The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (53 page)

When Pauline did not arrive home by midnight, her parents went out to look for her. They called the police the next morning when the night-long search had failed to find any trace of their daughter. A police search also proved negative; it seemed that Pauline had disappeared into thin air. The second child victim
disappeared on 11 November 1963. Twelve-year-old John Kilbride and his friend John Ryan had gone to the local cinema for the afternoon. When the film finished at 5pm, they went to a local market to see if they could earn some pocket money helping the stallholders pack up. Ryan left Kilbride standing beside a salvage bin near the carpet dealer’s stall to go and catch his bus home. It was the last time that anyone saw Kilbride alive.

As before, Hindley lured the unsuspecting victim into her vehicle from the market place and drove him to Saddleworth Moor. Brady was waiting there and ordered Hindley to wait for him in a nearby village in the Ford Anglia he’d hired to drive to the moor. While Hindley waited, Brady raped and attempted to stab the boy with a knife, but the weapon was too blunt. Brady lost his temper and strangled him to death with string before burying the body in a shallow grave. When John did not return home for dinner, his parents called the police. For the second time, a major search was conducted, with police and thousands of volunteers combing the surrounding area for any clue as to John’s disappearance.

On 16 June 1964, 12-year-old Keith Bennett left to go to his grandmother’s home to spend the night. As his grandmother’s house was only a mile away, he walked there by himself. His mother watched him over the crossing and onto Stockport Road, and then left him to go in the opposite direction. Again, Brady and Hindley enticed him into their car and drove to Saddleworth Moor. Hindley stood and watched from the top of an embankment while Brady raped Keith in a ravine before strangling him to death with a piece of string and burying his body. When Keith didn’t arrive at his grandmother’s house, she assumed that his mother had decided not to send him. Keith’s disappearance was not discovered until the next morning when his grandmother arrived at her daughter’s home without Keith. Again the police were called and again a search was conducted; again another child had disappeared without a trace. Keith Bennett’s body has never been found.

Six months passed before a fourth child, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, disappeared. It was on the afternoon of 26 December 1964. Lesley had gone with her two brothers and some of their friends to a local fair only 10 minutes away. They had not been there long before they’d spent all of their money and become bored. All but Lesley left for home. A classmate last saw her, at just after 5.30pm, standing alone next to one of the rides. Brady lured her from the fairground into his car. He took nine obscene photographs of her, showing her naked, bound and gagged (these would later be found in a suitcase in a left luggage locker). Hindley recorded the child’s rape and torture by Brady on audiotape. The tape clearly identifies the voices of Brady, Hindley and the child, who is heard to scream and protest and ask to be allowed to go home and pleading for her life. It is believed that Brady then killed her. The following morning, Brady and Hindley drove Lesley’s body to Saddleworth Moor, where it was buried in a shallow grave.

When Lesley had not returned home, her mother began to search for her. She called the police when she could find no sign of Lesley. The countryside was searched, thousands of people were questioned and missing posters were displayed but no new leads were discovered. It would be another 10 months before the gruesome truth was uncovered.

On 6 October 1965, the couple claimed their fifth and final victim, 17-year-old Edward Evans. They enticed him from Manchester Central railway station to their house in Hattersley, where Hindley’s 18-year-old brother-in-law David Smith was visiting. Smith heard a long, loud scream. Hindley called to him from the living room. When Smith first entered the room, he saw Brady holding what he initially thought was a life-size rag doll. As it fell against the couch, no more than 2ft from him, the realisation dawned on him that it was a young man, and not a doll at all.

As the young man lay sprawled, face down on the floor, Brady stood over him, his legs apart, holding an axe in his right hand.
The young man groaned. Brady lifted the axe into the air, and brought it down on the young man’s head. There was silence for several seconds and then the young man groaned again, only it was much lower this time. Lifting the axe high above his head, Brady brought it down a second time. The young man stopped groaning. The only sound he made was a gurgling noise. Brady then placed a cover over the youth’s head and wrapped a piece of electric wire around his neck. As he repeatedly pulled the wire tighter, Brady kept saying, ‘You fucking dirty bastard,’ over and over again. When the young man finally stopped making any noise, Ian looked up and said to Hindley, ‘That’s it, it’s the messiest yet.’

