Ian Huntley

1974-present

Convicted murderer Ian Huntley, 49, was in the news for most unusual reasons in September 2023, after comedian and actor Russell Brand was accused of rape, sexual misconduct, and emotional abuse by at least four different women. Among the allegations to emerge against Brand was that the comedian made jokes about Huntley and made up a song about him while in the middle of a threesome with two women in 2008. According to The Times, Brand’s unnamed accuser said the names of the two women sounded vaguely similar to “Holly and Jessica”—the names of the 10-year-old girls who Huntley killed in 2002—prompting Brand to make jokes about Huntley during the sexual encounter. She said Brand referenced Huntley “quite a few times, like in a joking way, but also made up a whole song about it.”

Ian Huntley was arrested for and convicted of the 2002 Soham murders in England. His victims were two 10-year-old girls named Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Their disappearance that August set off a highly publicized search. Huntley was arrested weeks later, convicted of both murders in late 2003, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He narrowly avoided a life sentence due to the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, which took effect one day after his conviction.

FULL NAME: Ian Huntley
BORN: January 31, 1974
BIRTHPLACE: Grimsby, England
SPOUSE: Claire Evans (1995-1999)
CHILD: Samantha
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aquarius

Ian Kevin Huntley was born on January 31, 1974, into a working class home in Grimsby, England, in North East Lincolnshire. He is the first son of Kevin and Linda Huntley. An asthma sufferer, Huntley had a turbulent time at school, as he was often the target of school bullying. The problem continued to escalate until, at age 13, he was forced to change schools. He left school in 1990 and declined to continue his studies, despite reasonable grades, choosing instead to get a job.

In the years after he left school, Huntley already seemed to have developed an interest in young girls, and he was seen out with 13-year-old girls when he was 18. In December 1994, Huntley, then 20, met 18-year-old Claire Evans. The two embarked on a whirlwind romance and married within weeks. The marriage was short-lived, however, and Evans left Ian within days of their wedding, choosing to move in with Huntley’s younger brother, Wayne, instead. An enraged Huntley refused to grant his wife a divorce until 1999, preventing her from wedding his brother.

Following the collapse of his marriage, Huntley became more nomadic, moving from one rented flat to the next and changing jobs frequently. He had a succession of relationships, one of which was with a 15-year-old girl, with whom he fathered a daughter in 1998. (In 2016, his daughter, Samantha Bryan, revealed that she had accidentally discovered the identity of her biological father while working on a school project when she was 14.) A subsequent enquiry revealed that, between 1995 and 2001, Huntley had sexual contact with 11 underage girls, ranging between 11 and 17 years old.

On January 7, 1998, Huntley appeared in court after being charged with robbing a neighbor’s house. That May, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old girl in Grimsby. Neither case proceeded to court due to lack of evidence, but the rape allegation tainted him substantially.

In February 1999, he met 22-year-old Maxine Carr at a nightclub, and they moved in together after four weeks. The relationship endured despite some turbulent arguments, and in 2001, they moved to the town of Littleport, where Huntley took a job at a local center as the manager of a team of caretakers.

In September 2001, he applied for the post of caretaker at Soham Village College. Despite his history of sexual contact with minors, he was awarded the position in November. The school’s principal later admitted he didn’t check Huntley’s references. Carr was employed as a teaching assistant at the local primary school.

Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman

In the early evening of August 4, 2002, two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, were on their way to buy sweets when they walked past Huntley’s rented house near Soham Village College. Huntley saw them and asked them in, claiming that Carr, who the girls knew through her work at their school, was also at home. Carr, in fact, was away visiting relatives at the time, and within a short time of Wells and Jessica having entered the house, Huntley had murdered both of them.

Huntley used his car to transport their bodies some 20 miles away, where he dumped them in a ditch and set them alight, in a bid to destroy the forensic evidence.

Later that evening, Chapman and Wells were reported missing, and a police search began at around midnight. Over the next two weeks, the search escalated to become one of the most widespread and publicized in British history.

Several witnesses came forward, including Huntley, who claimed to have seen the girls shortly before they disappeared. His home was searched routinely in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Huntley also granted television interviews to the press, and his unusual interest, together with his emotional involvement, made investigators suspicious. Their hunch led to a wider search that revealed the half-burned remains of Wells and Chapman’s shirts, in a storage building at Soham College where Huntley was employed.

Following the find, police arrested Huntley and Carr on suspicion of murder on August 17. Later that same day—13 days after the girls had disappeared—a game warden discovered the girls’ bodies near RAF Lakenheath, an airbase in Suffolk that was close to Huntley’s father’s home.

