Ian Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart in Glasgow on January 2, 1938, to an unmarried tea-room waitress, and was raised by another family in the Gorbals. He had a juvenile record, moved to Manchester at sixteen, served a borstal sentence, and by 1959 was a stock clerk at Millwards Merchandising in Gorton, reading Nietzsche, de Sade and books about the Nazi party. Myra Hindley, a typist there, fell in love with him.
Between July 1963 and October 1965 they killed Pauline Reade, sixteen, John Kilbride, twelve, Keith Bennett, twelve, Lesley Ann Downey, ten, and Edward Evans, seventeen. Hindley, a young woman with a van and a friendly manner, made the approach; children went with her. Four of the five were taken to Saddleworth Moor and buried there, and the pair became known as the Moors Murderers after that ground.
On Boxing Day 1964 they took Lesley Ann Downey to Hindley's house, photographed her, and recorded sixteen minutes of audio tape.
The tape was played in open court at Chester Assizes in 1966. It is the reason the case has never faded in Britain, and the reason it is cited whenever a British court has to decide what a jury and a public gallery can be made to hear.
They were caught because Brady wanted an accomplice. On October 6, 1965 he killed Edward Evans with an axe in the living room in front of Hindley's seventeen-year-old brother-in-law David Smith, whom he had been grooming. Smith went home, was sick, and telephoned the police in the morning.
They found Evans's body in a bedroom and, later, a left-luggage ticket for two suitcases at Manchester Central containing the tape and the photographs.
Both were convicted on May 6, 1966 and Brady was given three life sentences. He admitted the Reade and Bennett murders in 1987, twenty-two years after the fact, and went back to the moor with police.
He was moved to Ashworth high-security hospital in 1985, went on hunger strike from 1999 and was force-fed for eighteen years, and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die. He died at Ashworth on May 15, 2017, aged seventy-nine.
He never disclosed where Keith Bennett was buried. Pauline Reade was found in 1987 on the strength of what he chose to say. Keith Bennett has not been found, and the twelve-year-old's grave was the one thing Brady held back through fifty-one years of custody, eighteen years of asking to be allowed to die, and every appeal Keith Bennett's mother made to him.