The Moors murders were a series of murders of children committed by Ian Brady (né: Stewart) and Myra Hindley in and around Manchester, England, between July 1963 and October 1965. The five known victims – Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans – were aged between 10 and 17, and at least four were sexually assaulted. The bodies of two of the victims were discovered in 1965, in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. Keith Bennett's body is also thought to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.
Brady and Hindley were charged only for the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans, and received life sentences under a whole life order. The investigation was reopened in 1985 after Brady was reported as having confessed to the murders of Reade and Bennett. Hindley stopped claiming her innocence in 1987 and confessed to all of the murders. After confessing to these additional murders, Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist in the search for the graves.
Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. She died in 2002 in West Suffolk Hospital, aged 60, after serving thirty-six years in prison. Brady was diagnosed as a psychopath in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside. He made it clear that he wished to never be released and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die. He died in 2017, at Ashworth, aged 79, having served fifty-one years.
The murders were the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, described as a "concatenation of circumstances". The trial judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, described Brady and Hindley in his closing remarks as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity". Their crimes were the subject of extensive worldwide media coverage.
Ian Brady was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow as Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938 to Margaret "Peggy" Stewart, an unmarried tea room waitress. The identity of Brady's father has never been reliably ascertained, although his mother said he was a journalist working for a Glasgow newspaper who died three months before Brady was born. Brady's mother had little support and after a few months was forced to give her son into the care of Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own. Brady took their family name and became known as Ian Sloan. His mother continued to visit him throughout his childhood.
At age 9, Brady visited Loch Lomond with his family, where he reportedly discovered an affinity for the outdoors. A few months later, the family moved to a new council house on an overspill estate at Pollok. Various authors have stated that Brady tortured animals. It was reported, for example, that he boasted of killing his first cat when he was 10 years old, and then went on to burn another cat alive, stone dogs and cut off rabbits' heads. Brady, however, denied any accusations of animal abuse.
Brady's behaviour worsened when he attended Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils. As a teenager, he twice appeared before a juvenile court for housebreaking. Brady left the academy aged 15 and took a job as a tea boy at a Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan. Nine months later, he began working as a butcher's messenger boy. Brady had a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, but their relationship ended when he threatened her with a flick knife after she visited a dance with another boy. He again appeared before the court, this time with nine charges against him, and shortly before his seventeenth birthday he was placed on probation on condition that he live with his mother. By then, Brady's mother had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Patrick Brady; Patrick got his stepson a job as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market Hall, and Ian took Patrick's surname.
Within a year of moving to Manchester, Brady was caught with a sack full of lead seals he had stolen and was trying to smuggle out of the market. He was sent to Strangeways Prison for three months. As he was still under age 18, Brady was sentenced to two years in a borstal for "training". He was sent to Latchmere House in London, and then to Hatfield borstal in the West Riding of Yorkshire. After being discovered drunk on alcohol he had brewed, Brady was moved to the much tougher unit in Hull. Released on 14 November 1957, Brady returned to Manchester, where he took a labouring job which he hated, and was dismissed from another job in a brewery. Deciding to "better himself", he obtained a set of instruction manuals on bookkeeping from a local public library, with which he "astonished" his mother and stepfather by studying alone in his room for hours.
In January 1959, Brady applied for, and was offered, a clerical job at Millwards Merchandising, a wholesale chemical distribution company based in Gorton. He was regarded by his colleagues as a quiet, punctual, but short-tempered young man. Brady read books, including Teach Yourself German, Mein Kampf and books about Nazi atrocities. He was partly inspired by the life and works of French author Marquis de Sade, whose name was the etymological inspiration for the term "sadism". Brady rode a Tiger Cub motorcycle, which he used to visit the Pennines.
Myra Hindley was born in Crumpsall on 23 July 1942 to Bob and Nellie Hindley, and raised in Gorton, then a working-class area of Manchester dominated by Victorian slum housing. Her father was an alcoholic who was frequently violent towards his wife and children. The family home was in poor condition, and Hindley was forced to sleep in a single bed next to her parents' double bed. Their living situation deteriorated further when Hindley's younger sister, Maureen, was born in August 1946. The following year, five-year-old Myra was sent to live nearby with her grandmother.
During the Second World War, Hindley's father had served with the Parachute Regiment and was stationed in North Africa, Cyprus and Italy. He had been known as a hard man while in the army and he expected his daughter to be equally tough; he taught her to fight and insisted that she stick up for herself. When Hindley was about eight years old, a local boy scratched her cheeks, drawing blood. She burst into tears and ran to her father, who threatened to "leather" her if she did not retaliate; Hindley found the boy and knocked him down with a series of punches. As she wrote later, "At eight years old I'd scored my first victory." Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, has written that Hindley's "relationship with her father brutalised her ... She was not only used to violence in the home but rewarded for it outside. When this happens at a young age, it can distort a person's reaction to such situations for life."
In June 1957, one of Hindley's closest friends, thirteen-year-old Michael Higgins, invited Hindley to go swimming with friends at a local disused reservoir, but she instead went out elsewhere with another friend. Higgins drowned in the reservoir; and Hindley – a good swimmer – was deeply upset and blamed herself. She took up a collection for a wreath; his funeral was held at St Francis's Monastery in Gorton Lane.
The monastery where Hindley had been baptised a Catholic as an infant in 1942 had a lasting effect on her. Hindley's father had insisted she have a Catholic baptism; her mother agreed on the condition that she not be sent to a Catholic school, believing that "all the monks taught was the catechism". Hindley was increasingly drawn to the Roman Catholic Church after she started at Ryder Brow Secondary Modern and began taking instruction for formal reception into the Church soon after Higgins's funeral. She took the confirmation name of Veronica and received her First Communion in November 1958.