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.
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.
In October 1965, Ian Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at a Manchester railway station, telling him he had been invited home for a drink. At the house on Wardle Brook Avenue, Brady had Myra Hindley fetch her brother-in-law David Smith under the pretext of sharing miniature wine bottles. Smith arrived in time to witness Brady strike Evans with a hatchet and strangle him with electrical cord, screams tearing through the house as Hindley called out for help.
Smith helped move the body to a spare room before fleeing home, where he was sick and told his wife everything. He contacted police the next morning armed with a screwdriver and bread knife in case Brady came after him. Officers found Evans’ body behind a locked door, and as he dressed for arrest, Brady offered a chillingly understated explanation: he and Evans “had a row and the situation got out of hand.” The killing exposed what became known as the Moors Murders.
Harold Shipman was a trusted family doctor in Hyde, England, who killed his patients with lethal injections of diamorphine and then falsified their medical records to make the deaths look natural. He often urged grieving families toward cremation, quietly destroying the evidence a post-mortem might have found.
What he did not understand was his own surgery computer. The practice software secretly time stamped every entry, and when investigators compared those hidden timestamps to the dates on his altered files, the lie was obvious: he had been rewriting patient histories after his victims were already dead. He went on trial in 1999 charged with just 15 murders, though he is believed to have killed close to 250 patients over more than two decades, making him Britain’s most prolific serial killer.
Shipman never confessed and maintained his innocence throughout the trial. He was convicted on all counts and later took his own life in prison.
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