Hindley then calmly made them all a cup of tea. She and Brady joked about the look on the young man’s face when he had struck him. They laughed as they told David about another occasion when a policeman had confronted Myra while they had been burying another of their victims on Saddleworth Moor. Brady had told David that he had killed some people before, but David thought it was just a sick fantasy. This was real. He was horrified and scared for his own safety. He decided that the best thing he could do was to keep calm and go along with them. He helped them to clean up the mess, tie up the body and put it in the bedroom upstairs. It was not until the early hours of the morning that he was able to escape, promising to return in the morning to help dispose of the body. Safely back at home, he was violently sick. He then went to a public phone box to call the police.

The police at first did not know whether to believe this bizarre story. However, when they went to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, the home address of Brady and Hindley, their doubts were put aside. At the house, they first spoke to Hindley, who reluctantly gave them a key to the upstairs bedroom, the only room in the house that was locked, where the body of Edward Evans was still wrapped in a grey blanket. The axe described by Smith as the murder weapon was found in the same room. Brady was then formally arrested.

Brady, when questioned at the police station, told police that there had been an argument between himself, David Smith and the victim. A fight had ensued that had quickly got out of control. Smith had hit Evans and kicked him several times. There had been an axe on the floor, which Brady said he had used to hit Evans. According to Brady, he and Smith alone had tied up the body and Hindley had had nothing to do with Evans’s death.

Hindley was not arrested until four days later after police had found a three-page document in her car that described in explicit detail how she and Brady had planned to carry out the murder. When questioned, she corroborated Brady’s story, describing how she had been horrified and frightened by the ordeal. The police investigation would probably have gone no further if Smith had not told police of Brady’s claim that he had buried other bodies on Saddleworth Moor and the fact that numerous photos of the moors were found in their home.

Once the area where Brady and Hindley frequented was pinpointed, the digging began. Police believed that the bodies of four children who had mysteriously disappeared over the past two years might have been buried in the moors. They were proved right on 10 October 1965 when the naked body of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was found in a shallow grave, with her clothing at her feet, but the police had nothing but hearsay and circumstantial evidence to connect Brady and Hindley to her death. They needed much more. A more thorough search of the house at Wardle Brook Avenue on 15 October gave them the evidence they needed.

They found a left-luggage ticket inside a prayer book, which led them to a locker at Manchester Central station. Inside were two suitcases filled with pornographic and sadistic paraphernalia. In among these were nine semi-pornographic photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, showing her naked, bound and gagged, in a variety of poses in Myra Hindley’s bedroom. A tape recording was also found. The voice of a girl could be heard screaming, crying and begging for her life. Two other voices, one
male and one female, could be heard threatening the child. Police were able to identify the adult voices as belonging to Brady and Hindley, but they needed Ann Downey’s assistance to identify her child’s voice. She listened in horror to her daughter in the last moments of her life. Even with such damning evidence against them, Brady and Hindley denied murdering Lesley. As in the case of Edward Evans, they attempted to implicate David Smith. They claimed that Smith had brought the girl to the house so Brady could photograph her. The tape recording was of their voices as they attempted to subdue the girl so they could take the pictures. Hindley protested that she had only used a harsh tone with the girl because she had been concerned that neighbours would hear her. As far as they were concerned, Lesley Ann had left their house, unharmed, with Smith, suggesting that Smith must have murdered her later.

