One of Your Own (60 page)

At present, Ian Brady clearly isn’t willing to divulge the whereabouts of Keith’s grave; shorn of the ‘power’ of being able to stand on the moor and survey the cemetery of his making, retaining that knowledge is the last vestige of control he can exert. But is it possible that Myra deliberately withheld the whereabouts of Keith’s grave? Her supporters are certain that she did all she could to assist Topping and his team, but we know now that she stuck to an impenetrable smokescreen: she told detectives that she hadn’t known where any of the graves were located and made it clear that she didn’t want the graves of Lesley or John pointed out to her during visits to the moor; she lied to Topping about the use of photographs as grave markers and used the promise of hypnosis as a bargaining tool, ultimately declining to submit to it.

Yvonne Roberts muses: ‘I do wonder about Keith. I wonder if she actually did know where his body was buried but couldn’t bear to let go of it. They were both committed to having pulled off the perfect murder. Perhaps she took the biggest secret with her to the grave quite deliberately.’
¹³
Fairley concurs: ‘I don’t trust Hindley. Much as I despise Brady, I would be more inclined to believe him than her. She has, on countless occasions, been proven to be a liar.’
¹⁴
Ian Brady told Topping that Myra knew the exact whereabouts of the undiscovered graves and – his own hypocrisy aside – in a letter to Ann West wrote that Myra ‘had been deliberately misleading the police by “distancing” herself from the sites by not giving the
precise
locations, which she knows’.
¹⁵

Myra wrote a curious letter to David Astor in February 1987; two lines imply that she was going to reveal more than she subsequently did: ‘Everything will be resolved with satisfaction all round . . . things they have to know to clear this case up.’
¹⁶
But there are no letters to shed further light on the matter. Later that same year, when discussing Shiny Brook, Ian told Topping that Keith might well be buried in a completely different area of the moor. He referred obliquely to the original investigation, when ‘the police had been close to the body of Pauline Reade and had not found it’.
¹⁷
During another conversation with Topping, Ian blurted out, ‘Myra knows the location of [Keith’s] grave on that slope.’
¹⁸
He went on to say that there was a railway sleeper on the side of the road where John Kilbride had been buried on the incline; he and Dave Smith had used the sleeper for target practice, but it was also ‘a marker to other matters’.
¹⁹
Elsewhere, he mentioned murdering and burying a youth in 1964 (the year Keith was killed) not far from John Kilbride’s grave. The victims at Hollin Brown Knoll were buried within a few hundred yards of each other; the two girls lay in the shadow of the black, molar-shaped rocks, while John Kilbride lay on the other side of the road, his grave partly hidden from the A635 by a peat bank.

Mike Massheder states, ‘Hollin Brown Knoll is the burial ground. I believe that Keith Bennett is there. Kilbride, Downey and Reade were all buried together. Why would Brady bury that one child two miles away? He was methodical, remember. I’m not saying the police were
wrong
to search Shiny Brook – on the basis of the information Brady and Hindley gave them, they would have failed in their duty if they hadn’t investigated it thoroughly. And I’m not necessarily saying they should stop looking there, but I know that if you spoke to anyone involved in the original search, they would say the same: look at Hollin Brown Knoll, where the other victims were. All right, they searched there before, but how diligently? Pauline wasn’t found until 20 years later, yet I know they searched around there when Lesley was discovered. Everybody felt there were more victims in that area. For
years
afterwards, Joe Mounsey would disappear up to Hollin Brown Knoll. If he wanted a driver, he’d ring through and, if I was in, it was “Send Mash”, because we’d worked together. We’d go up there and he’d stand and stare out across the moor, where John’s grave had been, and potter about. It was always on his mind. He’d say, “There’s
got
to be others around here, Mash.” He wouldn’t let it go. When I retired, a card went round and people wrote the usual daft comments. But he wrote on it: “A635, Joe Mounsey.” That was the road past the graves.’
²⁰

