Hidden horrors of the Moors Murders: MICHAEL ATTWELL

Early on the morning of October 7, 1965, just as daylight was breaking and the world beginning to stir, the local police station in the Manchester suburb of Hyde received a strange 999 phone call. A terrified teenage boy was calling from a telephone box on a nearby council estate.

He begged the police to come immediately and fetch him. The young man was a 17-year-old called David Smith and with him was his wife, Maureen.

Once at the station, David blurted out a bizarre story about how the previous evening he had gone to the house of his wife’s sister, Myra Hindley, and her boyfriend Ian Brady. Decades later, for a television documentary I was making, he recounted what happened next.

‘I go in the house. All of a sudden there’s screaming and swearing, there’s banging around. I go running into the living room and Brady’s got this lad and is whacking him with an axe! It’s very violent. The lad is on the floor, Brady still hitting him. He then strangles him. He’s swearing at him; he’s cursing him; he’s calling him filthy names. And then it’s over.’

Smith’s survival instinct kicked in. He realised that if he was to get out of that house alive and not be the next victim, he must keep his cool and not show any disgust. ‘The three of us – me, Myra and Brady – clean up. We wrap the body up and carry it upstairs. We come downstairs and Brady passes me the axe.

‘“Feel the weight of that”, he says to me and wonders out loud, “How did he take that?”

‘It’s a normal conversation. I know it sounds unbelievable but Brady’s in control. I am totally obedient. I am going to do anything to get out of that room. Was I frightened? Was I shocked? Yes, but if I’d panicked, if I had made a run for the front door, I swear I wouldn’t have got to it.’

Smith finally escaped at about three in the morning, with a cheery ‘See you tomorrow, right, bye-bye.’

He begged the police to come immediately and fetch him. The young man was a 17-year-old called David Smith and with him was his wife, Maureen

The police were bemused by this account. It seemed almost too extreme to be credible. Nonetheless, Superintendent Bob Talbot and Detective Sergeant Ian Fairley drove round to the house, a modern two-up, two-down semi-detached at the end of a small terrace in the recently developed suburb of Hattersley.

Myra Hindley opened the door, cool, calm and collected. Brady was sprawled on a sofa in the living room, also totally composed and nonchalant. As the police looked around, there was no evidence of any struggle or blood.

Everything looked completely normal – until the officers insisted on inspecting the rest of the house and found a locked upstairs bedroom. They asked for the key. Hindley prevaricated but Brady, with casual resignation, told her to give it to them. In the bedroom they found the body of a young man trussed up in polythene.

What was unfolding that autumn morning six decades ago was one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th-century – the notorious Moors Murders, in which four children were randomly abducted off the streets, abused, tortured, murdered and buried in graves dug in the peat bogs of moorland in the middle of the Pennines.

Brady was taken to Hyde police station where a detective constable photographed him – having no inkling that this routine mugshot would become one of the best known, and most reproduced photographs in all British criminal history.

At this stage, the police believed there had been some kind of altercation that had got out of hand between Brady and the victim. He was identified as a 17-year-old apprentice engineer called Edward Evans.

Until now, the police opinion was that this was a single murder. But then David Smith told them that, before the Evans killing, Brady had boasted he had already committed several murders.

In Brady’s wallet they found what looked like a checklist on how to clear up after a murder. Brady conceded it was such a checklist, but claimed he had made it after the Evans killing.

Brady was taken to Hyde police station where a detective constable photographed him. This became one of the best known, and most reproduced photographs in all British criminal history

Then, in a notebook of Brady’s the police found doodlings, with various names, including ‘John Kilbride’ – a 12-year-old boy who had gone missing nearly two years earlier in the nearby town of Ashton-under-Lyne.

He had gone to the cinema on a Saturday afternoon with a friend, and after that, they had gone to the market to do odd jobs for stallholders to earn a little money to buy biscuits.

The boys split up at 5.30pm and his friend was the last person to see John alive.

When asked about John Kilbride’s name in his notebook, Brady said he couldn’t remember why he had written it down.

