Long life | 14 July 2012

There have been enough monsters after them — Denis Nielsen, Peter Sutcliffe, Harold Shipman, Fred West — but the 1960s Moors Murderers still arouse the greatest revulsion. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley didn’t murder as many people as those other serial killers: their victims were only five. But they were all children, sexually abused, tortured and then killed with unspeakable cruelty. The case of the ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey is the most dreadful. Brady, with Hindley’s collusion, not only undressed her, gagged her, forced her to pose for pornographic photographs, raped her and killed her, probably by strangling her with a piece of string; he also made a 13-minute tape recording of her screaming and pleading for help, a tape to which her mother had to listen to confirm to the police that the voice was hers.

These are events that are still painful to think about almost half a century after they occurred.