Five decades after Ian Brady and Myra Hindley killed five children, the search continues for one of their victim’s bodies. As a book and documentary shed possible new light on Keith Bennett’s final resting place, Kate Whiting speaks to author Duncan Staff about the ’lost boy’

FIFTY years ago next week, a young girl dressed up to go for a dance.

She never returned.

It was on July 12, 1963, that 16-year-old Pauline Reade left home all dressed up for a dance in Gorton, Manchester and ended up on a date with death.

She was the first victim of the Moors Murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, but her body wasn’t recovered from its shallow grave on Saddleworth Moor until July 1987, after the duo confessed to two more killings.

Police had taken Hindley and Brady back to the moors and searched an area just off the A635 Greenfield Road out of Holmfirth.

Between 1963 and 1965, Brady and Hindley went on a murder spree, taking the lives of five children: Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans.

The body of Keith Bennett has never been found. Brady told his former girlfriend Hindley that he wanted to commit “the perfect murder” - where the body is never found.

Unless Bennett’s body is discovered, he’ll have achieved this.

But a new ITV documentary, Brady And Hindley: Possession, based on the book The Lost Boy by Duncan Staff, hopes to shed light on where he might lie.

In the first draft of her unpublished autobiography, Hindley wrote about one Christmas Eve before the murders, when she and Brady went to midnight mass in Gorton and afterwards, drunk on whisky, Brady relieved himself on a grave.

She wrote: “Little did I realise then that his graves would be marked by photographs and not headstones.”

It was only after her death, in 2002, that the autobiography, along with her personal papers, was given to journalist Staff, who had corresponded with her at length for a BBC documentary in 2000.

Following years of trawling through the material, with the help of forensic psychiatrist Malcolm MacCulloch, Staff wrote The Lost Boy, about the background to the murders and the photographs taken by Brady and Hindley, which Hindley confirmed in her book were part of a system for recording where all the bodies were buried.

The documentary, based on Staff’s newly-revised book, will feature black and white photos taken by the couple on their trips to the Moors, which they kept in a tartan-covered album.

The programme suggests the photographs could be “grave markers”, and potentially significant in the ongoing search for Keith Bennett’s body.

Some show a Staffordshire beauty spot, Ramshaw Rocks, miles from Saddleworth Moor.

While Staff’s keen not to draw a direct link between the pictures and the location of Bennett’s body, he thinks the police ought to at least look there.

“I think his body can be found, but all the possible lines of inquiry need to be examined by the police. At the moment, there’s a divide between the police and experts like Professor John Hunter, the country’s leading forensic archaeologist, who wants active searches to take place, and things like the Ramshaw Rocks photos to be looked at and eliminated.

“Nobody’s saying there are definitely bodies there, but what is being said is, ‘You know there are grave markers in one location, and here you have a set of pictures which are almost identical and you haven’t searched’.”

The case has been formally closed and handed over to the cold case review team, or the ‘New Tricks’ section, of Greater Manchester Police, who will only dig for a body if they’re given a very specific location.

Prof Hunter, who regularly works on tricky high-profile cases, has helped the Bennett family over the years by leading digs on Saddleworth Moor, focusing on an area called Shiny Brook, a favourite picnic spot of Hindley and Brady.

“He’s saying the only way you can find Keith Bennett is by doing an invasive search of Saddleworth Moor, in a particular area, and that’s based on material that’s been sent to me by Hindley,” Staff says, matter-of-factly.

“In her unpublished autobiography, there are references to local children being taken to picnic in this particular spot, and what Hunter’s saying is there’s enough things to take you to this area – you need to do an invasive search.”

Such a search would cost tens of thousands of pounds and the police are reluctant, having had their fingers burnt by negative publicity when they took Brady and Hindley separately to the Moors on previous failed missions to find Bennett, even though a vital clue from Hindley led them to find the body of Pauline Reade.

Staff is “sympathetic” to the difficulties faced by the police.

“The minute you start searching, there’s an expectation that you’re going to find, and then if you don’t find, the risk is that you’re seen as having failed, which is completely unfair.”

But he adds: “Brady is saying there are more bodies, which may be rubbish. It might not be, but as long as you don’t work on the case, you leave him in charge. It’s about taking control away from Brady and denying him the satisfaction of taking that knowledge to his grave.”

Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson died last August, without having been able to give her son a proper burial. Keith was just 12 when he was abducted, in June 1964.

After her funeral (she was buried with Keith’s glasses), her son Alan, Keith’s brother, said: “Until Keith is found, he is still in the possession of Brady and Hindley. Our fear as a family is that now my mother is no longer with us, this may be seen by the police and the media as some sort of closure to the case. This must not be allowed to happen.”

Alan has since launched an internet petition (www.searchingforkeith.com), appealing for a new search so he can give his brother “a Christian burial”.

Staff notes that of the 200 photos he has which were taken by Brady and Hindley, a lot show Staffordshire.

“What Malcolm MacCulloch says is you can’t assume that just because they’ve done everything in one way, that they’ve done it the same way on this killing.

“They had intended to dispose of Edward Evans at a place in Staffordshire and at the last minute they changed it to Derbyshire, so it’s not like Saddleworth Moor was their only disposal site.”

The case was thrown into the spotlight last month when Ian Brady appeared by videolink at a mental health tribunal at Ashworth high-security hospital, where he has been held since 1985.

The 75-year-old, who has apparently been on hunger strike since 1999, appeared with his feeding tube attached to argue his case to be returned to prison, where he wouldn’t be tube-fed.

“Keith Bennett’s family want him alive, because then there’s a chance, however small, that he might willingly or unwittingly divulge some piece of information that could help them find Keith,” says Staff.

Staff has seen passages of a book co-written by Brady, to be published on his death, in which he claims there are nine more bodies.

“It could be that’s just his game-playing and grandstanding and messing people around again, or it could be there’s more in it,” says the journalist.

“A forensic psychiatrist will say it’s possible there are more, because the man was a psychopathic serial killer, and there was a gap in the sequence of murders.

“They killed every six months but, between the last two murders, there’s a gap of a year.

“No one can say there are more bodies, but given the fact Keith Bennett hasn’t been found, and there are still things that can be searched, I would argue that should be done.”

The Lost Boy: The Definitive Story Of The Moors Murders by Duncan Staff is published by Bantam Books, priced £6.99. Available now

Brady And Hindley: Possession is on ITV on Thursday, July 11