Even before his evil and sadistic crimes shocked and appalled Britain, Ian Brady was a grim character.

As a young boy fascinated by horror movies, he was nicknamed Dracula by neighbours in Glasgow and later, locals who watched the young man slouch around the Hattersley Estate in Greater Manchester in his long trenchcoat dubbed him the Undertaker.

They were nicknames that would come back to haunt them with the knowledge he had brutally murdered five children, burying four bodies on isolated moorlands.

In May 1966 Brady, then 28, was convicted, along with lover Myra Hindley, of murdering 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and 17-year-old Edward Evans.

Brady was also convicted of the murder of 12-year-old John Kilbride. He received three life sentences to run concurrently.

Brady escaped the hangman's noose as the death penalty was abolished just months earlier.

The evidence seen and heard at the Chester Assizes chilled the hearts of those who sat through the trial.

It included pictures of Lesley Ann Downey, naked, bound and gagged, and a tape recording of her begging for help and asking to be allowed home to her mother, as she was repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted by Brady and Hindley before being murdered.

The little girl had fallen into the clutches of the sick pair on Boxing Day 1964 after they snatched her from a fairground.

They recorded her at their home in Wardle Brook Avenue, Hattersley and her cries reduced the judge, jury, spectators and even hardened police officers to tears.

Lesley Ann and John, who was murdered in November 1963, were later found buried in unmarked graves on the desolate Saddleworth Moors in Lancashire.

The evil lovers kept a trophy of the killings, with Hindley holding her pet dog and posing for pictures on the edge of John's grave.

The brutal murder of Edward Evans on October 7 1965 finally led the police to the killers.

Brady made the fatal mistake of involving a third person in the killings.

Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith was present when Brady hacked the homosexual teenager to death with an axe.

He asked Smith to help him carry the body upstairs but Smith was so horrified by the murder that he reported Brady to the police and he was arrested the following day.

Their crimes had appalled the nation, which sighed with relief the day they were locked up.

But there was more to come.

In 1987 Brady finally confessed to the grisly murders of Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12, but was never tried for the crimes.

He was however allowed briefly out of prison, as was Hindley, to help police pinpoint the spots where both bodies were buried.

Pauline's body was found almost completely preserved 25 years after she had been murdered.

The teenager was still dressed in the pink and gold party dress she was wearing when she set off from her home in Gorton, Manchester, to attend a youth club dance.

Her throat had been cut with such force that it had broken the vertebrae and she had also received a violent blow to the head.

Keith's body was never found.

Brady has pointed to a spell in Borstal as a teenager as the trigger for his bitter hatred of society.

He started life as the illegitimate son of a tearoom waitress, born into the Gorbals on January 2 1938.

Ian Stewart Brady was never to learn who his father was and was soon fostered out by his mother, Margaret Stewart.

Even as a young child he displayed the sadistic streak which later in life resurfaced in a much more terrifying manner.

He had a bad temper and was described by neighbours as a "terrible heartbreak" to his foster mother.

As he grew older he would bang his head against a wall when in a rage and loved to torture cats.

Frank Flanagan, who lived below him at this time, said: "Once Ian threw a cat out of a top floor window and on another occasion he boasted he had buried a cat under a gravestone because he wanted to see how long it would live.

"We released the animal."

The young Brady was fascinated by horror movies and local people remembered how he would spend his pocket money on going to see horror films over and over again, earning him the nickname, Dracula.

Meanwhile his mother had moved to Manchester, where she met and married Patrick Brady in 1950.

A year later, in Scotland, her son was beginning to come to police attention.

In 1951 he appeared in Glasgow Sheriff Court on charges of housebreaking and theft.

Then followed nine charges of housebreaking and theft for which he received two years' probation, on condition he went to live with his mother in Manchester.

On arriving to live with his mother at Cuttell Street, Gorton, he changed his name to Brady and found steady work with his stepfather.

But it was not long before he once again turned to crime and in December 1955 he appeared on a theft charge and was sent to Borstal.

On release in 1958 he joined his mother and stepfather at their new home in Westmoreland Street, Longsight, and a few months later began work at Millwards Merchandise, a small chemical distributing firm in Levenshulme Road, Gorton.

It was at this factory that he was to meet Hindley two years later, setting the scene for their spree of child killings.

Brady became obsessed with Hitler. He bought records of Nazi speeches and had a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

At the time of his trial one witness said he would have made an excellent guard at Belsen.

When Hindley first arrived at the factory at the age of 18, 23-year-old Brady ignored her and it was only a year later that she managed to break through to him and their sick love affair began.

Brady called her Myra Hess and when she moved with her grandmother to an overspill estate at Hattersley, Cheshire, he moved in.

Hindley was obsessed with him and he grew to love the idea of being worshipped and adored and decided to include her in his plans for a crime spree.

He made her buy a car and taught her to shoot, but on realising how much his young lover would do for him he persuaded her to become involved in his twisted fantasies.

