When the newspapers printed details of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's unspeakable cruelty disbelieving readers are said to have wept. And to this day the crimes the evil pair committed still haunt Manchester.
Between 1963 and 1965 Brady and Hindley tortured and murdered five children - Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17 - before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor. During their trial at Chester Assizes in the spring of 1966, a harrowing 16 minute tape was played to the jury in which Lesley Ann, could be heard pleading for her life.
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She could be heard whimpering 'let me go' and 'don’t undress me will you?'. Hindley could be heard telling the girl to 'shut up' while Brady appeared to taking pictures.
"Please God help me, ah, please, oh," the girl is heard to say before screaming. The press reports were filed from court and a disbelieving public read them and wept.
Brady and Hindley were eventually jailed for life on May 6, 1966, for the murders of John, Lesley Ann and Edward.
Twenty one years later they finally admitted they had also killed Pauline and Keith Bennett. Pauline's body was discovered in 1987, but Keith was never found.
Despite Keith's mum Winnie Johnson writing hundreds of letters to Brady, he refused to reveal her son's whereabouts. She died in 2012 aged 78 having never being able to give Keith the Christian funeral she longed for.
Brady was born Ian Stewart in Glasgow on January 2 1938, the illegitimate son of a waitress. Neglected by his mother Peggy, he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals from the age of four months.
The courts sent the young Brady to Manchester to live with his mother and her new boyfriend, Patrick Brady, whose surname he would later assume. He became a teenage alcoholic and read Mein Kampf as part of a burgeoning obsession with Nazi Germany while also developing an interest in sexual perversion and cruelty, devouring erotic literature written by the Marquis de Sade.
As a boy of 17 he spent time in Strangeways. After his release in November 1957, he took a job as a stock clerk at a Manchester chemical firm Millward’s Merchandising, where he first met a 17-year-old secretary called Myra Hindley.
On their first date they went to see The Nuremberg Trials at the cinema. Hindley was besotted. She bleached her hair and started wearing bright red lipstick. By June 1963, Brady had moved in with her; the following month they committed their first murder - that of 16-year-old Pauline Reade.
Pauline, from Gorton, disappeared on her way to a disco on July 12, 1963. She got into a car with Hindley - a woman she knew and trusted - while Brady secretly followed on a motorbike. Brady murdered her on Saddleworth Moor and buried her there.
John Kilbride, the eldest of seven children from Ashton-under-Lyne, was snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered on November 23, 1963. His mother Sheila had religiously set the dinner table for her missing son for two years after the murder until his body was found buried on the moors.
Keith Bennett vanished after his mum watched him cross the road to walk the last few yards to his gran's house in Longsight on June 16, 1964. Lesley Ann Downey, who was lured away from an Ancoats funfair near her home and killed at Hindley’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley, on December 26, 1964.
Edward Evans was lured from Manchester Central Station and died in a hail of axe blows inside the couple's home on October 6, 1965. The murder was witnessed by Hindley's 17-year-old brother-in-law, David Smith, who ran into the room to find Brady standing over his victim with an axe. He later told police: "I heard the blow, it was a terrible hard blow, it sounded horrible."
Fearing for his life, Smith helped Brady clean up and took the body upstairs. Then all three had tea. David remained for hours until he felt it safe to leave and strolled away, feigning calm. Only once out of sight did he break into a sprint for home.
Det Ian Fairley was just 22, when he and two other officers arrived at 16 Wardle Brook Avenue in Hattersley the following morning. Smith had called the police to describe what he witnessed.
Later, recalling that morning Mr Fairley said: "The three of us went in. Hindley was dressed for business and Brady was in bed. We found the body of Edward Evans and we found the guns. Edward Evans was trussed up in a plastic bag in the bedroom."
After his arrest for Evans' murder, police started to trawl through Brady's library books on murder and sexual perversion. With dawning horror, they realised he might be responsible for more than one killing.
In his wallet they found sheets of paper and plans on how to dispose of Evans' body on the moors. In a notebook written in Brady's handwriting, police found the name 'John Kilbride'. The boy had been missing for two years.
Some 150 officers from three police forces - Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire - formed a unit to search the moorland. On October 10, 1965 the naked body of Lesley Ann Downey was found; eleven days later John Kilbride was recovered from his grave.
A left luggage ticket found at Brady's home eventually led police to suitcases stowed at Manchester railway station containing hundreds of photographs, plus Brady's infamous 'trophy' tape of little Lesley Ann pleading for her life.
Brady spent his last years at the high-security Ashworth Hospital - claiming to be on hunger strike since 1999 - where he was treated as a mentally-ill patient rather than a prisoner. He died at Ashworth Hospital on May 15 2017 aged 79.
Hindley died aged 60 on November 15, 2002 of bronchial pneumonia at West Suffolk Hospital.
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