Maxine Carr’s world: Rumours, false sightings and vigilante assaults

The new identity of Maxine Carr who lied to help her Soham child killer lover Ian Huntley still remains a closely guarded secret while the cost of protecting her has reportedly soared to well over £2.5million.

Taxpayers are said to have paid out for the former teaching assistant to change her appearance with cosmetic surgery and even £8,000 of dental work since she was released from prison just over 20-years-ago.

Carr, 47, became one of the UK’s most hated women after she initially gave a bogus alibi for her fiancée Huntley when he first came under suspicion of murdering ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.

Despite having a lifetime High Court anonymity order banning reporting of her new name or whereabouts, she is thought to have been forced to move ten times to new safe houses to stop her true identity being exposed.

The order means it is impossible to confirm alleged sightings of Carr around the country or reports ten-years-ago which suggested she was living in a British seaside town after getting married to a ‘besotted’ husband.

Some reports have suggested she enjoys quiet walks in the countryside and has a school age son who will potentially grow up without ever knowing about her past life with Huntley.

Public interest in Carr’s new identity has failed to abate since former school caretaker Huntley was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum 40 years behind bars for the horrific murder of Holly and Jessica in Soham, Cambridgeshire.

Claims about where she might be living, and even the name she is using, have regularly surfaced on social media over the years, although many of the reports have been proved to be unfounded and based on fake rumours.

More than a dozen innocent women are said to have been driven from their homes across Britain after being wrongly accused by vengeful mobs of being Carr since she was released from Foston Hall prison in Derbyshire in May 2004.

The killing of Holly and Jessica was thrown into the spotlight yet again this week with the screening of the Channel 5 documentary The Soham Murders Trial, using transcripts, testimony of those in court and reconstruction of key moments.

The two girls disappeared on Sunday 4 August, 2002, when they left a family barbecue, dressed in their Manchester United shirts, to buy sweets from a vending machine at their local sports centre in Soham.

The pair were on their way home when Huntley lured them into his house, saying they could see Carr who knew the girls through her job as a teaching assistant at St Andrew’s Primary School in Soham where they were pupils.

In reality, he was alone at the house as Carr was spending the weekend visiting her mother 100 miles away in her hometown of Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and he was able to murder the pair within an hour.

Huntley made media appeals for their safe return as a desperate search for the girls, involving up to 400 police officers, got underway in the countryside around sleepy Soham.

He admitted being the last person to see the girls when he briefly spoke to them on his doorstep while washing his dog outside, telling police that they both appeared to be ‘happy as Larry’.

Carr later cleaned their house and lied about her whereabouts over the weekend, telling police that she had been at home with Huntley, leading to police initially virtually eliminating him as a suspect.

She also told journalists that she had been in the bath when he had spoken briefly to the girls, and that she had also burned the roast potatoes while cooking Sunday lunch.

The decomposed bodies of the girls were finally found on August 17 in a ditch around ten miles east of Soham in woodland near RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk. Post mortems revealed that that their likely cause of death was asphyxiation.

Inconsistencies in Huntley’s account led to his eventual arrest, and, on December 17 2003, he was found guilty of their murder after a trial at the Old Bailey.

Huntley claimed at his trial that Holly died accidentally after falling into the bath at the house after she suffered a nose bleed. He said he then unwittingly smothered Jessica when he tried to silence her screams.

Carr who was emotionally abused by Huntley during their relationship admitted attempting to pervert the course of justice, but was cleared of assisting an offender after insisting that she did not know Huntley had murdered the girls.

She claimed she had only lied to stop him being unfairly accused as she believed he was innocent at the time, despite him being earlier accused of rape and underage sex offences.

Carr was jailed for 42 months, and was released with her new identity after serving half her sentence.

High Court judge Mr Justice Eady granted a temporary anonymity order on her release, ruling that Carr’s identity should be kept secret to protect her safety.

The order was given an indefinite extension and made permanent nine months later after the judge ruled it was ‘necessary to protect life and limb and psychological health’.

Carr’s QC, Edward Fitzgerald, argued that there was an ‘overwhelming case’ for making the injunction ‘against the world at large’, saying: ‘There is a real and significant risk of injury or of worse – killing – if the injunction is not granted.’

He claimed the order was ‘amply justified’ following previous anonymity orders granted for child killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson who murdered James Bulger, and Mary Bell.

But it was reported in November 2004 that Carr had been forced to move from her Midlands safe house she was staying in after it was discovered by a baying mob.

Carr was reported to have had cosmetic surgery, and changed her hair colour to disguise herself after being given her new identity

It was also claimed that she asked to have her breasts enlarged on the NHS for mental health reasons, claiming she was depressed because they were too small.

The years after her release were marked by vigilantes repeatedly falsely accusing women in their communities of being Carr, in what was dubbed a modern day witch hunt.

At least a dozen innocent victims were forced to flee from their neighbourhoods despite many having no resemblance to the ex-teaching assistant and being able to prove who they were.

The ordeal of some of those being wrongly accused was revealed in 2007 in the Channel 4 documentary ‘First Cut: Being Maxine Carr’.

One woman told how vandals repeatedly threw bricks and rocks through the windows of her home in York, leaving her terrified.

The woman said she moved to York but gossip soon spread that she was actually Carr because of her southern accent.

She told the documentary makers: ‘My immediate reaction when one of the neighbours told me there was a rumour I was Maxine Carr was one of total disbelief.

