Soham murders

• 1. Introduction

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  The Soham murders began with a photograph. At 5:04 pm on Sunday the 4th of August 2002, Nicola Wells took a picture of her daughter Holly and Holly's best friend, Jessica Chapman. Both girls were ten years old. They stood side by side in matching Manchester United football shirts. It was a snapshot from a family barbecue in a Cambridgeshire village. Police would later release it in their public appeals as the last known image of the girls before they disappeared. What followed was a search of thirteen days that has been described as one of the most intense and extensive in British criminal history. This documentary asks how two children could vanish on a short walk through their own village. It asks who saw them, who lied, and what a ditch beside an airbase in Suffolk would reveal. And it asks how a man who spoke to reporters about the missing girls ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey, and what that courtroom could never fully establish.

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• 2. The Last Afternoon

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  Jessica Chapman left her home on Brook Street at 11:45 am with a gift for her friend. It was a necklace engraved with the letter H, bought for Holly on a recent family holiday in Menorca. She was heading to a barbecue at the Wells home in Redhouse Gardens, nearby in Soham.

  The two girls spent about half an hour playing computer games and listening to music with a friend, Natalie Parr, who then went home. By 3:15 pm both had changed into replica football shirts. One belonged to Holly and the other to her older brother, Oliver. After dinner with the other guests, they went back upstairs and sent several emails between 5:11 pm and 5:32 pm.

  At about 6:05 pm the girls left the house without telling anyone. They wanted to buy sweets from a vending machine at the Ross Peers Sports Centre. CCTV later showed them arriving there at 6:28 pm.

  On the way back to Redhouse Gardens they passed College Close, where Ian Huntley lived. He was the senior caretaker at the local secondary school. He lured the girls inside by saying that his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was in the house. Carr was their teaching assistant at St Andrew's Primary School. In fact she was visiting her mother in Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

  Nobody knows exactly what happened after the girls stepped into number 5 College Close. Investigators believe that some of Huntley's later remarks to the media and his testimony at trial may contain fragments of truth. Those remarks include a claim that he was washing his dog when the girls passed, and a claim that one of them had a mild nosebleed. The cause of death was later judged to be asphyxiation. Chapman's Nokia 6110 mobile phone was switched off at 6:46 pm.

  At 8 pm, Nicola Wells went up to the girls' bedroom to call them down to say goodbye to her guests. The room was empty. She and her husband, Kevin, searched the house and the surrounding streets. Soon after the girls' 8:30 pm curfew had passed, she telephoned the Chapman household. Leslie and Sharon Chapman were already worried that their youngest daughter had not come home. At 9:55 pm, after frantic efforts by both families to find the girls, their parents reported them missing.

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• 3. Search and Sightings

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  More than 400 officers were assigned full time to the hunt for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. They carried out house-to-house enquiries across Soham. Hundreds of local volunteers helped search the surrounding land, and later so did United States Air Force personnel from nearby airbases.

  Cambridgeshire Police released the photograph of the girls in their football shirts, along with a description of each. Both were white, slim and about 4 ft 6 in tall. Chapman was tanned with shoulder-length brown hair. Wells was fair with blonde hair.

  The parents said both girls had been warned since early childhood not to trust strangers. The headteacher of St Andrew's Primary School agreed. He told reporters: "The possible danger from strangers is something we have impressed upon the children from an early age."

  Suspecting a kidnapping, detectives questioned every registered sex offender in Cambridgeshire and neighbouring Lincolnshire. More than 260 registered sex offenders across the UK, including 15 high-risk paedophiles, were questioned as well. All were eliminated. Police also looked at whether the girls had arranged to meet someone from an Internet chat room, but that idea was soon ruled out.

  The community held a candlelight vigil on the 7th of August. The next day, police released CCTV footage of the girls arriving at the sports centre. A televised reconstruction of their last known movements was broadcast nationally on the 10th of August. Two days later, both sets of parents gave an interview to presenter Colin Baker for ITV's current affairs programme Tonight. The appeals produced more than 2,000 calls and tips, all of which went into the HOLMES 2 database.

