2003: Ian Huntley guilty of Soham murders

Former school caretaker Ian Huntley has been found guilty of the murder of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Huntley was given two life sentences.

The two ten-year-old girls, who were best friends, vanished from a family barbecue at Holly's house in Soham, Cambridgeshire, on 4 August 2002.

Their bodies were found in a ditch nearly two weeks later after one of the biggest police operations the UK has ever seen.

As the verdicts came in, it emerged Huntley, 29, has been accused of having sex with underage girls and of rape several times in the past.

His girlfriend, Maxine Carr, 26, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail for conspiring to pervert the course of justice by giving a false alibi to police for Huntley on the day of the murder.

She was cleared of two counts of assisting an offender.

Carr has already spent 16 months in prison and is likely to be freed with an electronic tag in a few months' time.

'Merciless cynicism'

Sentencing Huntley, Mr Justice Moses said he had displayed "merciless cynicism" after killing the 10-year-old girls.

The judge said: "You murdered them both. You are the one person who knows how you murdered them, you are the one person who knows why."

He also told Huntley that he had added to the families' grief by pretending to help search for the girls and by offering words of sympathy to Holly's father.

No emotion

As the jury returned 11 to 1 majority verdicts on Huntley, the Wells family hugged each other and sobbed.

Huntley showed no emotion.

Jessica's father, Leslie Chapman, described Huntley as a "timebomb just ready to go off".

"Unfortunately our girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

He said he hoped Huntley would one day have "the guts" to publicly explain what happened on the night the girls died.

Huntley was a school caretaker at the time of the murders. Maxine Carr was a teaching assistant in the girls' class.

In court, Huntley said that Holly died after falling into his bath, and he said he killed Jessica accidentally when he put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.

But the prosecution laid out an alternative version of events - that Huntley lured Holly and Jessica into his house, possibly with a sexual motivation, and murdered them when his plan went wrong.

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