives and remains the most disturbing audio evidence in any British criminal case.
Edward Evans, seventeen, killed on 6 October 1965 at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. He was an apprentice engineer. He was killed in the presence of a witness, David Smith, whose testimony broke the case.
The mothers of the murdered each made the case their own, in different ways, over the decades that followed. Ann West, Lesley Ann Downey’s mother, became one of the most visible campaigners in the case, conducting a long and ultimately fruitless correspondence with Hindley and a continuous public campaign against her release. She died in 1999. Joan Reade, Pauline’s mother, was hospitalised with serious mental illness in the years after her daughter’s disappearance and never fully recovered; she lived to see her daughter’s body finally returned in 1987 and died in 2001. Sheila Kilbride, John’s mother, separated from his father Patrick in the years after the killings and lived a quiet life in Manchester; she died in 1999. Doris Evans, Edward’s mother, attended the trial and died in 1973.
And Winnie Johnson, Keith Bennett’s mother, spent the rest of her life trying to bring her son home. She walked the moor herself, on more than one occasion, armed only with a spade. She wrote thousands of letters. She gave hundreds of interviews. She made television appeals. She wrote directly to Brady on at least two hundred separate occasions. He never answered with what she needed. She died of cancer on 18 August 2012, aged seventy-eight, in a hospice bed in Manchester. Her son’s body lay then, and lies now, somewhere in the peat of Saddleworth Moor.
A Final Note
Saddleworth Moor is, in physical terms, an unremarkable piece of British landscape. It is an open expanse of high moorland, blanket bog, and weather-worn grit, ringing the south-eastern edge of the Pennine hills above the textile towns of Greater Manchester. It is, on a clear day, beautiful in the bleak way that English upland landscapes are beautiful. It is also, in a way that English literature has been processing for at least a hundred and sixty years since Emily Brontë was writing about the same kind of country a hundred miles further north, a place that holds.
The A635 road that runs across the moor is, for most of the year, a quiet route through a sparsely populated landscape. In the years immediately after Brady and Hindley’s arrest, it became, briefly, one of the most photographed pieces of road in Britain. The sites of the recovered graves became, briefly, places where journalists and television crews and curious members of the public went to stand. Over the following decades, the gradual reassertion of the moor over the disturbances of 1965 to 1987 has been almost complete. The peat covers things. The heather grows over.
What does not grow over, in the way that the landscape does, is the case itself. Sixty years on, the Moors Murders remain the British criminal case that retains the most undiminished hold on the public consciousness. It is the case that produced the standard police mugshot every British schoolchild can identify, that produced the legal phrase whole-life tariff in its modern formulation, that produced the lifelong campaign of one mother that became, eventually, a kind of national reproach. It is the case that, when British people think about the absolute floor of human cruelty, they tend to think about first.
The honest summary of what the case demonstrates is hard to write because the case resists summary. What it perhaps shows, more clearly than any other modern British crime, is what happens when two people whose individual disturbances would have been manageable meet each other at the wrong moment and form the partnership that allows what was previously only fantasy to become method. Brady alone might have been a violent fantasist who never acted. Hindley alone might have been an unhappy young woman who eventually settled into a difficult but ordinary life. Together, between 1963 and 1965, they killed five children. The simple existence of that fact, sixty years on, remains the part of the case that the available historical and psychological literature has not been able to fully metabolise.
Saddleworth Moor still holds Keith Bennett. He was twelve. He was on his way to his grandmother’s house. He had been promised, for the weekend after his birthday, that the family would go to the seaside. He was last seen by his mother at a crossing on Stockport Road on the evening of 16 June 1964. She loved him for forty-eight years after that and could not, in all of those years, bring him home. That is the part of the case that should be the last thing said, and the part most worth remembering when everything else about Brady and Hindley has, eventually, faded from the cultural memory that has held them too long.
