Ian Brady's final hours revealed: Police pleaded with dying Moors Murderer to tell them where he and Myra Hindley buried victim's body - but killer refused and took his chilling secret to the grave

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Moors Murderer Ian Brady died at a high security psychiatric hospital in Merseyside yesterday aged 79. It emerged today that police urged the serial killer to tell them where his undiscovered victim's body is buried

Serial killer Ian Brady handed victim Keith Bennett's family one final insult from his deathbed - by refusing to reveal where he buried the 12-year-old.

The 79-year-old, who killed five children with lover Myra Hindley in the 1960s, died of cancer and emphysema at a secure mental health hospital yesterday.

The death of the Moors Murderer leaves unresolved the issue of where he dumped the body of little Keith, whose mother, Winnie Johnson, died in 2012 after fighting tirelessly for decades to find her son and provide a Christian burial.

It emerged today that police attempted to convince him to reveal the mystery location of the grave in his final hours.

Family lawyer John Ainley told Good Morning Britain: 'The police spoke to me in the course of the evening, and they were trying to have access to his papers.

'That's difficult without consent from his solicitors and a court order. [The police] were trying, I think, to implore Brady at this very late stage to pass on any information or documents to them so they could carry out a meaningful search of the moors.'

But Brady's lawyer, Robin Makin, told Radio 4's Today programme that if Brady did know where Keith's body was, he would have told police when they took him to the moor in 1986.

He said: 'He did go to the Moors a long time ago and I suspect that if there had been information for him that he could have provided, he would have provided it then.' 

He added: 'I would very much hope that the remains can be found, but unfortunately I haven't got any information that's going to assist.'

Mr Makin said he had seen Brady about two hours before his death and they discussed Brady's legal wishes and arrangements for his funeral.

He said: 'It was, I suppose, quite a moving sort of situation. I got a call that he wanted to see me, he was obviously well aware that his death was imminent.' 

Brady and his co-accused Myra Hindley (left) murdered five children including Keith Bennett (right) whose body has never been recovered despite several extensive searches. His mother tragically died without discovering where he is buried

Brady (pictured with Myra Hindley and her younger sister Maureen) was a twisted individual who became obsessed with cruelty and torture. He had been at Ashworth Hospital since 1985 and died just after 6pm on Monday.

Brady, and his co-accused Myra Hindley (pictured together) murdered five children in the 1960s and the bodies of four of his victims have been found. The couple became infatuated with Nazis and sadism after getting together at a chemical firm

Police took Brady to the Moors in 1986. His lawyer thinks that if Brady knew where the body was he would have told them then

Brady was being held in a secure unit in Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside after spending 51 years in jail for the murders

Mr Makin said: 'I do feel there's something of a frenzy of expecting something from him, and indeed there would have been something from him that he would have been able to provide over many years so I'm not sure how helpful that has been.'

Mr Makin told the Liverpool Echo that Brady was 'very weak, but still articulate' and knew he was about to die in his final hours.

The solicitor said: 'We discussed a few things but he was extremely weak and it was very difficult for him.

'It was somebody who was in his last hours. He wanted to make sure that his legal and preparatory wishes were going to be fulfilled by me.'

Mr Makin wouldn't be drawn on whether Brady expressed any remorse or regret for his crimes - or what his last requests were.

Keith Bennett disappeared on the way to his grandmother's house on June 16, 1964, and Hindley lured him into her car and drove him to the Moors.

But Brady would not reveal where he buried Keith and Mrs Johnson died five years still not knowing where he left her son's body.

Brady, from Glasgow, Scotland, died just after 6pm on Monday and police informed relatives of the children who were killed. They included Terry West, whose sister Lesley Ann Downey was murdered aged ten in 1964. 

He said: 'I poured myself a glass of wine when I found out – we've been waiting for this day for such a long time. It's closure for our family.

'But I really feel for Keith Bennett's brother Alan and the rest of his family – this probably means they'll never know where his body was buried. 

'He's taken it to the grave. There's still one poor kiddie up there on the Moors. My heart goes out to Alan – at least I've got somewhere that I can visit our Les, he hasn't even got that.' 

Mr West, 66, added: 'What Brady did will never be forgotten – it's had such an effect on all our lives. I had to protect my children when they were growing up, I wouldn't let them play out in the street. 

How Brady's five victims were snatched from markets and fairs before being murdered in the most brutal ways

• Pauline Reade, 16, was the couple's first victim. She was on her way to a local dance when Hindley persuaded her to get in her car. They drove Pauline to Saddleworth Moor where she was raped Pauline, beaten and stabbed.

