Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that I think for most people brings up
a really instinctual reaction, even if they don't
know all the specifics. We are heading into the
dark, windswept territory of Saddleworth Moor.
We are talking about the Moors murders. It's
a heavy one. It really is. Yeah. And you're so
right about that instinctual reaction. This isn't
just a true crime story. It's arguably the moment
the British psyche fundamentally changed in the
20th century. Changed how? It shattered a specific
kind of post -war innocence. The idea that kids
could play out in the street until dark and be
safe. That idea, it died on those moors. I want
to start with the landscape itself because in
all the source material, it feels like the moor
is a character in this story. It absolutely is.
It's not just a dumping ground. It feels like
an accomplice. That's the perfect word for it.
Saddleworth Moor, which is just outside Manchester,
is this vast peat -covered... desolate place.
It's beautiful, you know, in a very stark, rugged
way. But it's silent. And that's what they needed.
That's what they relied on. The two people we're
discussing today, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley,
they weaponized that silence, that emptiness.
It's this wild place right on the edge of the
industrial sprawl of Manchester, a place where
secrets can be buried. And the peat, it preserves
things in a very eerie way. We have a lot of
source material here, investigative files, biographies,
trial transcripts. But our mission for this deep
dive isn't just to list a timeline of events.
Anyone can look up a date on Wikipedia. Right.
We need to try and understand the mechanism of
this partnership. How do two individuals lock
into a psychological spiral that leads to the
abduction and murder of five children and teenagers?
That is the absolute core question. It's what
psychologists call fully a do a madness of two.
A shared madness. A shared psychosis. And the
source is also. suggest that neither of them,
on their own, might have committed these specific
atrocities. It required a truly toxic chemical
reaction between Brady's existing sadism and
Henley's, well, her capacity for compliance.
It's all about how their individual pathologies
interlocked and amplified each other. We are
going to get into some of the nuggets from the
files that really just stand out. The secret
tape recording that silenced an entire courtroom.
a lost glove used as a lure, and a forensic breakthrough
that involved a pet dog. And the suitcase. Don't
forget the suitcase. The suitcase left at the
train station that broke the whole case wide
open. But we have to start with the people. Let's
look at Ian Brady first. The sources really paint
a picture of someone who was, for lack of a better
term, born wrong. Is that a fair assessment or
is that just hindsight bias? I think it's a bit
of both, but the red flags with Brady were incredibly
distinct from a very early age. He was born Ian
Duncan Stewart in the Gorbals area of Glasgow,
January 2nd, 1938. And the Gorbals in the 30s
was a tough place. One of the toughest slums
in Europe. And context here is absolutely key.
He was illegitimate. He never knew his father.
In 1930s Scotland, that carried a huge social
stigma. His mother, a waitress named Peggy, had
basically no support. So she had to give him
up essentially to foster parents, the Sloans,
when he was just a few months old. Which is a
rough start for any kid, for sure. But plenty
of children in the 30s and 40s were in foster
care, came from broken homes. They didn't all
grow up to, you know, read the Marquis de Sade
and murder children. Exactly. That's the trap
of trying to find a single cause. Environmental
factors matter, but they are not predictive on
their own. The difference with Brady was the
early onset of this profound cruelty. We're not
talking about a kid pulling wings off flies.
No. We are talking about serious allegations
that at age 10 he burned a cat alive. He was
reported to have stoned dogs, to have cut the
heads off rabbits. Now, later in life, Brady
denied some of these specific instances. But
the pattern of behavior, this complete lack of
empathy for suffering creatures, it was noted
by everyone around him. And that's the classic
triad of sociopathy, right? Animal cruelty is
often step one. It's like practicing on something
helpless before you graduate to people. It is.
It's a rehearsal. And when you combine that with
a high intelligence that he used purely for manipulation,
well, you have a problem. He was an above average
student at Shawlins Academy, but he was bored.
He was resentful. He quickly turned to housebreaking
theft, smuggling lead seals from the docks. Which
is how he ended up in the Borstal system. Right.
