David Smith, a seventeen-year-old Manchester lad, didn’t think anything of it when his sister-in-law showed up at his place and asked him round to her house. She and her boyfriend Ian would often visit with David and his wife, Maureen, and Dave and Ian would frequently drink cheap wine until past midnight, talking about Germany, the many achievements of Adolf Hitler, Ian’s interest in sexual sadism and the Marquis de Sade, and make vague plans to rob a bank or post office or something. You know – guy talk.
When he arrived at their house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley, he was a little surprised to find another young man there – another seventeen-year-old who was introduced as Eddie. He went into the kitchen, as he’d been offered some sample bottles of wine that Ian didn’t want to drink, and whilst there he heard screaming. He ran back into the living room, thinking the new bloke might be attacking his friend Ian, but what he saw instead was Ian repeatedly smashing an axe into Eddie Evans’ head and body.
Eddie slumped to the floor and Ian hit him a few more times, before grabbing a piece of electrical flex cord and strangling the poor boy to death. David, understandably frightened, cooperated when they insisted he help with cleaning up and wrapping the body for disposal. “That was the messiest one yet,” Ian commented to Myra.
“It usually only takes one hit.” At some point Ian chuckled about the fact that this one was “a bleeder”, and “a brainy sod”, as they scrubbed brain and blood from the floor. Ian was unable to carry the body to Myra’s van, so he arranged for Dave to come back the following night with a pram, as Dave had a newborn.
The plan was to load it up with the pram and then drive it out to the moor. Dave got home at about three in the morning, woke his wife Maureen and told her everything. A few hours later, armed with a hammer and a screwdriver for safety, they both went to a phone box and called the police.
Or at least, that’s David’s story, which he stuck to until the day he died. Some of the accounts, including his own on separate occasions, vary slightly in terms of details, but then David told this story for decades, and also dozens if not hundreds of times under intensive police interrogation, so it’s understandable that some of his available transcripts don’t agree with each other. Some have speculated he might have been far more involved, as David and Ian frequently spoke about committing crimes together and had talked about “rolling a queer”, i.e., enticing a homosexual back to the house and robbing him.
At least, that’s what Ian Brady initially insisted, claiming at his trial that he and David had killed Eddie together. Whatever might have been going on between the two men, we now know that young David was completely unaware an axe murder was about to take place.
The police arrived the next morning, cautious in the knowledge there were firearms in the house. This was well before the days of SWAT Teams or SO19 hut-hutting all over the place and rappelling down buildings, so they needed to think carefully about how to effect entry. Spotting a bread delivery van nearby, Detective Superintendent Bob Talbot approached the driver and borrowed his white uniform coat, before knocking on the door.
Myra Hindley answered it, confused, as Talbot wore a Tip Top Bakeries coat and, as she put it, “Our house always took Mother’s Pride”. Her confusion was resolved when Talbot identified himself as a police officer and demanded entry. Inside, they found Ian Baker in his underwear, sitting on a divan, and writing a sick note to send into work.
They also found a locked bedroom door. Hindley said the key was at work, but when they offered to drive them to the office to pick it up, Ian told Myra to surrender the key. There police found the body of Edward Evans, stripped, mutilated, hogtied, and wrapped in plastic.
Naturally, at this point, Ian Brady was arrested on suspicion of murder. Myra Hindley wasn’t, as this was 1965 in the north of England, and women were both far too peripheral and far too heavily stereotyped to pop out immediately as a suspect, especially when there was a man nearby. This might sound strange, but it’s taken directly from the firsthand accounts of the arresting officers – they all say it didn’t even occur to them that Myra might be involved in murder.
Despite not being under arrest, Myra insisted on accompanying Ian, along with her dog, Puppet, to the station, and so they all toddled off to the local nick. None of the police involved at the time had any real inkling of what was coming – a criminal case which incensed an entire nation, and which has reverberated through to the present day. The “Moors Murders” case, as it came to be known, became the catalyst for significant reforms in both the criminal justice system and press regulation, as well as sparking vehement debate in both houses of parliament as well as the court of popular opinion.
Its ripples even disturbed the serene waters of academia, sparking furious (for academia) arguments about the agency and representation of women, the nature and origins of psychosis and psychosexual sadism, ‘the permissive society’ and mass media, censorship, and the sociological and psychological origins of evil.
Abandon All Hope
The last time I edited someone’s Master’s thesis, I saw the quote “every story’s a Jesus story, whether the author knows it or not.” I put a comment on this saying, “slight overstatement”, as while this isn’t strictly true in all cases, the vast majority of Western literature, especially in the English-speaking world, has been shaped by the lingering remnants of Christian mythos. What this means is that almost every story ends up being about redemption of some kind, either of the self-sacrificing hero, or the world, or both.
So ubiquitous is this mythos that even non-fiction pieces are frequently structured this way, following an arc of redemption carefully plotted out by the writer through selection and emphasis of facts. This, however, isn’t a story which either can or should be treated as such. There’s no real upside here.
As DS Topping, who led the later phase of the investigation, said, “To sum it up, what they were about was pure evil. They set out to rape and murder small children.” Crimes like this don’t fit a neat redemption arc – they shatter the lives they come in contact with, to say nothing of the innocent lives they brutally end, leaving nothing but an ugly scar on the collective memory of the communities they’ve ravaged.
Even closure – the second draw prize where redemption’s not available – is difficult to find here. Many central questions around the case are doomed to remain open for the foreseeable future, as the bulk of available information comes from third parties, journalists, and a pair of liars and murderers who didn’t confess for twenty years. This is just a horrific sequence of events, from which it’s near impossible to extract hope or meaning.
So, now you’ve all been warned, let’s proceed.
The Moors Murders
What follows is the most factual accounting possible of the Moors Murders. As one of the bodies has never been found, the case is still open, so many of the official documents are sealed. They are technically available under the Freedom of Information Act, but my FOIA request was knocked back almost immediately – in less time than it would have taken to read it, I’d say. When I asked some of my journalist and law enforcement friends for advice, they came back with the suggestion that something about this case might be embarrassing to the government in some way, and that as far as they can make out, rejections have been pretty routine. Having said that, there’s hours and hours of interviews with the investigating officers and the victims’ parents, partial transcripts of interviews with David Smith, Ian Brady, and Myra Hindley, and partial transcripts of the trial scattered across the various books about the case. There are also those books themselves, but many of these are garbage. Of especial note, On Iniquity, by Pamela Hansford Johnson, stands out as particularly egregious. The book’s central argument seems to be that freely available pornography, girls in short skirts, and men with long hair led directly to a pair of psychotic child rapists preying on the children in their immediate neighbourhood. Which is about as sensible as saying video games lead directly to gun violence. The chief virtue of this book is that it’s quite short, the author having kindly excluded anything resembling evidence to support her assertions. There are a few others which are little more than a very dark brand of soft porn, and a couple which are excellent analyses of the case, despite being somewhat dated. But good or bad, I was able to use the primary records which they’d been granted access to – those same records HMG deemed me unfit to see, – as well as partial transcripts of the trial and documentation from Myra Hindley’s sentencing appeals. Fortunately, there’s been a high level of academic interest in the case, so there’s a wealth of white papers, dissertations, and doctoral theses, and I’ve relied heavily on some of these with an emphasis on criminal psychologists, criminologists, and historians. A special shout out needs to go to Ian T Field Ph.D., whose thesis on media representations of the Moors Murderers was of immense value. I also dipped quite heavily into Hansard, as the case was discussed in depth and at length in The House of Lords. Some excellent reporting by The Times, BBC, Channels 4 and 5, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, and People rounded out the picture, as many of the online sources either disagreed about basic facts or contained very little that wasn’t dark titillation or armchair psychology. With that said, I have to apologise if some of the facts are incomplete or uncertain, as I’ve prioritised that which can actually be known.
