One of Your Own (22 page)

At the beginning of June, Ian told Myra he was ‘ready to do another one’.
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Keith Bennett celebrated his 12th birthday on 12 June 1964. His home at 29 Eston Street was cheerfully crowded with family: mum Winnie, stepfather Jimmy Johnson and Keith’s younger siblings, Alan, Margaret, Ian, Sylvia and stepsister Susan, who was the same age as Keith and very close to him. ‘She and Keith went everywhere together,’ Winnie recalls. ‘I can just see their little faces now, asking me if I’d give them the money for the pictures. And if they liked the film they’d stay in the cinema and see it twice . . . And Margaret, she was only about three at the time, but she was devoted to Keith. Used to follow him around like a little dog.’
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Winnie’s own childhood was deeply scarred by the death of her seven-year-old sister, who burned to death when her dress caught light on the front-room fire; Winnie was ten at the time. Her life since hadn’t been easy – she had separated from Keith’s father when Keith was very young – but she regarded Jimmy as the love of her life, and their wedding in 1961 brought their two families together. Keith got on well with his stepfather and called him ‘Dad’.

Like most boys, Keith was keen on football; he and his brother Alan, with whom he shared a bedroom, spent hours kicking a ball in front of the house and had painted two goal lines on the brick wall at the end of the street. Winnie describes Keith as a kid anyone could love: ‘There was no harm to him. He enjoyed life and was very interested in nature. He used to pick up leaves and caterpillars and bring them home, and he collected coins.’
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He was small, with sandy-brown hair, and wore spectacles for acute short-sightedness. He participated in the school swimming gala when he turned 12 and swam a length of the old Victorian baths for the first time, receiving a certificate for his achievement. That day he had dropped his glasses and broken a lens. His mother had set them aside to be mended.

The Bennett children often stayed the night with their gran, 65-year-old Gertrude Bennett, who was a cleaner at Toc H rugby club in Victoria Park. She lived on Morton Street, which was known locally as ‘the concrete’ because the ground was laid with tarmac, while the surrounding streets were cobbled. Kids loved it because they could get up a bit of speed on their bikes and scooters without juddering about or catching their wheels between the cobbles. ‘The concrete’ was in Longsight, between the Daisy Mill Works factory on Stockport Road and the railway line, and three streets from Westmoreland Street, where Ian Brady lived.

Winnie had arranged for Keith, Alan, Ian and Margaret to stay with her mother on the night of 16 June while she went to the eight o’clock bingo at St Aloysius School in Ardwick. That morning, Ian and Myra made their own plans for the evening ahead. They had already deposited a suitcase at the left luggage department of a railway station, and Ian had presented Myra with Roy Orbison’s ‘It’s Over’, which hit the number one spot in the music charts the following week with its deeply mournful refrain about the loss of a loved one.

The day passed in a haze of sunshine, and it was still warm when Myra drove to collect Ian from Westmoreland Street, pausing on the journey to pull on the black wig. When she arrived at Ian’s home, he climbed into the back of the car and said he would rap on the glass divider to indicate a potential victim. Myra accelerated out of the street, glancing at the groups of children playing outside their houses in the evening sunlight. It was just after half past seven.

Winnie and Keith left Eston Street shortly after Alan, Ian and Margaret. Winnie was a few weeks away from giving birth to her fifth child, and a little slower at walking than usual. Keith was slightly ahead of her as they turned past the school on Plymouth Grove West, but she followed him, wanting to be certain that he crossed busy Stockport Road safely without his glasses. He met a couple of girls whom he knew from school and larked about behind them, pretending to be fierce. ‘I shouted to him to be careful in case he hurt them girls,’ Winnie remembers. ‘He just give me one of them big grins of his, as much to say don’t worry, mam. And them’s the last words I spoke to him.’
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She watched him walk across the zebra crossing on Stockport Road. When he reached the other side, he turned and waved, then she lost sight of him as he turned into a side street next to the Daisy Works. His path took him down Upper Plymouth Grove, bypassing the back entry into Westmoreland Street.

