I’ve spent my life searching for Keith
Moors murder victim’s brother on coming face-to-face with Myra Hindley and his special pilgrimage each Christmas
JUST before Christmas every year Alan Bennett drives alone to Saddleworth Moor.
Once there he plays a cassette tape of a family gathering recorded by his auntie Jean.
Emerging out of the chatter is a pure, clear, rendition of the hymn Jerusalem.
It is the voice of his brother, Keith Bennett, six months before he was abducted and murdered by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.
“It is a special thing to the family. I drive up to the moor, play the tape outside the car on the moor, just to get a feeling of ‘we have not forgotten you.’ It is something I have to do.”
Alan, 62, has devoted more than 30 years of his life to trying to find Keith’s remains. He had been eight when his brother, who was 12, vanished.
He wrote dozens of letters to both killers in a bid to extract clues, and in 1998 took the unnerving step of meeting Hindley twice in prison.
The police had taken Brady to the moor, and then separately Hindley, but neither had delivered a breakthrough. They had both been found guilty in 1966 of torturing and killing John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. In 1985 they admitted killing Keith and Pauline Reade. Pauline’s body was found on Saddleworth Moor in 1987 but Keith’s has never been recovered. The then chief constable James Anderton has ordered the search for Keith to cease after Pauline had been found. But Alan would not give up on his big brother. He faced Hindley at Durham Prison and at Highpoint Prison in Suffolk to ask for her help.
“I took a pen and notebook naively thinking I could take notes. A guard said ‘no way, you could take her eye out with a pen.’ I said I was not there to harm anyone.
“I sat in this room, waiting, all nervy, thinking what to say. The thing was not to lead her – let her tell me what she knew.
“A man who was from the Home Office popped his head into the room and said ‘good luck,’ which made me even more stressed. A woman walked in and left some cups. Then this woman walked in with a stick, and hobbling, I looked at her and thought that’s not Hindley either.
“But it was. She had dark hair, and was wearing a trouser suit – nothing like I expected. I supposed I still had THAT picture of her in my head.
“She started walking towards me. She said: ‘hello Alan’ and I stood up, and I looked her in the face. It was her eyes, and her nose – I thought, this is her. I didn’t know what to do and stood up and said hello. She started crying, and put her arms round my side and said ‘I am so sorry for the trouble I have caused and the pain I have caused over the years, and for being such a coward.
“Next thing she was sat next to me and said ‘I do want you to know that I never touched Keith, I never murdered him, but I am as guilty as Brady because I put him in the car, I knew what was going to happen to him, but I never laid a finger on him.”
Hindley agreed to view photographs that she and Brady had taken in the aftermath of the moors killings in a bid to help identify where Keith’s body was.
She suggested they should meet again, but with detectives present, to scrutinise the photographs together.
“She did seem genuine in her desire to help, and genuinely upset – she did break down when she saw me. She said she thought Keith was in the vicinity of Hoe Grain, which is near a lay-by off the A635, but quickly becomes hidden from the road. She said they had been sat at the top of a waterfall and the bottom of a waterfall, and pictures had been taken.”
The location leads to Shiny Brook area where police believe Keith was murdered.
“She was concerned that people thought her prison was a holiday camp and invited me into her room. On the wall was a picture of a waterfall. She said had a problem with Keith and waterfalls – it was another indication, I believe that he was left not far from one.”
He asked Hindley to have hypnosis in a bid to help unlock her memories of the day Keith was taken, but she never did.
Two days before Alan was meant to meet Hindley again with police he got a message. One of the officers had a ‘family crisis’ and the meeting was cancelled. A few days later Hindley suffered a cerebral aneurysm and took six months to recover. She said she could not cope with seeing Alan again. But over the years he has never given up. Every weekend during the summer and sometimes in the winter Alan – along with family and helpers – has searched the moors.
In recent years, Cold Case unit officers from GMP have re-examined what happened to Keith. They, like Alan, have been supported by forensic archaeologists and the case is known throughout the world.
“I still feel that one day we will find Keith. Professional people who work with us are well regarded all around the world. They have worked in Brazil, Australia, Russia, on body search techniques. One is working in Ireland at the moment regarding the bodies missing after being killed by the IRA. GMP know who they are and talk to them. These people actually go to the moor.”
There is one very tangible hope –
two briefcases belonging to Brady. Just before his death in 2017, Brady requested the two combination-locked cases be put in secure storage.
As reported in the M.E.N., Brady’s solicitor, Robin Makin, has refused to hand them over. It emerged last month that officers went to court for a search warrant to open the cases to check them for clues, but a district judge refused the application, stating there was no prospect of an investigation as both killers were dead.
Alan is undeterred. “You get to a stage and think ‘where can I go from here?’ then something pops up like these briefcases.
“Mr Makin will not reply to me or the police. I would ask him where is your compassion, where is your humanity, put yourself in our position.”
Mr Makin, of E Rex Makin & Co Solicitors in Liverpool, has declined to comment on Alan’s plea to hand over the briefcases to GMP.
He has previously said: “The will (Brady’s) does not contain any instructions for Alan Bennett or contain anything that could be given to him that would now identify where Keith Bennett’s body was buried.”
Alan is a dignified man despite his years of pain. He works as a teaching assistant at a primary school in Manchester and ‘loves’ the satisfaction he derives from helping children learn and grow towards their teenage years.
His brother Keith never became a teenager. He was just 12 when he was lured into a van by Hindley, who asked him to help her with some boxes. Brady was sat on the back seat.
It is the memory of that day – June 16, 1964 – which burns inside Alan and means he is unable to give up.
He and his family were living in Eston Street, Longsight. Several nights a week, to give their mother Winnie a break, her children would stay with their grandma, Gertrude.
Alan, then eight, his sister Maggie, three, and brother, Ian, seven, arrived at their gran’s in Morton Street, the other side of Stockport Road. Sister Sylvia, 11, and step-sister, Susan, 11, stayed at Eston Street.
Winnie walked Keith to Stockport Road to make sure he was safely across, then waved goodbye. He was never seen again.
He would have walked down Dallas Street, where Hindley parked her van when visiting Brady who lived in Westmoreland Street with his mother.
Alan said: “The next day – because we didn’t have a phone – was when we found out Keith was missing.
“Panic set in and I couldn’t take any more.”
Police would later dig up the backyard of the house in Eston Street, and arrest Keith’s step-father, James Johnson – in those days suspicion always started with the family – creating more turmoil. Eventually police told the family they suspected Keith was a victim of Brady and Hindley.
Somewhere under cotton grass bent by howling winds on the moor Keith lies. Alan said: “I will never stop searching for him. In a way it has ruined my life, but he is my brother and I will not forget him.”