The family of slain child Keith Bennett is still trying to find the 12-year-old’s body in the infamous moor where serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley dumped their victims’ mutilated corpses.
The coldblooded couple, infamous for their abductions, rapes, tortures and killings of five youngsters aged 10 to 17 during the 1960s, are still among England’s most reviled criminals, long after their heinous crime spree ended and the two were caught and jailed.
In the decades since these "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity" were convicted, each slowly revealed the locations of their young victims. All of whom they said were buried in Britain’s vast swampland called Saddleworth Moor, which gave the serial murders their notorious name.
But despite repeated searches there for Keith Bennett’s body, the young boy’s remains are still missing.
Up until her death in 2012, Keith’s heartbroken mother Winnie Johnson continued to scour the bogs of Saddleworth for her slain son, having at least twice written directly to the imprisoned Myra Hindley for help in that sad mission.
“I am a simple woman,” one of those appeals read. “I work in the kitchens of Christie's Hospital. It has taken me five weeks labour to write this letter because it is so important to me that it is understood by you for what it is, a plea for help. Please, Miss Hindley, help me,” she begged.
By this time, though, cunning lifer Hindley’s recollection had grown murky and the moor itself had also undergone some change, so she died in prison before being able to find the murdered child’s unmarked grave, now thought to be in the vicinity of Hollin-Brown Knoll.
Regarded by court-appointed psychiatrists as “a quiet, controlled, impassive witness who lied remorselessly,” the value of Hindley’s assistance was questionable anyway. Although, once upon a time, she surely did lay the butchered boy’s body somewhere in the moor.
In fact, it was the “wicked beyond belief” Miss Hindley herself who vitally aided psychopathic killer Ian Brady in realizing his perverted quest for young blood; luring each of the trusting children to his side so he might defile and slay them.
And despite her early protestations, Hindley also confessed in the late 1980s that she participated in the Moor Murders too -- even taping one child’s horrific assault, torture and death, in a chilling recording that ultimately drove the mother of yet another murdered girl over the edge of madness.
“I ought to have been hanged. I deserved it,” Myra Hindley privately told her defense attorney before her own death in 2002. “My crime was worse than Brady's because I enticed the children, and they would never have entered the car without my role,” she said. “I have always regarded myself as worse than Brady.”
Brady himself has long ago gone insane, if he wasn’t at the time he committed the shocking offenses, and in spite of a 2005 promise, he’s also failed to deliver up the body of his third victim.
Today, more than 50 years since Keith Bennett headed off one morning to his grandmother’s house and was instead kidnapped, violated and slain by Ian Brady and his twisted lady-friend, the child’s family is still trying to bring their lost lad home again.
Visit www.searchingforkeith.com to see how you can help in that worthy mission.
