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Moors Murderer Ian Brady Dies at Ashworth Hospital, Aged 79, Without Revealing Where Keith Bennett Is Buried

He had been held at the Merseyside secure hospital for 32 years. The boy’s grave on Saddleworth Moor has never been found.

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Illustration of a tall green security fence around low brick hospital buildings at dusk, hawthorn in flower beside it. Not the actual hospital.

At half past noon on Monday, May 15, 2017, the doctors at Ashworth Hospital concluded that Ian Brady was dying. He was unresponsive at times, his breathing labored. He declined a chaplain. What he asked for instead was that his solicitor be told and that his locked briefcases be taken out of his room; security staff sealed them and locked them in the director of security's office. A little after 6 p.m., on the hospital's Newman Ward, he was pronounced dead. He was 79.

The Moors Murderer had spent his last 32 years at Ashworth, the high-security psychiatric hospital at Maghull in Merseyside, where he was moved from prison in 1985. "We can confirm a 79-year-old patient in long term care at Ashworth High Secure Hospital has died after becoming physically unwell," a spokesman for Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust said that night. Two private ambulances were seen leaving the grounds.

With Myra Hindley, who died in prison in 2002, Brady tortured and murdered five children and teenagers between 1963 and 1965. He was sentenced to life in 1966 for the murders of John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. Two decades later he confessed to killing Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12. Four of the victims were found buried on Saddleworth Moor. Keith Bennett's body never was, despite searches as recent as 2014, and Brady died without saying where it lay.

Hours before the news broke, Terry Kilbride, whose brother John was 12 when he was killed, had appealed to Brady one last time to reveal Keith's grave. "What good is going to do taking it with him?" he said. Once the death was confirmed, he said he did not drink but would have a pint. Martin Bottomley, head of Greater Manchester Police's cold case review unit, declined to say anything about Brady himself. "It is especially saddening for the family of Keith Bennett that his killers did not reveal to police the whereabouts of Keith's burial site," he said, adding that only two people had ever known where Keith was. The force was not actively searching the moor, he said, but it would never close the case. "Brady's death does not change that." Brady's lawyer, Robin Makin, who saw him hours before he died, said he did not believe his client had any meaningful information left to give.

Brady had spent his final years trying to leave the hospital for a prison, where he could not be fed by tube, and losing that argument before mental health tribunals. He had been on an intermittent hunger strike since 1999. He pulled out his nasogastric tube on May 10, and staff did not put it back.

The coroner for Sefton, Christopher Sumner, refused to release the body until he was assured that Brady's ashes would not be scattered on Saddleworth Moor; it stayed under police guard until it was handed to Makin on May 18. At the inquest in Bootle that September, Sumner accepted the pathologist's finding that Brady died of cor pulmonale, a form of heart failure, brought on by bronchopneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. His lungs, the pathologist said, held very little normal tissue. The coroner found no evidence that neglect or the hunger strikes had contributed and ruled that Brady died of natural causes.

What this story covers. The death, the trust's statement and the words of Terry Kilbride, Martin Bottomley and Robin Makin come from ITV News's report on the night of May 15, 2017. Brady's last hours, the release of his body and the cause of death come from ITV News Granada's report of the September 21, 2017, inquest, including the evidence of the clinician who certified the death at 18:02. Some reports give the time as 18:03.

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