World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 3 - Ian Huntley - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-On the 4th of August, 2002, 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared whilst buying sweets
in the sleepy Cambridgeshire town of Soham. -They were so appealing, so beautiful,
so charming, so smiley. The world and his wife wanted to know what on earth had happened to them.
-For 2 weeks, police and locals desperately scoured the area. It was every parent's worst nightmare.
-There was a sense of real fear and dread in the village. People were starting to get more and more desperate
as to what might have happened to these two little girls. -Ian Huntley, a local school caretaker,
gave an emotional interview to the press, appealing for the safe return of Holly and Jessica.
-Somebody would've seen or heard something if somebody had tried to get those girls into a car,
if it had just been somebody passing through. -But in truth, Huntley had brutally murdered
both girls in the bathroom of his home. -Huntley was a bomb waiting to explode. All he needed was an opportunity,
and on that sunny August afternoon in 2002, he found an opportunity. -Ian Huntley had unquestionably become
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ It is one of the most talked about crimes
of the 21st century. The murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman shocked the nation to its core.
For 2 weeks, newspapers and rolling news channels brought a constant flow of updates
in the search for the missing pair. When their bodies were finally found on the 17th of August, 2002, the world mourned.
-Out of an evening mist, which had fallen on a remote patch of Suffolk woodland,
the bodies of Holly and Jessica were taken away. -The killer was 28-year-old school caretaker Ian Huntley,
a man who moved to Soham in 2001 to escape a troubled past. Huntley was born in Grimsby in Lincolnshire
on the 31st of January, 1974. He had a turbulent time at school and was often the target of bullying.
-So I think this created a bit of a sense of shame in Ian Huntley, something that is often at the root of a lot of men
like him in terms of what they go on to do. So he started off as somebody who was always the kid
that was a bit odd, the odd one out, the one who's a bit of a loner. -In December 1994, Huntley met 18-year-old Claire Evans.
They had a whirlwind romance and were married within weeks. -His wife, Claire, quickly found that he had a terrible temper.
She later claimed that she feared for her life and that he would often put his hands round her neck.
-Ian Huntley is somebody who is not capable of having a normal relationship with a woman,
so he moves very quickly because he wants to maintain a sense of control within his relationships.
So he will breeze into women's lives, this knight in shining armor, full of charm and compliments,
and will kind of try and wind them in. -Huntley's marriage didn't last long. His wife, Claire, had started a relationship
with his younger brother, Wayne. Despite the marriage being all but over, Huntley refused to grant her a divorce until 1999
to prevent their relationship from becoming official. -He'd always felt incredibly threatened
by his younger brother. He took the attention away from him when he came into that family.
And because of Ian Huntley's narcissistic tendencies, he's always going to feel that he's being outdone by his brother.
-While still married to Claire, Huntley fathered a daughter with a 15-year-old girl in 1998.
-I think it would be fair to say that Huntley demonstrated, throughout his adolescence and early manhood,
that he had a unhealthy appetite in younger and younger women. -Well, during his 20s, Ian Huntley preyed
on a lot of young girls, underage girls, and the police who investigated the case thought
that there were possibly up to 60 young girls that he'd had some kind of interaction with on that level,
and he would kind of worm his way into these girls' lives, and they're younger. They're more impressionable.
They're easier to lure in. -In 1998, 24-year-old Huntley appeared at Grimsby Crown Court,
charged with both burglary and the rape of an 18-year-old girl. Both cases were dropped due to lack of evidence,
but he was gaining a bad reputation across Lincolnshire. -He was an insignificant little man who,
on the surface, wouldn't say boo to a goose. Unfortunately, he had no conscience
and would do whatever he wanted when he wanted to do it. -In February 1999, Huntley met 22-year-old Maxine Carr,
and after dating for just 4 weeks, they moved in together. -She was naive, impressionable,
and he was an interesting figure to her, I think. She found him perhaps -- I would hesitate to call him charismatic --
but at least interesting and did not discover the violent side to his nature that his wife had.
-Maxine Carr was a very easy target, in a way, for Ian Huntley because at this point in his life,
he's managed to hone those skills of hooking women in, being quite superficially charming and manipulative
and saying the things that they wanted to hear. So he's got quite a well-rehearsed script
at this point in time, and he pulls that out when he meets Maxine Carr. -In February 2000, after a year together,
the couple move from Grimsby and set up home just 30 miles away in Scunthorpe. Their new neighbor, Morisa Gibb, befriended the couple.
