THE MOORS KILLINGS                                                         

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A moor is a tract of open, rolling wasteland, usually covered with heather and often marshy with peat.

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. Two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on the Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches the boy’s body remains undiscovered.

The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain",

Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but she was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60. Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital. He made it clear that he never wished to be released, and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die. He died in 2017, at Ashworth, aged 79. There was no funeral for the Moors murderer Ian Brady and no music was played during the disposal of his body as he had requested before he died.  A senior judge in his his ruling, said in part, “The deceased’s wishes are relevant but they do not outweigh the need to avoid justified public indignation and actual unrest.”

The murders were the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a "concatenation of circumstances".^[ The trial judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, described Brady and Hindley in his closing remarks as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity

The full extent of Brady and Hindley's crimes did not come to light until their confessions in 1985, as both had until then maintained their innocence.

Their victims

Brady told Hindley that he wanted to "commit his perfect murder". He told her to drive her van around the local area while he followed behind on his motorcycle.  When he spotted a likely victim he would flash his headlight, and Hindley was to stop and offer that person a lift. Brady and Hindley later provided different accounts of the murder.

Driving down Gorton Lane, Brady saw the young girl walking towards them, and he then signaled Hindley to stop, which she did not do until she had passed the girl. Brady drew up alongside Hindley on his motorbike, demanding to know why she had not offered the girl a lift, to which Hindley replied that she recognized her as Marie Ruck, a near neighbour of her mother.

Shortly after 8:00 pm, continuing down Froxmer Street, Brady spotted a girl wearing a pale blue coat and white high-heeled shoes walking away from them, and once again he signaled for the van to stop. Hindley recognized the girl as Pauline Reade; a friend of her younger sister. The pending victim,  Maureen. Reade got into the van with Hindley, who then asked if she would mind helping to search for an expensive glove she had lost on Saddleworth Moor. Reade said she was in no great hurry, and agreed. At 16, Pauline Reade was older than Marie Ruck, and Hindley believed that there would be less of an outcry over the disappearance of a teenager than there would over a child of seven or eight.

When the van reached the moor, Hindley stopped and Brady arrived shortly afterwards on his motorcycle. She introduced him to Reade as her boyfriend, and said that he had also come to help find the missing glove. Hindley claimed Brady took Reade onto the moor while Hindley waited in the van. Brady returned alone after about 30 minutes, and took Hindley to the spot where Reade lay dying. Her throat had been cut twice with a large knife. The larger of these wounds was a four-inch incision across her voice box, and the collar of Reade's coat had been deliberately pushed into this wound. He told her to stay with Reade while he fetched a spade he had hidden nearby on a previous visit to the moor, to bury the body.

Hindley noticed that "Pauline's coat was undone and her clothes were in disarray. She had guessed from the time he had taken that Brady had sexually assaulted her. Later Brady's account differed from Hindley's. He claimed that Hindley was not only there at the scene, but that she assisted him with the sexual assault on Pauline.

 Returning home from the moor in the van—they had loaded the motorcycle into the back—Brady and Hindley passed Reade's mother, Joan and accompanied by her son, Paul, they were searching the streets for Paulin unaware that the girl’s murderers had just driven past them in the van.

Accompanied by Brady, Hindley approached 12-year-old John Kilbride in the early evening the of 23^rd of  November 1963, at a market in Ashton-under-Lyne and offered him a lift home on the pretext that his parents would be worried about him being out so late. With the added inducement of a bottle of sherry, Kilbride readily agreed to get into the Ford Anglia car that Hindley had hired. Brady told Kilbride that the sherry was at their home, and they would have to make a detour to collect it. On the way, he suggested that they take another detour, to search for a glove he said that Hindley had lost on the moor. When they reached the moor Brady took Kilbride with him while Hindley waited in the car. Brady sexually assaulted Kilbride and attempted to slit his throat with a six-inch serrated blade before fatally strangling him with a piece of string, possibly a shoelace.

Twelve-year-old Keith Bennett vanished on his way to his grandmother's house in Longsight, Manchester, early in the evening of the 16^th of June 1964, four days after his birthday. Hindley lured him into her Mini Pick-up—which Brady was sitting in the back of—by asking for the boy's help in loading some boxes, after which she said she would drive him home. She drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor as she and Brady had previously arranged, and Brady went off with Bennett, supposedly looking for a lost glove. Hindley kept watch, and after about 30 minutes or so Brady reappeared, alone and carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier. When Hindley asked how he had killed Bennett, Brady said that he had sexually assaulted the boy and strangled him with a piece of twine.