But the police were increasingly of the view that Brady may have murdered other children who had gone missing in the Greater Manchester area. Even they, though, could never have imagined the horror of what they were in due course to discover.

A further trawl through Brady’s and Hindley’s house turned up more than 150 photographs of deserted moorland and of the two of them posing. Smith told them Brady and Hindley had often taken him and Maureen on drives around the countryside and in particular, to a part of the moorland above Manchester called Saddleworth Moor.

This was the area the police were now focusing on. They also discovered Brady and Hindley had taken neighbours’ children up to the moors, and drove one of them to Saddleworth to see if she could recognise exactly where they had been.

She and the Smiths singled out a small hillock known as Hollin Brown Knoll. It triangulated with a number of the photographs they had found at the house.

Police discovered that Brady and Hindley had taken neighbours’ children up to the moors, and took one of them to Saddleworth to see if she could recognise exactly where they had been

Unfortunately, although the police were growing increasingly suspicious of Brady, they didn’t yet think Hindley had been actively involved in any criminal offences, nor did they have anything concrete against her.

We now know that during this five-day breathing space before she too was arrested, Hindley carried out a plan pre-agreed with Brady for exactly an eventuality like this. She went to the offices of Millwards, the chemical distribution company where she and Brady had both worked, and where they first met.

There she retrieved Brady’s so-called Master List – the master template he used to plan all his murders – which they had secretly stored there, away from their home premises.

I am pretty sure that also stored at Millwards was a great deal of additional material relating to the murders, like maps, photographs, tapes, mementoes and other potentially incriminating evidence. Hindley burned all this, as a consequence of which a great deal of evidence relating to their crimes was irretrievably lost.

The police were becoming increasingly convinced that if Hindley hadn’t actually been involved in any murders, she must have known something about what Brady was up to.

Five days after his arrest they arrested her too, charging her with being an accessory to Edward Evans’s murder.

Once again, a policeman took a routine mugshot of the prisoner, having no inkling that this photograph too would become infamous over the next decades.

Her defiant, staring eyes would come to feature on the world’s front pages for years as she and Brady were labelled as ‘monsters’, with special opprobrium being reserved for Hindley as ‘the most evil woman in Britain’.

This became even more appropriate after a policeman made a crucial discovery at their home. Inside the spine of a white-covered prayer book belonging to Hindley, he found the receipt for two suitcases stored in the left-luggage department of Manchester’s Central Railway Station. 

When the suitcases were tracked down, several spools of audio tape were found inside and then – most shockingly – nine photographs of a young girl in various stages of undress, bound and gagged and looking pleadingly at the photographer.

Hindley’s defiant, staring eyes would come to feature on the world’s front pages for years as she and Brady were labelled as ‘monsters’, with special opprobrium being reserved for Hindley as ‘the most evil woman in Britain’

The police quickly identified her as ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, who had vanished without trace from a funfair ten months earlier, just before Christmas. Hardened as they were, the police were profoundly shocked by the photographs. And even more so when they listened to the audio tapes.

On one, after a long section of Christmas music – The Little Drummer Boy – was a recording of Lesley Ann Downey begging to be released, being admonished by Hindley to keep quiet and being given a slap, pleading with both Hindley and Brady, and ending with her screaming.

I have never heard the tape recording. Very few have. John Stalker, the highly respected former Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, heard it as a junior CID officer at the time, and said that nothing in criminal behaviour, before or after, penetrated his heart with quite the same paralysing intensity.

When it was played in court at Brady and Hindley’s trial, it was reported that grown men wept. Now extremely concerned that other abductions or even murders might have taken place, the police started examining records of other children who had gone missing. Two names stood out: Pauline Reade, aged 16, and Keith Bennett, aged 12. But none of this was proof.

Throughout this time, they had continued digging on the moors with Hollin Brown Knoll as the main focus. Late in the afternoon of October 16, a mere nine days since David Smith had made his phone call to the police, a young police constable called Bob Spiers hung back to relieve himself.

