For most of us, the Moors Murders are a bygone terror, remembered in black and white photographs of grim-faced coppers standing on moorland, Myra Hindley’s hooded eyes beneath peroxide bouffant hair, Ian Brady’s blank stare and teddy boy quiff.

But for Alan Bennett, it is here and now, ever present. For over 20 years, he has headed for Saddleworth Moor whenever he can, digging in the peat with a dwindling group of supporters, looking for his brother Keith, who disappeared on June 16, 1964.

For Bennett, a new book about David Smith – the chief prosecution witness in Brady and Hindley’s trial – is not an old story re-told, it is a chance for more information to emerge about possible landmarks on the moors which may lead to the discovery of Keith’s body.

“People have suggested, ‘You’ve done enough. Put a memorial on the moor’,” says Bennett. “But we just can’t do it.”

The book – Witness, by David Smith with Carol Ann Lee – tells how Smith, then 17 years old and married to Hindley’s sister Maureen, was groomed by Brady, who took him for boozy picnics on Saddleworth Moor, and spouted his sadistic philosophy to him. Smith was unwittingly being taken for fun days out at murder scenes.

But when, right in front of Smith, Brady killed 17-year-old apprentice Edward Evans with an axe in the living room of Brady’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley, Smith went to police. Photographs led officers to the moor, where the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey, aged ten, and John Kilbride, aged 12, were found.

Brady and Hindley both tried to implicate Smith in their crimes, and, despite being the witness who put them behind bars, Smith was loathed, shunned and even beaten for years, suspicion hanging over him even after Hindley admitted, in 1987, she had lied about his involvement.

Alan Bennett’s own mother Winnie Johnson suspected, as did others among the victims’ families, that Smith was more than just a witness to Brady and Hindley’s crimes.

“The older generation, the parents, wanted someone to get at,” says Bennett. “They couldn’t get at Brady and Hindley. The next one is another ‘Hindley’... the husband.”

But Bennett was always convinced of Smith’s innocence, and felt strongly enough to write the foreword to the book. In it, he writes that information which may have been useful in the search for Keith did not come to the fore, either in the original police investigation in the 1960s or in the search of the moors in the 1980s which yielded victim Pauline Reade’s body, because of “the hard-headedness and mishandling of David Smith by some senior detectives”.

“The man who was the chief prosecution witness in the ‘Trial of the Century’ was reduced to a suspect too many times, and a bruised and battered man for decades,” writes Bennett.

Bennett’s own story is as compelling as Smith’s. He was just nine when Keith, aged 12 went missing on the short walk to his gran’s house in Morton Street, Longsight. To this day, Bennett tortures himself with “what ifs” about that day, and writes of feeling Keith by his side “unseen but ever present” long after he was gone.

“I used to read for him,” he recalls of life before the horror. “He was older than me. He could read but he’d struggle with it. He was a bit of a dreamer, a simple soul.”

Now 56, a teaching assistant living in Longsight, and with a grown-up son, Bennett’s life has been spent not just dealing with the tragedy of Keith’s loss but also with the media circus that engendered. He has attempted to keep a low profile, but put himself forward now because he believes in the importance of the Smith book.  

“I used to think that everybody in the world was looking for Keith – all these people coming asking questions,” he says. “I came to resent it.”

It was in 1988 – after months of searching by police, and visits to the moors by both Brady and Hindley – that Bennett, family and friends began their own search for Keith.

“It was a family decision. My mam said, ‘I’ll never give in’,” he recalls. “We were taken to Shiny Brook by the police when they called the search off, to show us where they searched. They were convinced he was in that area. There were theories that the body may not even be there to be found any more. It could have been washed away. But I checked up on that. People said there would have to be something – a skeleton or whatever.”

Brady had remembered particular features of the landscape when police took him to the moor, but had then grown confused. Bennett wonders if Brady was playing games.

“I think it’s all he’s got left,” says Bennett. “As long as Keith’s there, Brady and Hindley have still got him. Once we find him and get him back, he’s got nothing.”

Bennett’s desire to make that happen even led him to visit Hindley in prison in 1998, without telling his mother or the police.

“The first thing she did was burst into tears and say how sorry she was for all the pain she’d caused over the years. She said, ‘I swear I’ll do whatever I can’,” he says. “And she actually hugged me.”

Bennett hoped Hindley really would co-operate further with police, and visited her again in prison. He was due to return to see her a third time, with police, when Hindley fell ill with angina. A plan for Hindley to be hypnotised to recall the location of Keith’s body also never came to fruition. Hindley’s replies to Bennett’s letters dwindled and, in November 2002, Hindley died, aged 60.

In 2008, another police search for Keith’s body was mounted, using Brady and Hindley’s souvenir photos for reference, and new chemical testing equipment. That was abandoned in July 2009.

So Bennett resumed his own visits to dig the moor, convinced that somewhere in an area of  approximately one square mile, his brother still lies, buried in the side of a gully, if Brady is to be believed.

The very final possibility of new information about Keith’s whereabouts lies with Brady, who has been in the high-security Ashworth Hospital, Merseyside, for 26 years.

“When Brady dies, a lot of stuff will come out,” Bennett predicts. “I think he’s got piles of junk stashed everywhere with different people. We believe he may have photographs in his cell now that we can’t get access to.”

The tantalising possibility is that Brady has kept the whole awful truth for an autobiography to be published after his death.

“For me it will stop when Keith is found,” says Bennett. His whole life has been shaped by his kinship with one of the Moors Murder victims, just as David Smith’s has been shaped by his association with the murderers.

What has been the effect of that on Bennett?

“Lots of things,” he laughs nervously. “It’s made me very very angry and at times very, very sad. I did suffer from depression for a while, but I sorted that out.

“It’s every emotion you can think of – anger, sorrow, frustration, desperation.”

» Witness: The story of David Smith, chief prosecution witness in the Moors Murders case, by David Smith with Carol Ann Lee is published by Mainstream at £11.99.
 
There is a chance to meet author Carol Ann Lee at Waterstone’s, Deansgate, Manchester, tomorrow at 7pm, tickets free but must be reserved in advance, call
0161 839 1248.

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