Ian Brady was convicted in May 1966 of murdering three young people: John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. His partner, Myra Hindley, was convicted with him of two of the murders and of being an accessory to the third. More than 20 years later, both admitted killing two more children, Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12. Neither was ever tried for those deaths. Four of the five victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor, in the south Pennines outside Manchester, and the case has been known ever since as the Moors murders.
Brady had worked as a stock clerk at a Manchester chemical firm. The killings began in July 1963 and ended in October 1965, when Hindley's brother-in-law, David Smith, saw Edward Evans killed in the couple's living room and went to the police the next morning. Brady spent the rest of his life in custody, the last 32 years of it at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside, where he was fed by tube during a hunger strike that lasted most of two decades. He died there on May 15, 2017, aged 79. Keith Bennett's body has never been found.
Brady was born Ian Stewart on January 2, 1938, in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, according to Peter Stanford's obituary of him, published in The Guardian and syndicated in The Irish Times. His mother, Peggy Stewart, was an unmarried waitress. She said only that his father had been a reporter on a Glasgow newspaper. She gave the baby up when he was three months old to the Sloans, a couple in their forties with several older children, who lived in cramped and poor conditions. When he was nine the family moved to the Pollok overspill estate on the edge of the city.
Teachers remembered him as neat, polite and delicate, a boy without friends. Classmates later told of cruelty toward other children and animals. He collected Nazi souvenirs as a teenager. At 14 he was bound over by a court for petty burglary, and he left school without qualifications. After another arrest, while he was working for a Glasgow butcher, his foster parents and probation officers arranged in December 1954 for him to go and live with his natural mother in Moss Side, Manchester. She had married a market porter named Pat Brady, and Ian took his stepfather's surname.
He was soon in trouble again. He was sent to borstal, the youth custody system of the time, for further theft, and he studied bookkeeping while he was there. He was released in November 1957. A mental health tribunal reviewing his history in 2013 noted the borstal training as part of his record before the murders.
After borstal Brady found work as a clerk at Millwards, a chemical company in Gorton, east Manchester. In January 1961 a new typist joined the firm: Myra Hindley, then 18, born on July 23, 1942, and raised in Gorton. CNN's profile of Hindley, published at her death in 2002, says the two met that month, when he was a stock clerk and she the new secretary, and became lovers about a year later.
Hindley later portrayed herself as a young woman dominated and threatened by an older man. In 1998 she alleged that Brady had abused her and had threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and sister, and that he had taken photographs of her to use as blackmail, according to the same CNN profile. Brady, for his part, wrote to government ministers in 1997 claiming that she had been as committed to murder as he was. The courts and Home Secretaries who later dealt with her case did not accept that she was a mere bystander. Lord Steyn, in the House of Lords judgment that upheld her whole life tariff in 2000, said the five children would probably still be alive but for her participation.
Pauline Reade was 16 and lived in Gorton. She knew the Hindley family through Myra's younger sister, Maureen, who was her friend. On the evening of July 12, 1963, she set out for a dance near her home, wearing a pink and gold party dress and a blue coat, ITV News reported. She never arrived.
Hindley stopped beside her in a van and asked for her help in finding a glove she said she had lost on Saddleworth Moor, according to the account the couple eventually gave police. Pauline was killed on the moor and buried in the peat. Her family went more than two decades without knowing what had happened to her. Her parents, Joan and Amos Reade, and her brother Paul now lie with her in a family grave at Gorton Cemetery, the Huddersfield Examiner reported in 2018.
John Kilbride was 12 and lived in Ashton-under-Lyne, east of Manchester. On November 23, 1963, the day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, he was at Ashton market, where he had been helping stallholders clear up, when he was offered a lift home. He was never seen alive again. His disappearance was overshadowed by the news from America, and it drew less attention than it might otherwise have done, ITV News and the Yorkshire Post noted in 2017.
Brady took him to Saddleworth Moor and killed him there. At some point afterward Brady photographed Hindley standing on the grave with her dog. That photograph, found by police in 1965, led them to the boy's body. His brother, Terry Kilbride, said in 2017 that Brady had taunted every one of the families.
Keith Bennett was 12 and lived in Longsight, Manchester. His family described him as cheeky and happy-go-lucky. He loved marbles and riding his bike, and he collected leaves in a scrapbook, The Scotsman reported in 2012. On Tuesday, June 16, 1964, four days after his 12th birthday, he set off to spend the night at his grandmother's home, a trip he made every Tuesday. He never got there.
