??/??/?? - Galway man who turned in the Moors Murderers
Ireland on Sunday

DAVID SMITH is one of the regulars in his local pub, The Back Room, in Oughterard, near his home in Co. Galway. If they know about his brush with infamy 36 years ago, they don't mention it or judge the man - and that's exactly what David has been searching for since he left his native Yorkshire a decade ago. David Smith has finally come to terms with what he witnessed in Hindley's house

DAVID SMITH is one of the regulars in his local pub, The Back Room, in Oughterard, near his home in Co. Galway. There, the other locals know him as a genial character who enjoys the craic and a good pint and whose quick-fire wit will make them laugh.

Sure, he's English, but by now he is accepted as one of their own. If they know about his brush with infamy 36 years ago, they don't mention it or judge the man - and that's exactly what David has been searching for since he left his native Yorkshire a decade ago.

For David, now 55, is the man who shopped the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, to the police and finally brought their vile killing spree to an end. For more than three decades, he has lived with innuendo and recrimination about his rumoured participation in the sickening killings.

Apart from his defensive mutterings as an 18-year-old when he was the chief prosecution witness against the pair, he has never properly told his story.

Only now, with Hindley dead and Brady on hunger strike, does he feel able to articulate what happened on the night he saw Brady hack his final victim, Edward Evans, 17, to death with an axe in Hindley's front room and why he helped mop up the blood-spattered room and hide the body.

It has taken him nearly four decades to be at peace, having had an entire community turn against him in the mistaken belief that he had always known more than he was letting on. His moment of epiphany only truly came when he heard on the news last week that Hindley, his former sister-in-law, was finally dead.

'I felt nothing when I heard she had died, not a flicker of emotion, no anger, nothing. But on the night she was cremated, I had a feeling that something good was happening. They were burning her and that meant that there wasn't a place on this earth that she will be. She is dust; she's not even in the air. She has gone off this planet and finally, she is nothing.

'While they were carrying out these horrible crimes, the death penalty was in force and they knew what the punishment would be if they were caught. It's only a shame that the law had changed before they came to trial. I'm glad she died in prison. Both of them should have died years ago - at the end of a rope.

'Of the two of them, without a doubt, she was the worst. She was the most evil. Brady had the decency to have himself certified mad and, whether he is or not, it is comforting to presume he is. Normal people don't do the sort of things they did. But Hindley didn't take that road. She simply said she was in love with the man, to the degree that she was infatuated.

But that doesn't excuse what she did. Most women find it difficult to forgive an adulterer - she forgave him murder. 'Brady didn't pick anybody off the street. She did. He didn't stalk the streets, offering kiddies sweeties. She did, knowing what the children were wanted for, knowing that they would get into the car with her, a woman, and knowing they wouldn't go with a man.

'For years, she left the mothers of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett in doubt as to what happened to their children, until she finally admitted what she had done. That's the only benefit of not hanging them.' Apart from a few sensational news stories, David virtually disappeared after the trial in 1966.

Rumours abounded in Britain that he had gone to start a new life in Germany, Sweden or Australia. It was long thought he had moved on, until we tracked him down to his 250-year-old cottage with views of the Connemara mountains where he runs a charming bed and breakfast business with his second wife, Mary, who has been his constant support for nearly 30 years.

Sitting by a cosy inglenook fireplace, with the top of his cottage's half-door open and a sheepdog at his feet, he says he simply wants to draw a line under his part in what was dubbed 'the trial of the century'.

He had married Hindley's sister, Maureen, in August 1964, at the age of 16, when she fell pregnant. In the streets of Gorton, the families all knew who lived where (Pauline Reade, later to be a victim of Brady and Hindley, lived a few doors away) but David did not properly meet Myra until after the wedding.

Then Brady and Hindley started to take them out in Brady's van for trips to the Lake District or the Yorkshire Moors. 'We only saw them three or four times and they didn't mean much to me. Brady was always aloof and was just the Scotsman who would turn up on a Friday night and sleep with her, and they'd go off to work together on Monday morning.

'Myra was very hard, she rarely smiled, she was just Maureen's older sister. And when our daughter, Angela, was born, we settled into a normal life.' But Angela was a cot death victim at the age of six months - something that David took particularly hard.

When Hindley arrived with flowers and a card, on which she had written: 'Another little flower for God's garden' to place on the tiny white coffin, Brady stayed outside in the car, smoking. But it was after Angela's funeral that Hindley and Brady started to take an interest in the young couple.

'They often came to pick us up and we'd go up to the moors with cheap bottles of wine. We'd go shooting up there with guns they had through a gun club. Brady seemed very sophisticated to me then. He wore three-piece suits and drank wine and showed me how to play chess.

With hindsight, I can see that I was impressed by him. 'It was a bad time for me, having lost Angela, and Brady seemed to be there for me as a friend. Only now, I know what friendship is. Looking back, I think Brady was trying to control me. He controlled Myra completely.

She had already gone along with murder with him and I think he was almost grooming me to become part of their sickening gang.' David admits that he was a thuggish teenager with a bad attitude, wanting to be a rebel without a cause, like the screen idol, James Dean, and was very much in Brady's thrall.

