From Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles to the landmark horror-comedy film An American Werewolf in London, the English moors have been home to some of the most bone-chilling horror fiction in modern history. But in the early 1960s, they were also the scene of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s gruesome serial murders — some of the most notorious killings since Jack the Ripper.
Brady and Hindley, also known as the Moors Murderers, were a young, murderous couple who went on a 28-month killing spree. Their acts were so twisted that the BBC would eventually call their crimes the “benchmark by which other acts of evil are measured.”
Ian Brady’s Childhood Was Littered with Warning Signs
Ian Brady was born Ian Stewart on January 2, 1938, to Margaret “Peggy” Stewart in Glasgow, Scotland. The man rumored to be his father, a local reporter, had died just three months before. This left Peggy to support herself and her son on her meager wages as a hotel waitress.
Although Ian’s mother was initially determined to care for him, she struggled to keep up with costs. After only four months, as the Glasgow Times explains, Peggy handed her son over to Mary and John Sloan. They were a local couple with four children of their own.
On the surface, Ian thrived under the care of the Sloans. He saw them as his parents, their children treated him as a sibling, and he even adopted the Sloan name. Ian also did very well in primary school and eventually attended a school for gifted children. From here, however, his behavior would take a dark turn.
Ian Brady Committed Terrible Acts Against Animals
Even at an early age, Ian showed patterns of deranged and unpredictable behavior. He began to see himself as an outcast among his classmates and would periodically lash out in violent fits of rage and self-harm when he didn’t get his way.
Brady later claimed to have thrown a cat from a Glasgow high-rise when he was only 10. According to The Independent, this was the first incident in a series of animal killings that included burning, stoning, and decapitation.
Ian Brady’s Life of Crime Began at 13 Years Old
By age 11, Ian began to smoke, his grades slipped, and he developed an obsession with Nazism and Hitler. By 13, he was committing low-level crimes like petty theft and break-ins.
In November 1954, after a third arrest for burglary and housebreaking, the courts sent 16-year-old Ian Sloan to live with Peggy and her new husband, Patrick Brady. The young criminal was now in the northwest English city of Manchester. From there, Ian took his stepfather’s last name and finally became Ian Brady.
Several more arrests landed Brady first in juvenile detention and later in a local prison. When he was released, Brady took a job as a clerk at Millwards Merchandise, a chemical manufacturer. This is where he would meet Myra Hindley, his future wife and partner in the Moors Murders.
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Ian Brady and Myra Hindley First Met at a Manchester Chemical Factory
While Myra Hindley grew up under comparatively ordinary circumstances, her childhood still had its share of pain and tragedy. In a letter to The Guardian in 1995, she described her father as an abusive alcoholic whom she “disliked … intensely for his violence, drunkenness, and the tyrannical way he dominated the household.”
Hindley’s close friend Michael Higgins also drowned in 1957, an accident for which she partially blamed herself. She had turned down the chance to join the boy at the reservoir on that fateful day.
Despite the tragedies Hindley faced, most accounts considered her a normal working-class girl before she met Ian Brady.
In January 1961, as The Oldham Times explains, Hindley took a job as a typist at Millwards. Brady had been working there for nearly two years. Although she was almost immediately infatuated with him, he showed no interest until nearly a year later. The pair became acquainted at a holiday party and bonded over their love of literature and classical music.
Brady’s fascination with nihilism, sadism, and other dark ideologies soon bled into the pair’s sexual repertoire and threatened to push them into a joint life of crime. They made preparations for robberies, but these plans ultimately gave way to darker fantasies.
John Kilbride: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s First Recorded Victim
Brady and Hindley’s arrests in late 1965 led to a wide-reaching investigation and a preliminary tally of three murder victims. The first was John Kilbride, a 12-year-old market hand whom the couple kidnapped on November 23, 1963, after convincing him to help Hindley load boxes into her car. According to the BBC, Hindley then offered to drive Kilbride home.
When the boy accepted, she lured him onto Saddleworth Moor, claiming she needed help finding a missing glove. Instead of the glove, however, Kilbride found Brady, who raped, strangled, and buried him in a shallow grave.
Two years later, police found Kilbride’s body using a photograph Brady had taken of the crime scene. The image depicts Hindley uncomfortably crouched at the edge of Kilbride’s grave, holding her dog.
Lesley Ann Downey: The Moors Murders Second Recorded Victim
Ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was visiting a holiday fairground on December 26, 1964, when Brady and Hindley lured her away from the festivities to Hindley’s home. There, they proceeded to sexually assault, torture, and kill her.
During the assault, Brady took a series of nude photographs of Downey, gagged and posed in Hindley’s bedroom. The pair also took an audio recording of her final moments.
On the tape, Downey can be heard pleading to God for help, begging for her mother, and screaming that she can’t breathe. Meanwhile, Brady and Hindley shush and threaten her. The Telegraph reported that for the 16 harrowing minutes that the tape played in court, “the room sat still and silent.”
Police found the recording and photographs after a search of Hindley’s home yielded a left-luggage ticket corresponding to a locker at Manchester Central Station. Inside the locker, they found two suitcases filled with hundreds of sadistic photographs, including the images and tape of Downey.
Like Kilbride, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley dumped Downey’s body on Saddleworth Moor.
Edward Evans: The Moors Murderer’s Final Victim
On October 6, 1965, Ian Brady recognized 17-year-old Edward Evans at Manchester Central Station. Brady had previously seen Evans at the Rembrandt, a now-longstanding Canal Street gay bar. Brady and Hindley invited Evans home for a drink, and Evans accepted.