Brady and Hindley visited a fairground on the 26^th of December 1964, in search of another victim, and noticed 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey standing beside one of the rides. When it became apparent that she was on her own, they approached her and deliberately dropped some of the shopping they were carrying close to her, before asking for the girl's help to carry some of the packages to their car, and then to their home. Once inside the house Downey was undressed, gagged and forced to pose for photographs before being raped and killed, perhaps strangled with a piece of twine. Hindley maintained that she went to fill a bath for Downey and found her dead (presumably killed by Brady) when she returned. In Chris Cowley's book Face to Face with Evil: Conversations with Ian Brady, Brady states that it was Hindley who killed Downey. The following morning Brady and Hindley drove with Downey's body to the Saddleworth Moor, where she was buried, naked with her clothes at her feet, in a shallow grave.

On the 6^th of October, 1965, Brady met 17-year-old apprentice engineer Edward Evans at Manchester Central railway station and invited him to his home at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley, Cheshire, where Brady beat him with an axe and strangled him to death

The attack on Edward Evans was witnessed by Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, the husband of her younger sister Maureen. The Hindley family had not approved of Maureen's marriage to Smith, who had several criminal convictions, including actual bodily harm and housebreaking, the first of which, wounding with intent, occurred when he was 11.^[18] Throughout the previous year Brady had been cultivating a friendship with Smith, who had become "in awe" of the older man, something that increasingly worried Hindley, as she felt it compromised their safety.

On the evening of that same day, Hindley drove Brady to Manchester Central railway station, where she waited outside in the car while he selected their next victim. After a few minutes Brady reappeared in the company of Edward Evans, to whom he introduced Hindley as his sister. After they had driven back home and relaxed over a bottle of wine, Brady sent Hindley to fetch her brother-in-law. When they got back to the house Hindley told Smith to wait outside for her signal, a flashing light. When the signal came, Smith knocked on the door and was met by Brady, who asked if he had come for the miniature wine bottles. Brady led Smith into the kitchen and left him there, saying that he was going to collect the wine. A few minutes later, Smith heard a scream, followed by Hindley shouting loudly for him to come and help. Smith entered the living room to find Brady repeatedly striking Evans with the flat of an axe, and watched as he then throttled Evans with a length of electrical cord. Evans's body was too heavy for Smith to carry to the car on his own—Brady had sprained his ankle in the struggle so they wrapped it in plastic sheeting and put it in the spare bedroom.

Smith agreed to meet Brady the following evening to dispose of Evans' body. But after he returned home and told Maureen. Hindley’s younger sister what he had seen, she insisted that he call the police, which he did from a nearby phone box bringing a screwdriver and knife in case Brady should confront them. 

Smith said to the police while talking on the phone at the nearby phone box,  “Brady opened the door and he said in a very loud voice to Smith, “’Do you still want those miniatures?’ I nodded my head to say yes and he led me into the kitchen and he gave me three miniature bottles of spirits and said: "Do you want the rest?’ When I first walked into the house, the door to the living room  was closed.  Ian went into the living room and I waited in the kitchen. I waited about a minute or two then suddenly I heard a hell of a scream; it sounded like a woman, really high-pitched. Then the screams carried on, one after another really loud. Then I heard Myra shout, "Dave, help him," very loud. When I ran in I just stood inside the living room and I saw a young lad. He was lying with his head and shoulders on the couch and his legs were on the floor. He was facing upwards. Ian was standing over him, facing him, with his legs on either side of the young lad's legs. The lad was still screaming. Ian had a hatchet in his hand. He was holding it above his head and he hit the lad on the left side of his head with the hatchet. I heard the blow, it was a terrible hard blow, it sounded horrible.”

Early on the morning of the 7^th of October 1965, shortly after Smith's call, Superintendent Bob Talbot of the Cheshire Police arrived at the back door of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, wearing a borrowed baker's overall to cover his uniform. Talbot identified himself to Hindley as a police officer when she opened the door, and told her that he wanted to speak to her boyfriend. Hindley led him into the living room, where Brady was sitting up in a divan writing a note to his employer explaining that he would not be able to get into work because of his ankle injury. Talbot using a pretext explained that he was investigating "an act of violence involving guns" that was reported to have taken place the previous evening.

Hindley denied there had been any violence, and allowed the police officers to look around the house. When they came to the upstairs room in which Evans's body was stored the police found the door locked, and asked Brady for the key. Hindley claimed that the key was at work, but after the police offered to drive her to her employer's premises to retrieve it, Brady told her to hand the key over. When they returned to the living room, the police told Brady that they had discovered a trussed up body, and that he was being arrested on suspicion of murder.^[  As Brady was getting dressed, he said "Eddie and I had a row and the situation got out of hand.

