Myra Hindley was convicted at Chester Assizes on May 6, 1966, of murdering two children: Lesley Ann Downey, who was 10, and Edward Evans, who was 17. The same jury found her guilty of harbouring her partner, Ian Brady, knowing that he had murdered 12-year-old John Kilbride. Brady was convicted of all three murders. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment, the only sentence the law then allowed, because the death penalty for murder had been abolished while they were awaiting trial.
The killings became known as the Moors murders, because the couple buried their victims on Saddleworth Moor, the high ground above Manchester. In 1987 Hindley admitted that she had also taken part in the abduction and killing of 16-year-old Pauline Reade and 12-year-old Keith Bennett, who had disappeared in 1963 and 1964. She was never charged or tried over those two deaths. Pauline Reade's body was found on the moor that year. Keith Bennett's has never been found.
Hindley spent 36 years in custody and was Britain's longest-serving female prisoner, CNN reported. For most of them she argued that she had changed and should be freed, and for most of them successive Home Secretaries refused. In 2000 the House of Lords upheld a ruling that she should never be released. She died in custody in November 2002. Lord Steyn, giving the leading judgment in her final appeal, summed up the courts' view of her part in the crimes: "Her role in the murders was pivotal."
Myra Hindley was born on July 23, 1942, in Manchester. CNN, in its profile at her death, gave her birthplace as Gorton, a working-class district in the east of the city. Little about her childhood has been reliably reported, and many details in popular accounts rest on no firm record.
In January 1961 she started work as a typist at a merchandising firm in Manchester. The firm's stock clerk was Ian Brady, four years her senior and born in Glasgow. CNN reported that they became lovers about a year later. The historian Joanna Bourke, in a 2021 Gresham College lecture, described the workplace as a local chemical firm where Hindley typed and Brady worked as a clerk.
At the trial, the prosecution described the change that followed. William Mars-Jones, the barrister who assisted the Attorney General in presenting the case, said she had been a normally happy girl who had wanted to marry and have a family, Bourke recounted. After she met Brady she abandoned her Roman Catholic faith, took on his ideas and drew away from others. She later said of that time that Brady "was God" to her.
Hindley had a sister, Maureen, who was married to David Smith, a teenager. Smith was therefore Hindley's brother-in-law, and it was he who would bring the killings to an end.
Pauline Reade was 16. On the evening of July 12, 1963, she set out from her home in Gorton to go to a dance at the Railway Club nearby. She was wearing a pink and gold party dress and a blue coat. She never arrived.
Her family did not learn what had happened to her until 1987. Hindley later admitted that she had stopped Pauline in the street and persuaded her to come to the moor on the pretext of looking for lost gloves, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post's account of the case. Pauline was killed on Saddleworth Moor and buried in a shallow grave. Her body was not recovered until July 1987, still in the dress she had worn to go dancing.
Her brother, Paul Reade, spent the following decades opposing any suggestion that Hindley should be freed. "Satan in satin is still Satan," he said of her, a remark Bourke quoted in her lecture.
John Kilbride was 12. He disappeared in November 1963 from the market in Ashton-under-Lyne, then in Lancashire, on the day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A missing-person poster for him later became one of the trial exhibits; it survives in the records of the Assize courts at The National Archives.
He was taken to the moor, killed and buried there. His grave was found in 1965, after police studied photographs from the couple's home. One of those pictures showed Hindley on the moor, holding her dog and looking down at the ground where the boy was buried. Brady had taken it.
Brady was convicted of John Kilbride's murder. Hindley was not. The jury convicted her instead of harbouring Brady, knowing that he had murdered the boy.
Keith Bennett turned 12 in June 1964. On Tuesday, June 16, four days after his birthday, he set out from his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock to spend the night at his grandmother's house in Longsight, a trip he made every Tuesday, The Scotsman reported. He never got there.
According to The Scotsman's account, Hindley lured him into a car and he was driven to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor, where Brady took him onto the moor. He has never been seen since, and his remains have never been found. Without a body, there has never been an inquest into his death.
