Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had been missing for over a week when I knocked on the door of Ian Huntley’s cottage to ask him to help.
I had no idea I was about to enter the crime scene of one of the most sickening child murders this century.
Yet within minutes I was perched on the sofa in the school caretaker’s living room as his fiancée Maxine Carr – later dubbed Britain’s most hated woman - offered round a plate of custard cream biscuits.
I could not have known then that I was sitting down with one of the most evil couples in modern history.
Huntley is serving life for murdering 10-year-olds Holly and Jessica in his home in Soham, a Cambridgeshire market town made infamous by his vile crimes in 2002.
The two best friends had gone out to buy sweets on a summer’s afternoon when he lured them into his three-bedroom cottage.
Their disappearance after a family barbecue sent shockwaves through the close-knit community and captivated Britain.
For two frantic weeks during that August, Soham was the centre of one of the biggest and most fraught missing child searches Britain has ever seen. More than 400 police were joined by concerned local residents and members of the media all trying to find the lost schoolgirls as the nation held its breath.
Which is why I paid a visit to Huntley’s home, 10 days into the increasingly wretched hunt.
I had no notion, at that moment, that his glass-panelled front door was the gateway to a house of horrors, haunted with grisly secrets and a child sex predator nervously hoping to forever dodge his fate.
Best friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in their Manchester United tops in the last ever photograph of the 10-year-old Soham schoolgirls just hours before they were murdered
Ian Huntley, the school caretaker who lured the two friends into his house and killed them before spending the next two weeks giving media interviews appealing for their safe return
Left: Reporter Sam Greenhill seen in a TV documentary speaking to detectives in Soham in 2002
As a journalist, I had needed the caretaker’s help - to ask to borrow his television and video player. Minutes earlier, Cambridgeshire detectives had handed me a VHS video cassette tape containing a pre-recorded police appeal to the girls’ abductor. I had to find a way of viewing it. Without realising it, I was about to watch it with the abductor himself.
That afternoon, detectives had drawn journalists into their confidence at a meeting in Soham’s school hall. Once the doors were shut, they had outlined their plan to find Holly and Jessica - and asked for our assistance.
The timing could not have been more urgent for the missing schoolgirls’ families, who by then had endured 10 long days and nights numb with terror and who were beyond desperate for news.
At 4am that day, the families had been told that two mounds of earth excavated in woodland less than nine miles from their homes were not graves but badger setts.
And police had all but discounted the only other potentially significant lead, a sighting of a green car being driven erratically away from Soham on the evening the girls vanished. It was painfully obvious that officers were short on clues and running out of ideas.
Detective Superintendent David Beck’s plan was ambitious but simple, and relied on Jessica’s missing blue Nokia 5110 mobile phone. Det Supt Beck hoped that, if he could trick the kidnapper into switching on Jessica’s phone, police would be able to use its signal to locate the girls.
And so he recorded a direct appeal to the abductor. His crucial message would be broadcast that evening on the Six O’Clock News. The police wanted journalists to watch the tape in advance, so that we would be ready to write about it and spread the message fast, in the hope the kidnapper would see it.
But they did not give journalists a transcript of their appeal. They simply handed us copies on video cassettes. In 2002, VHS tapes were still a common way to watch videos. But you needed a television set with a VHS player.
Maxine Carr posing with a card which Holly made for her classroom teaching assistant - as Huntley's duplicitous girlfriend pretended to help the search for the missing girls
The television set and VHS player in Huntley and Carr's living room where journalists viewed the police appeal to the girls' abductor - watching it along with the abductor himself
Detective Superintendent David Beck in his televised plea to the kidnapper: 'I appeal to you to work with me to stop this getting any worse than it is'
The cottage in Soham where the two schoolgirls were lured inside. They never came out alive. Ten days later Huntley invited journalists in to watch a video
The hallway and stairs inside the house of horrors where Huntley asked journalists to wait while he checked with Carr. Just days later, forensic officers found traces of blood
I was with Harriet, a reporter from another newspaper, and we rushed out of the hall onto the streets of Soham, clutching our cassettes, trying to think of how we could watch the police video.
The answer came to us almost immediately as we walked past a house with a poster for the missing girls displayed prominently in the front room window. The caretaker’s cottage. Huntley worked at the town’s secondary school and his fiancée was a trusted teaching assistant at Holly and Jessica’s primary, St Andrew’s. Both had given numerous interviews to aid the search. Huntley, 28, had even set up the chairs in the school hall for press conferences. They would surely help us.
The door to No.5 College Close opened slowly, and Huntley’s pallid face peered out. Harriet told him we had a videotape containing ‘a police appeal to the girls’ abductor’. With our deadlines looming, we asked him to let us come in and watch it. Harriet added: ‘Please don’t say you’ve got DVD’ - the successor to VHS players.