• John Kilbride, 12, was snatched from Ashton market on Saturday November 23, 1963. He was strangled and buried in a shallow grave. He was the second of Brady and Hindley's five victims.

• Keith Bennett, 12, disappeared on the way to his grandmother's house. Hindley had lured him into her car and driven him to the Moors where he was murdered. The method of killing has never been made clear. The pair buried his body which has never been found.

• Lesley Ann Downey, 10, disappeared on Boxing Day. She had been snatched from the fair and taken back to Hindley's house. She was brutally assaulted with the ordeal captured on tape.

• Edward Evans, 17, was the sick duo's final victim. He had just been to see Manchester United play when Brady lured in Edward. Brady repeatedly bludgeoned Evans with an axe

John Kilbride, 12, (left) and 16-year-old Pauline Reade (right) were killed by the pair and their bodies were later located in the North West

Lesley Ann Downey (right) was killed when she was just ten, while Edward Evans (left) was 17 when he was murdered by the pair

The method of the killing of Keith Bennett, 12, has never been made clear. The pair buried his body which has never been found

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Brady and Hindley murdered at least two of their victims at this 'house of horrors' in Hyde, west of Manchester

In December 1965, police searched the housing estate home of Brady and Hindley after Edward Evans was killed. The house was pulled down in the 1980s after a series of would-be tenants refused to move in

Court artist sketch of Brady in 2013 when he appealed against being held in a secure unit. He told the court he should be returned to a normal prison and had killed for what he called the 'existential experience'

Terry Kilbride, 63, the brother of John Kilbride, told The Sun: 'It's a lot to take in. It's been years and years of anguish and pain for us and the families of the victims. 

'He's ruined our lives all these years and he'll still ruin it even though he's gone. I feel numb. He was a murderous psychopath. What a bastard. We're going to be taunted by a dead man from beyond the grave.'

A family member of Lesley Ann Downey reportedly posted online: 'We as a family have had the best news ever! Brady the devil's disciple is DEAD!!! May you rot in F****** HELL!!!!!!!!!!' 

At a court hearing in February lawyers said Brady had been bedridden for two years and was terminally ill, with emphysema and cancer among his illnesses.

Speaking yesterday before Brady's death, Terry Kilbride, whose 12-year-old brother John was murdered, begged Brady to reveal where his final victim's body was. 

'I would beg him to do the right thing on his deathbed and tell us where Keith is,' he said. 'Now is the time for him to stop playing tricks and come clean. If he takes it to the grave, I will feel so sorry for Keith's family.

'There will only ever be another search if there's fresh evidence. That has to come from him. When Brady dies I truly hope he rots in hell. That's the only place he's going.'

Brady and Hindley, who died in prison in 2002, tortured and murdered five children.

Their two other victims were Pauline Reade, 16, and Edward Evans, 17. Four of the victims were buried on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester.

Brady was jailed for three murders in 1966 and has been at Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside since 1985. He and Hindley later confessed to another two killings.

He campaigned for several years to be moved from the secure unit to a Scottish prison so he could not be force-fed – as at Ashworth – and where he would have been allowed to die had he wished. 

Brady (pictured, left, in later life) and lover Myra Hindley (right) continued to communicate in coded messages while in jail

Police chief Arthur Benfield addresses his staff during the huge hunt for the bodies of the murdered children in 1967

Hundreds of volunteers searched Saddleworth Moor (left and right) to find the children who were killed by Hindley and Brady

Search teams scour Saddleworth Moor in 1965 looking for the first three victims and were using police dogs to help find them

Brady (pictured left in 1963 and artist's impression, right) was put into foster care after his birth in Glasgow

His request was rejected after Ashworth medical experts said he had chronic mental illness and needed continued care in hospital.

A further review was due in September last year, but Brady refused to take part after it was ruled that his solicitor Robin Makin could not be involved. 

His legal challenge to that ban was rejected in February. At that point, his legal team said he was terminally ill. In December, Brady wrote to Channel 5 journalist Julian Drucker to reveal his fatal condition.

He wrote: 'I'm still bedridden and have been for over two years.

'The lung and chest condition is terminal.' 

A Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust spokesman said: 'We can confirm a 79-year-old patient in long term care at Ashworth High Secure Hospital has died after becoming physically unwell.' 