His mother, Winnie Johnson, worked in the kitchens of the Christie Hospital in Manchester. She spent the remaining 48 years of her life looking for him, often on the moor itself.
Lesley Ann Downey was 10. On Boxing Day, December 26, 1964, she disappeared from a fairground in the Ancoats area of Manchester. She was taken to the house that Hindley shared with her grandmother, which by then was on Wardle Brook Avenue on the Hattersley estate, and was killed there. Her body was buried on the moor.
Hindley was convicted of her murder. The prosecution's evidence included photographs and an audio recording made in the house, which were found in October 1965 in two suitcases that Brady had left at the left-luggage office of Manchester Central station. Lesley Ann's mother, Ann West, later identified her daughter's voice. Bourke said in her lecture that the recording proved Hindley was present and took part.
Ann West wrote a memoir, For the Love of Lesley, published in 1989. For the rest of her life she campaigned to keep Hindley in prison, and she spoke of her with open hatred, Bourke said.
Edward Evans was 17. On the evening of October 6, 1965, Brady brought him back to the house on Wardle Brook Avenue. David Smith, who by his own account had walked Hindley home that evening, was in the house when Brady killed Evans with an axe. Smith later said he had been made to help clean up, and the body was moved to a bedroom upstairs, to be taken away the next night.
Smith got home shortly after 3 a.m. and told Maureen what he had seen. At first light the couple went to a telephone box, Smith carrying a knife and a screwdriver to protect himself, and called the police. The call was logged at 6.07 a.m. at Hyde police station by a constable named Edwards, according to the account Smith later published with the writer Carol Ann Lee. Smith and Maureen were collected and taken to the station, where Smith described the killing.
Hindley was convicted of Edward Evans's murder, along with Brady.
Police went to the house early that morning. Bob Talbot, a Cheshire police officer, got through the door, dressed as a milkman, by one account recalled by a local journalist. Officers found Edward Evans's body in the upstairs bedroom, where Smith had said it would be. Brady was arrested at once. Ian Fairley, a detective, was one of the officers at the arrest, he recalled half a century later.
Hindley was not arrested that morning. The historian Chris Cook has written that detectives at first doubted that a woman would be involved in a murder, and that the delay gave her time to destroy evidence.
The search of the house turned up material that pointed beyond Edward Evans. An exercise book contained the name John Kilbride, a boy who had been missing for nearly two years. Many of the photographs in the house had been taken on Saddleworth Moor. A left-luggage ticket hidden in Hindley's prayer book led officers to the two suitcases at Manchester Central station, where they found the photographs of a young girl and the recording of Lesley Ann Downey. Ian Fairley said in 2016 that he was the officer who found the photograph in the suitcases. Hindley was arrested once the contents of the cases were known, Cook wrote.
Police planned a search of the places shown in the photographs. On Friday, October 15, 1965, about 150 officers from Lancashire, Cheshire and Manchester searched the places shown in the pictures, pushing long metal probes into the peat. They found nothing, and senior officers, worried about the cost, decided to stop.
Joe Mounsey, a detective who had been searching for John Kilbride, persuaded them to allow one more day. On Saturday, October 16, about a dozen officers from the Ashton division went back. Late that afternoon Bob Spiers, a 23-year-old officer who had been in the force for only a month, saw something in a water-filled hollow and refused to leave until a sergeant came to look. Officers drained the water and dug. Spiers believed they had found John Kilbride. It was Lesley Ann Downey. Spiers retired in 1997 and said his record had never credited him with the find; Ann West later gave him a plaque on behalf of her family.
The grave of John Kilbride was found later, with the help of the photograph of Hindley on the moor. The search of the moor in 1965 drew on whatever technology the police could find. A columnist writing in the Northumberland Gazette in 2016 recorded that an RAF Canberra aircraft and a United States government satellite were used to look for more graves, without success.
