One of Your Own

by Carol Ann Lee

  For other families, apart from the usual seasonal festivities, Christmas 1963 was dominated by the Beatles, whose music and merchandise were everywhere. Christmas audiences gathered around the TV set to watch Ian’s favourite shows – TW3, the Hitchcock Hour – and two new programmes, which proved immediate hits: The Avengers and Doctor Who, the latter’s fame rising steeply ever since the first episode aired on the night John Kilbride went missing. On 27 December 1963, a photograph appeared in the local press, demonstrating the stark contrast in the Kilbrides’ Christmas: it showed Shelia and Patrick sitting around the decorated table with all their children but one, and a gap in the chairs where John should have sat.

  ‘My mum laid a place for John and bought him presents that Christmas and the next,’ Danny confirms. ‘She bought him birthday presents and cards as well. But she just used to cry all the time until they found him. She couldn’t help herself. No matter who was there, she’d collapse. My dad felt the same, but he hid himself away. I caught him a couple of times sobbing on the back step. I talked about everything to my brother Pat, because he was nine and a half when John went missing, but the others were too young. I kept trying to work out what had happened. I knew John wouldn’t run away because he had so many friends and was a happy kid. He was going out with a young girl at the time; she was upset. They were only just getting into their teens; it was light, innocent stuff. But after two or three months, I knew our John wasn’t ever coming home again.’31

  On New Year’s Eve 1963, Ian and Myra climbed on the Tiger Cub and drove to the moor. In the lay-by at Hollin Brown Knoll, Ian held his whisky bottle aloft until it glittered in the soft light from the full moon and shouted, ‘To John!’32

  11

  When I saw a photo of Keith Bennett, I was shocked at how young he looked. Once he was in the van, I never saw his face again. Only the back of him, walking along with Ian.

  Myra Hindley, letter, quoted in Modern Times: Myra Hindley

  Britain was almost halfway through the 1960s, but despite the much-vaunted social and cultural changes taking place ‘there was no such thing as a single national experience . . . the soundtracks to The Sound of Music and South Pacific comfortably outsold any Beatles albums of the decade . . . more people attended church than went to football matches [and], far from turning against a supposedly repressive Establishment, most people were content to vote for socially conservative, Oxford-educated politicians’.1 John Lennon spoke of the absence of an actual revolution: ‘The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same . . . nothing happened except that we all dressed up.’2

  The North was fast falling into industrial decline, and the cinema reflected the geographical shift in focus from Liverpool and Leeds to London in the last authentic new-wave film, Billy Liar. Critic Alexander Walker commented, ‘With Julie Christie, the British cinema caught the train south.’3 In the same way that they used literature to make their sexual preferences more palatable, Myra and Ian took their discontent with the stagnation of life in Manchester’s suburbs to an incomprehensible end. They spent hours on the moor, ruminating on how the murders had enabled them to rise high above the limitations of their working-class backgrounds, telling themselves that social dissatisfaction justified their crimes, which Ian described as ‘merely an existential exercise’.4

  In February 1964, Myra bought a second-hand Austin A40. At Millwards, her new acquisition caused a stir; Tom Craig recalled, ‘Everyone thought she’d gone ambitious.’5 Only 37 per cent of households owned a car by 1965; it was the apex of all affluent symbols and indicated not merely a certain level of prosperity but status as well. One of the first trips Myra and Ian took in the Austin was a reconnaissance visit to the moor. It had snowed, but the steep road up to Hollin Brown Knoll was still open to traffic. In the car with them was a small black-and-white puppy, one of a litter that Lassie had given birth to in January. Myra loved the little dog with a passion and called him Puppet or Pekadese. Ian had bought him a tartan collar and held the inquisitive animal on his knee as they parked in their usual place, the ice on the road making the turn hazardous. In warm clothing, they walked across the moor with Puppet tucked inside Myra’s coat, heading to the high ground where Pauline was buried. Ian took a photograph of Myra standing nearby, cuddling Puppet. Then they returned to the road and made their way carefully down the slope to John’s grave. There, in the watery sunlight, with the snow melting on the moor, Myra crouched on the sludgy ground above John’s body. In the photograph Ian developed a few days later, Puppet peeks out from inside Myra’s coat while she stares intently at the flat stones at her feet, an eerie half-smile playing about her lips.