The spokesman added that Brady died at 6.03pm on Monday and they were unable to say what Brady died of, but said he had been on oxygen for a while.

Brady was not found dead in his room, the spokesman said, but he was unable to confirm if anyone was with him when he died, adding: 'Quite possibly. I don't know.' 

Man who narrowly avoided death at Brady's hands tells of sadness that missing victim may never be found

Tommy Rhattigan avoided becoming one of Brady's victims. He told of his sadness that Keith Bennett may never be found

A man who escaped the murderous clutches of Moors Murderer Ian Brady as a child said he learned of his death with a 'heavy heart'.

Tommy Rhattigan was lured to the home of Brady by Myra Hindley aged seven, with the promise of a jam butty, but climbed through a window after becoming uneasy.

On learning of Brady's death, he told ITV's Good Morning Britain: 'I was actually stunned, I had a lot - a lot - of mixed emotions, a heavy heart, and the reason why I had a heavy heart is because his time's up, he's gone, but the families of the victims are still here.'

In 2000, he wrote to Brady because he felt 'really sorry' for the mother of victim Keith Bennett and wanted Brady to tell her where her son's body was buried. She died in 2012 without knowing his final resting place.

The killer wrote back, telling him he was mistaken in having met him and Hindley and that they were 'quite ordinary and not dripping blood'.

Mr Rhattigan told the programme that Hindley approached him in a park with the promise of a jam butty, and she reminded him of one of his sisters, due to the smell of her perfume and hairspray.

Mr Rhattigan followed her back to the house but climbed through a sash window after becoming uneasy, while a shouting Hindley grabbed his foot in a bid to prevent the escape.

He said: 'Whilst I was in the house certain things weren't adding up. They never sat and spoke to me like most people did.

'They stayed back in the kitchen - well he did - she came in and it's as if she pushed the plate with a big slice of jam and bread on there, and I'm looking at that and there's something just not right about these people, it's the house, the furniture didn't match them, it was so old.'

He said he had been dubbed by the media 'the one that got away' but believed there had been many other children like him.

Asked if he believed it was just five victims he said: 'No, 100% I don't. I truly believe that - the media sort of tag me with the one that got away, there's more than one that got away.' 

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The policeman who heard tape of Brady's little victim's screams said he'd gladly kill him with his bare hands, by author Colin Wilson, who Brady wrote to for 10 years  

Now that Ian Brady is dead, most people will shrug and say: 'About time too!' But if Brady's spirit is hanging around somewhere in the psychic ether, he will be saying exactly the same thing.

He told me many times that he wished he had been executed in 1966 – as he would have been if capital punishment had not been abolished the year before.

It was on April 19, 1966, that Brady and Myra Hindley went on trial at Chester Assizes, charged with three murders: Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, John Kilbride, 12, and Edward Evans, a 17-year-old homosexual who was the last of the victims. The police were also fairly certain that the couple had been responsible for at least two more murders: a 16-year-old girl named Pauline Reade, and 12-year-old Keith Bennett.

The evidence against them was overwhelming.

On Boxing Day 1964, they had driven to a fair in Hulme Hall Lane, Manchester, and had picked up Lesley Ann Downey, offering her a lift home.

The sadistic crimes of Ian Brady (pictured) and Myra Hindley shocked the nation to its core. He has now died aged 79 

Police were seen blocking the A635 near Manchester as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were taken back to Saddleworth Moor to find the remaining bodies in 1986

The child had been warned not to speak to strange men, but had no reason to suspect a young couple.

They drove her back to the home of Hindley's grandmother in Wardle Brook Avenue – they had already taken the precaution of making sure the old lady was away, staying with an uncle at Dukinfeld.

There, Lesley was ordered to undress, and Brady and Hindley did the same. A tape recorder was switched on, as well as the radio. Lesley, with a gag in her mouth, was then made to pose naked in a number of semi-pornographic positions. As she cried and tried to scream, Hindley is heard snarling: 'Shut up or I'll hit you one.'

After that, the recorder was switched off, and Lesley was raped and strangled.

The next day, the couple buried her on Saddleworth Moor.

Brady later told me that it was Hindley herself who strangled her with a cord, and that afterwards she enjoyed toying with the cord when other people were present.

When the tape was played in court, it destroyed any chance that the jury might find extenuating circumstances. A policeman who had heard it told me it was one of the most harrowing experiences of his life, and that he would gladly have killed them both with his bare hands.

