Little innocent Keith Bennett in NHS glasses was led off by Ian Brady ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’

Keith Bennett lived in a red-brick, end of terrace house on Eston Street in Manchester. Outside, there was, until relatively recently, a poignant reminder of the little boy with wire-framed NHS glasses; it was a wall with goalposts painted on it — by Keith — but which has now been knocked down after falling into disrepair.

‘They seemed to have been there forever and then one day about ten years ago they were gone,’ said a neighbour.

In almost every other respect, though, the house and the street where Keith Bennett spent his cruelly short life is exactly the same as he would have remembered.

It was around 7.45pm on June 16, 1964 — four days after his 12th birthday — that Keith walked out of his front door for the last time with his mum Winnie and his younger siblings. The kids were going to spend the night with their nan, just a short stroll away on the other side of the busy Stockport Road, to give their mam a break.

They usually walked together but on this particular evening his brother Alan and sister Maggie went on ahead.

Keith, who was extremely short-sighted, had broken his glasses the day before so his mam accompanied him most of the way and made sure he got across Stockport Road safely.

Then she kissed him goodbye. She never saw Keith again.

Somewhere between Stockport Road and the few hundred yards to his nan’s house in Morton Street, a Mini Traveller estate pulled up alongside him.

The driver, a young blonde woman, wound down the window. Could he help her carry some boxes, she asked. Keith jumped in the back where her boyfriend was also sitting.

Had Keith been with his brother and sister as he normally was, or arrived a few minutes earlier or later or taken a slightly different route, he might never have got into the car. The driver was 21-year-old Myra Hindley and her passenger — who lived just round the corner from Keith’s nan — Ian Brady.

We know that Keith was taken to Saddleworth Moor. We know that he was sexually assaulted and strangled — probably with an old belt from a washing machine — and buried in a shallow grave.

What we have never known, which has haunted his family for nearly 60 years, is where. Now, is the moor about to finally give up its tragic secret?

Just off the A635, the main route between Manchester and Doncaster, there’s a spot known as Eagle Rock which offers a panoramic view of a vast expanse of moorland.

This is where Brady was brought from his cell in Ashworth maximum high security hospital on Merseyside in the 1980s after offering his ‘assistance’ to locate Keith.

He was playing mind games and had no intention of doing so. The landscape had changed, he said. He was confused. He couldn’t say where he had hidden Keith, after all.

But not far beneath where he once stood — and I am now standing — is a small patch of wasteland where suspected human remains have been found.

The site is in the vicinity of Shiny Brook, a stream which stretches for nearly a mile through the folds of rock and shifting layers of peat on Saddleworth.

Is the location significant? It would seem so.

It is within a few hundred yards of where three Moors Murders victims were buried: Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, and ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. Edward Evans, who was 17, was found bludgeoned to death with an axe inside Brady and Hindley’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue in Hyde, Manchester.

Keith, the bespectacled lad with the endearing grin, is the only victim who has never been found.

The depravity of the killing spree which claimed his life and those of four other children in similar circumstances, between 1963 and 1965, is still seen by many as the passing of a more innocent age.

Over the years, Greater Manchester Police have used geologists, geophysicists, archaeologists and anthropologists to help them look for Keith’s body. 

At one point, a U.S. spy satellite was employed in the search and a cryptologist from GCHQ was drafted in to try to crack a possible code in letters shared between Brady and Hindley which might identify his whereabouts.

The terrain around Shiny Brook is probably the most intensely searched few square miles in Britain, perhaps anywhere.

But now a team of experts, including soil analysts and an archaeologist specialising in human remains — assembled by author Russell Edwards in his seven-year quest to find Keith — have discovered what they believe is the skull of a child aged around 12. 

Samples of earth also revealed the presence of potential human tissue, calcium and other elements such as phosphorus and nickel which are indicators of human, not animal, remains.

The specimens have not yet been subjected to conclusive laboratory testing because the area is a potential crime scene. The police have been informed, however, and are preparing to exhume a small section of moorland. For the first time in 35 years, a blue tent, eerily familiar on such occasions, can be seen on the moor.

On a bright sunny day, with the heather in full bloom, Saddleworth, which straddles the metropolitan boroughs of Oldham in Greater Manchester and Kirklees in West Yorkshire in the shadow of the Pennines, is often described as breathtaking. 

But, for many, a line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, reproduced in a Manchester Evening News supplement about the Moors Murders, comes closer to the truth.

‘We meet in an evil land that is near to the gates of hell’ are the words printed at the introduction of the section entitled: ‘A Lonely Resting Place.’

Saddleworth Moor felt like the ‘gates of hell’ this week, metaphorically speaking, at least, regardless of whatever emerges in the coming days. Tragically, Keith’s mother died in 2012, without knowing the truth.