Hindley asked him to help her load some boxes into her vehicle and then drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor, where Brady was waiting in the back, according to the couple's later admissions as summarized in The Scotsman and by ITV News. Brady led the boy onto the moor on the pretext of looking for a lost glove and killed him. Where Keith was buried, only Brady could say, and he never did.
Keith's mother, Winnie Johnson, searched for her son for the rest of her life. She wrote hundreds of letters to Brady and dug on the moor herself, often photographed with a spade, and on fence posts she tied teddy bears. "When he's found, I'll know I've done my duty as a mother," she said.
Lesley Ann Downey was 10, the youngest of the five. On Boxing Day, December 26, 1964, she went to a fairground in Manchester and did not come home. Brady and Hindley drew her away from the fair by asking her to help carry some packages, and took her back to the house in Hattersley where Hindley was then living with her grandmother, ITV News and the Yorkshire Post reported. She was killed there, and the next morning she was buried on Saddleworth Moor. Detectives were never able to say exactly how she died.
A tape recording connected with her death, which ran 16 minutes and 21 seconds, and a set of photographs were found by police in 1965. The tape was played in open court at the trial in 1966. John Stalker, then a detective sergeant and later deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester, said afterward: "Nothing in criminal behaviour before or since has penetrated my heart with quite the same paralysing intensity."
By 1965 Brady and Hindley were living with her grandmother at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, a council house on the new Hattersley estate at Hyde. David Smith, who had married Hindley's sister Maureen, had become a regular visitor. He knew Brady and Hindley well and spent time with them before their crimes came to light, The Sunday Post reported in 2014.
Edward Evans was 17. On the night of October 6, 1965, Brady brought him back to the house. ITV News reported that he was lured from a gay bar in Manchester. Smith was summoned to the house on a false pretext, and he watched as Brady attacked the young man with an axe and killed him. Smith helped with the body and then left. Early the next morning, October 7, he telephoned Hyde police and said he had witnessed a murder at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue the night before, according to the 2019 study of the case by the criminologists Ian Cummins, Marian Foley and Martin King.
Police went to the house that morning. The Cheshire officer Bob Talbot got in, disguised as a milkman, according to an account given in 2017 by David Parry-Jones, the former editor of the Chester Chronicle, who covered the case. Officers found Edward Evans's body in the house and arrested Brady at once. Hindley was arrested four days later.
Smith's information pointed detectives beyond a single killing. On October 15, 1965, police recovered two suitcases belonging to Brady from the left luggage office at Manchester Central railway station. Among the contents were photographs and the tape connected with Lesley Ann Downey. Ian Fairley, a young detective on the original team, said in later years that finding one of those photographs was the moment the case opened up. "That really was the Pandora's Box, if you like," he said.
Other photographs showed the moor. Police from three forces, the West Riding, Lancashire and Cheshire, searched the high ground along the A635 between Greenfield and Holmfirth, with journalists racing down the road to the nearest public phone box to file their stories, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner reporter Mike Shaw recalled. In 1965 police found the graves of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The picture of Hindley and her dog on the moor helped them find the boy.
Brady was charged with the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. Hindley was charged with the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and with being an accessory to the murder of John Kilbride. Nobody was charged over the disappearances of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, which police did not then connect to the couple.
While the two were on remand, Parliament suspended the death penalty for murder. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 ended hanging for an initial five years, and the Moors case became the first high-profile murder trial held under it. Whatever the verdict, life imprisonment was the only sentence available.
The trial opened at Chester Assizes on Tuesday, April 19, 1966, before Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson. The Attorney General opened the case for the Crown. Brady and Hindley sat in the dock behind bulletproof glass screens, put up because feelings ran high, and Parry-Jones remembered that neither of them spoke a word in the dock, even to each other. Both pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
The prosecution's chief witness was David Smith. The tape recording was played in court. Parry-Jones recalled that reporters who had covered many trials flinched as they listened; the Yorkshire Post later wrote that judge, jury, spectators and police officers were moved to tears.
The press coverage of the opening day was itself a subject of debate. Writing in The Spectator on April 22, 1966, the broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy listed the double-page spreads in the popular papers and the heavy coverage in the broadsheets, and asked whether such detail could harm young readers or blunt public feeling. He concluded that the public had a right to know what was happening around it, and that parents, social workers and police needed the full picture if they were to protect children.