  In prison therapy sessions, Myra discussed how they collected ‘souvenirs’ of their crimes but attempted to distance herself from the practice: ‘[Ian] would have liked the victims to have suffered for the rest of their lives after he had abused them. He could only savour past experiences through the items that he kept under lock and key. Returning at a later date to rekindle the excitement . . . Some of the photographs that we took on the Moors were constructed with the location of the graves taken into consideration, [but] Ian did not need a camera’s image, he could reproduce the image in his own head.’6 They slotted the photographs he had taken of their victims’ graves among holiday snaps and family pictures in a tartan album.

  That Easter, Myra and Ian drove to Scotland; they slept in the back of the Austin and toured the sites of Ian’s 1949 holiday to Dunning with the Sloans. They visited St Andrews and St Monans, and walked from the small village of Comrie through beech woods to the Devil’s Cauldron, a sheer drop of rushing white water that surged from a cavern into a wide pool. On the journey home, they paused in Glasgow, and Myra discovered Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross; in her letters, she mentions visiting Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with Ian and falling in love with the painting.

  On 6 May, Myra part-exchanged the Austin for a white Morris Mini-Traveller. A two-door estate car, the rear bench seat folded flat to convert the back into a load-carrying area. On the moor, she and Ian took photographs of each other standing like sentinels on the high boulders at Hollin Brown Knoll, with the car parked in the lay-by below. In one picture, Ian wears dark glasses and turns his head towards Pauline’s grave, smiling faintly. In another, Myra stands on the same boulder, grinning broadly at the camera, her body angled towards the opposite side of the road, where John Kilbride lay buried. A transistor radio sits at her unsuitably clad feet; she remembered later that Mary Wells’ Motown hit ‘My Guy’ was playing at the time. They also photographed the Mini-Traveller on its own, with the tumbling boulders behind.

  John Kilbride would have celebrated his 13th birthday on 15 May 1964. His mother bought him presents and wrote on his card: ‘For John, if he is found by today, May 15th 1964, All my love.’ She kept all John’s belongings safe, including his guitar and toy submarine, and the Flintstones annual he’d received with such pleasure the Christmas before his disappearance. She prayed regularly at St Christopher’s Catholic Church and continued to scour the streets for him. Likewise in Gorton, Pauline Reade’s parents carried on their search for their missing daughter.

  At the beginning of June, Ian told Myra he was ‘ready to do another one’.7

  Keith Bennett celebrated his 12th birthday on 12 June 1964. His home at 29 Eston Street was cheerfully crowded with family: mum Winnie, stepfather Jimmy Johnson and Keith’s younger siblings, Alan, Margaret, Ian, Sylvia and stepsister Susan, who was the same age as Keith and very close to him. ‘She and Keith went everywhere together,’ Winnie recalls. ‘I can just see their little faces now, asking me if I’d give them the money for the pictures. And if they liked the film they’d stay in the cinema and see it twice . . . And Margaret, she was only about three at the time, but she was devoted to Keith. Used to follow him around like a little dog.’8 Winnie’s own childhood was deeply scarred by the death of her seven-year-old sist
er, who burned to death when her dress caught light on the front-room fire; Winnie was ten at the time. Her life since hadn’t been easy – she had separated from Keith’s father when Keith was very young – but she regarded Jimmy as the love of her life, and their wedding in 1961 brought their two families together. Keith got on well with his stepfather and called him ‘Dad’.

  Like most boys, Keith was keen on football; he and his brother Alan, with whom he shared a bedroom, spent hours kicking a ball in front of the house and had painted two goal lines on the brick wall at the end of the street. Winnie describes Keith as a kid anyone could love: ‘There was no harm to him. He enjoyed life and was very interested in nature. He used to pick up leaves and caterpillars and bring them home, and he collected coins.’9 He was small, with sandy-brown hair, and wore spectacles for acute short-sightedness. He participated in the school swimming gala when he turned 12 and swam a length of the old Victorian baths for the first time, receiving a certificate for his achievement. That day he had dropped his glasses and broken a lens. His mother had set them aside to be mended.

