Police are reported to be investigating on the Yorkshire Moors for the first time in 35 years in a bid to find the body of Keith Bennett after the discovery of a human skull. Keith, aged 12, was taken by Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley on June 16, 1964 while he was on his way to his grandmother's house.
Mailplus reports that a skull has been found on Saddleworth Moor and police are preparing to dig at the site. Experts are trying to extract DNA and are examining material found at the scene.
Keith is the only victim of the murders never found. His killers refused to say where he was.
Hindley died in 2002 and Brady in 2017. Forensic archaeologist Dawn Keen remotely supervised the dig. She said: "From the photographs, I saw the teeth, I could see the canines, I could see the incisors, I could see the first molar. It is the left side of an upper jaw. There is no way that it is an animal."
Keith’s brother Alan, 66, has been informed about the discovery. The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester. The victims were five children—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—aged between 10 and 17, at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The bodies of two of the victims were discovered in 1965, in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. Bennett's body is also thought to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.
The pair were charged only for the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans, and received life sentences under a whole life tariff. The investigation was reopened in 1985 after Brady was reported as having confessed to the murders of Reade and Bennett. After confessing to these additional murders, Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist in the search for the graves.
Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. She died in 2002 in West Suffolk Hospital, aged 60, after serving 36 years in prison.
Brady was diagnosed as a psychopath in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital. He made it clear that he never wished to be released, and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die. He died in 2017, at Ashworth, aged 79.
The murders were the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, described as a "concatenation of circumstances". The trial judge, Justice Fenton Atkinson, described Brady and Hindley in his closing remarks as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity". Their crimes were the subject of extensive worldwide media coverage. Some individuals with deceased relatives continued to search for their physical remains, after the deaths of the murderers.
Early in the evening of 16 June 1964, Hindley asked twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, who was on his way to his grandmother's house, for help in loading some boxes into her Mini Pick-up, after which she said she would drive him home. Brady was in the back of the van. Hindley drove to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor and Brady went off with Bennett, supposedly looking for a lost glove. After about thirty minutes Brady returned alone, carrying a spade that he had hidden there earlier, and, in response to Hindley's questions, said that he had sexually assaulted Bennett and strangled him with a piece of string.
