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The only time she showed any emotion was when she was told that her dog had died.

‘You fucking murderers,’ she screamed at the police.

The police found a detailed plan that Brady had drawn up for the removal from the house of all clues to Evans’s murder. One of the items mentioned was, curiously, Hindley’s prayer book. When the police examined the prayer book, they found a left luggage ticket from Manchester station stuck down the spine. At the left luggage office, they found two suitcases which contained books on sexual perversion, coshes and pictures of Lesley Ann Downey naked and gagged. There was also the tape of her screams, which was later played to the stunned court-room at Chester Assizes. Other photographs showed Hindley posing beside graves on Saddleworth Moor. These helped the police locate the bodies of Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride.

At the trial the true, horrific, sexual nature of the crimes was revealed. The pathologist disclosed that Edward Evans’s fly had been undone and he had found dog hairs around Evans’s anus. John Kilbride’s body was found with his trousers and underpants around his knees. Hindley, it seemed, got turned on by watching Brady perform homosexual acts on his victims. Later Brady let it slip that both he and Hindley had been naked during the nude photographic sessions with Lesley Ann Downey. But otherwise they refused to talk.

They were sentenced to life. Brady did not bother to appeal. Hindley did, but her appeal was rejected. They were also refused permission to see each other, though they were allowed to write.

Brady has shown no contrition in prison and has refused to be broken. He saw himself as a martyr in his own perverted cause. Gradually, he went insane. Hindley eventually broke down and petitioned to be released. When that was refused, a warder, who was Hindley’s lesbian lover, organised an escape attempt. It failed and Hindley was sentenced to an additional year in jail.

She took an open university degree and gave additional information on the whereabouts of the victims’ graves in a bid for mercy. But Brady countered her every move by revealing more of her involvement in the crimes. He saw any attempt on her part to go free as disloyalty.

‘The weight of our crimes justifies permanent imprisonment,’ Brady told the Parole Board in 1982. ‘I will not wish to be free in 1985 or even 2005.’

He got his wish. Though he made several attempts to starve himself Brady was still incarcerated in 2005. Hindley died in jail in 2002.

Chapter 8

Ted Bundy

Name: Ted Bundy

Nationality: American

Born: 1946

Number of victims: 20 killed

Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation

Reign of terror: 1970s

Final note: conducted his own defence and tried to charm the jury

Executed: 1989

Ted Bundy had the power to charm women. Many of them paid with their lives. He claimed his sexual impulses were so strong that there was no way that he could control them. He later maintained that during his first attacks he had to wrestle with his conscience. But soon he began to desensitise himself. He claimed not to have tortured his victims unnecessarily, but said that he had to kill them after he had raped them to prevent them identifying him.

Bundy had been a compulsive masturbator from an early age and later became obsessed by sadistic pornography. After glimpsing a girl undressing through a window, he also became a compulsive Peeping Tom. His long-time girlfriend Meg Anders described how he would tie her up with stockings before anal sex. This sex game stopped when he almost strangled her. For years they maintained a more or less normal sexual relationship, while Bundy exercised his craving for total control with anonymous victims, whom he often strangled during the sexual act.

His attitude to sex was often ambivalent. Although he desired the bodies of attractive young women, he would leave their vaginas stuffed with twigs and dirt and sometimes sodomise them with objects such as aerosol cans.

Some of