In August 2012, Winnie Johnson died, aged 78. She died never knowing where her twelve year old son, Keith Bennett, was buried, and her long held wish to give her son a proper burial was never fulfilled.
It was the summer of 1964 when Keith Bennett went missing. He was heading to his grandmother’s house but he never arrived. The last Winnie saw of her son, he was crossing the street. At some point following that last glimpse, Keith Bennett was taken by the notorious serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the so-called ‘Moors Murders.’
It took 23 years for Ian Brady to admit that he killed Keith and buried him up on Saddleworth Moor on the outskirts of Manchester. But he never revealed the exact location of Keith’s grave, despite numerous campaigns urging him to do so.
When Winnie Johnson died, the smiling, bespectacled face of Keith Bennett was prominently displayed in the media, a poignant testament to the cruel silence of Ian Brady. When I saw that photograph again, I was struck by how familiar it was. Keith Bennett’s face was somehow seared onto my memory, a sad piece of cultural iconography, despite his death having occurred before I was born.
I have always found the photograph of Keith extremely touching. It’s such a powerful image. His innocence and happiness are palpable and you can almost hear his laughter. Once you have seen the photograph of Keith Bennett, you never forget it.
I thought about that photograph a lot in the weeks after Winnie’s death. For some reason, that photograph warps time for me. Every time I see it, I am haunted by the knowledge of what was to happen to Keith. The contrast of his terrible death with his happy smiling face is shocking and unfathomably cruel, and a piece of me always wants to freeze that happy moment so that he never has to encounter Hindley and Brady on the street that summer day in 1964.
I always wondered if Winnie ever looked at that photograph and imagined the same thing. If she ever longed to go back to the moment she waved goodbye to her son on the street and change one small thing. Some small insignificant decision that meant he was not there when Brady and Hindley passed through.
I can imagine how the impossibility of this would increase the longing to shape events afterwards. To regain some sort of control over a terrible and heartbreaking situation. Winnie lost her son, but she could still offer him a proper burial. She could still ensure he was treated with decency and love and respect.
Ian Brady must have understood this longing too, but not in a compassionate way. Rather, I think his controlling nature meant he took some perverse sort of pleasure in withholding this information from Winnie. I don’t think he ever wanted her to find her son.
And it was this thought that stayed with me for years. I always wondered how Winnie sustained the hope that she would one day bury her son. How she managed to counter Ian Brady’s callousness with love, despite it all. She never stopped hoping, and her surviving family still want to find Keith and bring him home.
That Winnie was denied this basic right was something I found very difficult to accept.
As a writer, I often find that issues that provoke a strong emotional response within me often trigger ideas. The story of Winnie and Keith, and the belief that a mother should be able to bury her son, was so strong, it wouldn’t let me go and I found myself imagining a story in which a mother is faced with the same torment— a lifetime of never knowing what happened to her son and where he was buried. A lifetime of longing to bring him home and lay him to rest with dignity and love.
With Brady and Hindley there was also a terrible aspect to their strange loyalty to one another. They kept each other’s secrets and allowed each other to act with impunity.
Their loyalty to one another was something I found morbidly fascinating and I thought a lot about the ways people have of justifying their actions to themselves—even murder. How do you convince yourself it is okay to kill or to help someone kill? How do you convince yourself it is okay to protect a killer with your secrets and lies? How do you see that smiling face, and go ahead anyway?
Eventually all of this started to come together in a story and I began to write “The Vanishing Child”.
In my novel, Winnie Johnson’s loss, and the fact that she died without ever knowing peace, shaped the emotional tone of the story and the power of her unending, unbreakable love formed the basis for the mother in my story.
In the novel, I also have a photograph of a smiling young boy who has been taken and never found. He too is caught forever in a happy, unknowing moment and when my protagonist sees hi , like me, she is filled with a desire to warp time and keep him safe.
In my novel however, the protagonist finds herself in the position of being able to help the mother find her lost son, a journey which also forces her to grapple with the complex and disturbing reasons people have for protecting a killer.
Whenever I think of my fictional child, I think of Keith Bennett and I hope that one day, Winnie’s wish will be fulfilled and he will be brought home at long last.
As long as that hope is maintained, it stands as a defiant refusal to accept the callous silence of Ian Brady.
Jennifer Harvey is a Scottish writer now living in Amsterdam.
Her short fiction has appeared in various publications in the US, Canada, and the UK and she has been shortlisted for the Bristol Prize, the Bridport Prize and placed third in the University of Sunderland Short Story Award. Her novels have been longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and her radio dramas have also won prizes and commendations from the BBC World Service.
Alongside writing, she is a Resident Reader for Carve Magazine, an editor for Carve Critiques, and serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Ellipsis Magazine. When not writing, she can be found sauntering along the Amsterdam canals, dreaming up new stories.
