Moors murders

Ian Brady was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow as Ian Duncan Stewart on 2 January 1938 to Margaret "Peggy" Stewart, an unmarried tea room waitress.

The identity of Brady's father has never been reliably ascertained, although his mother said he was a reporter working for a Glasgow newspaper who died three months before Brady was born.

Stewart had little support and after a few months was forced to give her son into the care of Mary and John Sloan, a local couple with four children of their own.

Brady took their family name and became known as Ian Sloan.

His mother continued to visit him throughout his childhood.

Aged 9, he visited Loch Lomond with his family, where he reportedly discovered an affinity for the outdoors.

A few months later the family moved to a new council house on an overspill estate at Pollok.

Various authors have stated that he tortured animals, although Brady objected to such accusations.

It was reported, for example, that Brady boasted of killing his first cat when he was aged just 10, and then went on to burn another cat alive, stone dogs and cut off rabbits' heads.

Brady was accepted for Shawlands Academy, a school for above-average pupils.

Brady's behaviour worsened at Shawlands; as a teenager he twice appeared before a juvenile court for housebreaking.

He left the academy aged 15 and took a job as a tea boy at a Harland and Wolff shipyard in Govan.

Nine months later, he began working as a butcher's messenger boy.

Brady had a girlfriend, Evelyn Grant, but their relationship ended when he threatened her with a flick knife after she visited a dance with another boy.

Released on 14 November 1957, Brady returned to Manchester, where he took a labouring job which he hated, and was dismissed from another job in a brewery.

Deciding to "better himself", he obtained a set of instruction manuals on book-keeping from a local public library, with which he "astonished" his parents by studying alone in his room for hours.

In January 1959, Brady applied for, and was offered, a clerical job at Millwards Merchandising, a wholesale chemical distribution company based in Gorton.

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester, England.

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.

Brady was diagnosed as a psychopath in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital.

He made it clear that he wished to never be released and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die.

In 1987 Hindley had stopped claiming her innocence and confessed to all of the murders.

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.

He died in 2017, at Ashworth, aged 79, having served 51 years.

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.

He again appeared before the court, this time with nine charges against him, and shortly before his 17th birthday he was placed on probation on condition that he live with his mother.

By then, Brady's mother had moved to Manchester and married an Irish fruit merchant named Patrick Brady; Patrick got Ian a job as a fruit porter at Smithfield Market, and Ian took Patrick's surname.

Within a year of moving to Manchester, Brady was caught with a sack full of lead seals he had stolen and was trying to smuggle out of the market.

He was sent to Strangeways for three months.

As he was still under 18, Brady was sentenced to two years in a borstal for "training".

He was sent to Latchmere House in London, and then Hatfield borstal in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

After being discovered drunk on alcohol he had brewed, he was moved to the much tougher unit in Hull.