Hindley was not arrested with Brady, but she demanded to go with him to the police station, accompanied by her dog, Puppet, to which the police agreed. Hindley was questioned about the events surrounding Evans's death, but she refused to make any statement beyond claiming that it had been an accident. As the police had no evidence that Hindley was involved in Evans's murder, she was allowed to go home, on the condition that she return the next day for further questioning. Hindley was at liberty for four days following Brady's arrest, during which time she went to her employer's premises and asked to be dismissed, so that she would be eligible for unemployment benefits. While in the office where Brady worked, she found some papers belonging to him in an envelope that she claimed she did not open, which she burned in an ashtray. She believed that they were plans for bank robberies, nothing to do with the murders. On the 11^th of October, Hindley was charged as an accessory to the murder of Edward Evans and was remanded at the Risley prison.

Brady admitted under police questioning that he and Evans had fought, but insisted that he and Smith had murdered Evans between them. He said, “Hindley had "only done what she had been told to do” . Smith told police that Brady had asked him to return anything incriminating, such as "dodgy books", which Brady then packed into suitcases. Smith daid that he had no idea what else the suitcases contained or where they might be, but he mentioned in passing that Brady "had a thing about railway stations". The police consequently requested a search of all Manchester's left-luggage offices for any suitcases belonging to Brady, and on the 15^th  of October, the British Transport Police found what they were looking for at Manchester Central railway station^[31]—the left-luggage ticket was found several days later in the back of Hindley's prayer book

Inside one of the suitcases were nine pornographic photographs taken of a young girl, naked and with a scarf tied across her mouth, and a 16-minute audio tape recording of her screaming and pleading for help. Ann Downey, Lesley Ann Downey's mother, later listened to the tape after police had discovered the body of her missing 10-year-old daughter, and confirmed that it was a recording of her daughter's voice.

Hindley, meanwhile, had been arrested on the 11^th of October after new evidence had emerged during the continuing investigation to convince police that she had also been actively involved in the murder of Edward Evans. She and Brady were both charged with the murder of Edward Evans, while police searched the moors for further victims.

While the police were searching the house at Wardle Brook Avenue, they found an old exercise book in which the name "John Kilbride" had been scribbled, which made them suspicious that Brady and Hindley might have been involved in the unsolved disappearances of other youngsters.  A large collection of photographs was discovered in the house, many of which seemed to have been taken on Saddleworth Moor. One hundred and fifty officers were drafted to search the moor, looking for locations that matched the photographs. Initially the search was concentrated along the A628 road near Woodhead, but a close neighbour, 11-year-old Pat Hodges, had on several occasions been taken to the moor by Brady and Hindley and she was able to point out their favourite sites along the A635 road.^[  On 16^th of October, the police found an arm bone sticking out of the peat; officers presumed that they had found the body of John Kilbride, but soon discovered that it was that of Lesley Ann Downey. Her mother Ann West had been on the moor watching as the police conducted their search, but was not present when her daughter’s body was found. The body of Lesley Ann Downey was still visually identifiable when recovered. She was shown clothing recovered from the grave, and identified it as belonging to her missing daughter.

Detectives located another site on the opposite side of the A635 from where Lesley Ann Downey's body was discovered, and five days later they found the "badly decomposed" body of John Kilbride, which had to be identified by clothing. That same day, already being held for the murder of Evans, Brady and Hindley appeared at Hyde Magistrates' Court charged with Lesley Ann Downey's murder. Each was brought before the court separately and remanded into custody for a week. They made a two-minute appearances on the 28^th of October and were again remanded into custody.

The investigating officers suspected Brady and Hindley of murdering other missing children and teenagers who had disappeared from areas in and around Manchester over the previous few years, and the search for bodies continued after the discovery of John Kilbride's body, but with winter setting in it was called off in November. Presented with the evidence of the tape recording, Brady admitted to taking the photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, but insisted that she had been brought to Wardle Brook Avenue by two men who had subsequently taken her away again while still  alive. By the 2^nd  of December 1965, Brady had been charged with the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. Hindley had been charged with the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and being an accessory to the murder of John Kilbride. At the committal hearing on the 6^th of December, Brady was charged with the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride, and Lesley Ann Downey, and Hindley with the murders of Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey, as well as with harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had killed John Kilbride. The prosecution's opening statement was held in camera rather than in open court, and the defence asked for a similar stipulation but was refused. The proceedings continued in front of three magistrates in Hyde over an 11-day period during December, at the end of which the pair were committed for trial at Chester Assizes

Many of the photographs taken by Brady and Hindley on the moor featured Hindley's dog Puppet, sometimes as a puppy. Detectives arranged for the animal to be examined by a veterinary surgeon to determine its age, from which they could date when the pictures were taken. The examination involved an analysis of the dog's teeth, which required a general anaesthetic from which Puppet did not recover, as he suffered from an undiagnosed kidney complaint. On hearing the news of her dog's death, Hindley became furious, and accused the police of murdering Puppet, one of the few occasions detectives witnessed any emotional response from her.

