Two crime reporters have recalled covering the “grim” searches for the remains of the Moors Murderers’ victims fifty years on from the killers’ convictions.

Mike Shaw and Neil Atkinson, of the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, have both recalled their time reporting from Saddleworth Moor as police tried to find the location of two of the victims’ graves.

Brady and Myra Hindley murdered five children between 1963 and 1965, with three of their victims’ being discovered in graves on the moor in later years.

Mike, now retired, spent many days on the moor back in 1965 as police hunted for the bodies of the killers’ young victims.

Ian Brady with police officers on Saddleworth Moor in 1987

He told his former paper: “There were three police forces involved, from the West Riding, from Lancashire and from Cheshire, and a huge number of people in the search.

“There were many journalists up there and we watched as the search teams combed the moors.

“It was obviously the days before mobile phones and the journalists would hurry down the hill along the A635 towards Greenfield towards the only public phone box to ring through their copy.”

More than 20 years later, Neil was back in the same area as Brady returned to the moors to try and help police pinpoint the remains of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.

Neil, now the paper’s live news editor, said: “It was a dreadful December day in 1987 and the snow was blowing horizontally across the moors.

“We had been told there was to be a police operation and it was conducted in huge secrecy, totally unlike what had happened back in 1965.

“The police put up roadblocks near The Ford Inn but journalists were allowed a little further up to The Huntsman Inn. We spent the day there, checking every so often what was happening and watching the police operation from afar.”

Hindley died in prison in 2002, while Brady is currently in the Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital, near Liverpool, after having been diagnosed as a psychopath in 1985.