Huntley had breakdown over rape charge in 1998, court told

IAN Huntley was charged with rape four years before he was accused of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, his Old Bailey trial heard yesterday.

untley was accused of the rape in 1998 but was “acquitted” when the case came to court, his ex-girlfriend Maxine Carr told police after they were both arrested on suspicion of the murder of the Soham schoolgirls.

She told police she had lied to protect Huntley, saying she was in Soham with him on the day the girls went missing, when in fact she was in Grimsby.

She did it because he had suffered a nervous breakdown after the rape accusation and feared he would be “fitted up” again, she said.

The former caretaker at Soham Village College told his then girlfriend that she was to tell the truth about where she really was on Sunday August 4 if they were ever arrested, she claimed.

The jury heard that Huntley and Carr were both arrested on August 17, and that Carr was interviewed later that day, when she admitted she was in Grimsby when the girls vanished.

She told police: “The reason why I told the police that I was at home was because my partner, Ian, he was accused in 1998 of attacking a girl, of raping a girl.

“It went to court, he was put in a prison and bail hostel and then the police came up with this videotape of him in a nightclub at the time it was supposed to have happened “He had a nervous breakdown and everything else and when I found out that he was the last person to see them at that time, to speak to them, I just didn’t know what to do.”

She said she had not wanted to see Huntley accused in the press and had lied for him, adding: “I’m sorry if I’ve wasted time and all that.”

Huntley, 29, denies the double murder of the schoolgirls but has admitted one charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Carr, 26, a former teaching assistant at the girls’ primary school, denies the conspiracy charge and two counts of assisting an offender.