The photograph of Pauline Reade’s body in its shallow grave still has the ability to shock — one shoe pokes accusingly out of the sodden turf. Her killers had completed their work hastily 24 years before. When her searchers found her, she was still clad in her pink party dress and remained well preserved two or three inches below the surface.

The desolate majesty of the moors, which first drew Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, is also a landscape that has remained unchanged and untouched for thousands of years. It is well away from hikers’ normal routes and too boggy and uneven to farm. The search team, led by Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Heywood, took advice from forensic archaeologists and anthropologists. They wanted to know whether they were looking for a recognisable body.

Mr Heywood said they were assured that the kind of peat bog that is known to delay human decomposition would have acted to preserve Keith Bennett — as it did with Lindow Pete, the Late Iron Age body discovered near Wilmslow, Cheshire, in 1984.The acidic, oxygen-free conditions of the peat bog are credited with preserving the skin, hair and internal organs for 19 centuries.

Mr Heywood said that although their search proved fruitless they were able to push the boundaries of knowledge in such a rarefied area. The experts who gave their time on the project have gone on to work in Iraq and Bosnia.

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

• Chilling pictures released as Moors body hunt ends

• Hindley wanted hypnosis to find body

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• Pictures: Moors murders

• ARCHIVE: the Moors Murders

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