My chilling cellphone name with Maxine Carr – and a burning query: Why are our taxes STILL paying to guard her?

How many people yearn to wipe the slate clean and begin a new life as someone else?

For most it is but a passing whim, something to ponder at this reflective time of year, perhaps while wistfully mulling over new year’s resolutions.

The theme has been explored many times in fiction, and there are notable real-life examples.

In 1974, John Stonehouse, a Labour minister facing exposure as a spy and financial ruin, left his clothes in a pile on Miami Beach and invited the world, including his wife and three children, to believe he had drowned.

The ruse involved fraud and deception and the law eventually caught up with him.

Yet an exceptional handful of criminals get to vanish with the full blessing of the State – and, most controversially, at taxpayers’ expense.

One such is Maxine Carr, the former fiancee of Ian Huntley, whose murder of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002, horrified the nation.

Emotions ran high at the time and when it transpired Carr, a teaching assistant, helped Huntley cover his tracks by providing a false alibi, she became a hate figure. Her defence counsel called her the most vilified woman in England.

Hyperbole or not, there were concerns that disclosure of her whereabouts would be ‘detrimental’ to her safety and so, on her release from prison after serving only half of her 42-month sentence for perverting the course of justice, she was given a new identity, a new home, a new life.

Keeping her safe and her privacy intact has cost several million pounds, and, more than two decades on, the bill to taxpayers is still rising.

A recent three-part television drama, Maxine, has brought her story to a new generation unfamiliar with the murders.

Too soon for some, it paints a broadly sympathetic portrait of the woman the world last encountered as a 25-year-old, her pale face framed by a wavy French bob haircut, lying through her teeth about her whereabouts on the day Holly and Jessica, both aged ten, disappeared.

Conventional wisdom has it that such renewed focus on one of the most infamous crimes of the past 50 years risks galvanising the baying mob, or at the very least, inflaming social media.

However, the truth is that even Carr herself has conceded that public anger towards her has long cooled. What the TV drama has achieved, though, is to stir debate on lifelong anonymity orders, how they stifle freedom of expression and whether Carr’s should now be revisited.

It reminded me, too, of my own surprise brush with the woman a few months after she began her life in the shadows.

I spoke to Carr after her release in the summer of 2004. She hadn’t planned to give an interview. It was on a whim that she decided to speak out.

I was sitting with her family – her mother Shirley Capp, sister Hayley Hodgson and her husband Graham and two young children – one Saturday afternoon in the lounge of a country hotel in Lincolnshire. Not for the first time that day, Carr rang her sister’s mobile. Hayley left the table to speak to her in private. She returned after a few minutes and handed the phone to me with the unexpected words: ‘She wants to speak to you.’

‘Hello,’ snapped the voice at the end of the line.

Carr expressed angry surprise that her sister was talking to a journalist and declared: ‘I am sick of the rubbish written about me – when will it ever stop?’ She went on a rant about her perceived injustices at the hands of the press and public, and how she was sick of being likened to the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she muttered.

She agreed that at the heart of her problem was a view, or suspicion, in the national consciousness that she’d lied for Huntley because she knew he killed Holly and Jessica.

‘I was stupid and lied but I never had any idea what he had done,’ she said firmly. What she claimed she had done was provide him with an alibi to prevent what she imagined would be harassment by police because he had once before been falsely accused.

‘All this stuff is being written about me. But what about him? He’s being left alone,’ she said.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, she added, Huntley wrote to her, pleading with her to believe he had nothing to do with the murders. ‘Why would he say that if I knew what he had done?’ she asked.

What struck me then was her breezy tone, how she seemed cocky rather than contrite – not once did she express remorse – and most of all how frankly bizarre it was that she was effectively invading her own court-protected privacy.

For not only did a court order prevent any comment on her identity, whereabouts, care or treatment, it also prohibited the media from trying to solicit details of her new life.

Yet here she was talking unbidden to a journalist, moaning that she was working ten hours a day for £50 a week.

Her sister volunteered, meanwhile, that on the rare occasions that Maxine had visited home she arrived ‘in a van with blacked out windows’.

She even revealed the secret five-letter name for her that they had been encouraged to use by the authorities.