On the 12th of July 1963, the British Railways Club in Gorton, a suburb of Manchester, were hosting a dance. Sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade had arranged to go with a couple of friends, but they’d pulled out at the last minute and her mother didn’t want her to go alone. She had her heart set on it, however, and put on her brand-new white court shoes and a bright blue coat in readiness.
She got her mother Joanne to help brush her hair while she persuaded her that she’d be likely to see other friends at the dance, so she wouldn’t really be alone after all. Joanne relented, clipping her own necklace around her daughter’s neck as she left. Joanne recalls Pauline protesting, “But mum, it’s your favourite necklace!”.
“Well, you’re my favourite girl,” Joanne said, before waving her off down the street. On the way, Pauline saw a van pull up in front of her and Myra Hindley, her friend Maureen’s older sister, was waving her over. Myra asked if she’d be willing to help find an expensive glove she’d lost on the moors – she could drive them there and, as a reward, she promised her some gramophone records for her trouble.
The fact that she knew Myra, as well as the enticing prospect of some new records, persuaded her to go along. According to her mother, she was also the sort of girl who was just eager to be helpful, especially to neighbours, friends, and family. Myra introduced Pauline to her boyfriend, Ian Brady, who was following on his motorcycle, and the three of them went to the moors together.
Once they arrived, Myra waited in the van while Brady and Pauline went down onto the moor. Brady took this opportunity to rape and torture Pauline, before cutting her throat and calling Hindley down to help bury the body in a shallow pit. From Hindley’s account, Brady had cut her throat somewhat inexpertly, as she was still alive when she came down to help with the body.
Myra Hindley and Ian Baker had been planning to commit “the perfect murder”, inspired in part by the crimes of the so-called “genius killers” Leopold and Loeb. They’d gone cruising down Gorton Lane, the plan being that Myra would drive ahead and Ian behind – a classic “front and follow” configuration. Ian Brady would flash his headlight when he’d chosen a victim, which would be the signal for Myra Hindley to stop and entice them into the Mini pickup.
The first girl Brady chose was 8-year-old Marie Ruck, but Myra refused. Marie was a close neighbour of her mother’s, and Myra feared an intensive hue and cry if a girl of that age went missing. When Brady selected Pauline second, Myra had reasoned that a teenage girl going missing would cause less fuss – that people might think she’d just run away – and also that she’d be easy to lure into the van owing to their relationship.
According to Myra, she suspected Ian had raped her from the disarrangement of her clothing, but there’d been no talk about sexual assault in their planning. There are reasons to seriously doubt this, which we’ll get into later. On their way back from the moors, the pair passed Pauline’s mother Joanne and friends from the neighbourhood searching for Pauline, as word had got out that she was missing.
Over the years, Myra Hindley would have frequent conversations with Joanne Reade, comforting her about the disappearance of her daughter and telling her she’d be sure to turn up soon.
Twelve-year-old John Kilbride went off to the cinema on the 23rd of November of the same year, 1963. In an interview with Channel 5, John’s mother Sheila described him as a “cheeky boy”, smiling fondly as she said the words, explaining that the reason for sending him off to the pictures was that he was tormenting his siblings and generally being rambunctious. Before he’d set out, she warned him to be “on his guard”, as the neighbourhood was still reeling from the disappearance of Pauline Reade.
In the same interview, Sheila expressed her regret at having only warned her son to watch out for bad men. “I never thought there were any bad women out there,” she said. When John failed to return home after the movie, Sheila wasn’t that worried – she assumed he was just “watching it over again”, as in those days, films commonly ran on loop.
What John was actually doing, though, was earning a bit of pocket money on the “market round”. Young kids used to go round market stalls and help shift boxes, clean up, or do other odd jobs for a few pennies. John was busily doing this when he came across Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who’d been cruising the markets for another victim.
Myra took care of the approach, persuading John to help them with some boxes in their van – this would be paid work, with a bonus offer of a bottle of sherry. It seems John was happy to go with a couple where he wouldn’t have gone with a single man, so he cheerfully agreed and off they went. Once they had John in the van, they drove him out to Saddleworth Moor.
As before, Hindley waited in the van while Brady took John out onto the Moor and sexually assaulted him before attempting to cut his throat with a serrated knife. When this failed, Brady removed one of the boy’s shoelaces and strangled him to death. According to Hindley, he came back to the car laughing and carrying the shoe, joking about the bluntness of the knife.
They then went back down together and buried John in a shallow pit. It’s important to note here that details of these crimes come almost exclusively from Myra Hindley, and in the context of a bid for parole to boot, so it’s really not certain that she was as hands-off as she says she was. She repeatedly claims she had nothing to do with the torture and sexual abuse, but once again, there are reasons to have serious doubts about this, as we’ll soon see.
On the 16th of June 1964, twelve-year-old Keith Bennett set off for his grandmother’s house in Longsight, a short bus ride away from his home. It was four days after Keith’s twelfth birthday, and his mother recalls making sure he was clean, presentable, and well dressed. She warned him to be wary of strangers, as the disappearances of Pauline Reade and young John Kilbride had put the whole tight-knit community on edge.
Keith, a bright young boy with glasses and, according to his mother, a sweet and helpful disposition, encountered Myra Hindley and Ian Brady sitting in their Mini Pickup. As with John, they promised him pay for help with loading and unloading some boxes, as well as a lift to his grandmother’s. According to Hindley, the fact of her being a woman, and the charming manner she was able to put on, made it easy to lure these kids into Brady’s clutches.
But this hides a darker truth. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady are often presented as monstrous psychological manipulators, intellectual aficionados of evil, gifted with a Pied-Piper-like power to lure children to their deaths. The simple fact is, though, that they lived in an overflow estate in an impoverished area of Manchester, where pretty much everyone knew or knew of everyone else.