Shortly after the pair moved in together they killed Pauline, who lived nearby and was a friend of Myra's sister Maureen.

The murders of John, Keith, Lesley Ann and Edward followed.

After his conviction Brady seemed to accept his life sentence, unlike Hindley who had her appeal thrown out of court, and initially he accepted the ruling he serve his sentence in solitary, made to protect him from other inmates' traditional hatred for child molesters.

He was not a model prisoner during his time at Gartree Prison in Leicestershire, staging hunger strikes to force the Home Office into allowing him visits from Hindley.

The strikes ended in him being force-fed and the Home Office, in the face of considerable public outrage at any compassion being shown to the two killers, refused his requests.

Brady became involved with Lord Longford in December 1969 when the Labour peer interested him in helping blind people by learning to type manuscripts in Braille.

Lord Longford backed his claim for a transfer to Broadmoor special hospital in 1971, but the Department of Health blocked it, saying medical criteria for such a move had not been fulfilled.

The peer continued his campaign to have him put into a special hospital, but attempts in 1978 and 1983 were both unsuccessful.

In 1985 Brady finally had his wish granted by home secretary Douglas Hurd who signed the document which allowed Brady to move to Park Lane special hospital, in Maghull, Merseyside, which was later renamed Ashworth.

It boasted some of the country's most infamous criminals as past patients included Bruce Lee, originally charged with burning to death 27 people, and double poisoner Graham Young.

Brady had already ended all speculation about a future release in 1982, after the home secretary announced he would not be considered for parole for at least another three years.

In a letter to the Sunday Times Brady said he accepted his life sentence and did not want to be released in 1985 or even 2005.

Twelve years later, when then home secretary Michael Howard announced he would never be released, he wrote to The Guardian and said he was "mildly surprised" at Howard's comments as he had always publicly stated he would never apply for parole.

Brady began a "hunger strike" while at Ashworth on September 30, 1999 but the decision to starve himself was later revealed as a sham.

It was sparked after he was forcibly removed from Jade Ward to Lawrence Ward, where some of Britain's most disturbed psychopaths are housed.

Nurses had discovered a knife fashioned out of a bucket handle taped under a sink in the laundry room at Jade Ward.

Two weeks later he was moved by a six-strong control team in riot gear who manhandled and strip-searched him.

He was kept under restraint for 50 minutes and his right arm was fractured.

Brady immediately protested at his treatment which turned into a full-scale legal battle with the hospital when staff began to force feed him through a nose-tube.

The child-killer went to court demanding the right to be allowed to die.

After a five-day-hearing at Liverpool Crown Court in March 2000, which Brady attended every day, Mr Justice Maurice Kay ruled Brady could be force fed.

In giving his decision the judge quoted from psychiatric reports that said Brady remained a psychopath who showed no remorse for his crimes or empathy for his victims, and was not capable of deciding his own fate.

Brady came to detest Ashworth and in 2013 successfully brought an appeal before a Mental Health Tribunal in a bid to be transferred back to a jail on the grounds he was no longer mentally ill.

Granted a public hearing, it was to be the first time he had spoken in public since he was jailed for life.

With wavy greying hair in a fading Teddy Boy style and wearing a dark jacket, shirt and tie and metal-framed dark glasses he sat hunched over speaking in a gravelly, quiet Scottish accent giving evidence for an entire day.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder, he gave rambling, incoherent and dismissive answers, claiming his mental illness was just a show after mastering the method acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski to feign the symptoms of mental illness to get into Ashworth in the first place.

The hearing was described as a "circus" and the wisdom of giving Brady the stage to publicly grandstand was questioned.

He likened himself to Jack the Ripper and described his own crimes as "recreational killings" done for "existential experience".

Brady had suggested, if allowed to go back to a jail, he would be "free to end his own life" by starving himself to death.

In fact the tribunal heard rather than on hunger strike, Brady daily ate toast and soup, the "strike" not seriously suicidal but just another protest to satisfy his pathological need for control.

He lost, the tribunal ruling Brady was still mentally ill and must remain at Ashworth.

Brady had already capitalised on his notoriety in 2001 when his book, The Gates Of Janus: Serial Killing And Its Analysis, by the "Moors Murderer", was published by an American company.

Although he did not write about his own crimes, the families of the victims called for a boycott of the book.

It has been claimed he has also written an autobiography to be published after his death.

Hindley died in November 2002 after suffering respiratory failure following a heart attack.

She was cremated following a private funeral conducted by Father Michael Teader, a Roman Catholic priest at Highpoint Prison, Suffolk, where Hindley spent her final years in jail.

A member of the public left a banner at the entrance to the crematorium which read "Burn in hell".

Detectives from Greater Manchester Police launched a special investigation, Operation Maida, in 2003, a year after Hindley died, to try to find Keith's remains.

Brady refused to help, dismissing detectives with a wave of his hand from his bed when they visited him at Ashworth.

Winnie Johnson died on August 18 2012, finally at peace after a lifelong but futile wish for Brady's help to find her son's body buried on the moors.