Brady’s finalvictim:the fought for 50 years to give
Brother vows to continue hunt for body and warns police: This is not closure
THE family of Moors murder victim Keith Bennett last night slammed the police for dragging their heels in the hunt for his body – as they mourned the death of his mother.
Winnie Johnson died yesterday after nearly 50 years of fruitless searching. A spokesman for the Bennett family demanded to know why police had not acted sooner on potentially vital information suggesting that killer Ian Brady might have written a letter finally revealing where he had left Keith’s body in 1964. The spokesman said: ‘The fact there seems to be such a delay from the time when police were made aware of the possible existence of this letter, to when they actually acted, will be a cause for concern for the family. Questions certainly need to be asked – answers will be expected.’
Mrs Johnson, who was 78, spent much of her life pleading in vain for Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley, who died in 2002, to help her find Keith’s body so that she could give him a Christian burial.
Keith, 12, was lured into the couple’s car while walking to his grandmother’s house in Manchester in June 1964 and was the third of their five known victims. Brady told Hindley he had strangled the boy with a piece of string.
The latest twist began last month when Brady’s legal advocate and frequent visitor Jackie Powell was interviewed for a Channel 4 documentary entitled Endgames Of A Psychopath, to be screened tomorrow.
On camera, Ms Powell, 49, said Brady had given her a sealed envelope to be opened only after his death, which would ‘allow Winnie Johnson to find peace’. Powell speculated that the contents might reveal the location of Keith’s body on Saddleworth Moor, which overlooks Oldham.
Documentary producer Paddy Wivell waited ten days before passing the information on to police, who took more than two weeks to act on it and arrest Ms Powell. Channel 4 sources said producers had urged Ms Powell to hand her letter over to the police, but she went ‘off radar’ for a few days.
When she made contact again, she told them she had returned the letter
‘I cannot understand the police’s apathy’
to 74-year-old Brady at Ashworth psychiatric hospital in Merseyside.
The first publicity packs for the programme went to newspaper journalists early last week and previews of the programme were also shown to TV reviewers.
Despite two weeks in which little action seemed to have been taken, within hours of journalists being made aware of Ms Powell’s claims, police sought an arrest and search warrant and raided her South Wales home.
The Bennett family spokesman said: ‘Did detectives treat this as a serious matter? If Brady has written a confession letter of some sort then that could be a vital piece of evidence which should have been considered immediately. There seems to have been liaison between producers from Channel 4 and the police. If detectives had such information why didn’t they act on it?
‘It sounds as if they were spurred on by the media interest. If this is found to be the case, the family would be deeply upset and disappointed.’
As the family promised to continue Mrs Johnson’s quest for the truth, her other son Alan Bennett criticised Greater Manchester Police for the way they have conducted the longrunning search for his brother.
In an open letter to police on his website, Mr Bennett hit out at claims by Martin Bottomley, head of the cold case team at GMP that new evidence had been taken seriously.
He claimed police ignored evidence from two ‘extremely credible’ witnesses over the past few months, one of them David Smith, the chief prosecution witness at the original trial, who called police after he saw Brady batter Edward Evans to death with an axe in October 1965. Mr Bennett said: ‘At the time of the original search in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, detectives wanted to know anything David could remember from his visits to the moor with Brady and Hindley.
‘Yet he was never taken to the area where Keith was murdered nor interviewed in the correct manner, despite wanting to help in any way he could.’
Mr Bennett said that when he and his partner sent Mr Smith photographs and a video of a particular area, he was able to instantly recall landmarks: ‘All this has since been made available to the police but they failed to take it seriously.
‘David passed away in May of this year but he had been prepared until the very end to speak to them.’
No one from Greater Manchester Police was available yesterday to comment.