Moors Murderer Ian Brady dies aged 79

Serial killer Ian Brady has died aged 79, after five decades behind bars.

He died of cancer at Merseyside's Ashworth Hospital, a high secure institution where he has been held since 1985 after being declared criminally insane.

"Even in death, Brady continued to cause anguish," says the Daily Telegraph, "taking the secret of where he had buried the last of his victims, Keith Bennett, to the grave with him."

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Brady was found guilty of murdering five children in the 1960s with his girlfriend Myra Hindley, who died aged 60 in 2002. The pair came to be known as the Moors Murderers after killing five young people - Keith Bennett, 12, Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, ten, and Edward Evans, 17 - on Saddleworth Moor, Greater Manchester, between 1963 and 1965.

"Few killers achieved such notoriety or received such public loathing," says The Times. "Sixties Britain was appalled by the revelation that children had been abducted, sexually abused, tortured and buried in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor on the outskirts of Manchester."

Equally shocking was the couple's "complete lack of remorse during the subsequent trial", writes the BBC.

The victims' relatives spoke of relief and joy at Brady's death. "I poured myself a glass of wine when I found out," Downey's brother, Terry West, told the Daily Mail. "I've been waiting for this day for such a long time. It's closure for our family."

However, Terry Kilbride, brother of John, told The Sun: "Nothing will change."

He added: "[Brady's] dead, but we will have to still live with the nightmare that he left behind.

"He's ruined our lives all these years and he'll still ruin it even though he's gone."