  One early lead came from Staffordshire Police. They noticed a resemblance to an abduction in their area the previous year, in which a six-year-old girl survived an indecent assault. The offender was still at large. He drove a green Ford Mondeo with number plates stolen in Peterborough, and a similar car had recently been seen in Glatton, Cambridgeshire. The detail was included in an appeal on the BBC's Crimewatch, but it produced no significant development.

  Members of the public also came forward with sightings. Mark Tuck said he drove past the girls on Sand Street in Soham town centre at about 6:30 pm. Their football shirts caught his eye, and he remarked to his wife, Lucy: "Look! There's two little Beckhams over there." About two minutes later, a young woman named Karen Greenwood saw them walking "arm in arm" along College Road. A woman in Little Thetford believed she saw two girls matching their description pass her home the following morning.

  Police also chased reports of a suspicious white van seen in Soham that evening. They seized it from a caravan park in Wentworth on the 7th of August, and the lead came to nothing. On the 12th of August they appealed for the driver of a dark green four-door saloon, possibly a Peugeot 405 or a Vauxhall Vectra. A taxi driver said he saw its driver "thrashing his arms" as he struggled with two young girls inside. This happened on the A142, south of Soham towards Newmarket. The car was last seen turning into the Studlands Park housing estate.

  The next evening, a jogger told police about two mounds of freshly disturbed earth at Warren Hill, just outside Newmarket. He suspected they were graves. An overnight examination showed they were badger setts.

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• 4. The Ditch at Lakenheath

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  At about 12:30 pm on the 17th of August, a 48-year-old gamekeeper named Keith Pryer pushed through an overgrown verge in Suffolk. Several days earlier he had noticed what he later called an "unusual and unpleasant smell" in the area. Now he had come back with two friends to find its source.

  About 600 yards from a partially tarmacked road, near a pheasant pen by the perimeter fence of RAF Lakenheath, Pryer and his companion Adrian Lawrence found the bodies of both girls. They lay side by side in an irrigation ditch about 5 feet deep. The spot was more than 10 miles east of Soham. Lawrence shouted to his girlfriend, Helen Sawyer: "Don't come any closer, Helen! Get back in the van!" Then he reported the discovery to police.

  The girls had been missing for thirteen days. Their remains were charred and in an advanced state of decomposition. Investigators found no clear footprints. They quickly concluded who the victims were likely to be, and that the girls had not died where they lay. Numerous hairs that were later shown to be Chapman's were found on a nearby tree branch.

  The next day, Cambridgeshire Deputy Chief Constable Keith Hodder confirmed the discovery. He said both families had been told. Formal identification would take several days, but investigators were as "certain as they possibly could be" that the bodies were Wells and Chapman. DNA testing confirmed the identification on the 21st of August.

  Two days later, the inquest opened at Shire Hall in Cambridge. Coroner David Morris said the bodies were partially skeletonised and that no precise cause of death could be found for either girl. The most likely cause was asphyxiation. He added that the girls had almost certainly died elsewhere, and that their bodies had been placed in the ditch within 24 hours of death. Forensic ecologist Patricia Wiltshire supported this by studying the nettle shoots at the scene. Her analysis suggested the bodies had been left there almost two weeks earlier.

  On the 24th of August, football clubs across Britain held a minute's silence before their games. An online book of condolence gathered more than 31,000 messages. On the 30th of August, about 2,000 people attended a public memorial service at Ely Cathedral. They included classmates, teachers and the six family liaison officers who had supported the two families around the clock. The Reverend Tim Alban Jones asked: "Would not the best and most lasting memorial to these two lovely young girls be a change for the better in how we behave towards each other?"

  The funerals took place on consecutive days in September 2002, both at St Andrew's parish church. At the families' request, the media did not report on either service. The girls were buried in adjacent graves in Soham's Fordham Road Cemetery, at ceremonies attended only by family and close friends.

