Huntley beat me...If police had done their job properly, Jessica and Holly might be alive today
After MoS revealed Soham monster’s secret family, the most devastating revelation of all
LAST week 18-year-old Samantha Bryan took the bravest decision of her life when she revealed she was the daughter of Soham killer Ian Huntley. She had broken down in tears on first discovering the truth for herself during a school project on murderers. Even more distressing was learning of the terrifying violence which Huntley had subjected her mother, Katie, to. In an exclusive interview, Katie reveals how she survived the abuse only because she found the strength to fight for her unborn child.
KATIE BRYAN stood transfixed as a familiar yet terrifying face filled her television screen. There, sandwiched between two police officers, walking from his home, was Ian Huntley, dramatically arrested for the murder of missing Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. It was August 2002, and in that instant Katie’s world descended into freefall – for she, more than anyone, knew the evil of which Huntley was capable.
She knew, too, that Holly and Jessica were by no means Huntley’s first or only victims.
Katie was just 15 when he subjected her to a sadistic regime of violent beatings and rape, even imprisoning her as his ‘girlfriend’. And she knew too that her closely guarded secret – that Huntley was the biological father of her eldest daughter, Samantha – was now in danger of discovery.
Last week Samantha, recently turned 18 and only now legally free to identify herself in public, spoke exclusively to The Mail on Sunday about being Huntley’s only child, and of her determination to renounce him. Her distress was almost indescribable when she learned what her own mother had suffered at Huntley’s hands.
It was a regime of imprisonment and violence which all but destroyed Katie – she was saved only by the knowledge that she was pregnant with Samantha.
Even today Katie feels guilty that had she somehow been strong enough to compel the police to act, she could have saved the lives of Holly and Jessica.
‘I was powerless under his spell, completely dominated by him,’ she says.
‘I was too young to understand he was controlling me and squashing every ounce of self-esteem I possessed. I was too young to know. But it doesn’t stop me thinking now that had I fought back harder, had I gone to police, perhaps his paedophilia, his violence, would have been uncovered sooner. That he would never have been able to walk into a job in a school where he could work with young children and ultimately kill those two beautiful little girls.’
Her four daughters and her marriage to husband Martin, she says, have been her salvation. Without them, she is convinced she would have crumbled.
But the memory of those dark days when she was used as a sex slave by Huntley has left deep scars.
It was in December 1997 that Huntley began grooming Katie to satisfy his need to dominate and control impressionable young women. The two had met while she was still a schoolgirl in Grimsby because her mother, Jacqui, worked with Huntley, who was at that time scraping a living selling home products and lottery scratch cards door-to-door in Cleethorpes and Grimsby for a children’s charity.
For three months, whenever Katie helped out, riding in the back of a minibus after class and at weekends, Huntley would make a point of sitting next to her. ‘I now understand he was grooming me,’ she says.
One afternoon he persuaded Jacqui to allow him to take Katie for a quick drink. As soon as they were alone he plied her with alcohol before using her as her sexual plaything while she was so intoxicated she would have no recollection.
‘Because I’d never had an alcoholic drink before I quickly ended up paralytic,’ she says.
‘The next thing I recall is waking up in his bed the following morning wearing just his T-shirt. He was naked, apart from boxer shorts, next to me, and he claimed he’d put me to bed and undressed me as I’d been
I was so powerless u under his spell – I was dominated by him m
sick all down my dress. But I knew something more had happened. I was confused, ashamed and frightened at what my dad would say. I wasn’t at all streetwise.
‘I knew what he’d done was wrong, but I was painfully naive and I thought I loved him.’
Huntley falsely told Katie, who was from a close-knit, respectable family, that he had spoken to her mother and Jacqui had said it was fine, as long as she came back home before school on Monday.
Hours later his deceit was revealed when Jacqui turned up frantic, banging at the door, and demanding to take her daughter home.
‘He locked me in the flat and I heard them having a heated argument and then I heard the door slam. He came upstairs and said, “She wants you home, she doesn’t agree with me and you. We need to stick together.”’
Besotted and scared of her par- ents’ reaction, she agreed to stay and from that point she never returned to school.
‘That night he made love to me. At first it was loving and nice, but then he tied my hands together and he had sex with me. I didn’t like it… it was all about control,’ she says.
Her frantic mother and father Brian drove to the bedsit at least twice a day over the following weeks and reported Huntley to Humberside Police, who visited the flat.
‘Ian denied everything, said we were platonic friends and that I’d had a row with my mum and dad,’ Katie recalls.
‘They ended up leaving. Some might say my silence gave him an alibi, but I was painfully young and naive. I was scared.’
Four months into their relationship, and now estranged from her parents, the pair moved into Huntley’s mother’s spare room, where they slept on the floor. It was there that Katie was first subjected to sadistic abuse.
As she sat in the bath, she made the mistake of questioning if Huntley had been seeing other girls. ‘Immediately he became aggressive and when I tried to get out of the bath he grabbed my leg, sending me crashing face-down to the floor, and I banged my head on the sink.
‘As I lay there, he raped me and as he did it he kept saying, “I will never hurt you.” When he finished he got up and calmly walked out of the room leaving me crying and naked.’
Shaken and bruised, Katie finally picked herself up and walked into the bedroom where Huntley sat watching television, as if nothing had happened. ‘I was too shocked to say anything so I lay on the floor and cried myself to sleep,’ she says.
