Ian Brady died on May 15, 2017, at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside, of restrictive pulmonary disease, after fifty-one years in custody, eighteen of them spent demanding the right to starve himself to death. The inquest found that he died of natural causes and that the hunger strike had not contributed. He took one thing with him: the location of the grave of Keith Bennett, a twelve-year-old boy he killed on Saddleworth Moor on June 16, 1964. Keith's mother, Winnie Johnson, wrote to the killers for decades and walked the moor herself, and she died in August 2012 still asking. At the end of 2005 Brady had written to her that he could take the police to within twenty yards of her son, if only the authorities would allow it. He never named the boy in that letter, and he never said where the grave was.
He was born Ian Duncan Stewart in the Gorbals district of Glasgow on January 2, 1938, to Margaret Stewart, known as Peggy, an unmarried tearoom waitress. His father was never reliably identified; his mother said he had been a journalist on a Glasgow newspaper who died three months before the birth. With little help, she gave the baby after a few months to Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own, and he grew up as Ian Sloan, visited by his mother through his childhood. When he was about nine the Sloans moved to a new council estate at Pollok. Several writers have said he tortured animals as a boy, a charge he denied. At Shawlands Academy, a school for able pupils, his behavior got worse, and he twice came before the juvenile court for housebreaking. He left at fifteen to work as a tea boy at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan and then as a butcher's messenger. He threatened a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, with a flick knife after she went to a dance with another boy, and when he came before the court again, on nine charges, he was put on probation shortly before his seventeenth birthday on condition that he live with his mother.
By then she had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Patrick Brady, who got him work as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market, and he took the stepfather's surname. Within a year he was caught trying to smuggle a sack of stolen lead seals out of the market. He spent three months in Strangeways and, being under eighteen, was sentenced to two years of borstal training, at Latchmere House in London, then Hatfield in Yorkshire, and then the harder unit at Hull after he was found drunk on alcohol he had brewed. He was released on November 14, 1957. Back in Manchester he taught himself bookkeeping from library manuals, and in January 1959 he was taken on as a clerk at Millwards Merchandising, a chemical wholesaler in Gorton, where colleagues found him quiet, punctual and short-tempered. He read Mein Kampf, a teach-yourself German course, books on Nazi atrocities and the Marquis de Sade, and rode a Triumph Tiger Cub motorcycle up into the Pennines.
Myra Hindley joined Millwards as a typist in January 1961, at eighteen, and began a diary in which she recorded her fascination with a man who hardly noticed her. They first spoke that July 27, and on December 22 he asked her to the cinema. Their evenings settled into a pattern of X-rated films and German wine, and at lunch they read aloud to each other from accounts of Nazi atrocities. She bleached her hair, joined a rifle club, bought a .22 rifle and, from club members, a Webley .45 and a Smith & Wesson .38, and passed her driving test on November 7, 1963, after three failures. Hindley said later that Brady began talking about committing the perfect murder in early July 1963, and that he often spoke of Compulsion, the novel about Leopold and Loeb. He had moved in with her at her grandmother's house on Bannock Street in Gorton.
On the evening of July 12, 1963, Brady had Hindley drive a borrowed van around the district while he followed on the motorcycle, ready to flash his headlight when he saw a likely victim. He signaled first at a girl on Gorton Lane whom Hindley recognized as an eight-year-old neighbor of her mother's, and she drove on. Some time after half past seven he signaled again, at Pauline Reade, sixteen, who had been at school with Hindley's sister Maureen and had briefly gone out with a local boy named David Smith. She was on Froxmer Street on her way to a dance. Hindley offered her a lift, then asked her to help look for an expensive glove lost on Saddleworth Moor. On the moor Brady took her away from the van and came back alone half an hour later. She had been raped and her throat cut twice, one wound across the voice box so deep that she was nearly decapitated. Hindley said she waited in the van; Brady said she took part. They buried Pauline in the peat by the A635. The police questioned David Smith about her disappearance and cleared him. Nobody questioned Brady or Hindley.
