I REMEMBER TREMBLING WITH RELIEF WHEN, A FEW HOUSES AWAY FROM MINE, THE AROMA OF SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE WAS CARRIED TOWARDS ME ON THE SAME GENTLE SUMMER BREEZE THAT HAD BROUGHT ME THE SMELL OF GRASS CUTTINGS A FEW HOURS EARLIER. That homely smell was coming from my house. I remember knocking on the outer door and then my mum saw me through the glass of the inner one. ‘Hang on, my spaghetti might burn,’ she shouted.
Crying had given me puffy-looking eyes, and they felt like organ stops, but in the time it took to walk home from the school they had become less inflamed. Quickly, I tidied up my clothes and hair. Mum didn’t give me a second glance, and why should she, for as far as she was concerned I had been into town with Katie Webber. I never let on what had happened. Besides, Mum never paid much attention to me when I came home; it was when I was going out that I had to be careful to always look my best, or she would nag me.
I had been so scared of the consequences of having left the street, and now here I was back home, with Mum none the wiser.
As I was undressing to take a bath, I noticed bleeding. I hadn’t started my periods at this age, so I wasn’t aware of what menstrual blood was. And, anyway, looking back, this certainly wasn’t period blood. After seeing it, I felt really sick and dirty.
And the smell: I just couldn’t get the stench off me. The more I tried to pull away from it, the more it clung to me. It was in my nostrils, it was in my hair. I was becoming nauseous and I retched. It was a certain smell that I just couldn’t get away from, a sort of musty dog smell that reminded me vividly of what had happened to me.
At that moment I wasn’t able to take in what had occurred. I was confused and wanted to ask somebody, ‘What happens if he comes and kills me? My bedroom is downstairs and he could come and break the window or whatever, and what happens if nobody believes me?’ I had these mad thoughts of self-hatred, self-blame and self-harm. With Huntley, I had been so near to death, which is why now I consider life to be priceless.
I wasn’t aware of the long-term significance of what Huntley had just done to me. I wasn’t aware that it was an abhorrent sex act. I wasn’t able to fully comprehend what he had done in terms of right and wrong. What didn’t pass through my mind was that he had no right to have done that. No, I didn’t think, He has got no right doing that and I am going to tell my mum and get the police in.
That is not to say that I hadn’t been made aware of ‘strangers’ and so on. I was aware, but I just thought these warnings related to strange men, not those you knew already. I mean, Huntley was considered a family friend. I didn’t even know what there was to fear about strangers, other than that they could take me away. No one had said, ‘Don’t let strange men fiddle with you down there, or even men you know.’
There was a man down the street one time who waved me over – I was only about seven – and asked, ‘Are you Mandy’s daughter?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I replied.
And then he moved a bit closer and said he was something to do with Auntie Bet. She was related to my granddad, but I’m not sure how; all I can remember is she had loads and loads of cats.
This man was her friend and I just said, ‘Oh, right.’
He was putting boxes into the boot of his car and he asked, ‘How’s your mum?
‘She’s fine, thank you,’ I answered.
As he handed me 50 pence he chirped, ‘Here you are, duck.’
I can remember going in and joyfully telling my mum as I held out my hand to show her this nice shiny coin, ‘Look, Mum, I just got 50 pence off that man down the road.’
Mum froze and sternly demanded, ‘What man?’
Innocently I replied, ‘The man who is putting boxes into the back of his car. He knows you.’
‘What bloody man?’ Mum snapped as she stood up, went and opened the door and craned her neck out to see the man for herself. With relief in her voice, she said it was this man called Rob. But she warned me, ‘Mind, don’t you ever go near anybody whether they say, “Oh, I know your mum” or “I know your dad” or whatever.’
I tried to explain to Mum that it was only because he said, ‘I know Mandy, you know. Mandy, your mum…’
Mum stopped me short when she hammered her point home: ‘Don’t go near anybody who says that or anybody who says, “Come with me”, OK?’
‘No, Mum,’ I said respectfully. ‘I’ll never do it again.’
So I knew at that age not to talk to or accept money from strangers, but to me Huntley wasn’t a stranger. So back then I was double wary of strangers and, as I said, Huntley wasn’t one, just as he wasn’t to Holly and Jessica.
He had built up trust within the community and held a responsible job, so who would think a school caretaker could take the lives of two children when he had been passed fit to be around them?