The white Mini-Traveller glided towards him. Myra wound down her window to ask if he would mind helping her carry a few boxes from an off-licence. When his eyes flickered towards Ian, she said he was helping too.
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Keith agreed, and climbed into the front passenger seat.

None of the children fought the initial approach, Myra claimed, years later: ‘It was probably because of me being a woman – they never had any fear.’
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They hadn’t driven very far through the sunlit streets before Ian asked Myra to stop and invited Keith to join him on the back seat. As Keith edged in beside him, Ian mentioned that Myra had lost a glove recently near Greenfield and that they’d appreciate Keith’s help in finding it. Ian kept talking as they drove away from the city, through Stalybridge and Mossley and the last huddle of cottages at Greenfield. The road wound through the falling landscape with its uncanny, elaborate rock formations and indigo summer veil of heather. It was still light, the copper glow of a warm evening, as Myra parked the car and watched Ian, who had a camera slung about his neck, lead Keith onto the sloping moor.
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She picked up a pair of binoculars and locked the car, then trailed Ian and Keith who went, she recalled, ‘like a little lamb to the slaughter’.
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They walked along a stream, keeping mainly to the right-hand bank, but occasionally crossing the water. After a while, Ian turned and pointed towards a rise in the land; Myra followed where he indicated, onto the plateau, and put the binoculars to her eyes. The moor was empty. She sat down, no longer able to see Ian and Keith, who had gone into a dip. ‘I don’t know how long I was there,’ she recalled. ‘It seemed like ages. It could have been 30 or 40 minutes.’
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She stared at a cluster of rocks, her back turned away from the direction in which she’d walked. Later, she claimed to have heard nothing as she sat there, other than the soughing of the wind across the moor.

When Ian returned, he was carrying the soiled spade. Myra asked how he had killed Keith and he replied that he had raped him, then strangled him with a length of cord – exactly as he had John Kilbride. He added that he had taken a photograph of Keith’s body before burying him. He began walking, and Myra followed him along the stream, watching him bury the spade in a bank of shale.
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Back in Gorton, they worked their way quickly through Ian’s list of necessary precautions following the murder. He sponged down the car and burned his shoes and hers, because she had been standing next to him when he had buried the spade. He cut up his clothes and handed them to Myra, who threw them on the fire, together with the cord used to end Keith’s short life. When everything on the list was done, she drove Ian back to Westmoreland Street for the night. They would meet at Millwards the next day.

Keith’s family didn’t realise he was missing until Wednesday morning. They didn’t own a telephone and when Keith failed to arrive at Morton Street, his grandmother assumed he had stayed at home instead. But at half past eight the following day, when Gertrude Bennett brought Alan, Ian and Margaret back to Eston Street, Winnie looked at her in puzzlement: ‘I said, “Where’s our Keith?” because normally she brought him with her on her way to her job . . . She said he hadn’t come to her last night. She said she’d been expecting him, but then she thought I must have made some other arrangements. We both started to panic . . . I went up to the school and the clinic, where I thought he might have gone about his broken glasses. But there was no sign, so I went to the police.’
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Like Danny Kilbride, Alan Bennett immediately sensed that something terrible had happened to his older brother. He left the house and went into the street with his football, kicking it repeatedly against the wall where the white lines stood out on the red-brick, and remained there for a long time, not knowing what else to do.

After work, Ian gave the Mini-Traveller a more thorough clean. He set up his makeshift darkroom and developed the photograph he had taken of Keith. Myra admitted to looking at it with Ian and recalled that it showed Keith lying on the ground with his trousers down and blood on him. Ian told her he was going to destroy the picture because it was out of focus.

Ian retrieved the suitcase of incriminating material from the left luggage department alone. Myra told Peter Topping that she didn’t know what was in the suitcase but believed the contents included an address book with the names of the men he had met in borstal and Strangeways, and a notebook in which he’d doodled the name of John Kilbride, though she claimed not to know about the notebook until after the trial. She related an implausible story about how she had been intrigued by the suitcase, which was kept under the bed, but never attempted to open it because she found that Ian had placed a hair over the lock, a trick she said she’d learned to look out for after reading James Bond novels.

