Britain's Most Disturbing Love Story: The Moors Murders

0:00 In 1963, two people in Manchester convinced themselves that they were above every moral rule that holds a society together. By the time anyone figured out what they were doing, five children were gone. This is the story of Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and the moors that kept their secrets for decades. [Music] Alright, so if you're like I am, there are subjects that you know almost to an expert level.

0:48 Some of them at an expert level and others you don't really know that much about. When I first heard the term "a mor", I didn't know what it was. It's not because I'm dumb, I hope. It's just a term that you don't really use in the US that often. So if you're like me and don't know what a mor is, let me read you the definition. A mor is a type of open, uncultivated habitat found at high latitudes and altitudes characterized by acidic, pete soil, poor drainage, and vegetation like heather grasses and mosses. It's very common in the UK and they use it for things like sheep grazing. So going forward in this story, when I mention a mor, that's what I'm talking about.

1:28 Alright, there's a neighborhood in East Manchester called Gordon. In the early 1960s, it was a tight-knit working class community where everyone knew everyone. Where kids ran between houses without knocking, where front doors stayed unlocked because nobody had a reason to lock them. The neighbors had watched each other's children grow up. That open door assumption of safety is what Brady and Henley depended on. Every single time. Ian Brady was born in Glasgow in January 1938, the illegitimate son of a waitress named Peggy Stewart. But the time he was three years old, his mother had placed a card in a shop window offering him for adoption. A couple named the Sloans took him in and gave him a steady home.

2:11 The Brady state emotionally unreachable from the start. His teachers described him as "polite" and "well-presented". His peers described him as someone who tied a classmate up and set him on fire during a game of cops and robbers, who buried a cat alive and made sure the other neighborhood kids heard about it. At 14, he had his first juvenile court case. By 17, he was inside Strangeway's prison for burglary. He was in prison, surrounded by nothing but time, that Brady found a philosophy that would frame the rest of his life. The Marquis desada, Adolf Hitler, Frederick Nietzsche. He wasn't reading out of boredom or shock value.

2:53 He was reading with the focused attention of someone who had just realized the books were written about him. He identified himself with those books, specifically the Adolf Hitler book, BTW. Myra Henley was born in 1942, a few streets from where Brady would eventually come to live. Her father was an alcoholic who beat her regularly, and by multiple counts raised her to view physical force as a reasonable solution to most problems. When she was 15, her closest friend, 13-year-old Michael Higgins, drowned in a local reservoir in June 1957. She had been invited to swim with him that day and had declined.

3:33 His death settled into her as guilt, and she converted to Catholicism shortly after. People who attended the funeral noted something that researchers kept returning two years later. Myra seemed genuinely fascinated by the body in a way that sat uncomfortably with everyone who was watching. That observation has followed this case ever since. By 1961, she was a typist at a company called Millwards Merchandising. There was a quiet job and a quiet life, and by most accounts she expected it to stay that way. Then she met the stock clerk. Brady was 23 when she was 18. He had clean fingernails and a shelf of philosophy books, which in hindsight should have been a warning sign for somebody.

4:19 She kept a diary and filled it with entries all about him, tracking what he wore, whether he had noticed her that day. She was pretty obsessed with him. In a few months, he had her reading accounts of Nazi atrocities allowed over German wine, attending films about the Nuremberg Trials, bleaching her hair because he considered it more Aryan. She later testified that he had persuaded her completely and methodically that there was no God, and that the two of them existed outside the moral framework that governed everyone else around them. Brady had built an ideology out of those books, and believed without reservation that it placed him beyond ordinary mortality.

5:02 Ian and Myra described the murders to each other as existential exercises. They discussed what they were doing in the language of philosophy and self-determination, as though there were two thinkers who had arrived at conclusions the rest of humanity simply hadn't reached yet. The murders were not random acts of violence to Ian. They were proof of concept. Investigators and psychologists spent decades afterward trying to understand what the thinking around violence revealed about human depravity. Pauline Reed was 16 years old, and she lived a few doors down from Myra Henley. On July 12, 1963, Myra pulled up beside her and asked if she would help search for a lost glove out on the moors.

5:45 That request probably didn't seem strange at all, coming from a familiar face on a street where you knew your neighbors. Pauline got in the car. Brady was waiting there when they arrived. Her disappearance remained a mystery for over two decades. Her body wasn't recovered until 1987, when Brady finally gave investigators enough to locator. Four months later, 12-year-old John Kilbride was taken from a market in Ashton under Lynn. His mother, Sheila, refused to accept that he was gone and set a place for him at the dinner table for two years. His body was eventually found on Saddleworth Moore in October 1965.