In total, Huntley came to the attention of the Humberside Police on ten occasions. In addition, between August 1995 and July 1998, he was reported to North East Lincolnshire Social Services on five separate occasions. Unbelievably, three of the reports alleging underage sex were passed on, independently of each other, to the Humberside Police.
I lay the blame squarely at the doors of North East Lincolnshire Social Services and the Humberside Police. From the Introduction to this book and what I say later, you will see why.
After kicking my clothes into the corner of the bathroom, I ran the water from just the hot tap: it was the hottest bath I’ve ever had. My feet and hands were really cold and I had a sick and ill feeling within me as I got into the bath. As I sat in that hot water I just wanted to dissolve into it and let it consume me, let it cleanse me through and through.
But the water on its own wasn’t removing the remnants of Huntley from me. I felt repulsed at what he had done; my body was screaming out to be purified.
I remember seeing the bottle of bleach and then a small brush, like a nailbrush, really thick. I had to get rid of that rancid smell, so I undid the yellow cap on the bottle and slowly poured the bleach over what I saw as Huntley’s calling card. I tried to scrub away in a mad frenzy what Huntley had done to me. As I scrubbed, the area became red-raw. My skin was starting to blister.
Although I was cleansing the superficial film of Huntley’s filthy touch from the outside of me, my insides were churning and my stomach was in knots. I was at the end of my tether as I reached out and picked up the bottle again. I pushed down the childproof cap and unscrewed it, then immersed the part-filled bottle in the water and let it fill. I wanted to really cleanse the stench of Huntley away. I felt soiled and sick. The hurt of that dirty, shameful nightmare was horrendous.
As my hands clenched in tension around the plastic bottle, part of me had shut down and the only way I could deal with the torment was by gulping down the cocktail of chemical and bathwater. As the hot toxic brew entered my mouth, I prayed that the liquid filling me would wash away my living nightmare. How much of the mix I swallowed, I don’t really know. I just kept gulping it down. I didn’t care, so long as I could get that monster’s stench off me and out of me. If only I could have washed away the pain that easily. The realisation that I was never going to be the same person again was dawning on me.
I thought I must be a dirty, horrible person and I was trying to wash it away. But it wouldn’t go away. And, when I couldn’t wash it away, I decided to push it deep down within me. I locked it away behind a mask of self-hatred.
Looking back, I don’t know how I didn’t kill myself by what I did. It wasn’t something I had planned; it was just a spontaneous act on seeing the bleach bottle. The contents were stronger than soap and I knew it was used for deep cleaning. I had no intention of killing myself, I just had to get rid of this smell, because what if anyone could smell it on me? What if they found out I had been out of the street with Huntley? Then I’d really be in for it. I needed to wash the stench of Huntley’s breath from my mouth, too.
I was ill for the rest of that night. Between my legs it burned from my scrubbing. I got my pyjamas on and sought the soothing comfort of my bed. Mum sensed something was amiss and asked, ‘Is everything all right? Did you have a good time?’
Although I longed to confide in her, I just couldn’t find the words, so I buried the pain in my reply, ‘Yes, thank you. I don’t feel very well. I’m off to bed.’
As I walked towards my bedroom, I bit down hard on my lip, praying that I wouldn’t burst into an uncontrollable flood of tears in front of Mum. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her what Huntley had done to me. I resigned myself to a life of bitter silence. In time, the pain of silence would become too much to bear.
When I closed the bedroom door, all of the ache inside me welled up and spilled out as tears of pain rolled down my cheeks. I felt so numb, lost and alone.
I was terrified of what might happen to me, as I was in the downstairs bedroom on my own. He only lives a few minutes away, I thought. He could come to my window easily at nine o’clock at night, put it through and kill me, and everyone is upstairs.
That night, as I lay there, it all came hurtling back to haunt me. I can remember literally twiddling my thumbs out of nervousness: 50 times one way and then 50 times the other way. Things started to come to the front of my mind, but I was running on autopilot, twiddling until my thumbs ached.
What am I doing that for? I thought. I kept going over what had happened during the day and thinking, I really, really, really want to tell somebody but what happens if he comes to kill me? Exhausted from the torment, I fell asleep.
A few hours later, about three o’clock, an uncomfortable feeling of dampness awakened me. I had wet the bed. I had never done it before, and I was quite embarrassed for myself. I tried to conceal this from Mum and didn’t tell her.