The press soon picked up on Keith’s disappearance. On 19 June, the
Manchester Evening News
featured an article on page 17. Under the headline ‘Tracker Dogs Join Hunt for Lost Boy’, readers learned that Keith’s home ‘is in an area where several murders have occurred and missing persons have gone untraced’.
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The search focused on Longsight, but there were no leads, as the press reported on 20 June: ‘Particular watch is kept on railways because he is keen on trains and frequented the railway sidings at Longsight.’
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The inevitable rumours began; two children gave separate but clearly inaccurate accounts of having seen Keith outside Longsight Library on the morning after his disappearance. There was speculation that he had run away, even though, like John Kilbride and Pauline Reade, he had no reason to want to leave home. The
Manchester Evening News
sent a photographer round to Smallshaw Lane, where Winnie had gone to meet Shelia Kilbride, instinctively feeling that Keith’s disappearance was linked to John’s, although the police had nothing to support that idea. The subsequent article was headed, ‘Missing Boys and the Two Mothers Who Wait’.
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Winnie visited the Kilbrides occasionally after that, and she met Joan Reade.

Gertrude Bennett, Keith’s grandmother, blamed herself for not having raised the alarm when he didn’t arrive at Morton Street. Winnie went into premature labour and gave birth to a healthy son, but her anguish about Keith was compounded by the police suspicion that centred on her husband, Jimmy. Detectives searched their home, tearing up the floorboards and inspecting the concrete in the backyard for signs of disturbance. They took Jimmy Johnson in for questioning four times over the next two years, once calling at the house early on Sunday morning while the family were still asleep. ‘They accused me of killing him because I was his stepfather,’ Jimmy recalled. ‘I don’t blame them. I’m glad they explored every possibility, they had a job to do. But it was terrible at the time. I was very fond of the lad and to be accused of doing away with him was too much.’
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The strain began to affect their marriage, Winnie recalls, and eventually she became so distraught that she confronted the police: ‘I said to the head of CID, “Do you think I’d have stayed with my husband if I thought he had anything to do with Keith? You’re splitting my family up. And if that happens, you’ll have my death and the death of four kiddies on your conscience because I’ll kill myself and take them with me.”’
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The police scaled down their interest in Jimmy Johnson, but Winnie’s fragile spirits were almost shattered by a stranger’s malice: ‘I was walking along Stockport Road one day with my mother and two of the kiddies when a woman stopped me. She said, “You’re Keith’s mum, aren’t you? Do you want to know what’s happened to him? He’s been chopped up and fed to pigs.” I was upset for days after that.’
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The rest of the family suffered in different ways: the girls persistently asked where Keith had gone and cried themselves to sleep, while Alan found his brother’s absence as insistent as his presence had been.

On 3 July 1964, the
Gorton & Openshaw Reporter
ran the front-page article: ‘Longsight Boy Still Missing’. Mention was made of the house-to-house enquiries and the dragging of a brook near Mellands Camp on Mount Road in Gorton. Winnie gave a hauntingly prophetic statement: ‘I’m very worried now, for the longer it is, I fear there’s less chance of him being found.’
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A week later, the same newspaper featured Pauline Reade on its front page: ‘One Year Ago: Girl Went Dancing and Disappeared’. Ten days later, the local press ran a renewed appeal for information about Pauline to tie in with a television broadcast by the police. But no one came forward.

Winnie’s desperate hope that her son might be found alive lasted only until the leaves began to fall from the trees that dotted the route Keith had taken that evening: ‘My senses told me he was dead, but I just couldn’t believe it. And then one night when my new baby was about three months old, I was feeding him and half falling asleep while I was doing it. And in my drowsy state I heard Keith call to me, as clearly as anything. “Mam!” he shouted. And then I knew for certain he was dead.’
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