That was all I needed.’ĭavid’s first wife, Maureen, was not a part of his life after the trial, according to Mary. He knew nothing was ever black and white. ‘My dad knew there are more than two sides to every story. When Mary first met him, she asked her father for advice. He had an almost picture-perfect memory and would recall his time with them with anger and sadness. Mary said David spoke of the Moors Murderers often. ‘Despite the consequence, despite everything, he would always have done the right thing. ‘If it wasn’t for him, who was going to be next? How many were going to follow? But few saw it like that.’Įven if he had foreseen the horrendous backlash his family suffered as a result of reporting Evans’s killing to the police, Mary said David would have done the same if given a second chance.
‘He was just one man and that one man stopped everything. ‘We should have been proud of David and who he was, and we were… but people could be so cruel.
Throwing rocks through the front window of their home became a sport for locals. Mary and David continued to endured verbal and physical abuse. The two married, and had a daughter together.īut his association with Brady and Hindley was still a blight on his life. ‘That is the only thing I wished he had lived to have seen.’ĭavid’s life changed for the better when he met Mary. ‘He felt as though he was getting somewhere. Keith’s brother Alan asked David to see if he recognised areas on the moors from photographs as recently as just before Christmas. ‘Even when David was ill, he continued to help. ‘They asked him to point out areas where he had been with Brady and Hindley but it all looked the same with the blanket of thick snow on the ground.’ĭavid was determined to use his knowledge of Brady and Hindley to help the families of their five victims.Įven up to the final few months of his life, he worked tirelessly to help find the body of the last missing child – 12-year-old Keith Bennett. ‘But they took him to the moors in the snow. He thought he was going to the station to go through it properly. ‘In the 1980s, he was driven back to the moors by the police. ‘He told the police about other areas on the moors where he had been with Hindley and Brady, but they didn’t want to know. But he always thought nobody listened to him,’ said Mary. ‘He was very angry with Hindley and Brady for years. He was jailed in 1969 for attacking someone with a knife in a fight that resulted from one such beating.Īfter he was jailed, Maureen left him for another man, abandoning their three young boys, who were taken into care.
Trip: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the country He couldn’t find work, his children were spat at, bricks were thrown through his window and he was repeatedly beaten up in local pubs. However, because of Hindley’s wicked claims about him, he became a victim of suspicion. This was reported time and time again and people believed what they read.’ĭavid testified for a day and a half at Brady and Hindley’s trial, one of the most sensational in British criminal history. ‘Hindley kept saying that she was innocent and it was Dave who helped Brady. He told me it was the worst thing in the world.’įollowing the October 1965 phone call to police, Smith was tormented for the rest of his life. ‘It changed his perception on everything. ‘But meeting them changed his life completely. ‘They took him to places he could never get to. ‘Nobody had a car in those days,’ said Mary. The older couple had plenty of money, booze and a car. The teenage couple looked up to Brady and Hindley and would regularly go on drink-fuelled trips to the wild moors east of Manchester with them. The meeting changed his life irrevocably. Mary told how David met the deranged killers as a teenager when he started courting Maureen. It was this phone call that brought an end to the murders.
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Witness: Maureen Hindley and David Smith during the trial in 1966
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