  The Bennett children often stayed the night with their gran, 65-year-old Gertrude Bennett, who was a cleaner at Toc H rugby club in Victoria Park. She lived on Morton Street, which was known locally as ‘the concrete’ because the ground was laid with tarmac, while the surrounding streets were cobbled. Kids loved it because they could get up a bit of speed on their bikes and scooters without juddering about or catching their wheels between the cobbles. ‘The concrete’ was in Longsight, between the Daisy Mill Works factory on Stockport Road and the railway line, and three streets from Westmoreland Street, where Ian Brady lived.

  Winnie had arranged for Keith, Alan, Ian and Margaret to stay with her mother on the night of 16 June while she went to the eight o’clock bingo at St Aloysius School in Ardwick. That morning, Ian and Myra made their own plans for the evening ahead. They had already deposited a suitcase at the left luggage department of a railway station, and Ian had presented Myra with Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’, which hit the number one spot in the music charts the following week with its deeply mournful refrain about the loss of a loved one.

  The day passed in a haze of sunshine, and it was still warm when Myra drove to collect Ian from Westmoreland Street, pausing on the journey to pull on the black wig. When she arrived at Ian’s home, he climbed into the back of the car and said he would rap on the glass divider to indicate a potential victim. Myra accelerated out of the street, glancing at the groups of children playing outside their houses in the evening sunlight. It was just after half past seven.

  Winnie and Keith left Eston Street shortly after Alan, Ian and Margaret. Winnie was a few weeks away from giving birth to her fifth child, and a little slower at walking than usual. Keith was slightly ahead of her as they turned past the school on Plymouth Grove West, but she followed him, wanting to be certain that he crossed busy Stockport Road safely without his glasses. He met a couple of girls whom he knew from school and larked about behind them, pretending to be fierce. ‘I shouted to him to be careful in case he hurt them girls,’ Winnie remembers. ‘He just give me one of them big grins of his, as much to say don’t worry, mam. And them’s the last words I spoke to him.’10 She watched him walk across the zebra crossing on Stockport Road. When he reached the other side, he turned and waved, then she lost sight of him as he turned into a side street next to the Daisy Works. His path took him down Upper Plymouth Grove, bypassing the back entry into Westmoreland Street.

  The white Mini-Traveller glided towards him. Myra wound down her window to ask if he would mind helping her carry a few boxes from an off-licence. When his eyes flickered towards Ian, she said he was helping too.11 Keith agreed, and climbed into the front passenger seat.

  None of the children fought the initial approach, Myra claimed, years later: ‘It was probably because of me being a woman – they never had any fear.’12 They hadn’t driven very far through the sunlit streets before Ian asked Myra to stop and invited Keith to join him on the back seat. As Keith edged in beside him, Ian mentioned that Myra had lost a glove recently near Greenfield and that they’d appreciate Keith’s help in finding it. Ian kept talking as they drove away from the city, through Stalybridge and Mossley and the last huddle of cottages at Greenfield. The road wound through the falling landscape with its uncanny, elaborate rock formations and indigo summer veil of heather. It was still light, the copper glow of a warm evening, as Myra parked the car and watched Ian, who had a camera slung about his neck, lead Keith onto the sloping moor.13 She picked up a pair of binoculars and locked the car, then trailed Ian and Keith who went, she recalled, ‘like a little lamb to the slaughter’.14

  They walked along a stream, keeping mainly to the right-hand bank, but occasionally crossing the water. After a while, Ian turned and pointed towards a rise in the land; Myra followed where he indicated, onto the plateau, and put the binoculars to her eyes. The moor was empty. She sat down, no longer able to see Ian and Keith, who had gone into a dip. ‘I don’t know how long I was there,’ she recalled. ‘It seemed like ages. It could have been 30 or 40 minutes.’15 She stared at a cluster of rocks, her back turned away from the direction in which she’d walked. Later, she claimed to have heard nothing as she sat there, other than the soughing of the wind across the moor.

  When Ian returned, he was carrying the soiled spade. Myra asked how he had killed Keith and he replied that he had raped him, then strangled him with a length of cord – exactly as he had John Kilbride. He added that he had taken a photograph of Keith’s body before burying him. He began walking, and Myra followed him along the stream, watching him bury the spade in a bank of shale.16

  Back in Gorton, they worked their way quickly through Ian’s list of necessary precautions following the murder. He sponged down the car and burned his shoes and hers, because she had been standing next to him when he had buried the spade. He cut up his clothes and handed them to Myra, who threw them on the fire, together with the cord used to end Keith’s short life. When everything on the list was done, she drove Ian back to Westmoreland Street for the night. They would meet at Millwards the next day.