Brady and Hindley were charged with the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. Hindley also faced the charge of harbouring Brady after the Kilbride killing. The committal hearing was held at Hyde Magistrates' Court, where Bob Spiers was among the witnesses. While they were on remand, Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder; the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 replaced it with a mandatory life sentence.
The trial opened at Chester Assizes in April 1966, before Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson. The Attorney General, Sir Frederick Elwyn Jones, led for the Crown, with William Mars-Jones assisting. Both defendants pleaded not guilty to every charge. They sat in the dock behind screens of bulletproof glass.
David Smith was the chief prosecution witness, and was publicly vilified afterward. Bob Spiers, the officer who found Lesley Ann's grave, also gave evidence. The recording from the suitcase was played to the court as evidence, and its playing was remembered decades later by the reporters who heard it. David Parry-Jones, who covered the trial for the Chester Chronicle and later edited it, recalled that the court was entirely silent, that Brady sat without expression and Hindley looked solemn, and that neither spoke in the dock. "Reporting on it for the Chronicle felt like a bad dream then and still does today," he said in 2017.
Hindley maintained, CNN reported, that her role had been to help bring the children to Brady and that she took no part in the killings or the sexual attacks.
The novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson attended the trial and wrote about it in a book, On Iniquity, published in 1967. Bourke described it as an attack on the permissive society of the 1960s that dwelt on Hindley's appearance.
After a trial of 14 days, the jury retired for a little over two hours, according to the Huddersfield Examiner's account in 2016. A columnist in the Northumberland Gazette put the time at less than two hours. On May 6, 1966, the jury returned its verdicts.
Brady was found guilty of murdering John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans. He received three life sentences, to run concurrently.
Hindley was found guilty of murdering Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and of harbouring Brady knowing he had murdered John Kilbride. She received two life sentences for the murders, with a concurrent term of seven years for the harbouring offence.
The judge drew a distinction between the two. Brady, he said, was "wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption (short of a miracle)." He did not think the same was necessarily true of Hindley once she was removed from Brady's influence, though he expected her to be kept in prison for a very long time. The Northumberland Gazette columnist recorded that the judge called them two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity.
In the Prison Service Journal, the law lecturer Karen Harrison, reviewing a 2016 book about her, noted the author's point that she was the first woman convicted of murder in England and Wales after the death penalty was abolished. The trial exhibits, including the index to exhibits and the photograph albums, are now held at The National Archives among the records of the Assize courts.
At Holloway prison in London in 1973, a prison officer, Patricia Cairns, a former Carmelite nun, fell in love with her. The writer Howard Sounes, whose 2023 book on the affair drew on prison records and interviews with former staff and inmates, says Hindley persuaded Cairns that she was a reformed woman who wanted to return to the Catholic Church, and that the two planned an escape so they could run away together; the publisher's description names Brazil. The plot failed. In 1974 Hindley received a further one-year sentence over the plan to escape, CNN reported.
In 1978 she was attacked in prison and needed plastic surgery to repair her face.
By the late 1970s her best-known supporter was Lord Longford, the prison reformer. He said he followed the teaching that one should hate the sin and love the sinner. He described her as a quiet, dark-haired woman quite unlike the staring blonde in the press photograph. "I took to her at once," he said. He believed she had been a good Catholic girl before she met Brady, that she fell under his spell, and that she had become sincerely religious, according to Independent Catholic News.
Longford's campaign made him a target. In January 1978 the Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn attacked it on LBC radio, suggesting that Longford was interested in Hindley only because she was a Catholic and arguing that she would never be fit for release. Bourke said Longford told her supporters that politicians privately agreed she should be released but feared the tabloid press.
In prison Hindley studied with the Open University and gained an honours degree in humanities. The writer Peter Stanford called her one of the few success stories of the prison system, Bourke recounted. A prison report in 1995 found her genuine in her remorse.
When Hindley was sentenced, a life sentence for murder had no fixed minimum. From 1983 the Home Secretary set a "tariff" for each life-sentenced prisoner: the period to be served for retribution and deterrence before release could be considered. The tariff system was announced to the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, on November 30, 1983, as the House of Lords later recorded.
