Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley. Nathan Yates
denials could reveal a mind which could not come to terms with the reality of its actions. Before he was unmasked as the killer, Huntley said he imagined what it was like going through the agony of the girls’ parents and pondered the ordeals of the girls themselves. We shall never know for certain how much truth there was in these claims and to what extent they were purely an attempt to put on a face of innocence. He pretended to be, like the rest of the world, wondering how this tragedy came to pass. Yet he was the murderer and could run through the acts from memory. It is possible that Huntley’s bafflement over the crime may have been partly genuine. He may have been tortured by the question: why had he murdered these two innocent girls and left so many lives in ruins? Sitting on his own in his cell, he may well have pondered these issues. Over the course of his coming life sentence, he would have plenty of time to reflect.
Doctors who studied Huntley at Rampton Hospital would diagnose him as a psychopath. By this they meant that he was capable of committing crimes without experiencing a normal person’s feelings of regret. In their view, Huntley had a personality disorder which made him immune to society’s moral code.
Whether Huntley did or did not feel guilt, police and psychiatrists who came into contact with him say there is strong evidence of self-hatred in his character. Since childhood he had experienced huge mood swings. He had described how at times he felt confident, arrogant and better than anyone else around him. He would bolster his self-esteem by a series of pretences designed to make him the subject of others’ admiration. Yet, away from the fantasies, at other times he experienced severe depression, feeling inadequate and rejected, particularly by women. At this, the lowest point in his life, these deep inadequacies were no doubt playing through his consciousness with a renewed force. Now he was one of the most despised people on the planet – even other criminals would hate him and be after his blood.
Always obsessed with getting away with his crimes, Huntley had dreaded capture. He had derived a sense of superiority from deceiving others, and during the murder hunt he had revelled in acting out his innocence. His deceptions had been a tool to control others; he had used his lies to manipulate people from early childhood, for power over others was something he always craved. Now his deception had been demolished; he was left naked without his mask, and utterly under the control of forces far more powerful than himself. He had reached rock bottom.
In a similar cell 30 miles away at Peterborough police station, Huntley’s girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was also in a state of torment. A 25-year-old woman of average looks and greasy appearance, she was so disturbed that she found it impossible to eat and she was losing weight rapidly. Huntley had meant the world to her, and despite his arrest she was still hopelessly bound to him. He was the first man who had wanted to stay with her, and she had invested everything in him. For Carr, Huntley offered the hope of a future with a man she loved; she had been prepared to stand by him through anything in the belief that they would be together for ever and would have a family. Sitting in her cell, she remained utterly emotionally dependent on the man who had landed her there, and talked about Huntley constantly, begging police for news of him. His dominating behaviour, which had driven away many other women, had been for her a sign of the devotion she so desperately needed.
Before Huntley had murdered the girls, Carr had felt she was at the beginning of a better life. Settled in a relationship at last, she had moved with her man to a new area of the country and both had managed to get better jobs than they had had before. Now, all that had been completely destroyed. She had lost her future husband, her home and her life. Carr had hoped for so much from her relationship with this man. How could she, how could they, end up like this? Did the secret lie somewhere in their past?
Ian Kevin Huntley was born into a life of instability, uncertainty and poverty, and from early childhood his existence was turbulent. When he came into the world, on 31 January 1974 at Grimsby Maternity Hospital, his parents, Kevin and Lynda, were already struggling to get by on pittance wages. His father worked as a gas fitter and the family saved money by lodging with Lynda’s parents at 100 Wintringham Road in Grimsby. The couple had married when they realised Lynda was three months pregnant with their first child. Both were only 18 when they signed the wedding papers on 23 June 1973, and at that point Kevin Huntley was just an apprentice in his chosen trade, while Lynda Huntley held down a poorly paid job in a printing works. With little income and no place of their own, the young couple would struggle to support their newborn child. Kevin would have to work overtime while his wife gave up her job to look after the baby.
Soon the hard work paid off and the family were able to move into their own home, a rented house at 1 Pelhams Road, Immingham, a few miles north of Grimsby. However, their task was made still harder when, on 16 August 1975, the birth of Huntley’s younger brother, Wayne, completed the family. Kevin Huntley found himself weighed down with the responsibility of a wife and two children. Tired and overworked, he was a dour father, strict with his family. Friends remember him as an unsmiling individual, dark and pinched, with a stern aspect, mature for his age. He took his trade very seriously and was a good worker. Despite his dour appearance he was devoted to his wife and would do anything to look after her.
The infant Huntley was also devoted to his mother, and became intensely jealous when this bond was challenged by Wayne’s arrival. With less than two years between the brothers, Lynda’s maternal attentions had to be divided. Huntley reacted to this with jealous furies so uncontrollable that they astonished his parents and their friends. Already his solution was to manipulate; placed in a situation he hated, he hit back by cheating his way to the attention he lacked. He would frequently deceive Lynda into caring for him and ignoring Wayne by bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. On many occasions he kept both parents up all night. A friend of the family remembers: ‘Ian was a handful as a baby. He was always screaming and crying and wanting his mum. He seemed to do it a lot when she was bothering with the younger one, as if he couldn’t stand her giving attention to Wayne.’ This jealousy of his brother was to be a driving force in Huntley’s life, and he would continue to be possessed by it almost 30 years later. Huntley’s former wife, Claire Evans, is among many who believe the envy has marred his whole life.
Another family circumstance which seems to have had a huge impact on him was his father’s sternness. Kevin Huntley’s strict code of behaviour seems to have made a strong impression on the youngster, and he grew up distant from his father, becoming something of a mummy’s boy and taking Lynda’s side in any argument. A friend of the family said: ‘As far as Ian was concerned, Lynda was always in the right and Kevin was always in the wrong. If there were any problems in the family, Ian blamed his father for them.’ The Huntley home during these early years was in a solidly working-class district. Immingham is a town at the mouth of the Humber estuary, and many of its inhabitants are employed in shipping or related industries. In the 1970s the way of life was unchanged in essentials from Victorian days, when the area’s first fish-processing plants and industrialised fishing fleet were established.
Huntley would later become one of Immingham’s many manual labourers, but for the time being his surroundings were restricted at first to the family home and then extended to include the town’s Eastfield Junior School, which he attended from the age of five. Although Huntley was later to make defenceless schoolgirls his own victims, back then he was the one who was the target of abuse. From the moment he walked into the school, classmates regarded him as the first choice if they wanted to hit someone or dish out verbal cruelties. ‘He was the class loner really. If anyone was ever bullied, it was him,’ recalled Matt Walker, 28, an assistant manager of an industrial supplier who had known Huntley since they were both five years old. Huntley’s large pale forehead got him the cruel nickname of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. Children would also call him ‘Spadehead’ because of the strange square shape of his face. Huntley, a sickly child who suffered from asthma, was in no position to defend himself against bullying. Matt remembers him trying to bluff his way through this kind of hostility, obviously having no idea of how to deal with it properly. He added: ‘He was the kind of kid who would