Ian Brady was a well-known weirdo, and Myra a well-liked daughter of a solid local family. I started doing a human network map of the families involved, given there were some intriguing connections, but I gave up quite quickly, as what I basically ended up with was that conspiracy theory meme with all the criss-crossing bits of string, and a deep sense of regret at having wasted time finding out what I already knew – this was a tight-knit community. They ruthlessly exploited this ‘us and them’ attitude within the neighbourhood, comfortable that they’d be either personally known to their victims or recognised as ‘insiders’ rather than ‘outsiders’ in the neighbourhood.
Which to my mind makes the idea of them as sleek, evil predators non-credible – a more accurate characterisation would be treacherous scavengers, picking off the vulnerable by breaching the trust of their community. But that’s just my opinion. What happened next was pretty much the same as for John Kilbride, with the exception that they photographed the body when they were done, before burying it in an extremely shallow pit.
I don’t know why, but this detail has really gotten to me – it feels to me like it adds insult to injury. Not only did they go around murdering children, they couldn’t even be bothered doing things thoroughly. They half-arsed the fatal strikes, the graves, target selection, and counter-detection measures, among other things.
I don’t know why, but this low effort slackness makes what they did seem even more of a desecration. But maybe that’s just me.
On the 26th of December 1964, ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was waiting for neighbours to take her to the fairgrounds at Ancoats, in the northern part of Manchester City Centre. Her mother recalls in several interviews that Lesley was a sweet, well-behaved girl. Every morning she’d get up, make her bed, and help with breakfast.
She was studious about her schoolwork, popular with her friends and, in her mother’s words, “never the sort to give anyone any cheek.” Lesley’s mother says she was doing dishes when Lesley left. Her older brother, Terry, recalls that he was meant to take her himself, but had fallen ill and couldn’t go out.
It seems that Lesley became separated from the children she was with – the last to see her alive reported spotting her on a gravity wall, which is a wheel-shaped ride which pins the riders to the outer rim through centrifugal force. When Lesley’s mother Ann saw other children returning from the fair, she began to worry. She recalls shouting out to see if any of them had seen Lesley.
As the afternoon wore into evening, she began asking at neighbour’s houses, and by that night the search was on. The whole family knew her absence was seriously out of character, but they attempted to reassure each other that nothing really bad could have happened to her. Terry told a documentary team that around the time he was reassuring his mother, Lesley was being buried in a shallow grave on the moorland behind their house.
For what follows, I need to apologise in advance – this is pretty rough. It’s important, though, as it speaks to Myra Hindley’s degree of culpability and agency. At various times she’s cast herself as the helpless victim of Ian Brady, a hapless, lovestruck accomplice who had no part in the actual rapes or murders. These assertions have been subjected to a great deal of scepticism, largely because of the Lesley Ann Downey case.
The Ancoats Fair was a popular spot for kids, and on Boxing Day – the day after Christmas – it was more than usually well attended. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were out shopping and had decided to take a turn through the fair to have a look around. At least, that’s the appearance they were trying to give.
They probably did need to go shopping but had also planned to cruise the fairgrounds for a victim on their way home. They came across Lesley Ann Downey, wearing a tartan patterned dress with a lace collar, apparently on her own. They got near Lesley and deliberately dropped some of their shopping.
Lesley, being a genuinely kind person, helped them to pick it back up. They got to talking, and Myra Hindley asked the little girl to help them take the shopping to their car – a Mini Traveller now, as they’d traded in their pickup – and then back to their home on Wardle Brook Avenue. Lesley agreed – according to Myra, she felt reassured by her being a woman.
They took her back to Wardle Brook Avenue – Myra’s grandmother’s house where she was by now living with Brady. They forced Lesley to strip, gagged her, bound her, and took a series of pictures of the naked child in bondage poses. It seems clear that they also raped her – Myra doesn’t admit to this, but hints dropped in her 1985 confession indicate that this was highly probable.
Not only did they take photographs, they also taped much of the process, producing a thirteen-minute audio recording of the torture, topped and tailed with Christmas songs and country music. Hindley claims she left the room and, when she came back, the child was “bleeding”, so Ian instructed her to run a bath. Hindley claims that when she came back from running the bath, Lesley Ann Downey was dead.
The tape, however, clearly shows Hindley barking instructions at the poor girl – an active participant not just in the abduction, but in the sexual abuse. It’s for this reason that many people, including this humble author, believe that Myra Hindley had at least as much agency and culpability in these crimes as her partner Ian Brady. While HMG didn’t see fit to provide me with police or court records, I was able to find this recording, as well as a full transcript from multiple independent sources for verification.
Leaving aside the fact that I fervently wish I hadn’t, it’s abundantly clear that Myra Hindley was a prime mover in this murder at the very least. She repeatedly snaps at the child to put her gag back in, and yells at her to shut up, all while the child screams and cries out for her mother and father. In her later confession, Myra Hindley claims the murder of Lesley Ann was a tipping point for her, where she finally came to realise just how wrong she’d been to help Brady.
I call bullshit. The tape condemns her, not just in my mind, but in the minds of the jury, the police, and unsurprisingly, Lesley’s mother – all of whom heard all or part of it. Anyway, however Lesley was killed, killed she was, and her body was taken to Saddleworth Moor and buried naked in a shallow grave with her clothing at her feet.
This murder is seen as the peak of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s career, and not just because of its essential horror. Here we have a pair of murderers who are confident in their MO. They’ve refined their targeting mechanisms and their ‘lure to capture’ technique appears smooth and efficient.
There’s also an increase in confidence as well – they’re not sneaking away to secluded quiet places on the moors, they take the victim to their own home. The photography and audio recording also speak to greater confidence, as well as greater premeditation. This is the mid-sixties, remember, and taking indoor photographs requires a good deal of preparation.
And making an audio recording for anyone who’s not a media professional is, at this time, not something which can be done lightly or on the spur of the moment. The equipment involved was clunky and demanding in terms of the technical capability required of the operator. At several points during the tape, we can hear a triplet of rhythmic cracking sounds – decades later, Brady explained that this sound was him adjusting the legs of a camera tripod.
It’s clear that, contrary to their confessions, this was a carefully planned and executed sequence of events, though I note that they still couldn’t be bothered with digging a proper grave – a detail which continues to sicken and infuriate me for reasons I can’t fully explain.
