# 33: The Moors Murders (Ian Brady & Myra Hindley) Part 3

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 8 Aug 2023, 1 h 03 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880351/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851612-44100-2-b988b7e2252958a3.mp3

Today's episode is the final part of the Moors Murders case which was carried out by UK serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Trigger Warning: child death, disappearance, sexual assault Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Ellen
[0:09] O'Neill, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the
[0:12] most notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] So today's video is going to be Part 3, the final part of the
[0:43] Mars Murder series on Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
[0:46] Just for a little recap on parts one and two, if you did see
[0:49] those, Myra Hindley met Ian Brady and they decided that they
[0:53] would commit the perfect crime together.
[0:55] The perfect crime would be to abduct and murder a child so
[1:00] well, leaving no evidence and no links to themselves that they
[1:03] would never get caught. And they believed that they had
[1:06] done this successfully. And when it seemed just they'd
[1:09] gotten away with that first murder, they decided to go out
[1:12] and commit three more. And these were on 12 year old
[1:15] John Kilbride, 12 year old Keith Bennett, and 10 year old Leslie
[1:19] and Downey. All the while they were keeping
[1:21] souvenirs of these murders. They were taking pictures and
[1:25] audio recordings. And after every single murder,
[1:28] they would bury the bodies on saddle with more.
[1:31] In Part 2, we were also introduced to David Smith, which
[1:34] is Myra's brother-in-law, her sister Maureen's husband.
[1:37] And David Smith seems to have a lot in common with Ian Brady.
[1:40] They had very similar childhoods and David Smith is considerably
[1:44] younger than Brady and he really looks up to him and Brady likes
[1:48] that he can easily manipulate David Smith.
[1:50] And that is where the last video left off.
[1:53] Ian Brady and Myra Hindley had just committed their 4th murder.
[1:57] A couple of days after the murder of Leslie Ann Downey,
[2:00] Hindley and Brady's next door neighbor Patty, the little 10
[2:03] year old girl, came round and noticed a newspaper on the side.
[2:08] And this newspaper must have had a picture of Leslie Ann Downey
[2:11] in it. And Patty just mentioned to
[2:13] Hindley and Brady that that was her friend.
[2:16] Not her friend, but she played with her before she knew of
[2:19] Leslie Ann Downey. And so Hindley and Brady decided
[2:23] to play dumb. They pretended that they hadn't
[2:26] ever heard of this disappearance, and they asked
[2:28] Patty to read this article out to them.
[2:31] So Patty sat and read this whole article about her missing friend
[2:36] to Hindley and Brady, not knowing that she was reading it
[2:39] to the people that had murdered her.
[2:42] Leslie's mother put out a £100 reward for her safe return,
[2:46] which is about 2000 lbs in today's money, and she never
[2:50] touched Leslie's bedroom again after that, and the bedroom
[2:54] stayed preserved for as long as they had that house.
[2:56] They never touched or moved anything.
[2:58] It was all as Leslie left it. Around a month later, Brady and
[3:03] Hindley planned a trip to Scotland.
[3:05] Something that they often did because of course, Brady was
[3:09] originally from Glasgow in Scotland and he just loved the
[3:12] kind of landscapes there. There was a lot of mountainy,
[3:16] hilly Moors kind of areas. And this particular time they
[3:20] asked their next door neighbor, 10 year old Patty, if she wanted
[3:25] to come with them. Before the trip, however,
[3:27] Patty's mother decided that she didn't really want her daughter
[3:30] to go and so Hindley and Brady just went alone.
[3:33] I personally don't think that Hindley and Brady would have
[3:36] done anything to Patty at any point in this case.
[3:40] It was weird. Hindley and Brady had some
[3:42] children that they liked and that they, you know, were nice
[3:46] to, but then they had the complete other end of the
[3:49] spectrum. They had children that they
[3:51] would abuse and torture and murder like the neighborhood
[3:55] kids. They never hurt any of the
[3:57] children in their neighborhood or Patty.
[4:00] Patty was like their best friend.
[4:02] I just find it really baffling what the kind of deciding factor
[4:06] between a child that they like is and what a child that they
[4:09] don't like is. But before long, Brady and
[4:12] Hindley friendship with Patty was cut short because Brady
[4:17] actually caught Patty climbing over their fence once and he
[4:21] believed that she was trying to steal things from her garden.
[4:24] And he said if he caught her doing that again, he would break
[4:27] her neck. And from that point on, she
[4:29] never spoke with them again. She never went round to the
[4:31] house. She avoided them at all costs.
[4:34] Then in April of 1965, Maureen and David Smith's baby Angela
[4:39] actually passed away at the age of 6 months.
[4:42] It was very sudden. They found out that she had
[4:44] bronchitis that morning and she died later that afternoon.
[4:48] David Smith was at work when he found out.
[4:51] Well, not when he found out that she'd passed away.
[4:54] He was at work and Maureen called him to come to the
[4:57] hospital. He came to the hospital and he
[4:59] was informed that his daughter had passed away.
[5:02] And David flew into a rage. He was angry.
[5:07] Not anything in specific. He was just angry at the world.
[5:10] That the universe could give him a daughter, and that he could
[5:13] love her so dearly and then they could just RIP her from him.
[5:17] He was furious. He completely trashed the whole
[5:21] hospital room that he was in. He was throwing things, he was
[5:24] punching walls, he was slamming doors.
[5:26] And then once that kind of subsided, he was full of sorrow.
[5:31] He didn't stop crying. He was a mess.
[5:33] He was hyperventilating. He was so emotionally moved by
[5:39] the death of his child. Of course, as most people will
[5:41] be, but that's an unusual thing to hear of in this case.
[5:45] And then one day when he was back at home in the days
[5:48] following his daughters death, he saw one of her belongings on
[5:52] the side. And again he flew into this
[5:54] rage. All he could think about were
[5:56] the good times. He could think about her smiling
[5:58] and her laughing and how he was never going to see that again.
[6:02] And so he grabbed all of the things that were once hers.
[6:07] All of her clothes, all of her toys, everything that reminded
[6:10] him of her, and he put it all in a suitcase.
[6:13] He then drove the suitcase out to a bridge and threw the
[6:17] suitcase off of it so that he never had to be reminded of what
[6:21] he lost ever again. Brady and Hindley on the other
[6:25] hand, of course it wasn't their baby, but it was their niece and
[6:29] they seemed unmoved by the whole situation.
[6:32] They were. They didn't care.
[6:33] They showed some fake sympathy. Brady quickly got really annoyed
[6:39] at people still talking about this baby.
[6:41] Like it had been days, it had been weeks, and people were
[6:43] still talking about this baby. He obviously didn't have any
[6:47] kind of connection to this child or understand a parental
[6:50] connection to a child. The funeral took place shortly
[6:54] after her death and Brady was the same at the funeral.
[6:57] He showed some fake sympathy and then for the rest of it he was
[6:59] completely emotionless. And Hindley was the same at
[7:04] first, but I think she was caught off guard.
[7:07] She wasn't expecting it to be an open coffin.
[7:10] And when she got up to the coffin and she saw her baby
[7:13] niece laying there lifeless, her eyes started to well up, but she
[7:18] didn't shed a tear. But it did start to smudge her
[7:22] makeup a little bit under her eyes.
[7:24] And she quickly tried to, like, fix it and, you know, pretend
[7:27] like she wasn't affected by it. But David Smith and Maureen did
[7:32] notice that Myra started almost crying.
[7:36] And she told them, don't tell Brady.
[7:37] And she went to the bathroom. She fixed her makeup and then
[7:40] went back out to the car to see Brady.
[7:42] She didn't want him to know that she had emotions, especially
[7:47] towards children. And then that night after the
[7:50] funeral, Brady and Hindley invited Maureen and David on a
[7:54] trip to Saddleworth Moore, which they thought was a nice gesture.
[7:58] They were taking them out there to clear their head, to get them
[8:01] away, to distract them from the whole situation.