-Max and Ian were a lovely couple. Maxine was any 25-, 26-year-old girl, bubbly, giggling, talking about wanting to have children.
She wanted to work in a nursery and get a job, and I think she was fantastic. -And it wasn't long before Huntley's past
was catching up with him. -I finished work at 8:00 at night, come home. The next minute, there was a police van outside in the back,
and I looked out the window and thought, "Oh, Christ, I hope everything is okay."
So then they left. Next day, I saw Maxine. I says, "Are you all right? Is the family okay, you know, anything like that?"
"No, Ian has been accused of rape in Grimsby." He said, "But the dates they've got,
we were living next door here." I said, "Well, why didn't you tell the police to come see me?
I'd verify that you moved next door." But then she said he was always getting allegations
when they lived in Grimsby that he was raping this girl and done this to this other girl.
That's why they moved to Scunthorpe, to get a new life. -The couple rarely left the house,
and Morisa recalls Huntley's controlling behavior. -I went round to see Maxine for a cup of coffee.
Ian was at work. And basically, I had a cup of coffee. I put it on the table. The next minute, it was taken off the table, bleached, cleaned
and put in the cupboard. I thought it was a bit OCD, but I thought it was just Maxine,
and then she told me, "No, Ian doesn't like to know that anybody has been in the house,"
so she was a bit scared of what was happening, and I was not allowed to tell him that I'd been in the house.
-Huntley's controlling nature would occasionally lead to violent outbursts. -My sitting room goes --
You can see straight into their kitchen, and he was shouting at her, calling all the names of sun.
"You do as you're told. You do what I tell you to do." You see her crouching in the corner where he was hitting her.
"You listen to me. You do what I say. You don't listen to nobody else. I'm your boss.
I'm in charge of you, nobody else." -Despite the tumultuous relationship, in 2001,
Huntley and Carr decided to up and leave once more and headed south to start a new life
in the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham. 24-year-old Carr had found herself a job
as a teaching assistant at St. Andrew's Primary School while 27-year-old Huntley was working as a caretaker
at nearby Soham Village College. The caretaker's job came with a cottage for the pair
to live in, Number 5 College Close. -I got a phone call of Maxine saying, "We've moved in. The house is lovely.
The countryside is lovely." I said, "I hope you're okay, but if you ever need me,
just ring me, and I'll get my brother, and we'll come and get you." -On Sunday, the 4th of August, 2002,
two of Maxine Carr's pupils, 10-year-olds Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, were enjoying a barbecue
at Holly's family home in Redhouse Gardens. The two girls decided to walk to the shops to buy some sweets
without telling their parents where they were going. It was a decision that would cost them their lives.
At 8:30 p.m. that evening, Holly's parents went upstairs in the family home to check on the girls,
but they were nowhere to be found. They immediately raised the alarm. As dawn broke the following day,
police began to search the local area with the help of hundreds of local volunteers.
The media were beginning to take note. -Within hours of their disappearance, police from three forces and hundreds of townsfolk
have joined the hunt for Holly and Jessica. -It is a small village in the middle
of the Cambridgeshire countryside where it's one of those places where everybody knows everybody,
so almost everybody in town would know the two families. They probably know the little girls, and therefore,
it was a community concern that these girls were missing, and they didn't know where they were.
-Later that same day, police issued a public appeal. They were becoming increasingly concerned for the girls.
-Their disappearance is incredibly out of character. They haven't been missing before.
They're very well-balanced, very bright, young girls. As far as we can tell, they've taken no change
of clothing and no money, so as we say, it's quite out of character. -The police had a very real belief
that the girls could've just gone missing, that they could've wandered off and got themselves lost in the countryside.
It was, after all, just a few hundred yards where they were last seen from open meadowlands
and then the fens of Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, so it would've been perhaps quite easy
for them to wander off, get lost, perhaps get into trouble, fall in a fen. -Police tried to track Jessica's mobile phone signal,
but they couldn't pinpoint a location. -There was still hope that they could be found alive,
and at worst-case scenario, was that perhaps they'd been taken hostage by somebody
or just abducted by someone with not good intent, so the police still and, I think,
the families and the people of Soham still had a real hope that they'd see the girls alive again in those first few days.
