The Moors Murderers - continued searches?

[soupyspoon]

Did anyone see the documentary last night on the BBC about the searches and evidence for where Keith Bennetts body might be?

A couple of things puzzled me, a) why the solicitor that has Brady's suitcases and other documents isnt made to give these up to police and b) why other bits of the moors couldnt be searched given the theories that came out of last nights programme

Also I dont know if anyone remembers Time Team but they had that piece of equipment that people walked across the ground with and it gave an impression of things under the ground, I dont know if that works for ground like moors and peat.

It’s quite easy to locate the solicitor named using Google. We could all write to him. After all, it would be in the public interest and probably an intended consequence of the documentary!
I do feel more should be done for the families - they have suffered for far too long. And Brady, a true psychopath- extending his control from beyond the grave 😡

why other bits of the moors couldnt be searched given the theories that came out of last nights programme

The potential area to search is absolutely vast with large areas quite featureless. I've seen the maps and know the area reasonably well. If you go there and stand and look around, it's fairly obvious how even targetted searching and digging could easily not find anything.

Plus the ground is often very waterlogged and subject to erosion/damage by walkers, quad bikes and cyclists and possibly some peat cutting so could show disturbances even if it's not been dug up. I also don't know if the scanning equipment can be used on the very uneven ground in the area.

I have used that scanning equipment - it is very slow, and only does a tiny piece of defined ground at any one time, also very hard to interpret - at Time Team rates you would be looking at a couple of thousand years to survey the whole moor!

Well I suppose I was thinking to scan the small bits that the researchers identified on the programme

I live in the North West and this has been covered on the local news so many times. The nature of the peat land means it shifts and changes constantly. Impossible task.

I have used the scanning equipment (Ground penetrating radar) and commissioned many surveys! It’s not great in waterlogged soils - like the peat moors around Saddleworth. It also doesn’t identify different material types, just different densities. To the best of my knowledge (and I’m a geologist not a archaeologist so my expertise is in the characteristics of soil and rock types) there is no trace response for “human remains” ( although it is possible to correlate traces to local soil types with callibration against intrusive investigation (digging holes!) too. ).

I can’t get my head round why Robin Makin won’t give the belongings to the police. I’m appalled the police gave up searching so early back in 1965 and have a suspicion that they don’t want to get involved again because of - again - money. The ex-policewoman who was interviewed didn’t exactly cover herself in glory.

It was chilling to hear Brady’s voice for the first time.

Not for the first time, I also reflected that if Brady hadn’t killed Edward Evans then they may never have been caught.

Makes you wonder who else hasn't been caught, doesn't it. I work in prisons and met a killer recently, killed 7 over 4 years, and caught by sheer luck, he might have just gone on and on and on, and I am sure some do, and not only are never caught, but are never even looked for, as their existance isn't even detected

I have a forensic archaeologist friend who has worked on searches for traces of human burials, including a case where someone present at the murder (from the early 1970s) came with her and her team and the police to try to identify the burial site in the late 1990s. Despite the burial area being far smaller than Saddleworth Moor and conducting a prolonged search very close to where the body was finally discovered (that the witness was trying in good faith is suggested by how close they were to the remains), they found nothing. The burial site was only discovered by accident after extreme weather washed away a bank, in the immediate vicinity of the dig.

What I’m saying is that, even with cooperation from someone present, expertise and tech, finding human remains in a large area is difficult to do.

That’s really interesting @NoCowardSoul. I imagine that fleshy human and animal remains decay quite quickly.

I used to do, then commission, ground investigations for engineering purposes. Twice (in maybe 200 investigations) I’ve dug up bones (both turned out to be animals) but they were completely clean of any flesh.

I’ve just watched this on iPlayer (day off). It rolled into a companion programme “The Search for Keith Bennett” and talks about the geophysics scans they did of the moors years ago, in 11,000 locations. Something that they raised, that I hadn't thought of, is that the courses of streams in soft ground move and meander over time. Keith’s grave is near a confluence of 2 streams, but that may have shifted from where it was at the time.