In 1982 a minimum term of 25 years was suggested in her case, and by then she had been refused parole once, Harrison's review recorded. In March 1985, Brittan made what the Lords called a provisional decision on her tariff, which Harrison's review gives as 30 years. Hindley was not told of it.
In 1990 the Home Secretary, David Waddington, reconsidered her case and decided on a whole-life tariff: she should never be released. She was not told of that either. She learned of both decisions only in 1994. That year she said in a statement: "After 30 years in prison, I think I have paid my debt to society and atoned for my crimes." In another statement in 1994 she described herself as wicked and evil and said the crimes probably could not have been committed without her, Independent Catholic News reported.
In 1985, Brady was reported in a Sunday newspaper to have confessed to killing Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Greater Manchester Police reopened the two cases under Peter Topping, head of Manchester CID, who led the inquiry from 1985 until he retired in 1988.
In 1986 Winnie Johnson wrote to Hindley in prison. "I am a simple woman, I work in the kitchens of Christie's hospital," she began, and asked what had happened to her son. She ended, "Please, Miss Hindley, help me."
Hindley was taken back to Saddleworth Moor under police guard to help look for the graves. In February 1987 she was questioned in prison over about 17 hours and admitted that she had been involved in all five killings. Topping later said that she made a very detailed confession, more complete than Brady's, and that she was seeking some form of parole in the future by doing so. Topping took each of them to the moor on two occasions.
On July 1, 1987, after more than 100 days of searching, police found Pauline Reade's body in a shallow grave on the moor, about 100 yards from where Lesley Ann Downey had been buried. In August 1987 the search was called off. Keith Bennett had not been found. CNN reported that Hindley offered to undergo hypnosis to help locate his grave, and that the Home Secretary blocked it.
Neither Hindley nor Brady was ever charged with the deaths of Pauline Reade or Keith Bennett. Their admissions were made to the police, not in court.
Hindley's confession changed how the Home Office saw her. In early 1997 the Parole Board recommended that she be moved to open conditions, with a further review two years later. The Home Secretary rejected the recommendation. On February 3, 1997, Michael Howard decided on a whole-life tariff and told her so. In a statement in response she said: "What I was involved in is etched into my heart and mind and my conscience will follow me to my dying day."
In May 1997 her solicitors were granted leave to seek judicial review of the whole-life tariff. That November the new Home Secretary, Jack Straw, explained his policy on such tariffs to the House of Commons, and on November 19, 1997, he wrote that he saw no reason to depart from his predecessor's conclusion, while leaving open whether her progress in prison might one day justify a reduction.
In 1997 a MORI poll found that 83 per cent of the public opposed her release, Bourke said. That year the artist Marcus Harvey's large painting Myra was shown at the Royal Academy in London, and Winnie Johnson joined the protest against it.
In 1998 Hindley alleged that Brady had abused her and had threatened to kill her mother, grandmother and sister if she refused to take part, and that he had taken photographs of her to blackmail her, CNN reported. Brady, for his part, had written to ministers in 1997 claiming she was as committed to the killings as he was.
Hindley's lawyers advanced nine arguments. A whole-life tariff, they said, was inconsistent with the statutory idea of a life sentence. The policy unlawfully fettered the Home Secretary's discretion and wrongly excluded the Parole Board. The 1985 provisional decision had been unlawfully increased. She had a legitimate expectation of a finite term. And the Home Secretary had failed to consider her mitigation: that she had been 22 and 23 at the time, that Brady had dominated and threatened her, and that she had already served 34 years.
The Divisional Court dismissed her application on December 18, 1997. Lord Bingham of Cornhill, the Lord Chief Justice, said he could see no reason in principle why crimes that were wicked enough should not be punished by imprisonment for life. In October 1998 she took her case to the Court of Appeal, as a test case for other prisoners with whole-life tariffs. The Court of Appeal dismissed her appeal on November 5, 1998, but gave her leave to go to the House of Lords.