[8:04] But that is even more sick and twisted from Hindley and Brady
[8:08] to take a couple that are mourning their recently passed
[8:12] away child to the grave sites of four other children.
[8:17] While they were up on the Moors, Myra suggested to her sister
[8:20] Maureen that she just get a dog rather than another child.
[8:24] As usual, Brady and David separated from the girls and
[8:28] they went and they sat on this particular piece of grass that
[8:31] Brady chose and they looked up at the stars and Brady just said
[8:36] look up at the stars. Just be silent for a bit.
[8:39] Clear your head. And they did, and they sat there
[8:41] for a good few minutes and then eventually went back to the van.
[8:44] But what David Smith didn't know at the time was that Ian Brady
[8:47] had taken him to that very specific spot because they were
[8:51] sitting on the shallow grave of John Kilbride as they were
[8:55] looking up at the stars. In the months following the
[8:57] baby's passing, the group only grew closer.
[9:00] However, this meant that the girls grew closer and the men
[9:04] grew closer. It was never really a four kind
[9:08] of thing. Whenever they met up, they would
[9:09] always split off into their pairs.
[9:11] And this meant that Myra's jealousy for David Smith just
[9:15] grew. Brady began doing even more
[9:17] things with David that only he and Hindley ever did.
[9:22] They would start planning crimes together, only little ones like
[9:25] petty theft and, you know, vandalism and stuff like that.
[9:28] But that was something that was Hindley and Brady's.
[9:32] David Smith was relatively poor. And planning all of these thefts
[9:37] and burglaries with Ian Brady gave him not only a distraction
[9:42] from his sorrow that he was feeling about his baby and, you
[9:46] know, some excitement and adrenaline in his life, but he
[9:50] also really needed that money. He was desperate for the money.
[9:53] Eventually, Ian Brady asked David Smith how he would feel
[9:58] about robbing a bank. It was like Ian Brady had
[10:00] groomed him to this point. He obviously, if you enter into
[10:05] a friendship with someone and you say, would you rob a bank
[10:07] with me, of course they're going to say no because that's insane.
[10:10] But Ian had brought up the topic of crimes and, you know, general
[10:16] dark stuff so many times with David Smith that he was used to
[10:20] it and he was confident talking about it.
[10:23] And he knew that Ian Brady wasn't messing about.
[10:26] He knew that Ian Brady was serious about robbing a bank.
[10:30] Brady even got David Smith to do extensive research on this one
[10:34] particular bank that they were planning to rob.
[10:37] He got him to make a list of all the employees and all their
[10:40] hours and when they would get particular deliveries.
[10:44] And one day, David Smith presented Ian Brady with all of
[10:47] this information that he had been collecting from his
[10:50] research of this bank. And Ian Brady looked at it and
[10:53] he goes, but we're not going to rob it.
[10:55] I don't think Ian Brady ever really intended on robbing a
[10:58] bank. Ian didn't really care for
[10:59] money. That was more of an initiation
[11:02] for David Smith so that Ian Brady could tell that he was
[11:05] serious and that he was willing to do the work and that he was
[11:08] willing to commit huge crimes with him.
[11:11] He now knew that he could introduce David Smith to their
[11:16] world. And after this point, every time
[11:18] Brady saw David Smith, he would increase the intensity of their
[11:23] conversations about crime and stuff, eventually moving on to
[11:28] rape and murder. And this increase in intensity
[11:32] didn't seem to face David Smith at all.
[11:35] He seemed as though he would go along with anything at this
[11:38] point. And so the next time he saw
[11:39] David, Brady decided to confess to having murdered someone.
[11:45] However, David didn't believe him.
[11:48] And this really angered Ian Brady.
[11:51] Brady was offended. It was like David didn't think
[11:54] he was capable of committing murder.
[11:56] It was like he didn't think he was capable of getting away with
[11:59] it. He wasn't intelligent enough.
[12:00] He wasn't powerful enough. And so Brady began proving are
[12:04] trying to prove that he had murdered someone.
[12:06] He was yelling saying he had photographic proof, he had audio
[12:10] proof. He was saying he took David to
[12:12] the grave sites without him even knowing.
[12:14] He was sat on top of one of his murder victims.
[12:18] Brady had previously said to Hindley after they murdered
[12:21] Leslie Ann Downey that that was it.
[12:22] That was the last one he wasn't interested in doing anymore.
[12:26] He'd already proved to himself that he could, and so now he
[12:30] just wasn't interested. He proved to himself that he
[12:32] could get away with it and that was the only reason he was
[12:35] killing. He didn't kill because he
[12:38] enjoyed killing. Well, I'm sure that was a factor
[12:40] in it, of course, but that wasn't his sole motive, and so
[12:45] he wasn't really interested in killing anymore.
[12:47] That was until he needed to prove himself.
[12:50] David didn't believe that he was capable of murder, and Brady
[12:53] knew that he was, and he knew that he had to prove this, and
[12:57] so he had to commit another murder.
[13:00] On October 6th, 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley would commit
[13:05] their 5th and final murder. Although something I have kept
[13:09] out of this story the whole time is that they had way more
[13:13] attempts than just five. They attempted to murder a
[13:16] couple of children, but we'll talk about that at the end, the
[13:20] survivors of the Mars murders. So anyway, on this particular
[13:23] day, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley drove to the local railway
[13:27] station because Ian Brady liked to keep a suitcase full of
[13:33] incriminating evidence in the lockers at the railway station.
[13:37] Stuff like the audio recordings and the photographs and stuff
[13:41] like that. Notebooks that had certain
[13:43] things in, like he didn't want to keep that stuff around the
[13:47] house just just in case police came round and searched it.
[13:50] He wanted that stuff out of the house at all times.
[13:53] So they went to the railway station either to get something
[13:56] out or to put something in. And when he was there, Ian Brady
[13:59] tried to go to the shop to buy some wine.
[14:01] But when he tried to open the door, it was locked, wasn't
[14:04] moving. And that was when a guy standing
[14:07] close by shouted to him saying, oh, it's closed.
[14:09] Ian Brady turned to this boy and he struck up a conversation and
[14:13] he found out that this was 17 year old Edward Evans.
[14:24] Now it's rumoured that Ian Brady and Edward Evans had actually
[14:28] met before at a gay bar, although some people don't
[14:31] believe that, some people do. Edward Evans, like I said, was a
[14:35] 17 year old boy, born and raised in Manchester.
[14:38] He had two siblings and he had a very normal life.
[14:42] That evening, he was actually supposed to be meeting a friend
[14:45] to go to a football game, but the friend never showed up.
[14:47] So he went to the football game alone.
[14:49] And that was why he was in the railway station.
[14:52] He'd just come back from that football game alone.
[14:54] Brady began speaking with Edward and flirting with him a little
[14:58] bit, and then he invited him back to his house and Edward
[15:03] said OK. They went out to the car where
[15:05] Myra was in the driver's seat. She was the only one that could
[15:07] drive. And Ian Brady opened the car
[15:10] door to let Edward Evans in and said, oh, this is my sister
[15:14] Myra. So they got back to the house
[15:16] that Ian and Myra shared with Myra's grandmother, who I will
[15:21] say right now is in the house the whole time.
[15:24] They all got out of the car and Brady and Edward Evans began
[15:28] walking towards the house and Brady turned to Myra and said go
[15:32] get David Smith. It was now like 11:00 PM and
[15:36] Myra walked all the way to Maureen and David's house and
[15:40] knocked on the door. The two of them were actually in
[15:42] bed at the time. So Myra woke them up and they
[15:45] came to the door. And Myra, she basically just
[15:48] needed a reason to knock on the door.
[15:50] She told Maureen something about how her grandmother couldn't see
[15:54] her for the next couple of days, but she could see her anytime
[15:57] next week. Honestly, not something that
[16:00] Maureen needed to know at 11:00 PM.
[16:02] And Maureen said that she was like, couldn't that have waited?