In the months that followed, Hunt-
ley became increasingly controlling, locking Katie in the bedroom when he went on nights out.
Later the violence escalated. The more she submitted, the more aggressive he became.
‘One night I burned his dinner and he flew into a rage and threw it at the wall,’ she says. ‘We had a kitten and he went to the cupboard and got out a tin of cat food and put it into a bowl, which he placed on the floor. He forced me to my hands and knees and pushed my face into the bowl. I tried not to eat it. It got it in my mouth but I resisted. Then he just stopped and walked away.
‘Afterwards I told him it was over but he got a knife and said, “If you leave I’ll kill myself.” I stayed as although I was scared of him, sometimes I pitied him.’
During one of many brutal attacks, he rammed a cucumber down her throat in an attempt to choke her when she failed to serve his dinner on time, and on her 16th birthday he chopped off all her hair, telling Katie: ‘This is for your own good.’
‘Every act of violence chipped away another part of me. I was more afraid of what would happen if I left than if I stayed,’ she says.
In 1997 she had a brief respite from the violence, when her mother, desperate to break Huntley’s hold over her, asked them to move into a caravan in her back garden, as they were struggling to pay rent on their flat. It was then that she would see his interest in girls even younger than herself. Katie was visited by a primary school-aged family friend, one of only a few people Huntley didn’t mind her having around.
‘Looking back, the way he acted wasn’t right,’ she continues. ‘He was flirty. I just didn’t see it at the time. Then one day she stopped coming. I asked friends but no one would tell me anything.
‘After we split up, Mum told me the girl’s parents had told her that Ian had made her climb a tree and indecently assaulted her. I couldn’t believe it. Much later the police did come to see me to ask me if I knew anything that had happened at that time, but I honestly never knew.’
No charges were brought due to lack of evidence.
‘There were so many missed opportunities with Huntley,’ says Katie. ‘It haunts me that he never got stopped. I think about the whatifs – if they had investigated him more when my mum got the police involved and when the parents of the primary school girl reported him to the police. If they’d pushed that little bit further and looked into it that little bit further things might have been different. There were other victims of rapes and assaults too and he got away with them all.’
When she became pregnant at 16 with her daughter Samantha, and moved from the caravan to Legsby Avenue in Grimsby, terror and rape were constant features in her life. Katie says: ‘I suffered from morning sickness and one morning he wanted to have sex with me and I said “No” as I felt so terrible. He wouldn’t take no for an answer… that wasn’t the only time, it was sometimes as often as once a week. It destroyed me i inside.id I’d lostl t all ll my confidencefid and I was scared of trying to get away from him.’
Becoming pregnant with Samantha proved to be the catalyst for Katie to break free.
‘He attacked me when I was three months’ pregnant and I realised I had to get out for the sake of my baby,’ she says.
‘I can’t even remember what the trigger was, but first he pushed me over a table and raped me. Then he opened the door, punched me in the stomach, then got hold of me and threw me down the stairs. Afterwards, he casually stepped over me and said, “Be gone by the time I get back” and he left.
Hysterical, Katie rang her mother, who collected her immediately.
As her pregnancy progressed, Katie often accompanied her mother to work, where she met Martin, now 40. ‘I never thought I’d be able to trust another man ever again,’ she says. ‘But over time he said to me, “I’ll be there for you if you need me.”’
They developed a bond, and when Samantha was born three months premature, Martin stood by her.
‘From the moment she was born and placed into my arms I loved Sammy completely and unconditionally,’ Katie says. ‘Huntley didn’t even cross my mind. But I still feel guilt that she’d been born three months prematurely, and he’d done that to her when he beat me that last time. I felt that if I’d been strong enough to break free earlier, it may not have happened. We never imagined Huntley would go on to commit
He got a knife and said if I left he would kill himself
murder – we thought no one would ever find out the truth that he was Sammy’s father.’
The next time Katie saw Huntley’s face was when it flashed up on the news in August 2002 after he was arrested for the murders of Holly and Jessica in Soham. She knew instantly her carefully crafted lie would now come crashing down. Katie says: ‘My first reaction was horror at what he’d done. My second thought was for Samantha, as I had a sixth sense it was all going to come out.
‘Within hours my phone started ringing and ringing. I was scared for Samantha, I was sweating and shaking, my worst fears had been realised and I didn’t want her to be victimised for what he’d done as she is completely innocent and has had no part of his life. I can only assume Huntley’s family revealed it [that he had a child] and I’ll never be able to forgive them for that.’
She admits the hardest thing she’s ever had to do is tell her daughter the truth, finally revealing the extent of her suffering at the hands of Huntley just before Samantha’s 18th birthday last month.
‘Some people think we shouldn’t be speaking out now, but many in our community knew half-truths,’ Katie explains. ‘I wanted to end the speculation and for people to understand that there is no part of Ian Huntley’s evilness in my daughter. He has never met her and he never will. But I feel so guilty she has to live with this because it’s my fault she is his biological daughter.
‘That said, I haven’t regretted her existence, not even for a second. My children have got me through this. If I never had them, things would have been very different.’
‘Huntley fractured my childhood, and I won’t let that happen to any of my girls,’ she insists. ‘He is nothing to any of us.’