The Soham Murders — Talk Murder With Me

I’ve been wanting to write about this case for a while. The stories I write about are by default very sad and tragic, but this one is a little more personal to me because it’s the first murder case that I really remember. Before that I didn’t think much about whether or not the world was a safe place, but seeing the media coverage of this case when I was 8 years old led me to the decision that it is not. There are many good people out there, but there are also those who are undoubtedly evil.

Holly Wells (left) and Jessica Chapman (right), both aged 10 (source: cosmopolitan.com)

The case I’m referring to is the murders of 10 year old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002. It’s also often referred to as the Soham Murders.

The picture above, which was taken the day the girls were murdered, became the image that popped into people’s minds whenever Holly and Jessica were mentioned. It was the main photo used by the media and police as it was a current photo of the two girls.

Holly and Jessica Disappear

On Aug. 4, 2002, Holly and Jessica had been at a barbecue with family and friends and as kids do, they got bored and wandered off at about 6:15pm. Soham, Cambridgeshire is a small town of around 11,000. I live in a town of nearly 17,000, which I consider to be small. You see the same familiar faces almost every day. About 15 minutes later, the girls had disappeared. At 8:30, when their parents went to check on them, they couldn’t find them anywhere. They were reported missing at 9:45pm.

In the days that followed, the case became national news. Appeals were made to the public to come forward if they had any information about Holly and Jessica. Search parties scoured the area for any sign of them. Soham residents were interviewed by the press, expressing their shock at what was going on in their small, quiet town. One of these people, who was interviewed on Sky News and BBC, was 29-year-old Ian Huntley.

Ian Huntley

Huntley was the caretaker at the local secondary school, Soham Village College, living in a cottage on the school grounds at the time of the murders. He lived with his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, a teaching assistant at the school the girls attended, who therefore knew them both personally. Huntley managed to get a job working in a school, despite previous allegations made against him of having sexual relations with underage girls. I say allegations because Huntley was never charged for any of these offenses; even though they were reported to police, the girls in question denied ever having sex with him.

In April 1998, Huntley was arrested on suspicion of raping an 18-year-old woman. While he did not deny having sex with her, he insisted the sex was consensual. He was never charged.

The next month, Huntley was charged and remanded in custody for a week after being accused of beating and raping another 18-year-old woman as she was walking home from a nightclub. As he had with the woman before, Huntley acknowledged that they had had sex, but once again insisted it was consensual. The charges against Huntley were dropped a week later.

Maxine Carr was out of town on August 4 and Huntley was home alone. When he saw Holly and Jessica walking by his house, he invited them in, telling them their teacher Ms. Carr was inside. It is believed that the girls had been in the house for less than 20 minutes when Huntley murdered them.

On her return, Maxine also spoke to the press. In her statement, she pleaded for the girls to “ just come home”, raising suspicions when she referred to Holly Wells in the past tense, saying “she was just a really lovely girl”. During her statement she showed a thank you card Holly had made for her on the last day of school before they went on summer break.

Maxine Carr holding up the card Holly Wells made for her (source: Wikipedia)

Investigations

The police received a number of tips regarding the whereabouts of the girls in the days following their disappearance, however, these showed little promise.

On Aug. 16, twelve days after Holly and Jessica went missing, police questioned Huntley and Carr separately. The questioning lasted seven hours, after which Huntley and Carr remained at the police station while their house and the surrounding school grounds were searched.

What they discovered strongly implicated Huntley in the girls’ disappearance. Amongst the evidence found was the Manchester United shirts they wore the day they went missing, which had likely been cut from the bodies of the girls, shown by the jagged edges of the material. They were discovered burned and disposed of in a bin on the school grounds. This was the first time in the investigation that the police voiced their fear that the girls had been killed.

The next day, Aug. 17, two bodies were discovered at Lakenheath, Suffolk. They were too badly decomposed to be identified at the scene, so were removed from the site for further forensic tests. On Aug. 21, they were officially identified as Holly and Jessica using DNA testing.

Huntley is Charged

Huntley was arrested on Aug. 20, 2002, charged with two counts of murder. During his trial, Huntley told the court the deaths were accidental. He claimed he had asked the girls into his house when he saw Holly had a nosebleed. He had been helping Holly clean up her bloody nose when she accidentally fell into the bath and drowned. When Jessica discovered what was going on, she began to scream and use her phone to call for help. However, before she reached anyone, Huntley panicked and smothered her to death.

Huntley then moved the bodies to the ditch where they were later found. He admitted he later returned to the bodies and set them on fire to try and destroy the forensic evidence. There was, however, evidence of when the bodies had been put in the ditch shown by analysis of the soil chemistry by forensic ecologist Patricia Wiltshire.

Huntley’s claims that the deaths were accidental were unsurprisingly rejected by the jury. On Dec. 17 2003, Huntley was given two life sentences. He will spend at least 40 years in jail, not being eligible for parole until 2042, by which time he will be 68-years-old. It is highly unlikely that he will ever be released from prison.

Maxine Carr was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for perverting the course of justice by providing a false alibi for Huntley, claiming she was with him the night of the murders. Carr was released after serving half of her sentence. On her release, Carr was granted an entirely new identity; she is one of four ex-prisoners in the UK to have been granted this.

Sources

Wikipedia - Soham Murders

Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells: 18 years on from the Soham murders