With Huntley sentenced to a minimum of 40 years behind bars and his release from jail unlikely any time soon, Carr’s status raises important issues. Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, told The Mail on Sunday that he does not think the courts ‘have got the balance right between the right to privacy and the right to free speech, with the scales gradually tipping towards the former over the last three decades.

‘The impact of banning the media from reporting about the protagonists in high-profile court cases is not to protect their privacy, since their names are all over the internet, but to make it harder for the mainstream media to compete with social media.’

Campaigner Dee Edwards, who co-founded the charity Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, believes it is ‘high time the anonymity order was revisited and challenged’.

She said: ‘What she did was despicable, despite all the attempts to simply portray her as a dupe. I never agreed with the decision to grant her special treatment – she should have taken her chances on her release from prison like every other criminal. In any case, do we really know if she was in that much danger?’

During our telephone conversation all those years ago Carr, now 47, told me that there were times when she felt scared but stressed that the response from many had been surprisingly sympathetic.

‘It is not the case that when I go out I get stick,’ she said. ‘There hasn’t been any hate mobs, despite what papers say. I have been treated quite well. People have been polite and I am grateful for that. An elderly couple recognised me when I was out and came over to say hello and say how the way I had been treated was shocking. That was nice.’

So much for the new identity, I thought. At this point, there had already been much controversy over the anonymity order. Critics claimed it set a worrying precedent and said the public had a right to know about her life.

And some lawyers noted that it marked a further step towards a new privacy law by stealth protecting high-profile criminals from media exposure.

When The Mail on Sunday published the interview, it was suggested that although Carr was not technically in breach of the injunction, she may have breached her licence agreement under which she was released from prison. She has never spoken publicly since. 

With her past excised, she took possession of a new passport, birth certificate, National Insurance number and medical and employment records, and melted away, her new world one of disguises and safe houses fitted with panic buttons and trip-wire alarms.

Over the years, injunction-friendly snippets about her life have occasionally filtered out. This newspaper revealed for instance that Carr sent details of her secret identity to a series of pen friends, rather making a mockery of the court order and raising questions about the £100,000 legally aided case her lawyers fought to safeguard her privacy.

She urged a wealthy Frenchman she had never met to write to her at her safe house. She also gave the same details to an admirer from Brighton with whom she regularly corresponded, and a number of others.

Her life has settled down since then. We know for instance that she married and that some years ago she had a child.

Nicola Wells, the mother of Holly, had addressed this contingency after Carr’s release from prison: ‘I shudder to think it, but one day she might be a mother herself and then she will surely have a greater insight into the hurt she has done.’

We’ll never know of course. There is every likelihood, however, that last week Carr experienced the kind of family Christmas she once hoped to enjoy with Huntley, now 50.

Bitter and envious, it is said he cannot bear to hear Carr’s name mentioned. Despite being closely guarded himself – he is just over half-way through his prison sentence – efforts to keep him safe from harm have been less successful.

In 2010, an armed robber slashed his throat, putting him in hospital, five years after a murderer threw boiling water over him in Wakefield Prison. Only a select few receive the level of protection afforded to his former girlfriend.

In 2003, the privacy of Mary Bell, who killed two boys when she was 11, was protected by an order. But it was specifically to protect the privacy of her daughter, whose life could have been destroyed by her mother’s exposure as a child-killer.

In 2001 lifelong anonymity was granted to two other child-killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, on reaching maturity.

The pair had been convicted of killing the toddler James Bulger in 1993.

But the difference between their order and that of Carr is that Thompson and Venables were first given protection as juveniles: to remove the order when they reached 18 would have been to expose them suddenly to serious harm and to destroy the benefit of their rehabilitation in custody.

Second, their offence was one of the worst on the criminal scale. Carr’s, by comparison, was minor.

Some lawyers have pointed out that had she committed the same offence today rather than 20 years ago, it is unlikely she would have been granted lifelong protection.

In this social media age, they argue, where news, gossip and hearsay move at lightning speed, such wide-ranging anonymity orders will become redundant.

Sometime over the next few days, somewhere in the UK, Maxine Carr will contemplate the new year. Whether she considers herself a lucky woman is anyone’s guess.