Posted on 09/30/2022 7:10:55 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Between 1963 and 1965 twisted killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tortured and murdered five children and buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor
When the newspapers printed details of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's unspeakable cruelty disbelieving readers are said to have wept. And to this day the crimes the evil pair committed still haunt Manchester.
Between 1963 and 1965 Brady and Hindley tortured and murdered five children - Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17 - before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor. During their trial at Chester Assizes in the spring of 1966, a harrowing 16 minute tape was played to the jury in which Lesley Ann, could be heard pleading for her life.
Read more: Skull found as police dig for Moors Murders victim Keith Bennett - latest updates
She could be heard whimpering 'let me go' and 'don’t undress me will you?'. Hindley could be heard telling the girl to 'shut up' while Brady appeared to taking pictures.
"Please God help me, ah, please, oh," the girl is heard to say before screaming. The press reports were filed from court and a disbelieving public read them and wept.
Brady and Hindley were eventually jailed for life on May 6, 1966, for the murders of John, Lesley Ann and Edward.
Twenty one years later they finally admitted they had also killed Pauline and Keith Bennett. Pauline's body was discovered in 1987, but Keith was never found.
Despite Keith's mum Winnie Johnson writing hundreds of letters to Brady, he refused to reveal her son's whereabouts. She died in 2012 aged 78 having never being able to give Keith the Christian funeral she longed for.
Brady was born Ian Stewart in Glasgow on January 2 1938, the illegitimate son of a waitress. Neglected by his mother Peggy, he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals from the age of four months.
(left to right) John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey Edward Evans, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett (Image: PA) The courts sent the young Brady to Manchester to live with his mother and her new boyfriend, Patrick Brady, whose surname he would later assume. He became a teenage alcoholic and read Mein Kampf as part of a burgeoning obsession with Nazi Germany while also developing an interest in sexual perversion and cruelty, devouring erotic literature written by the Marquis de Sade.
As a boy of 17 he spent time in Strangeways. After his release in November 1957, he took a job as a stock clerk at a Manchester chemical firm Millward’s Merchandising, where he first met a 17-year-old secretary called Myra Hindley.
On their first date they went to see The Nuremberg Trials at the cinema. Hindley was besotted. She bleached her hair and started wearing bright red lipstick. By June 1963, Brady had moved in with her; the following month they committed their first murder - that of 16-year-old Pauline Reade.
Ian Brady, photographed by Myra Hindley, near the site of a victim's grave on Saddleworth Moor, circa 1965 (Image: Mirrorpix) Pauline, from Gorton, disappeared on her way to a disco on July 12, 1963. She got into a car with Hindley - a woman she knew and trusted - while Brady secretly followed on a motorbike. Brady murdered her on Saddleworth Moor and buried her there.
John Kilbride, the eldest of seven children from Ashton-under-Lyne, was snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered on November 23, 1963. His mother Sheila had religiously set the dinner table for her missing son for two years after the murder until his body was found buried on the moors.
Myra Hindley, circa 1980 (Image: Mirrorpix) Keith Bennett vanished after his mum watched him cross the road to walk the last few yards to his gran's house in Longsight on June 16, 1964. Lesley Ann Downey, who was lured away from an Ancoats funfair near her home and killed at Hindley’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley, on December 26, 1964.
Edward Evans was lured from Manchester Central Station and died in a hail of axe blows inside the couple's home on October 6, 1965. The murder was witnessed by Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, who ran into the room to find Brady standing over his victim with an axe. He later told police: "I heard the blow, it was a terrible hard blow, it sounded horrible."
Fearing for his life, Smith helped Brady clean up and took the body upstairs. Then all three had tea. David remained for hours until he felt it safe to leave and strolled away, feigning calm. Only once out of sight did he break into a sprint for home.
Det Ian Fairley was just 22, when he and two other officers arrived at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley the following morning. Smith had called the police to describe what he witnessed.
Later, recalling that morning Mr Fairley said: "The three of us went in. Hindley was dressed for business and Brady was in bed. We found the body of Edward Evans and we found the guns. Edward Evans was trussed up in a plastic bag in the bedroom."
After his arrest for Evans' murder, police started to trawl through Brady's library books on murder and sexual perversion. With dawning horror, they realised he might be responsible for more than one killing.
In his wallet they found sheets of paper and plans on how to dispose of Evans' body on the moors. In a notebook written in Brady's handwriting, police found the name 'John Kilbride'. The boy had been missing for two years.
The remains of Pauline Reade were found on Saddleworth Moor in the early hours of July 1, 1987 (Image: Mirrorpix) Some 150 officers from three police forces - Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire - formed a unit to search the moorland. On October 10, 1965 the naked body of Lesley Ann Downey was found; eleven days later John Kilbride was recovered from his grave.
