Police have reopened an investigation into the death of Moors Murderers victim Keith Bennett, who was "strangled with a piece of string" by the brutal killers.
Keith's body was the only one of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's victims never to be found, and police called off the search 35 years ago after his killers refused to say where he was.
But after a human skull was recently discovered on the Yorkshire Moors, officials reportedly have new-found hope that his remains could be found nearly 60 years after he was killed.
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Experts are now trying to extract DNA from the skull, found on Saddleworth Moor, and police are preparing to dig in the area where it was found, Mailplus reports.
Speaking of the find, forensic archaeologist Dawn Keen, who remotely supervised the dig, said: "From the photographs, I saw the teeth, I could see the canines, I could see the incisors, I could see the first molar. It is the left side of an upper jaw. There is no way that it is an animal."
Keith was taken to the Moors by Brady and Hindley on June 16 1964, when he was just 12.
With Brady in the back of the van, Hindley drove the three of them to a lay-by on Saddleworth Moor before Keith was taken out onto the Moor under the guise of looking for a lost glove.
30 minutes later, Brady returned alone carrying a spade he had hidden there earlier in preparation for the attack.
When Hindley asked what had happened, Brady reportedly said he had sexually assaulted the boy and strangled him with a piece of string.
Keith is survived by a brother, Alan, 66, who has been informed about the discovery.
The brutal Moors murders took place between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester.
Five children were killed in the brutal slayings - Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans, all aged between 10 and 17.
At least four of them, including Keith, were sexually assaulted.
Two of the victims' bodies were discovered in 1965 on Saddleworth Moor and Brady and Hindley were charged for the murders of Kilbride, Downey and Evans, both entering not guilty pleas.
However they were both sentenced to a life behind bars under a whole life tariff in 1966.
The judge, Justice Fenton Atkinson, described Brady and Hindley in his closing remarks as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity".
The investigation was then reopened in 1985 after Brady reportedly confessed to the murders of Reade and Bennett.
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Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist in the search for the graves, leading to the discovery of a third body in 1987.
Hindley, described as the "most evil woman in Britain", died in 2002 at West Suffolk Hospital at the age of 60.
Meanwhile Brady was diagnosed as a psychopath in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital, where he died in 2017, aged 79.
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