What kind of boy was Keith Bennett? His brother Alan shared a bedroom with him on Eston Street, which is in the Longsight district of Manchester.

He remembers how they bent the street light near their window so it almost came into the room.

‘We had the biggest light in Longsight,’ he recalled in his website (searchingforkeith.com). ‘The room was flooded with an orange glow every night.’

Keith tried to teach Alan, who was four years younger, to swim, which he excelled at. 

In return, Alan helped Keith with reading, something he struggled with. ‘Keith had little time for anything but laughter and nature,’ Alan adds. ‘He was an ordinary, uncomplicated child, with his head in the clouds most of the time.

‘He lived for the natural world and animals and never returned home from a trip to the local park without a few finds — usually a handful of twigs.’

Until one day, on a short journey he had made a thousand times before, he simply vanished.

They didn’t have a telephone. Many working-class households didn’t in those days.

It was the year when Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton for the first time and Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Winnie only realised her son was missing the next day when she saw her mother. ‘Where’s Keith?’ she asked. Within days, he was staring out from a ‘missing’ poster in shops, billboards and newsstands, an image that has entered the national psyche along with the monochrome mugshots of his murderers.

Brady and Hindley, a couple who had gone to see the Nuremberg Trials at the cinema on their first date, had already struck twice in the previous year in Greater Manchester by the time Keith got into their Mini.

Pauline Reade was on her way to a dance at a British Railways Club in Gorton when she disappeared while John Kilbride was snatched from a market.

The trial of Brady and Hindley took place at Chester Assizes in 1966. The evidence which convicted them included photographs that the pair had taken of themselves and their victims and a tape recording of the sexual abuse of Lesley.

Brady, who had developed a burgeoning obsession with Nazi Germany, and Hindley, who had bleached her hair to emulate Aryan perfection, began their life sentences as the most notorious child killers in modern British criminal history, a description that probably still holds true today; ‘two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity’, to quote the judge. Yet, for more than two decades, the Moors Murderers denied killing Pauline and Keith, only admitting their guilt in 1985.

They were taken to Saddleworth separately to help find the bodies. Pauline was found in 1987 but Keith never was and remained somewhere out there on Saddleworth. His mother made thousands of visits to that lonely place and wrote countless letters to Brady, begging him to tell where on the moor he had buried Keith. He ignored every one. ‘Ian Brady has tortured me for over 40 years and enjoyed every minute of it,’ she once said.

Few parents of murder victims could have endured such mental cruelty as Winnie Johnson, as she became after leaving her ‘womaniser’ first husband and remarrying Jimmy Johnson, the love of her life, a joiner by trade and the man Keith called Dad.

She was 30 when Keith was taken from her and 78 when she died from cancer ten years ago. Keith’s broken glasses were buried with her. Alan, her younger son, worked in the stockroom at Argos in Manchester but, like Winnie, devoted his life to finding Keith.

Hindley described the haunting last sight of Keith disappearing across the moor with Brady in correspondence with documentary maker and author Duncan Staff, who wrote Lost Boy, an acclaimed book about the Moors Murders. ‘I remember thinking then, as I later said to the police, that he looked like a little lamb being led to the slaughter.’

In 2001, she sent an annotated map to Staff purporting to show the spot where she kept lookout while Brady continued with Keith towards Shiny Brook, carrying a spade he would use to dig the boy’s grave. The map, drawn with a black pen on a plain white sheet of paper, had no scale to calculate distances or enough detail to lead to the body.

‘It was as if she could not put herself by the graveside in case it compromised her chances for parole,’ Staff would later write.

Hindley died shortly afterwards, aged 60, from respiratory failure following an earlier heart attack.

Brady himself continued to toy with everyone right up to his own death from cancer and emphysema in 2017. He told hospital staff to remove two-combination Samsonite briefcases he kept in a cupboard beside his bed and give them to his solicitor.

Keith’s family believed they might contain information about where he was buried.

Until a new law was passed in April, police had been refused permission to examine the cases and it could take several months for them to lodge an application to open them.

Perhaps they won’t need to.

Hanging on Winnie’s living room wall in Longsight was a picture of Keith in his NHS glasses accompanied by a poem: ‘From that day to this/I pray both day and night/That I will find my Keith/And lay his soul to rest.’

She had chosen hymns in expectation of a funeral service. She kept a wooden cross in her home, hoping one day to place it on a proper grave. She dreamt of an oak coffin being pulled along by a horse and carriage as crowds of mourners lined the street.

Today, a solitary small tent stands on a lonely plot of land, buffeted by a strong, autumnal wind, carrying the threat of rain, as police, once again, begin their search for Keith Bennett.

Will he now be able to be given the final farewell his mother desperately wished for — the farewell he deserves?