PREVIOUSLY unseen photographs of Glasgow-born serial killer Ian Brady and accomplice Myra Hindley on holiday in Scotland could be “grave markers”.

The Moors Murderer told police who interrogated him in the 1980s that “something had happened” north of the border and he was “puzzled” as to why he “had never heard more about it”.

Photographs taken by Brady, who died this week aged 79, were used by officers to find the bodies of his victims on Saddleworth Moor. Some of the Saddleworth Moor images showed Hindley posing near grave sites of victims.

Read more: Murderer Ian Brady could still be cremated in his native Glasgow

Duncan Staff, the writer of the definitive account of Myra Hindley’s involvement in the brutal murders of five children in the 1960s, was left a series of photographs and her unpublished autobiography when she died in 2002 aged 60.

Now the Sunday Herald can publish for the first time Brady and Hindley’s holiday snaps at popular tourist spots Stirling Castle and Loch Long, as well as pictures taken by Brady of his first home in Glasgow’s Gorbals.

Brady was born Ian Duncan Stewart in the Gorbals in 1938, the illegitimate son of tearoom waitress Margaret ‘Peggy’ Stewart. The identity of his father is unknown but he is believed to have been a newspaper reporter who died three months before Brady was born.

His impoverished mother “put him up for adoption in a shop window,” according to Staff and he was brought up by the Sloan family.

Brady went to Camden Street primary school and later Shawlands Academy before landing a job as a butcher’s assistant.

Read more: Glasgow-born serial killer Ian Brady's longing for Scotland came through in his letters

When he was caught stealing from his employer the magistrate gave 17-year-old Brady the choice of prison or moving to Manchester where his mother had settled after marrying Irish fruit merchant Pat Brady. The young Ian Stewart not only moved but also took his stepfather’s name and was given a job as a fruit porter.

Staff said: “What we do know from Hindley’s unpublished autobiography, which I’ve got, and from her letters, is that Scotland remained really, really important to him.

“The landscape – the beautiful outdoors, the rawness of it – is something that mattered to him. That’s something that he found echoes of on Saddleworth Moor and that’s why it became an important location to him.”

In the 1980s Sir Peter Topping, former head of CID at Greater Manchester Police, led the hunt for two of Brady’s victims – Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett.

He recalled in his memoirs, published in 1989, that Brady asked him “a strange question” about his jurisdiction when the then Det Chief Superintendent interviewed him.

Topping said: “He particularly wanted to know if I had jurisdiction over the border in Scotland and I replied that if he wanted to talk to me about things that happened there I felt sure the Scottish authorities would leave the interviewing to me. He said that something had happened, and he was puzzled why he had never heard more about it.”

Hindley told Topping she and Brady had been on holiday in Scotland “five or six times, maybe seven or eight, travelling sometimes on the motorcycle and sometimes by car.”

Read more: Murderer Ian Brady could still be cremated in his native Glasgow

She said she did not think Brady had murdered anyone in Scotland and used the story of a Loch Lomond trip they took after they had already killed to make her point.

Topping said: “When she saw a child walking past and asked him, ‘Don’t you want to do another one?’ he retorted that he could not kill one of his own – meaning anyone Scottish.”

However, Topping’s memoirs suggest Brady’s victim in Scotland may have been English.

Topping said: “He asked once more about my jurisdiction in Scotland but this time he wanted to know if it made any difference if the victim was English.”

The cryptic conversation saw police go through files to find out if anyone went missing in Scotland at the time of Brady’s trips north.

Staff said: “They went through records and didn’t find anyone who disappeared at the time. The bottom line is Brady said it but no one knows for sure. There is no evidence.

“The thing about Brady is he left a deliberately confusing trail. The photos he took, some are grave markers and some are taken to be deliberately confusing. Sorting your way through it is a nightmare.

“For the police to search through and investigate every item is a massive task. That’s the problem. And Brady knew that. He created a deliberate pattern of confusion.”

Hindley wrote a series of letters to Staff which he used to make a documentary which concluded that she was not forced into becoming Brady’s accomplice.

Read more: Glasgow-born serial killer Ian Brady's longing for Scotland came through in his letters

When she died Staff was given her personal paperwork by her estate which included all of Brady’s photographs, Hindley’s unpublished autobiography and correspondence with her mother.

Using this archive Staff wrote the book The Lost Boy, first published in 2007, which cast new light on the crimes and Hindley’s relationship with Brady.

Her unpublished autobiography revealed that it was while they were in Scotland that Brady spoke to her for the first time about how he would attempt to get away with murder.

Staff said: “The discussions about carrying out the perfect murder, those discussions took place while driving around Scotland.”

Hindley’s autobiography recalls a trip to Glasgow when she and Brady slept in a car outside the Sloan’s house in Pollok.

Staff wrote in his book: “The trip to Scotland helped Myra to understand Ian’s hunger to ‘rise above’ the ‘confines’ of the working class. Committing the perfect murder was a way of asserting his superiority.”

Staff also said rejection by his birth mother may have contributed to his psychotic state which led to the deaths of Pauline Reade, 16, who disappeared on her way to a disco on July 12, 1963; John Kilbride, 12, who was snatched in November the same year; Lesley Ann Downey, 10, who was lured away from a funfair on Boxing Day 1964, Edward Evans, 17, who was axed to death in October 1965; and Keith Bennett, 12, who was abducted and murdered in 1964, and is the only one of Brady’s five young victims whose body has never been traced.

Staff said: “In some ways what happened with his upbringing was what threw him together with Myra Hindley. While Brady was put up for adoption Hindley had a very difficult relationship with her father and was sent to live with her grandmother.

“So that sense of rejection threw them together and they then constructed what they described as their ‘world above’ – they viewed themselves as separate to and above everyone else.

“That sense of separation is really what bound them together and she goes into that in her autobiography. Unfortunately that’s what made the Moors murders possible. She helped him to act it out but without the shaping of him in his childhood the Moors murders may not have taken place.”

Many people wrote to Brady while he was imprisoned but Staff insists everything he ever said must be taken “with a pinch of salt”.

He added: “You can’t take anything that Brady writes at face value. It was part of Brady’s game playing. So, he came up with this idea in Scotland of the perfect murder. That was the first time he introduced Hindley to the idea.

“From that point onwards there was a recurring theme of control. So, hiding the bodies was for control. Never, ever letting on where the final body is. In the words of his psychiatrist, Brady thought: ‘I know. You don’t know. You want to know, and I’m not going to tell you’.

“I think the letters and what he wrote was part of enjoying that. He wrote letters to [Keith Bennett’s brother] Alan Bennett and you read those letters where Bennett asks: ‘Where is my brother’.

“Brady replies: ‘It’s like describing colours to a blind man’. It’s just playing with people. Brady’s mind was a dark place.”