A former detective involved in the hunt for Soham killer Ian Huntley told how he came face-to-face with the grinning monster.
Retired Det Supt David Hankins, 71, said caretaker Huntley would meet him each morning at the school hall as cops searched for missing Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Mr Hankins was among 400 officers working around the clock to find the schoolgirls after they vanished following a family barbecue on August 4, 2002. But today – in his first ever interview – Mr Hankins told how he never imagined twisted killer Huntley was capable of a crime so heinous it shocked Britain.
Mr Hankins said: “It’s 20 years ago but it’s still one of the worst cases I’ve ever had to deal with. It was a daunting experience, it was harrowing, it was a lot of pressure.
“I’ve never dealt with anything like that and there’s not many officers who would have dealt with anything like that. There were two girls who had been murdered and it had never happened before, certainly not in my 30 years service.”
It has been nearly 20 years since 10-year-olds Holly and Jessica – both wearing replica Manchester United football shirts – vanished.
They had gone to buy sweets when they were lured into Huntley’s home after he claimed his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was in the house.
She worked as a teaching assistant at Holly and Jessica’s school and was close to both the girls.
But when the two girls went inside, despicable Huntley murdered them both and hid their bodies.
For 13 days, the world’s media followed every twist and turn of the search – with Mr Hankins leading press briefings sitting beside the girls’ shattered parents.
Mr Hankins, who left the police service 18 years ago, added: “I arrived at 7am on the first morning and the irony was that Ian Huntley was the one who let me in. I used to see him on a daily basis. He was just a normal bloke, a youngish chap who sorted things out for the dozens of camera crews and reporters.”
In the days and weeks that followed Holly and Jessica’s disappearance, Huntley, now 48, spewed a sickening web of lies, even appearing on television to claim that he spoke to the youngsters before they disappeared.
But it was these appearances that ultimately helped cops in their hunt for the girls’ killer.
The publicity backfired in Huntley’s hometown of Grimsby, where locals recognised him as someone who had been linked with a sex attack.
Meanwhile Carr, now 45, had also started speaking to TV crews. In one interview she chillingly referred to Holly – who at this point was still missing – in the past tense. She was covering for Huntley, who smothered them and ditched their bodies.
Mr Hankins said: “He didn’t seem odd at all. We used to have a lot of conversations, I knew his name but whether he knew my name I don’t know.
“Nobody thought anything about him, it was only when the evidence came out that he made the mistake he had appeared on camera.”
Mr Hankins said it would “take many generations” for the Cambridgeshire village to shake the image of Huntley’s crime.
He said: “It’s a horrible thing. Anyone who lives anywhere else in the UK thinks, ‘Oh, that’s where those two girls were killed’.”
Speaking of the moment he was assigned to the case, Mr Hankins said: “I was just a local detective in Peterborough. Out of the blue I get this phone call from the media people saying that they need a senior officer.
“I got a briefing from the media team at 7am in the morning, the girls were so young they must have been missing for only a short period.
“The alarm bell was pressed pretty quickly and the cavalry were called. It was obvious something terrible had happened. I was involved in handling the media. I had done routine murder investigations but had never handled the world’s media before.”
He added: “I was on the investigation for quite a short period of time but I was on the investigation during the period when it was just breaking.
“It’s always a difficult job to balance the importance of getting the information out to the public and not jeopardising the investigation.
“It’s quite a difficult line to tread. I was never a secretive person, but there was a real sensitivity to the case.
“That case was a highlight – in a very negative way – of my career.
“I didn’t get to know the families too well because I didn’t want to be muddling up hard facts with the profound emotion that the parents had because it was their children.”