And for... Our listeners, maybe younger ones
or those outside the UK, can you clarify what
Borstal actually was in this context? It sounds
so Dickensian. It was essentially a youth detention
center. But in 1950s Britain, it was an incredibly
hard environment. The philosophy was to break
rebellious spirits through hard labor and very
strict discipline. And did it work on Brady?
The opposite. He went to some of the toughest
units, Hull and Hatfield. Instead of breaking
him, it calcified him. It hardened him. He learned.
to be quieter, more cunning, more secretive.
He learned how to manipulate authority rather
than just fighting it head on. So it was just
a training ground for him. In a way, yes. It's
where this intellectual pretension really kicks
in, which I found so disturbing in the notes.
After Borstal, he moves to Manchester to live
with his mother and her new husband, Patrick
Brady. That's where he gets the name. But he's
not trying to reintegrate into society. He's
building a philosophy to justify his hatred of
it. He's building a justification for what he
wants to do. Exactly. He taught himself German
specifically so he could read Mein Kampf in the
original text. He was obsessed with Nazi atrocities.
And this is key. It wasn't out of historical
interest. It was out of admiration. He admired
the scale, the efficiency of the cruelty. He
was reading the Marquis de Sade, exploring this
philosophy of absolute power over other living
things. He began to see himself as a superior
man. Nietzschean superman. Yes, someone above
the petty morality of the sheep all around him.
He saw everyone else as insects. And on the outside,
he was just, what, a clerk at a brewery? A stock
clerk at a chemical firm, Millwards, living this
completely mundane life. But in his head, he
was a misunderstood genius, a predator walking
among prey. His colleagues described him as having
this calm, undisguised arrogance. He was punctual,
quiet, but just seething with this dark superiority
complex. Okay, so that's Brady. A loaded gun
waiting for someone to pull the trigger. Right.
And then you have Myra Hindley. And this is where
the debate has always raged. Was she a monster
in her own right or was she made into one? Because
her background looks, well, surprisingly normal
compared to his. On the surface, yes, it does.
She was born in 1942 in Gorton, Manchester. Working
class. She had a job as a typist. She had friends.
She was even engaged to be married at one point.
But when you scratch the surface, you find these
cracks. Her father, Bob, was an alcoholic and
by all accounts, extremely violent. There's that
story about her father teaching her to fight.
It feels like such a pivotal moment in her development.
It's a crucial anecdote, I think. She was eight
years old. A boy in the neighborhood scratched
her face during a playground scuffle. She came
home crying, you know, expecting comfort from
her dad. And she didn't get it. She got the opposite.
He didn't comfort her. He threatened to leather
her, to beat her. if she didn't go back out there
and retaliate. So she did. She went out, found
the boy, and punched him until he fell down.
That teaches a child a very specific and I'd
say very dangerous lesson about how the world
works. It does. It teaches you that violence
is the only way to avoid punishment. If you are
weak, you get hurt. Not just by your enemies,
but by your own protector. You have to align
yourself with the source of power to be safe.
Precisely. It normalizes aggression as a survival
tactic. Then you add to that the trauma she experienced
as a teenager. Her close friend, a boy named
Michael Higgins, drowned in a local reservoir.
And she blamed herself. Deeply. He had invited
her to go with him that day, but she went somewhere
else instead. She carried this immense survivor's
guilt over it. That kind of guilt can make a
person incredibly vulnerable. looking for answers
for some kind of structure. And she was. She
converted to Catholicism after his death, taking
the confirmation name Veronica. She was searching
for redemption or for rules or just for someone
to tell her how to live. She even broke off her
engagement because she said the man was too immature.
She wanted someone strong. And unfortunately,
the strong person she found was Ian Brady. They
met at Millward's Merchandising in 1961. She
was a typist. He was a clerk. And if you look
at her diary entries from the source material,
it was an immediate obsessive infatuation. What
was it about him? He was quiet, arrogant, not
exactly Prince Charming. He was fascinated by
him because he was aloof. He ignored her for
months. He barely acknowledged her existence.
Which, for someone with her background, that
need to please the dominant male to prove her
worth. that probably felt like a challenge she
had to conquer. It was the hook. It was irresistible.
She wrote about him constantly in her diary.