[16:04] Why did you have to come and wake me up at 11:00 PM to tell
[16:06] me that? And Myra just came up with
[16:09] something on the spot. And then she said, can David
[16:12] walk me back home because it's late, it's dark, and I don't
[16:15] feel safe walking home alone. And so that was how she got
[16:19] David out of the house without bringing Maureen.
[16:22] Now, from this point on, not only do we have two different
[16:26] version of events like we always do, Hindley's and Brady's, but
[16:30] now we have David Smith's. Now, Hindley and Brady say that
[16:34] David Smith knew exactly what was going on that night.
[16:38] He knew that Myra Hindley would be coming to knock on the door
[16:41] to come and get him to walk her home because he was about to be
[16:45] involved in the murders and they said that he knew that and he
[16:49] was willing. Although David Smith on the
[16:51] other hand claims he knew absolutely nothing and that he
[16:54] was asleep and that he woke up and thought that Hindley just
[16:58] needed someone to walk her home. Anyway, on the walk home,
[17:01] Hindley offered David Smith a bottle of wine that they had at
[17:05] their house and she said that she would get it as soon as he
[17:08] walked her home. So this is David Smith's version
[17:10] of events, by the way. So as soon as they got to the
[17:13] house, David says that he and Myra went into the kitchen to
[17:16] get these bottles of wine. And then in a matter of minutes,
[17:19] David claims he heard banging and shouting and swearing
[17:23] outside in the living room. And so Hindley shouted to him
[17:26] saying you should go help him. So he burst into the living room
[17:30] and there he sees Ian Brady straddling Edward Evans with an
[17:34] axe in his hand, repeatedly hitting him.
[17:38] He claims he just stood there frozen.
[17:40] He didn't know what to do. He didn't say anything, He
[17:42] didn't move, he didn't he didn't do anything.
[17:45] And he watched as Brady repeatedly hit Edward Evans with
[17:49] this axe and then eventually strangle him to death.
[17:52] After the murder took place, David remembers thinking to
[17:55] himself that he has now got to go along with anything that
[17:59] Brady and Hindley want him to go along with because he now knew
[18:04] that Ian Brady was capable of murder and he could easily meet
[18:07] the same fate that Edward Evans just had.
[18:09] David said that Brady ordered Hindley to go into the kitchen
[18:13] and get some cleaning products and start cleaning the blood off
[18:16] the walls and off the carpet. Brady then asked David Smith to
[18:20] help him with the body. At first they picked him up and
[18:23] took him up to the bedroom and then kind of like wrapped him in
[18:26] some plastic. David recalls Myra Hindley being
[18:29] rather excited about the whole thing.
[18:31] She kept talking about how his eyes looked like they had fear
[18:35] in them and the noises from when his head hit the floor and
[18:39] stuff. David Smith said that it was
[18:41] mainly him and Myra that were doing the cleanup efforts,
[18:43] cleaning the carpets and stuff, while Ian Brady just kind of
[18:46] paraded around the house with the axe in his hand, talking
[18:49] about how heavy the axe was and how brutal of a murder he just
[18:54] committed. David recalls looking at Myra
[18:56] and not being able to understand how or why she was so calm about
[19:01] all this. She was just picking up pieces
[19:04] of hair, pieces of flesh and pieces of bone from the carpet
[19:08] and just putting them in the bin.
[19:09] She wasn't disgusted by it. She wasn't, you know, it was
[19:12] like, it was just like a wrapper off the floor that she was just
[19:15] throwing in the bin. And bear in mind, like I said
[19:18] earlier, Hindley's grandmother was asleep upstairs the whole
[19:21] time. In the early hours of the
[19:23] morning, David Smith went back home to Maureen.
[19:26] He set off walking and then halfway through he began running
[19:31] home because he just, he was so overwhelmed and he didn't know
[19:34] what to do and he was scared and he just wanted to get home and
[19:37] he just wanted to tell Maureen or call the police or anything.
[19:40] As soon as he got in, though, he couldn't even go in and tell
[19:42] Maureen. He immediately ran to the
[19:44] bathroom and threw up because of what he'd just witnessed.
[19:48] So Maureen went into the bathroom and asked him if he was
[19:51] alright, like what was going on and everything.
[19:54] And David Smith just breaks down and tells her everything that
[19:58] just happened. And Maureen kind of found it a
[20:03] bit hard to believe at first. Of course, it was her sister,
[20:06] and she didn't think that her sister would be capable of that.
[20:09] But he had to sit there and say, no, your sister was complicit in
[20:15] the whole thing. She wanted to do it.
[20:17] So they both decided that they needed to call the police, but
[20:20] they didn't want to do it right then and there because David
[20:23] Smith was actually scared that maybe.
[20:25] Hindley and Brady had followed him home and they didn't have a
[20:29] landline at the house at this point.
[20:31] A lot of families didn't. And so they would have to go out
[20:34] and go and call the police from a pay phone.
[20:36] And they didn't want to go outside.
[20:38] They locked the doors and they stayed in for the rest of the
[20:40] night. But obviously they couldn't
[20:42] sleep. They couldn't really talk about
[20:44] anything other than the murder because it's all they could
[20:47] think about. Eventually morning came round,
[20:49] the sun came out, people started going to work.
[20:51] And so the two of them grabbed weapons and went to a local
[20:56] payphone and called the police on their own sister and
[21:00] brother-in-law. So now before I get into like
[21:03] the police stuff and everything, I just want to tell Brady's
[21:08] version of events because like I said, there's three different
[21:10] versions of events in the whole thing.
[21:12] So Brady says that Hindley and David arrived at the door.
[21:15] They knocked on the door and he pointed them in the direction of
[21:19] the kitchen and shouted loud enough so that Edward Evans
[21:22] could hear upstairs. He shouted to them all the wines
[21:25] in the kitchen. He then brought Edward Evans
[21:28] downstairs and killed him on the living room floor.
[21:31] And the noise was so loud that it actually woke up Myra
[21:34] Hindley's grandmother. And Myra actually shouted up to
[21:37] her at one point. Don't worry, go back to bed.
[21:39] It's nothing. After the murder took place,
[21:41] Brady, Hindley and David Smith all sat down and devised a plan
[21:46] on how they were going to dispose of this body and
[21:49] continue on afterwards. Brady had actually injured his
[21:53] ankle in this attack and so he knew that he wouldn't be able to
[21:56] transport the body to and from the car and up to the more as he
[22:00] normally would. And so Brady claims that David
[22:03] Smith suggested that they use his baby's old pram.
[22:08] He said that he would go home and then the next morning he
[22:12] would bring his now deceased baby's pram back to the house
[22:17] with him. They would tie the body up in a
[22:20] fetal position and pack it into this pram, put a blanket over it
[22:25] and then take it up onto the mall.
[22:26] And so that's exactly what they did.
[22:28] David Smith and Ian Brady both tied up this body into the fetal
[22:33] position. You didn't ropes and everything
[22:35] so that it would be ready for the next morning.
[22:37] Now, Hindley's version of events is that she just stayed in the
[22:40] kitchen the whole time. She didn't witness any of the
[22:42] murder. She didn't see anything.
[22:44] She heard it all from the next room, but she didn't go in.
[22:47] She didn't see anything. And what's interesting about
[22:49] this is that Brady actually backs her up on that.
[22:52] That's the first and only time he does it.
[22:54] In this whole case, they were questioned separately and they
[22:57] both gave the same version of events of that night.
[22:59] I don't know. I find it hard to believe that
[23:01] Brady would lie at this point. He's implicated in every single
[23:05] other murder when she was trying to say that she wasn't there.
[23:09] So why wouldn't he do it in this one?
[23:11] I don't know, I find it very confusing.
[23:13] But also, why would David lie? Because in David's version of
[23:17] events, Myra was talking about the look in Edward Evans eyes
[23:21] and the sound his head made when it hit the floor.
[23:24] So one of them's lying. Either David Smith is lying
[23:28] about the things that Myra said afterwards, or Brady and Hindley
[23:31] are both lying about where she was at the time of the murder.
[23:34] So anyway, the next morning David Smith tells police
[23:38] everything about the night before.