Somewhat unusually, nearly a year went by before they killed again. As a general rule, the gaps between serial murders don’t widen – they narrow. I know there’s lots of exceptions to this – BTK springs to mind – but it is still consistent enough that it’s a general rule. We do have some undated recollections of people who claim to have been approached by Hindley when they were children. Some of these accounts seem very credible, even with all the potential tainting of memory and evidence by notoriety and the passage of time. So it’s possible that 1965 was a year of failed attempts for them. At any rate, on the sixth of October 1965, Ian Brady beat poor Edward Evans to death with an axe in the living room of 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the place where we started this tale. Evans has been described as “the lost victim” of this saga, and it’s true that his murder hasn’t received nearly as much attention as the others. It’s possible this has something to do with his age – a seventeen-year-old male wasn’t really considered a child at the time. The media characterisation of this story feels like an ultra-dark Hansel and Gretel with no happy ending, and there’s a lot of work out there saying Evans was practically ignored because he didn’t fit this narrative. Then there’s the fact that at the time of the murder and subsequent arrests, nobody could have known this had anything to do with the missing children. Only two newspapers reported on it at the time, one local and one national – the national one being the Guardian, presumably because it started life as The Manchester Guardian, and retained an interest in Manchester happenings. The murder itself wasn’t that interesting either – there didn’t really seem to be any angle, no clear reason for the story to stand out against all the other rapes and murders which cross the desks of crime reporters. As for press reporting after the crimes were linked, some have suggested that the tabloid press was bigoted about Evan’s possible homosexuality. I agree with Dr Field, however, who assesses that they didn’t wish to further traumatise his family. Homosexuality was still illegal at the time, and Field highlights several indications that the dailies were disinclined to sling mud at a victim. This might seem surprisingly decent for the tabloid press, but their reactions to these crimes were actually quite complex and, in some cases, uncharacteristically sensitive.
Investigation and Trial
I know I said at the start that there wasn’t really an upside to this story, and I stick by that. One brighter spot, though, is the performance of the police. From the moment of Brady’s arrest, right through to the present day, multiple investigations have been conducted and all of them feature some exemplary police work.
Of course, there was some of the usual silliness associated with coppering in the sixties, but for the most part, the police work was and is exemplary. Of course, when they first arrested Brady, they had no inkling of any connection to the missing children. They’d been called out to a house where violence had been reported and found a dead body and a strong suspect.
They might reasonably have decided that was job done. I think I’d be right in saying that many less motivated police would have called it a day and shunted it onto the prosecutors. Not so the Greater Manchester Police.
The circumstances of the murder – especially the way the body was prepared for disposal, and the carefully written elaborate disposal plan found in Brady’s wallet – suggested this might not be the only killing. Added to this was the disturbingly calm demeanour of Ian Brady, well-spoken, thoughtful, and carefully guarded in everything he said, as well as the frankly weird, emotionless behaviour of Myra Hindley, who was questioned for four days before also being arrested. The cops sensed something was off, so they continued hammering David Smith for more details, questioning Brady and Hindley, and conducting a painstaking search of the house and effects.
Brady, who was described by police as the sort of man who couldn’t go on a picnic without first developing a three-page plan, had kept a journal or scrap book of sorts where he’d written the name of John Kilbride next to a doodle of someone’s face. This led Detective Talbot – the one who’d dressed as a baker to get into the house – to call DCI Joe Mounsey, who was SIO on the John Kilbride inquiry. He’d been so dogged in his pursuit of this case, working it at all hours and frequently updating the boy’s family, that officers at his station called John Kilbride “Mounsey’s lad”.
DCI Tyrell, Manchester CID, was looking for a missing girl, Lesley Ann Downey, and he also showed up, showing an exemplary adherence to due diligence. So Inspector Talbot’s inquiry was well coordinated across jurisdictions, and at a very early stage, because keen and motivated investigators, including Talbot himself, had all decided to follow up every lead, however slim, and had now converged into an effective team.
The Police found a large collection of photographs – Hindley and Baker were keen amateur photographers, and not just in pursuit of snuff porn. They seemed to be quite dedicated to the artform for its own sake. Some of these photos would, at the time, have been considered risqué or even pornographic, though they’re pretty tame to our modern eyes. A bunch of them, however, were just flat out weird. They showed Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, or both, sometimes with Myra’s dog Puppet, in various poses on completely unremarkable patches of moorland. DCI Mounsey was fascinated by these photos and had extra copies printed out. Of all the officers involved, he was the most convinced that this pair were multiple murderers, and he spent hours combing the moors with his unfortunate subordinates, but to no avail. In the meantime, David Smith had spilled some details about having been asked to return any “dodgy books” to Brady, who then locked those books up in two suitcases. He didn’t know where the cases were, but in separate interviews, he told police that Baker “Had a thing for Railway Stations.” Police ordered a search of left luggage areas of every station in the city, and Transport Police soon found them in Manchester Central Station, so hats off to them for unusually efficient coordination. Personally, I would have just looked in Central first, given that shortly after Dave saw the suitcases, Brady and Hindley had picked up Edward Evans there, but you can’t fault them for being thorough. Inside the suitcases was a cornucopia of dark artefacts. There were books on sexual sadism, pornographic magazines, a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and sundry random items and photographs. There were also nine photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, bound, gagged, naked, and posed on a bed, as well as the thirteen-minute audiotape which, when they played it, had some seasoned detectives running out of the room, and others in tears. This was, of course, the tape of poor Lesley being tortured. Brady’s explanation of the photos and tape recording of Lesley was that two men had brought the child to their flat, and then taken her away again, still alive. Hindley didn’t say much of anything, claiming to have merely provided logistical and moral support while Baker did his thing. This was part of a concerted plan between the two of them. Baker had, from the outset, advised Hindley to say as little as possible, as he was prepared to take the weight of whatever charges might be laid, and was determined to shield her from prosecution as best he could. And he did – he kept his silence about Hindley’s involvement for more than twenty years.
In the meantime, investigators had noted that the corpse disposal plan Brady had kept in his wallet involved burying the body on Saddleworth Moor. More than 150 officers were dispatched on a search of the moor, proceeding in what Australians call an “Emu bob”, this being a loose line abreast designed to cover large patches of ground as quickly as possible. The police used tamping rods – long cane or steel poles – which they pushed down into the earth and then sniffed, looking for the smell of decay.
It was a huge area of ground to cover, and they were wrapping up for the day when PC Bob Spiers decided to nip off for a quick pee. By the time he was done, most of the coppers were already back on the buses and were yelling at him to hurry up so they could go to the pub. As he hurried back, he happened to look down into a small depression in the earth and saw what he thought was a sheep bone sticking out.
He called over his seniors, and they uncovered a child’s body, half preserved by peat. They initially thought they’d found a small boy, and Ann Downey, Lesley’s mother, who was watching the search from behind the barricade, was repeatedly reassured it wasn’t her daughter. That is, until they found the clothes buried at her feet.
This made it much worse when later, she had to identify her daughter’s dress. And later still, when the police played her excerpts of the tape, which they’d agonised over – cutting and re-cutting in a futile effort to make it less traumatic – one can only imagine how much of a bad day that had to have been for all involved. The police photographer, Ray Gelder, noticed when he was taking the crime scene photos that the backgrounds matched pretty near exactly with those strange pictures of the pair on seemingly random patches of moorland.