Just as he was about to rejoin the team, he noticed a piece of bone sticking up out of the ground. The police uncovered a shallow grave, and in it the body of a young girl, buried with her clothes at her feet. They had found Lesley Ann Downey.

At the mortuary her distraught mother, Ann West, had to make a formal identification.

The hideousness of Mrs West’s experience was not yet over.

A few days later, she was shown two of Brady’s photographs of Lesley for further formal identification, and then was played the tape recording to identify Lesley’s voice.

What she heard never left her –two voices fighting in contention with one another: that of her much-loved child and that of the woman she came to hate, Myra Hindley.

It was now incontrovertible that Brady and Hindley were serial killers. The police continued searching the moors and on the morning of the fifth day they found the body of a young boy. It was 373 yards from Lesley Ann’s grave.

The boy’s features were unrecognisable owing to water erosion, but he was still partially clothed, with his trousers and underpants rolled down to near knee level – strongly suggesting he had been sexually assaulted, though whether pre- or post-mortem it was impossible to say.

The mother of the missing child, John Kilbride, confirmed that one of the shoes found in the burial site was his.

She also recognised the plastic buttons she had personally sewn on his jacket.

In court where they stood accused of three murders, Brady and Hindley were protected by a bulletproof screen, an unprecedented precaution, such was the public anger at the case.

In his evidence, Brady revealed his devotion to Hindley – the only person in his troubled life he’d ever felt close to – by minimising her role and trying to absolve her of any guilt.

It was a strategy they had agreed on in the hope she would receive minimal punishment.

They claimed that David Smith had been an equal partner with Brady in the Edward Evans killing and that Hindley had been a horrified bystander.

Brady and Hindley did not make a favourable impression on most people in the court. They affected an air of nonchalance, laughing and giggling at times, smiling at each other.

Brady not only spent time looking bored by the entire process, he occasionally appeared to nod off. When confronted with the most harrowing evidence, Hindley appeared completely unmoved.

Throughout the trial the two of them were clearly trying to give the impression they didn’t care.

Nevertheless, they couldn’t escape the gravity of the charges against them, especially after the tape recording made by Brady of the pornographic photo session with the undressed Lesley Ann was played to the jury and a transcript read out in open court.

Here was pitiless cruelty of the most extreme kind.

The jury weren’t convinced by any of the defence’s arguments. They deliberated for less than two-and-a-half hours before finding Brady guilty of all three murders and Hindley guilty of the murders of Edward Evans and Lesley Ann Downey, and of being an accessory to John Kilbride’s murder.

The death penalty for murder had been abolished in the UK the previous year. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Brady was taken to Durham Prison where he was attacked by other prisoners almost as soon as he arrived.

He was quickly put on Rule 43, which allows a certain category of prisoners to be kept segregated.

It is generally used for ‘nonces’ – convicted paedophiles – who are regarded as the lowest of the low in prisoner hierarchies and who would otherwise be physically attacked or even killed. He was given a job sewing mail bags.

For Hindley, however, prison life was very different.

When she entered Holloway Prison to begin her life sentence, she wasn’t segregated and she quickly learned to read people and situations astutely and turned both to her advantage.

Very soon she was taking lovers. Lesbianism was an enormously powerful tool for her. As the years passed, Brady became displaced in her affections by another.

Patricia Cairns had been a Carmelite nun but had left the order and joined the prison service. Hindley was immediately attracted to her. Via secret messages, Cairns was made aware of Hindley’s interest in her and the interest was soon reciprocated.

Thus began a relationship which, despite many ups and downs and long periods of separation – at one point they even made a failed escape bid, for which Cairns was sentenced to six years in jail – would endure until Hindley’s death over 30 years later.

They had clandestine meetings in the prison music room and played table tennis in the sports room. And in the prison chapel they were spied making passionate love to each other.

It became something of an open secret within the prison and eventually was reported higher up the chain of command.

A number of investigations were launched but Hindley and Cairns – who despite her Carmelite training was clearly no angel – lied to protect themselves.

