Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley. Nathan Yates
one dead-end job to the next, with bouts of unemployment in between. He would take on an incredible variety of jobs; between the ages of 16 and 20 he worked at Ross’s Fish Wholesalers in Grimsby, stacked shelves at a local branch of Kwik Save, stuffed babies’ nappies at the Kimberly-Clark factory in Grimsby and worked as a barman at a pub in the town.
In 1994, at the age of 20, he embarked on one of his more settled periods of employment, working at the Heinz factory in Grimsby for the next two years. He got the job there because by then both his father and mother were also working on the premises, and during this time all three would be part of the workforce. Here again Huntley was seen as a loner. Ex-colleague Stuart Rowson said: ‘In factories men and women tend to have their own little groups but at break time he would sit on his own or with a very select number of friends.’ All the same, Huntley seemed to be in for a more stable existence at Heinz, not least because his mother and father were with him every day.
However, this promise was not to be fulfilled, for Huntley had severe problems finding somewhere to settle. Just as he moved from job to job, so too he moved from home to home, accumulating a bewildering list of addresses. He liked to move at least every six months, and in each location he would begin anew another life of lies. He would arrive at a new flat and tell landlords and neighbours a string of falsehoods designed to enhance his reputation. Always there was the pretence of having a higher-status job or a glamorous past. He had been invalided out of the RAF, or he had worked as the manager of a large store. When the lies wore thin, Huntley moved on.
In the period 1995 to 1999 he lived in eight different locations in Grimsby and the surrounding area. Starting off at a one-bedroomed rented flat at 50 Heneage Road in 1995, he moved later that year to a room in 41a Algernon Street, a house occupied by his mother, where neighbours remember him as ‘quiet’. He stayed there for less than a year, then in 1996 he was off again, this time to a very similar terraced house in Florence Street. He divided his time between there, another flat in Cleethorpes and a caravan in a girlfriend’s garden. Nine months later, in 1997, he moved out and went to a rented top-floor flat in Legsby Avenue. But he again moved out within months, going to live in a flat in Veal Street in 1998. Later that year he left there and went to a new place in Abbey Drive East.
Landlord Len Smith, 65, remembered how Huntley arrived at the new flat and immediately put on yet another front. This time the future killer, always craving admiration, dressed up smartly and made out he had a professional job. Mr Smith said: ‘My wife and I did not know him very well but he was very presentable and wore a suit and tie all the time. He said he worked as a rep.’ Huntley lived there from August 1998 to June 1999, before he moved away with Carr. Mr Smith and his wife Valerie, 64, remembered Huntley as taking care to make his room ‘very nice’. He never brought drink into the house, and owned a large Alsatian crossbreed called Sadie. Mr Smith said: ‘He had a big dog but it was always well cared for.’ Mrs Smith added: ‘He was a charmer. He was a good-looking lad.’
While Huntley was working at the Heinz factory and living all over town, his family began to disintegrate around him. His parents went through a troubled period in their relationship which ended in their splitting up. In 1993 Lynda, a chubby, blonde woman known for her timid character, finally decided to move away from her husband and set up home alone in Algernon Street. The separation came as a shock to Huntley. As always, he took his mother’s side in the conflict, and blamed his father for what had happened. He told people his father had been carrying on with other women, an accusation which at that stage was not true. Such was the distaste Huntley developed for Kevin, he even took to using his mother’s maiden name, Nixon. He regarded his Irish grandfather, Alwyn Nixon, as a far better man than his own father, who he felt had broken up the family by being too strict with his children and rejecting his wife. After Mr Nixon died, on 23 February 2002, Huntley made a pilgrimage to Ireland to attend his funeral. He always had a soft spot for the old man, a former joiner who had married twice and fathered three girls.
