The morning of October 7, 1965 was cold and grey over Hattersley, a housing estate perched on the eastern fringe of Greater Manchester. David Smith, eighteen years old and visibly shaking, walked to a public telephone box and dialed 999. He told the officer on duty that a body was lying at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue. He had watched the man who lived there kill someone with an axe the previous night. That man was his brother-in-law, Ian Brady. The woman of the house was his sister-in-law, Myra Hindley.

Police arrived within the hour. They found Edward Evans, seventeen years old, wrapped in polythene and bound with electrical flex. He had been struck repeatedly with an axe. Brady greeted officers at the door with near-perfect composure. Hindley offered little. Both were taken into custody, Brady immediately, Hindley four days later, after detectives began methodically working through the contents of that terraced house and what it connected to.

What they found would redefine evil in the British imagination for decades to come.

Myra Hindley was born on July 23, 1942, at Crumpsall Hospital, Manchester, the first child of Bob and Nellie Hindley. The family lived in Gorton, a tight-knit, sooty working-class district of row houses and corner pubs. Her father, Bob, had served with the Parachute Regiment during the Second World War and returned from it psychologically damaged and prone to violence. He drank heavily. He encouraged his daughter to fight back when provoked, to be hard, to never show weakness. It was, in its way, an education.

When Myra was five, her sister Maureen was born, and the cramped family circumstances led her parents to send her to live with her maternal grandmother on Bannock Street. She stayed permanently. She adored the old woman, later saying that whatever good existed in her came from her Gran. The arrangement also removed her from the worst of her father's rages, though it couldn't insulate her entirely from Gorton's rough edges.

She attended Ryder Brow Secondary Modern, where teachers recognized above-average intelligence alongside poor attendance. Neighbors remembered her as sociable, kind to young children, someone who could be trusted. Then, in 1957, a close friend named Michael Higgins drowned, and the fifteen-year-old Hindley was undone by it. She blamed herself for not being there. She converted to Roman Catholicism, carried a prayer book, attended Mass. The faith would follow her for the rest of her life in ways that grew increasingly and grotesquely ironic.

In January 1961, she took a job as a typist at Millwards Merchandise, a chemical distribution firm in Gorton. On one of her first days, she noticed a stock clerk named Ian Brady and wrote in her diary that she hoped he would ask her out. He didn't. For nearly a year, he barely acknowledged her existence, which appears to have sharpened her fixation rather than diminished it.

Brady was then twenty-three, Glaswegian by birth, with a history of juvenile theft and a consuming private obsession with Nazi philosophy, Dostoevsky, and the Marquis de Sade. He was cold, deliberate, intellectually vain. When he finally turned his attention toward Hindley, the effect on her was total.

She bleached her hair platinum blonde and began wearing heavy makeup and short skirts. She read the books he placed in front of her: Hitler's Mein Kampf, the writings of de Sade, texts on domination and pain. She absorbed his contempt for ordinary people, his conviction that certain individuals existed beyond conventional morality, his view that the strong owed the weak nothing. The transformation was not subtle. People who had known her before noticed. Most assumed it was simply what infatuation did to a young woman. They were wrong about what this was.

The couple became romantically involved in late 1961. Within a year, they were photographing each other on Saddleworth Moor, a high, treeless, windswept expanse of peat bog and heather twelve miles east of Manchester. The images look almost like holiday snapshots: Hindley smiling into the wind, Brady squinting in a leather jacket. Hidden in the same collection were other photographs. Images of a young girl, bound, gagged, posed.

On July 12, 1963, Pauline Reade, sixteen years old, left her home in Gorton for a dance at the British Railways Club. She never arrived. Hindley had approached her in a van and asked her to help search for a lost glove on the moor. Brady followed on his motorbike. On Saddleworth Moor that evening, he sexually assaulted Pauline and cut her throat. They buried her in a shallow grave in the peat, and drove home.

What followed had a terrible, patient rhythm. John Kilbride, twelve, was taken from a market in Ashton-under-Lyne in November 1963. Keith Bennett, also twelve, disappeared while walking to his grandmother's house in Longsight in June 1964. Lesley Ann Downey, ten years old, was taken from a fairground in Ancoats on Boxing Day 1964. Each time, Hindley provided the vehicle, the approach, the trusted female face that made children feel it was safe to accept help.

What happened to Lesley Ann Downey was recorded. Brady brought a reel-to-reel tape machine. The sixteen-minute recording captured the child crying, begging, praying, being directed and mocked. One voice was Brady's. The other was Hindley's. Photographs taken that day showed Lesley Ann bound and gagged in Hindley's bedroom.

The evidence trail that broke the case open ran through Manchester Central Railway Station, where detectives located two suitcases Brady had stored in the left-luggage office. Inside: the photographs, the tape, other materials. The luggage ticket for those suitcases had been concealed inside the spine of Hindley's Catholic prayer book.

