John Kilbride had vanished the previous November after leaving a Lancashire market, one of several victims to disappear from the Manchester area without explanation. Nearly a year later, on 21 October 1965, police dug up his badly decomposed remains on Saddleworth Moor; so little remained that he could only be identified by his clothing.
The discovery came the same day Ian Brady and Myra Hindley appeared in court charged with the murder of another victim, Lesley Ann Downey. Kilbride’s body on the moor would soon tie the pair to a second killing, as the full scale of what became known as the Moors Murders began to emerge.
