The former school caretaker murdered ten-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002 and died in prison aged 52 following a fatal attack
His name is as infamous as any criminal in recent memory, but many will be eager to forget Ian Huntley following his death at the age of 52. The former school caretaker murdered ten-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in August 2002, in what became one of the largest and most notorious police investigations in British history.
As the nation became caught up in the desperate search for the two girls from Soham Huntley cold-heartedly tried to conceal his actions by participating in searches and posing as a concerned helper desperate to find them.
He audaciously invited journalists covering the case into his own home, where he had killed the pair just days earlier, for cups of tea and coffee. He even boldly appeared on TV to discuss the ongoing search and how he was likely the last person to see the girls before they vanished.
Unbeknownst to anyone but himself at the time, Huntley had murdered both Holly and Jessica, who would now be aged 34, inside his three-bedroom cottage before discarding their bodies and setting them on fire in a ditch 17 miles away. Police eventually apprehended him after becoming suspicious of his behaviour, which included speaking to officers about the girls in the past tense and asking how long DNA evidence lasts.
Even following his arrest, Huntley appeared convinced he could deceive his way out of the situation. He initially claimed he had only briefly spoken to them as they walked past his house on their way to buy sweets, reports the Mirror.
He subsequently changed his account, alleging Holly had accidentally drowned in his bath whilst he was helping her with a nosebleed, and Jessica had accidentally been smothered to death as he attempted to stop her screaming.
He later tried to persuade detectives he was insane by refusing to speak during interviews, and even dribbling, which briefly resulted in him being taken to Rampton secure hospital instead of a jail cell. His attempts at deception represented clear and audacious efforts to cheat the system, but given Huntley’s history of avoiding justice, they were hardly surprising.
The fiend, who was born into a working-class family in Grimsby in January 1974, had previously had multiple run-ins with police in his hometown in his early 20s after conducting a string of sexual relationships with schoolgirls, including one aged just 13. However, despite mounting allegations, he avoided prosecution time and again.
He was accused of indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl in September 1997, but police decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. He was also charged with burglary, but the case was dropped in court.
And he was charged with raping a teenager in an alley before the case was later discontinued. Huntley was also suspected of another sexual assault on a woman shortly before moving to Soham, but the investigation against him was dropped when his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, provided him with an alibi, just as she later did in Holly and Jessica’s case.
At the age of 20, Huntley met his first wife Claire Evans in December 1994 whilst he was employed as a machine operator in a food factory. He won over the 18 year old and they quickly married after a whirlwind romance, but their relationship deteriorated within days and she later moved in with his younger brother, leaving him furious.
Following the split, Huntley, described as a “latent predatory paedophile” by a psychologist, engaged in sexual relationships with at least four underage girls, three of them aged 15 and one 13, between August 1995 and May 1996. A subsequent inquiry also revealed that, between 1995 and 2001, Huntley had sexual contact with 11 underage girls, aged between 11 and 17.
At the age of 23, he fathered a daughter with then 15-year-old Katie Bryan, who has since waived her anonymity, after he groomed her and tricked her into believing he was her boyfriend. He also raped her, forced her to eat cat food, cut off her hair and threw her down a flight of stairs when she was pregnant.
Despite at least ten contacts with the police and five with social services, he remained free to continue offending. Social services never linked the cases together, and only the burglary charge was placed on the police national computer on the orders of a judge.
Huntley wooed his young admirers by wearing smart suits and telling tall tales about his past, including that he was a former RAF pilot and a lottery winner. In reality, he had been a sickly child who was in the bottom set for most subjects and ridiculed by other pupils because of his large forehead, leading him to be nicknamed “Spadehead” and the “white cliff of Dover”.
Huntley moved between bedsits in Grimsby and other nearby towns in what was then the county of Humberside, whilst working low-paid jobs, including in a Heinz factory with his mother, who later upset him by setting up home with a lesbian lover.
In February 1999, he met Maxine Carr, then aged 22, in a nightclub in Grimsby. Whilst living together in a rented property in Scunthorpe, Huntley falsely claimed they were emigrating to the US.
Instead, the pair initially moved 160 miles to Wangford, Suffolk, before later relocating to Cambridgeshire, where Huntley conned his way into a £16,000-a-year position at Soham Village College using the name Ian Nixon. Carr, who had agreed to marry him, was employed as a teaching assistant at the local primary school where Holly and Jessica were pupils.
The bodies of the girls were discovered near RAF Lakenheath – just a few hundred yards from where Huntley and Carr had resided in Wangford – 13 days after their disappearance. The likely cause of death, as determined by pathologists, was asphyxiation, and extensive hair and fibre residue linked Huntley to the victims.
Disturbingly, due to severe decomposition, it was impossible to ascertain whether they had been sexually assaulted.
Carr received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice by providing Huntley with a false alibi. Upon her release, she was given a new identity and an indefinite anonymity order, as a judge ruled that disclosing her new name publicly would put her life at risk.
Huntley was convicted of both murders and sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in prison in December 2003, which meant he wouldn’t have been eligible for parole until 2042, at the age of 68. Their convictions led to the Bichard Inquiry in 2004, which highlighted critical shortcomings in police vetting and data sharing.
The inquiry’s findings led to a significant revamp of child protection laws and safeguarding procedures in the UK, including the introduction of the Police National Database in 2011. This system amalgamated intelligence from all 43 forces in England and Wales to prevent information on suspects from being lost between jurisdictions.
The Criminal Records Bureau underwent reforms to enhance the sharing of “soft” intelligence, including unproven allegations, rather than just convictions. It later evolved into the Disclosure and Barring Service, which improved the vetting of individuals working with children.
Last week’s fatal prison attack was not the first time Huntley had been rushed to hospital. In 2005, an inmate threw boiling water over him whilst he was on the healthcare wing of Wakefield Prison, West Yorkshire.
In September 2006, prison officers found him unconscious in his cell following a suspected drug overdose and he was rushed to hospital again. And in 2010, he underwent emergency surgery after fellow convict Damien Fowkes slashed his throat.
Fowkes later pleaded guilty to attempted murder at Hull Crown Court.
Huntley reportedly gained significant weight in his final days, which he largely spent hiding away in his cell watching TV and playing computer games whilst fearing another attack. In 2016, a fellow prisoner told The Mirror Huntley had claimed he felt remorse over the killings and wanted to apologise to Holly and Jessica’s parents.
But he also told how Huntley remained so obsessed by the double murder he regularly paraded around jail in a replica Manchester United jersey similar to those the pair were wearing when he killed them. They were famously pictured wearing the matching tops, with David Beckham’s name and his number 7 on the back, at a family barbecue just before their murders.
The inmate told us: “I couldn’t believe it when I first saw him wearing it. It’s an insult to their memory. He knows how offensive people find it and receives constant abuse whenever he wears it, but he just carries on.
“It’s like he’s trying to remind people of exactly what he’s done. He’ll often wear it in the morning and then change to the blue away shirt from the same year in the afternoon.”
The former prisoner added: “He’s still a sick man and even though he says he’s sorry he doesn’t deserve anybody’s sympathy. He’s a master of manipulation.”
Huntley’s own daughter, Sammie Bryan, 27, who only discovered he was her father when she was 14 whilst participating in a school crime project, summed up the feelings of most following the fatal attack. The beautician, from Cleethorpes, said: “He’s definitely up there with people like Fred and Rose West and the Yorkshire Ripper. There’s a special place in hell waiting for him”.