The trial lasted 14 days. On May 6, 1966, the jury returned after just over two hours. Brady was found guilty of the murders of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. Hindley was found guilty of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and of harboring Brady knowing that he had murdered John Kilbride. Brady received three concurrent life sentences. Hindley received two life sentences, with a concurrent term of seven years for the accessory offense. Brady was 28.
The judge called it a "truly horrible case." He described Brady as "wicked beyond belief," with no reasonable possibility of reform. He took a different view of Hindley, believing that she might be rehabilitated once she was removed from Brady's influence, and he set that view down in a letter to the Home Office, as reported by CNN in 2002.
Brady was taken to Durham Prison after the trial. The 2013 mental health tribunal set out his later moves: to Albany on the Isle of Wight on August 28, 1971; to Wormwood Scrubs in London from June 11, 1974, to March 31, 1982; to Parkhurst, also on the Isle of Wight, on March 31, 1982; and to Gartree in Leicestershire on April 22, 1983. For almost two decades he was held mostly in solitary confinement, Stanford wrote.
Hindley was sent to Holloway. Several years into their sentences Brady broke off contact with her, and unlike her he made no attempt to win parole. His main link with the outside world became long letters to the penal reform campaigner Lord Longford, who called him "brilliant but bonkers." Brady later turned against Longford, calling him a Home Office stooge, and refused to see him except once, in 1998.
The question of whether either of them could ever be released reached the Prime Minister's office. A Downing Street file titled "Parole position of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady," catalogued with the dates February 1985 to March 1987, was released by the National Archives on July 20, 2017.
In 1985 Brady was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and moved from the prison system to a high security psychiatric hospital. He was admitted to Ashworth, near Maghull on Merseyside, on November 29, 1985. He would never leave it. Years later, the 2013 tribunal examined that diagnosis closely, and rejected his claim that he had not been ill in 1985. The symptoms, the tribunal found, had been too severe to have been feigned.
In 1985, after press reports that Brady had confessed to killing Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, Greater Manchester Police reopened the investigation. It was led from 1985 until his retirement in 1988 by Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping, formerly head of Manchester CID.
In 1987 Hindley made confessions to police in which, as the House of Lords later put it, she revealed a far greater part in the crimes than she had admitted at her trial. Her advisers also put to the Home Secretary her account of all five killings, which she said she had carried out under Brady's influence and intimidation. Topping took both prisoners, separately, to the moor.
On July 1, 1987, after a three-month search, police found Pauline Reade's body in the peat, just below the surface and about 250 yards from the main road, the Huddersfield Examiner reported. She was still wearing the party dress she had set out in, Agence France-Presse noted. Her family buried her at Gorton Cemetery.
Brady confessed to Topping in 1987 during an interview in custody. Topping took him to the moor in July 1987, but the visit did not locate a grave, the Scottish Daily Express reported from Topping's 1989 memoir. Brady was brought back on a snowy day in December 1987. The operation was run with far more secrecy than the searches of 1965: police set up roadblocks near The Ford Inn, and reporters waited at The Huntsman Inn higher up the road, watching from a distance, the Examiner's Neil Atkinson recalled. Hindley had told police that Keith was buried near Shiny Brook, a stream that runs into the Wessenden Valley. Nothing was found there.
Brady's confession was less complete than Hindley's, Topping later said. The detective said the information Hindley gave about Keith had been searched "to exhaustion." Neither Brady nor Hindley was ever charged with or tried for the deaths of Pauline Reade or Keith Bennett.
Hindley spent the rest of her life trying to win parole. In 1974 she was given an extra year for a plot to escape, and in 1978 she was attacked by another prisoner and needed plastic surgery to her face. She earned an honors degree in humanities in prison, and her supporters described her as reformed and a devout Catholic. In 1994 she asked to be judged as the person she then was, after 30 years inside.
Successive Home Secretaries decided against her. Leon Brittan had made a provisional decision on her minimum term in March 1985, which she was not told of until 1994. David Waddington set a whole life tariff in 1990; Michael Howard confirmed it on February 3, 1997; and Jack Straw saw no reason to depart from it on November 19, 1997. The Divisional Court dismissed her challenge on December 18, 1997, the Court of Appeal on November 5, 1998, and the House of Lords on March 30, 2000. The Lords held that it was lawful for a Home Secretary to impose a whole life tariff.
Hindley died in hospital on November 15, 2002, aged 60, while another court challenge to her detention was pending. She had served 37 years, and was Britain's longest-serving female prisoner.
