Myra Hindley gives a sidelong glance at the camera, her blonde hair ruffled by the wind and her cheeks curved into a smile. If her face had not become synonymous with one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th century it would resemble a memento of a day out in the country. Instead, police believe, the photograph shows Hindley looking indulgently at her boyfriend Ian Brady in the knowledge that she had recently helped him to torture and murder five children.

Detectives hoped to use the photographs, taken 45 years ago by Brady at a waterfall on Saddleworth Moor, to find where the couple buried Keith Bennett, 12, the only one of their five victims not to have been found. Even with the latest technology, though, police had to admit defeat and called off the search yesterday.

Keith was on his way to his grandmother’s home when he was snatched in June 1964 by the Moors murderers and buried in a shallow grave somewhere in a 30 square mile wilderness of rugged moorland.

The black and white photographs, believed to have been taken by Brady as an aid to help him to revisit the scene later, provided police with macabre clues in their renewed search for the boy’s resting place. Greater Manchester Police released two photographs yesterday as they announced that, despite extensive searches using the latest technology, and some early hopes of a breakthrough, they had discovered no evidence of the body.

Times Archive, 1966: Life for Moors case couple

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were both sentenced at the bodies on the moor trial to life imprisonment

• Topic: The Moors Murders

Related Links

• Desolate moors keep their secrets

• Hindley wanted hypnosis to find body

• Media outnumber mourners as Hindley is cremated

Multimedia

• Pictures: Moors murders

• ARCHIVE: the Moors Murders

Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Heywood, head of the force’s serious crime division, said that the case was now officially “dormant”, but insisted that this did not mean closed. He made a “final” appeal to Brady in his hospital cell to offer up the detailed information that would bring comfort to Winnie Johnson, 76, Keith’s mother.

Brady and Hindley were jailed for life at Chester Assizes in May 1966 for the murders of Lesley Ann Downey, 10, Edward Evans, 17, and John Kilbride, 12. The couple were caught after the murder of Edward, who had been invited to Brady’s house. They tried to co-opt Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith into disposing of the body, but he promptly informed the police. Their trial horrified the nation, not least because of the tape recording the killers made of Lesley Ann pleading for her life.

Twenty-one years later they confessed to killing Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett. The pair were then escorted — separately — to the moors to try to locate the graves. Pauline’s body, her white shoe pathetically poking out of the soggy peat ground, was discovered but Keith’s was not.

The new search, Operation Maida, was initiated in 2003 inauspiciously with a fruitless visit to Brady at Ashworth Hospital on Merseyside. Officers recall how he waved them away dismissively as he lay on his bed.

Officers returned to the police archive, a “floor to ceiling” room full of documents, where they re-examined Hindley’s statement that the couple took Bennett to the Shiny Brook area of the moor.

Unknown to Hindley — who died in a Suffolk hospital in 2002 — Brady had given detailed information about a gully where he carried out the attack. The area was some distance from the Hollin Brow Knoll area, where most of the bodies were recovered. Officers returned to the archive of photographs that they believed that the killers had used as “markers” so they would be able to find the graves at a later date. One sequence of black and white photographs was identified as Shiny Brook.

“We put quite a lot of weight on these photographs,” one officer said. “It corroborated the accounts given by Brady and Hindley.”

Scientists had assured the search team that a human body was likely to remain well preserved in the ancient peat bog.

Times Recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• Why Ann Widdecombe has got it wrong
• Alas, it’s the end of the road for petrolheads