Grim journey for girls’ parents

THE parents of murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have made private visits to the site where the bodies of their daughters were found, police said yesterday.

Kevin and Nicola Wells and Sharon and Leslie Chapman made the journeys yesterday morning from their homes in Soham to the wooded area close to Lakenheath air base where the bodies were discovered on Saturday.

A Cambridgeshire police spokesman said the two families visited the area separately.

Police announced yesterday the formal identification of the two bodies found in the copse had been completed, and the bodies were those of the missing 10-year-olds.

Ian Huntley, 28, has been charged with the murder of the youngsters and is detained in Rampton Hospital while psychiatric tests are completed.

His 25-year-old partner Maxine Carr was remanded in custody yesterday when she appeared before Peterborough magistrates on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice in connection with the case.

Meanwhile, police yesterday began searching a bungalow in Lakenheath.

Forensic officers began scouring the property, a bungalow understood to belong to Ian Huntley’s paternal grandmother Lily Gollings, who was not present.

On Wednesday, they completed a three-day search at Huntley’s father’s home in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, from where about 50 items were taken away for testing.

That house remains sealed off by a police cordon and is expected to remain cordoned off for at least a week.

Meanwhile, it emerged that an inquest into the deaths of the two 10-year-olds is due to be opened and adjourned tomorrow. The coroner for south and west Cambridgeshire, David Morris, will open and adjourn the inquest at Shire Hall, Cambridge, at 2pm tomorrow to deal with issues about the identification of the bodies.

The formal opening and adjourning of the inquest allows funeral arrangements to be made, although initial post-mortem examinations on the bodies proved inconclusive and they must undergo further analysis which is expected to take some weeks.