In a letter to her mother shortly afterwards, Hindley wrote:

“I feel as though my heart's been torn to pieces. I don't think anything could hurt me more than this has. The only consolation is that some moron might have got hold of Puppet and hurt him.”It It is obvious that she has no empathy for human beings however I can appreciate the fact that she has empathy for her pet which is normal since has lived with her pet and was emotionally attached to her dog.  

The trial was held over a period of 14 days beginning on the 19^th of  April 1966 in front of Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson. Such was the public interest that the courtroom i was fitted with security screens to protect Brady and Hindley.

The two serial killers were each charged with three murders, those of Evans, Downey and Kilbride, as it was considered that there was by then sufficient evidence to implicate Hindley in Kilbride's death.

The attorney general, Sir Frederick Elwyn Jones, led the prosecution, assisted by William Mars-Jones. Brady was defended by the Liberal Member of Parliament Emlyn Hooson,^[  and Hindley was defended by Godfrey Heilpern, recorder of Salford from 1964—both experienced Queen's Counsels (QCs). 

David Smith was the chief prosecution witness, but during the trial it was revealed that he had entered into an agreement with a newspaper that he initially refused to name—even under intense questioning—guaranteeing him £1,000 (equivalent to about £20,000 in 2019) for the syndication rights to his story if Brady and Hindley were convicted, something the trial judge described as a "gross interference with the course of justice". Smith finally admitted in court that the newspaper was the News of the World, which had already paid for a holiday in France for him and his wife and was paying him a regular income of £20 per week, as well as accommodating him in a five-star hotel for the duration of the trial.

Brady and Hindley pleaded not guilty to the charges against them. Both were called by their lawyers to give evidence, Brady was in the witness box  for over eight hours and Hindley for six. Although Brady admitted to hitting Evans with an axe, he did not admit to killing him, arguing that the pathologist in his report had stated that Evans's death was "accelerated by strangulation". Under cross-examination by the prosecuting counsel, all Brady would admit was that "I hit Evans with the axe. If he died from axe blows, I killed him." Hindley denied any knowledge that the photographs of Saddleworth Moor found by police had been taken near the graves of their victims. A 16-minute tape recordingof Lesley Anne Downey, on which the voices of Brady and Hindley were audible, was played in open court. Hindley admitted that her attitude towards Downey was "brusque and cruel", but claimed that was only because she was afraid that someone might hear Downey screaming. Hindley claimed that when Downey was being undressed, she herself was "downstairs"; when the pornographic photographs were taken she was "looking out the window"; and that when Downey was being strangled she "was running a bath"

On the 6^th of May, after having deliberated for a little over two hours, the jury found Brady guilty of all three murders and Hindley guilty of the murders of Downey and Evans. As the death penalty for murder had been abolished while Brady and Hindley were held on remand, the judge passed the only sentence that the law allowed: life imprisonment. Brady was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences and Hindley was given two concurrent life sentences , plus a concurrent seven-year term for harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had murdered John Kilbride.^[45] Brady was taken to Durham Prison and Hindley was sent to Holloway Prison.

In his closing remarks Justice Atkinson described the murders as a "truly horrible case" and condemned the accused as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity". He recommended that both Brady and Hindley spend "a very long time" in prison before being considered for parole but did not stipulate a tariff. He stated that Brady was "wicked beyond belief" and that he saw no reasonable possibility of reform. He did not consider that the same was necessarily true of Hindley when he said, , "once she is removed from Brady's influence".

Throughout the trial Brady and Hindley "stuck rigidly to their strategy of lying", and Hindley was later described as "a quiet, controlled, impassive witness who lied remorselessly.

In my opinion, Brady was a sex fiend who killed his victims so that they wouldn’t report him to the authorities.  Hindley simply didn’t care that Bradley’s victims were murdered by his partner in crime.

In 1985, Brady allegedly confessed to Fred Harrison, a journalist working for The Sunday People, that he had also been responsible for the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, something that the police already suspected, as both children lived in the same area as Brady and Hindley and had disappeared at about the same time as their other victims. The subsequent newspaper reports prompted Greater Manchester Police (GMP) to reopen the case, in an investigation headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, who had been appointed head of GMP's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) the previous year.