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• 5. The Spokesman

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  In the weeks after the disappearance, Ian Huntley reluctantly gave television interviews to outlets including Sky News and the regional programme BBC Look East. By the second week he had become an unofficial spokesman for Soham. He said he wanted to convey the frustration and despair the community felt. To Sky News correspondent Jeremy Thompson he said he held a "glimmer of hope" that the girls would be found safe. He also said he last saw them walking in the direction of a local library.

  He had already given police a version of this. On the 5th of August, the 28-year-old said the girls had stopped at his doorstep the previous afternoon. According to him they were "happy as Larry" and asked whether his partner, Maxine Carr, had won a full-time teaching assistant job at their school. When he told them she had not, one girl said, "Tell her we're sorry." They then walked off along College Street towards a bridge leading to Clay Street.

  Police were suspicious. A single officer searched his house that day and found no incriminating evidence. But clothes were hanging on the washing line even though it had been raining, and the rooms showed signs of heavy cleaning. Huntley said: "Excuse the dining room. We had a flood." The officer did not believe him and noted his agitated manner.

  On the 6th of August, Huntley drove to Grimsby to collect Carr. A neighbour of Carr's mother, Marion Clift, watched the couple standing at the back of their car with the boot open. She described Huntley as "pale, shaking" as he stared into the boot for several moments. Carr stood beside him with her head bowed, weeping. When Huntley noticed Clift, he shut the boot abruptly.

  Carr also spoke to the press during the second week. In a live interview she backed up Huntley's story of the doorstep conversation, saying she had been bathing at the time. She said: "I only wish we had asked them where they were going... if only we knew then what we know now." She described Wells as the "more feminine" girl and Chapman as "more of a tomboy". She showed the reporter a thank-you card that Wells had given her on the last day of the school year. Speaking of Wells in the past tense, she said, "She was just lovely, really lovely." Then she appealed directly to the girls: "Just get on the phone and just come home. Or if somebody's got them, just let them go."

  By then Huntley was losing weight and showing signs of insomnia. He kept asking officers how their enquiries were going and how long DNA evidence could last before it deteriorated. One officer noticed three vertical scratches, each about 3 cm long, on his left jaw. Huntley said his dog had made them. To another officer he said, "You think I've done it? I was the last person to see them!" and then began to weep. He was prescribed anti-depressants on the 13th of August.

  On the 16th of August, twelve days after the disappearance, police questioned Huntley and Carr for about seven hours each. Both gave witness statements and were placed in a safe house in the village of Histon. By then, residents of Grimsby had recognised Huntley from his television interviews and recalled that he had once been accused of rape. Others said Carr had been socialising in Grimsby town centre on the night the girls vanished, not at home in Soham as she had told the media.

  That evening police searched 5 College Close and the grounds of Soham Village College, where Huntley worked. His home had been meticulously cleaned with a "lemony" fluid, yet the search still turned up items of "major importance". In a bin in a hangar at his workplace, officers found the girls' Manchester United shirts, charred and cut. Fibres from the shirts precisely matched samples from Huntley's body and clothing and from his house. His fingerprints were on the bin. His Ford Fiesta had also been thoroughly cleaned. But around the wheel arches and pedals were traces of brick dust, chalk and concrete of the type used to pave the road leading to where the bodies were found. A cover from the rear seat was missing, and the boot lining had been replaced with an ill-fitting piece of household carpet.

  Police arrested Huntley and Carr at 4:30 am on the 17th of August, about eight hours before the gamekeeper's discovery. Huntley refused to answer questions and appeared evasive, confused and detached. He even drooled during questioning, apparently trying to feign mental illness. Carr confessed quickly that she had lied about her whereabouts and about his actions on the 4th of August. She said Huntley had phoned her in Grimsby and told her: "The thing is, Maxine, they came in our house!" He had said the girls came in so that Wells could treat a nosebleed. Carr then agreed to help him build a false story. When detectives told her the bodies had been found and described the evidence against Huntley, she burst into tears and shouted: "No! He can't have been! It can't have been! He hasn't done it!"

