Damning second in Ian Huntley interview that gave him away, by producer behind it: ED FRASER reveals chilling behaviour face-to-face, Maxine Carr’s weird transformation and their five-word slip of the tongue
I first came face to face with Ian Huntley inside the very school where ten-year-old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were pupils. He was employed as the caretaker, a position that gave him quiet authority and access, but hid the monster within.
Behind Huntley’s composed exterior was a calculating, cold-blooded predator. The girls had been missing for more than a week by the time I met him, and a vast and increasingly frantic police search was underway to find them. Their bright red Manchester United tops – so heartbreakingly recognisable – would become symbols of the unfolding tragedy in Soham.
It was August 2002, and the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham was swarming with journalists and police amid one of the most intensive search operations ever seen in Britain.
Helicopters buzzed overhead and search teams, who’d already spent days scouring the windswept fens, mingled with the friendly townsfolk. Everyone was clinging to the hope the girls would turn up safe and well.
The local school had become the hub of the policing operation – the place from which the investigating team and distraught families broadcast their gut-wrenching appeals for information. How could any of us have known the person holding the vital information was there among us?
At the time, I was a producer with Sky News. I got to work and made it my business to find the last-known person to see the girls alive. When I asked for directions to Huntley’s house, I was surprised to find it lay right next to the school.
My first encounter with the caretaker was in the school hallway as I looked for the press briefing area. Or, rather, he encountered me, blocking my path: ‘What are you doing in here and what do you want?’ he demanded, clearly showing that this was his domain and he was in command.
I explained I was a journalist and he gave his gruff consent to enter.
Ian Huntley, then caretaker at Soham Village College Secondary School, had a mask of composure but beneath that, writes Ed Fraser, was ‘a calculating, cold-blooded predator’
Best friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, pictured in their Manchester United shirts, which Huntley attempted to burn in order to destroy incriminating evidence
Little did I know that I’d been looking into the unflinching eyes of a murderer. I had no idea that the girls’ shirts would be found just a few feet away in the school boiler room, where Huntley had tried to burn them in an attempt to destroy evidence. The shirts would later become a key part of the case against him.
I left Huntley and headed to the house next door. When I rang the doorbell, Huntley’s girlfriend Maxine Carr appeared and stated that she’d been employed as the girls’ teaching assistant. She expressed her shock and sadness about the missing children – crocodile tears it would turn out.
I asked whether her partner, Huntley, might be interviewed and she immediately agreed: ‘Anything to help the girls,’ she said. We made arrangements to return a few hours later.
When we came back, we found Maxine Carr transformed. As I would later testify at the Old Bailey, Carr was wearing fresh new clothes, bright make-up and lipstick and – agonisingly – was holding a handmade card the missing girls had given her at the end of term.
It became obvious we would have to interview Carr, which had clearly been her intention, and started talking – and were immediately drawn to her description of Holly and Jessica in the past tense: ‘They were just lovely girls,’ she said.
It was startling. Could have been a slip of the tongue? Was it worth telling the police?
When, not long afterwards, our presenter and correspondent Jeremy Thompson spoke to Huntley himself, the interview became a matter of significant public record. Huntley was strangely aloof, imperious and clinical in his answers.
When Ed Fraser interviewed Maxine Carr – who, oddly, spoke about the missing girls in the past tense – she was holding a handmade card they had given her at the end of term
Positioned outside the caretaker’s house, Jeremy began by recounting the information we had on the missing girls:
‘How do we know they were here at 6:15pm? Well, we have an eyewitness, Ian Huntley. Ian, you’re the school caretaker, the girls Jessica and Holly would know you, and they saw you on the front doorstep. What went on?’
Huntley replied as follows: ‘I don’t know the girls. I stood on the front doorstep grooming my dog down. She’d run away and come back a bit of a mess. They just came across and asked how Miss Carr was, and she used to teach them at St Andrew’s.
‘And I just said she weren’t very good as she hadn’t got the job. [Carr had failed in a recent application for a full-time teaching assistant role].
‘And they just said, “Please tell her that we’re very sorry,” and off they walked in the direction of the library over there.’
Jeremy told Huntley on air that he was probably one of the last people to see them alive.
‘It seems that way,’ came the reply.
The very next day, amid growing suspicion – based partly on the way they behaved in interviews such as ours – Huntley and Carr were arrested for questioning and released on bail.
That night we decided to phone Maxine Carr’s mobile. Jeremy tried to speak to her but the controlling Huntley took the phone and insisting they were doing just fine.
In a revealing interview, Huntley admitted talking with the girls on the front doorstep of his house (pictured), which was just round the corner from their school
In court Huntley showed ‘no indication of remorse or understanding of the devastation he had caused’, says Ed Fraser
Teaching assistant Carr was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice for helping cover up her boyfriend Huntley’s crimes
The following morning, August 17, they were rearrested – and this time charged.
The bodies of the two girls were found that day. They’d been discovered by a dog walker in Fenland, in a stream near a large American airbase – a secluded area which, as it would later turn out, was known to Huntley. For those of us involved, news of the discovery was a moment we will never forget.
The next time I saw the accused couple was in Number One Court in the Old Bailey, where I would testify on oath about the striking discrepancies in the accounts of Huntley and Carr as they sought to evade justice.
Ed Fraser testified against Huntley and Carr in the Old Bailey
Huntley sat impassionate in the dock, the embodiment of evil. He stared at me with no indication of remorse, or understanding of the devastation he had caused.
His partner in crime, Carr, was more animated and seemed to follow the proceedings in detail.
She watched carefully as I gave my evidence in the tiny courtroom, seeming to present herself as a wronged and innocent party. But she would be found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice for helping cover Huntley’s crimes.
Huntley has never explained his actions – an additional cruelty for the girls’ families – and I refuse to feel any pity for him. He showed not an ounce of human emotion, which left me in no doubt about my own verdict: that Huntley is a dangerous psychopath who deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
- Ed Fraser is the Managing Editor of Channel 4 News and was at the time a producer at Sky News.