Police surmised these must be murder souvenirs of a sort – perhaps pictures of gravesites, as DC Mounsey had suggested earlier. One photograph in particular appeared, at first glance, to show Hindley with her dog Puppet in her arms, apparently looking down at him. Closer examination revealed, however, that what she was really looking at was the ground.
About a week after the searches that uncovered Lesley’s body and the suitcases, DC Mascheder and DI Chaddock went back out on the moor with this photograph. They had been helped in this process by a child who’d been friendly with the couple in the past, Pat Hodges. Pat was the daughter of a near neighbour of the pair and had regularly gone for picnics on the moor with Hindley and Brady.
Pat showed police the couple’s favourite spots, which helped our two detectives narrow down where they should be trying to match their photograph. Eventually, Mascheder found the spot and went through the grim ritual of using the tamping rod to discover the smell of decay. When they dug down, they found a shoe, and then the body of John Kilbride.
John’s mother was able to identify her son’s shoe and clothing, as the shoe had recently been repaired, and she’d personally mended most of the clothing. In the meantime, Detective Iain Fairley had found the left luggage ticket corresponding to the suitcases in the back of Myra Hindley’s prayer book – Hindley had a lifelong fascination with Catholicism – and investigators had found a way to match markings on the bedhead in the Lesley Ann Downey pictures with those on the bed in the Wardle Brook Avenue House. The couple continued to stonewall police, however.
Myra Hindley was especially unemotional, with officers interviewing her incredulous at just how calm she was. During one interview, she was served her lunch with a photo of John Kilbride on top of it. She reacted angrily, claiming that this was “unfair”, and also complained about it in letters home to her mother, in which she also asked for hair dye as her dark roots were showing, and she didn’t want to go to court unkempt.
The prison didn’t allow prisoners to bleach or dye their hair (for obvious reasons), so the famous photograph of Hindley, with her roots showing, became an iconic image of female evil. The only other time she showed emotion was when investigators, attempting to date the moorland photographs by the age of her dog Puppet, had to put the animal under general anaesthetic to examine its teeth. For some reason, the dog never woke up again, and Hindley was furious, claiming they’d murdered her dog out of spite.
Both Hindley and Brady were charged with the murders of Edward Evans, John Kilbride, and Lesley Ann Downey, and by this time public interest in the case was at fever pitch. Special security screens needed to be installed for the length of the fourteen-day trial. They both pleaded not guilty, Brady only admitting to hitting Evans with an Axe, in a vain attempt to run his defence on a post-mortem finding which said that strangulation had accelerated the cause of death.
Hindley denied being involved in the murder of Lesley Ann, claiming she’d been downstairs or running a bath, despite the tape being played in court and senior police officers identifying both their voices. In fact, neither of them properly confessed to any of the murders. Unsurprisingly, it only took the jury two hours to come back with a collection of guilty verdicts.
Brady was found guilty of all three murders, whereas Hindley was convicted of two, being found not guilty of murdering John Kilbride. She was, however, convicted of harbouring Ian Brady in the knowledge that he’d murdered him. During the time they’d been in custody and on trial, an act to abolish the death penalty had come into force, so Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were given three concurrent life sentences, Brady in Durham, and Hindley at Holloway.
The judge made it clear in his opinion from the bench that he thought it a wretched misfortune that he could not sentence them to hang.
Aftermath and Confessions
Initially, the British press had some difficulty with this case, and in particular with Myra Hindley. Tabloids like The Mirror published short factual accounts, whereas the Daily Mail basically ignored it. The Daily Chronicle, which was struggling financially, plastered Hindley and Baker over a series of salacious front pages and full-page spreads, but they were the exception. According to Dr Field, the tabloids at the time were highly conscious of their role as a voice for ‘ordinary people’ – an ideology which persists to this day – but also as “family newspapers”, i.e., producers of content which was morally suitable for all ages. Much of the technical language around paedophilia we’re very familiar with today wasn’t in general use at the time, and it’s fascinating to look through archived articles and see the range of euphemisms used for child sexual abuse. Some of them are quite clear: “interfered with” leaves little room for misinterpretation. A great many others, though, are far from being as clear, and it’s easy to believe that many readers may have missed the fact that “scandalised” was code for “raped”, for example. Gender stereotypes were much more forceful and uniform in those days as well, and the tabloid press had real trouble, initially, in finding a way to articulate the reality of a female child murderer in a way which also stayed within family friendly bounds. At one point during the trial, the prosecutor asked Hindley how she could have so abandoned her “duty as a woman to treat a female child, or any other child” with care. Hindley replied “I should have done, but I didn’t. I have no defence to that.” So the majority of the tabloids, in the lead-up to the trial, seem to have solved this problem by talking about other things. There was quite a lot to talk about. Over this whole period, the Rhodesia crisis – where Rhodesia, now Kenya, unilaterally left the British Empire – was going on. The Empire-loving right-wing press competed with the Empire-hating left-wing tabloids to stoke the public’s emotions about the crumbling of British international power. There’s also the fact that, as loose as the British press can be, they are still afraid of the courts, and contempt of court laws kept many of the tabloids from publishing more than an editorial or two. After the trial, however, all bets were off, and most of the tabloids published stories sensationalising Myra Hindley, as well as highlighting the stories of the grieving mothers. The major broadsheets had no such qualms about reporting the case – they felt their audience was sophisticated enough to deal with the manifold issues which it surfaced. When the transcript of the Lesley Ann Downey tape became available, most of the tabs either didn’t print it, or printed heavily redacted versions. The Times, however, bastion of the black bowler hat and umbrella crowd, published the transcript in full, along with a detailed commentary on the evils of ‘the permissive society’. Of course, tabloids are gonna tabloid, and it did emerge in the trial that the News of the World had paid £1000 for David Smith’s testimony, as well as putting him up in a hotel for the duration of the trial and paying for him and his wife Maureen to go on holiday. The scandal this kicked up meant that the paper couldn’t actually use much of what they’d paid for, and the press was ‘volun-told’ to restrain its penchant for chequebook journalism, which it did by adopting a new code of conduct. This clearly didn’t include anything about phone hacking, but it did have a slight restraining effect, arguably helping to prevent the whole popular press in the UK going the same way as the yellow press in the USA.
It’s worth talking a bit about this ‘permissive society’. From the fifties onwards, quite a few controls on media and public morality were removed from British law. This reflected a broader movement across the Western world, led by the USA’s frequently turbulent relationship with itself.
Remember that this was the time of the hippie movement, free love, and New Age philosophy and so on. And in the UK, a battle was going on for the soul of the nation. At least, that’s what the combatants thought at the time.
Mass publishing drove much of this phenomenon, with relatively cheap paperback editions of specialist texts, like a twelve-volume edition of the works of the Marquis De Sade, showing up in bookstores and libraries. On the back of this, laws around the sale of pornography, and what actually constituted pornography, were significantly liberalised. What all this amounted to was a general and rapid removal of many of the paternalistic controls which centuries of monarchy and Christianity had placed over the British people.