She dressed up for work every day, hoping he'd
notice. When he finally asked her to the cinema
in December 1961, it wasn't a date in the romantic
sense we'd think of. It was the beginning of
an indoctrination. This part of the timeline
reads like a cult recruitment of one person.
It is so systematic. It's brainwashing, plain
and simple. Brady systematically dismantled her
entire worldview. Their dates were watching X
-rated films and drinking German wine. He introduced
her to his library, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, all
the Nazi literature. He'd play recordings of
Hitler's speeches. And he went after her faith.
He attacked it directly. He convinced her that
God was a myth, that her Catholic faith was just
a crutch for the weak. He systematically replaced
her morality with his nihilistic, power -obsessed
philosophy. There's that quote she gave later
that really stuck with me. She said she would
have believed the moon was made of green cheese
if Ian Brady had told her so. And that right
there is the definition of the folia do. She
completely subsumed her identity into his. She
wasn't Myra Hindley anymore. She was an extension
of Ian Brady. The physical transformation is
part of that, too. A huge part. She dyed her
hair peroxide blonde. wore bright crimson lipstick,
leather jackets, high boots. She was dressing
herself as the Aryan ideal that he fetishized.
They created this hermetically sealed world where
the only approval that mattered was his. She
cut off her friends. She became distant from
her family. She was living entirely in Brady's
orbit. And they weren't just reading books and
playing dress -up. They were preparing for something.
The outline mentions they joined a rifle club.
They were arming themselves. Hindley joined a
rifle club to learn to shoot. She eventually
managed to buy two handguns privately, a Webley
.45 revolver and a Smith & Resin .38. They were
taking explicit photographs of each other, constantly
testing boundaries. And then Brady started talking
openly about committing the perfect murder. This
concept of the perfect murder, it wasn't just
some idle fantasy. He was referencing historical
cases, wasn't he? He was obsessed with Leopold
and Lode. The two wealthy American students in
the 1920s. Exactly. Who killed a boy just to
see if they could get away with it. To prove
their intellectual superiority. Brady saw murder
in the same way. He called it an existential
exercise. An existential exercise. That phrase
is just chilling. It implies they wanted to kill
not for passion, not for money, not for revenge,
but just to prove they could. To prove they were
superior to the law, to society, to life itself.
To prove they were the superior beings they'd
read about in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Brady identified with the character, with Skolnikov,
the idea that extraordinary men have a right
to commit crimes. In July of 1963, they stopped
theorizing and they started acting. Which brings
us to the murders themselves. And I want to focus
on the method because this is where the partnership
becomes so lethally effective. A lone man on
a moor is suspicious. A couple asking for help,
not so much. Exactly. Their apparent normality
was their primary weapon. Their first victim
was Pauline Ree. She was 16 years old. And she
knew Myra Hindley. She was a neighbor of Hindley's
sister. She knew Myra by sight, trusted her.
And this is where they first deployed the Lost
Glove ruse. Can you walk us through that? It
sounds so... So simple, almost childish. Why
was it so effective? Because it weaponizes a
child's natural inclination to be helpful and
polite. Hindley would be the one to approach
the victim, usually in her van. She'd pull up
and say she'd lost an expensive glove on the
moor and was worried her mother would be angry.
Could they please help her find it? It's not
a threat. It's a request for assistance from
a woman. It disarms every defense. Who would
ever suspect a woman asking for help finding
a glove? It's the perfect lure. So they get Pauline
to the moor. Brady is waiting nearby on his motorcycle.
Yes. They lead her out into the emptiness. And
Pauline was murdered and buried there. Now, the
sources diverge here on the specifics of the
act. Henley always claimed she waited in the
van while Brady committed the murder. And Brady
claimed she was a full participant. He did. But
regardless of who held the knife, she drove the
van. She was the lure. She helped choose the
burial spot she was all in. And then, just a
few months later, they do it again. John Kilbride,
12 years old. November 1963. The same method,
essentially. Lured from a market in Ashton Underline.
It was getting dark, cold. They offered him a
lift home, maybe some sherry to warm him up.
