Away from helping to expose her sister Myra Hindley’s sick crimes, Maureen Smith’s life was marred by tragedy from miscarriage to marriage breakdowns and violent threats
Maureen Smith and her husband David once looked up to her older sister Myra Hindley and her partner Ian Brady. The couples grew closer as the mid ’60s approached, spending evenings together listening to music and drinking in their homes in east Manchester.
When Maureen and David lost their first child, a daughter, at the age of six months, her older sister and her ‘eccentric’ partner were a source of support. Myra even had a car, which meant the foursome could escape to the nearby Saddleworth Moors for fresh air and solace. The teenagers had no idea the wide expanse of moorland they were relaxing on was the final resting place of four innocent children.
For sick Hindley and Brady – two of the most notorious murderers this country had ever seen – had abducted, sexually assaulted and strangled John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, Pauline Reade, 16 and 12-year-old Keith Bennett in 1963 and 1964, before disposing of their bodies across the remote location. The horrific murders have now been plunged back into the spotlight as Ian Brady’s secret diary has been discovered and point to a chilling detail that could spark a brand new investigation.
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David would later call his friendship with evil Brady a “car crash” moment. “There was no indication whatsoever,” he said of the days before he found out the truth. “He was a slightly eccentric friend. That’s all.”
In October 1965, David had arrived at Hindley and Brady’s home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, to find the Glaswegian beating 17-year-old Edward Evans to death. He helped the couple clean up the house, with Edward’s body wrapped in polythene and placed in an upstairs bedroom.
The terrified teenager fled under the pretence of fetching a pram to help dispose of Evans’ body. Reaching his council flat home, he vomited in the bathroom and woke up his sleeping wife. Maureen persuaded him to report the murder, the fifth committed by the serial killers, to the police. When light dawned at 6am, they walked to a phone box between the two houses, armed with makeshift weapons to ward off any approach from the evil couple and dialled 999.
Brady, 27, was arrested and police went on to find evidence connecting him to missing children from the area. The shocking truth about the stock clerk and his secretary lover’s evil actions began to unravel but Hindley, 23, would deny any involvement, claiming David was her lover’s true accomplice.
Instead, David was the prosecution’s star witness against the serial killer couple, who continued to claim he was involved in their vile crimes. But while senior police officers were sure this wasn’t the case, the public weren’t convinced, leading to bricks being thrown through his window and graffiti declaring ‘Child Killers Live Here’ daubed on his home. David was later jailed after a fight with someone who confronted him in a pub.
Maureen, who had three children with her first husband, was also targeted by locals, who were furious at the actions of her only sister. After her first marriage ended, she had a further child with her second husband Bill Scott and was in her 30s when she died of a brain haemorrhage in 1980.
Violence over Maureen’s links to her sister, dubbed “the most evil woman in Britain”, would even break out at her funeral at Blackley Crematorium, with the instigator believed to be a relative of one of the sick couple’s victims.
Maureen’s ex David remarried, moved to Galway in Ireland and had a daughter with his second wife Mary Flaherty. She said he had remained haunted by his friendship with Hindley and Brady up until his death in 2012 at the age of 65.
Hindley died in hospital aged 60 in 2002 and Brady was 79 when he died at a high-security psychiatric hospital in Liverpool in 2017. Keith Bennett’s body has never been found and his mother Winnie Johnson died of cancer in 2012. She had never given up hope of finding her missing son.