Eighteen Hours with a Monster: Fred Harrison and the Moors Murders

How One Journalist's Determination Helped Solve Britain's Most Notorious Crime

Fifty years ago, Fred Harrison wrote a book that would become a crucial chapter in one of Britain’s darkest criminal sagas. It wasn’t about economics, property rights, or the structural flaws in our financial system—topics that would later define his career. It was about something far more visceral: a series of murders that shocked a nation and left families trapped in an agonising limbo, desperate for answers that seemed destined never to come.

The story began with late-night telephone calls from a grieving parent, a voice on the other end of the line asking a simple, haunting question: could anyone help them discover the truth about what happened to their missing child?

The Moors Murders: A Nation’s Nightmare

For those too young to remember, the Moors murders represent one of the most chilling episodes in British criminal history. Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and his girlfriend Myra Hindley embarked on a killing spree that would forever change how Britain thought about evil. They lured children off the streets of Manchester, subjected them to torture, murdered them, and buried their bodies on the desolate moorlands of northern England.

Brady and Hindley were eventually caught and convicted, but their crimes cast a shadow that extended beyond what the courts could prove. Two other children remained missing, their fates unknown. For the families of these missing children, the convictions brought no closure. They lived with the terrible suspicion that Brady had killed their children too, but without proof, without bodies, without answers—they had nothing but endless, corrosive uncertainty.

A Parent’s Plea

It was this unbearable state of limbo that led one of the grieving parents to reach out to Fred Harrison. Late at night, when the world was quiet, and the weight of loss felt heaviest, the telephone would ring. On the other end was a voice asking for help—not from the police, not from official channels that had seemingly given up, but from a mother hoping someone might, just might, be able to do something.

The parents’ request was both simple and impossibly complex: could Harrison find out what really happened? Could he somehow penetrate the wall of silence that surrounded these additional disappearances? Could he get Brady to tell the truth?

It was a long shot—perhaps even foolhardy. Brady was already in prison, convicted and sentenced. He had no incentive to confess to additional murders. Why would one of Britain’s most notorious killers suddenly decide to unburden himself to a journalist? But Harrison decided to try.

Eighteen Hours in Hell

What followed was extraordinary. Harrison managed to gain access to the prison where Brady was held. Not just for a brief visit, but for an extended series of conversations that would span eighteen hours. Eighteen hours sitting in a cell with a man who had committed unspeakable acts. Eighteen hours of dialogue, negotiation, and psychological manoeuvring.

One can only imagine what those hours were like. The confined space. The presence of evil, made mundane by prison walls and the passage of time. The careful calibration required to keep Brady talking without alienating him, to build whatever twisted rapport might encourage him towards confession. Harrison was not there to judge or condemn—others had already done that. He was there for one reason only: to get information that might bring closure to devastated families.

The approach worked. Eventually, after hours of conversation, Brady confessed. He admitted to killing additional children, confirming what the families had long suspected but could never prove. The truth, terrible as it was, was finally spoken.

Finding Pauline

Armed with Brady’s confession, investigators returned to the moors. And there, buried in the harsh landscape that had held its secrets for years, they found Pauline Reade. She was sixteen years old when Brady and Hindley murdered her. For years, her family had lived not knowing whether she was alive or dead, whether she might someday walk through the door or whether they would spend the rest of their lives wondering.

Now they knew. It was the worst news imaginable, yet it was also an ending—a terrible, final full stop to years of unknowing. They could grieve properly now. They could bury their daughter.

But the Reade family’s closure came at the price of another family’s continued torment. A boy remained missing. His body, according to Brady’s confession, was still buried somewhere on those desolate moors. Despite searches, despite Brady’s directions, the boy has never been found. His family’s agony continues to this day—a reminder that even the most determined investigative efforts cannot always deliver the answers we seek.

Revisiting the Past

Fifty years after writing his book about these events, Fred Harrison found himself revisiting this chapter of his life. A film crew arrived to document his role in the Moors murders investigation, to capture his memories and insights about those eighteen crucial hours that helped solve part of one of Britain’s most notorious crimes.

For Harrison, it represented a departure from his usual work. By the time of this recent filming, he had long since left journalism to embark on what he calls ‘the Rent project’—his decades-long investigation into the economic structures that perpetuate inequality and premature death through the privatisation of community-created wealth. In his view, this represents ‘the ultimate crime’, a systemic violence that kills far more people than any individual murderer ever could.

