Enda Brady: Nobody will mourn depraved murderer Ian Huntley
Ian Huntley had been serving a life sentence with a recommended minimum term of 40 years. The reality is that he would never have been released, such was the depravity of his crimes and the callousness of his actions. File picture
Britain has witnessed many horrific crimes over the decades but the 2002 murders of best friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was shocking beyond belief. It stunned the country, and further afield, for so many reasons.
Nearly 24 years later that awful period is back in the news because their killer has now been killed.
There was the mystery of their disappearance after a family BBQ on a summer’s day. The search. The rolling news coverage. The hope. Their innocence. Then the discovery of their bodies. The cruelty. The grief. The manhunt. The arrest. The anger.
The revelation that a school caretaker, a bland, forgettable little man called Ian Huntley, was their murderer.
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And that picture of them, smiling together in their matching red Manchester United jerseys. It was given to the media when there was still hope that they might be found, that their disappearance could have been because of something silly or childish.
Huntley had been serving a life sentence with a recommended minimum term of 40 years.
The reality is that he would never have been released, such was the depravity of his crimes and the callousness of his actions.
Now he is no more. He took their lives without a thought and his life too has ended in the most brutal fashion inside a prison, allegedly at the hands of a fellow prisoner.
The double killer had been held on a segregated wing of HMP Frankland in the north-east of England, living alongside other prisoners whose crimes are so deplorable they can’t safely mix with the general prison population for fear of attack.
Child killers, paedophiles, terrorists and rapists. The irony is that one of his fellow segregated inmates allegedly killed him with a metal pole after an argument.
Huntley had enemies everywhere and he apparently knew it, once telling a fellow prisoner that “prisons are very, very dangerous places and nowhere is safe”.
How prophetic his words proved to be.
Nothing more could be done for Huntley after the savage beating he took and he died at the weekend. A man has now been charged with murder.
Nobody will grieve his death, reviled as he was. It has been reported that the UK taxpayer will have to stump up £3,000 for his funeral because he died in custody and those are the rules.
His own daughter has said that his ashes should just be flushed down a toilet.
It’s time now for the UK’s justice secretary David Lammy to make sure that not a single penny more is wasted on Huntley or anything to do with him. On this occasion, nobody will criticise a politician for breaking the rules.
There had been previous attacks on him in jail, emergency trips to hospital and extra security. It all added up — his 24 years in custody will have cost the British taxpayer several million pounds.
There will, no doubt, be an inquiry into how this could have happened inside a prison. Given the rancid state of the UK’s prison system there should be no surprise.
The prison estate is crumbling, overcrowded and the level of violence is off the charts.
Prison guards do well to avoid attacks, never mind the likes of double child killers.
The barbarity of Huntley’s crimes means that nobody will care what comes of the inquiry or what recommendations are made as a result of it.
You would hope that they don’t waste too much time on it because Huntley deserves absolutely nothing.
What he deserves is the dustbin of history.
It has been reported that segregated inmates were “queuing up” to kill him.
It would appear that in the depths of criminality, Ian Huntley lived at the bottom of a very scummy pond. And even there they found him.
Even the men who had to be on the same wing as him — all segregated because of their own awful crimes — couldn’t bear to be near him.
What made this case all the more enraging and upsetting was that the girls knew his girlfriend Maxine Carr, who worked as a teaching assistant at their primary school.
She gave him an alibi as the police search intensified.
Carr was jailed in 2003 for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. She was released in May 2004, relocated and given a new identity.
The double murderer was even brazen enough to give an interview to my former Sky News colleague Jeremy Thompson at the height of the search in 2002.
When the media was attending daily news briefings with the police in charge of the search for Holly and Jessica, Huntley would be on the periphery.
A pathetic little runt of a man, who could have ended the media circus by coming clean, but chose not to.
As the UK prayed for a miracle, he knew there was never going to be one. He knew exactly where their little bodies lay and said nothing.
It took almost two weeks for them to be found, in a ditch, near RAF Lakenheath, 10 miles away. Huntley was arrested that same day.
Until that Sunday evening in August 2002, when the girls vanished, hardly anyone had ever heard of the Cambridgeshire town of Soham.
Now it is forever linked to Huntley and the appalling evil he visited on two little girls, their families and an entire community.
Nobody will ever know why he did what he did, he has taken that with him.
To the end, he denied that he had killed them, claiming that Holly had fallen into his bath and drowned and that he killed Jessica while trying to silence her.
The last word on Huntley should go to his only daughter, Samantha Bryan. As he lay in a coma last week, with no prospect of recovery, she told reporters that "a special place in hell is waiting for him".
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