[23:40] But not only that, he also says that he believes Ian Brady is
[23:44] responsible for more than just the one murder.
[23:48] When Ian got really mad at David for not believing that he
[23:52] committed more murders, David told police that Ian told him
[23:57] that he had buried bodies on the Moors.
[23:59] Does that make sense? David told police that Brady
[24:03] took him up to the grave sites of some murdered children, so a
[24:08] lot of police were sent to Hindley and Brady's home.
[24:12] There were a lot of police cars, although only one of them was
[24:17] parked in front of the house. The other ones kind of stayed
[24:20] out of the view of like the house and the windows that
[24:24] Hindley and Brady could see out of.
[24:26] They wanted to be there just in case Hindley and Brady tried to
[24:29] run and they needed backup. But they also didn't want to
[24:31] scare Hindley and Brady. Imagine you are a serial killer.
[24:36] I believe I just said that. Imagine you're a serial killer
[24:38] though, and you're sitting in your living room and immediately
[24:40] 15 police cars all pull up in front of the house.
[24:43] You know what they're there for, you know they've caught you and
[24:47] you're going to try and run. But if it's just one police car,
[24:49] it could be anything anywhere, or all the other police cars
[24:52] stood at the end of the road anywhere.
[24:53] And one police officer went and knocked on the back door and
[24:57] Myra Hindley answered. He said to Hindley, or is your
[25:00] husband in? And Myra Hindley said, I don't
[25:02] have a husband. So this officer says, look, I'm
[25:05] a police officer and I have reason to believe that there is
[25:08] a man in this house. And Myra Hindley said there's no
[25:11] man in this house. He tried asking a few more
[25:13] questions to Myra, but she was very dismissive.
[25:15] She was very blunt. And so eventually this officer
[25:18] just pushed past her, pushed straight into the house.
[25:20] And as he did, Myra said to him, he's in the other room.
[25:24] And so this officer walks into the living room and there he
[25:26] sees Ian Brady sitting on the sofa, like reclined, like he's
[25:32] relaxing. He's writing a letter and he
[25:34] doesn't even look up from from this letter that he's writing
[25:38] and police start pouring into this house.
[25:41] Police had a look around the house.
[25:42] They looked in Myras grandmothers bedroom.
[25:44] They found her grandmother and then they tried to get into
[25:46] Myras bedroom but then they noticed the door was locked.
[25:49] They asked Myra where the key was and she said she left it at
[25:52] work. And so the officers were like,
[25:55] well, let's go get it then. And she was she was making up
[25:58] all these different excuses about like how she can't
[26:01] remember where she put it at work and stuff.
[26:03] And then Ian Brady, the irritable man that he was,
[26:06] looked up from his letter. He was getting really annoyed
[26:09] about all this back and forth about this bloody key.
[26:11] And so he looks up and just says to Myra, you'd better go unlock
[26:14] it. He then turned to one of the
[26:16] police officers and said fight got out of hand last night, It's
[26:20] upstairs, it being the body of Edward Evans.
[26:23] And that was basically him setting up the cover story that
[26:27] he and Hindley would go on about that night.
[26:30] That was him saying to Hindley if they ask, say it was a fight
[26:34] that got out of hand. So they go upstairs, Myra
[26:37] unlocks the door and lets police in and immediately they find the
[26:41] body of Edward Evans tied up in the fetal position.
[26:45] Police immediately arrested Ian Brady, but not Myra Hindley for
[26:49] some reason they just took Hindley and her grandmother to a
[26:52] different place while they searched the house.
[26:54] Ian told police that he got into an argument with Edward Evans
[26:58] and this argument turned into a fight and this fight just got
[27:02] out of hand and he ended up killing him.
[27:05] But Edward's body was taken for an autopsy and it was found that
[27:08] he had 14 different wounds on his body plus his cause of death
[27:15] with strangulation. Now that is not a fight that got
[27:18] out of hand. You don't go that insane on
[27:22] another human being in a fight gone wrong.
[27:24] Myra Hindley was later questioned and she was asked
[27:27] what happened and what went on and she simply said I don't know
[27:31] and I'm not saying anything. Ian's story is my story.
[27:34] She did however, implicate David Smith in this murder a lot,
[27:39] repeatedly and she wouldn't stop.
[27:42] Everything was David's fault to Myra Hindley.
[27:44] Of course, she never liked the man, and as soon as she saw her
[27:47] opportunity, she was trying to get this man put away and sent
[27:52] away from her sister. Meanwhile, police were searching
[27:55] Brady and Hindley's home, all their possessions, their car,
[27:59] and they found some insane evidence.
[28:03] In Myra's car they found a brown wallet and when they opened that
[28:06] they found a few scraps of paper written in Ian Brady's
[28:10] handwriting and the things on these pieces of paper seemed to
[28:13] be in instructions on how to get away with murder.
[28:18] There were things like how to clean a gun and how to dispose
[28:21] of a body, how to dig a deep enough hole, how to clean an
[28:26] axe. In the house they found and
[28:28] seized a photo album. They seized the letter that Ian
[28:31] was writing that morning when police broke in.
[28:33] It was actually a letter to his boss telling him that Ian
[28:37] wouldn't be in that day, obviously because he planned on
[28:40] disposing of Edward Evans body. They also found Ian Brady's
[28:44] notebook that had a lot of interesting little things in it.
[28:48] It had a lot of drawings of like fields which are presumably the
[28:53] Moors. It had strange little phrases in
[28:55] it, like stone by the brook, which was later theorized to
[29:00] mean the resting place of John Kilbride because it was by a
[29:06] Little River and there was a stone nearby, like a big kind of
[29:10] boulder thing. But something that really
[29:12] alarmed police about this notebook was that Ian Brady had
[29:15] straight up written John Kilbride in this notebook
[29:19] multiple times. And why was Ian Brady, an almost
[29:23] 30 year old man, writing this 12 year old boy's name in his
[29:26] notebook? It's not like they knew each
[29:28] other before Kilbride went missing.
[29:31] And at this point, police were putting two and two together.
[29:34] They had David Smith saying that he thinks that Ian Brady is
[29:38] responsible for multiple murders.
[29:40] They have a connection between Brady and John Kilbride.
[29:42] They don't know what the connection is.
[29:44] But why would this 30 year old man be writing this 12 year old
[29:47] boy's name all over his notebook if it didn't mean something?
[29:51] So police went to speak with David Smith again because it was
[29:54] clear that he was on the right track.
[29:56] And they decided to talk to him a little bit more about the
[29:58] Edward Evans murder because that's the one that he
[30:01] witnessed. And at one point during this,
[30:03] David Smith makes a passing comment about how he believed
[30:06] Ian Brady picked up Edward Evans from the railway station.
[30:10] Now, this is something that he hadn't mentioned before because
[30:13] he didn't think it to be important, but police really
[30:16] latched on to that. So police decided it might be
[30:18] worth going to the railway station and speaking with staff
[30:22] or anyone that was there regularly that might have seen
[30:27] Ian Brady. So police went up to this one
[30:29] particular staff member and they mentioned the name Ian Brady.
[30:32] And immediately this staff member recognized the name.
[30:35] They went to the log book and realized that an Ian Brady had
[30:40] rented a locker in the railway station and was still currently
[30:44] using it. And so they went and used the
[30:46] master key to unlock it. And in this locker they found
[30:50] two big suitcases. So they took these suitcases
[30:53] back to the police station and opened them.
[30:56] And in them they found a lot of incriminating evidence.
[30:59] There were more photo books, some photos of children, some
[31:03] photos of Brady and Hindley on the Moors.
[31:05] There were knives. There was Myra's black wig.
[31:08] There was the tape recorder and the tapes from Leslie and
[31:12] Downey's murder. And immediately, as soon as
[31:14] police played that tape recording in the office, they
[31:18] knew that they were listening to Ian Brady commit murder.