John Kilbride was twelve, from Ashton-under-Lyne, and in the early evening of November 23, 1963, the day after President Kennedy was shot, he was at Ashton market when Brady and Hindley offered him a lift home and a bottle of sherry. In the Ford Anglia she had hired, Brady said they would have to go by the house for the sherry, and then suggested a detour to the moor to look for the lost glove. There he sexually assaulted the boy, tried to cut his throat with a six-inch serrated blade, and strangled him with a shoelace or string. At some point afterward he photographed Hindley and her dog standing on the freshly turned ground. More than seven hundred statements were taken and two thousand volunteers searched waste ground and empty buildings. Hindley hired a car again the following week and on December 21, apparently to check that the graves had not been disturbed.
Keith Bennett was twelve, from Longsight, and on the evening of June 16, 1964, he was on his way to spend the night at his grandmother's house when Hindley asked him to help load some boxes into her Mini pickup and offered him a lift home afterward. Brady was in the back. She drove to a lay-by on the moor, and Brady took Keith off to look for the glove. Half an hour later he came back alone, carrying a spade he had hidden there, and told her he had sexually assaulted the boy and strangled him with string. Keith's stepfather, Jimmy Johnson, came under suspicion and was taken in for questioning four times over the next two years, and detectives searched under the floorboards of the family house and then the whole row. Keith is the only one of the five still on the moor.
That August, Maureen Hindley, eighteen and seven months pregnant, married David Smith, sixteen, at a register office; none of her family came. The day after the wedding Brady proposed a trip to Windermere, and on it he and Smith talked about society, wealth and robbing a bank, and Brady paid for everything. It was the first of many outings. The same year Brady, Hindley and her grandmother were rehoused under the slum clearances to 16 Wardle Brook Avenue, a new council house on the Hattersley estate near Hyde. They took an eleven-year-old neighbor, Patricia Hodges, with them on trips to the moor to dig peat for the garden, and never harmed her; she lived a few doors away.
On Boxing Day 1964 Hindley left her grandmother with a relative and would not let her come home that night. At a funfair in Ancoats, the couple noticed ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey on her own, dropped some shopping near her, and asked her to help carry it to the car and then into the house. There she was undressed, gagged with a scarf and forced to pose for photographs, and a reel-to-reel recorder ran while she screamed and begged to go home to her mother, with both their voices on the tape. She was raped and killed, probably strangled with string. Hindley said she had gone to run a bath and found the child dead when she came back; Brady said Hindley killed her. The next morning they drove the body to the moor and buried it naked with the clothes at its feet. Lesley Ann's stepfather, Alan West, was treated as a suspect and questioned again and again.
By 1965 Smith was a regular at Wardle Brook Avenue, reading the books Brady lent him and listening to him talk about robbery and murder. On the evening of October 6, Hindley drove Brady to Manchester Central station and waited while he went in. He came out with Edward Evans, seventeen, an apprentice engineer from Ardwick, introduced Hindley as his sister, and brought him home for wine. Later he sent Hindley to fetch Smith. Smith waited in the kitchen until he heard screaming and Hindley shouting at him to help, then ran into the living room to see Brady standing over the young man with a hatchet and bringing it down on the side of his head, and then strangling him with electrical cord. Brady sprained his ankle in the struggle. The body was too heavy for Smith to carry to the car alone, so they wrapped it in plastic sheeting and left it in the spare bedroom, and Smith agreed to come back in the morning to help take it to the moor. He got home at about three, drank a cup of tea, was sick, and told Maureen. At 6:10 a.m., carrying a screwdriver and a bread knife in case Brady was waiting for him, he called the police from a phone box on the estate.
Superintendent Bob Talbot of the Stalybridge division went to the back door in a bread deliveryman's overall over his uniform. Brady was lying on a divan, writing to his employer about his ankle. When the police asked for the key to the locked bedroom, Hindley said it was at work, until Brady told her to hand it over. They found the body, and as he dressed Brady said, "Eddie and I had a row and the situation got out of hand." He was arrested on October 7. Hindley insisted on going to the station with him, refused to say more than that it had been an accident, and was arrested on October 11 and charged as an accessory to the Evans murder. An old exercise book in the house bore the name John Kilbride. Smith told detectives that Brady had packed incriminating books into suitcases and had a thing about railway stations, and on October 15 police found the cases in the left-luggage office at Manchester Central; the claim ticket later turned up in Hindley's prayer book. Inside were nine photographs of Lesley Ann Downey, naked with a scarf across her mouth, the sixteen-minute tape, and pictures of the moor. Patricia Hodges showed officers the couple's favorite spots along the A635. On October 16 they found an arm bone in the peat, which proved to be Lesley Ann's, and on October 21, matching the photographs of the moor with help from local people, they found John Kilbride.
