Heartbroken motherwho her son a proper burial

She loathed him for taking her child, but she loathed him far more for never giving him back

SHE WAS a Christian – but Winnie Johnson never forgave Ian Brady, whom she hated with a ferocity born of grief, desperation and fury. She loathed him for taking her child but she loathed him far more for never giving him back. Of the five child victims of Brady and his twisted lover Myra Hindley, Keith Bennett was the only one whose body has never been found on Saddleworth Moor. He was just 12 when they raped and strangled him, an ordinary boy with broken spectacles who loved nature and collecting coins.

I spoke to Winnie four years ago, in what proved to be one of her final interviews before ill health claimed her ability to fight for justice for her son. She told me then: ‘I would like to tie Brady to a stake in the street and tear bits of flesh off him, to torture him as slowly and as completely as he has tortured me. And then when he was dead, I’d happily bang the nails into his coffin myself.

‘A lost child is something which destroys part of you at the time and then the rest of you slowly. It can and does drive you mad.’

Winnie was gentle with a deep wellspring of kindness and compassion for others. But she spoke with such sincerity that I believed her. She likened Brady to the fictitious serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a genius who derived intense pleasure from his ability to torment others – even when he was behind bars.

‘That’s him,’ she said. ‘Brady has toyed with me for more than 40 years and has enjoyed every minute of it. He’s just like Lecter with his mind games. I feel as if his mind is in search of…’ And then she tailed off. ‘Your soul?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘My soul.’

Winnie, who died yesterday aged 78, was a product of her class and time. She had little by way of education or material wealth – she counted her riches in her health, her home and children – but she spent the second half of her life campaigning for funding and the political will to bring Keith’s body home. A woman with nothing other than an instinct for right and wrong, she coped without the phalanx of advisers, agents and spokesmen who now assist families in her situation.

She was permanently embattled but never embittered. When the Moors Murders and Keith faded into history, and public attention was seized by the killing of James Bulger in 1993, the Soham murders in 2002 and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, she spoke not of resentment but of sorrow for other mothers. ‘Few people know what they’ve been through,’ she told me. ‘I’m one of them.’

Sadly her death from cancer means she has failed in all three of the aims she stated to me back then. She wished to give Keith a proper funeral; to have charges pressed against Brady for the murder to which he confessed 25 years ago while already serving a triple life sentence; and, more simply, to outlive him.

She said: ‘I want Brady charged with murder and taken to Saddleworth Moor and left there until he leads a search party to Keith’s body. I know that after all this time, there will be very little left but even if it’s just a handful of dust, I want it back.

‘The thought of my little boy alone there for eternity fills my every waking moment. The only thing which might make it stop is finding Keith. I am beside myself at the prospect of Brady dying before that happens.’

WINNIE had no fear of his discovery – she was ready to bury Keith. After thousands of trips to the moor with family and friends, with police search teams and mediums and the media, she had chosen his hymns and made plans for a horse-drawn procession. She even kept a cross on her mantelpiece in readiness.

The strain had, she admitted, almost killed her. ‘He [Brady] has nearly pushed me over the edge several times. Once in the early days when Keith was missing, I got all my children together and marched down to a police station. I told them I’d kill the whole family if they didn’t find him. I couldn’t cope any more.

‘There’s only Brady and me left. Hindley is dead and so are the other parents of the victims. But I will fight him until the end because I know he knows where he left my son.’

The last thing Winnie said to me was this: ‘His very existence gives me the will to outlive and outwit him. Why should he get away with murder? He has spent all these years thinking that he stole my son and then got the better of me. I want him to die knowing that I got the better of him.’

Except now she’s gone. And of course, she never did.