Another heartbreaking chapter in the Keith Bennett story - the wait to lay a little boy to rest goes on

When news broke last Friday morning that police were back on the moors looking for the remains of Keith Bennett, his brother Alan braced himself.

It's a road he and his late mother Winnie Johnson travelled many times, on each occasion setting out in the hope that at last they'd be able find Keith and give him a proper burial. Each journey has ended in heartbreak, disappointment and sometimes downright anger.

After a week of painstaking digging and analysis by police-commissioned experts, today (Friday) officers have been forced to admit defeat. No human remains have been found despite information from author and amateur sleuth Russell Edwards to the contrary. A picture he took - which has not been made public - purporting to show parts of a child's jaw may simply show vegetation, according to GMP.

READ MORE: The memorial to a murdered boy and his grieving mother - battered by the elements, but still standing on the bleak moors

However well-meaning the latest attempt to find him, the bottom line is that Keith's family have again been denied the closure they have craved for decades.

Keith was sexually abused and murdered, one of five child victims of killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. A beguiling, cherubic black and white photo of bespectacled Keith smiles at all of us every time his story is revisited. It has become an emblem of one family's unending suffering. Aged just 12, he vanished on June 16th 1964. His is the only body not to have been found. The other victims were Pauline Reade, 16, John Kilbride, 12, Lesley Ann Downey, 10, and Edward Evans, 17.

But it's the hope, however feint and diminishing, that tortures the surviving Bennett family. Because they know hope has not always been futile. In 1987 Hindley and