On March 30, 2000, five Law Lords dismissed her appeal unanimously: Lord Browne-Wilkinson, Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, Lord Steyn, Lord Hutton and Lord Hobhouse of Woodborough. The case is reported as R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex parte Hindley [2000] UKHL 21.
Lord Steyn gave the leading speech. A whole-life tariff, he held, was lawful, subject to the Home Secretary's continuing power to review it. The 1985 decision had never been communicated and could not found her complaint. She had no legitimate expectation of a fixed term. The Home Secretary had assumed, without deciding, that her account of threats and intimidation by Brady was true, and his treatment of her mitigation was rational.
Steyn set out the court's view of her part in the crimes. The two murders of which she was convicted, he said, were the culmination of a series of five killings committed by her and Brady. The Home Secretary was not entitled to punish her for murders of which she had not been convicted, but he was entitled to take into account that, when she took part in the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, she knew what had happened to the earlier victims. "Her role in the murders was pivotal," Steyn wrote. Without her active participation, he said, the five children would probably still be alive.
Lord Hobhouse added a point about her confession. A willingness to confess would normally count as mitigation that favoured a defendant. In her case, the new information about what she had known of the earlier killings showed that her part in the crimes for which she was convicted was more serious than had been understood, and the Home Secretary was entitled to take that view.
When the Lords ruled, 23 prisoners in England and Wales were serving whole-life tariffs, and she was one of them. She then applied to the European Court of Human Rights. She died before that court heard her case, Bourke said.
Over her years in custody Hindley was held at Holloway, Durham, Cookham Wood and, finally, Highpoint in Suffolk. The writer Nina Wilde met her at Cookham Wood in 1993 while doing research there and became a close friend; Wilde's 2016 book, The Monstering of Myra Hindley, argued that she was treated more harshly as a woman and that the press would not let her story rest, always reprinting the same photograph of her as a platinum blonde although she was mostly a brunette.
Others who met her drew different conclusions. Mark Leech, who spent three hours with her in Durham prison in 1997, said she was "very adept at telling you what she thought you wanted to hear," and found her cold, the Press Association reported in 2002.
Her health declined in her last years. She had angina and osteoporosis, had suffered suspected strokes and had been a heavy smoker. Before an operation in 2000 she told her lawyers that she did not want to be kept alive artificially if she fell into a coma, that her organs should not be used for transplants, and that she wanted to be cremated, with her ashes scattered at a secret location.
Early in November 2002 Hindley was taken from Highpoint to West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds with a suspected heart attack. She was readmitted on November 12. A priest gave her the last rites. She died at the hospital at 4.58 p.m. on November 15, 2002, aged 60. The Prison Service gave the cause as respiratory failure and said her next of kin had been told.
An inquest was opened on November 18 at Highpoint prison by Peter Dean, the Greater Suffolk coroner, and adjourned. The Home Office pathologist, Dr Michael Heath, gave the cause of death as bronchial pneumonia, linked to high blood pressure and a poor blood supply to the heart from blocked coronary arteries.
Twenty undertakers refused to handle her funeral, Bourke said. The private service was held at the crematorium in Cambridge at 7.30 p.m. on November 20, for family and friends only, with the time confirmed by Cambridgeshire police. Someone fixed a sign reading "Burn in Hell" to the crematorium fence.
Winnie Johnson said she had no sympathy for Hindley. CNN noted that the death might end her hope of learning where her son was buried. Peter Topping, the retired detective, said Hindley had been more involved in the murders than she admitted. Phil Woolas, the MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, said no one in his constituency would mourn her. Her solicitors, Taylor Nichol, said that prison staff and others who knew her considered her deeply aware of her crimes and truly repentant.
At the time of her death, a challenge by another life prisoner to the Home Secretary's tariff powers was before the House of Lords. On November 25, 2002, ten days after she died, the Lords ruled unanimously in the case of Anthony Anderson that the Home Secretary's power to set the minimum terms of convicted murderers was incompatible with the right to a fair trial before an independent court, and that judges should set them instead. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had already vowed to pass a new law to keep killers such as Hindley in jail even if the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the system.
