Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady claimed first victim Pauline Reade 25 years ago
PAULINE Reade, 16, was off to a suburban dance in 1963 when she became the first victim of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
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AT 7.30 on a warm summer evening, 16-year-old Pauline Reade kissed her mother Joan on the cheek and set off to walk about 1km to a dance at the British Railways Social Club in Cornwall St, suburban Manchester.
When entreaties to neighbouring families for one of their daughters to accompany Pauline were denied, Joan reluctantly allowed her daughter to go alone, trusting her to be sensible. An apprentice baker who worked with her father Amos, Pauline had her hair done up and wore a pink twist-dress with new white stiletto-heeled shoes she had bought that day.
That Friday evening of July 12, 1963, was the last time Pauline’s family saw their daughter. It was almost 25 years before they knew she had become the first victim of Moors killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, arrested in 1966 for three other murders.
The truth of Pauline’s disappearance will never be known, as Brady, who died last year, and Hindley, who died in 2002, gave varying accounts of her final hours.
They agreed that as Pauline walked along the street 55 years ago, Hindley, then 23 and a family acquaintance, was sitting in a parked black van on a nearby deserted street and heard her stilettos clicking along the footpath.
As Pauline passed, Hindley called out, then told Pauline she had lost a glove on Saddleworth Moor, a “vast tract of barren land” a half-hour drive northeast of Manchester. Hindley asked if Pauline would come to help her look for the glove, and promised the girl some records in return.
The appalling union that claimed five young lives between July 1963 and October 1965 had begun in 1960 or 1961 in the offices of Millwards Merchandising, where Hindley said it was “love at first sight” when she met Brady, a stock clerk, on her first day as a typist. At first, Hindley recounted, Brady sometimes treated her normally. Other times he ignored her or was nasty. Their romance began after Brady, who already had a criminal record, danced with her at a Christmas party and they moved into Hindley’s grandmother’s home in Wardle Brook Avenue on Hattersley housing estate.
Born on July 23, 1942, in Gorton, Manchester, Hindley’s father was a violent alcoholic who beat her mother, and she grew up with her grandmother Ellen Maybury. When a close male friend drowned, after she refused to go swimming with him when she was 15, Hindley left school and converted to Roman Catholicism.
Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart on January 2, 1938, in the poor Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland. His mother Maggie Stewart, 28, was a single tearoom waitress and the identity of his father is uncertain. Unable to afford to care for a child, Maggie left him in the care of local couple John and Mary Sloan, who already had four children.
She visited frequently at first, but less as he grew up. In 1950 she moved to Manchester with her new husband, Patrick Brady. As a child Brady had reputedly tortured and killed animals, and later also attacked children.
In high school he became interested in World War II and Nazi atrocities, later listing Hitler’s Mein Kampf, along with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and less well-known books about sadism, as his favourite books. Between 13 and 16 he was charged with housebreaking and burglary three times, then sent to live with his mother and stepfather.
Hindley says on their first date Brady took her to see The Nuremberg Trials, then introduced her to Hitler’s marching songs, Mein Kampf, Crime and Punishment and de Sade. Brady also took pornographic photos of Hindley. She claimed he had drugged her and later threatened to show the images to her family, and to push her grandmother downstairs, if she did not help him find victims to murder, which he described as the “supreme pleasure”.
Hindley’s friends, work colleagues and family say that after taking up with Brady she became surly, aggressive and secretive. Hindley later claimed that Brady regularly raped, beat and sexually humiliated her. She says Brady introduced her to the idea of killing when he gave her a book called Compulsion, about the abduction and murder of a 12-year-old child. In July 1963, Hindley said Brady began talking about committing the perfect murder.
When Pauline agreed to help Hindley search for the fictional lost glove, she was driven to Saddleworth Moor, where Brady raped her before cutting her throat, although he later claimed Hindley had also stabbed and beaten her. Pauline was buried in a metre-deep grave, where she was found on June 30, 1987, after more than 100 days of searching.
Brady and Hindley had been jailed for life in 1966 for the sexual abuse, torture and murder of three children, whose bodies were buried on Saddleworth Moor. In 1987, when Hindley received counselling from a priest, she confessed to two other killings, including Pauline Reade which Brady also admitted.