Britain's Most Disturbing Love Story: The Moors Murders

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In 1963, two people in Manchester convinced themselves that they were above every moral

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rule that holds a society together.

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By the time anyone figured out what they were doing, five children were gone.

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This is the story of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and the moors that kept their secrets for

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decades.

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[Music]

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Alright, so if you're like I am, there are subjects that you know almost to an expert level.

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Some of them at an expert level and others you don't really know that much about.

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When I first heard the term "a mor", I didn't know what it was.

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It's not because I'm dumb, I hope.

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It's just a term that you don't really use in the US that often.

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So if you're like me and don't know what a mor is, let me read you the definition.

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A mor is a type of open, uncultivated habitat found at high latitudes and altitudes characterized

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by acidic, pete soil, poor drainage, and vegetation like heather grasses and mosses.

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It's very common in the UK and they use it for things like sheep grazing.

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So going forward in this story, when I mention a mor, that's what I'm talking about.

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Alright, there's a neighborhood in East Manchester called Gordon.

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In the early 1960s, it was a tight-knit working class community where everyone knew everyone.

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Where kids ran between houses without knocking, where front doors stayed unlocked because

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nobody had a reason to lock them.

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The neighbors had watched each other's children grow up.

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That open door assumption of safety is what Brady and Henley depended on.

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Every single time.

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Ian Brady was born in Glasgow in January 1938, the illegitimate son of a waitress named Peggy

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Stewart.

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But the time he was three years old, his mother had placed a card in a shop window offering

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him for adoption.

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A couple named the Sloans took him in and gave him a steady home.

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The Brady state emotionally unreachable from the start.

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His teachers described him as "polite" and "well-presented".

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His peers described him as someone who tied a classmate up and set him on fire during a

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game of cops and robbers, who buried a cat alive and made sure the other neighborhood kids

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heard about it.

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At 14, he had his first juvenile court case.

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By 17, he was inside Strangeway's prison for burglary.

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He was in prison, surrounded by nothing but time, that Brady found a philosophy that would

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frame the rest of his life.

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The Marquis desada, Adolf Hitler, Frederick Nietzsche.

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He wasn't reading out of boredom or shock value.

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He was reading with the focused attention of someone who had just realized the books were

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written about him.

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He identified himself with those books, specifically the Adolf Hitler book, BTW.

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Myra Henley was born in 1942, a few streets from where Brady would eventually come to live.

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Her father was an alcoholic who beat her regularly, and by multiple counts raised her to view physical

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force as a reasonable solution to most problems.

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When she was 15, her closest friend, 13-year-old Michael Higgins, drowned in a local reservoir

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in June 1957.

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She had been invited to swim with him that day and had declined.

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His death settled into her as guilt, and she converted to Catholicism shortly after.

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People who attended the funeral noted something that researchers kept returning two years

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later.

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Myra seemed genuinely fascinated by the body in a way that sat uncomfortably with everyone

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who was watching.

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That observation has followed this case ever since.

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By 1961, she was a typist at a company called Millwards Merchandising.

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There was a quiet job and a quiet life, and by most accounts she expected it to stay that

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way.

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Then she met the stock clerk.

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Brady was 23 when she was 18.

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He had clean fingernails and a shelf of philosophy books, which in hindsight should have been a warning

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sign for somebody.

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She kept a diary and filled it with entries all about him, tracking what he wore, whether

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he had noticed her that day.

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She was pretty obsessed with him.

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In a few months, he had her reading accounts of Nazi atrocities allowed over German wine,

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attending films about the Nuremberg Trials, bleaching her hair because he considered it more

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Aryan.

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She later testified that he had persuaded her completely and methodically that there was

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no God, and that the two of them existed outside the moral framework that governed everyone

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else around them.

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Brady had built an ideology out of those books, and believed without reservation that

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it placed him beyond ordinary mortality.

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Ian and Myra described the murders to each other as existential exercises.

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They discussed what they were doing in the language of philosophy and self-determination,

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as though there were two thinkers who had arrived at conclusions the rest of humanity simply

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hadn't reached yet.

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The murders were not random acts of violence to Ian.

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They were proof of concept.

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Investigators and psychologists spent decades afterward trying to understand what the thinking

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around violence revealed about human depravity.

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Pauline Reed was 16 years old, and she lived a few doors down from Myra Henley.

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On July 12, 1963, Myra pulled up beside her and asked if she would help search for a lost

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glove out on the moors.

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That request probably didn't seem strange at all, coming from a familiar face on a street

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where you knew your neighbors.

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Pauline got in the car.

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Brady was waiting there when they arrived.

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Her disappearance remained a mystery for over two decades.

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Her body wasn't recovered until 1987, when Brady finally gave investigators enough to

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locator.

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Four months later, 12-year-old John Kilbride was taken from a market in Ashton under

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Lynn.

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His mother, Sheila, refused to accept that he was gone and set a place for him at the dinner

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table for two years.

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His body was eventually found on Saddleworth Moore in October 1965.

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In June 1964, Keith Bennett, also 12 years old, was walking to his grandmother's house in

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long-sight.

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When Myra Henley offered him a ride, his mother, when he Johnson, watched him from across

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the road that evening.

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Ian Brady later confessed to strangling Keith with a string, but his body has never been

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recovered.

