BRADY DEAD
MOORS MURDERER DIES AT 79 AFTER 50 YEARS LOCKED UP KILLER BELIEVED TO HAVE NEVER REVEALED WHERE HE BURIED BODY OF KEITH BENNETT
MOORS Murderer Ian Brady has died.
The 79-year-old child killer – who has been locked up for the last 50 years – had reportedly fallen seriously ill in the last few days with cancer.
It was confirmed last night that Brady had died.
On Sunday it was reported he was on his death bed, being cared for by specialist cancer nurses.
Glasgow-born Brady was a patient at the highsecurity Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside.
He had claimed to be on hunger strike since 1999. Reports suggested he was being force-fed in the hospital after losing a legal battle three years ago to be moved to a mainstream prison so he could starve himself to death.
Brady and Myra Hindley, who died in prison in 2002, tortured and murdered five children in the 1960s. Four of the victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor.
Brady and Hindley were jailed for life on May 6, 1966, for the murders of John Kilbride, 12; Lesley Ann Downey, 10; and Edward Evans, 17.
It was 21 years later when they finally admitted they had also killed Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.
Pauline’s body was found but it’s believed Keith’s is still somewhere on the moors. Brady never revealed where he buried the remains. THE crimes Ian Brady inflicted on five children in the 1960s are so horrific they still resonate today with generations who weren’t even alive when he buried their bodies on Saddleworth Moor.
Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley, who died in 2002, tortured and then murdered their young victims.
This simple summary of their crimes betrays the vicious cruelty which characterised their victims’ dying moments, suffering which Brady wanted to capture on tape and on camera.
During their trial at Chester Assizes in the spring of 1966, a harrowing 16 minute tape was played to the jury in which one of their victims, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, could be heard pleading for her life.
She is heard whimpering ‘let me
go’ and ‘don’t undress me will you?’ Hindley can be heard telling the girl to ‘shut up’ while Brady appears to be heard taking pictures of the unfolding crime.
“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 Kilbride, 12; Lesley Ann Downey, 10; and Edward Evans, 17.
It was 21 years later when they finally admitted they had also killed Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.
Pauline’s body was found, but Brady never revealed where he buried Keith’s remains. It’s believed they are somewhere on the moors.
Keith, their third victim, was 12 when he vanished in 1964 as he walked to his gran’s house in Longsight.
For decades, Brady suggested he knew where Keith was buried and could lead the police there.
It added to the unbearable suffering of Keith’s mother, Winnie Johnson, who died aged 78 in 2012 without being able to give him the Christian funeral she longed for.
Keith’s brother Alan still searches the moors regularly in the hope of finding the body.
Police even escorted Brady to Saddleworth Moor in 1986 in a bid to find Keith’s body but officers suspected he had treated it only as a ‘day out.’
He repeatedly hinted in a series of letters that he knew where the body was buried but never revealed a location.
Brady refused to answer letters written on behalf of the Bennett family pleading with him to help find Keith.
If he knew, Brady has now taken that secret with him to the grave.
Ian 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 and turned to petty crime when he reached adolescence.
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 developed new interests. He read Mein Kampf as part of a burgeoning obsession with Nazi Germany and also developed an interest in sexual perversion and cruelty, devouring erotic literature written by the Marquis de Sade.
He spent some time in Strangeways as a boy of 17 and, after his release in November 1957, he took a job as a stock clerk at a Manchester chemical firm Millward’s Merchandising.
It was here he met one of the secretaries, a 17-year-old called Myra Hindley.
They went to see ‘The Nuremberg Trials’ at the cinema on their first date.
Hindley, a virgin, was besotted: she bleached her hair and started wearing bright red lipstick.
By June 1963, Brady had moved in with Hindley; the following month they committed their first murder – that of 16-year-old Pauline Reade. The Moors Murders had begun. 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.
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.
When his mother Winnie died in 2012, she was buried with a broken pair of Keith’s NHS spectacles – set aside to be mended after he broke them on a swimming trip. They became a last remnant of her beloved son.
Next to be murdered was 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. He told police.
Detective Ian Fairley was aged just 22, and at the start of what would become a long and illustrious career, when he and two other officers arrived at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley.
Smith, Myra Hindley’s brother-inlaw, who had fled from that address the previous night, after seeing Edward Evans beaten and strangled to death, had called the police to describe what he witnessed.
Later, recalling that morning of October 7, 1965, 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.
Three police forces - Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire - combined a unit of 150 men to search the moorland. They scrambled through peat bog and grassland in the weak October daylight, looking for any clues that might lead them to a lost child - and met with dreadful success: The naked body of Lesley Ann Downey was found on October 10, 1965; 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.
The bodies of two more children, Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, stay lay in their cold graves on the moors. Pauline’s would eventually be found, but not Keith’s.
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.