Huntley paused, looking unsure. Obviously, with hindsight, we were asking the 10-year-old girls’ killer himself if he wanted to watch a police appeal to the abductor. Still shamefully plotting to somehow get away with his evil, Huntley must have been desperately scheming about what to say to us, as we hovered on his doorstep.
‘Please,’ we begged. ‘It’s an appeal for the abductor to get in touch – it may help get the girls back safe and sound.’
‘Okay,’ he said, gradually opening the door more fully. ‘But let me check with my girlfriend first.’
This seemed odd for such a minor request. Of course, at the time, no one but the wicked couple themselves knew that Maxine Carr - who had shown off a sweet thank-you card from Holly – had given her double killer boyfriend a false alibi that would make her one of the most reviled women in British history.
We stepped inside and waited in the hallway at the foot of blue-carpeted stairs, while Huntley went off to find her.
Just days later, police forensic officers would discover tiny traces of blood spattering in the hallway and at the top of the stairs by the entrance to the main bedroom.
Huntley returned with Carr, 25, and they pointed us to the living room. Decorated in pale pastel shades and with few personal knick-knacks, it seemed soulless. Carr vanished and returned with a few custard creams on a chintzy oversized saucer. No one touched them.
Huntley laughed and said we were fortunate they still had a VHS machine because ‘you know, we are actually getting a DVD, but not for a couple of weeks. You’re lucky’.
He gestured for us to sit on the sofa, then he and Carr squatted on the carpet. He took the video cassette from me to put into the machine. Carr spoke for the first time. ‘Are we allowed to watch this?’ she asked quietly.
The four of us were silent as the small black TV flickered into life and Detective Superintendent Beck’s sombre face filled the screen.
‘I appeal to you to work with me to stop this getting any worse than it is,’ he intoned. ‘You do have a way out.’ Mr Beck had wanted the kidnapper to hear his message - and Huntley’s face was barely more than two feet away from the detective’s on the screen. But if his plea meant anything to Huntley, he did not show it. The paedophile caretaker already knew what poor Holly and Jessica’s parents did not – their children were lying in a shallow grave and what pitiful hopes they still clung to would soon be extinguished.
Mr Beck spoke slowly and purposefully as he continued: ‘I have left you a message on Jessica’s mobile phone. Listen to that message. It will tell you how to contact me - so you can stop this now. You have the opportunity to speak to me. This is the time to use it.’
The policeman leading the hunt for the girls stared into the camera a final time and urged: ‘Ring me by midnight tonight.’
The carefree schoolgirls were best friends and would be aged 33 now if perverted Huntley had not brutally cut short their young lives
Huntley pictured outside his house No.5 College Close which had a poster for the missing girls displayed prominently in the front room window
Another view of the living room in the house where Huntley and Carr watched the police video appeal - rewinding to see it three times
TIMELINE OF TRAGEDY
4 August, 2002
3.15pm Holly and Jessica change into red Manchester United tops and pose in final photo
6.15pm They go out for a walk round Soham
6.46pm Jessica's mobile phone is switched off - believed to be by paedophile Ian Huntley who murders the girls.
5 August
The girls' frantic parents appear at a police press conference to appeal for help.
6 August
Footballer David Beckham issues an appeal to find the two young Manchester United fans, as the nation rallies round in support
9 August
Police say they believe the girls are still alive, based on advice from psychologists and criminal profilers.
14 August
Detectives issue direct appeal to abductor, and through a twist of fate, Huntley becomes the first person to watch it after reporter Sam Greenhill knocks on his door asking for help to play a VHS tape handed out by police.
17 August
Holly and Jessica's bodies are discovered in an irrigation ditch 10 miles away from Soham.
Huntley and Carr arrested.
The video had lasted less than a minute, with Harriet and I scribbling down the words in our notebooks. Huntley and Carr gazed at the screen, emotionless and silent.
When it had finished, we began comparing shorthand notes to make sure we both had it right. We watched it a second time, to double-check. But then, as we made to leave, Huntley suggested playing it a third time.
‘Shall I rewind and play it again, so you can make sure you’ve got it all?’ Huntley asked. ‘No, don’t worry,’ said Harriet. ‘We’re in such a rush and anyway it’s so short, I’m sure we’ve got it all down.’
He persisted. ‘No really, why don’t I rewind – it won’t take long.’
We agreed, and so Huntley rewound the videotape to the start. We all sat watching it again, silent apart from when Huntley shook his head and murmured: ‘It beggars belief.’
This audacious pair were the very people Mr Beck’s appeal was directed at, but you would never have guessed. Not a flicker of emotion passed across either of their faces. They just looked, like most people in Soham, exhausted and concerned.
At the end, we thanked the couple, took the video and apologised for bothering them as we raced out of the door.
‘It’s no trouble,’ trilled Huntley. ‘Anything to help get those two little girls back.’