Ian Brady’s literary tastes formed a major pillar of the prosecution’s arguments, as he was known to be interested in texts related to fascism and sexual sadism which a lower-middle-class youth from the north of England simply couldn’t have accessed in the ‘non-permissive’ society of the past. The press latched onto this as an explanation for the crimes. The reason for this seems to be in the unremarkable backgrounds of the two killers.
Ian Brady was a juvenile delinquent, but not in any particularly serious way, and he was brought up from a very young age in a kind and caring adoptive family. Brady was the eternal outsider, and much was made of this by those who knew him at the time, using 20-20 hindsight to say that his differences in dress and behaviour obviously added up to his becoming a sadistic child rapist. In truth, though, he just seems to have been a pretty typical adolescent edgelord.
Hindley grew up in a tight, multi-generational family, and did well at school despite frequent truancy. She failed to pass her tertiary entrance exams, seemingly through lack of interest, and went on to become a typist, first for a firm which was about to go under, and then for the same company as Brady, which is where she first met him. The thing to point out here is that their biographies are quite banal, which is why I haven’t really focused on them.
Certainly, Hindley would go on to make claims of violent abuse at the hands of her father, but this was decades after the crimes and she is the sole source for these tales, which we’ll deal with later.
Anyway, this lack of killer backstory presented a problem for the press, and also for some criminologists, so many of them latched onto the idea that the general ‘moral decay’ of the Western world was what caused these two young people to go off the rails. The theory was that if their minds hadn’t been polluted by freely available pornography and the increasingly relaxed morality of the permissive society, they wouldn’t have committed these crimes. This picture doesn’t really conform with reality, though.
For a start, the books Ian Brady was reading weren’t as ‘freely available’ as the press made out. Brady spent a startlingly high proportion of his salary to get them, so he didn’t just happen on cheap and easy to find texts – he expended significant effort and funds to get them. So he wasn’t a hapless victim of moral pollution, but rather an agential and motivated seeker of it.
There’s a fair amount of class prejudice in the representation of Brady as being helplessly muddled by dangerous books, the general idea being that only Oxbridge types are equipped to process complex literature. When we track their development as murderers, it seems pretty clear that they both just wanted to kill some people. Their own explanations for this are pretty unsatisfactory, which leads us to the somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion that they were just, for no apparent reason, profoundly evil.
The question of Myra Hindley’s role in all this came under heavy scrutiny as well. One of the more popular views of Hindley is that she was a sort of Pygmalion figure, an innocent, untutored girl shaped by contact with a more sophisticated and older male. There is some evidence for this, in that Hindley changed her appearance shortly after meeting Brady, adopting a more risqué style of dress and dying her hair blonde.
By the time of her arrest, she was self-consciously imitating the look of Irma Grese, the Beast of Belsen, an infamous Nazi. This resemblance was not lost on the public, who commented on what was to become the most frequently used photograph of Hindley, and it seems the consensus at the time was that she was corrupted by Brady’s influence and obviously, as a woman, subordinate to his personality. This view isn’t corroborated by her own testimony at the time, however.
In her trial testimony she was given frequent opportunities by both the prosecution and defence to shift the majority of responsibility onto Baker. Baker later admitted to deliberately propagating this narrative in his own testimony as he “wanted to help the girl”. So when Hindley was tried, the Attorney General and her own counsel frequently tried to lead her down the path of a sort of Nuremberg Defence, as in, ‘I was just following orders’, but she steadfastly refused.
“I made all my decisions. People go through several stages in their life. After discussions, they change their mind.
Ian never made me do anything I didn’t want to do,” she said to police on the day of Brady’s arrest. And this was a line she stuck to throughout her trial.
As well as culture wars about public morality, and whether or not homosexuals and perverts were going to end civilisation by turning everyone into some version of Hindley and Brady, the case kicked off a decades long debate about the death penalty, life sentences, and whether or not Myra Hindley should be released. Now, I know I said their trial coincided with the abolition of the death penalty, but English law is never quite so clean cut – it is, in fact, seriously weird. The UK’s abolition of capital punishment should more be viewed as a protracted and messy divorce.
In the 1700s, practically every crime was a capital crime, the usual thing being to sentence petty criminals to death, and then have the sentence commuted to life or transportation by The Crown. Over the years, the range of capital crimes gradually narrowed, with the most significant narrowing happening around the time corporal punishment was also phased out. By the time Hindley and Brady came to trial, it was still possible to be hanged for crimes like treason and arson in royal dockyards, but the death sentence for murder was abolished.
This seems to have led to some misunderstanding, so when the judge sentenced Hindley to life imprisonment, he was supposed to then ‘set a tariff’ or, in other words, say how many years this meant. When the lawyers pointed out he hadn’t done so, asking him after the trial what tariff he’d intended, he answered with the less than helpful, “I meant life”. While this may seem clear to us, it didn’t really answer the question from a legal perspective.
Did he mean life without the possibility of parole, the conventional life as twenty-five years’ imprisonment, or something else entirely? This looseness around life sentences also affected the Krays, who went on trial just a few years later and were given a tariff of thirty years, which was considered by many to be malicious and politically motivated. So Hindley was sent to prison for an indeterminate period of time, which some argued constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
You might think, “who cares?”, given it’s Myra Hindley we’re talking about here, but the argument wasn’t always about her. She was more often used as a case study in how the justice system might fail to deliver appropriate justice to any UK citizen.
By 1985, Hindley was constantly applying for parole because, as far as she could make out, this was an option according to the loose and murky legal understanding of life sentences. This was a non-issue for Brady, as he’d been diagnosed as a schizophrenic and psychopath and moved to Ashworth – a mental institution, where parole isn’t really a thing. In the meantime, Hindley had converted to Catholicism, had a lesbian relationship with one of her prison guards, who assisted her in a failed escape attempt, and gathered a small circle of supporters, including serial do-gooder Lord Longford, who would take her case to the House of Lords. Daily Mail investigative journalist, Fred Harrison, had been speaking with the pair as he was working on a book, when Baker unexpectedly offered to confess in exchange for the means to commit suicide. Harrison took this to the police, who’d never stopped looking for the two missing kids. And so it was that DCI Peter Topping kicked off the second investigation into the Moors Murders. Over multiple interviews with Brady, both Topping and Harrison would receive testimony about Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady refused to speak about any of the other murders, and also continually put impossible conditions on his confession, most frequently relating to demands he either be killed or allowed to kill himself. For this and other reasons, Brady’s testimony was pretty unhelpful – from excerpts I was able to access, it seems he spent most of his time explaining his philosophy and worldview. In view of this, Topping went to see Myra Hindley to tell her Brady was talking. People close to Myra had been urging her to confess for some time, saying she had no possible hope of release without a confession and expression of remorse. When Topping approached her, she was furious Brady was talking. At the time, the Home Secretary – basically the minister for justice and home affairs – had the power to determine life sentence tariffs. Leaving aside the weirdness of a politician having the power to reach past a judge and change a sentence, they were also under no obligation to inform the prisoner of their decision. Hindley’s tariff was increased and then set as whole of life by a succession of Home Secretaries, reportedly owing to massive public outcry whenever it looked like she might be released, and on this first occasion she didn’t actually find out about it until two years after the decision. When Brady started talking, Hindley clearly thought she needed to take control of the narrative, mistakenly believing she had a shot at parole.
