Ian Brady: I killed 4 more and Keith Bennett is buried in Yorkshire

London: Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, claimed to have killed four more people and said the body of Keith Bennett was buried in Yorkshire, in previously unpublished letters shown to The Daily Telegraph.

Brady, 75, said he killed two men in his native Glasgow and a man and a woman in Manchester, where he and Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children in the 1960s.

His claim about the location of 12-year-old Keith’s body suggests that police might have been looking in the wrong place in searches on Saddleworth Moor in Greater Manchester.

On Friday, Brady lost his legal bid to be transferred from Ashworth maximum security hospital back into the prison system after a mental health tribunal ruled that he continued to suffer from a mental disorder. He had hoped to return to jail so that he could starve himself to death rather than being force-fed through a tube, as he has been since 1999. He can appeal against the decision. Brady made a series of claims about his crimes in letters to Brendan Pittaway, a former journalist who wrote to him in Ashworth. Brady described the four additional murders as “happenings” and said he killed a man in Manchester “on the waste ground behind the station” and a “woman in the canal”. He went on to say he killed a man in Glasgow and another man “above” Loch Long, a 32-kilometre sea loch at the mouth of the Clyde.

Brady also gave details of the four alleged murders to detective chief superintendent Peter Topping, the man who led the search for Keith Bennett when Brady confessed to killing him in 1985. In his autobiography, Topping discussed the claims, but said he thought they might be “figments of his imagination”.

In a letter to Pittaway, Brady claimed Topping told him a “mentally retarded man” had confessed to the killing near the station but was never charged, and that the woman found in the canal had been classed as a suicide despite “the absence of a suicide note and the presence of a bruise on her head”. He alleged that Topping told him Strathclyde Police did not keep records going back as far as the death of one of the men in Glasgow and that the second did not match any missing persons reports. Brady claimed he gave Topping “names, places and methods used”.

He wrote: “My statements were an embarrassment to the police, who, rather than admit irregularities had taken place, will move mountains to cover up.”

In the same letter, dated November 24, 1989, he wrote: “As for Keith Bennett. The area of the site is in Yorkshire, not [double underlined] Lancashire, and should have been dealt with by the Yorkshire Police. I have already stated my readiness to questioning under Sodium Penthatol [sic] so-called ‘truth drug’, but not [double underlined] by the Manchester Police.”

It is unclear whether Brady was suggesting that police had been looking in the wrong place, or was splitting hairs about county boundaries to involve West Yorkshire Police, rather than Greater Manchester, against whom he bears a grudge.

At the time of the Moors murders Saddleworth Moor was in West Yorkshire, but after a boundary change in 1974 it became part of Greater Manchester.

John Ainley, the solicitor for Keith Bennett’s mother Winnie Johnson until her death last year, said the search remained a “a needle in a haystack” despite Brady’s claim. “I would appeal to Ian Brady to come forward and either identify the whereabouts of Keith or tell us that he doesn’t know,” he added.

Det chief supt Darren Shenton, the head of Greater Manchester Police’s Serious Crime Division, said detectives had looked into Brady’s claims in the 1980s, adding: “These claims were fully investigated based on the information available at the time and were not substantiated. Should any new information about historic murders come to light, these will be fully investigated.”