The next day – well, a few hours later – I remember just staying in the sanctuary of the house, but then I started worrying. What if Huntley were to knock on the door and come after me?
The odd thing is that Katie never made any effort to come and see me after that fateful day when Huntley took me to ‘climb trees’, which was unusual. I, obviously, wasn’t going to call on Katie, because Huntley was there.
I don’t know the reason for Katie Webber’s withdrawal from my life immediately after that sunny Saturday afternoon when Huntley turned his evil thoughts into reality. But it has to be considered very strange that she didn’t even come along for the regular Saturday trip into town. The longest length of time she had stayed away before that was about three or four days.
No one even asked why I never went around to Katie’s. It was as if she had never existed. At some point, I thought, she would have called to see me to ask why I hadn’t been going there. I was quite surprised and thinking, Why hasn’t she come along to see me?
She never even came to see what happened on the Saturday she had called for me, the day she had hurriedly left and said she would see me at her place. Surely that warranted some explanation?
As time went on, I was having flashbacks to the sex attack. I was finding it increasingly difficult to contain it within me. I felt it would only take some stupid thing to trigger the release mechanism within me and I would spill the beans on Huntley’s crimes.
This is exactly what happened one day in July 1998 when a fête was taking place next to our local church in Humberston. The venue was what is called the Paddock, where the swings are, and they usually had bric-a-brac stalls and other attractions.
My friend knocked on the door and asked, ‘Are you coming out to the fête today, Hailey?’
‘Yes,’ I said enthusiastically.
No sooner had I spoken than my mum came out of nowhere and overruled me: ‘No!’
In stark disbelief I pleaded with her, ‘Oh, what’s the matter, why?’
To my relief, Mum said, ‘Not until you’ve tidied your room.’
‘OK,’ I groaned, and told my friend, ‘I’ll meet you there in half an hour.’
‘It’ll take you longer than half an hour to clean your bedroom,’ Mum said.
OK then, I thought. But by this time I had an attitude like: I don’t care what anybody says, I will do what I want and nobody has the upper hand with me. I’m a big girl and, if you want to mess with me now, you mess with me.
I cleaned my bedroom quickly by putting everything under my bed and under my quilt, all my mucky clothes and things, and then cheerfully announced, ‘I’m finished. I’ll walk to the fair now.’
‘No, you are not,’ Mum insisted.
‘Why not?’ I moaned.
She barked back, ‘Your bedroom is still bloody messy and this is getting ridiculous. Keep your room tidy. It used to be nice and tidy, why isn’t it tidy now?’
After the Huntley attack, I must admit, my whole outlook on life seemed to have changed overnight. The experience had a dramatic effect on my character. Whereas once I would be polite and wore party dresses and had long hair, now I was dressing down, trying to make myself as unattractive as possible. I cut my ponytail, shunned dresses in favour of trousers and became a rebellious teenager.
My bedroom was downstairs, facing the garden. The fête was a tantalising thought. So, when Mum was out of sight, I shut my bedroom door, jumped out of the window and scampered off to the Paddock with an arrogant air about me.
There I met up with all my friends, and after about 15 minutes I spotted the local bobby, PC Andy Woods. It turned out that he had been to our house for a coffee to see how my mum was. My dad was a special constable and Andy, as well as being a policeman, was a friend of the family.
Mum had got nattering with him and she had a strop on about the state of my room and how I had slipped away to the fête. She said to Andy, ‘If you see Hailey when you’re at the fête, will you pick her up and bring her home, please, because she shouldn’t have gone.’
‘I’ll get in my car and go now,’ Andy told her.
And this was why he rolled up at the fête. All the school kids knew Andy because he was an all right copper. A girl called Danielle Hattersley knew that I had absconded out of my bedroom window to come to the fête and she went over and greeted Andy, ‘All right, PC Woods, how are things?’
He replied, ‘Oh, great. I’m looking for Hailey.’
Innocently or self-importantly, I don’t know which, Danielle informed him, ‘She’s over there in them bushes with all her mates.’
Andy came over to me and said, ‘Come on, then, Hailey. I’ve got to take you home.’
I was mega-embarrassed in front of all my friends, thinking, Mum has got him to do this. I don’t believe this, it’s a farce. All my mates are here and how embarrassing is that?