On September 30, 1999, Brady was moved from one ward at Ashworth to another. A six-member control and restraint team in protective gear carried out the move, and he suffered a small crack fracture at the lower end of his right forearm. He stopped eating that day. In October clinicians drew up a plan to feed him against his will, and he was fed through a tube passed through his nose into his stomach.
Brady went to court. In R v Collins and Ashworth Hospital Authority, ex parte Brady, decided in the High Court on March 10, 2000, Mr. Justice Maurice Kay considered whether the feeding counted as treatment for his mental disorder, which under the Mental Health Act could be given without his consent. A later case summarizing the decision records that the judge ruled the force-feeding lawful.
The hunger strike, in name, went on until his death. The coroner later described it as intermittent. He took some meals from staff he chose, and a hearing in 2013 was told that he regularly ate toast and soup. Brady himself said he wanted to be allowed to die.
From Ashworth, Brady wrote at length. He corresponded for many years with the writer Colin Wilson, and he was interviewed by the theologian Alan Keightley, later described as his biographer. In 2001 the Los Angeles publisher Feral House brought out Brady's own book, The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis, with an introduction by Wilson, a foreword by Keightley and an afterword by Peter Sotos. In it Brady discussed a series of killers, among them John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas and Peter Sutcliffe, and claimed that killers understood the criminal mind better than psychiatrists, reporters or police.
Reviewers were unimpressed. Publishers Weekly called the argument unremarkable and the chapters on individual killers gratuitous. The criminologist James Sheptycki of Durham University, reviewing the book in Criminal Justice Matters in 2003, quoted Brady's own line from a letter to Wilson, "My life is over, so I can afford honesty of expression," and read the book as his final statement.
Winnie Johnson never stopped. In 1986 she wrote to Hindley asking for help, in a letter she said had taken "five weeks labour" to write. Police searched the moor again in 2009 and found nothing, and Greater Manchester Police said then that it would be the last search unless significant new information came to light. A memorial service for Keith was held at Manchester Cathedral in 2010. "I've lived through this life knowing he is on those moors," his mother said there. After she was diagnosed with cancer she recorded a DVD asking Brady to tell her where her son was. He ignored it, The Scotsman reported.
In August 2012, Brady's mental health advocate told a television documentary that he had given her a sealed envelope to pass to Winnie Johnson if he died, and police began to investigate whether a letter revealing where Keith lay existed. On August 16 they arrested the advocate at her home in Llangennech, South Wales on suspicion of preventing a lawful burial, and searched her papers and Brady's room at Ashworth. The advocate said she had given the letter back to Brady. No letter was found. "There is only one person who knows where Keith is buried and that is Ian Brady himself," said Martin Bottomley of Greater Manchester Police.
Winnie Johnson died of cancer in a Manchester hospice in the early hours of August 18, 2012, aged 78. Her family said she had "fought tirelessly for decades to find Keith and give him a Christian burial." Her son Alan Bennett, Keith's brother, said that Keith remained in Brady's and Hindley's possession until his body was found.
David Smith, the trial's chief witness, also died in 2012, aged 64. Before his death he gave Alan Bennett a recorded interview, about an hour long, in which he described Brady sitting and staring at one particular part of the moor, which Smith believed was the place. Smith had been willing to take police there. Alan Bennett passed the tape, maps and photographs to police in 2012. Bottomley said in 2014 that a thorough assessment of the material had been made, and that Smith had not been interviewed as a result of that assessment. Searches continued from time to time, ITV News reported, the latest before Brady's death in 2014.
In 2013 Brady asked a mental health tribunal to find that he no longer needed hospital treatment, so that he could be moved back to prison. His lawyers argued that he had a severe narcissistic personality disorder but was not mentally ill. Brady had suggested that in prison he would be free to end his own life. There was no possibility of his release into the community, the tribunal noted; the only question was hospital or prison.
At his request the hearing, a week long, was held in public, and he appeared by video link, his first public appearance since the 1980s. He called himself "a petty criminal." He described the killings as "recreational" and as "an existential experience," and said he had accepted "from day one" that he would be in prison for life.
On June 28, 2013, the tribunal, chaired by Judge Robert Atherton, ruled that Brady still had a mental disorder for which hospital treatment was appropriate and necessary for his health and safety and for the protection of others. In its written reasons, published later, it found that he had been correctly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1985, that he still had residual symptoms, and that his account of having feigned the illness was unreliable. All the medical witnesses agreed that he also had a personality disorder with antisocial and narcissistic features. Terry Kilbride called the hearing a waste of public money. John Ainley, the solicitor who had represented Winnie Johnson, said that hearing Brady call the murders recreational "beggars belief."