[31:28] At this point, police have theorized that Ian Brady and
[31:32] Myra Hindley were potentially responsible for or connected to
[31:37] 8 different disappearances. Now spoiler alert, three of them
[31:41] were wrong and they could never find any evidence for and no
[31:45] one's ever found any evidence for, so they don't think that
[31:48] Myra and Ian were connected to those.
[31:51] But the other five were the five murders that they did commit.
[31:56] And of course one of those was Leslie Ann Downey, a little 10
[31:59] year old girl. And as soon as they heard this
[32:01] tape, they knew it was a little girl.
[32:03] And so they went and played it for Leslie Ann Downey mother,
[32:06] and she confirmed the the voice on that tape was her daughter.
[32:10] And a few pictures in those photo albums were also confirmed
[32:14] to have been pictures of Leslie, the ones that they were taking
[32:17] as they were recording that audio.
[32:20] Meanwhile, as all of this was going on, as police were looking
[32:23] for evidence for the other murders, Ian Brady was charged
[32:27] with the murder of Edward Evans, although Myra was still free as
[32:32] ever. And when she heard that Brady
[32:34] was charged with Edward Evans murder, she took it on herself
[32:38] to burn any evidence that she could get her hands on.
[32:42] She burned a full notebook, some photos, some undeveloped photos
[32:46] and a list, Brady said. I don't know what this list was
[32:51] of. She, of course, didn't manage to
[32:53] get to the locker in time before police found it, so she didn't
[32:57] manage to burn the tape recording or anything like that.
[33:00] But she did manage to burn a lot of things to do with Keith
[33:04] Bennett's murder. So pretty much all the pictures
[33:07] that they'd taken on top of his grave, they were gone.
[33:10] Literally all the notes that they'd taken, everything to do
[33:14] with Keith Bennett's murder was gone.
[33:15] So now police were piercing this whole thing together.
[33:18] They had to connect to Leslie Ann Downey.
[33:20] They had a connection to John Kilbride, they had a connection
[33:22] to Edward Evans, but they couldn't find a connection to
[33:25] Pauline Reed or Keith Bennett. And so they called back in David
[33:29] Smith because they remembered what he said about the Moors and
[33:33] how Brady had once told him that he was sat on the grave of a
[33:36] child. And so they brought him back in
[33:39] to try and, you know, think about that a little bit more.
[33:42] As police were searching these photo albums, they also noticed
[33:45] that a lot of them were taken in big grassy areas, potentially
[33:50] settle with more. And so connecting these two
[33:52] things together, they felt that Saddleworth Moor was a good
[33:56] place to look. Most of the photos seemed to
[33:59] have been taken in the same places, so it wasn't like they
[34:03] were all just random parts of the Moors.
[34:05] Like there would be 1 particular like rock that was in every
[34:10] single picture and they'd be wearing different outfits in the
[34:13] pictures. So they were on different days,
[34:14] they seemed to be going to particular spots to take
[34:17] pictures on different days. And so police sent out a search
[34:21] party on to Saddleworth Moor to go and try and find these
[34:25] specific spots, the one that David Smith could describe as
[34:29] the one that Brady took him to and sat him on that day.
[34:32] They were also looking for the ones in the pictures, but also
[34:35] they took out the neighborhood children, including Patty to see
[34:41] if they remembered anything in particular because Brady and
[34:44] Hindley would take all the neighborhood kids to the malls.
[34:47] So they thought maybe they SAT the kids on top of one of the
[34:51] graves. The search of the Mars was to be
[34:53] a long and tedious process. But in the meantime, five days
[34:58] after the murder of Edward Evans, Myra Hindley was finally
[35:02] arrested as an accessory to murder and this was later
[35:06] changed to just murder and she was charged with his murder as
[35:09] well. At one point before the trials,
[35:12] Ian somehow managed to get a handwritten letter to Myra
[35:15] Hindley. And in this letter, he was
[35:19] weirdly affectionate, something that he never really was.
[35:22] And people think this was to keep her sweet so that she
[35:26] didn't, like, turn against him and, you know, say things that
[35:30] incriminate him even more, as if he wasn't incriminated enough.
[35:33] But in this letter, he was comparing him and Myra to a
[35:38] famous Nazi couple that stuck together even when they were
[35:41] both being like, turned against each other.
[35:44] They stuck together. They never ratted each other
[35:46] out. He wrote in this letter that he
[35:48] knew about he was going to be going to prison for a long long
[35:50] time but he thought that she would get out and he hoped that
[35:54] she would stay in touch and write him letters and love him
[35:58] forever. Signing it saying I love you in
[36:01] German. Finally, 10 days into the search
[36:04] of saddle with more, the first body was found.
[36:08] It was 10 year old Leslie and Downey.
[36:10] Her body was strangely well preserved in the mud.
[36:13] I don't know what it is about the mud on the Mars, but it
[36:17] perfectly preserved, almost perfectly preserved her face.
[36:21] And so her mother was able to identify her body visually.
[36:25] This was something that couldn't be done with the other bodies
[36:28] that were found. They all had to be identified by
[36:30] their clothes. Leslie Ann Downey was also found
[36:33] with her clothes still at her feet, including a white beaded
[36:37] necklace that her brother had gifted to her the morning before
[36:40] she died on Christmas Day. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were
[36:44] both confronted with this information that 10 year old
[36:47] Leslie Ann Downey's body had been found and they found the
[36:50] suitcase that had the tape recording and pictures of Leslie
[36:53] Ann Downey in Ian Brady's suitcase that had Ian Brady's
[36:57] name on. And so they couldn't really deny
[37:00] that they took the pictures, but they tried.
[37:03] Brady said that he did take those pictures, but he didn't
[37:07] kill Leslie and Downey. His story was that two men came
[37:11] to his house with Leslie. This 10 year old little girl
[37:14] brought her up to the bedroom and demanded that he took
[37:18] photographs of her. They commissioned Ian Brady to
[37:21] photograph child pawn of this child.
[37:24] He says that he did it, he took the money and then these two men
[37:28] took Leslie back out to their vehicle and drove away with her
[37:31] and he never saw her again, but she did leave his premises live.
[37:35] Myra, on the other hand, when she was confronted with the same
[37:38] information that they'd found her body and pictures and a tape
[37:42] recording, she just didn't say anything.
[37:44] She just said she wasn't involved and she didn't know
[37:48] anything about that. Five days after the body of
[37:51] Leslie and Downey was found, a second body was found and this
[37:54] time it was 12 year old John Kilbride.
[37:57] And this was the body that was by the river.
[38:01] You know the note in the notebook but said the stone by
[38:04] the brook. This time John Kilbride mother
[38:06] was able to identify him based on the clothes that he was found
[38:10] wearing. She had actually sewn on little
[38:13] buttons on his T-shirt that looked like footballs.
[38:16] So it was very custom and she knew exactly that that was her
[38:20] son. And on the same day that John
[38:22] Kilbride's body was found, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were both
[38:25] charged with the murder of Leslie and Downey.
[38:28] It was confirmed that the voice on the tape was Ian Brady's and
[38:32] that the bedroom in the pictures was Myra Hindley's, which put
[38:35] them both in that room at the time of her death.
[38:38] So now they had Myra and Ian charged with two separate
[38:42] murders, but they wanted to try and charge them with every
[38:45] single one that they thought they were guilty of, obviously.
[38:47] And so they moved on to John Kilbride because now they had a
[38:51] body on Saddleworth more, it looked likely that it was Ian
[38:56] Brady and Myra Hindley. So they found one particular
[38:58] picture where Myra Hindley is posing on top of John Kilbride's
[39:02] grave. And they now know it was John
[39:04] Kilbride's grave because they can compare the background of
[39:07] the photo to where they actually found him.
[39:09] And in this picture, she's like holding her dog puppet and she's
[39:13] looking at the floor. First of all, police asked her
[39:16] who took this photo and she said it was David Smith and they said
[39:19] are you sorry it's not Ian Brady?
[39:21] And she said no. Ian did sometimes take photos
[39:24] upon the Moors, but that 1 was definitely David Smith.
