by David Smith
Ultimately, it fell to a child to lead the police to the graves of other children.
Twelve-year-old Patty Hodges lived next door but one to Ian and Myra on Wardle Brook Avenue. Together with her siblings and a couple of other children on the estate, she had been befriended by the couple, and often spent time at their house or accompanied them on picnics to the ‘countryside’. Brought forward by her mother, Patty told surprised detectives that she was certain she could identify the spot she had visited with the couple but would have to be driven there because she didn’t know the name; Ian and Myra had only ever referred to it as ‘the moor’.
Patty led the police up to Saddleworth, and as the car followed the turn in the road, the jutting rock formation from the photographs loomed into view. Within the hour, the tentative search that had been taking place at Woodhead switched decisively to Hollin Brown Knoll.
The Daily Mail broke the story nationwide. When it was reported that police forces around the Greater Manchester area were checking their records for missing children, the news went global. Clive Entwistle, then a young journalist from Rochdale, recalls: ‘The whole thing just exploded. We had the world’s press coming to us. Not just Britain, but everywhere – New Zealand, America, Japan, France . . . It was a colossal story.’ Every night journalists would gather in the bar of the Queen’s Hotel in Hyde to trade information with the police. The case remained in the headlines for the next six months and sightseers’ cars clogged the A635 during the ongoing search of the chill, rain-spattered Knoll.
On Wednesday, 13 October, Edward Evans was laid to rest in Southern Cemetery. Two days later, on Alex Carr’s orders, Ian Fairley collected David from Underwood Court and brought him into Hyde for further questioning. Carr decided to head back to Hattersley to conduct the interview; the station was under siege. But when the three of them returned to Underwood Court they found David’s flat without electricity and none of them had a two-bob bit for the meter. Undeterred, Carr insisted on interviewing David in the car park below; the press had gathered in Hyde and on the moor. Ian Fairley sat in the driver’s seat of the CID car next to ‘Jock’, with David in the back. They remained there throughout the afternoon; twilight had fallen across the vast housing estate by the time the interview was wrapped up.
Ian Fairley’s contact with David had been minimal until then, but the young detective was quietly impressed with him: ‘Smith was cooperative, he never hid anything, and he never changed his story. He was . . . not belligerent, but I think he was fed up. During the course of the interview, Jock asked him where they spent their time. Where did they go? David said he’d already gone through all this – the moors, drinking, at home, drinking. Did they use the guns? No, only for target practice. Then he talked about this robbery they’d plotted and at that point mentioned the fact that Brady had told him to bring anything he had that was incriminating back to him. Like what, we asked. He said books, and we knew what he meant, the sort of rubbish you could pick up from a dodgy place. He said he’d taken it all back to Brady and we asked him what had happened to it then. He said, ‘Well, they put it in the suitcases.’ Suitcases? What suitcases? Now, I don’t know how many times this lad had been interviewed, and I don’t know if he had mentioned the suitcases before or not, all I know is that it was the first time Jock Carr and I heard about the suitcases. We asked him again about these suitcases and he said, ‘They were huge, packed with stuff, but I don’t know what else, just the stuff I handed back.’ We knew that no suitcases had been found because obviously there had been a search, and there was nothing. We started asking him again where they’d gone and he repeated what he’d said before. Then we asked where they went, Brady and Hindley, and he said sometimes they went into Manchester and Brady would go to the railway stations . . .’
David nods slowly when asked about the interview in the car park of Underwood Court. ‘I remember that. We were there for a long time – hours. It was dark when I got back to the flat. I had already mentioned the suitcases, but no one paid it any attention. The old story – no one seemed interested. Jock Carr picked up on it, though. He must have twigged it was significant, especially the link between the suitcases and railway stations, and wasn’t going to let it drop. He was a brilliant detective. It was through him that the major breakthrough was achieved.’