Why did Bradly tell the journalist about the other murders he had not been charged with?  It was for the notoriety he was seeking. He knew that whatever sentence he would be given would be academic since he was already serving a natural life sentence. 

Since the Moors Murders came to light in 1965, regional and national newspapers had been keen to name other missing children and teenagers from in and near the Manchester area as possible victims of Brady and Hindley. One victim was Stephen Jennings, a three-year-old West Yorkshire boy who was last seen alive in December 1962. His body was finally found buried in a field in 1988, but the following year his father William Jennings was found guilty of his murder.^[  Jennifer Tighe, a 14-year-old girl who disappeared from an Oldham children's home in December 1964, was mentioned in the press as a possible Moors Murders victim some 40 years later, but after a few more years Greater Manchester Police confirmed that she was indeed still alive. This followed claims in February 2004 that Hindley had confessed to another inmate that she and Brady had murdered a sixth victim, who was a teenage girl.

On 3 July 1985, DCS Topping visited Brady, then being held at Gartree Prison in Leicestershire, but found him "scornful of any suggestion that he had confessed to more murders. Police nevertheless decided to resume their search of Saddleworth Moor, once more using the photographs taken by Brady and Hindley to help them identify possible burial sites. In November 1986, Keith Bennett's mother Winnie Johnson wrote a letter to Hindley begging to know what had happened to her son, a letter that Hindley seemed to be "genuinely moved" by. It ended: “I am a simple woman. I work in the kitchens of Christie's Hospital. It has taken me five weeks labour to write this letter because it is so important to me that it is understood by you for what it is, a plea for help. Please, Miss Hindley, help me.”  She wanted Hidley to tell her where the body of her missing son was.                                              

I can’t fathom what kind of help she expected from a sociopath. I don’t know if she even got a reply.

Police visited Hindley, then being held in Cookham Wood, Kent, a few days after she had received the letter, 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. She showed particular interest in photographs of the area around Hollin Brown Knoll and Shiny Brook, but said that it was impossible to be sure of the locations without visiting the moor. The security considerations for such a visit were significant; there were threats made against her should she visit the moors, but Home Secretary Douglas Hurd agreed with Topping that it would be worth the risk. Writing in 1989, Topping said that he felt "quite cynical" about Hindley's motivation in helping the police. Although the letter from Winnie Johnson may have played a part, he believed that Hindley's real concern was that, knowing of Brady's "precarious" mental state, she was afraid that he might decide to co-operate with the police, and wanted to make certain that she, and not Brady, was the one to gain whatever benefit there may have been in terms of public approval, notwithstanding her role in the killings.

On 16 December 1986, Hindley made the first of two visits to assist the police search of Saddleworth Moor. Four police cars left Cookham Wood at 4:30 am. At about the same time, police closed all roads onto the moor, which was patrolled by 200 officers, 40 of them armed. Hindley and her solicitor arrived by helicopter from an airfield near Maidstone, then she was driven, and walked, around the area. It was difficult for Hindley to make a connection between her memories of the area and what she saw on the day, and she was apparently nervous of the helicopters flying overhead. At 3:00 pm she was returned to the helicopter, and taken back to Cookham Wood. Topping was criticized by the press, who described the visit as a "fiasco", a "publicity stunt", and a "mindless waste of money,” He was forced to defend the visit, pointing out its benefits when he said, “We had taken the view that we needed a thorough systematic search of the moor. It would never have been possible to carry out such a search in private without Hindley being present.” 

On 19 December, David Smith, then 38, also returned to the moor. He spent about four hours helping police pinpoint areas where he thought more bodies might be buried. Topping continued to visit Hindley in prison, along with her solicitor Michael Fisher and her spiritual counsellor, Peter Timms, who had been a prison governor before becoming a Methodist minister. She made a formal confession to police on the 10^th of February 1987, admitting her involvement in all five murders, but news of her confession was not made public for more than a month. The tape recording of her statement was over 17 hours long; Topping described it as a "very well worked out performance in which, I believe, she told me just as much as she wanted me to know, and no more".^[79] He added that he "was struck by the fact that she was never there when the killings took place. She was in the car, over the brow of the hill, in the bathroom and even, in the case of the Evans murder, in the kitchen". Topping concluded that he felt he "had witnessed a great performance rather than a genuine confession."

That wouldn’t have recused her of the murders because she was instrumental in convincing the victims that nothing was going to happen to them.

