Soham murderer Ian Huntley dies after being bludgeoned with metal pole in prison attack
Soham murderer Ian Huntley has died in hospital after being beaten over the head with a spiked metal pole by a fellow inmate in prison.
The double child killer had been serving a life sentence for the 2002 murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Huntley, 52, was taken to hospital in a critical condition on Thursday, February 26, and spent a week on life support having been left blind and brain damaged by the assault.
There was no improvement in his condition, and the Ministry of Justice confirmed his death this morning. A spokesperson said: ‘The murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman remains one of the most shocking and devastating cases in our nation’s history, and our thoughts are with their families.’
Durham Constabulary said: ‘A man who was attacked at HMP Frankland in Durham last week has died in hospital this morning.
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‘Ian Huntley, 52, was taken to hospital with serious injuries following an incident in the workshop on the morning of Thursday, February 26.
‘A police investigation into the circumstances of the incident is ongoing.
‘A file is being prepared for the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration for charges.’
Huntley’s mum Lynda Richards, 71, was reportedly at his bedside when his life support was switched off yesterday.
Triple killer Anthony Russell, 43, was widely named as the prime suspect, with reports saying the attack was launched following an argument in a workshop.
The attacker was said to have shouted: ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it. I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him.’
Huntley was a marked man in prison, surviving repeated attempts on his life, and was kept under close protection along with other notorious killers.
Armed robber Damien Fowkes slashed his throat in 2010, five years after fellow murderer Mark Hobson threw boiling water over him.
After the latest fatal attack, Huntley only daughter Samantha Bryan, 27, told The Sun on Sunday: ‘There’s a special place in hell waiting for him.’
She said she was ‘glad’ to hear he had been attacked and started crying with an ‘overwhelming sense of relief’ because she thought he was dead.
Ms Bryan added: ‘It felt like I could breathe again. I felt if he died, that burden died with him. I have always been judged for being his daughter – it has been a very difficult thing to deal with over the years.’
Inmates were reportedly in uproar last year after Huntley sported a red football shirt with the number 10 on the back.
It led to accusations he was taunting the families of his victims, who were last seen wearing red Manchester United shirts.
The Soham murders
Huntley was found guilty of the two murders at the Old Bailey in December 2003 and jailed for life with a minimum term of 40 years.
The judge, Mr Justice Moses, said the sentence – then one of the longest tariffs ever handed down in a UK court – offered ‘little or no hope’ of him ever being released.
Best friends Holly and Jessica vanished after leaving a barbecue at the Wells family home to go and buy some sweets on August 4, 2002.
Huntley lured them into his home, likely under the ruse of seeing his partner Maxine Carr who was a teaching assistant at their school, and murdered them soon after.
One of the biggest manhunts in UK history was underway by the following morning.
But it would be another two weeks before the girls’ badly burned bodies were found in a ditch near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.
During that time, Huntley loitered around police officers, helped set up the televised appeals at Village College and courted journalists for interviews to try and stay a step ahead of the investigation.
He even brazenly approached Holly’s dad Kevin Wells, telling him: ‘Kev, I just wanted to say I did not realise it was your daughter.’
The caretaker told reporters he had been washing his dog in the front garden of 5 College Close when the two friends, wearing matching Manchester United shirts, stopped by to ask how Carr was.
He claimed he told them she was upset at losing her job, to which the girls said they were sorry before walking off.
Huntley’s interactions with the police and the press would prove his undoing, with jurors hearing how he asked one ‘Have they found the girls’ clothes?’ before police had even found their bodies and seen what condition they were in.
In another interview with BBC Look East, Huntley callously told the interviewer it had been ‘very hard’ knowing he was likely ’the last friendly face’ they saw before they disappeared.
One reporter, Brian Farmer, then with the Press Association and now working at the BBC, previously spoke about going to detectives after interviewing the couple and telling them: ‘He’s your man.’
The pair, who met in a Grimsby nightclub in 1999 and moved to Soham in 2001, were taken in to be interviewed as significant witnesses on August 16.
Huntley’s alibi that Carr had been with him all weekend quickly crumbled when phone records proved she had been with her family 100 miles away in the Lincolnshire port town on the night of the murders.
Detectives decided to search the couple’s home in College Close while they were being quizzed and found keys to a storage building at the secondary school which Huntley previously denied having access to.
Inside, they found Holly and Jessica’s burned clothing crumpled inside a bin hidden by a plastic liner with Huntley’s fingerprints on.
On August 17, nearly two weeks after they vanished, their bodies were found lying side by side and badly burned near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.
