12 Years Old Keith Bennett Sexually Assaulted And Strangled To Death
On Manchester’s Eston Street, Keith Bennett resided in a red-brick end-terrace home. Outside, a wall with goalposts painted on it by Keith served as a painful memory of the young child with wire-framed NHS spectacles until relatively recently. However, the wall has now been demolished since it had become dilapidated.
A neighbor remarked, “They seemed to have been there forever, and then one day, maybe ten years ago, they were gone.”
The house and the street where Keith Bennett spent his mercilessly brief existence, however, are virtually identical to how he would have recalled them.
Keith Bennett was snatched by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 1964. He is their only victim who has never been found
12 Years Old Keith Bennett Sexually Assaulted And Strangled To Death
On Manchester’s Eston Street, Keith resided in a red-brick end-terrace home. The home and the street where Keith spent his mercilessly brief life are virtually identical to how he would have recalled them.
Four days after becoming 12 years old, at around 7:45 p.m. on June 16, 1964, Keith left his home for the final time with his mother Winnie and his younger brothers. To give their mother a rest, the kids were going to spend the night with their nan, who lived just a short distance away on the other side of the busy Stockport Road.
Normally, they would walk side by side, but on this particular occasion, Alan and Maggie proceeded ahead.
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Keith, who was extremely short-sighted, had broken his glasses the day before so his mum accompanied him most of the way and made sure he got across Stockport Road safely.
Haunted: Keith’s mum Winnie, who died in 2012 without ever knowing where her son was buried. Pictured with the famous ‘missing’ poster of her son
Keith can be seen on the left in Manchester with two little lads. In the Longsight neighborhood of Manchester, on Eston Street, he and his brother Alan shared a bedroom.
And she said him farewell with a kiss. She never again ran into Keith.
A Mini Traveller estate drove up next to him somewhere between Stockport Road and the few hundred yards to his grandmother’s home on Morton Street.
The young, blonde driver rolled down the window. She asked if he could assist her carry some boxes. In the rear, where her lover was seated, Keith leaped.
Had Keith been with his brother and sister as he normally was, or arrived a few minutes earlier or later or taken a slightly different route, he might never have got into the car. The driver was 21-year-old Myra Hindley and her passenger — who lived just round the corner from Keith’s nan — Ian Brady.
Myra Hindley, on the left, and Ian Brady, on the right, murdered five children between July 1963 and October 1965. Brady passed away in 2017 and Hindley in 2002, both without disclosing the whereabouts of Bennett’s body.
Keith was reportedly brought to Saddleworth Moor, as is known. We are aware that the 12 Years Old Keith Bennett was Sexually Assaulted Strangled To Death and buried in a small hole. His likely method of death was with an old belt from a washing machine.
Where, however, is a mystery to us that has plagued his family for close to 60 years. Is the moor about to reveal its awful secret at this time?
Eagle Rock, a location with a panoramic view of a huge stretch of moorland, is located just off the A635, the main road connecting Manchester and Doncaster.
Police are today digging on the Moors for murder victim Keith Bennett for the first time in 35 years to investigate suspected human remains
Greater Manchester Police forensic staff are pictured today on the Moors
This is where Brady was brought from his cell in Ashworth maximum high security hospital on Merseyside in the 1980s after offering his ‘assistance’ to locate Keith.
He was playing mind games and had no intention of doing so. The landscape had changed, he said. He was confused. He couldn’t say where he had hidden Keith, after all.
But not far beneath where he once stood — and I am now standing — is a small patch of wasteland where suspected human remains have been found.
What we have never known, which has haunted his family for nearly 60 years, is where Keith’s body was buried. Now, is the moor about to finally give up its tragic secret?
The site is in the vicinity of Shiny Brook, a stream which stretches for nearly a mile through the folds of rock and shifting layers of peat on Saddleworth.
Is the location significant? It would seem so.
It is within a few hundred yards of where three Moors Murders victims were buried: Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, and ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. Edward Evans, who was 17, was found bludgeoned to death with an axe inside Brady and Hindley’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue in Hyde, Manchester.
Detectives are also looking at a small sample of material thought to be clothing found buried 3ft underground beside the skull. A forensics tent is pictured on Saddleworth Moor today as police search the area for Moor’s murder victim Keith Bennett
Greater Manchester Police rushed to send a team of officers and forensic experts to Saddleworth Moor on Thursday night just hours after receiving information from Mr Edwards about his compelling findings
Keith, the bespectacled lad with the endearing grin, is the only victim who has never been found.
The depravity of the killing spree which claimed his life and those of four other children in similar circumstances, between 1963 and 1965, is still seen by many as the passing of a more innocent age.
Over the years, Greater Manchester Police have used geologists, geophysicists, archaeologists and anthropologists to help them look for Keith’s body.
At one point, a U.S. spy satellite was employed in the search and a cryptologist from GCHQ was drafted in to try to crack a possible code in letters shared between Brady and Hindley which might identify his whereabouts.
The terrain around Shiny Brook is probably the most intensely searched few square miles in Britain, perhaps anywhere.
