A FORMER detective constable from Pwllheli has spoken of his experience of being one of the first officers to sit with Moors Murderer Ian Brady after his arrest.

Evan John Hughes was a senior officer with Cheshire Police while living in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, with his wife and 12-month-old daughter when Brady was arrested in October 1965.

Brady, who, along with his lover Myra Hindley, tortured and murdered five children in the 1960s and buried at least four of the victims on Saddleworth Moor, died last week aged 79 at Ashworth Hospital, a secure psychiatric unit in Merseyside where he had been detained since 1985.

He was jailed for the murders of Edward Evans, 17; John Kilbride, 12; and 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, and later admitted to the murders of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.

Speaking to the Cambrian News this week, Mr Hughes, who joined the police after a stint as a physical training instructor with the RAF, recalled the “stern and angry-looking man” who sat opposite him the day he was detained.

“He was quite cool, reading a newspaper and having a smoke,” he said.

“Honestly, you wouldn’t think he had done anything. He probably thought that he hadn’t.

“He was a hard man. He was hard and devilish in what he had committed, but on the other hand, he didn’t show this.

“He was just a stern and angry looking man who said nothing.

“It makes you wonder how on earth a man could have done what he did.”

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