  By the 20th of August, police held enough physical evidence to charge Huntley with two counts of murder. He was being held for observation at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire. Carr was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, but not with murder, because police and prosecutors had ruled out any direct role in the killings. On the 16th of January 2003 she faced two further counts of assisting an offender. On remand at Holloway Prison she wrote letters professing her love for Huntley. She cut off contact with him in December 2002.

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• 6. Two Histories

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  Ian Kevin Huntley was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, on the 31st of January 1974, the elder of two sons in a working-class family. His peers remembered him as a timid child, a loner and an attention seeker, and he was a target for bullies. As a teenager he supported Manchester United and joined the Air Training Corps at the urging of his father. The Corps deepened his childhood interest in aeroplanes, and he took up plane spotting. That hobby made him familiar with the area around RAF Lakenheath.

  He left school in 1990 with five GCSE passes and drifted through menial jobs until 1996. In January 1995 he married Claire Evans, whom he had met at a Heinz factory. The marriage collapsed within weeks because of his violence and control. His wife later married his younger brother, Wayne.

  His record with the law shows a pattern of allegations without convictions. In March 1996 he was charged with burglary, and the case was ordered to lie on file. Between 1995 and 1996 he had relationships with teenage girls below the age of consent, and police were told about these three times. No charges followed because the girls would not make complaints. In April 1998 he was arrested on suspicion of rape and not charged. A month later, a second woman accused him, and he was held on remand for a week before prosecutors dropped the case. He was fired from his job and moved back to his mother's home. A rape in July 1999 led police to take a DNA sample from him, but the victim later said he was not her attacker. By 2001, Humberside Police had been told about Huntley on ten occasions, and social services on five.

  Maxine Ann Capp was born in Grimsby on the 16th of February 1977, the younger of two daughters. Her parents separated in 1979, and she grew up in the village of Keelby, raised by her mother and grandparents. She was a timid child with few friends. She was bullied at school and struggled with her weight and with anorexia. She left school in 1993 with no qualifications, but always wanted to be a teacher. In 1996 she earned a diploma in general care and later packed fish at a processing plant. At some point she took the surname Carr, apparently to distance herself from her father.

  They met in February 1999 in a Grimsby nightclub. Within four weeks she had moved into Huntley's flat in Barton-upon-Humber, and by June he had proposed. In public they seemed devoted. In private he was possessive, and he abused her emotionally and physically. She often left to stay with her mother, and he persuaded her to return. Both of them had affairs.

  The couple moved to East Anglia in early 2001. Huntley's father worked as a school caretaker in Littleport, near Ely, and helped him learn of a vacancy at Soham Village College. Huntley applied using the alias Ian Nixon and won the post of senior caretaker in September 2001. No background check was made. His employers helped him obtain the tenancy of 5 College Close, and he began work on the 26th of November. In February 2002 he found Carr part-time work at St Andrew's Primary School. She lied about her qualifications to get it, and she later became a teaching assistant in the Year 5 class. Wells and Chapman were among her pupils, and both were fond of her.

  On the 23rd of July 2002, Carr learned she had not won a full-time post. Holly Wells cried at the news and gave her a hand-drawn card with a smiling face. It read: "I'll miss you a lot. Thank you! C ya around school! Miss ya! Luv Holly."

  By then the relationship was failing. Huntley later admitted he was sexually frustrated and had tried, without success, to persuade a married colleague to date him on the weekend Carr visited her mother. On the 4th of August he phoned Carr at 9:53 am and got no answer. She called back at 6:23 pm, and their four-minute conversation became a row when she said she planned to go out in Grimsby that evening. Huntley hung up in anger. Four minutes later she texted him: "Don't make me feel bad because I'm with my family." He did not reply.

