SELF PITY A MO
In an excruciating tape, Soham murderer Ian Huntley says he’s sorry for his sickening crimes. But as GUY ADAMS reveals, his whining about boredom and bad food in jail betrays what he really regrets about the day he stole two young lives...
WITH his voice supposedly ‘cracking with emotion’, Ian Huntley has at last issued what appears to be a grovelling apology for murdering ten-year-old English schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, confessing: ‘I think about them every day.’
Giving every impression of begging for some form of public forgiveness, the notorious predatory paedophile, who has now spent more than 15 years behind bars, has declared himself to be ‘so terribly, terribly sorry for what I have done’.
‘I am so sorry for the pain I have caused to the family and friends of Holly and Jessica, for the pain I have caused to my family and friends, and for the pain I have caused the community of Soham,’ he said. ‘I am genuinely, genuinely sorry and it breaks my heart when it is reported I have no remorse, that I relish something. I do not.’
Huntley admits he ‘can’t change anything’ about the awful summer evening in 2002 when he cut short the lives of the two young friends who had just enjoyed a family barbecue and were walking to their local sweet shop. Neither can he ‘remove that day from history’.
His self-pitying remarks came in the form of a leaked recording of a telephone conversation from prison, and it is the first time he has been heard speaking for more than a decade.
The comments were dismissed yesterday by senior police sources as a ‘hollow apology’ which would cause further upset to Holly and Jessica’s relatives.
Huntley, now 44, said he’d like it to be known that he can now ‘understand and accept’ the nature of the appalling crimes that made him one of the most reviled criminals in Britain, and is ‘sorry for the way I made the country feel and how it has affected people’.
Lest we are tempted to think that Huntley has got off lightly, he’d also like to stress that in addition to feeling remorse, he has spent recent years being properly punished for his crimes.
Life behind bars is lonely, monotonous, and often highly uncomfortable, he says. Inmates are forced to eat ‘shocking’ food and sit ‘cooped up’ for hours every day. He has made only ‘two or three friends’, has suffered ‘a lot of health problems’, and has twice been driven to attempt suicide.
‘I miss cuddling up on my sofa with a girlfriend, watching a DVD on television with a can of beer, walking the dog, going to the shops, nipping out for a pizza if you fancy a pizza, being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it,’ he said.
‘It is the very small, mundane things that you actually do every day and don’t think about you miss the most.’
Compassion is, of course, a noble emotion. But should any reader feel a shred of sympathy for the notorious criminal, they should be warned to ignore every one of his crocodile tears.
This is, after all, a man who spent years exploiting vulnerable young girls, before using his position of trust as a local school caretaker to entice his two final victims into his clutches.
Having murdered Holly and Jessica in cold blood, and almost certainly having sexually abused them, he then coldly attempted to cover up his crime, dumping and incinerating not just the Manchester United shirts that the girls were wearing, but also their bodies, which were dumped in a remote ditch.
Then, in a breathtaking display of cynicism, he took part in missing-persons searches and gave heartrending interviews to TV news crews and journalists as the people of Soham desperately tried to find the missing girls.
After his arrest, despite the huge weight of evidence against him, Huntley then refused to confess to having murdered the girls, forcing the families of his victims to go through the trauma of a full trial, which, incidentally, cost the British taxpayer £715,000 (€800,000) for his legal aid bill alone.
One can only imagine what those poor parents – who have largely maintained a dignified silence since his conviction – must have thought yesterday when they read of Huntley casually imagining the lives their lost daughters might now be living.
‘I know those girls would be 26 this year, with families of their own, jobs and lives,’ he said. ‘I thought about them when they were turning 21 and when they were turning 18. I know no matter what I say that people are not going to think any better of me.
‘I know that. I don’t expect it, but I would much rather people have the truth about how I feel.’
Dig into the detail of his comments – which emerged via a recording leaked from HMP Frankland, Huntley’s supposedly maximumsecurity prison near Durham, northeast England – and several other salient facts quickly emerge.
First, for a man guilty of one of the most appalling crimes in British history, Huntley leads a remarkably cossetted existence behind bars (of which more later). Secondly,
‘I miss cuddling up on my sofa with a girlfriend’
despite his grandstanding, the self-pitying killer has not yet properly accepted his guilt.
Instead, Huntley continues to cling to the claim – advanced by the defence at his 2003 trial – that Holly Wells died because of some sort of freak accident.
According to this fiction, which was dismissed by the jury at the time, she came into his house in Soham, Cambridgeshire, eastern England, because she was suffering from a nosebleed, and needed to clean herself up, before managing to drown in the bath.
Huntley argues this put him in a state of panic, during which he decided to kill Jessica Chapman to stop her raising the alarm.
‘I maintain that the first one was a genuine accident,’ he said in the leaked recording.
