Journalist Brian Farmer was the first reporter to interview Ian Huntley before the then Soham school caretaker was arrested on suspicion of murdering Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman
The first journalist to speak with Ian Huntley before his arrest on suspicion of killing two 10-year-olds has revealed what prompted him to alert police about the former school caretaker.
Reporter Brian Farmer, who was employed by the Press Association in East Anglia at the time and had been covering the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman on August 4 2002, told BBC News he approached Huntley after officers released a list of final sightings of the girls.
He spoke with Huntley, then 28, and his girlfriend Maxine Carr, then 25, who worked as a teaching assistant in Holly and Jessica’s primary school class at St Andrews Primary School in Soham, Cambridgeshire.
“I knew where the caretaker’s house was, and it’s quite nearby, and also he seemed to be the last man to see them,” Mr Farmer told BBC News on Saturday, when Huntley died following an attack at high-security prison HMP Frankland.
“Though, it’s always possible that the last man to see missing children or missing women is the culprit. So for those two reasons, I went to knock on the door.”
The journalist said he was struck by the fact that Carr and Huntley required some convincing before agreeing to speak with him.
“What first took me by surprise was that both Maxine Carr and Ian Huntley seemed a little reluctant to let me in to talk about it, and it took a little bit of persuasion for them to allow me to go in and sit down and talk.”
Mr Farmer, who is now employed by the BBC, revealed that Huntley had described washing his Alsatian, Sadie, on a Sunday evening following a muddy walk, claiming Holly and Jessica had enquired about their teaching assistant.
“It wasn’t what they’d said that I thought was strange. It was what they hadn’t said,” Mr Farmer remarked about the interview conducted on August 8 2002.
“They didn’t seem to have mentioned the dog, and I couldn’t really believe that there would be two 10–year-old girls anywhere on Earth who would be wandering about carefree on a summer’s day, who come across a man washing the dog with soap and water, who wouldn’t see the dog.
“There were no: ‘How cute is that dog’ or oohs and aahs. Nothing like that.
“I simply didn’t believe what he was saying. It simply didn’t seem possible.”
Mr Farmer’s suspicions deepened when, after questioning Carr about whether the girls had learnt about stranger danger at school, or how they might respond if a man opened a door and invited them inside, Huntley interjected to provide an answer, despite supposedly not knowing the girls.
He recalled: “To my astonishment, really, Ian Huntley answered the question, and he said that Holly would probably go quietly, but Jessica would put up a fight.
“I didn’t show it at the time, but I couldn’t understand how he could know that.
“He was the caretaker at a secondary school, a school they didn’t go to. Their parents might know how they’d react. Maybe a teacher could speculate on how they’d react.
“But how could the caretaker at another school possibly know how they’d react?”.
“I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that I didn’t think he was telling the truth.”
In his contemporaneous report, Mr Farmer documented Huntley breaking down in tears whilst discussing the girls’ “disappearance”.
“It seems they have just disappeared off the face of the earth,” the killer informed Mr Farmer.
“How can two girls go missing in broad daylight, then nothing? No sighting. No nothing. It beggars belief.”
Following his interview with the pair, Mr Farmer filed his article before telephoning his elder brother, a former senior detective.
“My brother Derek told me that I should contact the police and he agreed that what Huntley had said was very strange and maybe even grounds for arrest if he’d been there himself,” Mr Farmer said.
“So, with his advice, I contacted Cambridgeshire Police and told them why I thought what Huntley had said was strange and not true.”
The pair were arrested on August 17 2002.
Mr Farmer was summoned to provide testimony at Huntley and Carr’s Old Bailey trial in 2003.
Huntley denied murdering the two 10-year-olds but was found guilty following the proceedings.
Carr provided Huntley with a fabricated alibi and received 21 months imprisonment for perverting the course of justice.
She now lives under a fresh identity.
The ex-school caretaker’s life sentence stipulated he must serve a minimum of 40 years for the Soham killings, meaning he would not qualify for parole until the 2040s. Mr Farmer stated: “I’ve been thinking today about the parents, not about me or about my experiences.
“It simply can never go away for them, and this must be a day that’s just beyond belief for them, isn’t it, that they have to go through it again.”