The Moors murders were the killings of five children by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady over a two-year period beginning in 1963. Their bodies were buried in the countryside, and the case remained unfinished in a particularly stark sense: initially, only two victims had been found. The 1986 search for Pauline Reade brought one of the missing children back into view and made the recovery of human remains, as well as the crimes themselves, central to the episode’s later history.

The killings and the buried victims

The murders began in 1963 and continued over two years. Hindley and Brady killed five local children and buried them in the countryside. At first, investigators discovered only two of the bodies. The others remained undiscovered, leaving the crimes with an unresolved physical dimension: the perpetrators had been identified and imprisoned, but not every victim had been recovered.

The search for Pauline Reade

In 1986, more than two decades after the killings began, retired detective Geoff Knupfer was introduced to Hindley, who was serving a life sentence. She agreed to help search for another victim’s body and was flown by police helicopter to the moors. In poor health and unsteady on the rough ground, Hindley was guided by Knupfer as they crossed the terrain. The search led to the discovery of the unmarked grave of Pauline Reade, who had been sixteen and on her way to a dance when Hindley and Brady murdered her.

Recovery and the return of the past

Reade’s body had been preserved in dense peat for decades. Once exposed to the atmosphere, it began to deteriorate rapidly. The contrast between long preservation underground and immediate decay after recovery gives the search its grim force: locating the body made it possible to identify a grave that had remained hidden, but exposure also began to undo the physical preservation that had kept the remains intact.

The episode also became a bridge to later searches for people disappeared during the conflict in Northern Ireland. Knupfer’s experience recovering Reade’s body preceded his involvement in those searches. In that later context, the recovery of remains carried a further human consequence: burial rites and the ability to mourn had been denied to families left without certainty about what had happened to their loved ones. The Moors murders therefore enter the book not only as a case of serial child murder, but as an early account of how concealed bodies can keep violence present long after the killings themselves.