They were building the high pressure gas grid across the Moors in the 1960s. Huge long stretches of deep trenches left open at night.

For obvious reasons you can't dig anywhere near them.

It was certainly a live topic when I was working in the central control department (Production and Supply) in British Gas in the 80s - when they resumed the seach for Pauline Reade RIP.

What programme was this pls?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002fxrd/the-moors-murders-a-search-for-justice

@mylovedoesitgood thank you

I hope that somehow, this will end one day.

I’m not sure what remains they’d be looking for -a skeleton, or even just fragments of bone? Not sure, with the passage of time, what would be likely there.

That poor boy’s mother walked the moors for years with a garden shovel, trying to find him.

Its really hard isnt it, everything people are saying is common sense of course, the moors move, its impossible to determine what material is under the ground anyway from the tech we have so its just not going to happen is it.

I think its harder than other cases where the body hasnt been found because in most of those similar cases, the body location isnt known at all, but here, we pretty much know that its within a 2 or 3 mile radius, even given the movement of the ground, he is right there, but cant be found. Horrific.

My heart aches for what Winnie Johnson went through all those years.

Brady played games with everyone, the police, the idiots who supported him, he even tried with the families. I do think his papers should be forcibly retrieved and investigated even if it's too late to find poor Keith's body now.

They could possibly find an intact body - peat is well known to preserve buried remains well (google Lindow man)

did Brady not try to help find him at some point though, IIRC or was that an excuse to get out for the day, I have not seen the documentary

It also ruined the life of poor person (child!) who shopped them into the police, he spent his life being accused of being in cahoots with them before they admitted he had no involvement decades later.

I really hope one day Keith is found. But…as awful as it is, I don’t think it should be a priority.there are people still missing today, and we have finite resources, they should be poured into newer cases. As a PP said finding him is an impossible task, and I don’t see the point in trying when so much good could be done elsewhere

Yes, I seem to remember that happening.

I'm not woo, but my grandad searched for the children when they went missing, as my family were local. It feels just a tiny bit like he can't rest in peace either knowing they never brought Keith home. I know it bothered him still when he died a few years ago.

Brady played horrible games in life, and it wouldn't surprise me if he tried to make sure they continued after his death.

I can’t get my head round why Robin Makin won’t give the belongings to the police.

Like it or not, lawyers are required to operate within the instructions and requirements of their clients - even after the clients are dead.

I grew up in the shadow of the Moors Murders. I was five when the first one happened, and despite being young it still had an impact; both in terms of knowing that some young people ahd disappeared, and also the fallout once it was understood what had happened. Adults are nowhere near as good ay hiding stuff from kids as they think they are. And many years later I met Myra Hindley on several occasions. The impact these crimes had was not just on the families of the victims, terrible though that was - it hit whole communities for miles around. The country may have sat up and noticed, but it didn't have the same impact. It was like the "innocence" of communities had been torn away. Serial killers were the stuff of fairy tales and Halloween.

As a result I do feel very strongly about the possibility of bringing this to an end and bringing Keith home. Anyone touched by this story would want to see that. But I think that it is unlikely to ever happen unless Brady has provided an accurate location (and given the shifts of time, possibly not even then). That said, if instructions have been left with Makin, then no matter what else, he must follow them and every single person must see that to be the case. Brady's horrific crimes do not provide sufficient cause for a lawyer to determine that they can ignore their instructions - what kind of legal system would we have if anything you instruct to a lawyer can be overruled because they decided to ignore what you said? Not one that we could trust.

Brady played horrible games in life, and it wouldn't surprise me if he tried to make sure they continued after his death.

I agree. Maybe he never wrote in his memoir about Keith’s location, or did and destroyed the 200 pages. But hopefully Robin Makin will eventually give the police Brady’s papers.