Sunday 2 October 2022 12:45 AM JENNI MURRAY: The terror of being a teen in the shadow of Ian Brady and Myra ... trends now
I was just 13 and growing curious about the world when, in 1963, we heard the first reports that two young people had disappeared.
At the time I was used to magnificent amounts of freedom, just like any other girl of that age in that era. My mother was very relaxed about me spending time with friends.
We went for long, unsupervised, walks in the woods around the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley, where we lived. I’d never considered that anything bad might happen and my friends were the same. It was – or it felt – a lovely, safe, protected world.
Then everything – and I mean everything – changed. On July 12 of that year, 16-year-old Pauline Reade disappeared on her way to a dance. She was still missing when, on November 23, there was yet more disturbing news, which we read in the papers and heard on the radio.
A 12-year-old old boy called John Kilbride had vanished on the way home from his job on the market at Ashton-under-Lyne, a town on the edge of Manchester, in the shadow of the moors. It was just 30 miles away from us. A sense of danger was creeping in, something I’d never felt before. My mother was palpably anxious.
Between July 1963 and October 1965 Myra Hindley, left, and Ian Brady, right murdered five children. Hindley died in 2002 and Brady in 2017 without revealing the location of Bennett's body
Keith Bennett was snatched by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1964. He is their only victim who has never been found
Then, in June the following year, 12-year-old Keith Bennett disappeared after leaving his home 33 miles away in Longsight, Manchester, to visit his grandmother nearby. Suddenly my freedom was severely restricted. My mother wanted to accompany me – everywhere.
If I was allowed to leave home at all, I had to assure her that I’d be with at least two friends. I got daily warnings never to speak to strangers. Never accept sweets. And never, ever get into a car with someone I didn’t know.
The suspected discovery in the past few days of remains on Saddleworth Moor has brought back so many memories of the fear that blighted my teenage years – and those of so many other girls, boys and families at that time.
It has also caused the horror we felt when we finally learned what had happened to those children to come flooding back with a vengeance. It was a lifetime ago but somehow feels like yesterday.
It wasn’t until 1965 that we would hear the names of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, of their other victims, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, or of ‘the Moors murders’ as their sadistic killings became known.
These depraved crimes against children, every parent’s nightmare, were a turning point – for all of us.
Victims : 17-year-old Edward Evans, left, and 12-year-old John Kilbride, right
Murdered: Leslie Anne Downey, 10, left, and Pauline Reid, 16, right
Not only had we been confronted with the true depth of human depravity, but a woman, Myra Hindley, was at the heart of them.
It was the gruesome killing of 17-year-old Edward Evans that finally brought the two killers into the open.
Edward had been bludgeoned 14 times with a hatchet in Brady’s front room and then strangled – brutality witnessed by Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith.
Horrified, he told police, who found Evans’ body wrapped in a plastic sheet together with the murder weapon. They also found Brady’s books on sadism and sexual perversion, and plans for disposing of the teenager’s body.
The name of John Kilbride was found in a notebook. In October 1965, his body and that of Lesley Ann Downey were found buried on Saddleworth Moor.
By April the following year, Hindley and Brady were pleading not guilty at Chester’s imposing Crown Court, but the evidence against them was incontrovertible.
Quite