On the nights when they would sit up, sometimes drinking three bottles of wine each, two guns on the coffee table, after the women had gone to bed, Brady's talk would turn to armed robbery and eventually to killing.

'He said we would do one and we would have live bullets, and would use them if we had to. Then he told me had had already done three or four killings and had the pictures to prove it. It was all said in drink and I didn't believe it. But now, with maturity and experience on my side, I think he was testing me to see what my reaction would be. And that's where he made his mistake.'

On October 6, 1965, Hindley asked David to their house on the pretext of picking up some miniature bottles. 'Edward Evans was already in the house and I believe Brady had planned to kill him, in a controlled way, with a single blow of the axe from behind.

Myra was sitting in front of Evans, keeping his attention. I believe that as Brady was bringing the axe down for what was meant to be a fatal blow, Evans moved and it didn't kill him. I was in the kitchen when Myra shouted out: "Dave, Dave, help him." I now know she meant help for Brady, not Evans.

I think I was meant to come in and find the dead body and that would have been the ultimate test. He would have been looking for a reaction from me, to see if I could be trusted. But it didn't happen as he planned. 'I rushed into the front room and Brady was astride this young lad, hitting him again and again with an axe. At first, he was still alive, shouting out and struggling, but then he slumped and Brady carried on hitting him.

'He was making a gurgling noise and Brady put something over his head, wrapped an electrical cord around his neck and pulled until there was no more noise.' Brady had hit Evans 14 times with the axe. 'I just stood there, frozen.

You think you would jump out of a window or run into the street shouting blue murder, but I knew if I did that, I wouldn't even make it to the front door, that Evans' wouldn't be the only murder that night. 'It was an almost animal self-preservation that clicked in. I suddenly became very calm, knowing I couldn't put a foot wrong if I was to survive.

I knew I had to show no emotion, no bad reaction to what he had done, or I wouldn't be going home. It frightens me to think I was even capable of that.' David was ordered to help clean up the mess and Brady picked up bits of hair and bone and put them in a carrier bag.

Hindley appeared with a large plastic sheet and blankets, and David helped wrap the body and take it upstairs. Hindley and Brady told him to come round the next day with Angela's pram to help them move the body. Then they simply said goodnight and David left.

'I was terrified. I tried not to panic. I didn't run for the first two or three streets, thinking they might be watching me, ready with an axe. When I got home, I had to tell Maureen. I had blood all over me and was violently sick and shaking.

'We knew we had to call the police but I still thought they might be outside, waiting. When the newspaper shop light came on and the milkman was about, we both walked to the phone box, carrying a carving knife and a screwdriver for protection, and dialled 999.

'Before, the hours had seemed like minutes. Now the minutes it took the police to arrive seemed like hours and we hid in a bush nearby.' The police found Evans' body, wrapped in plastic, in the locked bedroom. Brady and Hindley hadn't had the time to move it.

But if David thought his nightmare was over, it was only just beginning. During his own interrogation, he was forced to look at the shocking pictures Hindley and Brady had taken of their first victim, Lesley Anne Downey, while they tortured and sexually assaulted her.

He was left in emotional shreds, crying at what they had done. He knew they were trying to implicate him as the killer and, as is always the way, particularly in a community which had been paralysed with fear, where parents had long before stopped their children going out to play, their allegations, albeit baseless, stuck.

For a youth aged 17 to deal with a situation in such a way seems incredible and David understands why so few people believed him. When he told the story later, during the trial, he came over as a teddy boy with a bad attitude and a criminal record for assault, whose story of calm collectedness seemed unbelievable when set against the fearful evil of Brady.

His reading of Hitler's Mein Kampf and works by the Marquis De Sade, undertaken at Brady's overbearing behest, were all used in an attempt to ruin his credibility as a witness. Both before and for many years after the trial, he was hounded wherever he went.

People picked fights or walked off their jobs if he joined their workforce. 'Every night became Friday fight night. I was out of control. When people keep punching you, eventually you punch back.' He was jailed for three years in 1969 for stabbing a man who had picked a fight with him over the trial.

'It was awful in prison, I was on the wing for sexual offenders, for my own safety, but I needed time to think and think. I was suicidal and slashed my wrists but eventually I started to learn to deal with the moors murders.'

Maureen, with whom he'd had three children, left him while he was in prison and they subsequently divorced. When he was released in 1971, he met Mary, who gave birth to their daughter, Jodie, two years later.

'Mary saved me because even then, it was still awful. My children were bullied in the playground; we couldn't go to a pub without being glared at or attacked; when something appeared in the papers, we would have bricks thrown through our windows; Mary's car was set on fire and even the children's pet rabbits were slaughtered.'

At first they refused to move, believing this would be seen as an admission of guilt, but eventually, seeking a peaceful life, they moved to Lincoln. Finally, nine years ago, when their children were grown up, they came to Ireland, where Mary's family live. In a way, David Smith, too, is a victim of the Moors Murderers.

He does not know how his life might have turned out otherwise. Since his teens, it has been ruled by the events of that fateful night. But he doesn't really accept that analysis. 'I am a survivor. I have a good wife, four children and eight grandchildren, with another one on the way.

The families of Pauline Reade or Keith Bennett cannot say that. 'To say that I am a victim, would be to denigrate what happened to all those people who ended up buried on the moors.'