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 locals who later 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 girlfriend Myra Hindley, of murdering 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey and 17-year-old Edward Evans.
He was also convicted of killing 12-year-old John Kilbride and received three life sentences.
They made a tape recording of Lesley Ann, naked, bound and gagged and begging for help and asking to be allowed to go home to her mother, as she was repeatedly tortured and sexually 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.
Lesley Ann and John, who was murdered in November 1963, were 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.
In 1987 Brady confessed to also murdering Pauline Reade, 16, and Keith Bennett, 12.
Keith's body was never found.
Brady pointed to a spell in a Borstal institution 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 Glasgow ghetto of the Gorbals on January 2 1938.
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.
The young Brady was fascinated by horror movies and local people remembered how he would spend his pocket money seeing horror films over and over again.
Brady met Hindley in 1960 while working at a small chemical factory in Levenshulme.
He became obsessed with Hitler, buying 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 the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Hindley was obsessed with Brady 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.
Brady began a "hunger strike" at the high-secutiry Ashworth Hospital in 1999 but the decision to starve himself was later revealed as a sham.
After a five-day-hearing in March 2000 it was ruled Brady could be force fed.
The judge ruled 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.
In 2013 he 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.
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.
Brady likened himself to Jack the Ripper and described his own crimes as "recreational killings" done for "existential experience".
Hindley died in November 2002 after a heart attack.
A member of the public left a banner where she was cremated which read "Burn in hell".
Brady refused to help a special investigation in 2003 to once again find Keith's remains.
Keith's mother Winnie Johnson died 2012 - her wish for Brady's help to find her son's body buried on the moors remaining futile.
