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Reporter ‘still haunted by Moors Murders horror’

A retired former regional journalist has told how the image of the body of a young Moors Murders victim being found by police will stay with him forever.

Mike Shaw, now aged 80, was a young reporter working the Colne Valley patch for the Huddersfield Daily Examiner in the early 60s, when Ian Brady and Myra Hindley carried out the killings.

In an interview with his former paper sparked by Brady’s failed bid to convince a health tribunal to allow him to moved from a secure hospital and into prison, Mike shared his memories of being at the scene of a police search for the couple’s victims.

He had been called out to the A635 Greenfield Road, which runs from Holmfirth over the moors, a few days earlier when police found the body of Lesley Ann Downey after an officer spotted an arm sticking out of the black peat.

And he was back there again as the 150-strong team continued the search for missing boy John Kilbride.

“There were a lot of press people up there and the police were very good; they let us get fairly close to the search site,” he said.

“I remember them heading back towards the road carrying a huge thing. It was a big lump of the peat from the moor, dug out with the boy’s body inside.

“That image of John Kilbride being carried to the back of a truck stays with me to this day.”

Brady and Hindley were arrested early in October 1965 over the death of Edward Evans and police then recovered evidence which shifted their search for the bodies to Saddleworth Moor.

Hindley died in prison in 2002 of pneumonia, while Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985 and moved to the high-security Ashworth Hospital.

Last month, Brady argued that he was not suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and asked to be allowed back to prison. However, the tribunal panel ruled he should remain in the facility.