It’s been 20 years since the quiet town of Sohamin Cambridgeshire was rocked by the horrific deaths of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The bodies of the childhood friends were found in a ditch in Laken heath 13 days after they had gone missing. Holly and Jessica, both ten, had been killed not far from their homes after they popped out for a walk on a Sunday night. Their disappearance in August 2002 was the start of a nightmare for their parents,Kevin and Nicola Wells, and Leslie and Sharon Chapman. It sparked one of the biggest manhunts in the Uk and led to an out pouring of grief around the world. To compound the agony, the close community soon realised the murderer must be someone living among them, and was likely to be someone they knew and trusted.
“Bubbly and popular” Jessica was a tomboy who loved sport. She played football for Soham Town Rangers Girls’ Under-11s team and represented her county with the Cambridgeshire Swimming Group. In contrast, Holly—named Carnival Princess 2001, and described as the “Soham rose” by her grief-stricken father — loved dressing up, dancing and playing with make-up. Despite their differences, they were “like sisters, always playing together”. On 4 August 2002, the best friends were reunited following Jessica’s holiday in Menorca. Jessica went to Holly’s home, as her parents were holding a barbecue. After spending most of the afternoon in Holly’s bedroom, the pair decided to go for a walk around 5.30pm. Dressed in matching Manchester United shirts and Adidas shorts, they strolled around town, buying sweets along the way.
Walking down College Close, they saw school caretaker lan Huntley washing his dog Sadie in the garden outside his home. They stopped to talk, as they knew Huntley’s fiancée Maxine Carr ~she worked in their class, and was their “favourite” teaching assistant at St Andrew’s Primary. Minutes later, Huntley lured the girls into his house. When the girls didnot return home two hours later, Kevin and Nicola began to get alarmed. By 10pm, they had grown frantic. They called police, who quickly initiated a search. They did not know that Huntley had already killed the girls and callously dumped their bodies. “it touched a chord in the nation’s hearts because people could see that here were two beautiful young girls from loving families who were doing nothing wrong, Holly’s dad Kevin would later say. “It was a lovely summer evening, they were within their parameters, they had a mobile phone, they were together and they were taken. It’s still very difficult to accept.”
One of the most shocking aspects of the case was how Huntley, then 28, played the concerned and helpful local as he joined in the search for Holly and Jessica alongside their parents and friends. In his book Beyond Evil, reporter Nathan Yates says one resident told him, “Huntley was the keenest person there. He kept going all night, not even taking arest. He seemed desperate to find them.” As the investigation intensified over the next two weeks, Huntley kept up his front, hiding his involvement -— and his guilt— by helping police and media, all the while lying to their faces. “I must have been one of the last people to speak to them,” he told police, adding that Carr had been in the house with him at the time. However, she was actually in her hometown of Grimsby with her mother. But one call from Huntley and she agreed to be his alibi, telling the lie that she was upstairs in the bath while he chatted to the girls.
Huntley went to great lengths to cover his tracks — he’d cleaned the house and car from top to bottom to remove any traces of the girls’ DNA, changed his cartyres and added false registration plates, burnt the girls clothes, and thrown Jessica’s mobile phone into a skip. But despite his efforts, he soon emerged as one of the prime suspects, as he was one of the last people to see Holly and Jessica. His attempts to ingratiate himself into the investigation also drew officers’ suspicions, as well as his suspect behaviour, including a constant desire for news and updates, his nervousness and agitation while being questioned, and the obsessive cleanliness of his home.
As each day went by, Huntley grew more confident that he had gotten away with murder. Cocky and arrogant, he made every eftort to be helpful and involved, while becoming more brazen, asking cops and journalists questions about forensics, and attending the daily media briefings and press conferences. He even appeared to be overcome with emotion over the missing girls. “He was quite emotional, he was quite upset. Itseemed strange. He was more upset than Maxine Carr and that seemed odd because Maxine story, Sky News presenter Jeremy Thompson said in Channel 5 documentary 5 Mistakes That Caught A Killer. This backfired on him, when Huntley became recognised and his history as a serial sex attacker came to light. Described as a “control freak who loved to dominate and abuse women’ by ex-girlfriends, Huntley had a penchant for younger girls, who he would drug and seduce. He once locked a teenager in his flat for two weeks with no food, and he is thought to have had sex with up to 60 underage girls between 1992 and 2002, the youngest being 11. He had been reported to police eight times, investigated for rape four times, and for having sex with underage girls on three occasions. He married Claire Evans when he was 20, but she walked out two weeks later after he was abusive to her, beating her up every day in the first fortnight of marriage.
Huntley was arrested in 1998 for rape, but though the case went to court, he was not convicted, so he didnot have a police record. This meant his past was not flagged up as a risk when he applied to be caretaker at é { Ps Soham Village College in September 2001.
As evidence mounted up against Huntley, his and Carr’s alibi came under further scrutiny. And, feeling the pressure, the couple started to slip up. In two TV interviews, Carr, then 25, referred to Holly— who was still missing at this point— in the past tense. “They was very close to, um, all their family,” she told Sky News’ Jeremy Thompson, adding, “ Holly was lovely, really lovely.” And it wasn’t long before her alibi was blown apart by witnesses who had seen her in Grimsby that evening and quickly tipped off the police. Certain that Huntley was Holly and Jessica’s killer, and Carr his accomplice, they were taken in for questioning on 16 August, 12 days after the girls vanished. By now, detectives had solid evidence against the school caretaker — Jessica’s mobile had been switched off at 6.46pm, right outside Huntley’s home, and the charred remnants of the girls’ clothes had been recovered from a bin at the school.
Huntley’s fingerprints and hair were found on the bin liner, while fibres from the girls’ football shirts were found inside his home and on one of his shoes. Hours afterwards, Holly and Jessica’s bodies were found, leading to the arrest of Huntley and Carr. Carr broke down under questioning, admitting that she wasn’t in Soham on the night that the girls disappeared. In court, Huntley claimed that the girls’ deaths were an accident. He said Holly had drowned after falling into a full bath, and he then unwittingly killed Jessica by smothering her to stop her screaming. “I wish I could do things differently. l wish none of this had ever happened,’ he said. “I’m sorry for what happened and I’mashamed of what I did. l accept I’m responsible for the deaths of Holly and Jessica, but there’s nothing I can do about it now.’ But after exposing the flaws in his story, the prosecution argued that he had lured them inside, possibly with asexual motivation, and murdered them. Faced with the truth, Carr then turned against Huntley, portraying him as controlling. “I told alie, but I was hardly going to tell the police that he is an abusive person who controls you, because I was scared,’ she said. She apparently couldn’t face using his name in court, branding him “that thing in the box”. In December 2003, Huntley, now 48, was found guilty of murder and given life, with a minimum of 40 years. Carr was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and jailed for three-and-a-half years. She was released in May 2004, having served less than two years of her sentence, and now lives under a new identity. Huntley’s house was later demolished.
While Carr, now 45, moved on, marrying and giving birth to a baby boy in 2011, life will never be the same for Holly and Jessica’s parents. “Time doesnot heal. It anaesthetises,” Kevin said. “Grief does not diminish, but you can manage the intensity and learn to live with it.” Holly’s dad, who founded bereavement charity Grief Encounter, added, “We still think of Holly every day.’ And each anniversary marks another milestone without his beloved daughter. “It gives rise to questions about all that Holly might have been by now, Kevin said. “I will never walk a daughter down the aisle, never see her off to another life.”
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