At first sight, they appear to be simple pictures of a happy couple living in the picturesque British countryside.
In one, a happy young man is seen holding his dog aloft, and in the other, a woman is seen cuddling her two pets while sitting on a blanket.
However, the disturbing holiday pictures of Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley that were just made public were really taken between 1950 and 1965, the year they were apprehended for their heinous crimes.
They killed five kids in and around Manchester between 1963 and 1965: Pauline Reade, 16; John Kilbride, 12; Keith Bennett, 12; Lesley Ann Downey, 10; and 17-year-old Edward Evans.
Then they interred their corpses in the Peak District’s Saddleworth Moor. The sole victim of the murderers whose body has not yet been located is Keith.
After Hindley passed away in 2002, Brady, who spent 55 years in jail and became the longest-serving prisoner in England and Wales, steadfastly refused to reveal the whereabouts of Bennett’s body for decades until his demise in 2017.
Author Chris Cook used the Freedom of Information Act to force the Home Office to provide the photos, and they have since been published in a new book. Now, he wants to figure out the whereabouts of Keith’s body.
The duo can be seen posing in a number of the pictures in unidentified locations. The difficult task of trying to find each one presented to the officers who examined them. Each’s precise date is likewise unknown.
However, Mr. Cook claimed that against the legendary killers’ wishes, the photographs were crucial in helping authorities locate the bodies of their victims.
Between July 1963 and October 1965, there were The Moors Murders.
The newly released photos are from a collection titled “The Tartan Album,” which was previously kept in a secure Home Office repository.
Later pictures in the album start to lose their innocent appearance as the smiling couple gradually turns stony-faced, right around the period in 1963 when the couple started their murderous rampage.
Before committing the first murder, the slaying of 16-year-old Pauline Reade on July 12, 1963, Brady conducted surveillance at Old Hall Drive School on Levenshulme Road and captured two unsettling photographs.
Brady and Hindley tricked Reade into a van and took him to a nearby dance under the guise of looking for a misplaced glove.
Another disturbing photo, taken the same day John Kilbride was kidnapped, shows Myra Hindley posing on a hill.
Brady and Hindley offered Kilbride a ride home from an Ashton-under-Lyne market on November 23, 1963.
The killers took a detour to Saddleworth Moor, where Kilbride was sexually raped before being killed, all the while using the identical explanation of the missing glove.
Although Brady and Hindley originally intended for these photos to serve as a record of their memories of their time together, they ended up being very useful to the police and yielded several significant leads, such as the fact that the couple frequently posed close to the graves of their victims.
As a result, the bodies of three victims—Pauline Reade in 1987, Lesley Ann Downey in 1965, and John Kilbride in 1964—were found by police.
Without David Smith’s assistance, it is unlikely that the police would have made this finding.
Edward Evans, the final victim, was murdered in front of Smith, Maureen’s brother-in-law.
Smith was supposed to assist Brady and Evans in burying Evans’ body on the moors after witnessing Brady thrash Evans with a hatchet and then choke him with an electrical cable.
Smith, however, was so alarmed by what he had witnessed that he called the police, which led them to search Hindley’s grandmother’s home.
This search turned up the photo album and a notebook that had, among other things, the name “John Kilbride.”
Mr. Cook, 39, the author of The Moors Murderers, discovered the pictures in an effort to advance the search for Bennett’s remains.
He claimed that if you were unaware of Ian Brady or Myra Hindley, you may believe that these images originated from a typical family photo album.
It demonstrates how these two appeared to be so commonplace, how they could blend in with any throng, and how their victims undoubtedly arrived at the same decision to voluntarily enter Hindley’s automobile.
“I discovered Mary Bastholm, a likely victim of Fred and Rose West’s atrocities who has never been located, while conducting research for a book about their murders.
“This in turn led me to look at other well-known cases where victims of crimes hadn’t been identified or recovered and it led me to this case, where Ian Brady and Myra Hindley admitted to abducting and killing Keith Bennett,” the author writes.
Between 1967 and 1987, Fred and Rose West—another British serial killer couple—killed at least twelve young girls, including two of their own kids.
Similar to Brady and Hindley, they have murderous impulses, and many of their victims were sexually molested before they died.
Mary Bastholm’s remains, like Keith’s, have not yet been located.
When Bastholm left her job at the Pop-In Café in 1968, she was 15 years old and en route to catch a bus. From this point on, her story is still a mystery, and the specifics of her disappearance are still unknown.
Such upsetting incidents give the relatives of the victims unimaginable suffering, especially those who will never find closure.
I wanted to look into deeper to see if there was anything that had been overlooked over the years in regards to where his remains are buried because of the agony and suffering that his family must still be experiencing.
These images demonstrate how challenging it was for detectives to locate each and every location.
They tried to find every location where the pair had stopped for a photo since one clearly showed Myra holding her puppy and gazing down at a disturbed area of the ground, which turned out to be John Kilbride’s grave.
‘As a significant component of my study, I went to the National Archives in Kew, London, and perused every file the Home Office and Department of Public Prosecution had on the matter.
One of the files contained the publicly available images from Ian Brady’s Tartan album, which the police had originally used to assist in identifying the locations of several of the victims’ graves, including John Kilbride’s.
The Home Office continues to withhold a large number of images, maps, and documents, but over the past five years I have forced the release of some of these via the Freedom of Information Act, and they make their debut in this book.
While Mr. Cook has not yet discovered the location of Keith’s bones, he has made some startling discoveries.
After Myra Hindley’s confession in 1987, a comprehensive map of Hoe Grain was made public by her confidante and labeled with the movements she claimed she and Brady had made on the day of Bennett’s murder. This information led the police to believe that this is where Bennett’s body is located.
Although I don’t think this is where he was buried, he wasn’t buried here, he added, “I did find some records that back up why the police investigated near Hoe Grain.”
“I recently unlocked a new Home Office file containing police files from the mid-1980s re-investigation, and the reason there are still pictures and maps withheld is because they depict the vicinity of Hoe Grain where they think Keith Bennett is buried.
The Home Office won’t make these available out of concern that people may perform their own searches and possibly tamper with any evidence.
Personally, I don’t think the body is there and think it’s far more likely to be close to the Hollin Brown Knoll region, where the other bodies were discovered.
Brady frequently declared his desire to carry out the “perfect murder,” which to him meant that the corpse would never be discovered.
“I believe that by telling the police that the body was close to Hoe Grain, all searches will continue to focus in the wrong place, and it is the last agreement that keeps Brady and Hindley bound together.”
Chris Cook’s The Moors Murderers is available at Pen & Sword Books for $25.
In May 2017, Brady passed away from emphysema and cancer. He and Hindley received identical terms of life in prison for their crimes.