Hindley elected to write down much of her confession, while also having multiple interviews with Topping and Harrison. Much of what she said isn’t publicly available, but a fair amount is, and the overall tendency is that she paints a much softer, more compassionate portrait of herself. At about this time she’d received the second of two letters from Winnie Johnson, mother of Keith Bennett, pleading with her to help find her son’s body. Myra cited this letter as her main reason for finally coming clean. By her account, she’d had a violent and abusive childhood, which she then traded in for a violent and abusive partner, who had coerced, raped, beaten, and blackmailed her into complicity with the murders. DCI Topping described her extremely long confession as, “a very well worked out performance”. I’m inclined to agree with this assessment. Most of it reads like a poor man’s David Copperfield. As she outlines her formative influences and upbringing, as well as her relationship with Brady, she seems to be casting herself as the tragic heroine of a middlebrow literary novel. Some incidents, like the time she claims her PTSD suffering ex-paratrooper father forced her to confront and beat down her own bully, reads so much like fiction that if I didn’t know her father actually was in the paras and fought in Africa, I would have thought she’d fabricated all of it out of whole cloth. Unlike other killers we’ve studied on CasCrim, there isn’t a whisper of anything but grinding urban poverty in her background. That is, until she started claiming to have been abused, at which point multiple sources, eager to clutch at some sort of explanation for her evil, repeated her claims, creating a frequency bias effect which makes them look as if they’re verifiably true. Nobody else, not the police, independent researchers, or this author has been able to verify her account of a violent past. It’s during this confession that she, for the first time, begins claiming that Ian Brady groomed and violently coerced her. She makes much of the fact that he was five years older than her, more widely read and more worldly wise. She casts herself as smitten from the outset, desperate to escape the grey world of her existence with this handsome and exotic (for Manchester) man. And for all we know, it might all be true. I highly doubt it, as the empirically provable aspects of her participation in the murders seem to point in exactly the opposite direction. Myra was involved in the planning, obtained vehicles and photographic equipment for the murders, knowingly lured children into Brady’s clutches, and actively assisted, on tape, in the sexual exploitation of a child. When I started this journey, I was open to the idea Myra Hindley might be a corrupted innocent rehabilitated by prison, but the more I found out, much of it directly from her testimony, the more this view became impossible for me to believe.
Regardless of her status as victim or perpetrator, Hindley did provide significant assistance to the police. As well as confessing to all the murders, she also agreed to help find the remaining two bodies. DCI Topping arranged to have her taken to the moors, but this turned out disastrously.
For reasons best known to himself, he decided to close off a huge area of moorland, plus a few access roads, and fly Hindley in by helicopter. Unsurprisingly the tabloids, who thought she might be released and were running a furiously shrill campaign to prevent this, got wind of what was happening and sent hordes of reporters and news choppers to the moor. Hindley, who’d been locked up for twenty years by this point, was confused by her fading memory, topographical changes, and all the helicopters flying around, and was unable to pinpoint any gravesites.
Later, Topping brought her out again under calmer circumstances, but still with no luck. The trips to the moor seem to have jogged her memory, however, and she was able to recall seeing the outlines of rocks against the sky when they buried Pauline Reade. This, combined with a fresh examination of the souvenir photographs, and some very intelligent triangulation based on the other graves, allowed police to unearth Pauline’s body, which was remarkably well preserved.
DCI Topping recalls the vivid blue of her coat, and the gold lettering on the insides of her brand-new white court shoes. These were taken to her mother, Joanne, who on that day lost all hope. Not only had she not believed that Myra, a family friend, was involved in her daughter’s murder, she’d never really accepted she was dead.
“I just thought she was about somewhere,” she said to a Channel 5 documentary team, as she explained that on her way back home from work she would search the streets for Pauline, or hurriedly get off the bus whenever she thought she’d seen her in the street.
Myra Hindley was unable to locate the area where they’d buried Keith Bennett, as the topography had changed significantly, and to this day his body has never been found. Myra Hindley kept insisting she was reformed, no threat to society, and should be released, right up to her death in prison in 2012. She smoked forty cigarettes a day and died of heart failure associated with respiratory dysfunction.
Ian Brady was also taken out to the moor, but his memory doesn’t seem to have been as sharp as Hindley’s, as he wasn’t able to help in any way at all. Or possibly he never meant to and was just angling for a day out. Of the two, though, Brady was the one who was actually mentally ill.
He attempted to starve himself to death several times, but given he was in a mental institution, he had no right to refuse treatment and was force-fed via tube. He tried to get himself transferred to a Scottish prison so he could kill himself there, but the fact that he made this clear in his application meant that was never going to happen. Brady died in prison in 2017, aged 79, from a condition unrelated to his starvation attempts.
And so ended the lives of two of England’s most hated killers. Interest in the case has never really faded, and apart from all the pain and suffering they caused, probably the most tangible legacy of the Moors murders was the clarification of the law around life sentences, and the eventual removal of the Home Secretary’s power to arbitrarily adjust sentencing. I’d like to end by saying something positive, but that’s quite difficult.
I guess the good part is that some great policing managed to get them locked up, and to find almost all of their victims. But nothing can repair the gaping wholes they tore into so many lives, or the stain they left on the UK’s national memory. Except, perhaps, the passage of time.
Dismembered Appendices
I never got round to explaining why there were firearms in the house at Wardle Brook Avenue. As it turns out, Brady’s original plan was to rob banks, so he had Myra, who was a cleanskin, join a rifle club. She tried and failed to get into a pistol club but was able to purchase some weapons from the other members before she stopped attending. He also claimed their year of no murders was owing to a change in focus to planning robberies again, but this is doubtful.
While in prison, Ian Brady wrote a book called The Gates of Janus in 2001, which was an analysis of serial murders. Janus is the two-faced Roman god of war and state, and the Janus gate in Rome was opened when they were at war, so it seems Brady knew his classics despite not having gone to Oxford. It was published by an underground press and caused outrage when the public found out about it. The book received mixed reviews, mostly because it was garbage.
In trying to compress about sixty years’ worth of material into a manageable script, I’ve obviously left some details out. What I most regret is the police officers I’ve left out of this account, namely Detectives Iain Fairley, Tom McVittie and Pat Clayton who, among others, were instrumental in bringing the Moors Murderers to justice.