Brady admitted taking the photographs of Lesley Ann but said two men had brought her to the house and taken her away alive. He was charged with the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans, Hindley with those of Downey and Evans and with harboring Brady knowing he had killed Kilbride. Their fourteen-day trial opened at Chester Assizes on April 19, 1966, before Mr. Justice Fenton Atkinson, with the defendants behind bulletproof glass. The Attorney General, Sir Elwyn Jones, prosecuted; Emlyn Hooson, a Liberal member of Parliament, defended Brady. Smith, the chief prosecution witness, had sold his story to the News of the World for weekly payments and a lump sum if the pair were convicted, and the judge called it a gross interference with the course of justice while finding his evidence not substantially affected. Brady gave evidence for more than eight hours, admitted hitting Evans with the axe and argued that someone else had finished him. The tape was played in open court. On May 6, after a little over two hours, the jury convicted Brady of all three murders and Hindley of two. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act had come into force five weeks after Evans died, and Brady received three concurrent life sentences. Atkinson called the pair two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity and Brady "wicked beyond belief," and said he saw no reasonable possibility that Brady could be reformed.
He went to Durham Prison and asked to be kept in solitary confinement. In 1982 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, said that if ever there was a case for a man to stay in prison until he died, this was it, and in 1985 Margaret Thatcher told the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, that his proposed forty-year minimum for Brady was too short and that neither prisoner should ever be released. After nineteen years in Durham, Wormwood Scrubs and Gartree he was diagnosed as a psychopath in November 1985 and moved to the high-security Park Lane Hospital, later renamed Ashworth, at Maghull. That year he was reported to have told a Sunday People journalist, Fred Harrison, that he had killed Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, and Greater Manchester Police reopened the case under Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Topping. When Topping visited him at Gartree on July 3, 1985, Brady was scornful of the idea that he had confessed to anything. Hindley confessed to all five murders in February 1987 and visited the moor twice. On July 1, 1987, after more than a hundred days of searching, Pauline Reade was found three feet down, a hundred yards from where Lesley Ann had lain. Brady then confessed formally to Topping. Taken to the moor on July 3 he seemed to lose his bearings; on a second visit on December 8 he claimed to have found Keith's grave, and nothing was there. He wrote to a BBC reporter describing five more killings, in Manchester, on the moor, in Scotland and in a canal, and police found no unsolved cases to match. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided there was nothing to gain from trying either of them for Reade or Bennett.
At Ashworth he refused to work with the psychiatrists and wrote to Lord Longford, the writer Colin Wilson, journalists and others. In a 2005 letter he called the murders an existential exercise of just over a year, concluded in December 1964, after which he and Hindley had turned to preparing armed robberies. In 1999 his right wrist was broken in what he called an unprovoked attack by staff, and that September he began a hunger strike; because he was detained for a mental disorder he had no right to refuse treatment for it, and he was fed through a tube. In March 2000 he was refused permission for a judicial review of the force-feeding. He spent twenty years transcribing classical texts into Braille until the machine was taken away as a possible weapon, and he once offered to donate a kidney and was blocked. His book on serial murder, The Gates of Janus, was published in the United States in 2001. In 2006 staff intercepted fifty paracetamol tablets hidden in a hollowed-out novel sent to him by a woman friend. After the child killer John Straffen died in November 2007, Brady was the longest-serving prisoner in England and Wales. In 2012 he applied to be returned to prison so that he could starve himself, and at a mental health tribunal in June 2013, arguing that he had a personality disorder and not the paranoid schizophrenia his doctors diagnosed, he was refused.
After his death he was cremated without a ceremony, and his ashes were put into the sea at night. The search for Keith has gone on without him. Operation Maida, begun in 2003, used a reconnaissance satellite to look for disturbed soil, and in 2009 Greater Manchester Police said only a scientific breakthrough or new evidence would restart it. In 2012 a woman was arrested on suspicion that Brady had told her where the body was, and no charges followed. In 2017 police asked a court to order two of Brady's locked briefcases opened, and the court refused because no prosecution was likely. In the autumn of 2022 an amateur investigator reported finding a skull on the moor, and the police dug for a week and found no human remains.