-On the 5th of August, Holly and Jessica's parents appeared at an emotional press conference
to appeal for their safe return. -We love them so much. We just want them home. Just anyone who's got children must know
what we're going through. -The disappearance of Holly and Jessica create a storm of interest, a media circus.
They were so appealing, so beautiful, so charming, so smiley. The world and his wife wanted
to know what on earth had happened to them. -The police based their headquarters
at Holly and Jessica's school. Around 500 locals and officers from neighboring Suffolk
and Essex joined Cambridgeshire police in the round-the-clock search for the girls.
It quickly became one of the biggest investigations the country had ever seen. -Not surprisingly,
an absolutely extraordinary manhunt results. Police are drafted in. Areas are searched.
News crews arrive. Reporters arrive. Everyone who's ever seen them is interviewed at great length.
-With no real clues as to where the children are and what state they're in, searching these vast areas of fenlands is difficult.
So these friends of Holly's parents have chosen an area close to the 810 Cambridge Road where the two girls
were reportedly last seen yesterday morning. -It's the helplessness, but as long as
there's something to look for, we just never give up hope. -Well, it's been probably the worst night so far, last night.
We've had and experienced friends and family searching in ditches. -But the police had no luck.
The search for Holly and Jessica continued for over a week, but it seemed as though they just vanished off
the face of the earth. On the 15th of August, 11 days after the girls went missing,
Sky News decided to retrace their steps, which meant interviewing the last person to see them,
local school caretaker Ian Huntley, the boyfriend of Holly and Jessica's classroom assistant,
Maxine Carr. -It's 6:15 p.m. The timeline on that Sunday night, the 4th of August, puts the girls here,
right in the fourth quarter of the Village College, the local education center. We know they've been to the sports center just across
the road a few minutes before to buy some sweets and were carrying on walking through
what would've been very familiar territory. Their primary school, St. Andrew's, is just across the back of the Village College here.
How do we know they were here at 6:15? Well, we have an eyewitness. Ian Huntley here is a familiar figure.
Evening, Ian. You're the school caretaker. The girls, Jessica and Holly, would know you,
and they saw you on the front doorstep. What went on? -Well, the -- I don't know the girls.
And I stood on the front doorstep grooming my dog down. She had run away and come back a bit of a mess.
They just came across and asked how Ms. Carr was, as she used to teach them at St. Andrew's,
and I just said she weren't very good as she hadn't got the job. And they just says, "Please tell her that we're very sorry,"
and after, walked in the direction of the library over there. -And you may, as it turned out, have been the last person
to actually chat to them before they vanished. -Yeah, that's what it seems like.
-Huntley looked like an unassuming, ordinary little bloke with a soft voice that wouldn't hurt a fly.
-He was a slight, withdrawn sort of character, but at the time, he seemed reasonably credible.
It seemed like a credible story. That's where the girls would've walked, so when I talked to him, I had an open mind.
I certainly, at the time, wasn't thinking, "This is the guy that's done them harm."
-Maxine Carr was also keen to appear on camera. -We interviewed her in the middle of the village
and got her to tell us about her relationship with the girls. -They were ever so funny, brilliant and kind to everybody.
They wouldn't say a bad word about anybody, and they loved their families and everything,
which is why nobody believes that they would ever run away. They was very close to all their family.
This is something I'll probably keep for the rest of my life, I think. It's what Holly gave me on the last day of term.
She was very upset, and that's the kind of girl she was. She was just lovely, really lovely.
-In the conversation, we realized, a few minutes afterwards, she spoke about the girls in the past tense.
When I was talking to her live, it didn't really occur to me. But a couple of minutes afterwards when we said,
"Thanks very much," and she walked off, and my producer said, "Just play that tape again.
I'm sure she was talking about the girls in the past tense." -They was very close to all their family,
and that's the kind of girl she was. -We thought, "That's strange," and that certainly got our alarm bells ringing.
-Huntley's unusual interest in the case and Maxine's TV interview raised suspicion among investigators.
On Friday, the 16th of August, 12 days after the disappearance of Holly and Jessica,
police brought the pair in for questioning while forensic experts began to search their home
and Soham Village College where Huntley worked. -It's commonplace now, and indeed,
it was commonplace even in 2002 for the police to take an intense interest in bystanders and onlookers
at crime scenes. It's true in arson. It's true in murder, and indeed, it is fairly familiar
and, indeed, even was then that they always look at who volunteers to search for a body,
whether it's the body of a child or an adult. Often, the perpetrator is among the searchers,
not without exception, but often because they want to admire their own handiwork.
