The brother of Moors Murder victim Keith Bennett has told how their mother spent her final days "slipping in and out of consciousness" repeating: "We never found him, did we?"
Winnie Johnson, 78, died in 2012 after a desperate campaign to get her son's killer, Ian Brady, to reveal where his body was buried. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer and died without ever learning the truth of her son's fate.
Final Days Haunted by Unanswered Questions
To mark the anniversary of her death, her surviving son Alan wrote online: "I wish I could look back on that day as a peaceful end to her pain and suffering, but the memory of her slipping in and out of consciousness, and in her confused state asking where Keith is and then saying, 'We never found him did we?' will haunt me forever."
Little Keith, 12, was abducted and killed by Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley in 1964. He was snatched as he made his way to visit his grandmother in Manchester, but his body had never been recovered.
Police Probe Into Brady's Letter
In 2012, as Winnie's life ebbed away, Brady's mental health advocate Jackie Powell told a television documentary he had given her a sealed envelope to pass to Winnie if Brady died. It sparked a police probe and Ms Powell was arrested on suspicion of preventing Keith's lawful burial - but the letter was never found. The Crown Prosecution Service later said no further action would be taken against Ms Powell, of Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, because it could not "be established that she knew the contents of the letter referred to, that the letter in question existed or what information it might have contained".
But writing about the ordeal, Keith said: "I received a phone call from the police to inform me that two units were on their way, one to raid Powell's house and another to search Brady's room, in the hope of finding the letter or anything else that may help to bring Keith home.
"This was, again, a time when friends of Brady were claiming he was bed-ridden, in a lot of pain, and not far from death. When the police arrived at Ashworth Hospital he was far from being unable to walk. He was very animated and abusive to the police calling them all sorts of names and shouting for his solicitor.
"We made sure that mam was unaware of what was happening all around us as she was slipping away but fighting to the end in those final few days. She had more than her share of hopes that turned out to be nothing more than false hopes while she was well, we made sure there would be no more in her last days."
Family's Ordeal Amid Media Frenzy
He added: "As a family we took turns sat or stood around mam's bed doing and saying all we could to make her passing as peaceful as possible while the media was full of reports of the rest that was going on in the background, noticing Brady's face in the news and on the television in the hospice as if continuing to mock our family.
"Powell being arrested for questioning and no trace of the Brady letter being found, only an empty opened envelope at Powell's home. A great shock to the police was the discovery of what can only be described as the huge amount of 'fan mail' they found in Brady's room."
He added: "It is impossible to even try to describe the mixture of emotions we all felt at that time, it was not the peaceful time it could have been, but, then again, there has never been too many peaceful times."
Missing Pages of Brady's Memoirs
Winnie spent her life trying to get answers about Keith's murder but was never told where he was buried. Last year a BBC documentary, The Moors Murders: A Search for Justice, claimed to have uncovered the first 394 pages of Brady's memoirs called Black Light, which he sent to a solicitor. They detail where the pair buried another victim on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester. But 200 pages of the manuscript, found in the attic of the solicitor who died in 2023, are missing. The missing pages are believed to have been deposited with Brady's solicitor, Robin Makin, in Liverpool, in a locked Samsonite briefcase. But Mr Makin has never disclosed its contents and has not commented.
Keith was the third victim of Brady and Hindley, who killed five children. The bodies of John Kilbride, 12, and Lesley Ann Downey, 10, were found at Saddleworth Moor near Manchester in 1965. Edward Evans, 17, was found at the killers' house after being murdered in 1965. The body of Pauline was found on the moor in 1987. Hindley died in 2002, aged 60, and Brady died in 2017, aged 79. They had been sentenced to life.