Ian Brady served 19 years in ordinary prisons. In 1985 he was moved to the high-security Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside, where he remained. In late 1999 he went on hunger strike and was force-fed, saying he had no interest in living another 20 or 30 years in prison. He never told anyone where Keith Bennett was buried.
In August 2012, as Winnie Johnson was dying, Brady's mental health advocate, J.P., said in a Channel 4 documentary that Brady had given her a sealed letter to be passed to Keith's mother after his death. She was arrested on suspicion of preventing the lawful burial of a body and released on bail; she said she had returned the envelope to Brady. Searches of her home in south Wales and of Brady's room at Ashworth found nothing. Martin Bottomley of Greater Manchester Police said, "We do not know if this is true or simply a ruse."
Brady died at Ashworth at 6.03 p.m. on a Monday in May 2017, aged 79, the Yorkshire Post reported. In October 2017 the Chancellor of the High Court, Sir Geoffrey Vos, ruled that he should be cremated without music or ceremony and took the arrangements out of the hands of his executor, saying the wishes of the dead did not outweigh the need to avoid justified public indignation.
Greater Manchester Police announced in July 2009 that they had ended their search for Keith Bennett. His mother set up the Keith Bennett Trust to fund searches of her own. On March 5, 2010, a memorial service for Keith was held at Manchester Cathedral, conducted by the Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCulloch. Winnie Johnson told the Yorkshire Post that whatever Brady had done, it would not stop the family celebrating Keith, and that she still prayed to find him so that he could have a Christian burial.
Winnie Johnson died of cancer at a hospice in Manchester on August 18, 2012, aged 78. "When he's found, I'll know I've done my duty as a mother," she had said. Her family, including Keith's younger brother, Alan Bennett, said they would keep searching. David Smith, the witness whose call ended the killings in 1965, died in 2012. Before his death he gave Alan Bennett a recorded interview about a spot on the moor where he believed Brady had liked to sit; Alan Bennett passed it to the police in 2012, and Greater Manchester Police said they had assessed it thoroughly. In a foreword to Smith's memoir, Alan Bennett wrote that Hindley had admitted, years later, that she had lied about Smith, and had said she was sorry.
When Brady died, Martin Bottomley, head of the force's cold case review unit, said: "Whilst we are not actively searching Saddleworth Moors, Greater Manchester Police will never close this case." He said that only two people had known where Keith was.
On September 29, 2022, an author researching the case told police he believed he had found human remains on the moor. Greater Manchester Police, with forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, a geologist and a botanist, excavated the site. By October 7, 2022, the force said that no human remains had been found and no evidence showed that the site was Keith's grave. The object in the author's photograph was much smaller than a child's jaw and might have been plant material. Detective Chief Inspector Cheryl Hughes said the investigation had been open since 1964 and would not be closed until the family had the answers they deserved.
Myra Hindley died in custody on November 15, 2002, and her case is closed. Her convictions for the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and for harbouring Brady after the murder of John Kilbride, were never overturned. Keith Bennett's body has not been found. In October 2022, Greater Manchester Police said they were keeping the inquiry into his death open.
Proven by final judgment: Hindley's guilt of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, and of harbouring Brady knowing he had murdered John Kilbride (Chester Assizes, May 6, 1966). Brady's guilt of all three murders.
Admitted, never tried: Hindley's and Brady's involvement in the deaths of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, which both admitted in 1987. Neither was charged. Some later press reports wrongly say the pair "admitted the murders in court" in 1987; the admissions were made to police.
Hindley's own account: from the trial onward she said her part was to bring the children to Brady and that she did not take part in the killings. After 1987 she said Brady had dominated, abused and threatened her. The Home Secretary assumed that account to be true without deciding it, and the House of Lords held that, even on that assumption, her role was pivotal. Peter Topping said she was more involved than she admitted. No court has ruled on what happened on the moor in the two cases that were never tried.