Alex Carr contacted the British Railway Police and asked them to search all their left luggage departments. By ten o’clock that evening, the suitcases had been found. A few days later, the receipt for their deposit at Central Station on 5 October was discovered in the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, tightly rolled in the spine of a prayer book given to Myra Hindley for her first Holy Communion in 1958. The finding of the receipt cleared up another enigma in the abbreviations on the disposal plan: ‘P/B’ (prayer book) and ‘TICK’ (ticket).
By mid-morning on Saturday, 16 October, news of the suitcases had spread to other constabularies and Hyde police station was inundated with senior officers arguing over access to them. Benfield had departed for Cheshire the day before, convinced that everything was cut and dried; he returned to Hyde quickly, together with Eric Cunningham, head of the Number One Regional Crime Squad, and Joe Mounsey. Benfield was firm that Hyde would remain in charge of the inquiry, since it was through his officers that the suitcases had been discovered.
With that settled, the objects in question were brought into his office and detectives from every neighbouring force looked on curiously as the buckles on the suitcases were unfastened and the lids thrown open.
* * *
From David Smith’s memoir:
Saturday morning, and I’m hoping for a day off from the suits, thinking that I might take Bob for a walk, then mooch around the flat, for a change. Nothing out of the ordinary, just getting back to normal for a while – or pretending to, at least. I know there are a few gentlemen of the press lurking in the car park but not many, not yet. They don’t bother me if I keep away from the balcony doors and ignore the intercom.
It doesn’t happen: today is when the whole thing erupts. After this, there’s no more pretending and no going back to any sort of life we knew before.
I’m picked up in an unmarked police car and whizzed to Hyde station. Even as I get out of the car on a typically grey, wet day I can feel the invisible quiver of something different in the air. In silence, I follow the copper who collected me from Hattersley; since telling me I was wanted down at the station he’s said not one word.
Inside the red-brick building there are so many detectives knocking about the place I begin to feel claustrophobic. The curtain of pipe smoke is dense enough to part, as well. I pass the desk sergeant, who glances up at me and then averts his gaze quickly, avoiding prolonged eye contact. I frown, thinking: what the fuck is going on?
I’m being led towards my usual interview room, the one I’ve spent so many hours in that I actually think of it as mine. But as I walk by the first office, for some reason I pause and look in.
The suitcases are on a table, the blue one and the brown. Both are open, their heaving contents spilling out like something wicked across the Formica surface. I’m rooted to the spot by what I see: a black wig, books with lurid covers – some of which I recognise – papers, photographs and several reels of tape. I remember the look that passed between Benfield and Talbot in the house when I mentioned Ian recording stuff on his eight-track and I feel a sudden chill without knowing why.
Someone ushers me along the corridor, towards my little room. I’m left there for ten minutes or more by myself and sit stiffly, cracking my knuckles and listening to the muted sounds in the rest of the building. There is a constant murmur of grim conversation, doors opening and closing, chairs being scraped back.
A copper I’ve never seen before enters my room and looks at me for a moment before saying, ‘Well, lad, we’ve found plenty of stuff all right.’
I sit up straight in my chair and wait for the questions to begin, but instead he tells me I can go home. I’m dumbfounded bu
t don’t need telling twice. It’s only as I leave the station that I realise the suitcases probably haven’t been examined thoroughly yet and, until the coppers have got their heads around it all, they won’t know what line to take with me. I get an easy ride that day, in the sense of being allowed to go early, but my stomach is in knots, wondering about the black wig, what those photographs show and what the hell might be on the spools of brown tape . . .
I spend my free afternoon in town with Dad. We do our best to avoid the newspaper stands, where every black-and-white placard reads: ‘Moors Search Continues’. I try not to think of that dark landscape and the reservoir lying at the bottom, still and silent under a full moon.
My efforts to forget don’t work, as the hours tick by: I can’t get the moor out of my head. I’ve been there again recently with Joe Mounsey, who explained as we drove out through the old mill villages that they’d managed to identify the place in the photographs as Hollin Brown Knoll. The name meant nothing to me, but as we rounded a sharp, high bend and the boulders came into view on the horizon – great black ugly rocks, like rotten teeth – I felt a sudden jolt of recognition. We parked below the boulders and crossed the road together, just me and Mr Mounsey at first, then with an army of coppers following us, clipboards at the ready. We stopped at the place I thought must have been where I’d stood with Ian the night before Angela died. It looked different in the watery daylight – the reservoir seemed wider, less of a silver streak bordered by high banks of land. I tried to answer Mr Mounsey’s questions, concentrating hard. Was the reservoir far away when you stopped, David? Was it this far or a bit further? Did it seem bigger or smaller than this? Would it be this angle or slightly to the side? Was the ground spongy beneath your feet like this, sinking in, or was it firmer, more rocky? I felt painfully inadequate, as I stumbled out the truth: it was dark when I was up there with Brady, and I hadn’t even realised it was a reservoir until he told me so – I thought it was a river. I was wearing cowboy boots that night and the heels sink into anything that isn’t concrete . . . Mr Mounsey, to his eternal credit, didn’t mock or become impatient: he nodded thoughtfully and paced about, occasionally waving me across to him and asking if this was actually the place I’d stood with Brady that night, or this . . . I wanted to help more than ever, to be able to point at the exact spot, but I couldn’t. As we walked back to his car, I felt as if the whole thing had been a waste of time, because without knowing for certain which was the precise area, nothing could come of it. Their search methods were medieval: push in a bamboo stick, sniff it for any hints of decomposition and then repeat. One pace in the wrong direction meant they could so easily miss something – or someone.
*
It’s getting dark in the city. Dad and I wander aimlessly; it’s as if the news-stands are being put out ahead of us because everywhere we look there they are, updated to announce that this is the last day of the search. Apparently the big brass have decided it’s too expensive to carry on doing the needle-in-a-haystack thing. I turn my head away from the paper shop on Market Street and tell Dad we ought to think about getting back for Maureen. He nods but doesn’t speak; he’s got about as much conversation in him as I have, and together we turn up our coat collars against the damp, bitter mist and shuffle through the babbling crowds towards our bus stop.
We’ve spent too long in town. In the alleys and down side streets it’s particularly dark – that deep, early dark peculiar to cities. The lights from the shops and offices turn the pavement rain into luminous patterns and when I step into a small pool of water, the light scatters at my feet.
We’re heading past the wide square of Piccadilly Gardens, the smell of exhaust fumes, fish and chips and beer stinging the wet air, when Dad squeezes my arm, forcing me to stop.
There is a placard to our left, outside a small shop with a yellow Manchester Evening News hoarding. Four words in black and white loom out from behind the criss-cross wire: ‘BODY FOUND ON MOOR’.
I close my eyes tightly shut. Ian’s voice fills my brain: ‘Maggots, they’re all fucking maggots . . . you’ve sat on one of the graves . . .’
Dad’s grip on my arm increases. I open my eyes and look at him. We stand there silently, letting the crowds surge round us, two small pebbles in a stream of people looking forward to tea and telly and Saturday night down the boozer. Dad moves first, hauling me on towards our bus stop further up, past the bright, busy shop fronts. The Hattersley bus is already there, and Dad pays our fare while I stagger upstairs like a man twice his age and slump into the front seat on the right. I lean forward and put my head in my hands.
This is real now. Everything is real. Ian wasn’t bluffing. He’s killed. Three or four, he said, you’ve sat on one of the graves. It wasn’t the drink talking. BODY FOUND ON MOOR.
Dad drops heavily down into the seat, his leg and elbow against mine. I don’t look at him and he doesn’t speak to me. What is there to say?
The engine starts up and the bus pulls out, a rumble of normality in a world I’m not part of, on the long road to Hattersley.