One week after the jury had heard the tape, the Moors Murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hindley died in prison 36 years later in 2002. Now Brady – who said repeatedly he wanted to commit suicide – has followed her to the grave.

As a writer with an interest in criminology, I had always found the case fascinating but incomprehensible.

Ian Brady, pictured as he arrived at the courthouse in Hyde, Cheshire, to be convicted of murdering children in 1965

Brady was obsessed with violence at the time of the killings and recorded the final moments of victims as the tortured them

Before she met Brady at the age of 18, Hindley had been a perfectly normal teenager. She loved animals and children, and had a strong religious streak.

What had driven her to kill? What kind of mesmeric hold did Brady have over her?

I began to understand more when, in November 1991, Brady wrote to me out of the blue. He wanted to know whether I was collaborating on a book about him with a girl who had been to visit him in prison. I answered that I was not.

But we began to correspond, with an average of one or two letters a month, and this went on for more than a decade. In time, he came to trust me, and told me many things.

For my part, there was intense hostility in my side of the correspondence. As a father, I obviously found his crimes unforgiveable. I felt that a man who murdered children deserved everything he got.

What was really striking was his obvious feeling that society was somehow to blame for his predicament. He particularly loathed the upper classes which, he felt, were full of liars and hypocrites.

Cases such as the Guinness scandal in the 1980s, where four City big-wigs manipulated share prices, and the 1990s downfall of former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken who was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice, excited a stream of bitterly satirical – and, incidentally, funny – invective from him.

Brady (pictured) was jailed for three murders in 1966 and had been at Ashworth Hospital since 1985 - where he died yesterday

To the end, he refused to acknowledge the slightest touch of guilt. Yet I do believe that he came to feel remorse.

I once asked if he ever thought about the feelings of the victims, and he replied: 'That would be a psychological suicide pill.' In other words, he dared not do so.

For some reason I could not at first explain, Brady was full of rage. I asked him if it was because he had been born illegitimate (in 1938), and fostered when he was still a baby. He denied this, saying he continued to see a great deal of his mother, and had a pleasant childhood on a Glasgow estate.

But as a child, he won a scholarship to a 'posh' school, where most of his classmates had far more money than he had. Yet he was intelligent, and a natural leader. It may have been because he felt fate had treated him unfairly in comparison to his richer peers that he started on a career of burglary in his teens that led to probation, then to an enforced move to Manchester to join his mother.

The real turning point came when he was 17, and working in the fruit market. A lorry driver asked him to help load some stolen goods, and Brady did it for nothing, simply to oblige. But the driver was caught, and Brady was sentenced to Borstal.

I came to realise that this two-year sentence was the key to Brady. Mad with rage at the injustice, he vowed he would make society pay. And from then on, he never lost his power to hate.

By the time he came out of prison, he had decided to become a career criminal. He vowed to become rich, then retire to some pleasant tropical climate such as in Bermuda.

Although he never told me fully about this period, I gather that he joined a gang that specialised in car theft, and that he occasionally broke his parole and went abroad to deliver stolen vehicles: he even went – on 'business' – to America.

Men and women digging on Saddleworth Moor, near Greenfield, in the search for Brady's victims in 1965

He loved travel and wandering in lonely places – which helps explains why he later came to select Saddleworth Moor to bury his victims. Meanwhile, he had taken a job as an office clerk, and spent his evenings reading Hitler's Mein Kampf, and books by the amoral and brutally libidinous Marquis de Sade. One of his favourite novels was Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. Brady claimed he could identify with the novel's intelligent hero who considers himself above the law and chooses to murder someone rather than remain a nonentity.

It was at this point, when he was a clerk in 1961, that an 18-year-old Myra Hindley arrived to work in the same firm. She was four and a half years his junior, and with her Lancashire accent, her dyed blonde hair and bright lipstick, she was not his type – too ordinary.

Yet she was fascinated by his sulky good looks, reminiscent of Elvis Presley, and by his air of sardonic self-sufficiency. And as it became obvious to Brady, who was something of a control freak, that she was totally infatuated, he began to eye her with predatory interest. Finally, when she had been in the office for a year, he invited her out, and lost no time in taking her virginity on her grandmother's divan bed in the front room of her home.

The next day, he seemed as bored and indifferent as ever. But Hindley was totally hooked. She once said: 'If he had told me the moon was made of green cheese, I would have believed him'.

To him, her total adoration was more intoxicating than the German wine he loved to drink on the moor. Suddenly, he felt he was capable of achieving anything.