‘It just felt like molten lead had been poured into my stomach. It felt awful. When a rock was thrown through our window, I was in complete shock.

‘I spent every night watching out of the bedroom window, trying to see if there were gangs approaching the house.

‘I tried staring back but that made them stare even more. I tried ignoring them but still they stared.

‘You should not have to justify your existence in your own home. I was doing a postgraduate research degree which was why I was working at home.’

The victim described how the vandal attacks became increasingly serious.

She added: ‘Somebody put a brick through the front door. The sound of that was horrific, the smash was just awful. The police really stepped up the protection for me then.’

The woman said she went round to the neighbours’ homes with a community support officer to try to convince them she was not Carr.

She said: ‘Unfortunately, most people just didn’t believe it. They said there’s no smoke without fire.’

Describing a third attack on her home, she said: ‘The window was double-glazed so they had to have had incredible determination to put the window through.

‘The attacks were escalating in violence and that was when I decided I could not take it any more. For the sake of my health, I had to leave, and that’s what I did.’

Other women accused of being Carr included a department store worker in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, who was also interviewed for the documentary, a café waitress from South Wales, a housewife from East Kilbride, a legal secretary in Scotland, a checkout worker at an Asda in the Midlands and a librarian on the Isle of Wight.

The Daily Mail revealed in January 2008 that Carr had ‘blossomed’ after regaining her health from an eating disorder, and had got engaged to a new boyfriend from a respected farming family.

The couple were said to be living 60 miles apart at the time while her fiancée was renovating a house in his spare time for them to move in together.

A source said at the time that the pair had met each other’s families and that her boyfriend had accepted her past.

The source said at the time: ‘Maxine is engaged and has the ring to show for it… Her fiancé is a nice man from a decent family.’

They added: ‘It is a big step for both of them. For the last couple of years they have just been trying to get on with what they feel is right and live out of the media spotlight.

‘They just like doing normal things together like going for walks in the countryside. It has grown stronger despite the fact that they live apart and have to make long journeys to see each other. They both have full-time jobs but manage to make the relationship work.’

The Sun reported in May 2014 that Carr had married her fiancée, wearing a £2,000 ivory-coloured wedding dress in a ‘lavish’ ceremony at a luxury hotel venue which could not be identified due to her anonymity order.

It is not known if her new husband was the same man identified as her fiancée six years later.

Carr was said to have spent the morning of her wedding having her hair and make-up done before being given away by her mother who was jailed herself for six months in 2004 after intimidating a witness who gave evidence against her daughter.

The couple exchanged vows in front of a registrar before signing a marriage certificate, and joining family and friends on a patio where they drank £10 bottles of sparkling wine. They later had a three course wedding breakfast.

A source stated at the time that her husband was ‘absolutely besotted’ with her.

It was claimed in 2014 that Carr was living in a seaside town, provoking comment on social networking site that it was being used as a ‘dumping ground for criminals’.

The town was dubbed as the ‘monsters-by-the-sea resort’ after it was revealed to be home to two other reviled female criminals – Karen Matthews who faked the kidnapping of her daughter Shannon and Tracey Connelly who was jailed for causing or allowing the death of her abused son Peter, known as Baby P.

One person asked online at the time: ‘What did we do to deserve them?’ while another resident said: ‘It’s incredible, even bizarre that they are all living here. Everyone is talking about it.’

The Sunday People report claimed that Carr was working for ten hours a week in one of the resort’s shops.

One person who claimed he was served by her said: ‘It suddenly clicked who she was. She is very distinctive.’

The Sun claimed in 2020 that Carr was outed again on social media with her alias, location and a recent photo being reportedly posted and then deleted.

Police were said to have moved her to a safe house after the leak and arrangements were made to relocate her, her husband and son

A Channel 5 mini-series called Maxine, screened in 2002, documented the Soham murders through her eyes.

The drama starred Jemma Carlton as Carr and Line of Duty’s Scott Reid star as Huntley, but some critics slammed the decision to make the show so close to the 20th anniversary of the murders

The drama recreated a scene where Carr described the missing girls in the past tense, saying: ‘They were ever so funny. They were brilliant, they were kind to everybody.’

The police were then heard speculating that she might be keeping a secret, with a detective pondering: ‘She used past tense because she knows they’re dead?’

In further chilling scenes, Carr was seen practicing looking serious in the mirror after Huntley shouted at her: ‘You tell me don’t look so guilty. You don’t look so cheery!’

Huntley finally admitted in a 2018 tape leaked from prison that he was responsible for the double killings.

He said: ‘I know the people of Soham took me into their community, they trusted me, gave me a job and a home, and I betrayed them in the worst possible way.

‘And I am sorry for what I have done, sorry for the pain I have caused to the families and friends of Holly and Jessica, for the pain I have caused my family and friends, and for the pain I have caused the community of Soham.

‘I am genuinely, genuinely sorry and it breaks my heart when it is reported I have no remorse, that I relish something. I do not.’

He added: ‘I can’t change anything. I cannot remove that day from history, what I have done. I know those girls would be 26 this year with families of their own, jobs and lives. I thought about them when they were turning 21 and when they were turning 18.

‘I know no matter what I say that people are not going to think any better of me … but I would much rather people have the truth about how I feel. I have nothing to gain by saying these things.

‘I know I am never getting out. I have accepted that from day one.’

Huntley said he did not want to be freed from prison and insisted he will not apply for parole out of ‘consideration’ for his victims’ families.