Brady came to sense by degrees that his relationship with Hindley was coming to an end. Her letters to him had dried up, confined to a Christmas card and Valentine’s Day card. And then silence.

Prison was, paradoxically, opening new doors for Hindley. In the working-class environment she had grown up in, she would never have met, let alone mixed with, highly educated and influential people like the human rights campaigner Lord Longford, who took up her case for parole on the grounds that she was repentant and should be forgiven.

She told other prisoners and also wrote in letters that she regarded him as a buffoon and held him in contempt.

Through his encouragement she was visited by other important people, such as John Trevelyan of the British Board of Film Censors. It came as a pleasant surprise to Hindley to discover that not only could she meet such eminent people because of her prisoner status, but she could talk to them and hold her own with them – and even turn them to her advantage.

She developed an extraordinary gift of being chameleon-like.

Among the old lags and the rough and tumble of prison life, she could talk the talk and give a tongue-lashing as ferocious as anyone else; among her lesbian lovers, she could bill and coo.

And with people like Lord Longford she could be devout, earnest and contrite.

She became a powerful presence in Holloway. An internal memo described her as forceful and dominating, adept at manipulating any circumstance to her advantage. Hand in hand with this ability went a facility to compartmentalise her mind.

This is how she could apparently still dote on other people’s children yet had participated in the murder of other small and vulnerable children without compunction. So many people who met Hindley were captivated by her. They include Dorothy Wing, the governor of Holloway no less, with whom Hindley built a personal relationship.

Hindley built a personal relationship with Dorothy Wing, the governor of Holloway. Wing believed in rehabilitation

Wing was a progressive who introduced a more humane prison regime in Holloway, allowing women to wear their own clothes and to prettify and personalise their cells. She also believed in rehabilitation and preparing prisoners for the day when they would resume their lives outside prison.

Hindley impressed Wing and won her favour by her generally quiet, cooperative and discreet deportment in prison, despite provocations by other prisoners.

Amazingly she was allowed, under escort, to visit Wing at her house, just a short walk outside the prison. Hindley quickly worked out that Wing was interested in poetry and she was allowed to attend private poetry readings with the governor in her home.

This cosy relationship ended after it was revealed, amid public outcry, that Wing had taken Hindley to nearby Hampstead Heath to walk her dog for an hour-and-a-half. Wing dismissed it all as a storm in a teacup. She argued that it did Hindley good to see some grass and trees and have a breath of fresh air. But, with the controversy refusing to abate, she took her scheduled retirement.

You won’t believe what this evil killer is doing now

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Later she confessed that she had taken Hindley to the hugely popular Tutankhamun Exhibition at the British Museum in 1972. Because of the queues, they had left and gone instead for tea in an Oxford Street department store.

There, Hindley had been recognised and the police were called, but Wing had the incident successfully hushed up.

In due course, with equally apparent unconcern for Hindley’s past, various people actually asked her to become godmother to their children. Prison staff entrusted her to look after and play with their children on occasions when they were allowed to bring them with them to work. All this would be used in her favour as she continued her campaign to be considered eligible for parole. It is undoubtedly true that she would never have got involved in those monstrous killings if it hadn’t been for Brady, and not even her fiercest critics ever suggested otherwise.

No one ever thought that if she had been released on parole, she would constitute any kind of continuing danger to society or to children in particular.

But there is another question that dominated all public discussion of her case for the 36 years of her imprisonment: was she genuinely remorseful?

Can we ever really know, given how adept Hindley was at assessing what people wanted to hear or needed to hear?

All I can contribute is to say that in all the myriad private correspondence and writings of Myra Hindley I have seen, I cannot see any evidence of genuine remorse.

There is nothing that remotely smacks of her lying awake at night, racked with horror at the memory of those children being strangled or having their throats cut, or tortured with guilt over the unending grief of the victims’ mothers.

Adapted from The Moors Murders by Michael Attwell (HarperElement, £10.99) to be published June 4. © Michael Attwell 2026. To order a copy for £9.89 (offer valid until May 30) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.