The trial opened at Chester Assizes on April 19, 1966. When the tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey was played in court, the room fell into a silence that journalists present struggled to describe adequately. Jurors wept. Members of the public gallery pressed handkerchiefs to their mouths. Brady and Hindley sat without visible reaction.

On May 6, 1966, after two hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Brady of all three murders for which he was charged: those of John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans. Hindley was convicted of the murders of Downey and Evans, and found guilty as an accessory after the fact in the murder of Kilbride. Justice Fenton Atkinson, sentencing both to life imprisonment, described them as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity." The death penalty had been abolished six months earlier.

Hindley received two concurrent life sentences plus an additional seven years for harboring Brady after the Kilbride murder. In 1985, the Home Office set her minimum tariff at thirty years. In 1990, Home Secretary David Waddington escalated it to a whole-life tariff. She would make parole applications anyway, repeatedly, for three and a half decades.

Inside prison, she remade herself with considerable energy. She converted more seriously to Catholicism. She earned an Open University degree in humanities. She took up badminton, pottery, tapestry. Prison reports noted exceptional intelligence alongside a pronounced arrogance. The peer Lord Longford became her most persistent public champion, repeatedly arguing for her release and being repeatedly mocked for it. The British public, who had heard her voice on the tape, remained implacably opposed.

In 1970, Hindley severed ties with Brady. She fell in love with a prison officer named Patricia Cairns, who had previously been a nun; Cairns was convicted in 1974 for her role in a plot to help Hindley escape. Later, at HMP Durham, Hindley developed a close relationship with Rosemary West, convicted in 1995 for her own series of murders. Some reports described the relationship as romantic, though neither woman confirmed this publicly.

In 1985, Brady confessed to journalist Fred Harrison that he had killed Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett, the two victims for whom neither had originally been charged. Hindley initially denied it. Two years later, in 1987, she released a full public confession admitting her role in all five murders. She then accompanied detectives to Saddleworth Moor and led them to Pauline Reade's burial site. The young woman's remains were recovered twenty-four years after she had walked out of Gorton looking for a dance.

Keith Bennett's body was not found. It has not been found since. Searches of the moor were conducted in 1987 and again in subsequent years. Hindley maintained she could not recall the precise location. Whether she truly couldn't or wouldn't is a question that died with her. Keith's mother, Winnie Johnson, spent the remaining years of her life writing letters to Hindley, to Brady, to police commissioners, to anyone who might help her bring her son home. She died in August 2012, still waiting. Greater Manchester Police subsequently announced they had no active plans to resume the search.

Hindley was diagnosed with angina in 1999 and later suffered a brain aneurysm. In November 2002, she contracted bronchial pneumonia at HMP Highpoint in Suffolk. She was transferred to West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds and died there on November 15, 2002, aged sixty, having served thirty-six years. Home Office pathologist Dr. Michael Heath confirmed the cause at the subsequent inquest: bronchial pneumonia brought on by hypertension and coronary heart disease. The jury returned a unanimous verdict of natural causes.

Fewer than ten people attended her funeral at Cambridge Crematorium. Twenty local undertakers had initially refused to handle her body. Her ashes were scattered at Stalybridge Country Park, less than ten miles from the moor where four of her victims had lain in the peat.

Ten days after her death, on November 25, 2002, the Law Lords ruled that judges, not politicians, should set minimum sentences for convicted murderers. The Home Secretary's power to set tariffs was abolished. She had outlasted the legal architecture that held her, if only barely.

Her 1965 police mugshot, taken at Hyde Police Station shortly after her arrest, remains one of the most recognized faces in British criminal history. In 1997, artist Marcus Harvey exhibited a large-scale recreation of it at the Royal Academy's Sensation show, the image rendered in children's handprints. Four Royal Academicians resigned in protest. Visitors threw ink and eggs at the canvas. It was cleaned and rehung. Author Helen Birch wrote that Hindley's image had become "synonymous with the idea of feminine evil." The Smiths, who grew from the same Manchester streets as their subject matter, addressed the case in their 1984 song "Suffer Little Children," written from the perspective of the children buried on the moor.

What the Moors Murders case forced upon British society, and continues to force, is a confrontation with a specific and deeply uncomfortable problem. The problem is not Ian Brady, whose violence and pathology fit recognizable patterns of male predatory evil. The problem is Hindley, who held children still, who offered a trusted face to lure them close, whose voice is the second one on the tape.

She spent her final decades claiming transformation and redemption while one family searched a moor for bones that have still not been found. Keith Bennett would have been seventy-two years old in 2024. His mother never stopped looking for him. The moor has kept its secret for sixty years, and there is no reason yet to think it will give it up.