When news broke last Friday morning that police were back on the moors looking for the remains of Keith Bennett, his brother Alan braced himself.
It's a road he and his late mother Winnie Johnson travelled many times, on each occasion setting out in the hope that at last they'd be able find Keith and give him a proper burial. Each journey has ended in heartbreak, disappointment and sometimes downright anger.
After a week of painstaking digging and analysis by police-commissioned experts, today (Friday) officers have been forced to admit defeat. No human remains have been found despite information from author and amateur sleuth Russell Edwards to the contrary. A picture he took - which has not been made public - purporting to show parts of a child's jaw may simply show vegetation, according to GMP.
However well-meaning the latest attempt to find him, the bottom line is that Keith's family have again been denied the closure they have craved for decades.
Keith was sexually abused and murdered, one of five child victims of killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. A beguiling, cherubic black and white photo of bespectacled Keith smiles at all of us every time his story is revisited. It has become an emblem of one family's unending suffering. Aged just 12, he vanished on June 16th 1964. His is the only body not to have been found. The other victims were Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17.
But it's the hope, however feint and diminishing, that tortures the surviving Bennett family. Because they know hope has not always been futile. In 1987 Hindley and Brady, already in jail, belatedly confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. After separate visits to Saddleworth Moor by the pair, the body of Pauline was finally discovered.
Only Keith’s body has never been found.
There have been so many false dawns. In 2018, farmer Chris Crowther, whose family own more than 9,000 acres of moorland, sparked another police dig - but forensic tests revealed the bones were that of a dead sheep. On another occasion some material and a stud fastener were found which suggested a jacket. It turned out to be camping equipment.
Alan wrote dozens of letters to both Keith's killers while they were behind bars to extract clues. In 1998 even visited Hindley twice in prison. All to no avail.
Keith's mother Winnie Johnson was a constant visitor to the moors. She never gave up searching for her son. She died on August 18, 2012, aged 78 without ever discovering where Keith was buried.
In the aftermath of the killings, Winnie, a mum-of-nine, said she was afraid to let her other children even go to school in case they disappeared. She said she hardly left the house for five years and contemplated suicide.
"I blamed myself of course even though everyone told me it wasn't my fault," she said. Winnie turned her home in Fallowfield, into a shrine to her spectacle-wearing little boy.
She always kept Keith's glasses and, alongside black and white photographs of him, the walls of her house were adorned with letters, poems and hymns written in support by well-wishers. But Winnie was never in any doubt Brady knew where Keith was buried.
She wrote to her son's killer hundreds of times over the years begging him to enable her to give her little boy a Christian burial. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. Brady refused to divulge his whereabouts.
After the official Greater Manchester Police operation was declared 'dormant', a privately-funded search began in 2010. At the memorial for Keith held at Manchester Cathedral in March that year, Johnson told the hundreds of people present: "I'm Keith's mother. He's there on the Moors. I want him back."
And even after being diagnosed with the cancer that would take her life, Winnie remained determined to find her little boy. In one of her final interviews Winnie told the Manchester Evening News : "I'd like Brady to tell me where Keith is before anything happens to me. Whether I'll go first or whether he'll go first, I don't know.
"I wish to God he'd turn round and tell me where Keith was. Because he's known all these years, he's known where he's put him, he know how he's murdered him, him and Myra Hindley."
Brady died aged 79 in room 35 of Newland ward at the high-security Ashworth Hospital in Merseyside, where he had spent the previous 32 years, on the evening of May 15, 2017.
Police say it's a case they will never close. Meanwhile the torment of the Bennett family remains.
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