And then the lost glove story again. But there's
a detail in the Kilbride case that shows the
absolute depth of their depravity, something
they did afterwards. The photograph. A photograph.
After they had buried John Kilbride, Brady took
a photograph of Myra Hindley standing over the
fresh grave. I've seen it described. She's sort
of crouching, looking down at the ground, and
her little dog, Puppet, is in the shot with her.
To any stranger looking at that photo, it's completely
innocuous. It's just a snapshot of a woman out
walking her dog on the hills. But to them? To
them, it was a trophy. A memento to relive the
thrill, the power. It shows a complete and utter
detachment from the reality of what they had
just done. They were literally posing for a souvenir
on top of a child they had just murdered. Then,
after Killbride, there's this gap. The sources
mention a cooling off period before the next
murders. Now, that seems unusual for serial killers,
doesn't it? I thought the urge usually accelerated.
It is an anomaly. Usually the high wears off
faster and faster, and the killer needs to strike
again more quickly, which often leads to a frenzy.
But they waited nearly seven months before they
took Keith Bennett in June 1964, and then another
six months before Leslie Ann Downey. So why the
pause? Were they getting scared? Losing their
nerve? The evidence suggests the opposite. They
were confident. Arrogant, even. They seemed to
have been distracted by other criminal ambitions.
What kind of ambitions? They were planning armed
robberies. Seriously? They were accumulating
more weapons, studying armored car routes, planning
bank heists. Brady seemed to be pivoting to armed
robbery as another way to prove his superiority
over society. So the murders weren't an uncontrollable
compulsion. It reinforces that they were in complete
control, which almost makes it scarier. It wasn't
an impulse they couldn't stop. It was an activity
they scheduled when it suited them. We have to
talk about Keith Bennett. June, 1964. Keith was
12 years old. He was on his way to his grandmother's
house, just a short walk. Henley pulled up in
her mini and asked him if he'd help her move
some boxes into the car. And he was a helpful
boy. A kind, helpful boy. So of course he agreed.
They drove him to the moor. Brady walked off
with him, again using some version of the glove
story. Sometime later, Brady returned to the
car alone, carrying the spade. And Keith Bennett's
body has never been found. We'll definitely touch
on the aftermath of that later. But the fact
that he is still out there on that moor is, it's
one of the most haunting aspects of this entire
case. It is. A wound that is never closed. But
let's move to Boxing Day, 1964. The day they
murdered 10 -year -old Leslie Ann Downey. This
is where the case gets even darker, if that's
even possible. Because they didn't take her straight
to the moor. No. They took her from a fun fair
and brought her back to their house, 16 Wardle
Brook Avenue. And this is where their use of
technology comes in. They recorded her ordeal
on a reel -to -reel tape recorder. This was a
deliberate act. They wanted a souvenir of their
own depravity. They wanted to be able to replay
it. To replay the power they held over that child.
To relive her terror. We'll discuss the take's
role in the trial later. But the sheer coldness
of wanting an audio record of that. It speaks
again to that trophy hunting mindset. It's beyond
comprehension for most people. Usually these
kinds of murder partnerships, they implode. One
person cracks under the pressure or they get
sloppy or they're caught by the police. But in
this case, the downfall came because they got
arrogant. They tried to recruit a third member.
Exactly. Enter David Smith. Smith was Hindley's
brother -in -law. He was just 17 and he was married
to her younger sister, Maureen. And Brady saw
him as a protege. He did. He saw a bit of his
younger self in Smith's rebellious, angry anti
-authority. Brady wanted to groom him, just like
he'd groomed Hindley. But Smith didn't know the
full extent of what was going on, did he? Not
at all. Smith was a bit dazzled by Brady's attitude.
He liked the talk of easy money and bank robberies.
He liked the feeling of being let in on a secret
criminal world. But he thought it was all talk.
He had no idea about the murders. Not until October
of 1965. When Brady decided it was time for a
demonstration. Brady wanted to blood Smith. That
was the term. He wanted to make him an accomplice
to a murder so that he couldn't go to the police.
And this is the murder of Edward Evans. Unlike
the others, this wasn't a clean disappearance
on the moor. This was messy. It was chaotic.
