When Maxine Carr met Ian Huntley, she thought it was a match made in heaven – but their toxic union unleashed hell.
She became one of Britain’s most reviled women after she provided manipulative Huntley with an alibi for the Soham murders of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman 20 years ago.
So sickening was her crime the authorities had no choice but to hand her a £1million-a-year secret identity after she had served time for perverting the course of justice.
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And, 20 years after Huntley lured the schoolgirls into the couple’s Cambridgeshire home, married Carr, now 45, remains cloaked in an anonymity order far from the scene of the crime that shocked Britain.
She is one of only a handful of former prisoners protected by a lifelong injunction – along with Mary Bell, who killed two little boys when she was 11 in 1968, and James Bulger’s killers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
So strict is the protection order that even details of her hairstyle or job can never be published.
Criminologist Prof David Wilson said: “It’s a unique situation, incredibly rare in British law. It’s a landmark case. What makes her unique is that Maxine Carr, unlike Mary Bell or Robert Thompson, did not murder anyone; she perverted the course of justice.
“The Soham murders created such an intense feeling of revulsion from the public that anybody who played a part would have difficulty after their release from having any sort of life that could be regarded as normal under their old identity.”
Carr was one of a number of girls and young women who fell under Huntley’s spell.
Born Maxine Capp and raised in the village of Keelby near Grimsby, Lincs, she was just two years old when her farm labourer father Alfred left her mum Shirley.
Carr hated her dad so much she changed her surname by deed poll.
Her mum said: “She changed her name because she wants nothing to do with her father. She does not care for her father any more.”
The feeling was mutual. Alfred said after Carr’s arrest in 2002: “I haven’t had anything to do with her and that side of the family for 20 years. I want nothing to do with them now.”
Shirley raised Carr and her older sister single-handed. She said: “It was not an easy childhood, but we coped. There were times when we barely had two pennies to rub together.”
The family were Elvis fans and there was an Elvis clock on the kitchen wall and other memorabilia scattered around the home.
Carr went to the primary school in Keelby and on to Healing Comprehensive, where Huntley had also been a pupil. Described as a “volatile child”, she was bullied and had few friends. She went on to suffer anorexia, and at one stage her weight dropped to a little over six stone. A neighbour recalled: “She was very ill.”
But after recovering she went on to have a string of relationships.
Her ex-boyfriends described a Jekyll and Hyde character – timid and quiet when sober, but after a few drinks flashing her breasts and having sex with near-strangers.
After she was jailed, scaffolder Paul Selby, who dated her for a year, said: “She would get up and dance on the tables. She wanted attention.”
Another former boyfriend, Jason Wink, said: “She loved being the centre of attention and if you so much as looked at another woman she would go mad. She was really insecure.”
Prof Wilson, a former prison governor now working as a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, said: “What’s interesting about Maxine Carr is just how difficult her own set of circumstances were.
“Somebody like Huntley could come into her life and give her a sense of being that was missing from her own familial circumstances. She was estranged from her own father and she changed her own name.”
Carr was 22 when she met Huntley, who was then aged 25, at a nightclub in Grimsby in 1999.
She moved into his flat in Barton-upon-Humber shortly after.
In November 2001, Huntley started his job as caretaker at Soham Village College and moved into a cottage. Carr, meanwhile, was working as a teaching assistant at the school where Holly and Jessica were pupils.
In the two weeks after the schoolgirls vanished after attending a family barbecue, Carr vouched for evil Huntley repeatedly.
She was so besotted with him that she went along with his lies after he lured Jessica and Holly into their home and murdered them in the bath.
She vouched for Huntley in the two weeks after the girls’ disappearance and cleaned their house of evidence.
Carr and Huntley were arrested when witnesses told police Maxine was at her mother’s home in Grimsby, 100 miles away from Soham, when the girls were killed on August 4, 2002.
A judge accepted she played no role in the murders. But police believe Huntley used Carr’s friendship with the girls to lure them into his house. He may even have told them Carr was home and invited them in to say hello.
In photos that could not be published at the time in case they prejudiced her trial, Carr can be seen smiling and giggling during a TV interview just days after Holly and Jessica went missing and while there were still hopes of finding them alive.
During the BBC Look East interview she kept slipping into the past tense while speaking about the girls, and laughed when she was corrected.
Carr played with her hair and smiled as she talked about the girls. She said they “always used to come up to me and confide in me and show me their boyfriends”.
She told journalist Rachael Dane that Jessica was “very funny” and Holly “was just like a little angel”.
When cameraman Shaun Whitmore noted she was talking about them in the past tense, she stopped, laughed and said “God” before resuming. She slipped again when she said Jessica “never looked feminine, she always looked more tomboyish”.
The photos emerged yesterday, the 20th anniversary of the murders. Huntley, now 48, was eventually found guilty of the girls’ murders and jailed for 40 years. Carr was jailed for three-and-a-half years in 2003 after she was convicted of perverting the course of justice. She served 21 months.
During her trial she complained she was dubbed “Myra Mark II” by inmates at Holloway where Moors murderer Myra Hindley served much of her term and where Carr was held on remand for 14 months.
Carr initially defended Huntley after their arrest, telling police: “He’s done nothing wrong, I love him.” But during the Old Bailey trial she turned on him furiously, saying: “I’m not taking the blame for what that thing has done.”
Carr accused him of being abusive and said she lied to police after her arrest because she was scared of him. Asked if she had been “pressured” to provide an alibi, she said: “He had a very controlling attitude towards me.”
Prof Wilson said: “The coercive control Huntley exercised made her behave in a way that ultimately she recognised she shouldn’t have done.”
Carr’s release from jail in 2004 posed a dilemma for the authorities. Police even made plans for her to start a new life overseas in a deal which would cost the British taxpayer £15million.
Instead she was granted life-long anonymity with a unique injunction.
What became of Carr remains a secret, two decades on.
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