Ian Fairley is in agreement: ‘Brady knows where Keith’s grave is, and if it was near John Kilbride’s grave, somewhere on Hollin Brown Knoll, then I shouldn’t be surprised. He knows where the others are too – because if you want my honest opinion, I’m certain there are other victims buried on the moor.’
²¹
Keith’s mother, Winnie Johnson, concurs: ‘I told Topping to stop looking in Shiny Brook. I’ve thought for a long time that Keith wasn’t there. I still put flowers up there, but I think he’s near the others. That makes sense, for him to be near John.’
²²
Danny Kilbride holds the same view: ‘They need to search in other places, not just Shiny Brook. Why don’t they search where they found John? On that side of the road? I’ve written to Brady and he’s written back, but he won’t see me. I’d sleep in the same cell as him if he’d only admit he knows where Keith is buried. I want Brady to tell Winnie where Keith is. That’s all I want. And if he doesn’t, then he’s a coward.’
²³

Chris Crowther, whose family own the land on which the other graves were found, recalls: ‘I’ve seen Brady all over the moors here, but I told Topping: “You won’t find Keith at Shiny Brook.” I told him that more than once. We’ve always felt Keith is near John. Brady was a lazy beggar, wasn’t he? He kept them close. Girls on one side of the road, boys on the other. John’s grave was just under the lay-by there that we’ve created. Not far from the road at all. Those photos of Myra that were published recently, showing her with a map and a compass by a stream – that’s not Shiny Brook. If you ask me, that’s closer to here, not far from Rimmon Cottage. Birchen Clough, it might be – it looks like it. There used to be a road there down to Greenfield Brook.’
²⁴

In a letter to Lesley Ann Downey’s stepfather, Ian described Keith’s grave in a gully ‘where a sheep pen is and a junction of two streams’.
²⁵
On Hollin Brown Knoll, not far from John Kilbride’s grave, the land slopes to the remains of dry-stone sheep pens, and two streams – Rimmon Pit Clough and Holme Clough – meet in a waterfall that drops down to Greenfield Brook. Nearby was the railway sleeper Ian and Dave had used for target practice but which Ian had said was also ‘a marker for other matters’. Between John Kilbride’s grave and Rimmon Pit Clough are the Standing Stones, a rock formation not unlike the one Myra described to her right as she sat on the plateau on the night of Keith’s murder.

‘There’s a photograph of Myra standing on rocks at Hollin Brown Knoll, with the puppy in her coat, the same coat she was wearing on John Kilbride’s grave,’ Mike Massheder muses. ‘In the distance is the hill – the Alderman. The day before they found John’s grave, I was standing on that same side of the moor, but further down, towards the Alderman on a piece of spongy ground, and I got a whiff, you know, this distinctive whiff of putrefaction. It’s a very distinctive smell – you can’t mistake it for anything else. And I remember looking there – somebody was prodding around the Knoll – and I thought afterwards: that must have been a grave. It was in that area. They searched and found nothing, but they must have been just off the right spot. That odour didn’t come from John’s grave, it came from another.’
²⁶

Until he is found, there is no way of knowing if Keith Bennett lies in the Shiny Brook area, as Peter Topping thought, based on information given to him by the child’s killers, or whether there are other victims, as those involved in the original investigation suspect. Topping’s belief that ‘W/H’ referred to Wessenden Head may or may not be correct; it might just as easily refer to Woodhead, or to White Moss, which appears in large letters close to Hollin Brown Knoll on Ordnance Survey maps from the mid 1960s.
²⁷
However, among the photographs recovered by the police in 1965, there must be one indicating the grave of Keith Bennett, featuring some identifiable landmark – identifiable to his killers, at least. The detectives from the original investigation, as well as the farmer whose land was desecrated by the couple and the mother of their last-known victim, are all in agreement on one issue: while Shiny Brook undoubtedly had to be explored, the probability that Keith Bennett lies closer to the graves of those whose fate he shared is equally worthy of consideration.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were keen on codes, riddles and private jokes. There was a time when they planned their perfect murder, lying together on a picnic blanket behind the rocks on Hollin Brown Knoll. A time when they walked across the wind-harrowed hills where they buried their victims, scorning the ‘maggots’ down in the city. A time when they took photographs of each other in a slam of wind on the black boulders above the reservoir where the deserted mansion stood in the shadow of trees, as Motown music poured from the transistor radio. A time when they made a pact to share their secrets with no one else, when they were ‘so close, we knew exactly what was in each other’s minds. We were one mind.’
²⁸

In the weeks after their arrest, during the early days of her separation from Ian Brady, when she was hunting for literary allusions to the landscape they had left behind, Myra Hindley copied a poem by Charlotte Mew into an exercise book. Read with the knowledge that at least one of their victims remains in his secret grave, its meaning twists and darkens like the road through the stark hills of the green-lit moor: