Ian Brady death: The five victims of the Moors Murderers (2024)

Ian Brady, who tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered five children with his lover Myra Hindley, has died. It marks the end of a horrifying chapter in which the sad*stic child-killer also tried to manipulate the press and the legal system - often making the headlines more than his victims.

Although his name will forever be synonymous with depravity and evil, it is his victims who will be remembered in the hearts and minds of those who matter.

These are the victims of the Moors Murderers.

Pauline Reade was the couple's first victim - a pretty 16-year-old who vanished on July 12, 1963 while on her way to a disco near her home in Gorton, Manchester.

Hindley, who was an acquaintance of Pauline's, lured the teenager to Saddleworth Moor with a fabricated tale about needing help to find some lost gloves.

It was there the vibrant teenager was beaten about the head and her throat cut with such force that her spinal cord was severed.

It would be more than 20 years before Brady and Hindley admitted her murder. In 1987 the pair led police to the site where Pauline had been buried in a shallow grave, still wearing her pink and gold party dress.

She is now buried at Gorton Cemetery.

Four months after Pauline disappeared, 12-year-old John Kilbride went missing.

On the morning of November 23, 1963, he had been earning pocket money by packing up stalls at Ashton market.

While there, hanging around with friends and eating broken biscuits, he was approached by Hindley who asked him to help her load some boxes into her car.

He agreed and she offered him a lift home. Brady was driving.

On the way, Hindley once again used the ruse of wanting to find a lost glove she had dropped on Saddleworth Moor.

When 20:00 came and went, John's family called the police. By then the boy had been raped, strangled, and his body dumped.

A photograph Brady took of his lover holding her pet dog at the edge of the schoolboy's grave led detectives to the site two years later.

John is now buried at Hurst Cemetery in Ashton-Under-Lyne.

Keith Bennett, a bespectacled 12-year-old with a cheeky smile, disappeared on June 16, 1964. He was on his way to his grandmother's house, who lived close to his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock.

Police searched Saddleworth Moor in 1986 following reports Hindley and Brady had confessed to his murder.

Even though the pair were both permitted to visit the moor to point out Keith's remains, his body has never been found.

Keith's mother Winnie Johnson spent the rest of her life trying to locate her son, even taking to the moor herself, armed with a spade.

She died in 2012. A plaque in her and Keith's memory overlooks Saddleworth Moor.

It reads: "To Winnie and Keith. May you both RIP. Keith will come home".

Lesley Ann Downey was Brady and Hindley's youngest victim when she was murdered on 26 December, 1964.

She had been lured from a fairground by the pair and taken to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother in Hattersley, Greater Manchester.

The little girl was sexually assaulted and tortured. Brady also took sexually explicit photographs.

In even lower levels of depravity, the pair recorded Lesley Ann's last moments on an audio tape, which was later played in court.

She is buried in Southern Cemetery, Chorlton-Cum-Hardy.

Edward Evans was the final victim of the Moors Murderers, and at the age of 17, their oldest.

He was an apprentice engineer who met the pair in a gay bar and, on 6 October 1965, accompanied them to their shared house in Hyde, near Stockport.

It was this fateful meeting that would lead to the killers' eventual capture.

They telephoned Hindley's brother-in-law, David Smith, and asked him to visit the house, where he witnessed Brady attack Edward with an axe, smother him with a cushion and strangle him with an electrical cable.

Mr Smith called the police, who searched the house - putting in motion an investigation which would unravel crimes that would horrify the nation for generations and bring the pair a lifetime in jail.

Edward is buried in Southern Cemetery, Chorlton-Cum-Hardy.