Hindley's infatuation meant she was untroubled when she discovered his criminal past. They bought a home together in Hattersley, east of Manchester, and he would take her for rides on the back of his motorcycle to Saddleworth Moor where they would get drunk.

She bought a revolver and joined a gun club and they would daydream about getting rich by robbing building societies. Her family disapproved but it was too late: Hindley was his slave and Brady enjoyed seeing how far he could make her do his will, getting her to pose for pornographic pictures with him.

When that day came in July 1963 when Brady told her he wanted her to help him kidnap and rape Pauline Reade, she agreed without hesitation. For weeks afterwards she carried on saying hello to Pauline's mother.

In October 1963 they drove to the market at Ashton-under-Lyne, where 12-year-old John Kilbride was earning pocket money by doing odd jobs for stall-holders. As it became dark and foggy, a 'kind lady' asked if he wanted a lift. When his body was found two years later, strangled with a piece of string, his trousers were round his knees.

Police search Saddleworth Moor for the bodies of the victims killed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the 1960s 

In June 1964, Keith Bennett vanished on the way to visit his grandmother in Manchester. His body was never found, and his broken mother Winnie Johnson died some 50 years later aged 78 still begging Brady to tell her where he had been buried. The couple picked up Lesley Ann Downey at a fairground on Boxing Day 1964. No one at the pair's subsequent trial who heard that 16-minute tape recording of Lesley's last moments will ever forget how, at one point, she pleaded: 'Please, God, help me...I want to see my mummy'.

Yet, after four rape-murders, a mawkish thing happened to Brady. Although the Marquis de Sade's writings had convinced him that it was no crime to kill for pleasure, he suddenly felt empty and drained. 'I felt old at 26. Everything was ashes.' He felt he had done everything, and there was nothing more to strive for.

This, I suspect, is why, although he had killed as regularly as clockwork every six months, he let the next 'killing time' go by without a murder.

And when he killed again, it was simply to try to involve Hindley's brother in law, David Smith, in his plans to rob a bank. He wanted to gain a hold over Smith, who, like Hindley, admired him to the point of idolatry, by making him an accomplice.

In October 1965, the couple lured a 17-year-old, Edward Evans, to the house and attacked him with a hatchet in front of Smith, who pretended he would help them dispose of the body.

But he miscalculated. Smith was horrified. He and his wife went to the police. Brady and Hindley were arrested the next morning. Brady told me he had always intended to kill any police who came to arrest him, then shoot himself. But when he reached cautiously under the bed for the concealed revolver, he remembered he had left it upstairs with the corpse of Edward Evans. That was the end of his freedom.

This mapfrom the time  showed the places where four children, including John Kilbride and Keith Bennett, disappeared

He was never an easy prisoner. Although he never physically attacked anyone, his rage and contempt for the guards and authorities made him hated by them. At one point he was reduced to a seven stone skeleton, and had a nervous breakdown. He was declared insane in 1985 and put into Ashworth high security psychiatric hospital near Liverpool. Still he continued to denounce the prison authorities.

In September 1999, guards burst into his cell, twisted his arms behind his back, and accused him of taping a knife under a sink out on the ward. Brady insists it was a set-up – a deliberate effort to get him off the ward so he would become someone else's problem.

Removed to a general ward where he was put under 24-hour watch, with two warders by his bed and four more outside the door, he went on hunger strike, and had to be force fed. I knew then that he was determined to cheat his captors by dying.

Had he not been in a hospital, he would long ago have starved himself to death, for the prison service has no right to force feed inmates. But at Ashworth the rules dictated that, as a patient, he had to be kept alive.

Which is why, with obsessive determination, he spent his last years fighting to prove his sanity so that he could be transferred back to prison and die. It never happened.

Although Ian Brady was a 'monster', I felt he should have been allowed to end the misery and futility of his totally wasted life. Even my wife, who at first could not bear to touch his letters because she felt they might contaminate her, admitted to feeling sorry for the way he was kept alive.

A truly moral society would recognise that very little purpose is served by keeping such a man inside. By doing so leaves them as the object of target-practice for other bloodthirsty prisoners and a psychotic maelstrom of their own suicidal fantasies. I am convinced that hanging Ian Brady would have been more humane. 

(Colin Wilson, author of Serial Killers: A Study In The Psychology Of Violence, died in 2013 and we updated this article yesterday.) 