By February 2017, a court hearing was told, Brady had been bedridden for about two years and was terminally ill, with emphysema among his illnesses. On Monday, May 15, 2017, he was urged once more to reveal where Keith was buried. At 12:30 p.m. that day, doctors concluded that he was close to death. He asked for his solicitor to be told and for two locked briefcases to be taken from his room. Security staff sealed them and locked them in the office of the hospital's director of security. Brady died at 6:02 p.m., the inquest heard. Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Ashworth, confirmed that a 79-year-old long-term patient had died.
His solicitor, Robin Makin, had seen him hours earlier and said he did not believe Brady held any more meaningful information about Keith. "I think if Keith Bennett's remains were to be discovered they would have been discovered in the 1980s," he said. Terry Kilbride told Sky News that the death was a relief but would not end 50 years of pain.
The inquest was held at Bootle Town Hall on September 21, 2017, before Christopher Sumner, the senior coroner for Sefton. The Home Office pathologist, Dr. Brian Rodgers, gave the cause of death as cor pulmonale, a form of heart failure, secondary to bronchopneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Brady's lungs were very severely diseased, but he was not emaciated; he weighed about nine stone. His consultant forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Noir Thomas, said that his 32 years at Ashworth had been marked largely by hostility and opposition to his care, and that he had refused antipsychotic medication and psychological therapy. The coroner recorded that Brady died of natural causes and found no evidence of neglect or self-neglect contributing to his death. Makin, the executor of his will, did not attend.
Brady's body was kept under police guard. The coroner refused to release it until he was assured that the ashes would not be scattered on Saddleworth Moor, and it was released to Makin on May 18, 2017. In October a judge took the decision on the remains out of the executor's hands. On October 25, an official of Tameside Council collected the body from the mortuary at the Royal Liverpool hospital, and police escorted it to Southport Crematorium, where it was cremated without ceremony. In the middle of the night of October 26, the ashes were taken in a weighted biodegradable urn from Liverpool Marina and put into the sea. Tameside and Oldham councils said they were pleased the matter was concluded.
Brady's death had one more consequence for the Reade family. During an audit that followed it, Greater Manchester Police found that some of Pauline Reade's remains, among them her jaw bone and samples of her hair, had been kept at Leeds University on the force's behalf since 1987, without the family's knowledge. Police told her niece, Jackie Reade, in August 2017. "I was disgusted that part of Pauline could be kept like that," she said. Martin Bottomley, by then head of the force's cold case unit, confirmed that the tissue had been stored externally. The family planned a second burial in the family grave at Gorton, which required licences from the Ministry of Justice.
On September 29, 2022, the author Russell Edwards told Greater Manchester Police that he had found what he believed was Keith Bennett's grave on Saddleworth Moor, with what he took to be part of a skull and a scrap of clothing. He gave officers samples, photographs and grid references and showed them the place. Police began digging on October 1. Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists excavated the spot and the ground around it, a forensic geologist took soil samples, and an image expert judged that the object in the photograph was considerably smaller than a child's jaw and might be plant matter.
On October 7, 2022, the force ended the search. "We have found no evidence that this is the burial location of Keith Bennett," said Detective Chief Inspector Cheryl Hughes. The investigation, she said, had remained open since 1964 and would not close until the family had the answers they deserved.
In July 2025 a two-part BBC Two documentary, The Moors Murders: A Search for Justice, made with the author and filmmaker Duncan Staff, reported that the archive of Alan Keightley, who died in 2023, held 394 typed pages of an unfinished autobiography by Brady titled Black Light. The pages cover his relationship with Hindley and describe the killing and burial of Pauline Reade, and they stop shortly before the murder of John Kilbride. Keightley had written that Brady described the full manuscript as at least 600 pages long. Keightley recalled that Brady once asked him to deliver a "double sealed parcel" to a London solicitor, and the parcel ended up with the Liverpool firm of Robin Makin, Brady's solicitor and executor. The London solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, who also died in 2023, had received material from Brady that his firm then sent on to Makin.
Whether the missing pages say anything about Keith is unknown. Geoff Knupfer, a former Greater Manchester Police detective who once led the case, called the find extraordinary and said it could lead to a new investigation. Makin had said he did not think the parcel contained new information, and he did not comment on the program. Alan Bennett said on social media that any missing material was "vital information in regard to the search for Keith" and should be made available to police. Greater Manchester Police said that visible searches had paused since 2022 but that its Major Crime Review Unit was still working on the case out of public view, and that it would act on any credible evidence.
