Memories cut through the murderous mists of Saddleworth

Eye witness: The Moors - Infamy still haunts the vast, empty spaces

The tired old man crouched in his living room before two bars of an electric fire shows the effects of three decades living with the legacy of Myra Hindley.

Alan West had bought a couple of tabloid papers yesterday bearing the words "killer" and "gone but not forgiven" – but he didn't seem to have had the heart to pick them up. When asked about his interests he nodded toward the television. "That thing in the corner," he said. It would have been filled with the images of his 10-year-old stepdaughter, Lesley Ann Downey – but yesterday it was switched off.

After losing 10-year-old Lesley Ann on Boxing Day 1964, Mr West saw his wife Ann's life consumed by the bitterness of her crusade to keep Hindley behind bars.

She fought cancer four times before it killed her, two years ago, but that has only been the beginning of Mr West's loss. On Boxing Day, a fire at his home also killed his 45-year-old son Tommy and seven-year-old granddaughter Kimberley.

The photographs which fill Mr West's room attest to the losses which seem to have dogged his life since, while a lorry driver delivering furniture from London, he met Lesley Ann's mother in 1964, 10 months before the murder. There's Lesley Ann at Rhyl in 1958; Lesley Ann and Tommy in the back garden in 1959; Ann at primary school circa 1937; Kimberley at her christening in 1998; his Yorkshire terrier Rigsby – also killed in the fire.

As for him, well, he's just about "ploughing on". He is 66 but looks a good 10 years older. The house fire also destroyed some of Mr West's best photographs of Lesley Ann – "Lesley" as he calls her – and forced him to revisit some long-forgotten details of sorrow. "When I moved house after the fire I cleared out my attic and discovered the sewing machine we'd bought for Lesley Ann that Christmas she died."

But it hasn't all been sadness. "You know, when the cancer kept coming back, the Hindley business seemed to keep her going. Over the years the doctors said 'slow down, step back, you're going to kill yourself'. But she ignored it. The last time she got sick they gave her until Christmas 1998 but she defied the lot of them and went on for another two years. That's my Ann – a good mother, good wife, good friend."

Mrs West broke her vow never to set foot on Saddleworth shortly before her death. "The wind cut me to the bone. What must it have been like for our baby in the dark, all alone?" she said – and her husband would have found little comfort had he made the journey up there yesterday.

The squirrels were out in big numbers, running amok among the mallards, Canada geese and long-tailed tits, but nothing could hide the forbidding, monochrome mood of the place.

As ever, the walkers tended to mumble and march on when engaged on the subject of Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett and Lesley Ann, who were buried on the moors by Hindley and Brady over a period of 18 months, or Edward Evans, whose body would have been buried next had the killers not been caught.

The middle-aged couple descending for a mid-morning bacon sandwich in Greenfield certainly conceded that they had been consumed by the subject of Hindley for most of their two-hour walk. "There's only one road in and out of the moors and I remember travelling it with my father when they were digging," said the woman. "We were children then and for us it was the end of quite a lot of freedom. We had to be where the adults could see. It was the same kind of fear that the Ripper case bred."

With the Saddleworth sheep farmers all but gone now and the Greenfield paper mill closed down and redundant on the western approach to the moors, this terrain is more abandoned and soulless than ever. For a 15-mile radius, the brown heritage signs read "Saddleworth tourist attractions", but in truth there are none, bar the sheer emptiness and the infamy of the place.

"We'll always be left with the murders," said Jim Whitworth, tramping out to the moors from nearby Greenfield village. "We're tired of that. Manchester might be known for its liberal roots but you won't find any around here who wanted Hindley set free."

Back in Manchester there's a sense that Mr West feels the timing of Hindley's death has been rather neat, as he surveys the wreckage of a year which has seen him bereaved again. "This is the Christmas box I've wanted and I've got it this year instead of last," he said. To celebrate on Friday, he swung out of the wheelchair to which he is confined by the need for a new right hip and made his way to the car which was waiting to take him to the grave which his wife and stepdaughter share.

The location must remain undisclosed, since Lesley Ann's last grave was desecrated several times, forcing the family to exhume her body and move her. "When you think of it, my Lesley's been buried three times," Mr West observes, apparently resigned to this grim, additional ignominy.

It was cold, damp and dark when Mr West reached the churchyard and the soggy ground was not best suited to his crutches but he hobbled on regardless.

"I just sat there for a time and told them all about what had happened," he said. "I've placed my flowers on the grave again and I'll be going to see them every Wednesday, just like I've always done, when my hip's right," he said. "Somehow, the spirits seemed to have lifted a little now that Hindley's gone."