Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley. Nathan Yates
whom they knew and trusted. Only hardened policemen and reporters thought there was something odd about Ian Huntley’s part in the story.
Privately, there were many, including the parents, who had a gut feeling from the beginning that this was a case of kidnapping. Experienced policemen and journalists at the scene knew it was unlikely the girls would ever be found alive. As the days ticked by, those uncomfortable private views came more and more to the forefront of people’s minds. Yet still, just under a fortnight after Holly and Jessica had vanished, there was the temptation to hope against hope. When Keith Pryer found the bodies in the ditch, the hope shared by millions was finally demolished. All the theories had turned out to be wrong, all the searching had come to nothing. It was a sickening blow, and it is little wonder that the man who suffered it first-hand felt physically ill.
Thousands of people from all over the world had been sending in their messages of support for the families of Holly and Jessica. Soon they would be sending their messages of mourning instead, either by email or by letter or in the form of bunches of flowers. The bouquets would pile high in the grounds of St Andrew’s Church in Soham, in scenes reminiscent of the public mourning for Princess Diana or the Queen Mother.
For Keith and Brian, as for others involved in this extraordinary case, its most puzzling and perhaps most disturbing feature was the senseless savagery of the murders, a savagery cloaked in a sick appearance of care. Someone had committed a double child murder, a crime which could hardly be surpassed in its gruesome and callous nature. Yet this same person had driven these girls to an idyllic spot in the countryside and laid them to rest side by side. It would later emerge that that someone had also posed as the girls’ friend, almost like an older brother, and that his girlfriend, who helped conceal his guilt, was regarded as a kind of sister to them.
Those responsible were not paedophiles who snatched the girls from the street and bundled them into the back of a van, but a young man and woman who knew them and their families, who were well thought of in the local community. These were the disturbing paradoxes of a killer who acted as though he cared, of a caretaker who killed.
The man responsible for this terrible act, Ian Huntley, was being held at a police station in Ely, Cambridgeshire, when Keith Pryer made his discovery. Huntley was trying to convince officers that he was a man so innocent the accusations against him were driving him mad. The 28-year-old caretaker was dribbling, foaming at the mouth and crying incessantly during questioning. He hardly spoke a word, and the sounds he did make were gibberish. From the moment he came under suspicion, Huntley denied all knowledge of the girls’ disappearance, a façade of innocence which he kept up right through his initial court appearances. Under repeated questioning by officers both before and after his arrest, he continued to claim he had done nothing to hurt the girls.
The appearance of the man languishing in the cells accused of murder betrayed nothing of his lethal nature. He was unremarkable to look at, of medium height and build, with close-cropped dark hair and skin which was also dark but without the healthy glow of a tan. It had an ashen tinge which could have been an indication of infrequent washing. A stubbly growth of beard grew in a patchy fashion at the bottom of his rounded cheeks and on the front of his chin. His unkempt appearance showed the dire straits in which the caretaker found himself. According to those close to him, he was normally very concerned about the way he looked, to the point of being vain. A former colleague from the Heinz factory in his home town of Grimsby remembers: ‘He looked much smarter than the others, even at work. You never saw him wearing old tracksuits and stuff like that, it was always cord trousers and shirts. When he went out on a Saturday night he made a real effort. He saw himself as a ladies’ man.’ Huntley’s habits were to bathe and shave every morning, clean his teeth twice a day and always keep his hair neatly cut, short but not spiky. His dirty-looking skin had nothing to do with lack of hygiene.
Several of Huntley’s many conquests had thought him quite good-looking, in a bland way. The circular face held regular features, and his active life had kept him slim. But what distinguished him from others was less his facial landscape than a permanent look of distance, or even hurt, in his eyes. They were, according to one former girlfriend, the eyes of a wounded animal. ‘At the beginning I thought he had sensitive eyes, but it was really more that he always looked like he felt sorry for himself,’ the woman, now 26, said. ‘The way he would look at me reminded me of a deer or a cow. But when he was mad about something or he wanted to tell me what to do, they were different. He could change completely, so he was really glaring at me. It was scary.’
Since Huntley’s arrest, many have remarked that this split personality was captured in one telling photograph which shows the killer posing in the grounds of Soham Village College. Huntley looks straight into the camera, with an expression which at first sight appears sad and concerned. But detectives noticed a strange quality about the picture. One explained: ‘If you cover the right side of it with your hand and look into his right eye he’s got a look of being sorry for himself. If you cover the left side of the photo and look into his left eye, there’s this expression of absolute cruelty. The first time I did this, the effect was so striking it made me jump.’
After murdering Holly and Jessica 13 days earlier, Huntley’s eyes had become rimmed by deep black shadows, a sign, perhaps, that he hadn’t been getting much sleep. He had lost weight, not more than a few pounds but enough from his already quite spare frame to make his trousers loose around his waist. According to his own version of events, he was being driven headlong towards a breakdown by continual police harassment. This treatment was particularly difficult to deal with, he would explain in letters sent from his cell, for a character like his. For, in his own mind, Huntley was a sensitive soul who found it difficult to cope with emotional turmoil. And certainly he was sensitive to his own pain, though much less so to the pain of others. During his life before killing Holly and Jessica, he had tried to do away with himself three times. As he sat in his temporary cell on Saturday, 17 August, there was little doubt that the pressure was beginning to tell.
With the ongoing burden of lying about his actions and hiding the truth, he was getting worn down, and it showed in his behaviour with police. When he was first questioned before his arrest, his responses had been expansive, his sympathies for the girls strongly uttered. But, after he was arrested, he had refused to say more than the bare minimum. With time he had become more and more morose and withdrawn. As we shall see, such moods were part of Huntley’s personality, but there was no doubt that he was sinking now. He spoke much less often, replying increasingly in monosyllables or not at all. He was spending all of his time locked away entirely by himself.
According to Huntley, one thing which tortured him was imagining the grief of the Wells and Chapman families. Earlier, during his many conversations with journalists, he had expressed his torment over a disappearance which, he said, ‘beggared belief’. He had watched with a face contorted in sympathy as the families had given a string of emotional press conferences in front of TV cameras, pleading for the return of their children. At this moment in the cells, there is every reason to suppose that he continued to think of these people – without ever admitting he had destroyed their lives.
Later, when police told him the bodies had been found, he would be racked with fear that the detectives were about to discover some incriminating clue. He would also think again of Kevin and Nicola Wells and Leslie and Sharon Chapman and their ordeal. Not only had Huntley known these people almost as neighbours in the small town of Soham, and as parents of children he worked with every day, he also had spent many hours with them during the hunt for the missing girls. As they begged for the abductor to return their children in the assembly hall of Soham Village College, the killer was for much of the time standing only a few feet away.
Much has been written about how the deaths of Holly and Jessica caused unspeakable grief to their parents, and it seems callous to entertain the idea that Huntley himself may have been stricken by guilt. In none of his statements under questioning did he say he was sorry, and he consistently