Moors murders
killings in Greater Manchester, England
The Moors murders were a series of murders of children committed by Ian Brady (né: Stewart) and Myra Hindley in and around Manchester, England, between July 1963 and October 1965. The five known victims – Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans – were aged between 10 and 17, and at least four were sexually assaulted. The bodies of two of the victims were discovered in 1965, in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. Bennett's body is also thought to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.
Brady and Hindley were charged only for the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans, and received life sentences under a whole life order. The investigation was reopened in 1985 after Brady was reported as having confessed to the murders of Reade and Bennett. Hindley stopped claiming her innocence in 1987 and confessed to all of the murders. After confessing to these additional murders, Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist in the search for the graves.
Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. She died in 2002 in West Suffolk Hospital, aged 60, after serving thirty-six years in prison.
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This entry incorporates text from “Moors murders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.