The police visited Brady in prison again and told him of Hindley's confession, which at first he refused to believe. Once presented with some of the details that Hindley had provided of Pauline Reade's abduction, Brady decided that he too was prepared to confess, but on one condition: that immediately afterwards he be given the means to commit suicide, a request with which it was impossible for the authorities to comply.

I can understand why he wanted to commit suicide. He was obviously not serving his sentence in the general population of the prison and was bored serving his sentence  in a cell by himself.

At about the same time, Winnie Johnson sent Hindley another letter, again pleading with her to assist the police in finding the body of her son Keith. In the letter, Johnson was sympathetic to Hindley over the criticism surrounding her first visit. Hindley, who had not replied to the first letter, responded by thanking Johnson for both letters, explaining that her decision not to reply to the first resulted from the negative publicity that surrounded it. She claimed that, had Johnson written to her 14 years earlier, she would have confessed and helped the police. She also paid tribute to Topping, and thanked Johnson for her sincerity.^[82] Hindley made her second visit to the moor in March 1987. This time, the level of security surrounding her visit was considerably higher. She stayed overnight in Manchester, at the flat of the police chief in charge of GMP training at Sedgley Park, Prestwich, and visited the moor twice. She confirmed to police that the two areas in which they were concentrating their search—Hollin Brown Knoll and Hoe Grain—were correct, although she was unable to locate either of the graves. She later remembered that as Pauline Reade was being buried she had been sitting next to her on a patch of grass and could see the rocks of Hollin Brown Knoll silhouetted against the night sky.

In April 1987, news of Hindley's confession became public. Amidst strong media interest, Lord Longford pleaded for her release, writing that her continuing detention to satisfy "mob emotion" was not right. What a twit.

Fisher persuaded Hindley to release a public statement, in which she explained her reasons for denying her complicity in the murders, her religious experiences in prison, the letter from Johnson, and that she saw no possibility of release. She also exonerated David Smith from any part in the murders, except that of Edward Evans.

Over the next few months, interest in the search waned, but Hindley's clue had directed the police to focus their efforts on a specific area. On the afternoon of the 1^st of July 1987, after more than 100 days of searching, they found a body buried 3 feet (0.9 m) below the surface, only 100 yards (90 m) from the place where Lesley Ann Downey had been found. Brady had been co-operating with the police for some time, and when news reached him that Reade's body had been discovered, he made a formal confession to Topping. He also issued a statement to the press, through his solicitor, saying that he too was prepared to help the police in their search. Brady was taken to the moor on the 3^rd of  July, but he seemed to lose his bearings, blaming changes that had taken place in the intervening years, and the search was called off at 3:00 pm, by which time a large crowd of press and television reporters had gathered on the Moor. I think he just wanted an outing.

Topping refused to allow Brady a second visit to the moors, and a few days after his visit Brady wrote a letter to BBC television reporter Peter Gould, giving some sketchy details of five additional murders that he claimed to have carried out Brady refused to identify his alleged victims, and the police failed to discover any unsolved crimes matching the few details that he supplied. Hindley told Topping that she knew nothing of these killings.

On the 24^th  of August, 1987, police called off their search of Saddleworth Moor, despite not having found Keith Bennett's body. Brady had been taken to the moor for a second time on the 1^st  of  December, but he was once again unable to locate the burial site. Earlier that month, the BBC had received a letter from Ian Brady, in which he claimed that he had committed a further five murders - including a man in the Piccadilly area of Manchester, another victim on the  Saddleworth Moor, two more victims in Scotland, and a woman whose body he allegedly dumped in a canal at a location which he declined to identify. The police decided that there was insufficient evidence from this letter to launch an official investigation.^[92] Although Brady and Hindley had confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) decided that nothing would be gained by a further trial since both were already serving life sentences no further punishment could be inflicted.

In 2003, the police launched Operation Maida, and again searched the moor for the body of Keith Bennett.^] They read statements from Brady and Hindley, and also studied photographs taken by the pair. Their search was aided by the use of sophisticated modern equipment, including a US satellite used to look for evidence of soil movement. The BBC reported on the the 1^st  of   July, 2009 that Greater Manchester Police had said that they 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".^[ Detectives were also reported as saying that they would never again give Brady the attention or the thrill of leading another fruitless search on the moor where they believe Keith Bennett's remains are buried.^[97] Donations from members of the public funded a search of the moor for Bennett's body by volunteers from a Welsh search and rescue team that began in March 2010. In August 2012, it was claimed that Brady may have given details of the location of Keith Bennett's body to one of his visitors. A woman was subsequently arrested on suspicion of preventing the burial of a body without lawful excuse, but a few months later the Crown Prosecution Service announced that there was insufficient evidence to press charges.^]Keith Bennett's body remains undiscovered as of 2019, although his family continues to search the moor in hopes of finding their son’s body.

