Huntley cried at detective inquiry

SOHAM-ACCUSED Ian Huntley burst into tears as he told a police officer: “You think I’ve done it”, his Old Bailey murder trial heard yesterday.

Huntley cried when he spoke to Detective Constable Jonathan Taylor near his home three days after Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman vanished.

The officer told the jury: "He said: 'You think I have done it. I was the last person to see them or to speak to them'. Then he started to cry.

"I told him not to persecute himself, to pull himself together. I told him other people had seen the girls in that area and in the High Street."

Detective Taylor had gone to Huntley's house at 5, College Close in Soham, Cambridgeshire, on August 7 last year.

He wanted to get him to sign a consent form for a search that he had been carried out there two days before with his colleague Detective Constable Andrea Warren, but as they spoke he became tearful.

Detective Taylor and Detective Con Warren had spent 90 minutes searching Huntley's house two days previously within 24 hours of the girls vanishing after it emerged he may have been one of the last people to see them.

Detective Warren took a statement from Huntley, who was then the site manager at Soham Village College, during that visit.

He agreed to allow his home to be searched and was mostly "very calm and very relaxed" but became "agitated" as the search went into a bathroom and a cupboard under the stairs.

The officers saw what appeared to be bedding hanging on the clothes line outside even though it was pouring rain. Huntley, 29, denies murdering 10-year-old best friends Holly and Jessica but has admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice.