October 6, 1965: The Moors Murders

October 6, 1965: Ian Brady is arrested in Hyde, outside Manchester, England, for murder. Five days later, his girlfriend, Myra Hindley, is arrested for her role in what became known as "The Moors Murders."

Ian Brady was born in 1938 in Glasgow, Scotland. Like many killers, he got his start by torturing and killing animals. He became a thief and a smuggler, and began to study and admire Nazi Germany. Myra Hindley was born in 1942 in Gorton, on the south side of Manchester. She grew up in poverty with an alcoholic, abusive father. That meanness was passed down to her. She took judo lessons, and her grip was so strong that classmates didn't want to train with her.

Both of them got jobs at Millwards Merchandising in Gorton, and they started dating in 1961. Brady got Hindley interested in the Nazi books he liked, and also books by the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche. She took on the appearance of an Aryan ideal, bleaching her hair blonde. Of him, she said, "Within months he had convinced me that there was no God at all: he could have told me that the earth was flat, the moon was made of green cheese and the sun rose in the west, I would have believed him, such was his power of persuasion."

Another book Brady persuaded Hindley to read was Compulsion, Meyer Levin's novel bases on the Leopold and Loeb murder of 1924, and he began to speak of what Leopold and Loeb intended, committing a "perfect murder." They moved in together, with Hindley's grandmother in Hyde, east of Manchester. On July 12, 1963, in Gorton, they killed 16-year-old Pauline Reade, a former classmate of Hindley's sister. On November 23, they kidnapped 12-year-old John Kilbride in Ashton-under-Lyne, northeast of Manchester, and killed and buried him on Saddleworth Moor, further northeast, where they'd previously buried Reade.

Keith Bennett, 12, was last seen on June 16, 1964, in Longsight, also on the south side of Manchester. On December 26, 1964, they kidnapped 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey (not to be confused with actress Lesley-Anne Down, who was the same age but living in London at the time) at Ancoats, in Central Manchester, took her back to the Hyde house, and recorded the sick things they did to her. Hindley later claimed to have started to run a bath for the victim, and returned to find that Brady had strangled her. She, too, was buried in Saddleworth Moor.

On October 6, 1965, Brady picked 17-year-old Edward Evans at Manchester Central rail station, and drove him to the Hyde house. He fought back, causing Brady to sprain his ankle, rendering him unable to dispose of the body after the killing. They had enlisted Dave Smith, Hindley's brother-in-law, for help, but upon seeing the aftermath, he left, and called the police. Brady was immediately arrested. Over the next 5 days, the evidence that the police uncovered proved that Hindley was also involved, and she was arrested, too.

The bodies of Kilbride and Downey were quickly found. Reade's body was found in 1987. Brady eventually confessed to Bennett's murder, but his body has never been found. As a result, Brady was indicted for the murders of Downey, Kilbride and Evans; while Hindley was indicted for those of Downey and Evans, and harboring Brady in the knowledge that he had murdered Kilbride. They were convicted on May 6, 1966.

Hindley was taken to HM Prison Holloway, in North London. She continued to write letters to Brady until 1971. Despite claims to have found religion and reformed, she was continually denied parole, and, a chain-smoker, died in 2002, at the age of 60.

Brady was taken to HM Prison Durham, in the city of the same name, in the North-East of England. In 1985, he was diagnosed as a psychopath, and moved to the high-security Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside. He died in 2017, at 79, as the longest-serving prisoner in England and Wales, 51 years.

He had outlived not just Hindley, but most of the other major British criminals of the 1960s: Reginald and Ronald Kray, all of the Cambridge Five, and all of the participants in the 1963 "Great Train Robbery" except Robert Welch. He also outlived his betrayer, David Smith, who died in 2012.

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October 6, 1965 was a Wednesday. Football was in midweek. The NBA season wouldn't start for another 9 days, and the NHL season for another 17. The only score on this historic day was Game 1 of the World Series. I have a separate entry for that event, because it was the Yom Kippur on which Sandy Koufax refused to pitch, and the Los Angeles Dodgers lost to the Minnesota Twins, 8-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.