Sordid sadism, sick Nazi love tokens and macabre photo shoots at the graves of their victims: How a twisted infatuation spawned the most shocking murders in modern history

It was an infatuation that would spawn some of the worst crimes in modern British history.

She was an impressionable, religious 18-year-old from suburban Manchester. He was a petty criminal from Glasgow, four years her senior.

But Ian Brady's fascination with Nazism and sexual perversion would take hold of his younger lover Myra Hindley as they plotted and carried out the abduction, torture and murders of children.

Ian Brady, who died yesterday, met Myra Hindley when they both worked at a chemical company. The pair went on to commit some of the most shocking murders of modern history

Watching him reading Hitler's Mein Kampf in his lunch breaks at the chemical company they both worked for in Manchester in 1961, Hindley began to see Brady as a sophisticated older man.

Brady, who was initially rejected by the mother he was later sent to live with, already had criminal record for burglary and had spent time in Strangeways jail when he met Hindley.

When the pair became lovers, they pushed each other towards an increasingly horrific sadism that would lead to the terrible murders of their child victims.

The couple watched films on Nazism, about which Brady had built up a library of books, and Hindley dyed her hair blonde to imitate an ideal Ayran woman.

Hindley was obsessed with him and he grew to love the idea of being worshipped and adored and decided to include her in his plans for a crime spree.

He made her buy a car and taught her to shoot, but on realising how much his young lover would do for him he persuaded her to become involved in his twisted fantasies. 

Their first victim was 16-year old Pauline Reade, who was murdered after Hindley asked her to help find her glove lost on Saddleworth Moor.

A similar photo which some speculate could be the site of missing victim Keith Bennett's grave

The pair took photos of each other on Saddleworth Moor, where they buried their victims

Brady had cut the teenager's throat with such force that her spinal cord was severed. Pathologists said it was impossible to say whether Brady had sexually assaulted her.

Four months after Pauline vanished, the day after President John F Kennedy's assassination in the US, 12-year-old John Kilbride became Brady's second victim.

He was lured on to the moor where he was sexually assaulted and murdered. Brady took a photograph of Hindley standing on the edge of his grave holding her pet dog. The photograph would later lead police to the young boy's resting place.

The body of the third victim, Keith Bennett, 12, has never been found. He died after leaving his home in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester on June 16 1964.

Even though Brady and Hindley were both permitted to travel to the moor to try to remember where the boy's remains were, they were not found.

Myra was rarely seen without her pet dog, but Brady had tortured animals before the killings

It was Brady and Hindley's next killing that sealed their reputation for pure wickedness - the murder of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey on Boxing Day in 1964.

She became their youngest victim when she was lured from a fairground to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother in Hattersley.

Brady stripped, sexually abused and tortured her, forcing her to pose for pornographic photographs.

Her last moments were recorded on a harrowing 16-minute, 21-second audio tape.

The terrified girl begged for mercy, called out for her mother and appealed to God for help before her voice was stifled forever.

Her cries reduced the judge, jury, courtroom spectators and even hardened police officers to tears.

Detectives could not say exactly how Lesley Ann died. Her body was dug up naked except for shoes and socks.

Hindley enticed one victim to her death by asking her to help her find her a glove she had lost

Had the pair not made a crucial blunder in involving Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith in their next enterprise, the murder of Edward Evans, 17, might not have been their last.

Edward was lured from a gay bar to a home then shared by Hindley and Brady on the Hattersley estate at Hyde. Brady then attacked Evans with an axe, smothered him with a cushion and completed his grim task with an electrical cable.

Brady was 28 in May 1966 when he and Hindley were convicted of murdering Lesley Ann and Edward.

He was also convicted of the murder of John Kilbride and received three life sentences to run concurrently.

In 1987 Brady finally confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett but he was never tried for the crimes.

Hindley (pictured in 1996) and Brady (right in 2013) continued to communicate behind bars

It later emerged that the pair continued to communicate after they were jailed.

Hindley's prison records were released after she died aged 69 in 2002 and they included five files of letters between the wicked couple - but only two have been made public.

In one, Hindley used the code to suggest Brady should get someone to attack the brother of one of their victims with acid.

Other letters contained coded messages to plan an escape from jail while on remand awaiting trial. However police managed to crack the code and were able to quash attempts when Hindley requested a jail move.

The couple are already known to have used at least one code they called 6-7-8 to communicate.

The code would start on the sixth line of a letter.

The seventh and eight words on alternate lines in the letter would then be used to parcel together of a sentence, a secret code.