After three days searching the moorland above Manchester, police uncovered the first grave. The discovery confirmed what detectives had feared since finding a body at Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s home: there were more victims. Eleven days later, searchers found a second grave. Another victim was never found. His mother spent the rest of her life searching for answers and returning to the moor, hoping to bring her son home.
Aileen Wuornos killed seven men in Florida, and later claimed the first death was self defence against a convicted rapist. By the time her case reached its final stage, she had turned against the very lawyers trying to save her.
When her appeal team moved for a retrial, Wuornos went to court and had them fired, insisting she was sane and wanted no further appeals. Many who studied her, including documentary maker Nick Broomfield, came to believe otherwise, pointing to erratic, unsettling behaviour in her final interviews as a sign of serious mental illness. The courts accepted her wishes regardless, and she was executed by lethal injection in 2002, declining a final meal.
Wuornos went to her death on this date maintaining a defiant, confused mix of guilt and conspiracy claims rather than a clear confession or denial.
One October night in 1965, Ian Brady and his lover Myra Hindley brought a seventeen-year-old back to their home near Manchester, where Brady killed him with an axe in front of Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, whom they had wrongly taken for a kindIan Brady and Myra Hindley brought 17-year-old Edward Evans back to their home near Manchester after Brady had approached him at Manchester Central station. Brady attacked Evans with a hatchet in front of Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, whom Brady apparently believed could be drawn into his criminal world, before strangling Evans with electrical flex.
Smith was horrified and notified police the next morning. Police Superintendent Bob Talbot arrived at the house wearing a bread deliveryman’s overall over his uniform. Inside, Brady was lying on a divan writing to his employer about his injured ankle. Talbot said he was investigating “an act of violence involving guns”, and Hindley denied that any violence had occurred.
When officers asked for the key to a locked spare bedroom, Hindley claimed it was at work. Police offered to take her there to retrieve it, at which point Brady told her to hand it over. Inside the room, they found Evans’s body, and Brady was arrested on suspicion of murder.
David Birnie and his partner Catherine abducted and murdered four women around Perth in 1986, in what became known as the Moorhouse murders. Their victims included 22-year-old Mary Neilson. Both pleaded guilty and received life sentences, with the trial judge declaring that Birnie should never be released. On 7 October 2005, nineteen years and one day after their first murder, Birnie was found dead in his cell at Casuarina Prison, hours before he was due in court over an alleged assault on another inmate. An inquest later heard that his antidepressant medication had been withdrawn and his computer confiscated in the weeks before his death.
1873·A Tearful Confession in Custody Cracked the Case: Two Men Hanged at Perth Gaol for Eating their VictimTrue crime stories, dark history and tour news, straight to your inbox.