‘OK, the second one I panicked, and once she tried leaving the house I realised I could not leave the house. And whilst I said in court that I just acted instinctively, I knew I had to stop her leaving the house.’
Even if this had been true, Huntley could have avoided subjecting the families to the trauma of a full trial by confessing to the murder of Jessica and the manslaughter of Holly.
However, he now insists ‘that was never going to happen’ because he ‘wanted to be able to say what happened in court’.
The second obvious conclusion to be drawn from Huntley’s selfpitying spiel is that parts of his story might have been dreamt up by a PR man seeking to turn around his tattered reputation. We don’t yet know how the tape recording of his remarks became public, though it may well have been made during a telephone call to one of his ‘approved contacts’ outside prison.
But whatever their provenance, they seem very carefully pitched indeed. A cynic might even wonder if this notorious killer actually wanted them to be leaked.
Take, for example, his reported comment that – unlike the so-called ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys – he never intends to apply for parole, out of ‘consideration’ for the victims’ families.
‘I accepted a long time ago my life was in jail,’ he said. ‘I don’t really think about getting out: it is a non-starter. I hear about other prisoners coming up for parole. That makes you think a bit. [But] I will never apply for it.
‘I will never ever apply to leave prison. Never ever apply for parole. I will die in prison. I accept that. I have come to terms with that a long time ago.’
Time will tell, of course. But while such contrite remarks may strike a chord with readers who believe in the Christian value of redemption, they are in Huntley’s case almost entirely irrelevant: he won’t be eligible for parole until 2043 at the very earliest.
Equally important, where this cynical attempt to burnish his image is concerned, are Huntley’s continued efforts to ensure that some of the public anger over the killings is directed at his former girlfriend, Maxine Carr.
Carr, who was visiting her mother in Grimsby at the time of the murders, was originally persuaded to give police a false alibi for her lover, claiming she was at home with him on the night in question.
For this, she was jailed for threeand-a-half years after being convicted of perverting the course of justice. In court, she claimed to have been brainwashed by Huntley, who had previously been investigated for sexual offences against at least nine young women.
Giving evidence, she said he had convinced her that his chequered past would see them unfairly targeted by detectives.
Carr has since been released and moved on with her life, thanks, in part, to a lifelong anonymity order. She had a child in 2014 and went on to marry that same year at a luxury hotel. In the tapes, Huntley insists that Carr was a liar, while in the same breath adding that ‘I wish her every happiness’. ‘In court, she told some lies in order to distance herself from me, and I understand that,’ he said. ‘I was a little shocked at how far she actually did go and my solicitors did advise me to be more upfront with Maxine.’ He then added: ‘I hope she is happy in what she is doing. I just hope she has found happiness. I hope she has been able to move on from all this.’ Whether Huntley has moved on from their relationship is a moot point. According to a leaked prison service memo obtained by the Mail when he moved to HMP Frankland in 2008, his cell in the healthcare wing of the maximum-security institution (where other inmates include the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Levi Bellfield, the killer of Milly Dowler) was plastered with pictures of his ex-girlfriend. The 12ft-by-10ft room also contained personal freeview TV, a Sony CD player, stereo and state-of-the-art games console. However, in his comments this week, Huntley insisted that people have no idea how tough life is behind bars.
‘When you come into prison, you think there are many things you will actually miss. But it is the very small, mundane things that you actually do every day and don’t think about that you miss the most. Being able to go to the shops when you fancy something. Walking my dog. Going for a drive to relieve stress,’ he said.
‘People go on about prison being cushy... They go on about having your PlayStations, your Xboxes and DVDs and things like this.
‘Well, if people on the outside were to sit cooped up in a room doing the same thing day after day, year in year out, not being able to do anything else but sit in a room, they would very soon get bored with it and it would become a difficult environment for them.’
Asked how he now passes the time, Huntley said: ‘I am a painter. I play chess. I play Scrabble. Do crosswords.’ He also claims to spend prison wages earned from painting and decorating ordering takeaway food from the prison canteen, adding boastfully: ‘The prison food is shocking. We send out for meals like fish and chips every weekend.’
Yesterday, prison sources insisted he has never been able to order takeaways from outside.
Over the years, Huntley has attempted suicide twice – he is still on antidepressants – and has twice been seriously assaulted by fellow inmates.
‘I never expected to survive my overdoses,’ he said. ‘I have committed a horrendous crime and am where I belong. I make no qualms about that. I don’t believe I should be free, not because I believe I am a danger but because two young girls are dead and I do not deserve to be released.’
On that, if very little else about this vile killer’s self-pitying remarks, it is hard to disagree.
‘I’ll never apply for parole. I will die in prison’ ‘I hope Maxine has found happiness’