-Could it be the person responsible for Holly and Jessica's disappearance had been under the noses of detectives from day one?
On the 16th of August, 2002, 12 days after the disappearance of 10-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman,
local caretaker Ian Huntley and his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, had been taken in for questioning by police.
Interviews given by the pair on Sky News had roused the suspicions of detectives.
-We were starting to think, "Wow. These two people really could be involved in something to do with these girls.
They're close enough to it. They've clearly aroused police suspicion at this stage."
-But after just 7 hours, they were released when Carr provided Huntley with an alibi.
She claimed she was with him in their home on the night of the girls' disappearance.
-It wasn't until about 10:00 or 11:00 at night that we heard that police released them,
which we found interesting, and I'd got a phone number from Maxine Carr. I thought, "Well, worth a gamble.
I'll just ring and see if I get through to them." And extraordinarily enough, I did.
I got straight through to Maxine Carr, and I said, "I gather you've been interviewed by the police.
What happened? How are you?" She said, "Well, we're fine. I can't tell you anything about it,
but it's all all right." Huntley then grabbed the phone off her, and I guess wanted to end the conversation quickly,
so he said, "Well, thanks for ringing. Yeah, we're fine. Nothing to report. The police have let us go.
Nothing going on. Thanks a lot. Thanks for ringing. Bye." -Once Huntley and Carr had been questioned,
further searches were carried out at their home and at Huntley's place of work, Soham Village College.
-It was quite clear as we tracked back that something had happened on the Friday night
during the interviews with Huntley and Carr. It had triggered further searches, and because they suddenly saw Huntley
as perhaps the key figure here, they went back over his territory, his home and his workplace,
and it was then that they began to find evidence that he had abducted the girls.
-On the 17th of August, investigators got their biggest breakthrough in the case yet.
In the bins at the school where Huntley worked, they found the burnt remains of two football shirts,
track-suit bottoms, shoes and some underwear. Forensic expert Peter Lamb identified the clothes
as those belonging to Holly and Jessica. -One of the crucial items in this particular case
was the tops that the little girls were last seen in. These were unusual, and this helped us
tremendously to build up a picture of the types of fibers that it would be easy for us to find.
-Whenever two human beings interact, there is an exchange of material, be that something as tiny as DNA up to something less subtle,
like a fiber, up to saliva or bodily fluids, blood. We leave a mark on each other,
and no matter how hard one tries to destroy all of that evidence, there will usually be something left to say
that the two people have been interacting. There is this constant interaction of material
that allows forensic scientists to draw conclusions and ultimately to come up with very strong evidence
that places one person in one place with another person and builds the case. -Forensic scientist Peter Lamb had the girls' clothes,
but now he had to link them forensically to Ian Huntley, and it didn't take long.
-During the examination of the items from the bin, I found five human head hairs.
These head hairs were compared with Holly's hair and Jessica's hair. They didn't match either of those two,
but they did match Ian Huntley's hair. -This vital evidence led to the arrest of both
Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr on the very same day, the 17th of August, on suspicion of abduction and murder.
When Carr had previously been questioned by police, she had provided Huntley with an alibi, but she'd lied.
She admitted that, on the night Holly and Jessica were murdered, she was in Grimsby, 110 miles from Soham.
-In the last few hours, a 28-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman have been arrested.
The 28-year-old man has been arrested for the murder and abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
The 25-year-old woman has been arrested for the murder of both girls. They've been taken to separate police stations
in Cambridgeshire where they will be interviewed. -Huntley and Carr's former neighbor, Morisa Gibb,
was completely shocked. -When they got him as a suspect, I didn't think he would be that type
because he's always wanted children. When my godchildren came round or my niece or my nephew
used to play with him in the back tent fort, everything, and I didn't see him to be the type to do it unto the two young girls.
It made me upset really because that could've been my godchildren. That could've been my niece or my nephew.
He could've done it then, you know, killed them. But it did upset me, and for Maxine
to stay by his side, that scared me a little bit because I knew she's always wanted children.
And I thought, "I'm glad they haven't got any children themselves. So what would've happened if they did have children?"
-And as the day went on came the news the whole world had been dreading. Burnt human remains had been found in a ditch
near an air base at Mildenhall in Suffolk. The following day, August the 18th, the police updated the press.