Brady is dead, and so is Hindley. No search has found Keith Bennett, and as of October 2026 no new search, and no handover of the missing Black Light pages to police, had been reported. Greater Manchester Police has said repeatedly that it will never close the case.
Proven by final verdict: the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans (Brady); the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and being an accessory to the murder of John Kilbride (Hindley).
Admitted but never tried: the killings of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, which both Brady and Hindley confessed to in 1987. Pauline Reade's body was found on July 1, 1987; Keith Bennett's has never been found.
Claimed but unsupported: in his 1987 interview with Topping, Brady claimed several more killings, among them a man stabbed by a canal in Glasgow, a man killed in Manchester, a woman thrown into a canal in Manchester, an 18-year-old buried on Saddleworth Moor and a hiker shot near Arrochar, between Loch Long and Loch Lomond. Topping wrote that he had four new murders to investigate, plus hints of two more. Strathclyde Police found nothing to match. "The police can find no record of any undetected murder or attack that fits his description even remotely," Topping wrote. None of these claims has ever been confirmed.
Points on which sources differ: the date Brady and Hindley met (January 1961 in CNN's profile; January 1962 in the Guardian obituary); how many times Brady was taken to the moor in 1987 (once, in some wire accounts; July and December 1987, in Topping's account and a local reporter's recollection); the start of the hunger strike (September 30, 1999, in the High Court record; 2000 in the 2013 tribunal reasons; 1989, as one psychiatrist put it at the inquest); and the minute of his death (6:02 p.m. at the inquest; 6:03 p.m. in the hospital trust's first statement).
January 2, 1938: born Ian Stewart in the Gorbals, Glasgow; placed with the Sloan family at three months old.
When he is nine: the Sloans move to the Pollok estate.
December 1954: sent to live with his mother in Moss Side, Manchester; takes the surname Brady.
November 1957: released from borstal.
January 1961: Myra Hindley joins Millwards in Gorton, where Brady is a stock clerk.
July 12, 1963: Pauline Reade, 16, disappears on her way to a dance in Gorton.
November 23, 1963: John Kilbride, 12, disappears from Ashton-under-Lyne market.
June 16, 1964: Keith Bennett, 12, disappears on his way to his grandmother's home.
December 26, 1964: Lesley Ann Downey, 10, disappears from a fairground.
October 6, 1965: Edward Evans, 17, is killed at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley.
October 7, 1965: David Smith calls Hyde police; Brady is arrested. Hindley is arrested four days later.
October 15, 1965: Brady's suitcases are recovered at Manchester Central station.
1965: the graves of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride are found on Saddleworth Moor.
1965: the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspends hanging while the pair are on remand.
April 19, 1966: trial opens at Chester Assizes before Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson.
May 6, 1966: Brady convicted of three murders, Hindley of two murders and as an accessory; Brady receives three concurrent life sentences.
1966 to 1985: Durham, Albany, Wormwood Scrubs, Parkhurst and Gartree prisons.
1985: police reopen the case under Peter Topping; Leon Brittan makes a provisional decision on Hindley's tariff (March).
November 29, 1985: admitted to Ashworth Hospital after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.
1987: Hindley and Brady confess to the killings of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.
July 1, 1987: Pauline Reade's body is found on the moor.
July and December 1987: Brady is taken to the moor; Keith Bennett is not found.
September 30, 1999: moved between wards at Ashworth; begins his hunger strike and is fed by tube.
March 10, 2000: High Court rules the force-feeding lawful.
March 30, 2000: House of Lords upholds Hindley's whole life tariff.
2001: The Gates of Janus published by Feral House.
November 15, 2002: Myra Hindley dies, aged 60.
2009: police search the moor again without result.
August 16, 2012: Brady's mental health advocate is arrested over a supposed letter; none is found.
August 18, 2012: Winnie Johnson dies, aged 78. David Smith also dies in 2012.
June 28, 2013: mental health tribunal rules that Brady must stay at Ashworth.
May 15, 2017: Brady dies at Ashworth, aged 79.
September 21, 2017: inquest finds he died of natural causes.
October 25 and 26, 2017: cremated without ceremony; ashes put into the sea at night.
November 2017: the Reade family learns that some of Pauline's remains had been kept since 1987.
September 29 to October 7, 2022: police dig on Saddleworth Moor after a tip; no human remains found.
July 2025: BBC documentary reports the Black Light manuscript.
October 2026: Keith Bennett still not found.