David Smith, whose call to the police ended the run of murders, had a very rough ride. A troubled youth from the outset, he had multiple juvenile convictions for violence. According to Hindley, they committed the murder in front of him because Baker wanted him to ‘join the team’, and Hindley claimed he was the chief accomplice in Evans’ murder. When this came out, David was routinely attacked and abused in the street, and his pregnant wife Maureen, Myra’s sister, was attacked near their home.
Later, he was jailed for stabbing someone in a fight – an action he said was aggravated by the stress of the trial and public scrutiny. This caused his wife to leave him. He wasn’t cleared until Hindley’s 1985 confessions. He eventually remarried and died of cancer in 2012.
Sheila Kilbride, John’s mother, continued to set a place for her son at the dining table. On his birthday and at Christmas, she’d buy him presents every year, and every now and then she’d sit down and have a look through a little box of treasures he used to keep in his room. When giving a video interview towards the end of her life, she explained that while it might seem silly, she felt this kept her son alive in some way. It doesn’t seem silly to me.
Ann West, who remarried after her daughter Lesley’s death, never really recovered from the ordeal. Until her death she campaigned relentlessly, helped especially by The Sun newspaper, against Myra Hindley’s release. In one of her final interviews she described a life where she hadn’t slept properly for years, was on dozens of pills just so she could get out of the house, and never stopped, even for a second, thinking about her daughter screaming out for her on that audiotape.
Winnie Johnson, the mother of Keith Bennett, regularly went out onto the moors looking for her son until she passed away. There’s haunting footage of her in one of the documentaries I watched for this piece. She and a companion roam the bleak moorland, carrying a bouquet of flowers. She stops at a tussock of grass, lays down the flowers, and says, “There you go, lad. We’ll find you one day and bring you home. We’ll find you one day, son.”
Key Takeaways
- David Smith witnessed Ian Brady murder Edward Evans with an axe in 1965, then helped dispose of the body before reporting it to police with his wife.
- Police arrested Brady after finding Evans’s body, but initially overlooked Myra Hindley due to gender stereotypes, despite her active participation in the crimes.
- The Moors Murderers killed five children between 1963 and 1965, luring victims through trust and community connections before burying them on Saddleworth Moor.
- An audio tape of Lesley Ann Downey’s torture definitively implicated Hindley as an active participant, contradicting her claims of being Brady’s coerced accomplice.
- The case prompted reforms in UK press regulation, life sentencing laws, and debates about capital punishment, while leaving lasting trauma for victims’ families.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was David Smith and what role did he play in the Moors Murders case?
David Smith was a seventeen-year-old Manchester lad who was the brother-in-law of Myra Hindley (married to her sister Maureen). He witnessed Ian Brady murder Edward Evans with an axe at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. After being forced to help clean up and wrap the body, he went home and told his wife, then called the police the next morning. His testimony ended the murderers’ run, though he faced years of public abuse and was falsely implicated by Hindley as an accomplice until her 1985 confessions cleared him.
How did Detective Superintendent Bob Talbot gain entry to the house at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue?
Detective Superintendent Bob Talbot borrowed a white uniform coat from a bread delivery van driver nearby. Wearing the Tip Top Bakeries coat, he knocked on the door. Myra Hindley answered, confused because she said ‘Our house always took Mother’s Pride,’ before Talbot identified himself as police and demanded entry.
What was the method used by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley to lure their victims?
They used a ‘front and follow’ configuration where Myra would drive ahead in a van and Ian would follow on his motorcycle. Brady would flash his headlight when he chose a victim, signaling Hindley to stop and entice them into the Mini pickup. They exploited their status as known community members, using deceptive requests for help—such as finding a lost glove, helping with boxes, or carrying shopping—to lure children.
What evidence was found in the suitcases at Manchester Central Station?
The suitcases contained books on sexual sadism, pornographic magazines, a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, sundry random items and photographs, nine photographs of Lesley Ann Downey bound, gagged, naked and posed on a bed, and the thirteen-minute audiotape of her torture.
How were the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride discovered on Saddleworth Moor?
Lesley Ann Downey’s body was found when PC Bob Spiers noticed what he thought was a sheep bone while hurrying back from urinating as the search was wrapping up. John Kilbride’s body was found about a week later when DC Mascheder and DI Chaddock, guided by Pat Hodges (a child who had picnicked with the couple), matched a photograph showing Hindley with her dog to a specific spot on the moor, where tamping rods detected the smell of decay.
What was significant about the audio recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s torture?
The thirteen-minute recording, topped and tailed with Christmas songs and country music, clearly demonstrated Myra Hindley’s active participation in the abuse. She can be heard barking instructions at the child, yelling at her to put her gag back in and shut up, contradicting her claims of being a passive accomplice. This tape was crucial in establishing her culpability and was played in court, causing seasoned detectives to run from the room and others to weep.
What were the outcomes of the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley?
Both pleaded not guilty. Brady was found guilty of all three murders (Edward Evans, John Kilbride, and Lesley Ann Downey). Hindley was convicted of two murders (Evans and Downey) but found not guilty of murdering John Kilbride, though she was convicted of harbouring Brady knowing he had murdered Kilbride. They received three concurrent life sentences as the death penalty had just been abolished. The judge expressed regret that he could not sentence them to hang.
What happened during Myra Hindley’s 1985 confession?
After learning Ian Brady was talking to police, Hindley wrote down much of her confession and gave multiple interviews to DCI Peter Topping and journalist Fred Harrison. She claimed a violent, abusive childhood and that Brady had groomed and coerced her. She cited a letter from Winnie Johnson (Keith Bennett’s mother) as her main reason for confessing. She helped police find Pauline Reade’s body but was unable to locate Keith Bennett’s grave.
DCI Topping described her confession as ‘a very well worked out performance.‘
What lasting legal and social impacts did the Moors Murders case have?
The case became catalyst for significant reforms in criminal justice and press regulation, sparked debate in Parliament and public opinion, and disturbed academia with arguments about women’s agency, psychosis, psychosexual sadism, ‘the permissive society,’ mass media, censorship, and origins of evil. It led to clarification of law around life sentences and eventual removal of the Home Secretary’s power to arbitrarily adjust sentencing. The press adopted a new code of conduct regarding chequebook journalism after the News of the World scandal over paying David Smith.
What happened to the victims’ families in the aftermath of the murders?
Joanne Reade continued searching streets for Pauline until her body was found in 1987. Sheila Kilbride continued setting a place for John at the table and buying him presents on birthdays and Christmas until her death. Ann West never recovered, campaigned relentlessly against Hindley’s release with The Sun’s help, suffered from insomnia and anxiety requiring dozens of pills, and never stopped hearing her daughter’s screams on the audiotape. Winnie Johnson regularly searched the moors for Keith Bennett until her death, leaving flowers and promising to find him.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Moors Murderers
- Hero image source by Joannesimpson27 / openverse, by-sa.