-It is with great sadness that I have to tell you the following news. It may be some days yet before we are able
to positively identify the two bodies found at Common Drove near Lakenheath in Suffolk yesterday lunchtime.
However, we are certain as we possibly can be tonight that they are those of Holly and Jessica.
-A team of experts, including me, went to the ditch, and we found that it was the bodies of two little girls,
and it was then that we began to carefully excavate the area, looking for any clues who might have put them there
and what had actually happened to them. Within the ditch whilst we were searching,
we found various items, which led us to believe, even before we'd done any DNA testing,
that these were the bodies of Holly and Jessica. In particular, we found part of the pocket
of the track-suit bottoms that one of them was wearing, part of the little plastic logo
off the side of the track-suit bottoms and also a piece of jewelry which belonged to one of the two girls.
-This isolated spot is about 10 miles from the where the two girls disappeared, and for the moment, the army of press from around the world
covering the police inquiry are being kept well away. -When you're live on air, the thing is to keep broadcasting.
I mean, the news that bodies have been found was dreadful, and it was all the worst we'd feared,
but we knew that a lot of people had been following this story on-air like everybody else.
You know, your hearts sink when you realize the reality of it, but it's much later when you finally come off air
that you kind of go, "That's just awful. I mean, what a terrible, terrible waste
and what a terrible tragedy for this family, for those little girls, for a village that was really, really torn apart."
-It was now officially a murder investigation. Forensic experts had to find as much evidence as they could,
but the remains were badly damaged. If the bodies couldn't provide any clues, perhaps the deposition site may,
but finding any small traces of evidence at the vast air base was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
To help hone in on exactly where the killer may have entered the ditch with the bodies,
the police called on botanical ecologist Professor Patricia Wiltshire. -It's a strange place.
There are a series of drove roads in this part. It's near Lakenheath Air Base. You're on the Breckland sands there.
That's the soil. When it gets wet, it gets very, very muddy and horrible. So what the farmers do, they get crushed up shells,
and they put them along a track, so as we drove along the track, it was all crunchy with shells and then stopped,
and beyond that was the Breckland sand. What is very interesting is that the girls were found in a ditch
just where the shells stopped. The police were flummoxed really. So they said, "Where did he enter the ditch?"
It was obvious to me because a lot of the nettles had gone through corrective growth.
They'd been flattened, but they'd grown up and corrected themselves, and so I said to the police, "Well, here it is."
And when they looked at that pathway, they found Jessica's hair on a twig, so they knew that's where he had entered the ditch.
It's quite important because then they can do their fingertip searching in appropriate places.
-Now investigators needed to prove that Huntley was the person who had deposited the girls' bodies in the ditch.
Again, the surrounding environment at the deposition site held the key. -When I looked at the burnt clothing,
it had masses of evidence that matched the vegetation in the ditch. There were alder trees
and all sorts of other things growing over the ditch, and there were alder fruits and pine grains,
all sorts of things embedded in the clothing that were from that ditch, and it showed
that the girls were clothed when he put them in the ditch, so he must have taken the clothes off
while they were in the ditch. -Further searches at Huntley's home revealed that his house
and car had recently been meticulously cleaned. Officers who interviewed Huntley a day after the girls
went missing also reported a strong smell of a lemon-y cleaning product coming from the house.
-Not only did we examine the carpets, upholstery and items within the house, but we were also given the contents of vacuum cleaners
that Mr. Huntley had access to. By the use of these vacuum cleaners, it's likely that some of these fibers
would've been distributed throughout the house, so not only had they been removed
but also distributed as well, and so there wasn't just one particular location in which we found the fibers from the girls' clothing.
They were found downstairs, upstairs and in the bathroom as well. -We had quite a lot of exhibits from Huntley's belongings,
but his car, he'd carefully changed the tires. He'd washed it. What he forgot was that the chassis had picked up soil.
The chunks of soil had the same profile as where he'd put the girls. -What investigators really needed was DNA proof
that the girls had been in Huntley's house, but there was none to be found. -It was unusual not to find any DNA evidence whatsoever
if the girls had been within Mr. Huntley's house. I now understand that it may be that Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr
cleaned the house thoroughly using solutions of bleach, and that type of cleaning may account for the fact
that no DNA was ever found within the property. -Prosecutors still felt they had enough evidence
to convince the jury that Ian Huntley had abducted and murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
On April the 16th, 2003, Huntley pleaded not guilty at a hearing at the Old Bailey.
