Drifter obsessed with young girls

IAN HUNTLEY was brought to the attention of social workers four times in under a year for having sex with different underage girls.

The reports, which involved three girls aged 15 and one aged 13, were made to North East Lincolnshire Council between August 1995 and May 1996 when Huntley was in his early 20s. The authority was also alerted over an indecent assault allegation against an 11-year-old in July 1998.

Yet there was no obligation for social services to keep a file on Huntley and none of the cases were ever linked because they were investigated by different people.

There was also no direct contact between Cambridgeshire police and the Lincolnshire authority when Huntley applied for a job at Soham Village College. Three of the four cases reported to North East Lincolnshire had been passed on to Humberside police but none of the girls would make a formal complaint.

Huntley's very ordinary world was turned upside down when his wife ran off with his brother and his mother moved in with a lesbian lover.

These traumatic events in the mid-1990s brought him close to a complete breakdown and he embarked on a string of affairs in which he preyed on younger women and underage girls. Huntley was born on January 31, 1974, and brought up in the working class port of Immingham, near Grimsby, by parents Kevin and Lynda.

A weak child, hospitalised by asthma and bullied, he went to Eastfield Primary school, then Healing Comprehensive and finally Immingham Comprehensive. He was ridiculed by pupils as "Spadehead" and the "white cliff of Dover" due to his big forehead and was in the bottom class in most subjects.

Classmates remember a child who was a "bit of a loner" who ran to teachers if provoked. School friend Rachel Buttrick, said: "There were people at school who you expected to be in prison and there were those who acted up in class because they were academically bright Ian wasn't one of them."

Another friend at Healing, Yvonne Puck , said Huntley was an "average lad". She added: "He just blended into the crowd. He wasn't outstanding at anything."

But in the years just after he left school it seems Huntley's obsession with younger girls was materialising. After his arrest at Soham, one woman came forward to say she had been french-kissed by Huntley when he was 18 and she was 13. In December 1994, Huntley met 18-year-old Claire Evans, embarked on a whirlwind romance and asked her to marry him. At least one local girl had already turned him down. They wed within weeks at a registry office in Grimsby and went to live in a one-bed flat above a shop.

But the marriage was over within days and Claire moved out, later to take up with Huntley's younger brother Wayne. Ian flew into a rage, vowing never to speak to his younger brother or wife again. The love triangle became the subject of local gossip and Huntley was shattered. Following the fall of his marriage in 1995, Huntley moved round various cheap flats and dead-end jobs in Grimsby in what became a humdrum life. His only release was his ability to pick up young girls.

One 28-year-old Immingham woman recalled how Huntley tried to chat her up in a nightclub on the outskirts of Grimsby: "There was something about him. He was too smooth a bit of a creep."

At 23, Huntley began a relationship with a 15-year-old with whom he later fathered a daughter. He was working with the girl's mother selling charity scratch cards and living in a caravan in their garden at the time.

Huntley and the girl moved in together. According to the girl, she felt bullied and controlled she once burnt a pizza and Huntley slapped her. She eventually fled.

Huntley's final partner Maxine Carr told jurors the girl had given birth to Huntley's daughter, now aged five, in 1998.

Another girlfriend Rebecca Bartlett, was 19 when Huntley was 23. Ms Bartlett said he flew into a rage when she said she may be pregnant and the relationship ended.

During this turbulent period in his early 20s, Huntley's parents also split up and his mother moved in with a lesbian lover, Julie Beasley, nearly 20 years her junior. This and his own turbulent love life took their toll and, according to friends, Huntley had some form of breakdown. He began to tell people stories about his past. At different times he said he was an ex-RAF pilot, his father died when he was a child and he had won the Lottery.

He got jobs through a recruitment agency, including working at a fish plant, packing nappies in a factory and as a barman and security guard.

In May 1998, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old girl in Grimsby. The girl was walking home from a nightclub when she was attacked in an alley. Huntley was arrested, charged and remanded in custody but the case was dropped after CCTV footage emerged which showed he had been elsewhere at the time. But the rape allegation followed him around. His mother said: "I've never seen a man cry so much. He sobbed his heart out."

In February 1999 he met Maxine Carr at Hollywoods nightclub in Grimsby.

After four weeks, the couple moved in together at a terrace house in Veal Street, Grimsby. It was a turbulent relationship and, according to neighbours, they had a series of huge rows. But in September 2001 they decided to start a new life, initially moving to Wangford, Suffolk. The cottage was a few hundred yards from where the bodies of Holly and Jessica would later be found.

Huntley applied for the job as site manager at Soham Village College. He had no experience of such work and would, for the first time in his life, be a manager.

After six months Huntley passed his induction period and was well on his way to becoming a fixture in Soham. As far as anyone who knew him could tell he had settled down, was getting ready to marry. Maxine Carr and had left his past behind.