Chapter 13
‘I want to take some photographs, that’s all.’
– Ian Brady, tape recording of Lesley Ann Downey, Boxing Day 1964
The small body recovered from the moor was swiftly identified as ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. She was found by Police Constable Robert Spiers, who had moved away from the search party on Hollin Brown Knoll after feeling drawn to the higher ground behind the jutting rocks. He saw what he thought was a white, withered stick, but upon investigation it turned out to be part of the little girl’s forearm poking out of the water-logged peat. In a statement later read to court, Dr Dave Gee described the state in which she was found: ‘The body lay on its right side; the skeletal remains of the left arm were extended above the head, and the hand was missing. The right arm was beneath the body, the hand being near the right knee. Both legs were doubled up towards the abdomen, flexed at hips and knees. The head was in normal position. The body was naked.’ Lesley’s clothes and shoes lay piled at her feet, together with the string of white beads her elder brother had won for her at the fair the day before Lesley disappeared from there on Boxing Day 1964.
On Monday, following the discovery on the moor, David and Maureen were taken up to Hollin Brown Knoll again by Joe Mounsey. A green tent concealed Lesley’s grave and a long line of police fanned out in a circle from that spot, probing the ground with the now ubiquitous bamboo sticks. Mounsey had several maps with him, but although David and Maureen walked around the area with him at length, neither could be of further assistance. David was taken back to Hyde, where the police station was in organised uproar, having been transformed into the headquarters of a momentous murder inquiry; the canteen was serving as the press room and a vast press conference – the first in Britain to be filmed – had been planned for that week.
David was ushered into ‘his’ interview room for the toughest day of questioning yet. He was asked about the books found inside the suitcases (among them Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, Cradle of Erotica, Sexus, The Kiss of the Whip, Tropic of Cancer, The Life and Ideals of the Marquis de Sade wrapped in the Daily Mirror and Mein Kampf wrapped in the News of the World), the pornographic magazines, two library tickets belonging to his father, a bandolier and ammunition, a cutlery box containing a cosh and a black mask, and another cosh with ‘EUREKA’ on it.
‘The police didn’t show me everything,’ he recalls, ‘but they asked me what I’d taken round to Ian’s the night before Edward Evans was killed and I told them: a notepad, books, a cosh, my starter pistol and the blank shells that went with it. That was it. Then they brought everything I’d listed as mine into the room and asked me if I could positively identify it all. I did – though I have no idea how those library tickets belonging to my dad came to be in there. That’s a complete mystery to me. I didn’t like admitting that the home-made cosh marked Eureka was mine, but I wasn’t going to lie about anything.’
He
pauses. ‘The notepad proved to be the biggest sticking point. It contained my interpretation of the books Ian had given me to read and the police pounced on it straight away. It was a major interrogation issue.’ Inside the notepad David had compiled a list of the novels recommended to him by Ian Brady, with some extracts from the texts and his own understanding of the authors’ intentions added alongside.
‘I thought it was clear enough that the notepad was a sort of diary of what I’d read,’ he reflects, ‘but it became a real battle to try and prove that these were not necessarily my views, as such. I understood why the police needed to get to the bottom of what I’d written, but I really struggled to convince them that the notebook wasn’t what it seemed. And I ended up becoming very defensive, which was the last thing I wanted. I’d never asked for a solicitor, not once, because I didn’t want the obstruction and constant interjections of some legal bloke telling me I didn’t have to answer this and that. Being upfront about the things that belonged to me in the suitcases might not have been the path a solicitor would have advised me to take, for example – he might have said that it wasn’t in my best interests. But as far as I was concerned it was the only option. I knew which way I wanted to go and I knew it was something I had to do on my own.’
Detectives moved away from the issue of the notepad and turned instead to other items found within the suitcases. These included a set of photographs, which were brought into the interview room and placed face down on the table. After waiting for a moment, one of the detectives flipped over the first photograph.