Details that vary between sources: the length of the recording played at the trial (13 minutes in one police officer's account; 16 minutes 21 seconds in CNN's and the Yorkshire Evening Post's); how long the jury deliberated (a little over two hours, or less than two hours); Keith Bennett's age (12 in police and most news reports; 10 in one 2016 article); Pauline Reade's age (16 in most reports; 17 in one); the length of Hindley's custody (36 years in most reports; 37 according to her solicitors); and the year of the convictions (Lord Steyn's speech says 1965, while Lord Hobhouse and every other source give May 1966).
July 23, 1942: Myra Hindley is born in Manchester.
January 1961: starts work as a typist at a Manchester firm where Ian Brady is a stock clerk.
July 12, 1963: Pauline Reade, 16, disappears on her way to a dance in Gorton.
November 1963, the day after President Kennedy's assassination: John Kilbride, 12, disappears from Ashton-under-Lyne market.
June 16, 1964: Keith Bennett, 12, disappears on his way to his grandmother's house in Longsight.
December 26, 1964: Lesley Ann Downey, 10, disappears from a fairground in Ancoats.
October 6, 1965: Edward Evans, 17, is killed at Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley, in front of David Smith.
October 7, 1965: Smith calls the police at about 6.07 a.m.; Brady is arrested and Evans's body is found. Hindley is arrested later, after the suitcases at Manchester Central are opened.
October 16, 1965: Lesley Ann Downey's grave is found on Saddleworth Moor; John Kilbride's is found later in 1965.
1965: the death penalty for murder is abolished while the pair are on remand.
April 1966: trial opens at Chester Assizes before Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson.
May 6, 1966: Hindley is convicted of the murders of Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans and of harbouring Brady after the Kilbride murder; two life sentences and seven years concurrent. Brady is convicted of three murders.
1973: Patricia Cairns, a Holloway prison officer, becomes involved with Hindley; an escape plan follows.
1974: Hindley receives a further one-year sentence over the escape plot.
January 20, 1978: Nicholas Fairbairn attacks Lord Longford's campaign for her release on LBC.
1978: attacked in prison; needs plastic surgery.
1982: a minimum term of 25 years is suggested.
November 30, 1983: the Home Secretary announces the tariff system.
March 1985: Leon Brittan makes a provisional tariff decision (30 years); she is not told.
1985: police reopen the Reade and Bennett cases under Peter Topping; Brady moves to Ashworth Hospital.
1986: Winnie Johnson writes to Hindley.
February 1987: Hindley admits involvement in all five killings in about 17 hours of police interviews.
July 1, 1987: Pauline Reade's body is found on the moor.
August 1987: the moor search ends without finding Keith Bennett.
1990: David Waddington decides on a whole-life tariff; she is not told.
1994: she learns of the 1985 and 1990 decisions.
February 3, 1997: Michael Howard confirms the whole-life tariff; the Parole Board's recommendation of open conditions is rejected that year.
May 1997: granted leave to seek judicial review.
November 19, 1997: Jack Straw sees no reason to depart from the whole-life tariff.
December 18, 1997: Divisional Court dismisses her challenge.
November 5, 1998: Court of Appeal dismisses her appeal.
March 30, 2000: House of Lords dismisses her appeal unanimously.
November 12, 2002: admitted to West Suffolk Hospital.
November 15, 2002: dies at West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, aged 60.
November 18, 2002: inquest opened at Highpoint; cause of death given as bronchial pneumonia.
November 20, 2002: private funeral at Cambridge crematorium.
November 25, 2002: the House of Lords rules in the Anderson case that the Home Secretary may no longer set tariffs.
July 2009: Greater Manchester Police end their search for Keith Bennett.
March 5, 2010: memorial service for Keith Bennett at Manchester Cathedral.
August 18, 2012: Winnie Johnson dies.
May 2017: Ian Brady dies at Ashworth Hospital, aged 79.
September 29 to October 7, 2022: police excavate a site on the moor; no remains are found.
As of October 20, 2026: Keith Bennett has still not been found.