A gruesome trial without relief, an end of innocence

I REMEMBER the start of the trial. People had queued overnight to ensure they got a seat inside. It was held at Chester Assizes, an old building, and there was limited room. Nonetheless, scores of journalists crammed inside. Many of us had been working on this story for two years, we had interviewed the families, police officers who had cried - we knew that this was going to be a case like none we or any other British journalist had covered before.

In my 42 years as a crime reporter, starting off on the Daily Sketch in 1960, I have covered the trials of the Krays, Rose West, Dennis Nilsen, but none was quite as horrific as that of Brady and Hindley because theirs ended the age of innocence that preceded the world of serial killers and child abductions which we now inhabit.

Some in the public gallery were related to the victims. Their anger and their grief were palpable. Others were trapped in an unimaginable hell - unable to start grieving because their children were still somewhere on the moors. Nobody knew where; nobody but the pair sat before us.

Among them was a relative of Lesley Ann Downey. I remembered him from an earlier magistrates hearing, when he came armed with a gun. The police took it from him but he was allowed back for the trial.

It was a trial without relief. I didn’t cry myself, but there were times when I came close to it. Some of my colleagues kept getting up and walking out. One journalist, who was writing a book about Brady and Hindley, told me he had to go to the toilet to have a weep in private.

The jury and the public, of course, hadn’t been warned just how gruesome and disturbing much of the evidence would be.

Many of the jury members - perhaps parents themselves - were listening intently to evidence but weeping silently the whole time. They were obviously trying not to make a sound but the tears kept rolling down their cheeks.

Throughout the duration of the three-week trial, Hindley and Brady observed the proceedings with frightening impassivity.

They sat close together and every now and then their heads bowed together and began whispering. At other times, Brady would shake his head as if to say, "No, no, no, I don’t agree with this".

Several things stand out in my mind. The moment when clothes belonging to the victims were pulled out of a bag. You smelled them before you could see them. They had been lying in bags for months and they were still coated in the peat in which the bodies had been buried.

It was only when the tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey’s last moments was played that Hindley fleetingly showed anything approaching remorse. And I was never convinced that that was what we were witnessing - more like self-pity, I thought.

The tape was recorded by Brady and Hindley as they tortured and sexually assaulted the girl before strangling her. What we heard lasted only 17 minutes but I remember wondering if it would ever end.

It was quite simply unbearable. The voices were muffled - it had taken police about 20 hours to make it more audible - but you still knew that a defenceless, terrified girl was minutes, then seconds, away from death.

As the recording thankfully came to an end, Hindley muttered under her breath: "I was cruel, I was cruel."

I remember after Hindley was convicted, she almost collapsed as she was led away. A few weeks ago Brady said he hoped she would die in jail. Now he’s got what he wanted.

The deaths that shocked the nation

PAULINE Read was the first child to die, disappearing on 12 July 1963 on her way to a dance near her home in Gorton, Manchester.

Hindley had stopped to talk to her neighbour, who was all dressed up to go out for the evening. Hindley said she had lost a glove on nearby Saddleworth Moor and Pauline, aged 16, didn’t hesitate in going to help her look for it. Brady followed them up on his motorcycle. Pauline was raped, murdered and her body buried on the moor.

Her mummified body was discovered in 1987. The body of their next victim, Keith Bennett has never been found. Like the parents of Pauline Read, the worst fears of his family were only confirmed in the Eighties, when Hindley and Brady tried to wipe the slate clean.

He died the day after his 12th birthday, after leaving his home to walk to his grandmother’s house in Chorlton-on-Medlock in Manchester on 16 June, 1964.

Next to die was Lesley Ann Downey, on Boxing Day in 1964. The ten-year-old - the youngest victim - was enticed from a fairground to the house Hindley shared with her grandmother in Hattersley. In Hindley’s bedroom, she was sexually abused and tortured.

The decision to involve Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, 17, in their next murder proved their undoing.

Edward Evans, also 17, was lured from a gay bar to the home then shared by Hindley and Brady on the Hattersley Estate at Hyde. Smith was summoned by a phonecall on a false pretext.

He was then forced to watch as Brady attacked Evans with an axe and smothered him. Shocked, Smith helped carry the body into a bedroom but then fled and called the police.

Police searched the house the next morning, and began unravelling the crimes.