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• 7. The Courtroom

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  Huntley spent almost two months at Rampton Secure Hospital under Section 48 of the Mental Health Act. Consultant forensic psychiatrist Christopher Clark assessed whether he was mentally ill and fit to stand trial. Clark concluded that Huntley was psychopathic but had no major mental or psychotic illness. He was declared fit to stand trial on the 8th of October. At a preliminary hearing at the Old Bailey on the 16th of April 2003, Huntley pleaded not guilty to murder and guilty to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Carr pleaded not guilty to all her charges. On the 9th of June 2003 he tried to take his own life with 29 antidepressants that he had saved up in his cell at Woodhill prison. He was back in his cell within 48 hours.

  The trial opened at the Old Bailey on the 5th of November 2003 before Mr Justice Alan Moses. Prosecutor Richard Latham QC told the jury that the girls had passed Huntley's house by "pure chance", at a time when Carr was away. He said Huntley deliberately lured them in at about 6:37 pm and that both were murdered soon afterwards. Cell site analysis, he said, showed that Huntley switched off Chapman's phone either outside his home or in the grounds of Soham Village College. Phone records and eyewitnesses placed Carr in Grimsby. The ditch near Lakenheath was a spot Huntley knew from plane spotting, and bodies there were unlikely to be found.

  Latham told jurors that the coroner could not give a precise cause of death or say whether the girls had been sexually assaulted. Neither body showed signs of compressive neck injury, knife wounds, drugging or poisoning, so asphyxiation was most likely. On Huntley's claim that the deaths were accidents, Latham said "only one person knows what happened" inside the house. He added: "Ten-year-old girls don't just drop dead." Then he asked: "We pose this question: two of them?"

  On the 24th of November, forensic scientist Helen Davey described tiny traces of blood and saliva on the girls' clothing, footwear and a dishcloth from the hangar at Soham Village College. She found no positive traces of semen, but said the charred and melted state of the items could explain that. A scenes of crime officer described blood spattering in the hallway and at the entrance to the master bedroom, despite Huntley's cleaning.

  On the 1st of December, Huntley took the stand and told a different story. He admitted both girls died in his house but denied that either death was intentional. He said Wells had a mild nosebleed, and that he took the girls to his bathroom, where the bath was full because he had been washing his dog. He claimed he slipped and knocked Wells into the water, and that she drowned as he "panicked and froze". Chapman, he said, screamed "You pushed her!" and he accidentally suffocated her while trying to silence her. His first coherent memory was of sitting on his landing beside Chapman's body. Asked why he never called for help, he said he feared nobody would believe the deaths were accidental, so he decided to hide everything.

  Carr testified on the 3rd of December. She said that when she came home on the 6th of August, she first thought Huntley had "had a woman in the house", because the bedding had been washed and the rooms cleaned. She also noticed a new crack in the bathtub enamel. She said she helped clean because she was "obsessive about tidiness". She insisted she lied to police and reporters only to protect Huntley, who told her he was innocent and feared being "fitted up". Had she believed he killed either girl, she said, she would have been horrified.

  In his closing speech on the 10th of December, Latham called the pair "accomplished liars". He said both girls had to die to serve Huntley's "selfish self-interest", and that "Each was a witness, a potential complaint." Defence counsel Stephen Coward QC accepted that Huntley was physically responsible and deserved punishment. But he argued the prosecution had not proved intent and asked for verdicts of manslaughter.

  The jury began deliberating on the 12th of December and took four days. On the 17th of December 2003, they returned majority verdicts of guilty on both counts of murder. Huntley showed no emotion, while the mothers of the two girls burst into tears. Carr admitted perverting the course of justice but was found not guilty of assisting an offender. The jury accepted that she had lied only to protect a man she then believed to be innocent. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Minutes later, Leslie Chapman told the media: "I think he was a time bomb waiting to go off and both our girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  Why Huntley killed the girls remains unknown. His mother and some police officers suspected a fit of jealous rage, since he suspected Carr of affairs. Before the trial, an eminent criminal psychologist described him as a "latent, predatory paedophile" who acted on opportunity. The prosecution argued a sexual motive was likely. Home Office pathologist Nathaniel Cary told the court the bodies were too decomposed and fire-damaged to show whether either girl had been sexually assaulted. Investigators found no evidence of premeditation.