Chilling moment reporter knew Huntley was a suspect
Brian Farmer, who interviewed the pair at their home while the search for the girls was ongoing, said Huntley’s answers were so suspicious that he raised his concerns with police.
Two decades later, he recalled: ‘The first thing that seemed strange, I remember quite distinctly, was that I asked Maxine if at school they’d done stranger danger, and “don’t get into cars”.
‘I asked her from her knowledge of Holly and Jessica how she thought they might have reacted if, for example, a man had pulled up alongside in a car and said: “Would you like a lift, girls?”
‘The odd thing was that she didn’t answer the question because Ian Huntley jumped in straight away and he answered the question.
‘He said that he thought Holly would probably get in the car and quietly go, but Jessica wouldn’t. She’d put up a real fight and a real struggle. He was quite agitated and emotional.
‘I remember thinking: “Why is he so agitated? Why is he so emotional?” The main thing that struck me when he answered the question was, well, how can he possibly know how they would react?’
The reporter, who was later called as a prosecution witness during Huntley’s trial, said: ‘I think the way he described how Holly and Jessica would react is exactly how they did react.
‘That’s why he knew how they’d react – because that’s how they reacted when he killed them.’
It would be more than a year until Huntley’s version of events was made public.
His barrister Stephen Coward QC told a hushed Court Number One that Huntley claimed Holly drowned in the bath before he unintentionally smothered Jessica while trying to stifle her screams.
However, the most shocking moment of the trial would come when Carr was called to give evidence.
In a moment of huge drama, she raised her hand and pointed directly at Huntley in the dock and told the court: ‘I’m not going to be blamed for what that thing has done to me or those children.’
The jury took 17 hours to convict Huntley of the two murders.
They had been told he was once accused of raping a teenager, but the charge was later dropped.
But they were not aware that he had also been accused of indecently assaulting an 11-year-old and having sex with a string of other schoolgirls.
The moment Huntley's mask slipped
Richard Latham QC, prosecuting, told the Old Bailey that Huntley found the two girls ‘too tempting’.
He said: ‘This whole incident was motivated by something sexual, that whatever he initiated with one or the other or both of the girls plainly went wrong.
‘Thereafter in this ruthless man’s mind both girls simply had to die, they simply had to die in his own selfish self-interest. Each was a witness, a potential complainant. He was quite merciless.’
Confronting the killer, he said: ‘Holly drowned in the bath because you wanted her dead. The only way that child would have drowned in the bath is if you were holding her under the water.’
Huntley replied: ‘I was not holding her.’
Mr Latham went on: ‘Jessica was screaming because you were murdering Holly, that’s the truth isn’t it? That’s the only reason she was screaming rather than helping her friend, isn’t it?’
Huntley said: ‘No that’s not true.’
He described trying to ‘collect his thoughts’ and being ‘frozen by panic’ after Holly fell into the water in a series of accidents.
Mr Latham said he did not need to collect his thoughts, and that instinct demanded that he would have tried to rescue Holly, had she fallen in the bath by accident.
Huntley lashed out in response, raising his voice and spitting out the words: ‘In these circumstances it is very rational to know what you are doing. In those circumstances it is not so rational. Believe me, I know’
Mr Latham coolly suggested: ‘You can be perfectly assertive when you want to Mr Huntley.
‘You can get angry, can’t you Mr Huntley?’
Huntley replied: ‘Yes.’
Mr Latham: ‘You just lost your temper with me, didn’t you?’
Huntley said: ‘That’s because you … you have your opinion.’
Mr Latham repeated: ‘You have just lost your temper with me, haven’t you?’
Huntley said: ‘Yes.’
Mr Latham pressed him: ‘Did you lose your temper with one of these girls on that Sunday evening?’
Huntley: ‘I had no reason to lose my temper.’
Mr Latham: ‘Did you become the assertive individual you became two minutes ago?’
Huntley: ‘No I did not.’
Sentencing the pair, Mr Justice Moses told Huntley his claim to have been ‘the last friendly face’ the girls saw ‘was a lie which serves to underline the persistent cruelty’ of his actions.
The senior judge added: ‘On the contrary, one of those girls died knowing her friend had been attacked or killed by you.
‘After you had murdered them both, you pushed their bodies into a ditch, stripped them and burned them, while their family searched for them in increasing despair.
‘And, as Kevin Wells called out their names, you pretended to join in the search. Three days later you demonstrated the extent of your merciless cynicism by offering that father some words of regret.
‘Your tears have never been for them, only for yourself.’
Carr now lives under an assumed name subject to a rare ‘Mary Bell’ anonymity order imposed upon her release from prison.
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