[39:27] But David Smith never took any photos on the Moors, especially
[39:31] not on Myra. Myra was unrelenting trying to
[39:34] get David Smith done for something, anything that she
[39:39] could get him done for. In this case.
[39:41] She was constantly trying to implicate him in these crimes,
[39:44] even though most people believe that he was not involved,
[39:49] especially in the ones of the children, possibly in Edwards.
[39:52] That one's up to you. But he's not believed to have
[39:55] been in the first four. So Myra said that David Smith
[39:58] took the picture. And so police asked her if she
[40:00] was stood on top of John Kilbride's grave in that
[40:03] picture. And she said no.
[40:05] And so police said, well, why are you looking down at the
[40:07] ground? And Myra said that she was
[40:09] looking at her puppy, which I mean, no, she's not.
[40:13] She's looking straight at the floor.
[40:14] Police didn't believe this for one second, and they charged Ian
[40:18] Brady. And Myra Hindley with the murder
[40:20] of John Kilbride as well. So that's three murder charges
[40:24] on both of them now. So before Brady and Hindley
[40:27] trial, they had a lot of pretrials.
[40:29] And even then, before the proper trial, where they were going to
[40:32] be tried for murder, people were turning up to the courthouses in
[40:35] their hundreds. And people were obviously
[40:39] outraged at these two people. And they turned up and they
[40:41] would shout things. Every time Brady or Hindley
[40:45] would be transported between the car and the courthouse or the
[40:47] courthouse and the car, people would be screaming child
[40:50] murderer, child killer monster. Multiple people, including
[40:54] Leslie Ann Downey's own uncle, all tried to rush two killers.
[41:01] They tried to fight them or like jump them or in some cases kill
[41:06] them. Leslie and Downey's uncle said
[41:08] that he if he would have got his hands on one of them, he would
[41:11] have killed them. And this happened so often that
[41:13] they actually had to start using decoys because it was getting,
[41:17] well, obviously dangerous, but also it was getting hard to
[41:21] transport Hindley and Brady anywhere.
[41:22] So first, they would bring out a random woman or a random man
[41:26] with a blanket over their head and just put them in a car and
[41:28] send them off somewhere. And the majority of the crowd
[41:31] would dissipate and follow that car, thinking it was Brady or
[41:35] Hindley, when Hindley and Brady would be still waiting inside
[41:39] the courthouse for another hour after that, waiting for the
[41:41] crowd to disappear. Meanwhile, police are still
[41:44] trying to get a little bit more information on Myra Hindley.
[41:48] They had quite a slam dunk on Ian Brady, but they still needed
[41:52] a little bit more on Myra because if she was smart enough,
[41:55] she probably would have been able to worm her way out of
[41:58] charges based on the evidence. So they just wanted to make sure
[42:02] they had it cemented in. So police decided to take
[42:05] Puppet, which was the dog that Ian and Myra adopted together
[42:09] when they first started killing. Obviously, in some of the
[42:12] pictures, Puppet is still a baby, it's still a puppy.
[42:15] And so they thought that if they could figure out how old exactly
[42:19] Puppet is right now, they'd be able to tell how long these
[42:24] murders had been going on for, because he was pretty much
[42:27] newborn in these pictures and he was now however old they were
[42:31] going to find out. So to do this, they put Puppet
[42:34] under general anesthetic, They put him to sleep, and then they
[42:38] were going to X-ray his teeth and try and figure out how old
[42:41] he was from that. However, once he went under,
[42:44] this general anesthetic puppet suffered some heart conditions,
[42:49] and he passed away. Of course, Hindley didn't
[42:51] believe this for one second. She thought that the police had
[42:54] just straight up killed her dog because she wasn't confessing,
[42:57] and a lot of other people believed that as well.
[42:59] A lot of people believed that the police were trying to
[43:03] exercise their power and just show Myra how powerful they were
[43:07] and that they weren't messing around.
[43:09] People think they were trying to scare Myra into confessing
[43:12] because if they could kill a dog, they could kill her and
[43:15] they could get away with it by saying it was a heart problem.
[43:18] But of course, this didn't work and Myra Hindley stayed true to
[43:22] her story till the day she died. That woman never changed a story
[43:27] once. In April of 1966, Ian Brady and
[43:30] Myra Hindley went on trial for the murders of Leslie Ann
[43:34] Downey, Edward Evans and John Kilbride.
[43:37] The media surprisingly focused mostly on Myra.
[43:41] They seemed to forget that this was a duo, you know, like a
[43:45] killing pair. And a lot of the articles
[43:48] focused mainly on Myra. They didn't forget that Ian was
[43:51] there, but there was a lot less on Ian than there was on Myra.
[43:54] The media focused on her appearance.
[43:56] She had this bright blonde hair, but her roots were coming in.
[43:59] They were focusing on the fact that she was 20 years old, but
[44:02] she looked much older, like very superficial things, like this
[44:05] woman just murdered children and you care about her hair.
[44:10] Like, you should be talking about her crimes and showing
[44:13] what an evil person she is, not what an ugly person she is.
[44:16] But I think a lot of the media coverage of Myra Hindley stemmed
[44:19] from the fact that she was a woman.
[44:21] And you don't expect women to commit crimes like this,
[44:25] especially not against children. Women are meant to be innately
[44:29] maternal and nurturing and care for children.
[44:32] It's in our hormones. Like, that's science.
[44:34] And to see a woman that can do such things to a child, it's one
[44:38] thing for a man to do them. It's disgusting both ways.
[44:41] But for a woman who is supposed to have that maternal instinct
[44:44] in her, I think the media was just very surprised.
[44:47] This was one of the first female serial killers they'd heard of.
[44:51] The newspapers also loved the kind of Bonnie and Clyde aspect
[44:55] of this couple, like the romance and the danger and the fact that
[44:58] they weren't turning on each other and the fact that they
[45:01] still had each other's back and they were both defending each
[45:03] other still in court. It was like a sick, twisted love
[45:06] story, and people were interested in it.
[45:09] Anyway, after two hours of deliberation, the jury came back
[45:13] and found Ian Brady guilty 3 counts of murder.
[45:18] However, they found Mira Hindley guilty of only two counts of
[45:21] murder, Leslie Ann Downey and Edward Evans.
[45:25] Whereas with John Kilbride, they didn't want to find her guilty
[45:28] of murder because they weren't too sure, so instead they found
[45:31] her guilty of being an accessory to murder.
[45:34] In that case, the two of them were both sentenced to life in
[45:38] prison, and it just so happened that the death penalty was
[45:41] abolished literally months before they were sentenced.
[45:45] So had they been just a few months earlier and sentenced
[45:48] just a few months earlier, they probably would have been
[45:51] sentenced to death. However, this is not how Ian
[45:55] Brady and Myra Hindley wanted this to go.
[45:57] Their plan was that Ian Brady was going to take most of the
[46:01] fall for this and he was going to get the mega long prison
[46:04] sentence. They knew that he was going to
[46:06] be behind bars for the rest of his life, but they were going to
[46:09] try and get Myra Hindley the lowest possible sentence that
[46:13] they could because Ian Brady thought, well, there's no point
[46:17] both of us being locked up for life.
[46:19] You might as well go out and live your life and just make
[46:22] sure you send me letters so that I can live vicariously through
[46:25] you. And so to be fair, I think
[46:26] that's why Hindley always said that she was at the van, because
[46:32] she was trying to get a lesser sentence.
[46:33] Makes sense. But of course, now it was
[46:36] looking like the two of them were going to just be locked up
[46:39] for the rest of their lives, as they should be.
[46:48] So their prison sentences began and they were put into normal
[46:52] prisons, which you can already tell there's going to be drama.
[46:57] You've probably heard that there's like a hierarchy in
[46:59] prisons. And right at the bottom of that
[47:01] hierarchy are people that commit crimes against children,
[47:05] rapists, you know, child rapists, child murderers.
[47:10] Those are the worst of the worst.
[47:13] And everyone above you in that pyramid is going to attack you.
