Winnie Johnson never gave up searching for her son. Tragically she went to her grave without ever discovering the truth.
Keith Bennett was just 12-years-old when Winnie waved him goodbye as he walked across Stockport Road in Longsight towards his gran's house on June 16, 1964.
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He never made it. Keith was snatched from the street by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
They took him to Saddleworth Moor where he was sexually abused and murdered by Brady in one of the bleakest chapters of British criminal history - the moors murders of five innocent children.
In 1966 Brady and Hindley were found guilty of torturing and killing John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17. Almost 20 years later Brady admitted in an interview with a journalist that he had also killed Keith and Pauline Reade, 16.
Prompted by the confession, Johnson wrote to Hindley, asking for her help in finding Keith's burial place. "I am a simple woman, I work in the kitchens of Christie's Hospital," she wrote.
"It has taken me five weeks labour to write this letter because it is so important to me that it is understood by you for what it is, a plea for help. Please, Miss Hindley, help me."
Pauline's body was found on Saddleworth Moor in 1987. Keith's remains have never been recovered.
He became the lost victim of the Moors Murders, the only one whose remains are yet to be found. In the immediate days after Keith’s abduction, 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 giver her little boy a Christian burial. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. Cruel Brady refused to divulge his whereabouts.
On Hindley's death in 2002, Winnie said 'I have no sympathy for her, even in death', and reiterated her determination to find her son's body.
"Whatever happens," she said, "I'll never give up looking for Keith and I'll keep asking Brady."
A worshipper at St Chrysostom’s Church, Victoria Park, Winnie had planned for Keith’s funeral should his body ever be recovered. Her dream was for his coffin to be pulled in a glass horse-drawn hearse and his grave to be covered to in roses.
"If they ever find Keith I would want to go up and have a look at him before he was moved," she said. "Then I'd want to bring him home."
She hoped for him to be buried next to her late husband, Jim Johnson, Keith's step-father, who 'worshipped' him. Keith's gravestone would have the simple epitaph 'At peace, at last'.
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."
Winnie died on August 18, 2012, aged 78 without ever discovering where Keith was buried.
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