-- -- -- --
Until brutally cut short by Huntley, Holly and Jessica’s young lives were filled with fun. The 10-year-old classmates – who would be aged 33 now - lived near each other, they shared a profound friendship and a passion for football, with Manchester United being their favourite team.
At 3.15pm on Sunday August 4, they had changed into matching Manchester United red shirts and asked Holly’s mother to take that indelible picture of them with their glowing young faces that was to be the unbearable last photo.
The girls sat down to a family barbecue at 5.30pm and got up from the table at 6.15pm, leaving Holly’s house without telling anyone where they were going.
They walked side-by-side in their red shirts through the town they knew so well. At around 6.30pm, eyewitness Mark Tuck remarked to the passenger in his car: ‘Look! Two little Beckhams’.
It was the last time anyone saw them alive of course, apart from the predatory school caretaker whose fiancée was friendly with the girls. No one except perverted Huntley himself knows exactly how he lured the innocent youngsters into his lair as they passed by on their walk. At 6.46pm, Jessica’s mobile phone was switched off.
Their panicking parents called police later that evening, and for two weeks, the nation prayed the missing friends would be found safe.
Scores of journalists arrived in Soham to report on the story and help police and the families publicise the search. Huntley and Carr both gave what were, with hindsight, jaw-droppingly cruel media interviews.
Carr was seen bursting into nervous giggles on BBC Look East as she repeatedly referred to the still missing girls in the past tense, laughing when she was corrected.
Huntley approached a BBC journalist who had been on the phone alerting her bosses to expect a possible police breakthrough before the Six O’Clock News. He had overheard her, and asked: ‘Have they found the girls’ clothes?’
The reporter said this was a Freudian slip, because nobody but their killer knew they were dead.
My journalist colleague Brian Farmer, a veteran Press Association correspondent, found Huntley’s answers so suspicious that he raised his concerns with police.
When Holly and Jessica were reported missing, Huntley said he’d seen them when he was outside cleaning his pet dog Sadie – but Brian found it strange the girls had supposedly been more interested in asking after Carr than the dog.
Brian said that, according to Huntley, the girls had enquired about Carr, their teaching assistant, but Huntley had not mentioned them talking about the dog.
‘I didn't think there was a child of that age in the world who on a sunny August afternoon would come across a man washing a dog with soap and water who wouldn't have mentioned the dog,’ said Brian.
And Brian said that when he asked Carr if the girls had learnt about ‘stranger danger’ in school, Huntley had got agitated and jumped in to answer for her – rather too specifically – that he thought ‘Holly would probably get in the car and quietly go, but Jessica wouldn't, she’d put up a real fight and a real struggle.’ Brian said: ‘He knew how they’d react because that's how they reacted - when he killed them.’
But the biggest giveaway was brainless Carr’s hopeless false alibi to throw police off her boyfriend’s scent – pretending she had been at home with him on the night the girls vanished when in fact she had been 100 miles away socialising in Grimsby town centre. On the evening of the murders, she was in a Grimsby nightclub kissing another man.
Holly and Jessica were spotted by more than a dozen witnesses as they wandered happily through the market town - with the last sightings close to Huntley's cottage
Huntley's house was demolished in April 2004 by Cambridgeshire council which feared it would be a permanent reminder of the grisly deaths that had haunted the local community
When, 13 days after they disappeared, the girls were finally found by a gamekeeper, their bodies rolled into a muddy ditch 10 miles away from Soham, their families’ misery was compounded by the killer having set fire to them to try to destroy evidence. The cause of death of both girls was found to be asphyxiation.
Huntley was charged with their murders and Carr with attempting to pervert the course of justice.
Both pleaded not guilty, prolonging the trauma for the families and earning Carr in particular a reputation for callousness that saw her dubbed The Most Hated Woman In Britain.
Huntley’s own web of lies in the Old Bailey witness box brought him worldwide revulsion. He pathetically claimed Holly had had a nosebleed so he invited her into his house to help, but she slipped into his bath and drowned - causing Jessica to scream, and then she died accidentally while he was trying to hush her.
Along with other journalists who had met Huntley and Carr, both Harriet and I gave witness statements to help the Crown Prosecution Service rebut the gruesome twosome’s despicable defences. The jury took four days to find them both guilty.
Huntley was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, with a minimum of 40 years behind bars. He is now aged 52. Carr, now aged 48, got three-and-a-half years. After her release from prison, she was granted lifelong anonymity as well as being given a new identity, to protect her from reprisals. To this day, she lives a secret life.
Looking back on that surreal afternoon in the couple’s living room, with Carr passing round custard creams and Huntley desperate to keep replaying the video for his own nefarious reasons, it still sends a shiver down my spine.
What kind of people would carry out such wickedness and then cheerfully offer visitors to their house a chintzy plate of custard creams.