[47:16] And that's exactly what they did to Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.
[47:21] Ian Brady was attacked so viciously that he was put into
[47:24] solitary confinement for the rest of his life.
[47:29] As for Myra Hindley, she was also attacked a lot.
[47:32] And she begged and pleaded for them to put her in solitary
[47:35] confinement for the rest of her life, but they said no.
[47:38] I don't actually know why they said no.
[47:40] But instead, she was given a personal bodyguard, which we
[47:44] probably paid a lot for. The two of them requested to
[47:47] meet with each other multiple times while they were in prison.
[47:51] Of course, every single request was denied.
[47:53] But Ian Brady was prepared to put himself through hell to see
[47:57] Myra Hindley again. He would go on hunger strike.
[48:00] He would make himself I'll. He would do all sorts of things
[48:04] to show them that he was serious, that he wanted to see
[48:08] Myra Hindley. He had to be tube fed at points.
[48:10] He was hospitalized because he was really making himself I'll.
[48:14] Meanwhile, Myra Hindley pretty much forgot about Ian Brady.
[48:18] But I mean, we'll get back to that in a second.
[48:22] David Smith, you're probably wondering what happened to him.
[48:24] He was actually granted immunity from any prison sentence.
[48:29] Yes, he cleaned up Edward Evans's murder.
[48:32] Some people think he had a part in it, but, you know, he was an
[48:35] accessory to murder in that case.
[48:37] Whether you believe he had a part in the murder or not, he
[48:41] helped to clean up. And he admits that.
[48:43] And police said you won't get any prison time for that.
[48:46] You will get immunity if you give a full witness testimony
[48:50] against Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
[48:52] But the public didn't like this one bit.
[48:55] This man wasn't going to get a single day, a single hour in
[48:59] prison. But but to everyone else, he was
[49:01] like the third Mars murderer. Everyone believed that he was
[49:05] responsible for something. Like I said, Myra tried to
[49:08] implicate him in every single one of the murders.
[49:11] All the children's murders, Edward Evans murder and the
[49:15] public believed her. And the public hated David Smith
[49:18] for it. They would shout things at him
[49:20] in the street, throw things at him, vandalise his house.
[49:23] He couldn't get a job because nowhere wanted to employ the
[49:26] third Moors murderer. And what made this so much worse
[49:29] for David Smith was when it came out that he had a deal with a
[49:33] newspaper for £20 a week to give them details of his experiences
[49:40] with Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. He actually used some of that
[49:43] money to go on holiday to France and people were disgusted at
[49:47] that. And like I said, David Smith
[49:49] found it very hard to find a job after that.
[49:52] He fell into poverty. The whole family did.
[49:55] He and Maureen actually had a second child, which obviously
[49:59] their first one passed away. And because he wasn't getting
[50:01] paid, he couldn't afford to support his wife or his child.
[50:05] And like I said, people would attack him in the street.
[50:08] And one day this guy came up to him.
[50:11] And at this point, David Smith had started carrying a weapon
[50:13] because it was a regular occurrence that people would
[50:16] attack him on the street. And this man came up and
[50:19] attacked him, and David Smith turned around and stabbed him.
[50:22] So David Smith was jailed for three years for that.
[50:26] And while he was in jail, Maureen divorced him because she
[50:30] was sick of this life. She felt like he was making it
[50:32] worse for himself. And, you know, she just didn't
[50:35] want their child to grow up around this.
[50:40] And at this point they actually had two children when he went
[50:42] into prison. And so she left and she took
[50:44] these two children. However, they still grew up
[50:48] really affected by their father's reputation.
[50:52] They fell into drugs, they fell into crime, and they never
[50:56] really had a fair chance at life because they were never given a
[50:59] fair reputation. They were not a reflection of
[51:02] their father, but the public saw them as that.
[51:04] Maureen eventually passed away at age 34 due to a brain
[51:08] hemorrhage, which is so young. And later in life, David Smith
[51:12] actually was arrested for attempted murder of his own
[51:16] father. But it's not how it sounds.
[51:18] His father actually had terminal cancer, and he wanted David
[51:22] Smith to poison him. And it wasn't attempted murder.
[51:25] It was successful. But I think the courts kind of
[51:27] took into consideration the context that he was helping his
[51:31] terminally ill father just to pass on peacefully.
[51:35] And so he didn't get too long in prison for that, but he did get
[51:37] some prison time. And around this same time, like
[51:40] I said, Myra Hindley completely forgot about Ian Brady in prison
[51:45] and she begins an affair with a prison guard.
[51:48] This woman was named Patricia Cairns, and Patricia claims that
[51:52] she didn't have a clue who Myra Hindley was.
[51:55] Everyone knows who Myra Hindley is, especially at the time
[51:57] because her face was all over the news.
[51:59] But anyway, Patricia fell in love with Myra Hindley and Myra
[52:02] Hindley fell in love with Patricia Cairns and together
[52:05] they came up with a plan to break Myra Hindley out of
[52:09] prison. However, this plan was foiled
[52:11] when one of Patricia Cairns colleagues noticed her acting
[52:14] weirdly. They reported it and the plan
[52:17] was somehow found out whether she'd like written something
[52:20] down or whatever. The plan was found out anyway.
[52:23] Patricia Cairns ended up serving six years in prison for even,
[52:28] you know, attempting this plan. And this whole time that Myra
[52:31] Hindley had been with another woman, Ian Brady had been making
[52:34] himself sick to see Myra Hindley hunger strikes.
[52:38] He was on feeding tubes. He was making himself I'll, he
[52:42] was like making himself throw up and all this.
[52:45] And then he found out that she was cheating on him from a
[52:48] letter that she wrote him herself.
[52:50] She told him in a letter that she was cheating on him and he
[52:53] went insane. He no longer wanted to protect
[52:56] this woman. Up until now, he had said that
[52:59] Hindley didn't have a part in any of the murders and that it
[53:02] was just all him. But now he was ready to tell the
[53:05] truth. For the past few years, a
[53:07] journalist had been coming to visit Ian Brady in prison.
[53:10] This journalist was the only visitor that Ian Brady ever had
[53:14] in prison, and this guy kept drilling him for information.
[53:17] And Ian Brady just was not given anything up.
[53:20] But after he read this letter and found out that Myra Hindley
[53:23] had cheated on him, the next time this journalist came
[53:26] around, he told him a completely different story.
[53:29] Ian Brady confessed to the remaining 2 murders of Pauline
[53:32] Reed and Keith Bennett and in turn he implicated Myra Hindley
[53:37] in those. He also told this journalist
[53:39] that Myra Hindley was involved in every single one of the
[53:43] murders. And at this point, Myra didn't
[53:45] really have anything to lose by just confessing to the murders.
[53:50] She was already going to be in prison for life.
[53:52] She might not have been in prison for life if she didn't
[53:54] try to escape, but that added a few years onto her sentence, so
[53:58] now it was looking like she was in prison for life.
[54:00] If she tried to deny being involved in these murders, it
[54:03] would be more hassle than it's worth because it's not going to
[54:06] take any time off her sentence and it's only just going to mean
[54:09] that she has to go to court every week or whatever.
[54:12] So she just admitted to the murders of Pauline Reed and
[54:16] Keith Bennett. Myra even went so far as to help
[54:20] police find the body of 16 year old Pauline Reed.
[54:25] It took about 100 days to search the whole of Saddleworth Moor,
[54:29] but eventually they found it. Unfortunately, the same can't be
[54:32] said for Keith Bennett because Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have
[54:37] both kept very tight lip about where they buried Keith Bennett
[54:41] on the Moors and they took that secret to their graves and I
[54:46] don't think we'll ever find out where his body is located.
[54:50] Winnie Bennett, Keith Bennett's mother passed away in 2012 and
[54:54] she said that it was her dying wish to know where her son was
[54:58] just to have recovered her son's body.
[55:01] However, of course Ian Brady and Myra Hindley did not care.
[55:05] But that wasn't the end of the Mars murders reign of terror.