6:26 In June 1964, Keith Bennett, also 12 years old, was walking to his grandmother's house in long-sight. When Myra Henley offered him a ride, his mother, when he Johnson, watched him from across the road that evening. Ian Brady later confessed to strangling Keith with a string, but his body has never been recovered. Six decades of searching have involved ground-penetrating radar, drone imaging, and volunteer excavations spanning multiple generations. Keith is the only one of five who never came home. Leslie Ann Downey was 10 years old when she was lured from a fun fare on Boxing Day in 1964. Ian and Myra brought her to their house on Wardle Brook Avenue and recorded what happened there on a 16-minute audio tape.

7:13 Police later found that tape inside a suitcase at a railway station. When it was played, as evidence at trial in 1966, court reporters described experiencing detectives sitting in the room unable to form words. The last victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans. Ian Brady lured him from Manchester Central Station in October 1965, and by that point, Brady had grown arrogant enough to invite an audience. He called over Henley's brother-in-law, a 17-year-old named David Smith, who had spent several evenings being impressed by Brady's talk of robberies and self-styled philosophy. Ian Brady attacked the boy with a hatchet while David Smith stood there, stunned.

7:56 David Smith helped clean up the scene afterward in a state of shock, walked home, and told his wife exactly what he had witnessed. The next morning, David Smith walked over to a phone box, called the police. He was reportedly shaking so hard he could barely hold the receiver. Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue dressed as a "bred delivery" to confirm that Ian Brady was home before making the arrest. They found Evans' body in a locked bedroom. They searched the rest of the house and found tucked inside a prayer book, a luggage-claimed ticket for a suitcase at Manchester Central Station. Inside the suitcase, photographs of the moors, the audio tape that I mentioned, and Brady's full library of extremist literature.

8:44 Also a bunch of BDSM stuff and some pornography. Hiding evidence of five murders inside a prayer book is to put it generously, a peculiar choice from someone who believed that he had transcended the rules of ordinary civilization. Among Ian Brady's possessions were landscape photos he had taken on the moors. Investigators spent weeks matching the horizons, the rock formations and sightlines in those images, two specific locations on Saddleworth Moore. One photograph showed Myra crouching over a patch of Pete with her dog, Puppet. That patch of Pete Moss was John Kilbride's grave. The trial in 1966 was the first time most of Britain understood the full scope of what had happened.

9:30 Both of them received life sentences and both died in custody. Myra Henley in 2002, and Ian Brady in 2017, at age 79. Three years on a hunger strike in public mental health tribunals that psychiatrist described as Brady's final strategy for maintaining a media presence. The timing of the case left a permanent mark on British law. The murders were committed while capital punishment was still technically legal in the UK, and by the time of the trial, that law had changed. That gap fueled decades of political debate and gave direct rise to the whole life tariff. The legal mechanism by which courts can designate certain crimes severe enough that the offender is never considered for release.

10:14 That's what we would call life without parole. For the rest of her life, Wendy Johnson wrote letters to Ian Brady pleading with him to tell her where her son was buried. She made public appeals. She never stopped. She died in 2012 without ever getting an answer. Some forensic scientists studying Saddleworth's Pete Boggs have theorized that the acidic composition of the more may have dissolved Keith's remains over six decades to a point where nothing recoverable exists. Saddleworth more if you've seen photos of it is beautiful, wide open sky, and that northern English light that turns the landscape golden late in the afternoon.

10:54 Ian Brady and Myra Henley used it as a hiding place, a trophy room, proof to themselves that they had moved beyond the reach of anyone. They were wrong about that, eventually. They spent the rest of their lives in custody. Never free, never able to claim what their philosophy had promised them. And somewhere out in the moors, Keith Bennett is still there. Thanks for listening to Ten Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories. I'm Joe. Hello.

11:34 Hello. I'm Joe. Hi, Joe. What's an unpopular opinion that you have? Like something that doesn't matter at all, but you still feel strongly about movies, food, everyday habits, anything like that. Rachel in Boise, Idaho. Rachel, it's a good question. Kind of strange, but I like strange. And what I'm going to say, I think, should be a popular opinion. But the number of people doing it might make it unpopular. And that is, there's no reason, absolutely zero reason for you to be talking on speakerphone to someone in a public place.

12:15 No reason at all. If you're in the grocery store and you find yourself having a speakerphone conversation with someone, what are you doing? Put that thing up to your ear. No one wants to hear that conversation. It's disrespectful to the people around you. And even more so disrespectful to the person that's on the other end of that phone call. I can't imagine if I'm on the other end of that call and someone's talking to me on speaker and I'm saying something personal. And now everyone in the crogour knows all about what I've told you. And again, I think that should be a popular opinion. But by the frequency that you see it, it appears to be unpopular. Thanks for the email. And hey, if you're a brand new listener, you listening to me right now, if this is the first or second or maybe third time you've listened to this podcast and you have not yet subscribed, please do that now.

13:05 You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com and you can contact me there. Also get Listen Links. You can get links to where you can follow the show on social media. And that's all at 10minuteMurder.com. And that's going to do it. That's your story for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder. See you next time.