Following the separation from Lynda, Kevin had a series of relationships, each of which Huntley regarded as a betrayal. The quick succession of flings culminated in the most significant affair, with Sandra Brewer, a Grimsby woman four years younger than Kevin. When Kevin met her in 1995 she was 36 and he was 40. She moved in with him almost immediately, and the couple soon left the area to live in East Anglia. They stayed together for eight years, moving between properties in Eriswell and Wangford in west Suffolk and Littleport in Cambridgeshire, seeing the rest of the Huntley family only on an occasional visit. To those who knew them they seemed a happy couple destined for a long future together, but then at Easter 2002 Kevin suddenly decided he wanted his wife back and dumped Sandra in a surprisingly brutal manner. He told her bluntly: ‘I want you out and my wife back’, and that was the end of their relationship.
A friend of Sandra’s describes how she was immediately kicked out of the cottage in Littleport she had shared with Kevin and had to go back to Lincolnshire to find somewhere to stay. A few days later she came back to get some of her possessions. ‘Kevin wouldn’t even let her in the house,’ the friend said. ‘She had lived with him for eight years. She was shocked.’ However, Sandra’s shock was to turn to relief just over a year later when she discovered Kevin’s son had been charged with murder. ‘I’m so glad I’m not mixed up with him any more,’ she told a friend. Kevin’s reunion with Lynda was also to prove short-lived, for in the aftermath of their son’s arrest the couple split up yet again, blaming the turmoil of events for the separation. The Sandra Brewer saga was regarded with a distaste bordering on contempt by Huntley, who saw the whole situation as an affront to his mother and therefore to himself.
Yet, while his father’s extramarital adventures were to cause him problems, it is fair to say that his mother’s behaviour also came as a jolt to the system. For in 1994 she met security guard Julie Beasley, who, at 21, was four months younger than her elder son. A close friendship developed which turned into a full-blown lesbian affair. This was a situation which nobody had expected; Lynda had felt no attraction towards members of her own sex before. Huntley was surprisingly accepting of his mother’s new-found homosexuality. He even moved in with the lovers shortly after they began their affair, and the three became unusual housemates. They caused quite a stir among the neighbours in Algernon Street. One said: ‘It wasn’t the sort of thing you come across much in Grimsby. Everyone was talking about them, although they seemed nice enough to me.’
Julie, with her short, straight, brown hair and bulky figure, appeared the more masculine of the pair, with Lynda taking on the weaker role in the relationship, as she had done with Kevin. The young woman developed a good rapport with Huntley and became a popular figure with the family as a whole. The neighbour said: ‘To Julie, Ian was just Lynda’s son. They shared an interest in computer games and his mother’s relationship didn’t seem to be a problem for him.’ However, Huntley still found the break-up of his parents’ marriage shattering. He suffered another period of breakdown as the last pillar of his emotional security was removed. He now began to put on weight, ballooning to 14 stone and having to buy a whole wardrobe of new clothes. His medium-built, five-foot-eleven frame did not carry the extra flab well, and he looked more than a little chubby. He spent his leisure time drinking, riding a small motorcycle and playing snooker regularly. He was drifting through life.
Away from the factory floor, Huntley continued his search for vulnerable girls with a tireless trawl of the Grimsby pubs. At this time his lack of confidence led to his telling the most outrageous lies in the hope of impressing women. Too insecure to let them know he was a humble factory worker, he put on a front of arrogance and pretended to be someone else. This skill in the art of pretence was a feature of Huntley’s highly manipulative character, and reflected his desire to have an impact on others by whatever devious means he could. Many who knew him felt he became so good at putting on a front that he even started to believe his own lies. Friends remember how he convincingly pretended to have been an RAF officer and slept with several girls on the strength of it. Of course, in reality the nearest he got to an aircraft was watching it through a pair of binoculars during his days spent plane spotting. Carrying out the illusion was some feat, even among the less discerning of Grimsby’s young females. As one of his conquests put it: ‘It sounds daft but it was easy to believe him. I think he even believed it himself, he was so into the planes and all that.’
Huntley,