  On the 29th of September 2005, Mr Justice Moses set Huntley's minimum term at 40 years, meaning no parole eligibility until 2042, when he would be 68. He said: "The order I make offers little or no hope of the defendant's eventual release." He also said a sexual motive was a likelihood but "no more than a likelihood". A whole life tariff was not possible. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 took effect on the 18th of December 2003, one day after the conviction, and applied only to later murders.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  Maxine Carr was released on probation from HMP Foston Hall on the 14th of May 2004. She had served 21 months, including 16 months on remand. She received a secret identity and a new home in an undisclosed location, and was one of four former prisoners in the UK given a new identity on release. On the 24th of February 2005 she won an injunction granting her lifelong anonymity, on the grounds that her life would otherwise be in danger. Tabloid newspapers reported the cost of the order as anywhere from £1 million to £50 million. At least a dozen women were wrongly identified as Carr, and some were persecuted or physically attacked.

  Huntley's years in prison were violent. Within days of his sentencing he told the media: "I'm going to rot inside this place. I'll rot in here, I know it." On the 14th of September 2005, at HM Prison Wakefield, convicted spree killer Mark Hobson scalded him with boiling water. The injuries kept him from the hearing that set his minimum term. He launched a claim for £15,000 in compensation over the prison's duty of care, and he was reportedly awarded £2,500 in legal aid. Huntley moved to HMP Frankland on the 23rd of January 2008. On the 21st of March 2010, convicted armed robber Damien Fowkes slashed his throat and left injuries needing hospital treatment. He sought £20,000 in damages.

  On the 5th of September 2006, Huntley overdosed on antidepressants he had stockpiled. A search of his cell turned up a cassette tape. It contains an account of the killings that differs sharply from his trial testimony. On it he claims he confessed the murders to Carr before their arrest. He says she slapped him and told him to "pull himself together" because she did not want to lose the teaching job she wanted. He also alleges she encouraged him to burn the bodies to destroy evidence. It is believed he agreed to make the recording for a fellow prisoner, who hoped to sell the confession to the media after release, in exchange for the antidepressants.

  In April 2007, Huntley confessed to sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl in 1997. He insisted the murders of Wells and Chapman were not sexually motivated. His victim welcomed the admission and said she felt "a massive sense of relief". But she added: "Yet, I still feel upset that Huntley was left at large, resulting in the deaths of two innocent children."

  On the 26th of February 2026, another inmate attacked Huntley in the workshop at HMP Frankland with an improvised weapon, causing serious head and facial injuries. Tension against him had reportedly grown because he wore a Manchester United shirt like those Wells and Chapman wore when they died. Life support was withdrawn on the 6th of March, and he died the next morning at the age of 52. His mother was the only person to visit him in hospital. Anthony Russell, a convicted murderer and rapist, was charged with Huntley's murder on the 10th of March. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman announced a formal investigation. At the inquest, which opened on the 14th of April, a pathologist found the cause of death was a "blunt head injury". The hearing was suspended pending the criminal case, and Russell was formally charged with murder on the 26th of April.

  In Soham, memory took gentler forms. An orange-petalled rose dedicated to the girls was unveiled by Soham Town Council at the 2003 Chelsea Flower Show. The idea came from a poem called Soham's Rose, which Holly Wells's father read at the Ely Cathedral service. On the 3rd of April 2004, the house at 5 College Close was demolished and the site levelled. All the rubble was taken to undisclosed locations. The plot is now a vacant patch of grass.

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