The ‘what if?’ that haunts Holly’s best friend

HOLLY WELLS’ best friend told how she had struggled with the guilt of wondering if the two girls would still be alive if she had stayed with them on the day they were murdered.

Natalie Parr spent the night at Holly's house before Holly and Jessica Chapman died and had left the girls just hours before they were killed.

"It's hard because I don't know whether if I'd stayed there they wouldn't have gone I just don't know," she said.

The 12-year-old girl spoke of the heartbreaking impact her friend's deaths had had on her life, saying that sometimes all she wanted to do was curl up and cry. "Sometimes, especially at night, I'll go to bed and read a book or whatever and write my diary and I'll lay there and just cry, just to get my emotions out," she said.

As Natalie tried to come to terms with their deaths, she started writing to Holly and Jessica in her diary, telling them what had been going on at school, expressing her feelings towards them.

"At first I didn't write 'Dear Diary', I wrote 'Dear Holly and Jess' and I was writing it to them. And then I sort of stopped doing that and I wrote to the diary, sort of about how much I missed them and how much I wanted them back. But when I wrote to Holly and Jess, I just wrote about everyday things: what lessons we had, what strict teachers we had and what essays we had to write and whatever."

At times she has cried herself to sleep, but gradually she has found her own way to cope with her sense of loss. "Before, I used to think, 'everyone just says they're gone but they're not really - they're still here'. But then I realised I had to grow up and they weren't here any more."

And she said even though she did not want to, she sometimes found herself imagining what her friends must have experienced, which scared her.

"Everything just came on top of you like a great big pile of rubbish and you're just trying to pick it all off so you can breathe again and it's hard," Natalie said.

"It's just everything is always on you and nothing can leave you alone and your emotions are always high and you just don't know what to do."

Speaking about Huntley, Natalie said: "I hate him to pieces really.

"I hate anybody that had anything to do with it and I personally don't think they should be allowed to stand up and talk any more.

"They took two people's lives and they only have one life. They can't ever repay for that second life, never."

Natalie said the girls had viewed Maxine Carr as "just like an everyday person".

"We didn't realise that her actions were going to affect us so much," she said.

Natalie said she had known the classroom assistant "very well" and had once spent some time chatting to her with Jessica.

"We got to know a lot about her, about her childhood and about her now and her supposed wedding that was going to happen ... we didn't think anything of it at the time ... she was just like an everyday person to us."