In the dining room of Kevin and Nicola Wells’s house is a cabinet containing a porcelain box that bears the name of their daughter Holly. Inside is a lock of her butter-coloured hair.
It was salvaged by the forensics team which recovered her body from the shallow Fenland grave where Ian Huntley dumped her, alongside her friend Jessica Chapman. He burned the girls to cover his tracks but the flames spared just enough hair to make a small, slim plait.
Kevin and Nicola showed it to me 22 years ago when I met them for the first time, sitting on the floor of their living room, looking at pictures of Holly, examining her favourite toys and trinkets, and admiring her paintings, the fragments of a life barely begun.
Of all the things we spoke about back then it was that lock of hair which touched me the most; the sense of evil done and innocence destroyed, and of a memory reclaimed by calm, courageous and loving parents.
Huntley was convicted in December 2003. In the hours afterwards I remember driving through a countryside lit up by Christmas lights to their home in Soham – Holly’s home – and saying the only thing I could: ‘I’m so sorry.’ With the world’s media camped outside, Kevin and Nicola asked me to move in and sleep in their spare room so that the three of us, as a team, could tell Holly’s story for this newspaper. Those next days of talking and typing, of drinking tea and eating the sandwiches which Nicola kept coming out of the kitchen, count as some of the most intense of my long career.
The schoolgirls Jessica Chapman, left, and Holly Wells, right, who were murdered in 2002
Everything they shared was shattering. How Kevin had desperately cycled around, peering through people’s curtains in the hope he’d see Holly bound and gagged and tied to a chair ready for him to rescue her.
How he had a terrible recurring nightmare that she had died second, after witnessing Jessica’s murder. How both he and Nicola had initially struggled to persuade police their obedient and well-organised daughter hadn’t run away after a row, or gone missing as a prank. At that time Nicola would have seen Huntley hang. Kevin, a practising Christian, could not agree.
But Soham was never just about what happened to Holly and Jessica in that heatwave summer of 2002. The story was also about what happened next, after Huntley’s conviction, to the ordinary family whose tragedy had led TV news bulletins and filled newspapers for a year-and-a-half.
At that point, Kevin and Nicola told me, they could still stun a restaurant into silence just by walking in and asking for a table. This weekend, with the death of Huntley, they are back in a spotlight they have never sought.
The last time they spoke publicly was when they talked to me to mark the tenth anniversary of the murders in 2012. There was a cacophony of coverage and they wanted their voices to be heard.
Kevin and Nicola Wells in 2012 after their last public engagement marking 10 years since Holly’s death
Nicola with daughter Holly. She and Kevin showed me Holly’s pictures, favourite toys and trinkets
It was an interview I was overjoyed to do because I knew that the Wells family, against seemingly impossible odds, were happy and calm, united, and purposeful. They had fought to stay happily married, to parent their surviving child, Oliver, and to remain in Soham. Kevin had given a year of his life to helping the police create an IT system and best practices which would ensure that a man such as Huntley (under suspicion of sexual offences but not at that point convicted) would never secure a job working with children. Kevin also quietly become the founding patron of a charity for young people who’d been bereaved.
‘Murder has the capacity to destroy more lives than the one taken,’ he told me over a pub lunch with Nicola in Soham.
‘I recognised that from the start so I tried to take control, to make plans and to exert positive thought. I clung to my family, my community, my work, sometimes to God and sometimes to a late night tumbler of whisky.
‘I chose to believe in the future, a future that I could craft from the life we once had. Really, all I wanted was for us to be the ones who’d make it out the other side.’
Huntley broke their hearts, upended everything they’d built together since they were teenage sweethearts and stole their sense of what their mid years and later life would look like.
But he has not destroyed them. I bump into them occasionally at our local racecourse, strolling in the sunshine, enjoying each other’s company and the anonymity offered by the passage of almost a quarter of a century.
They survived, and I am glad.