It was a chilling moment which would lead to the conviction of Britain’s most notorious child killers.

Former detective, Ian Fairley, said: “I found a photograph of a little girl, and she had a scarf tied round about her mouth, and she was naked.

“That really was the Pandora’s Box, if you like.”

The picture of the child and other incriminating evidence was in two suitcases belonging to Ian Brady, which he had put in the left luggage department of Manchester Central railway station.

A few weeks earlier, in October 1965, Mr Fairley, then a young detective, had arrested Brady for the murder of teenager Edward Evans.

Keith Bennett
Keith Bennett

It was a moment in a distinguished career which he could never forget.

Mr Fairley died recently after 32 years of service in Cheshire, GMP, and Norfolk.

He was a member of the original team which investigated the Moors Murders.

READ MORE: Search begins for body of Keith Bennett

READ MORE: Brady urged to reveal location of burial site on moors

And 50 years ago today, Brady and his lover, Myra Hindley, were convicted after a 14-day trial. Brady was found guilty of the murders of Edward Evans, 17, Lesley Ann Downey,10 and John Kilbride, 12, while Hindley was convicted of killing Downey and Evans.

On May 6, 1966, after having deliberated for a little over two hours, the jury came back with their verdicts.

As the death penalty for murder had been abolished while Brady and Hindley were held on remand, the judge passed the only sentence that the law allowed: life imprisonment. Brady was sentenced to three concurrent life sentences and Hindley was given two, plus a concurrent seven-year term for harbouring Brady in the knowledge that he had murdered John Kilbride.

Complex character of Myra Hindley revealed prison reports
Complex character of Myra Hindley revealed prison reports

The Moors Murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a bleak spot at the best of times, straddling the A635 road between Holmfirth and Greenfield.

Police found the bodies of Lesley Ann and John on the moors in 1965. A third grave was discovered on the moor in 1987, more than 20 years after Brady and Hindley’s trial in 1966. Both killers had been taken back to the moors to try and help police find the remains

The investigation had been reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.

Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

Ian Brady then and now
Ian Brady then and now

The remains of Pauline Reade were found after a long search by police in areas pinpointed by Brady when he was taken back to the Moor in December 1987. The killer spent hours with police in appalling weather, trudging over the barren landscape.

The search led to Pauline Reade, 16, being found in a shallow grave.

The fifth victim of the pair, 10-year-old Keith Bennett, has never been found despite repeated searches of the moors.

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 she was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60.

Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985, since when he has been confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital