Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley. Nathan Yates
Huntley’s tale-telling made him even more of a hate figure with the other pupils and his attempts to make friends were disasters. In a foretaste of his later life of fantasy, he would even make up tittle-tattle to spread as much disruption as possible. Another former pupil at Eastfield said: ‘Everyone hated him. He caused so much trouble making stories up about people who didn’t like him, and that turned out to be pretty much everyone. The teachers didn’t like him much either.’ The result of Huntley’s bizarre behaviour was a total lack of close friends. Carl McLaughlin, another classmate, remembers, ‘He used to get bullied really badly. He was a loner.’ During this period, Huntley encountered another, still more serious form of abuse. He was beaten and sexually abused by an adult. He would later tell friends and acquaintances of this terrible experience. It was, he said, an ordeal which left him scarred for life.
At the age of 11 Huntley moved to Healing Comprehensive School, one of the better schools in the area and later attended by Maxine Carr. Here he proved to be equally unpopular, and classmates remember him as a ‘scruffy outcast’ who always wore a battered, fake-leather jacket and had no friends. One former pupil recalls how he had developed his habit of lying to teachers. He said: ‘Huntley was terrible at football and the other kids would take the mickey out of him for it. So every time we were supposed to play football during a games lesson he would suddenly have a massive asthma attack. It’s true that he did have asthma, but the funny thing was that it always seemed to come on much worse during football, and the attacks happened for example when he let a goal in or made some other cock-up. It was obvious he was faking it, but all the same the way he could do the cough and wheeze was just like it was for real. He was a very good actor, I’ll give him that much.’
In the first form at Healing Huntley became the target of abuse from the older pupils. Fifth- and sixth-formers would frequently beat him up in the playground, and on one occasion he was found hanging by his jumper from a peg in the cloakroom, unable to get down. He was also subjected to a practice known as ‘kegging’, where two older boys would grab his legs and pull his groin into a post in the yard. The punishment seems savage, but classmates felt little pity for Huntley, insisting he deserved it for his devious habits. In the course of this ordeal his school work also suffered. Never the brightest of pupils, Huntley slid behind in key subjects like Maths and English.
After two years at Healing the situation had become so bad that Huntley moved school to Immingham Comprehensive, considered in the area to be a rougher, less middle-class institution. He arrived there at the beginning of the third form, the hope being that he could make a fresh start at an age when he was growing bigger and becoming less easy to victimise. Unfortunately, the escape did not work as well as planned. He again failed to make any friends and was bullied physically and verbally. Known here simply as ‘Huntley’, the nearest he came to any real contact with his fellow pupils was through a nerdish preoccupation with computer games. Former classmate Kevin Scott, 29, said: ‘He was weak-minded and often bullied. I did have the misfortune of hanging around him. We swapped computer games – he was very average and not very popular. He seemed terrified of his dad, who, I think, was quite strict. Once he came round for tea and his plastic computer-game case got broken. He was petrified about what his dad would say.’
Desperate to make friends, Huntley joined the 2nd Immingham Scouts during his first term at his new school. But he left two months later because he couldn’t stand the physical activities and remained unpopular with the others. Then, at the age of 13, he revealed what was to become a lifelong passion for aeroplanes by joining the Air Training Corps. The move was inspired partly by his father, who felt the military ethic would give his son some much-needed discipline, but Huntley grew to like the idea less for the training than for the machines themselves. He dreamt of joining the RAF, and would cling on to that vision for years to come, later boasting in pubs that he had been a pilot. Yet in the event he spent only one year with 866 Squadron – known as the ‘Flying Vikings’ – before leaving the cadets. From then on his contact with real aircraft would be restricted to watching them as he developed the hobby of plane spotting.
Another former classmate, Adrian Good, remembers the beginnings of this pastime. ‘As a child, he was totally obsessed with aeroplanes,’ he said. ‘He would scribble down details and talk about them all the time.’ Huntley’s fantasy world of aeroplanes offered him an escape from teenage problems and insecurities; while dreaming of being a pilot he could imagine himself as a powerful, independent figure in charge of his own destiny. It could be argued that his other hobbies during this period, weightlifting and shooting air rifles, served similar purposes. Huntley liked to feel himself in command of a powerful machine or weapon, he wanted to be physically strong and possess a body which would impress others.
He would spend hours building models of his favourite aircraft, painting them and suspending them from his bedroom ceiling. He would also pore over plane-spotting magazines and put up posters of his favourite jets on the walls. One of these was the Harrier Jump Jet, which had seen much action during the 1983 Falklands War. Huntley remained so smitten with this plane that in his late twenties he would make pilgrimages to airbases to watch it in action. This was how he became familiar with the airbase at Lakenheath and the land around it, where one day the bodies of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman would be discovered.
Back at Immingham Comprehensive, the hostility of his schoolmates and the disappointment caused by his failures with the Scouts and the Air Training Corps were getting to Huntley. He became so desperate for attention that he attempted suicide in what would be the first of at least three such efforts. He stole a box of paracetamol painkillers from his mother’s medicine cabinet and swallowed the lot while his parents were out. Friends say Lynda found him lying on his bed barely conscious, and he was taken by ambulance to Grimsby Hospital for an urgent stomach pump. Huntley’s life may well have been in danger if his mother had not returned in time, but the bid to take his life did not inspire sympathy at school. One classmate said: ‘He did it because he wanted people’s attention, it was as simple as that. I don’t believe for a minute he really wanted to die, it was just a stunt to get people to notice him and feel sorry for him. It was just an act he pulled because he didn’t have any friends.’ Ex-pupils of Immingham have a similar attitude to Huntley’s asthma attacks. Another said: ‘He would take massive puffs of his inhaler so everyone would think he was really sick, but we mostly didn’t believe him because it was Huntley and we all knew he was a liar. He couldn’t bear people not to notice him all the time and he wanted everyone to think he was marvellous. The problem was we all thought he was a prat.’
Some believe the trigger for Huntley’s first suicide attempt was his being rejected by one of the girls in his class. This is quite possible given his precocious sexual behaviour. For from an early age Huntley was a predator. His first sexual adventure occurred when he was 12, when he shared kisses with his classroom sweetheart, and he rapidly progressed to much less innocent behaviour. Later he would boast how he lost his virginity at the age of 14 and, although like all of his statements this must be treated with caution, it is certainly true that he had early sexual successes. Unusually for one so young, he was attracted to girls even younger than himself. One classmate remembers: ‘His technique with girls was to pick on the youngest, most easily conned ones he could find and basically just lie to them. He’d tell them anything just to get in with them, and he’d put on this really cocky manner, acting as though he was great. I could never figure out how they fell for it, but then again he did choose his victims. I can remember at least three girls he went out with at school. They were all younger than him, and none of them lasted very long.’
Huntley’s exploitation of the vulnerable contained an element of savage cruelty. Although he had yet to be violent to girls, as a teenager one of his favourite pastimes was torturing animals. He would roam the streets looking for dogs and cats to feed his perverse craving. A former schoolmate said: ‘The things he did were really sick. He used to strap bangers to dogs and cats to blow them up, or pour paraffin over them and set them on fire. He was always boasting about it, as if everyone would think it was great.’
Huntley finished his unhappy school career as soon as possible, leaving Immingham Comprehensive at the age of 16 having scraped five GCSE passes. He immediately started work gutting fish for a wholesaler in Grimsby. His working life was to show the same pattern seen