It was a slaughter in a suburban living room.
Brady lured Edward Evans, a 17 -year -old apprentice
engineer he met at a train station, back to the
house. Then he sent Hindley to go and fetch David
Smith. He brought him to the house. Brought him
to the house and told him to wait outside for
a signal, a flashing light from the window. It's
so theatrical, so cinematic in his mind. It's
Brady living out his movie villain fantasy. Smith
sees the signal, he goes inside. Brady leaves
him in the kitchen, says he's just going to get
some wine. And then Smith hears screams. He runs
in. He runs into the living room and he sees
Brady attacking Edward Evans with a hatchet.
That must have been just a shattering moment
for Smith. He thinks he's there for a drink or
to talk about a robbery and suddenly there's
an axe murder happening in front of him. He described
hearing this terrible hard blow of the weapon.
He watched Brady then strangle the boy with a
piece of electrical cord to finish the job. And
Henley... She wasn't cowering in the corner.
No, she was participating. She was shouting instructions,
handing Brady the ligature. She was an active
participant. Smith was frozen with terror. He
was convinced he was next. So he played along.
He had to. He helped them wrap the body in plastic
sheeting because he was sure that if he showed
any hesitation, any disgust, he would be on the
floor right beside Evans. But here's the crucial
error Brady made. In the struggle, he hurt himself.
Yes. During the fight with Evans, Brady badly
injured his ankle. He was essentially incapacitated.
He couldn't easily move the body by himself,
and more importantly, he couldn't chase anyone.
So Smith plays along, helps clean up, and gets
out of the house. He runs home to his wife, Maureen.
And this is the moment where the folie a deux
fails to expand into a folie a trois. Exactly
right. Smith gets home, he's violently ill from
the shock, and he tells Maureen everything. And
they make a decision that saves, well... Who
knows how many future lives? At 6 .10 in the
morning, David Smith goes to a public phone box
to call the police. And the detail of how he
went to that phone box is so telling of the fear
he felt. He armed himself. He took a screwdriver
and a bread knife with him. He was absolutely
convinced that Brady was coming for him and his
family. He was ready to fight for his life. The
arrest itself has this bizarre, almost mundane
quality to it. You expect a SWAT team kicking
down the door, but it was much more subtle. There
were no SWAT teams in 1965 Manchester. The officer
in charge, Superintendent Bob Talbot, he realized
that if they just knocked on the door, Brady
might destroy evidence or even start a siege.
So he came up with a plan. A very clever one.
Talbot disguised himself as a bread delivery
man. He put a white coat on over his police uniform
to get Hindley to open the front door. That is
proper old school policing. Bread delivery. And
it worked perfectly. Hindley opened the door.
Talbot identified himself and his team pushed
in. They found Brady in bed, nursing his injured
ankle and writing a note to his employer to explain
why he wouldn't be at work that day. The banality
of evil right there. There is a body wrapped
in plastic in the spare bedroom and he's writing
a sick note for his stock clerk job. The police
asked for the key to the locked spare bedroom.
Hindley stalled. She claimed the key was at her
workplace. Brady, maybe realizing the game was
up or maybe just in too much pain to argue, told
her to give them the key. And they opened the
door. They opened the door and there was the
body of Edward Evans. And Brady immediately tries
to talk his way out of it. His first words are
something like, Eddie and I had a row and it
got out of hand. He's already trying to frame
it as a fight between friends that went too far.
Manslaughter, perhaps, not murder. But the police
were smart. They started searching the house
meticulously. And the real breakthrough, the
thing that blew this case wide open, was a prayer
book. A prayer book of all things. Inside a prayer
book they found in the house, tucked away, was
a small slip of paper. It was a claim ticket.
A claim ticket for the left luggage office at
Manchester Central train station. For listeners
who might not know, left luggage is basically
a locker or storage area at a train station where
you can leave bags. Precise amount. And in those
bags, a pair of suitcases, was a treasure trove
of self -incrimination. Brady had stored his
most damning possessions there for safekeeping.