It meant the families would have to suffer through a trial, which was set for the 3rd of November.
The whole world wanted justice for the two girls. Huntley was charged with the murders
of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and Carr with perverting the course of justice
and assisting an offender. Both had pleaded not guilty. The world was watching. The lead prosecutor on the case, Karim Khalil,
had received new information from the defense team. -The initial defense position,
up until about a month before the trial, was that he had nothing whatsoever to do
with the death of these two girls. About a month before the hearing, his position changed,
and we were informed by his counsel that, in fact, he would accept that the two girls had gone to College Close
and that they had died whilst in that property and that he had taken them to the area
which became known as the deposition site where the bodies were eventually found.
What we were not informed about was what Huntley would say about the actual death of the two girls
and how that had come about. -The reason that I think Ian Huntley is so terrifying
is because of this chameleon-like quality that he's got. He's able to roll out a performance
to whatever audience he's in front of, so it's that ability to create that veneer of normality,
that facade of normality, and I think, behind closed doors, yeah, he really was a monster in the making.
-On the 25th of November, Huntley spoke in court. He proceeded to give an extraordinary explanation
of how Holly and Jessica had died. -Part of Huntley's story was that the first child
had fallen into the bath, having a nosebleed. She had died without really any involvement on his part.
And the second child he had held around the mouth with his hand because she was screaming, and he was anxious that others
shouldn't be disturbed and to settle her down, and that was going to be his account.
A suggestion by Ian Huntley that he didn't mean to kill those girls I regard as preposterous.
Two fit and healthy 10-year-olds, it just seemed inconceivable that their death could've been caused by anyone
other than the person intent on causing their death. -The prosecution argued that, minutes before seeing the girls,
Huntley had had a furious telephone argument with Carr as he suspected her of cheating on him.
He then saw the girls, lured them to his house and killed them in a jealous rage.
-We can only speculate about why Huntley killed the two. It's too horrifying to contemplate what might
or might not have happened, and I feel that so strongly because of Holly and Jessica's parents.
It cannot be anything but torture to imagine what might have happened to your daughter
at the hands of Huntley. -Sky News presenter Jeremy Thompson, who had interviewed Huntley and Carr on camera
before they were arrested, testified during the trial. -I got a call from the police saying,
"Yes, please, we would like you to be a witness in the murder trial of Ian Huntley."
And so I've been in the Old Bailey plenty of times, sitting in the press benches, but for the very first time,
I was in the witness box. It's intimidating, being in the witness box, particularly at the Old Bailey
because it's got a venerable and weighty atmosphere. But then I look down. There's Huntley looking up at me
as well with a fairly blank face, a fairly deadpan face, but who knows what he was thinking?
He was probably thinking, "I wish I hadn't done that interview with you. I might have given myself away."
Who knows? -I think, for Ian Huntley, that interview on live television news was the high point of his life.
He was absolutely loving every minute of this. He's completely 100 percent in control.
Nobody knows what's going on. He's the only one who knows exactly what happened,
and that makes him feel incredibly powerful. -On the 3rd of December, 2003, Maxine Carr took the stand.
She admitted she had lied about being with Huntley on the day of the murder and was, in fact, in Grimsby.
She argued if she'd known of Huntley's murderous actions, she would never have lied to protect him.
-I think the media saw Maxine Carr as a bit of a target because she was employed as a teaching assistant.
She was supposed to be somebody who cared for and nurtured and looked after children.
You've got to remember Ian Huntley was the one who carried out these murders. He was the one who made these decisions,
and Maxine Carr, looking back on it now, it's clear that she was another one of his victims.
-Huntley's defense was falling apart. Investigators had proved he tried to cover up his actions,
and there was a vast amount of forensic evidence linking him to the girls. -We had a large number of transfers of fibers.
We had fibers transferred from Mr. Huntley's clothing and his home to the track-suit bottoms.
We had hairs from Mr. Huntley transferred to the items of clothing of the girls,
and in total, we had 154 transfers of one-way and two-way types. -It took the jury just 5 days of deliberation
to reach a verdict. They refused to believe Huntley's explanation of the accidental killings.
