Smiling sweetly for the camera in her Sunday best, Moors Murders victim Pauline Reade looks a picture of childhood happiness and innocence.
Seen here for the first time, the old family photo shows her with elder brother Paul and their cat before heading to church in the outskirts of Manchester.
This poignant image, taken in about 1953, a decade before her death at the hands of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, is now a treasured keepsake of Pauline’s niece.
It was on an old roll of film we developed for Jackie Reade who found it in a box of memories she dug out of her loft as she spoke to us of her family’s heartbreak 60 years on from the terrifying Saddleworth Moor child murders that shook Britain.
It is not known exactly when the photo was taken, but Pauline – the first victim snatched by the monsters at 16 on her way to a local dance on July 12, 1963 – is believed to have been about six or seven.
Tearful Jackie, 49, says: “I always thought my auntie might have been on the film but hadn’t any way to get it developed. I keep crying looking at it.”
Today she tells how she became a comfort to her shattered gran Joan after the unbearable loss of her daughter because she reminded her of Pauline.
“I think until Pauline’s body was found in 1987, my nana had never given up hope she would be found alive, that she would come home,” says Jackie.
“Even when we used to walk down the road holding hands she was always looking out in a certain way. I used to say, ‘What are you looking at?’ She’d say, ‘I’m just looking.’ But I thought she was looking for Pauline. That’s why she never moved house. She stayed in the area, just in case.”
Jackie vividly recalls the day she first found out her aunt had disappeared. She was about 13, dancing to the radio in Joan’s living room when she noticed her grandmother watching her, deep in thought.
“She said, ‘You remind me of your auntie Pauline. You do things like her’. Then Nana started explaining to me Pauline had gone missing when she was 16 and she didn’t come home – and that she was still waiting for her to come home.”
Jackie, who lives in Manchester suburb Gorton where her auntie Pauline was raised, didn’t meet her grandmother until she was nine after her dad Paul – Pauline’s brother – had split from her mum when she was little.
She says: “I remember running up to her and saying , ‘Are you my nana?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ She filled up with tears. She knew who I was already but I think she hadn’t met me because my mum and dad had gone their separate ways when I was very young. After we met, I would be round her house every day after school. We would go to church and play bingo, and do stuff like that.
“We liked walking around the markets or sitting in the house chatting. I’d fall asleep and she’d cover me up on the settee and give me a cuddle. – all things she would have done with Pauline.”
Until that dreadful night in 1963 when Joan waved her daughter off to a dance.
During her walk to a social club 10 minutes from home, Pauline was lured into a black van by 23-year-old Hindley on the pretence of helping her to look for a glove she had lost on nearby Saddleworth Moor. She promised the teenager records in return.
Instead Brady, 25, was waiting for them, and Pauline was raped and murdered.
The monsters, now both dead, went on to kill John Kilbride, 12, Keith Bennett, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans,17.
Jackie recalls being at her grandmother’s house when detectives knocked on the door in 1987 to tell her Pauline’s remains had been found on the moors.
Tearful Jackie says: “Nana broke down in tears and said, ‘Thank God, they’ve found her, put her to rest. At least we know where she will be now.’
“There was a kind of relief. Nana could stop looking out for her because I think that’s what she had been doing for all those years. I have seen the police photographs of how Pauline was found in her grave on the Moors. The peat soil had preserved her. It was like looking at her as she was when she was 16.
“But my nana didn’t go to see her body. She wanted to remember her daughter the way she was.”
While Jackie never met Pauline, her grandmother’s descriptions evoke for her a poignant picture of the lively youngster.
She recalls: “Nana would say what a lovely person she was, how I would have loved her, that I was a lot like her.
“She said she would have been a very kind person.”
As well as the newly discovered picture, Jackie treasures other possessions of Pauline’s, including a bible and a cookbook from 1959, Children’s Outdoor Cookery with Fanny and Johnnie who found fame on TV.
She says: “The book has her address written in it and a message saying, ‘This book belongs to Pauline Reade. If this book gets lost, smack its bum and send it home crying. Pauline xxx.’ I haven’t cooked any of the recipes but my auntie loved cooking with her mum.
“There are little thumbprints on some pages where Pauline must have turned over or touched them when she was cooking. They’re so small. Seeing them makes me feel strange.
“My nana used to make me apple pie, from trees in her garden. She made good Sunday dinners and showed me how to make gravy. Seeing this book really brings it home that she would have done all that stuff with Pauline.”
And the bible was equally personal – with page markings showing passages Pauline was reading before she died – and even a dried, pressed flower.
Despite facing difficulties in her own life, former carer Jackie says her grandmother, who died of a stroke in 2000 at the age of 71, always stood by her.
Jackie, whose civil partner of 24 years died 10 years ago, says: “Nana used to look after me when I was almost homeless at one point.”
Jackie was relieved her grandmother was no longer alive in 2018 to discover Greater Manchester Police still had some of Pauline’s remains – and had taken her jawbone away during the postmortem.
“I was absolutely devastated,” Jackie says.
“It felt like they had taken her voice away from her. I’m just glad my nana died before we found out.”
Pauline’s remains were later buried in the family grave.
This coming Wednesday, six decades on, Jackie will raise a glass in honour of her auntie, as she does every year.
She adds: “My nana used to say Hindley and Brady would get what was coming to them and they’d not last long in prison. But they lasted longer than my nana.
“It was so heartbreaking to see her crying, saying Pauline had been murdered, that she was never going to get her back, that she was never coming home.”
