When Maureen Smith lost her daughter at six months, her big sister Myra Hindley was a welcome source of support. The siblings were close, regularly enjoying evenings together drinking and listening to music with their men – Maureen’s husband David Smith and Hindley’s partner Ian Brady – in tow.
Saddleworth Moor was a favourite spot for Hindley and her “eccentric” other half and the two couples would often pile into her car to escape east Manchester for the wide expanse above the city. The four young people were close so when David was struggling to pay the rent, he turned to Brady for help.
The Glaswegian, who had met Hindley when he was working as a stock clerk and she his secretary, suggested he lure a man back to his home, with David arriving to help swindle him out of some cash. But while the teenager was up for breaking the law, he was horrified to arrive at Brady’s home in October 1965 and find his pal beating 17-year-old Edward Evans to death.
Stunned David helped Hindley and Brady clean up the house after Edward’s brutal death before fleeing under the pretence of sourcing a pram to transport his body more easily. Instead, he arrived back at the council flat he shared with Maureen, threw up in the bathroom and woke up his sleeping wife.
Despite being the sister of Hindley, for Maureen there was simply no option – she told David he had to report the murder he had just witnessed. Terrified of Hindley and Brady coming for them, the teenagers waited until light was dawning at 6am and armed with makeshift weapons, they walked to a nearby phone box to call 999.
Brady, 27, was arrested and police searched his home and found Edward’s body wrapped up in polythene in an upstairs bedroom. The shocking, unimaginable truth about the couple’s evil actions soon began to unravel.
Maureen was horrified to learn the wide expanse of moorland they had so often frolicked on was the final resting place of four innocent children. For sick Hindley, 23, and Brady – two of the most notorious murderers this country had ever seen – had abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, Pauline Reade, 16 and 12-year-old Keith Bennett in 1963 and 1964, before disposing of their bodies across the remote location.
David would later call his friendship with evil Brady a “car crash” moment. “There was no indication whatsoever,” he said of the days before he found out the truth. “He was a slightly eccentric friend. That’s all.”
David became the prosecution’s star witness against the serial killer couple, with Hindley maintaining the teenager was a co-conspirator with Brady, not her. And while senior police officers were sure this wasn’t the case, with Hindley and Brady both being jailed for life for their parts in the murders, the locals of east Manchester weren’t so convinced.
From bricks being thrown through David and Maureen’s window to graffiti declaring ‘Child Killers Live Here’ daubed on their home, in the eyes of the public the couple were guilty by association. David was later jailed after a fight with someone who confronted him in a pub and violence over Maureen’s links to her sister would even break out at her funeral at Blackley Crematorium, with the instigator believed to be a relative of one of the serial killers’ victims.
Maureen, who had three children with her first husband, had a further child with her second husband Bill Scott before she died of a brain haemorrhage in her 30s. Her ex remarried, moved to Galway in Ireland and had a daughter with his second wife Mary Flaherty, who said he had remained haunted by his friendship with Hindley and Brady up until his death.
Hindley died in hospital aged 60 in 2002 and Brady was 79 when he died at a high-security psychiatric hospital in Liverpool in 2017.
See No Evil: The Story of the Moors Murders is available to stream on Netflix
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