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In his own chilling words, taken from hours of interviews, Brady reveals how the brotherin-law he and Hindley recruited for his last sickening murder finally led to his capture

DR ALAN KEIGHTLEY was head of religious studies at a West Midlands college when he began writing to Ian Brady in 1992. He received hundreds of letters from him and, from this archive, Dr Keightley has written a biography that sheds a unique light on Brady’s evil. Today, in our third extract, he reveals how Brady thought he was untouchable. But then he planned another bloody killing...

THE MOORS Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, never expected to be caught. After coldheartedly slaughtering four young people in Manchester and burying each of them in peat graves on Saddleworth Moor, they felt omnipotent.

When I talked to Brady in prison 30 years later, I asked him if they had thought about the prospect of living into middle age, or even beyond. He told me they discussed a long-term plan to convert a farmhouse.

‘We looked at two in the Manchester area. One had a well in the cellar.’

Clearly they believed they could go on killing for as long as they pleased. That they were stopped after the next murder was down to something Brady had never allowed for — his own carelessness.

This fact would come to haunt him, and he would admit to me in the end that his life had been a failure.

Brady’s criminal activities had never lived up to his expectations of himself as a successful bank robber.

As for the murders, he broke his own rules — he left a trail that could be traced back to him and Hindley and incriminating evidence everywhere, on paper, in photographs, on tapes.

Here was the arch-criminal who boasted that the police would never take him alive or gather the evidence to convict him — only to be arrested with hardly a murmur and the case against him as watertight as it could possibly be, short of a grovelling confession.

The terrible fact is that, for a while after the murder of Lesley Ann Downey, their fourth victim, Brady and Hindley became bored with their crimes.

‘Power, once attained, becomes a curiously empty experience,’ Brady told me. He was so restless he thought of leaving Hindley and twice packed a bag to do so, but she begged him to stay.

They looked for a diversion and considered how they could start ‘a small race war’ in Moss Side, the area where Manchester’s immigrant community was concentrated.

‘We had no political or racial motive,’ Brady told me. ‘It was simply an existential challenge.’ They did extensive research on this and on another possible project — derailing an express train.

Their relationship continued to have an undercurrent of violence. He hit her hard once when, while they were having a row in the car, she vented her fury by driving fast and exceeding the speed limit. He was furious with her for taking the needless risk of being stopped by the police.

BUT THEN he rarely managed to live up to his own self-image as the cool, dispassionate killer, a face that would melt into the crowd. His rage was in danger of drawing attention to him.

Brady was always spoiling for a fight and carried a knife with him at all times. He loved to walk around with a revolver under his waistcoat and became obsessed with firearms.

He liked to wake up in the mornings and see his Smith & Wesson .38 lying on the table beside him, ‘glinting in the sunshine’, as he recalled.

He carried it with him, ‘ready for the police if they tried to catch us off guard to make a surprise arrest’. The couple began seeing more of Hindley’s sister, Maureen, and her husband, a layabout with a police record named David Smith. Brady had long had a hankering to bring them into their activities, not least because he fancied Maureen.

Now the four of them began taking trips out to Saddleworth Moor, where Brady and Smith would practise shooting at an old oil drum. Without knowing it, Smith once stood on the grave of 12-year-old John Kilbride, Brady and Hindley’s second victim.

At night they drank heavily and Brady talked to Smith about carrying out armed robberies. But Smith got very nervous when Brady produced his guns. Brady took against Smith. He found him irritating and intellectually inferior. Now he was also proving undependable, as Brady always suspected he might.

Brady was worried that, if they went on a robbery, Smith’s nerve would crack and he would have to shoot him — which would lead the police to Myra and himself.

He decided instead that he would get rid of Smith and once got close to luring him up to the moor to kill him. But Hindley argued him out of it.

For the rest of his life, Brady would regret listening to her and missing the opportunity of eliminating the man who would eventually cause their ruin. ONE night Brady and Smith were discussing plans to rob a gas and electricity showroom when a drunken Brady asked Smith: ‘Are you capable of murder?’

Then he added: ‘I’ve done it. I’ve killed three or four. Their bodies are buried on the moors. You and Maureen were sitting near one of them.’

A few days later, he returned to the subject, telling Smith he had photographs to prove his murders. Then, still feeling Smith doubted him, he promised: ‘I’ll do another one.’

In what happened next, Brady had a double motive. He would convince Smith that he really was a killer. He would also test Smith’s nerve for the robbery that they were planning.

This murder was conceived and executed within the space of five hours, Brady told me. That evening, he and Hindley drove into the centre of the city. At 10.30pm, they parked the car close to Manchester Central station and Brady went to the station bar to buy some wine.

Hanging around nearby was 17-year-old Edward Evans, whom Brady recognised. He had seen him in a Manchester gay pub a couple of times, but the two had never spoken.

Brady walked over to Evans and asked him if he wanted to come back for a drink. Evans had been planning to meet friends, but they had not turned up, and he was only too happy to salvage what was left of a wasted evening.

He accepted what — according to Brady — was a covert invitation to sex. They got into the car and all three drove to Brady’s and Hindley’s home. As they got out of the car, Brady whispered to Hindley: ‘Fetch Smith.’

Hindley went to Smith’s flat in a block nearby, chatted for a while and then asked him to walk her home because the lights were out on the estate and she was afraid of the dark streets. Smith told his wife he would be back soon and, picking up a walking stick, left with his sister-in-law.

Meanwhile, at home, Brady had had sex with Evans. When Hindley and Smith arrived, he let them in.