On December the 17th, 2003, Ian Huntley was found guilty of the murders of Holly Wells
and Jessica Chapman by a majority vote. Huntley was given two life sentences by the judge,
Mr. Justice Moses, and was immediately sent to Belmarsh Prison. Two years after the trial, in September 2005,
it was recommended that Huntley should serve 40 years as a minimum. -I think Ian Huntley would like to think
that he was a master manipulator, but I don't think he had the correct level of social skills
to be able to get away with a crime like this. I think he became a victim of his own narcissism in the end.
He literally just couldn't help himself in putting himself in front of the television cameras,
so he was never going to get away with this, and I think he very much enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame.
-Maxine Carr was found guilty of perverting the course of justice but not guilty of assisting an offender.
The court accepted that Carr had only lied to the police to protect Huntley because she believed his claims of innocence.
She was sentenced to 3 1/2 years and immediately sent to Holloway Prison. In May 2004, Carr was released and given a new identity.
-Well, I think she's a victim as well because I think if she said anything, he would've probably killed her as well,
and that's probably why she kept quiet because she was scared of her own life. Her sister spoke to me and said,
"Would you like to speak to Maxine?" I said, "Yeah," because she is a friend, and I was there through thick
and thin with Ian Huntley, and I did speak to her a couple times on the phone, and we wrote.
I wrote to her when she was in prison and that, and then it just all faded away.
-It's been over a decade since the Soham murders, and one question still remains unanswered.
Why did Ian Huntley carry out these senseless killings? -There's only one person who knows what happened,
and because he chose to give the account he did and has given no other, we will never be certain as to what precisely did occur.
One only hopes that, one day, Huntley's conscience will allow him to tell us what really happened.
-He kept himself together pretty well through nearly 2 weeks of investigation, of police interviews,
of media interviews like ours, so he didn't fall apart. He didn't act crazy. He certainly seemed to know what he was doing in covering up
a crime that, at the time, only he knew about it, and I would question those aren't the actions of a madman,
just someone who's very cold and calculating. -Ian is so secretive. You will never find out what he did to the girls
and why he did it because he's, like, somewhat within a ball, and he won't come out that ball.
You'll never know until the day he dies. You'll never know what he did to them girls.
-Huntley was able to leave his dark past in Grimsby behind just by moving away from the area,
but as a direct response to the Soham murders, the Police National Database was launched in 2011,
which transformed the way information is shared between forces across the U.K., and a new child-protection scheme was set up
to help prevent such a tragedy ever taking place again. -Well, I think the most positive thing
to come out of the case is simply that the government then tightened laws on employment with children,
you know, to work in schools or work in any areas where children are involved. Hopefully, they've closed up the loopholes,
so an Ian Huntley, with his past record, which hadn't come to light, now that wouldn't happen again.
-Huntley's house, 5 College Close, where Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman spent their last moments, was demolished in 2004,
but for some, the memories of the Soham murders cannot be erased. -It still upsets me because I'm a mother.
I'm a grandma and everything, and it's just the fact it could've been my family.
Even though it's not your children, it's still mother instinct. It's children. -Cases like this are quite rare,
and the thing that always sticks out is that children are involved. And this case, I think, perhaps gained more notoriety
simply because two innocent little girls, two pretty little girls who'd gone out from a family barbecue
to buy some sweets and never came back. Anybody who had kids would've thought, "Ah, there but for the grace of God go our family."
When it can happen in Soham, it means it can happen anywhere, everywhere. -For 13 days in August 2002,
the British public went through a range of emotions during the search for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman,
from shock to hope and finally to sorrow, but over a decade on, it's important we remember the victims and their loved ones,
not Ian Huntley, one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Ian Huntley abducted two ten-year-old schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, murdered them and tried to burn the bodies.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

The episode recounts the disappearance and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by Ian Huntley in Soham, 2002, and the ensuing investigation.

Key points

The Disappearance of Holly and Jessica. On August 4, 2002, two 10-year-old girls vanished while buying sweets, sparking a nationwide search.
A Community in Fear. The village of Soham was gripped by fear as the search for the girls intensified.
The Killer Revealed. Ian Huntley, a local caretaker, was revealed to be the murderer of the two girls.
The Discovery of the Bodies. On August 17, 2002, the bodies of Holly and Jessica were found, shocking the nation.
The Emotional Plea. Holly and Jessica's parents made a heartfelt appeal for their safe return during a press conference.
The Arrests. A 28-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman are arrested for the murders of Holly and Jessica.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The world mourned.

Reaction to the discovery of the girls' bodies.

2:09WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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