  Keith’s family didn’t realise he was missing until Wednesday morning. They didn’t own a telephone and when Keith failed to arrive at Morton Street, his grandmother assumed he had stayed at home instead. But at half past eight the following day, when Gertrude Bennett brought Alan, Ian and Margaret back to Eston Street, Winnie looked at her in puzzlement: ‘I said, “Where’s our Keith?” because normally she brought him with her on her way to her job . . . She said he hadn’t come to her last night. She said she’d been expecting him, but then she thought I must have made some other arrangements. We both started to panic . . . I went up to the school and the clinic, where I thought he might have gone about his broken glasses. But there was no sign, so I went to the police.’17 Like Danny Kilbride, Alan Bennett immediately sensed that something terrible had happened to his older brother. He left the house and went into the street with his football, kicking it repeatedly against the wall where the white lines stood out on the red-brick, and remained there for a long time, not knowing what else to do.

  After work, Ian gave the Mini-Traveller a more thorough clean. He set up his makeshift darkroom and developed the photograph he had taken of Keith. Myra admitted to looking at it with Ian and recalled that it showed Keith lying on the ground with his trousers down and blood on him. Ian told her he was going to destroy the picture because it was out of focus.

  Ian retrieved the suitcase of incriminating material from the left luggage department alone. Myra told Peter Topping that she didn’t know what was in the suitcase but believed the contents included an address book with the names of the men he had met in borstal and Strangeways, and a notebook in which he’d doodled the name of John Kilbride, though she claimed not to know about the notebook until after the trial. She related an implausible story about how she had been intrigued by the suitcase, which was kept under the bed, but ne
ver attempted to open it because she found that Ian had placed a hair over the lock, a trick she said she’d learned to look out for after reading James Bond novels.

  The press soon picked up on Keith’s disappearance. On 19 June, the Manchester Evening News featured an article on page 17. Under the headline ‘Tracker Dogs Join Hunt for Lost Boy’, readers learned that Keith’s home ‘is in an area where several murders have occurred and missing persons have gone untraced’.18 The search focused on Longsight, but there were no leads, as the press reported on 20 June: ‘Particular watch is kept on railways because he is keen on trains and frequented the railway sidings at Longsight.’19 The inevitable rumours began; two children gave separate but clearly inaccurate accounts of having seen Keith outside Longsight Library on the morning after his disappearance. There was speculation that he had run away, even though, like John Kilbride and Pauline Reade, he had no reason to want to leave home. The Manchester Evening News sent a photographer round to Smallshaw Lane, where Winnie had gone to meet Shelia Kilbride, instinctively feeling that Keith’s disappearance was linked to John’s, although the police had nothing to support that idea. The subsequent article was headed, ‘Missing Boys and the Two Mothers Who Wait’.20 Winnie visited the Kilbrides occasionally after that, and she met Joan Reade.

  Gertrude Bennett, Keith’s grandmother, blamed herself for not having raised the alarm when he didn’t arrive at Morton Street. Winnie went into premature labour and gave birth to a healthy son, but her anguish about Keith was compounded by the police suspicion that centred on her husband, Jimmy. Detectives searched their home, tearing up the floorboards and inspecting the concrete in the backyard for signs of disturbance. They took Jimmy Johnson in for questioning four times over the next two years, once calling at the house early on Sunday morning while the family were still asleep. ‘They accused me of killing him because I was his stepfather,’ Jimmy recalled. ‘I don’t blame them. I’m glad they explored every possibility, they had a job to do. But it was terrible at the time. I was very fond of the lad and to be accused of doing away with him was too much.’21 The strain began to affect their marriage, Winnie recalls, and eventually she became so distraught that she confronted the police: ‘I said to the head of CID, “Do you think I’d have stayed with my husband if I thought he had anything to do with Keith? You’re splitting my family up. And if that happens, you’ll have my death and the death of four kiddies on your conscience because I’ll kill myself and take them with me.”’22