Why did these sociopaths become serial killers? Lets look at their previous history.

Ian Brady was born in Glasgow as Ian Duncan Stewart on the 2^nd of  January 1938 to Margaret "Peggy" Stewart, an unmarried tea room waitress The identity of Brady's father has never been reliably ascertained, although his mother said he was a reporter working for a Glasgow newspaper, who died three months before Brady was born. Stewart had little support, and after a few months was forced to give her son into the care of Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own. Brady took their name, and became known as Ian Sloan. His mother continued to visit him throughout his childhood.^[105] Various authors have stated that he tortured animals, although Brady objected to such accusations. Aged nine, he visited Loch Lomond with his family, where he reportedly discovered an affinity for the outdoors, and a few months later, the family moved to a new council house on an overspill estate at Pollok. He was accepted for Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils, Obviously, he wasn’t a dummy.

At Shawlands his behaviour worsened as a teenager he, twice appeared before a juvenile court for housebreaking. He left the academy aged 15, and took a job as a tea boy at a Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan. Nine months later, he began working as a butcher's messenger boy. He had a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, but their relationship ended when he threatened her with a flick knife after she visited a dance with another boy. He again appeared before the court, this time with nine charges against him, and shortly before his 17^th  birthday he was placed on probation, on condition that he live with his mother. By then she had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Patrick Brady, and it was the latter who got Brady a job as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market. Ian took his new stepfather's surname.

Within a year of moving to Manchester, Ian Brady was caught with a sack full of lead seals he had stolen and was trying to smuggle out of the market. He was sent to Strangeways for three months. As he was still under 18, he was sentenced to two years in borstal for "training".He was sent to Latchmere House in London and then Hatfield borstal in the West Riding of Yorkshire. After being discovered drunk on alcohol he had brewed he was moved to the much tougher unit at Hull. Released on 14^th of November 1957, Brady returned to Manchester, where he took a labouring job, which he hated, and was dismissed from another job in a brewery. Deciding to "better himself", he obtained a set of instruction manuals on book-keeping from a local public library, with which he "astonished" his parents by studying alone in his room for hours.  In January 1959, Brady applied for and was offered a clerical job at Millwards, a wholesale chemical distribution company based in Gorton. He was regarded by his colleagues as a quiet, punctual, but short-tempered young man. He read books including Teach Yourself German and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, as well as works on Nazi atrocities. He rode a Tiger Cub motorcycle, which he used to visit the Pennines.

There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was 17, he was on the road that led him to the Saddleworth Moor.

Myra Hindley was born in Crumpsall on the 23^rd of July 1942 and was raised in Gorton, then a working-class area of Manchester. Her parents, Nellie and Bob Hindley (the latter an alcoholic), beat her regularly when she was a young child. The small house the family lived in was in such poor condition that Hindley and her parents had to sleep in the only available bedroom, she in a single bed next to her parents' double. The family's living conditions deteriorated further when Hindley's sister, Maureen, was born in August 1946. About a year after the birth, Hindley, then 5, was sent by her parents to live with her grandmother, whose home was nearby.

Hindley's father had served with the Parachute Regiment and had been stationed in North Africa, Cyprus and Italy during the Second World War. He had been known in the army as a "hard man" and he expected his daughter to be equally tough. He taught her how to fight, and insisted that she "stick up for herself". When Hindley was 8, a local boy approached her in the street and scratched both of her cheeks with his fingernails, drawing blood. She burst into tears and ran into her parents' house, to be met by her father, who demanded that she "Go and punch him [the boy], because if you don't I'll leather you!" Hindley found the boy and succeeded in knocking him down with a sequence of punches, as her father had taught her. As she wrote later, "at eight years old I'd scored my first victory"

Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, has suggested that the fight, and the part that Hindley's father played in it, may be "key pieces of evidence" in trying to understand Hindley's role in the Moors murder          

He said that The relationship with her father brutalized her. She was not only used to violence in the home but rewarded for it outside. When this happens at a young age it can distort a person's reaction to such situations for life.  