But before he turned his investigative skills towards economics, before he began documenting what he sees as humanity’s greatest ongoing crime, there was this: a series of murdered children, grieving families, and a journalist’s determination to find the truth.

From Individual Evil to Systemic Injustice

There is a through-line in Harrison’s career, strange as it might seem to connect the Moors murders with economic theory. In both cases, he has been concerned with uncovering hidden truths that others prefer to ignore. In both cases, he has investigated crimes that result in premature death—whether the immediate, violent deaths of murdered children or the slower, statistical deaths of those condemned to poverty by a flawed economic system.

Harrison notes that 200 years ago, the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas in Britain was ten years. One might expect that two centuries of technological innovation—modern medicine, improved nutrition, better housing, sanitation, and countless other advances—would have closed this gap. Yet it has widened. Despite all our progress, despite all our wealth and knowledge, people in poor areas continue to die younger than those in rich areas, and the disparity is worse now than it was in the early 19th century.

This, Harrison argues, is crime. Not murder in the legal sense, but something just as deadly: a systematic arrangement that ensures certain people never live to the fullness of their potential lives. Brady and Hindley’s victims number in the single digits. The victims of economic injustice number in the millions.

The Investigator’s Calling

Soon after revealing that Brady had killed two additional children, Harrison left journalism to focus on his economic investigations. The skills that allowed him to spend eighteen hours extracting confessions from a killer would now be applied to extracting truth from economic data, policy documents, and historical records.

The work is different in its particulars but similar in its essence. It requires patience, determination, and a willingness to pursue uncomfortable truths that society would rather avoid. It requires sitting with difficult realities and refusing to look away simply because they’re disturbing.

Harrison’s investigation into the Moors murders showed that even the most seemingly impenetrable silences can be broken, that determined inquiry can sometimes bring answers where official channels have failed. His subsequent decades of economic investigation represent a similar faith: that understanding and exposing the structural crimes embedded in our economic system is the first step towards ending them.

Two Kinds of Justice

The Moors murders investigation brought one kind of justice—incomplete and imperfect, but real nonetheless. Pauline Reade’s family got their answers. They could bury their daughter and begin the long, painful process of healing. Another family still waits, their son still somewhere on those moors, but at least they know the truth of what happened, even if they cannot bring him home.

Harrison’s economic investigations seek a different kind of justice—one that would prevent premature deaths on a massive scale by restructuring how society captures and distributes the wealth it creates collectively. It’s a harder sell than solving a murder. The crimes are less visible, the victims less identifiable, the villains more diffuse. But in Harrison’s view, the stakes are immeasurably higher.

As a film crew documents his role in one of Britain’s most notorious criminal cases, Harrison can reflect on two distinct phases of his career. First came the investigative journalist who spent eighteen hours extracting truth from a killer. Then came the economic researcher who has spent decades extracting truth from a system.

Both investigations, in their own ways, are about the same thing: understanding how and why people die before their time, and doing whatever can be done to stop it. Brady’s victims deserved justice. So do the millions who die prematurely not from individual evil but from collective failure.

The film about the Moors murders will tell one part of Fred Harrison’s story. But it’s only part. The fuller story encompasses both the eighteen hours in a prison cell and the decades spent investigating what he calls ‘the ultimate crime’—the systematic theft of community-created wealth that ensures some of us never live to see our full potential, whilst others prosper from that theft.

Both crimes demand investigation. Both demand justice. And both, ultimately, are about the same fundamental question: what do we owe to the dead, and what do we owe to the living who might otherwise join them prematurely?

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Fred Harrison’s investigation into the Moors murders took place over half a century ago, but its lessons remain relevant. Sometimes the pursuit of truth requires uncommon courage and determination. Sometimes it means sitting in uncomfortable places, asking difficult questions, and refusing to accept silence as an answer. Whether the crime is individual or systemic, whether the victims number in single digits or millions, the investigator’s calling remains the same: to uncover what is hidden, to name what is denied, and to pursue justice even when the path seems impossible.

Brady and Hindley: Genesis of the Moors Murders. Fred's horrifying book dissection of these crimes can be bought here: By the Book Here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=B00N8RXA7M&i=digital-text&_encoding=UTF8&shoppingPortalEnabled=true