They found the guns. They found a collection
of pornographic photos. They found the 16 -minute
tape of Leslie Ann Downey's final hours. And
they found photos. Photos of the Moors. Dozens
of photos of the Moors. And they also found an
exercise book with the name John Kilbride written
in it. And that was the link. That was the moment
everything changed. Suddenly, this wasn't just
a domestic murder of Edward Evans. The police
connected the name in the book to the missing
boy. And then they looked at the photographs
of the moors, these bleak landscapes, close -ups
of the ground, and they realized they weren't
looking at holiday snaps. They were looking at
a graveyard. I want to highlight the forensic
work here regarding those dog photos. They had
pictures of Henley's dog puppet on the moor.
How did that specifically help them find the
bodies? It was a brilliant piece of deduction.
They suspected the photos showed the grave sites.
But to know which missing child case to connect
them to, they needed to date the photos. And
there were no timestamps back then. No. So they
looked at the dog, Puppet. They brought in a
forensic veterinarian to examine the dog's teeth
to determine its age in the photographs versus
its age now. They were trying to build a timeline
based on the dog's growth. And this leads to
the only time during the entire investigation
that Myra Hindley showed any genuine emotion.
The dog. Puppet sadly died under the anesthetic
during the dental examination. When Henley was
told, she went ballistic. She screamed at the
police. She accused them of being murderers.
She wrote to her mother, quote, I feel as though
my heart's been torn to pieces. That creates
such a terrifying paradox, doesn't it? She can
listen to a 10 -year -old girl pleading for her
mother on a tape and feel absolutely nothing?
She can call her own attitude brusque? But the
dog dies and she's heartbroken. It completely
demolishes any defense that she was just a scared
victim of Brady who was numb to everything. She
clearly had empathy. She was capable of love
and grief. She just chose not to extend it to
human children. She reserved it for her dog.
It implies a conscious dehumanization of her
victims, which is chilling. So using the photos
as a map, they go back to the Moors. They start
trying to identify the locations. And they found
Liz Leanne Downey's body relatively quickly.
She was identified by the clothing found with
her. A few days later, they found John Kilbride.
The Moors were finally giving up their secrets.
Let's move to the trial. April 1966 at Chester
Assizes. The atmosphere around that courthouse
must have been incredibly volatile. It was dangerous.
The public rage was unlike anything seen in Britain
before. Mobs attacked the prison van, bringing
them to and from court every day. They had to
install bulletproof glass in the dock. A first
in British legal history. Yes, because there
was a genuine fear that someone in the public
gallery would try to shoot them during the proceedings.
And the moment that defined that trial, the moment
that I think seared this case into the public
memory forever, was when they played the tape.
The prosecution made the decision that the jury
needed to hear the reality of what happened to
Leslie Ann Downey, not just read about it, but
hear it. So they played the 16 -minute audio
tape in open court. And the reaction? The sources
say that grown men, hardened police officers
and journalists were openly weeping. Two women
in the gallery physically covered their ears
and had to be helped out of the courtroom. It
was just pure, distilled suffering. And what
was the reaction from Brady and Hindley in the
doc? Brady was, by all accounts, indifferent.
He sat there taking notes, acting bored, as if
it was all beneath him. Hindley, however, was
forced to confront it. On the stand, she was
asked about her voice on the tape, about her
tone with the child. She described her attitude
as brusque. Brusque? What a sterile, bureaucratic,
inhuman word to describe that kind of cruelty.
It was her attempt to minimize, to sound detached
and professional. But it didn't work. The jury
saw right through it. They found them both guilty
on all counts. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.
And we have to note a crucial historical detail
here. The timing of this trial is staggering.
The death penalty for murder had been abolished
in the UK just six months prior, in November
of 1965. That is incredible. They missed the
hangman's noose by a matter of months. If the
murder of Edward Evans had happened a year earlier
and they'd been caught then, they would almost
certainly have been executed. Instead, the judge,
Justice Fenton Atkinson, sentenced them to life,
calling them two sadistic killers of the utmost
depravity and recommending they never be released.
Now, usually for most cases, the story ends when
the cell door slams shut. But the Moores murders
had this long, toxic tale. They kept secrets
for decades. They did. They denied the murders
of Pauline Reed and Keith Bennett for 20 years.