A left luggage ticket found at Brady's home eventually led police to suitcases stowed at Manchester railway station containing hundreds of photographs, plus Brady's infamous 'trophy' tape of little Lesley Ann pleading for her life. Brady spent his last years at the high-security Ashworth Hospital - claiming to be on hunger strike since 1999 - where he was treated as a mentally-ill patient rather than a prisoner. He died at Ashworth Hospital on May 15 2017 aged 79.
Hindley died aged 60 on November 15, 2002 of bronchial pneumonia at West Suffolk Hospital.
The noose was made for monsters like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. But the UK (like most of the West) is oh too civilized to go for that. It was much easier to pretend, and give them prison sentences instead.
In a way, it’s like having a wolf in your sights, but letting him go. You are then oh so humane. No matter that the wolf has tore the guts out of many sheep.
Drugs or otherwise.
The families need to have their loved one's bodies returned.
When I was a kid we used to get Life magazine. I saw a story in it, 1966, ‘Killers on the Moors’. I had never heard of the Moors outside of Wuthering Heights. I was young, their story of murder, of this horrible blonde woman who lured children into a van for her boyfriend to rape and torture and then bury on the moors never left me.
I was reading of murders that happened over in England. It was never really covered over here again but I never forgot that picture of her or the story.
A few years ago it came out Ian Brady died and I found the story again, I read a book about the two of them and then one on Myra who babysat kids for her friends and was well liked and thought well of as a babysitter. How could she turn into this monster of a woman.
This is the book I read.
https://www.amazon.com/One-Your-Own-Death-Hindley/dp/1845967011
The photographer who took that picture with the policeman standing nearby caught ‘her’ in the first shot I believe. After that other books and photos came out trying to make her look more human, the cop who was in the room said ‘that first photo, that is the one that shows who she really is’.
I read/review murder mysteries as a hobby and Manchester is almost ALWAYS at the heart of it.
So much injustice in this world. :(
How was this pair caught as they practiced the ‘dead men tell no tales’ rule and forensic criminology was in its infancy.?
I forgot about smith. Really dumb. Either go it alone or kill anyone who knows. That is how the apparent Green River killer plied his trade for years and years and he was a rather dull average fellow who just knew all the young whores in the SEA-TAC area provided him a target rich environment in which to hunt.
With dawning horror, they realised he might be responsible for more than one killing.
Geez, how can homicide cops ever view anything with ‘dawning horror’, most likely this is a journalistic cliche. The cops may have been (a) amused and (b) really interested that they had a real live one in their net and solution of high profile crimes might follow, with rewards and promotions as well. Real veteran cops are not the sanctimonius, sawdust figures from Criminal Minds, if they do their job, and often they don’t, they are tough, cynical opportunists who fully understand the public tolerates but does’t like them and the tax payer wants them to control the rabble.
I imagine MS Brady enjoyed the power rush of sadistic pleasure in hurting others after eating the common dogshit of life since she became aware of her ratty surroundings and miserable family. The pure pleasure in cruel bullying and even killing others is one of man’s most problematic aspects.
He died at Ashworth Hospital on May 15 2017 aged 79.
and like Charlie Manson, he laughed all the way at the straight schmucks. Does he play chess with one of Satan’s lieutenants?
What does Manchester have to answer for, other than it is a shit city, so is , say, St Louis.
Belligerent ghouls
Run Manchester schools
This is different from other big ciiies how? Further these crimes happened during the last Ice Age, what connection is that burg then with now?
No, dawning horror is right. My grandad was a firefighter covering the same are at the time and he was acquainted with a lot of police officers, including ones involved with the case. They most definitely were not in any way amused or excited about having to deal with it. Nor was my own friend, a former police officer who was on site in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing.
My grandad also had to pull the dead bodies of children from fire sites on a semi regular basis too. Even though he saw plenty of them he never became totally hardened to it. It is an awful thing to have yo deal with dead children, especially ones that have died in horrific circumstances. If you are normal that is.
Big surprise he had a liking of Nazism. For some bizarre reason, a lot of Nazis got their jollies from the combination of eros and thanatos. Men were almost required to be domineering during that period, and the younger soldiers (and Hitler Youth) were exposed to all of the violence and blatant sadism while discovering their own sexual preferences. It’s part of the reason why Richie Ramirez came out a sexual sadist - his cousin showed him photos of them torturing and raping the women and girls in Vietnam while he was going through puberty.
My dream job is executing people like this. I’d want to do it my way. It would take a while.
You make an interesting point about the appeal of sadism to the young.
Fully 2/3s of Germans were under the age of 40 when Adolf Hitler came to power.
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