One of her closest friends was 13-year-old Michael Higgins, who lived on a nearby street. In June 1957, he invited her to go swimming with friends at a local disused reservoir. Although she was a good swimmer, Hindley chose not to go and instead went out with a friend, Pat Jepson. Higgins drowned in the reservoir, and upon learning of his fate, Hindley was deeply upset and blamed herself for his death. She collected for a funeral wreath, and his funeral at St Francis's Monastery in Gorton Lane—the church where Hindley had been baptized a Catholic on the 16 th of August 1942that had a lasting effect on her. Hindley's mother had agreed to her father's insistence that she be baptized as a Catholic only on the condition that she was not sent to a Catholic school, as her mother believed that "all the monks taught was  the catechism". Hindley was increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church after she started at Ryder Brow Secondary Modern, and began taking instruction for formal reception into the Church soon after Higgins's funeral. She took the confirmation name of Veronica, and received her first communion in November 1958.     

Hindley's first job was as a junior clerk at a local electrical engineering firm. She ran errands, made tea, and typed. She was well liked at the firm, enough so that when she lost her first week's wage packet, the other girls had a collection to replace it. Beginning at Christmas 1958, Hindley began a short relationship with Ronnie Sinclair, and became engaged at 17. The engagement was called off several months later. Hindley apparently thought Sinclair immature, and unable to provide her with the life she envisaged for herself.  Shortly after her 17^th birthday, she changed her hair colour with a pink rinse. She took judo lessons once a week at a local school, but found partners reluctant to train with her as she was often slow to release her grip. She took a job at Bratby and Hinchliffe, an engineering company in Gorton, but was dismissed for absenteeism after six months.         

In January 1961, the 18-year-old Myra Hindley joined Millwards as a typist.^[  She soon became infatuated with Brady, despite learning that he had a criminal record. She began a diary and, although she had dates with other men, some of the entries detail her fascination with Brady, to whom she eventually spoke for the first time on the 27^th of July 1961. Over the next few months she continued to make entries, but grew increasingly disillusioned with him, until the 22^nd of December when Brady asked her on a date to the cinema where they watched the biblical epic King of Kings. Their dates together followed a regular pattern; a trip to the cinema, usually to watch an X-rated film, and then back to Hindley's house to drink German wine.^] Brady then gave her reading material, and the pair spent their work lunch breaks reading aloud to one another from accounts of Nazi atrocities. Hindley began to emulate an ideal of Aryan perfection, bleaching her hair blonde and applying thick crimson lipstick.^[  She expressed concern at some aspects of Brady's character; in a letter to a childhood friend, she mentioned an incident where she had been drugged by Brady, but also wrote of her obsession with him. A few months later, she asked her friend to destroy the letter.^[

 In her 30,000-word plea for parole, written in 1978 and 1979 and submitted to Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, Hindley said, “Within months he Brady had convinced me that there was no God at all. He could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion.”

Hindley began to change her appearance further, wearing clothing considered risqué such as high boots, short skirts and leather jackets, and the two became less sociable to their colleagues.^[134] The couple were regulars at the library, borrowing books on philosophy, as well as crime and torture.  They also read works by the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Although Hindley was not a qualified driver (she passed her test on the7th of November 1963 after failing three times^,  she often hired a van, in which the two planned bank robberies. Hindley befriended George Clitheroe, the President of the Cheadle Rifle Club, and on several occasions visited two local shooting ranges. Clitheroe, although puzzled by her interest, arranged for her to buy a .22 rifle from a gun merchant in Manchester. She also asked to join a pistol club, but she was a poor shot and allegedly often bad-tempered, so Clitheroe told her that she was unsuitable; she did though manage to purchase a Webley .45 and a Smith & Wesson .38 from other members of the club.^[140] Brady and Hindley's plans for robbery came to nothing, but they became interested in photography. Brady already owned a Box Brownie, which he used to take photographs of Hindley and her dog, Puppet, but he upgraded to a more sophisticated model, and also purchased lights and darkroom equipment. The pair took photographs of each other that, for the time, would have been considered explicit. For Hindley, this demonstrated a marked change from her earlier, age, as she became more shy and prudish.

Hindley later claimed that Brady began to talk about "committing the perfect murder" in July 1963,^[143]and often spoke to her about Meyer Levin's Compulsion, published as a novel in 1956 and adapted for the cinema in 1959. The story tells a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb case, two young men from well-to-do families who attempt to commit the perfect murder of a 12-year-old boy, and escape the death penalty because of their age.

By June 1963, Brady had moved in with Hindley at her grandmother's house in Bannock Street, and on the  12^th of  July 1963, the two murdered their first victim who was 16-year-old Pauline Reade. Having got away with that crime, that is when their  serial killings began.

What they were doing was out of the scope of most people's understanding and certainly beyond the comprehension of the minds of ordinary people and this is why this murderous duo managed to get away with their murders for so long.