For two decades, they held that information hostage,
leaving those families in a state of agonizing
limbo. And their lives in prison were... Quite
something. Brady went into the high security
psychiatric system, eventually ending up at Ashworth
Hospital. He leaned into the villain role. He
wrote a book called The Gates of Janus, where
he analyzed other serial killers. He went on
hunger strikes for years, being force fed through
a tube, claiming he wanted to die, but clearly
enjoying the battle of wills with the authorities.
And Hindley tried to rebrand herself completely.
She did. She claimed to be a reformed, devout
Catholic. She argued that she was just another
one of Brady's victims, that she had been brainwashed
and was now redeemed. And she had some high profile
supporters, didn't she? She did. Most notably,
Lord Lawnford. a prison reformer who genuinely
believed she was a changed woman. He visited
her. He campaigned tirelessly for her parole.
He was branded a loony and a fool by the press
for it. But the public never, ever forgave her.
That police mugshot of her, the peroxide blonde
hair, the hard, cold stare, it became the icon
of feminine evil in Britain. But in the late
1980s, the secrets finally started to come out.
Why then? What changed? Desperation, mainly.
By the mid -80s, Hindley realized she was never
getting out unless she showed total and complete
cooperation. She thought that if she finally
confessed everything, it might clear the slate
and help her chances for parole. So she talked.
In 1987, she officially confessed to her role
in the murders of Pauline Reed and Keith Bennett.
And that led to this surreal, macabre operation
where the police took both of them, separately,
back to Saddleworth Moor. Imagine that scene.
It's 1987. There are helicopters overhead, police
cordons for miles, media from all over the world,
and these two killers are walking the landscape
again, trying to remember where they buried children
two decades earlier. It was a spectacle. And
it worked, in part. Based on Hindley's memory
of the landscape, she remembered a specific view
of the rocks from one of the burial sites. They
finally found Pauline Reed's body in 1987. But
not Keith Bennett. No. And that is the open wound
that remains in this case. Despite massive, repeated
searches over the decades, despite Brady playing
cruel mind games with Keith's mother, Winnie
Johnson, sending her cryptic letters and maps
that led nowhere, Keith Bennett was never found.
Winnie Johnson spent her entire life campaigning,
searching the Moors herself, begging them to
tell her where her son was. She died in 2012,
never knowing. Never being able to give her son
a proper burial. That is a level of cruelty that's
almost separate from the murder itself. It's
a continuous, decades -long act of torture against
a family. Brady died in 2017, Hindley in 2002.
The case is technically closed, but it feels
so unresolved. It feels unresolved because the
landscape still holds a secret. And the cultural
impact is permanent. It truly did end that age
of innocence. Before this case, there was a general
belief that children could play out on the street
until dark. After Brady and Henley, parents in
Britain and really across the world started to
look over their shoulder, the rules changed.
It also introduced the idea that a woman could
be just as dangerous, just as much of a predator
as a man. Yes, it shattered that stereotype completely,
which brings us back to that central disturbing
question of the folia due. When you look at the
totality of the evidence, what is the final takeaway
about human nature here? It's terrifying, isn't
it? The realization that evil isn't always something
that just is. Sometimes it's something that is
unlocked. Would Myra Hindley have lived a normal,
unremarkable life if she had never met Ian Brady?
It's possible. She might have been a clerk, gotten
married, had children, and that darkness inside
her would have just stayed dormant. He found
the key. So the final thought is, how many other
people are walking around just one wrong meeting
away from becoming monsters? That's the question
that this case leaves you with. And it's a deeply
disturbing one. A very disturbing thought to
end on. The idea that the more is quiet now,
but it still remembers everything. It does. It
stands as a monument to what happens when two
dark psychologies meet. And instead of canceling
each other out, they amplify each other into
something hellish. We've covered a lot of dark
ground today. Thank you for guiding us through
the psychology and the history of this case.
Thank you. It's a difficult one, but an important
one to understand. And to our listeners, take
care of yourselves. We'll see you on the next
Deep Dive.