As the search of Saddleworth Moor continued, 11 days after the discovery of Lesley Ann Downey the body of John Kilbride was found, also in a shallow grave. The evidence linking Brady and Hindley to his murder was mainly circumstantial and not overwhelming, but the police believed it was sufficient to charge them. They found the name ‘John Kilbride’ written, in Brady’s handwriting, in his notebook and a photograph of Hindley on John’s grave at the moors. It was also found that Hindley had hired a car on the day of John’s disappearance and returned it in a muddy state. Also, according to Hindley’s sister, Brady and Hindley shopped at Ashton market every week, where John had disappeared. Despite all their efforts, the police were unable to find the bodies of the two other missing children or any evidence to link Brady and Hindley to their disappearances. They had to content themselves with prosecuting them both for the murders of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride.

On 27 April 1966, Hindley and Brady were brought to trial at Chester Assizes, where they pleaded not guilty to all charges. Throughout the trial, they continued their attempts to blame David Smith for the murders, a cowardly stance that deepened
public hatred of them. At no time during the trial did they show any remorse for their crimes or any sorrow towards the families of their victims. To those who were present at the trial, the accused appeared cold and heartless. Despite protestations of their innocence, Ian Brady was found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride and Edward Evans. Myra Hindley was found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and for harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had killed John Kilbride. They escaped the death penalty by only a couple of months as the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 had come into effect just four weeks before their arrest. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1965, this murder investigation was unique. It was the first time in British legal history that a woman had been involved in a killing partnership that had involved the serial sex murders of children. The public could not comprehend how any woman could take part in such a horrific crime; her involvement made the crimes seem even more evil and unforgivable.

The trial judge spoke of his doubt that Brady could ever reform, describing him as ‘wicked beyond belief’ and effectively giving him little hope of eventual release. Successive Home Secretaries have agreed with that decision, while Lord Lane (the former Lord Chief Justice), set a 40-year minimum term in 1982. In 1990, Brady was told by the then Home Secretary David Waddington that both he and Hindley should never be freed. His successor Michael Howard agreed with this judgment in 1994 and told Brady so. Although in the UK Home Secretaries can no longer decide the minimum length of a life sentence, Brady has always insisted that he never wants to be released. He went on hunger strike in September 1999 and had to be force-fed, after the High Court refused him the right to starve himself to death. In early 2006, Brady was hospitalised and wanted to be allowed to die. He is, at the time of writing, still alive and is being held at Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool.

One question that has been asked many times since his arrest
is, ‘were there any more victims?’ In 1987, Brady contacted the BBC and gave incomplete information about five other murders. They included a man from Manchester and a woman whose body was allegedly thrown into a local canal. At the time, police were unable to find out more and Brady would not elaborate further.

However, in 2008, this same question was asked again when a statement was issued by a lawyer representing another female murderer, Linda Calvey, who was known as the Black Widow. Calvey was serving a sentence for murdering an ex-lover and had made a statement that Hindley had told her (while they were in the same prison) how she and Brady had picked up a girl in her teens hitchhiking to Kilburn, north London. After murdering her they disposed of the body, which had at that point not been found. To date, police officers refute this and are of the belief that there were no more victims other than those already known. A young girl who did disappear in similar circumstances on 30 December 1964 and could not be traced thereafter has, after 43 years, now been traced and is alive and well.

Following her conviction, Hindley was sent to Holloway prison and quickly won many friends, who claimed that she had reformed. Although Hindley and Brady wrote to each other during their first few years in prison, and at one stage were refused a request to marry each other, in May 1972 Hindley broke off all contact with Brady, as she realised she would never see him again, and that doing so would increase her chances of parole. A year later, Hindley attempted to escape with the help of Pat Carnes, a prison officer said to have fallen in love with the murderer. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Hindley was transferred to Durham, Cookham Wood and then to Highpoint.

In November 1986, more than 20 years after the crimes, Brady and Hindley finally confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. It is thought that the initiative came from Brady. Shortly afterwards, they returned to the moors, under heavy guard, to help police look for the dead children’s burial
places. Pauline Reade’s body was discovered the following July. Keith Bennett’s was never found. Brady and Hindley were never charged in connection with these murders.