[55:09] They actually had a few survivors, which we'll talk
[55:12] about in a second. Myra Hindley passed away aged 60
[55:15] in prison on November 15th 2002 from pneumonia as a result of of
[55:20] her smoking habit. Ian Brady stuck around a lot
[55:23] longer and eventually passed away aged 79 in hospital from
[55:27] lung disease. Brady was ill for a long, long
[55:30] time before he eventually passed away.
[55:32] He was on feeding tubes and oxygen tubes and all sorts and
[55:36] he said that he wanted to die. He kept trying to go on hunger
[55:39] strike, and then they'd put the feeding tube back in and he just
[55:42] kept trying to end his life prematurely.
[55:46] And one of his dying wishes was that those suitcases that
[55:50] contained all that evidence, all the pictures, notebooks, the
[55:54] tape recording, everything, he said that he wanted all of that
[55:58] stuff locked away forever and he didn't want anyone else to ever
[56:02] touch that stuff. And he actually got his wish.
[56:04] I really cannot believe that the courts would honor such a dying
[56:09] wish from a child murderer. But here we are.
[56:13] No one's ever allowed to go in those suitcases again.
[56:17] Keith Bennett's brother has appealed so many times to just
[56:22] look through these suitcases and then they can lock them back up.
[56:25] But no, the courts won't let him.
[56:27] He really wants to because he feels like there might possibly
[56:30] be a clue in those suitcases, in those scrapbooks, in those
[56:35] notepads that might lead to 5 Keith Bennetts body, the only
[56:40] remaining Moores Murders victim whose body has not been
[56:43] recovered and potentially never will be.
[56:46] Now, for those survivors that I keep mentioning, the first one
[56:50] that we're going to talk about is Tommy Ratigan.
[56:52] And he was seven years old at the time that he met Myra
[56:56] Hindley and Ian Brady. One day, he was alone in the
[56:59] park on the swing, and it was already dark at this point when
[57:03] a woman approached him. Myra Hindley approached him.
[57:06] And Tommy remembers Myra smelling very nice.
[57:09] He recognized the smell. It was like perfume mixed with
[57:12] Hairspray. It reminded him of his older
[57:14] sisters. He also remembered she had very
[57:17] kind eyes. She approached him and just said
[57:21] like, are you OK? He obviously looked pretty poor.
[57:23] He was from a family and his clothes and the way that he
[57:27] looks showed that. And Myra played really
[57:29] sympathetic. She was saying like, oh you poor
[57:31] things, you want to come back to my house and I'll make you some
[57:34] bread and jam. And Tommy Ratigan took the
[57:37] chance with open arms. He was like, yes, let's go home.
[57:41] And so he went to the van with Myra.
[57:43] And as they were walking out of the park, he noticed a man
[57:47] standing further away from them. And he began walking alongside
[57:51] him and Myra. And Myra introduced this man as
[57:54] her boyfriend. So they get to the house and
[57:57] Myra let's Tommy Ratigan sit in the living room at the kind of
[58:01] dining table that they've got. And Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
[58:04] go into the kitchen. Now, Brady stays in there the
[58:07] whole time that Tommy is in the house, but Myra Hindley keeps
[58:11] popping in and popping out. Tommy recalls hearing kind of an
[58:15] argument in the kitchen, but no one was raising their voice.
[58:18] It just seemed a little bit heated, like they were kind of
[58:21] snapping at each of them. And then Hindley comes out of
[58:23] the kitchen with the bread and jam in her hand, and Tommy
[58:26] Ratigan recalls this being the moment that he knew something
[58:30] was wrong. Myra Hindley slams this plate of
[58:33] bread and jam down on the table in front of him, and he recalls
[58:36] looking up at her and her eyes were no longer kind.
[58:40] They were very sinister. So Myra goes back into the
[58:43] kitchen, continues talking to Ian Brady, and Tommy recalls
[58:46] hearing Brady shout. Wait, so Myra was probably
[58:51] trying to rush killing. Tommy remembered looking down at
[58:55] this bread and jam and noticing that there was number margarine
[58:58] on it. It was literally just jam on
[59:00] bread, which is not really how you do it.
[59:03] It's not proper. That's that's rushed jam on
[59:05] bread. And Tommy just remembered
[59:07] thinking, like, if she was doing this to be kind, if she was
[59:10] making me bread and jam to be kind, she would have done it
[59:13] properly. But this seemed as though she'd
[59:15] rushed it, like she was only making it because she hacked
[59:18] her. And Tommy says it was at that
[59:19] point that his fight or flight response kicked in.
[59:22] And he noticed a window on the other wall.
[59:25] And he saw that as his getaway. He ran to the window, and he
[59:29] undid the latch and tried to, like, lift the window.
[59:32] So it was like one of those slidy uppy windows.
[59:34] I don't know if I'll be able to post a picture because I don't
[59:36] know what to type in on Google Images for that.
[59:38] But it was like one of those windows that you slide up.
[59:40] And he recalls it getting stuck at about four inches.
[59:44] So there's about that much of a gap and not big enough for him
[59:48] to fit through anywhere. And he remembers panicking.
[59:51] He felt like he was going to faint, but he just kept trying
[59:54] to push this window up and eventually it swung all the way
[59:57] up and slammed right on the top. And it was then that Myra and
[1:00:02] Ian heard the noise in the living room and they burst
[1:00:05] through the door. Myra said he's getting away and
[1:00:07] they ran to the window to go and grab him and Tommy dived
[1:00:10] straight out of the window. And Myra manages to grab hold of
[1:00:14] his ankles. Luckily, he had enough momentum
[1:00:17] and enough weight outside of the window at that point that he
[1:00:19] just kind of fell. And her hands just kind of
[1:00:22] slipped. He slipped out of her grasp and
[1:00:25] he was able to run away. Tommy Ratigan says that he has
[1:00:29] survivor's guilt from this experience because this took
[1:00:33] place just a week before John Kilbride was abducted and
[1:00:37] murdered. And he always feels like if he'd
[1:00:39] have just died that night, maybe John Kilbride wouldn't have been
[1:00:43] killed. It's so sad.
[1:00:44] Imagine thinking if I'd have just died, then maybe that
[1:00:49] little boy would still be alive. The second person that claims to
[1:00:52] be a survivor of the Mars murders was a man named David
[1:00:55] Gray. And of course, he wasn't a man
[1:00:57] at the time. He was a little boy.
[1:00:59] And he was in a sweet shop when he believes Ian Brady approached
[1:01:04] him and pretended to be a police officer.
[1:01:06] Ian Brady said, come with me, I need to ask you a few questions.
[1:01:09] And this boy was clever. He asked to see some kind of
[1:01:13] identification, like proof that he was a police officer.
[1:01:16] Now, most young kids would just be scared out of their skin and
[1:01:20] just go with it and just go with this police officer.
[1:01:23] But not David Gray. He asked for identification.
[1:01:26] And when Ian Brady didn't have any to give him, he just
[1:01:29] laughed. And then David Gray kind of
[1:01:32] assessed the situation and realized that maybe this was
[1:01:35] dangerous. And so he stepped back.
[1:01:38] When he did, he stepped back into the shop door.
[1:01:42] Now when certain shop doors open, they've got like a little
[1:01:45] bell to let the shop owner know that someones come in and he set
[1:01:49] off that little bell did David Gray.
[1:01:52] And immediately Myra Hindley came out from the other side of
[1:01:54] the shop and just said come on in, let's go.
[1:01:56] Obviously at this point they've drawn too much attention to
[1:01:59] themselves. There was noise and it was clear
[1:02:01] that there were two adults talking to a child.
[1:02:04] If they were to abduct him now, they would have easily been
[1:02:06] traced back to it. And that has been the Mars
[1:02:11] murders case. Thank you so much for listening
[1:02:16] to usual disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:02:19] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:02:21] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:02:24] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:02:28] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[1:02:31] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[1:02:34] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:02:37] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:02:40] Usual Disclaimer with Ellen O'Neill is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:02:43] production. See you next time.

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