Hitch-hiker to give evidence at Soham murder trial

A hitch-hiker picked up by Soham accused Ian Huntley two days after Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman vanished was giving evidence today at the caretaker’s Old Bailey murder trial.

Huntley travelled to Grimsby to collect his then girlfriend Maxine Carr from her mother’s house, and travelled back to Soham, Cambridgeshire, on Tuesday August 6 last year.

The pair stopped to pick up hitch-hiker Robert Jeynes and the prosecution alleges that they spoke about the missing 10-year-olds during the journey south.

Yesterday the court heard from a neighbour of Carr’s mother, who said she saw Carr earlier that day, sobbing as she and Huntley looked into the boot of his red Ford Fiesta.

The prosecution claims Huntley murdered the girls on August 4 and put their bodies in the boot of his car before driving them to a remote ditch near Lakenheath, Suffolk, and dumping them.

Huntley, 29, denies murdering the friends but has admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Carr, 26, a former classroom assistant at the girls’ primary school, denies conspiring to pervert the course of justice and two charges of assisting an offender.

The prosecution alleges she gave Huntley a false alibi for the day the girls went missing. Their bodies were found 13 days later on August 17.