Subsequent autopsy reports on the girls listed their probable cause of death as asphyxiation, but their bodies were too badly decomposed to establish whether they had been sexually assaulted.

The parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman—Kevin and Nichola Wells and Les and Sharon Chapman—arrive for the first day of Ian Huntley’s murder trial in November 2003.

Despite Huntley’s attempts to destroy forensic evidence, extensive hair and fiber residue remained, linking Huntley to the girls. Huntley was formally charged with the girl’s murders and sectioned under the Mental Health Act at Rampton Hospital, pending a hearing to establish if he was fit for trial. Carr was arrested for assisting an offender, as well as conspiring to obstruct the course of justice, as she had initially provided Huntley with a false alibi for the time of their disappearance.

The trials of Huntley and Carr opened, to worldwide media interest, in London on November 5, 2003. Huntley was faced with two murder charges, while Carr was charged with perverting the course of justice and assisting an offender.

The prosecution entered exhaustive evidence linking Huntley to the girls, though he previously denied having any knowledge of their murders. Then, three weeks into the trial, Huntley suddenly changed his story. He admitted the girls had died in his house, but he claimed that both deaths were accidental. The defense called Huntley as their first witness, and he described how he had accidentally knocked Wells into the bath while helping her control a nosebleed and had accidentally suffocated Chapman when she started to scream and he tried to silence her. On cross-examination, the prosecution described his latest version as “rubbish.”

Carr’s testimony began three days later. She claimed she had no control over the events on the day of the murder and that had she known of Huntley’s murderous intent, she would never have lied to protect him.

Following her testimony, the prosecution presented their closing statements, claiming that both Carr and Huntley were convincing liars and that Huntley’s motive for murdering the girls was sexual, though physical evidence of assault was impossible to prove.

After five days of deliberation, the jury rejected Huntley’s claims that the girls had died accidentally and, on December 17, 2003, returned a majority verdict of guilty on both charges. Huntley was sentenced to life imprisonment, but there was a delay on the setting of his sentence, as the 2003 Criminal Justice Act took effect one day after his conviction.

At a hearing on September 29, 2005, a judge ruled that the Soham murders didn’t meet the criteria for a “whole-life” sentence that under the new act was reserved for sexual, sadistic, or abduction cases. Instead, the judge imposed a 40-year prison sentence, which offers Huntley very little hope for release. Huntley didn’t actually attend his sentencing hearing, because 15 days earlier he had been attacked by another inmate at Belmarsh Prison and scalded with boiling water.

Carr was cleared of assisting an offender but found guilty of perverting the course of justice and jailed for three and a half years. She was freed under police protection in May 2004, as she had already spent 16 months on remand pending the trial. Carr was given a new identity on her release and, on February 24, 2005, was granted an indefinite order protecting her new identity by the High Court on the basis that her life would be in danger were her new identity to be revealed.

A number of investigations, launched by then Home Secretary David Blunkett, looked into the failures of the police and other social and vetting agencies that should have stopped Huntley sooner. These investigations identified system-wide communication and intelligence-sharing errors, which led to the suspension and early retirement of the chief of Humberside Police.

Candles are lit in remembrance of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells inside St Andrew’s Church on August 18, 2002, in Soham, Cambridgeshire.

Since being jailed, Huntley has reportedly admitted to his father that he lied when giving evidence at his trial, saying that he killed Chapman to prevent her from calling for help on her mobile phone, rather than suffocating her accidentally as he claimed in court.

On July 23, 2004, Carr’s mother, Shirley Capp, was sentenced to six months in jail for intimidating a witness during the trial. Capp’s neighbor Marion Westerman had told police that she had seen a crying Carr and Huntley looking in the boot of a car outside Carr’s mother’s house, shortly after Wells and Chapman had gone missing. Capp’s threats to Westerman had nearly resulted in her retracting her statement at the time, instead of testifying in court.

On September 5, 2006, Huntley was rushed to the hospital after being found unconscious in his prison cell. He was taken to Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield to receive treatment for a suspected drug overdose and was returned to prison the next day. Following the incident, the Home Office released a statement to the media:

“Huntley continues to be managed according to Prison Service policy on the prevention of suicide and self-harm. In particular he will be subject to Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork procedures through which his risk will be continually assessed. The Prison Service works to minimize the risk of any prisoner taking their own life, but it cannot eliminate that risk entirely.”

Huntley had been considered a suicide risk in 2003 after he took 29 antidepressant pills that he had hidden away in a box of teabags.

In 2007, Huntley confessed to the 1997 sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl. A year after, in 2008, he was relocated to Frankland Prison. During his incarceration, Huntley reportedly has been attacked by fellow inmates, including an incident of having his throat slashed by Damien Fowkes in 2011.

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