Emotional day as Carr completes Soham evidence

Maxine Carr wept in the witness box at the Old Bailey today, saying she “would not be blamed” for what her ex-lover Ian Huntley did to Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

At one stage Carr was unable even to say Huntley’s name and pointed her finger at him in the dock, calling him “that thing”.

In an extraordinary moment of drama she broke down under cross examination by Huntley’s counsel Stephen Coward QC when he accused her of lying to make her own situation better.

Carr sobbed angrily: “I don’t need to put my position in a better light – I know exactly what I have done, sir.

“I have come in this witness box to say what I have done and I am not going to be blamed for what that thing in that box has done to me or those children.”

She raised her right hand and pointed at Huntley in the dock, 20ft across the packed court room.

As Carr regained her composure Mr Coward reminded her she had earlier claimed never to have heard what she had heard in court over the last few days.

Mr Coward asked her if she was referring to Huntley’s evidence.

Carr said she meant: “That the children died, he killed those children.”

She later broke down in tears again when she was reminded by prosecution counsel Richard Latham QC how she had referred to Holly and Jessica in the past tense in a television interview in the days after they disappeared.

Carr choked back sobs and her voice cracked with emotion as she said: “I have been feeling very, very guilty for a long, long time, that if I was there I could have stopped them from dying.”

During seven hours in the witness box over two days Carr admitted that she lied to police to protect her then fiance by giving him an alibi.

But she repeatedly insisted she had believed Huntley when he told her the 10-year-old girls had left their house alive.

Carr sobbed yet again as she said: “They went away happy and laughing, that was what he said.

“They were alive when they left my house because that man said so.”

Carr, 26, a former classroom assistant in Holly and Jessica’s class, denies conspiring to pervert the course of justice and two counts of assisting an offender.

Huntley, 29, a former caretaker at Soham Village College, denies the double child murder on Sunday August 4 last year but has admitted a single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

The jury has heard he admits Holly died accidentally in his bath and that he killed Jessica as he tried to silence her screams, although he insists he did not mean to kill her.

He bundled their bodies into his car, dumped them in the remote ditch where they were found 13 days later, cut off their clothes and torched their corpses.