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Six decades of searching have involved ground-penetrating radar, drone imaging, and volunteer

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excavations spanning multiple generations.

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Keith is the only one of five who never came home.

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Leslie Ann Downey was 10 years old when she was lured from a fun fare on Boxing Day in 1964.

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Ian and Myra brought her to their house on Wardle Brook Avenue and recorded what happened

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there on a 16-minute audio tape.

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Police later found that tape inside a suitcase at a railway station.

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When it was played, as evidence at trial in 1966, court reporters described experiencing

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detectives sitting in the room unable to form words.

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The last victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans.

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Ian Brady lured him from Manchester Central Station in October 1965, and by that point,

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Brady had grown arrogant enough to invite an audience.

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He called over Henley's brother-in-law, a 17-year-old named David Smith, who had spent several

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evenings being impressed by Brady's talk of robberies and self-styled philosophy.

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Ian Brady attacked the boy with a hatchet while David Smith stood there, stunned.

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David Smith helped clean up the scene afterward in a state of shock, walked home, and told his

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wife exactly what he had witnessed.

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The next morning, David Smith walked over to a phone box, called the police.

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He was reportedly shaking so hard he could barely hold the receiver.

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Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue dressed as a "bred delivery"

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to confirm that Ian Brady was home before making the arrest.

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They found Evans' body in a locked bedroom.

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They searched the rest of the house and found tucked inside a prayer book, a luggage-claimed

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ticket for a suitcase at Manchester Central Station.

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Inside the suitcase, photographs of the moors, the audio tape that I mentioned, and Brady's

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full library of extremist literature.

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Also a bunch of BDSM stuff and some pornography.

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Hiding evidence of five murders inside a prayer book is to put it generously, a peculiar

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choice from someone who believed that he had transcended the rules of ordinary civilization.

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Among Ian Brady's possessions were landscape photos he had taken on the moors.

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Investigators spent weeks matching the horizons, the rock formations and sightlines in those

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images, two specific locations on Saddleworth Moore.

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One photograph showed Myra crouching over a patch of Pete with her dog, Puppet.

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That patch of Pete Moss was John Kilbride's grave.

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The trial in 1966 was the first time most of Britain understood the full scope of what had

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happened.

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Both of them received life sentences and both died in custody.

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Myra Henley in 2002, and Ian Brady in 2017, at age 79.

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Three years on a hunger strike in public mental health tribunals that psychiatrist described

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as Brady's final strategy for maintaining a media presence.

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The timing of the case left a permanent mark on British law.

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The murders were committed while capital punishment was still technically legal in the UK, and

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by the time of the trial, that law had changed.

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That gap fueled decades of political debate and gave direct rise to the whole life tariff.

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The legal mechanism by which courts can designate certain crimes severe enough that the offender

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is never considered for release.

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That's what we would call life without parole.

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For the rest of her life, Wendy Johnson wrote letters to Ian Brady pleading with him to

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tell her where her son was buried.

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She made public appeals.

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She never stopped.

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She died in 2012 without ever getting an answer.

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Some forensic scientists studying Saddleworth's Pete Boggs have theorized that the acidic

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composition of the more may have dissolved Keith's remains over six decades to a point where

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nothing recoverable exists.

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Saddleworth more if you've seen photos of it is beautiful, wide open sky, and that northern

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English light that turns the landscape golden late in the afternoon.

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Ian Brady and Myra Henley used it as a hiding place, a trophy room, proof to themselves

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that they had moved beyond the reach of anyone.

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They were wrong about that, eventually.

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They spent the rest of their lives in custody.

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Never free, never able to claim what their philosophy had promised them.

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And somewhere out in the moors, Keith Bennett is still there.

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Thanks for listening to Ten Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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I'm Joe.

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Hello.

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Hello.

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I'm Joe.

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Hi, Joe.

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What's an unpopular opinion that you have?

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Like something that doesn't matter at all, but you still feel strongly about movies, food, everyday

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habits, anything like that.

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Rachel in Boise, Idaho.

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Rachel, it's a good question.

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Kind of strange, but I like strange.

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And what I'm going to say, I think, should be a popular opinion.

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But the number of people doing it might make it unpopular.

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And that is, there's no reason, absolutely zero reason for you to be talking on speakerphone

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to someone in a public place.

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No reason at all.

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If you're in the grocery store and you find yourself having a speakerphone conversation

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with someone, what are you doing?

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Put that thing up to your ear.

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No one wants to hear that conversation.

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It's disrespectful to the people around you.

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And even more so disrespectful to the person that's on the other end of that phone call.

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I can't imagine if I'm on the other end of that call and someone's talking to me on speaker

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and I'm saying something personal.

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And now everyone in the crogour knows all about what I've told you.

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And again, I think that should be a popular opinion.

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But by the frequency that you see it, it appears to be unpopular.

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Thanks for the email.

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And hey, if you're a brand new listener, you listening to me right now, if this is the

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first or second or maybe third time you've listened to this podcast and you have not yet

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subscribed, please do that now.

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You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com and you can contact me there.

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Also get Listen Links.

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You can get links to where you can follow the show on social media.

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And that's all at 10minuteMurder.com.

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And that's going to do it.

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That's your story for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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See you next time.