Detectives remove a body of a victim from Saddleworth Moor
But now a team of experts, including soil analysts and an archaeologist specialising in human remains — assembled by author Russell Edwards in his seven-year quest to find Keith — have discovered what they believe is the skull of a child aged around 12.
Samples of earth also revealed the presence of potential human tissue, calcium and other elements such as phosphorus and nickel which are indicators of human, not animal, remains.
The specimens have not yet been subjected to conclusive laboratory testing because the area is a potential crime scene. The police have been informed, however, and are preparing to exhume a small section of moorland. For the first time in 35 years, a blue tent, eerily familiar on such occasions, can be seen on the moor.
On a bright sunny day, with the heather in full bloom, Saddleworth, which straddles the metropolitan boroughs of Oldham in Greater Manchester and Kirklees in West Yorkshire in the shadow of the Pennines, is often described as breathtaking.
But, for many, a line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, reproduced in a Manchester Evening News supplement about the Moors Murders, comes closer to the truth.
‘We meet in an evil land that is near to the gates of hell’ are the words printed at the introduction of the section entitled: ‘A Lonely Resting Place.’
Geologists, geophysicists, archaeologists, and anthropologists have all assisted Greater Manchester Police in their search for Keith’s body throughout the years. Following the finding of graves in 1987, a photo of police holding a press conference is shown.
Whatever happens in the next several days, Saddleworth Moor felt this week like the “gates of hell,” at least metaphorically. Sadly, Keith’s mother passed away in 2012 without being aware of the reality.
Keith Bennett was what kind of a boy? He and his brother Alan shared a bedroom on Eston Street in Manchester’s Longsight neighborhood.
He remembers how they bent the street light near their window so it almost came into the room.
‘We had the biggest light in Longsight,’ he recalled in his website (searchingforkeith.com). ‘The room was flooded with an orange glow every night.’
Keith tried to teach Alan, who was four years younger, to swim, which he excelled at.
In return, Alan helped Keith with reading, something he struggled with. ‘Keith had little time for anything but laughter and nature,’ Alan adds. ‘He was an ordinary, uncomplicated child, with his head in the clouds most of the time.
‘He lived for the natural world and animals and never returned home from a trip to the local park without a few finds — usually a handful of twigs.’
Until one day, on a short journey he had made a thousand times before, he simply vanished.
They didn’t have a telephone. Many working-class households didn’t in those days.
victims: John Kilbride, 12, and Edward Evans, 17, all of whom were twelve years old.
The following day, when Winnie saw her mother, she discovered her son was missing. She enquired, “Where is Keith?” Within days, he was looking out from a “missing” poster in stores, on billboards, and at newsstands. This image, together with the black-and-white mugshots of his murderers, has become part of the American consciousness.
Brady, who had developed a burgeoning obsession with Nazi Germany, and Hindley, who had bleached her hair to emulate Aryan perfection, began their life sentences as the most notorious child killers in modern British criminal history, a description that probably still holds true today; ‘two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity, to quote the judge. Yet, for more than two decades, the Moors Murderers denied killing Pauline and Keith, only admitting their guilt in 1985.
They were taken to Saddleworth separately to help find the bodies. Pauline was found in 1987 but Keith never was and remained somewhere out there on Saddleworth. His mother made thousands of visits to that lonely place and wrote countless letters to Brady, begging him to tell where on the moor he had buried Keith. He ignored every one. ‘Ian Brady has tortured me for over 40 years and enjoyed every minute of it,’ she once said.
In 1987, Ian Brady works with the police to locate the victims’ graves.
Few parents of murder victims could have withstood such emotional torture as Winnie Johnson, who later remarried Jimmy Johnson, the joy of her life and a joiner by profession who Keith referred to as Dad, after divorcing her first, “womaniser,” husband.
When Keith was taken from her, she was 30 years old. Ten years later, she passed away from cancer at age 78. She was buried next to Keith’s cracked spectacles. Her younger son, Alan, worked in the Manchester Argos stockroom but, like Winnie, he devoted his life to locating Keith.
Hindley described the haunting last sight of Keith disappearing across the moor with Brady in correspondence with documentary maker and author Duncan Staff, who wrote Lost Boy, an acclaimed book about the Moors Murders. ‘I remember thinking then, as I later said to the police, that he looked like a little lamb being led to the slaughter.’
Keith’s family believed they might contain information about where he was buried.
Until a new law was passed in April, police had been refused permission to examine the cases and it could take several months for them to lodge an application to open them.
Perhaps they won’t need to.
Hanging on Winnie’s living room wall in Longsight was a picture of Keith in his NHS glasses accompanied by a poem: ‘From that day to this/I pray both day and night/That I will find my Keith/And lay his soul to rest.’
In anticipation of a funeral, she had chosen hymns. She kept a wooden cross inside her house with the intention of putting it on an appropriate cemetery someday. In her dream, she saw a horse-drawn carriage pulling an oak casket down a street lined with bereaved people.
Today, as police reopen their search for Keith Bennett, a lone little tent stands on a desolate stretch of land, buffeted by a strong, autumnal wind and carrying the prospect of rain.
Will the 12 Years Old Keith Bennett Sexually Assaulted And Strangled To Death now be able to receive the fitting final farewell that his mother fervently desired?