Once the trio arrived at the couple’s house, Brady called Hindley’s brother-in-law, 17-year-old David Smith. Brady had already formed a close friendship with Smith and saw him as a potential apprentice in crime. Brady viewed this meeting with Evans as the perfect opportunity to involve Smith in his and Hindley’s depravity.
A few minutes after he arrived, Smith watched in horror as Brady hacked Evans nearly to death with an axe while the boy screamed in agony. Brady then used a couch cushion to suffocate and some electrical wire to strangle Evans.
Smith later admitted that he and Brady had spoken about committing murders and robberies. However, he claimed that “[t]here was no indication whatsoever” that these conversations were anything more than drunken jokes. Until that night, Brady had been nothing more than a “slightly eccentric friend.”
Brady and Hindley later disputed Smith’s claims without success and repeatedly attempted to pin their murders on him.
David Smith Put an End to Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s Killing Spree
After witnessing Ian Brady gruesomely murder Edward Evans, Smith feared for his life and initially played along as a co-conspirator. He even helped the murderous couple tidy up the bloodied living room and relocate Evans’ body upstairs.
When the deeds were done, Smith shared tea and casual conversation with the killers behind the Moors Murders. When he finally decided it was safe to leave, Smith ran home and called the police.
According to Detective Ian Fairley, when the police arrived at the crime scene the following morning, they found Evans “trussed up in a plastic bag in the bedroom.” They also found evidence that would lead them to the bodies of John Kilbride and Lesley Ann Downey.
The trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley began on April 19, 1966. The case garnered such widespread attention that authorities installed special protective screens in the courtroom to keep the public from attacking the killers.
On May 6, the courts found Brady guilty of the murders of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans. They also found Hindley guilty of murdering Downey and Evans as well as harboring Brady after the murder of Kilbride.
Before the jury’s verdict, Justice Fenton Atkinson said that if Brady and Hindley were truly guilty, they were “two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity.” The United Kingdom had abolished the death penalty just months before the trial, so Atkinson sentenced the pair to life imprisonment.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley Later Admitted to Two More Killings
David Smith served as the primary witness for the prosecution during the court proceedings. In his testimony, he said that Brady had drunkenly admitted to killing three or four children before murdering Evans — not just two. But it wasn’t until 1987 that Brady and Hindley finally owned up to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. According to Manchester Evening News, both of them had been missing since the mid-1960s.
The Moors Murderers abducted Sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade on July 12, 1963, making her the couple’s first victim. Reade was an acquaintance of Hindley, who lured her into a minivan while Brady trailed them on his motorcycle. Hindley then employed the same missing glove tactic that she’d eventually use to bait John Kilbride onto the moors.
Once on Saddleworth Moor, Brady beat and sexually assaulted Reade before slitting her throat to the bone.
Keith Bennett: Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s Actual Third Victim
On June 16, 1964 — a year after they’d murdered Reade — Myra Hindley and Ian Brady abducted 12-year-old Keith Bennett on his way to his grandmother’s house. Although Brady and Hindley claimed they buried Bennett on the moor, the authorities have never managed to locate his remains. According to the BBC, authorities even pulled the killers from prison twice to assist in the search but their efforts still fell flat.
An independent investigator unearthed what he thought were Bennett’s remains in 2022. The evidence, however, wasn’t sufficient to convince the Greater Manchester Police.
The murders of Reade and Bennett bring the total known victims of the Moors Murderers to five. However, a letter from Brady to BBC reporter Peter Gould in 1987 suggests that the number might be higher.
The letter mentions these possible victims:
- “a man on a piece of waste ground near Piccadilly in Manchester”
- “a woman in a canal”
- “a man in Glasgow”
- “another one on the slopes of Loch Long”
- “another on the other side of the moor road.”
Investigators haven’t verified Brady’s claims.
Many Think Myra Hindley Was a Victim Herself
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Myra Hindley spent nearly two decades lobbying for an early release from prison. She claimed she was remorseful and had paid her debt to society. Many of her supporters and legal representatives also argued that, without Brady, Hindley would never have been a killer. They believed she was being held in prison to appease the public rather than to serve justice.
Former Observer editor David Astor said in 1997 that “[Hindley] had shown no criminal tendencies until her involvement with Brady, and she has shown none since.”
Judge Atkinson expressed a similar sentiment during Hindley’s trial in 1966: “Though I believe Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel that the same is necessarily true of Hindley, once she is removed from his influence.”
There has even been speculation that Ian Brady may have groomed and abused Hindley. In a letter to The Guardian in 1995, Hindley claimed to have been “totally besotted” with Brady, painting a twisted picture of their relationship in which she both feared him and hung on his every word. Yet she also denied ever being completely under Brady’s spell and has accepted responsibility for her part in the killings.
Both Killers Behind the Moors Murders Died in Prison
Myra Hindley died of respiratory failure on November 15, 2002. She was never released from prison despite her efforts.
Brady lived out his sentence between prisons and mental institutions. During his time behind bars, he regularly attempted to manipulate staff, other prisoners, and patients. He used everything from hunger strikes to verbal abuse and outright violence. In 1997, for example, he nearly strangled another psychiatric patient to death after an argument in the institution’s kitchen.
Ian Brady died on May 15, 2017. His ashes were driven to the Irish Sea in an unmarked car, transferred to an unmarked boat, and dumped in the ocean — a place where Brady could never cause harm again.