After a show of dumb insolence, I got into his little panda car and he drove me home. We’d only just pulled up at the door when all of a sudden my mum began shouting at me. I was at a loss as to why she was going on like this.
PC Woods ordered, ‘Go on, Hailey, go and sit down.’
I sat down without a word and she started screaming blue murder. ‘You could get kidnapped. I can’t believe that you are putting me through this. I have already told you, you are not going out until you have tidied your bedroom.’
All this because I didn’t do a good enough job on my room. ‘I have tidied my bedroom,’ I said in mock disbelief.
‘Like what, putting all your crap underneath your bed?’ she ranted.
I brazened it out, then snapped defensively, ‘Well, it’s tidier than what it was this morning, so it is tidier now,’ and lamely finished with a sullen, ‘you know’.
‘Lose the attitude,’ she fumed.
I just sat there and took my telling off with her screeching voice ringing in my ears. As the scolding went on, it filled my head, got louder and built up to a crescendo. She was incandescent as she raged, ‘You could get kidnapped. You could get raped one day. You could get murdered.’
I broke my silence angrily. ‘I don’t care what you’ve got to say.’
At this, Mum seethed, ‘Well, you will care when one day you end up getting really hurt or you end up getting raped.’
By this time, I think I understood what rape was, and maybe that’s what Huntley had done to me. I didn’t need this ear-bashing. After all, my life had been turned upside down and I only had a thin veneer of tolerance.
As soon as the keywords ‘raped’ and ‘murdered’ had been thrown at me, they unlocked the floodgates that had been holding back my secret horror for some ten months, since September 1997. My flashbacks took me into another dimension, one of lurking demons.
I had had this bollocking going on against me for half an hour when I stood up and unleashed my torment. ‘I have been raped,’ I screamed.
This brought a sudden end to her tirade and you could hear a pin drop as, her eyes bulging, she gasped, ‘Eh!’
‘I have been,’ I blurted.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
I got up to walk out and our policeman friend stood there and brusquely ordered, ‘You are not going anywhere. Sit down.’
And by that time, because I’d had to bury the pain deep within me and had lived alone with the agonising torture that was tearing me apart for so long, I exploded with anger, ‘Just get out of my way, just leave me alone. He’ll kill me!’
As far as I was concerned, I had been raped. My interpretation of rape was what had happened to me. As it happens, rape would have been less enduring than a whole afternoon at the hands of Huntley’s repeated and unremitting barrage of sexual assaults. Rape would have been over and done with far quicker than the prolonged and agonising torment that I suffered at Huntley’s evil, filthy hands. So, as far as I was concerned, yes, I had been raped.
Mum’s face was ashen as she searched for a response. ‘Talk to me, Hailey. Who by?’
All this ice was running through my body. I knew by that time that Huntley had moved away. I didn’t know where to, as he had left a month earlier, but I now felt able to reveal the horrific suffering I had undergone.
Then Mum’s face softened as she tentatively asked the heart-wrenching question every mother dreads: ‘Do you know what rape means?’
Not knowing anything other than my definition of the word, I said, ‘Yes.’
As she held back her tears, Mum apologised, ‘Right, sorry. Who by?’
Overcome with the fear of God, I edged my way closer to revealing the name of my secret tormentor, and then I quickly blurted, ‘By that Ian down the road.’
Mum’s demeanour had changed to that of a woman at war, and as the fire came into her eyes she stormed, ‘Ian who?’
I held back the tears of pain as I stuttered, ‘Katie Webber’s boyfriend.’
The fury in my mum’s voice cut through me when she spat out, ‘What’s his last name?’
‘Huntley or Hunter,’ I said timidly.
This news was like a bolt of lightning and she was aghast.
PC Woods was lost for words as he stumbled out. ‘I’m going to call in the special police, the people who deal with this kind of thing, the sexual side of things.’
On hearing that, Mum demanded, ‘I want a special trained police officer that can deal with this.’
She then gathered herself and said in a soothing tone, ‘Do you want me to wait here and comfort you when they call or do you want me to stand in the kitchen out of the way to save your embarrassment?’
Embarrassed at what Mum would overhear, I told her, ‘Will you go in the kitchen, please.’
It will be fine, I thought, if it’s just me and this police officer that calls; it’s not going to go any further.
Later, when the police officer arrived, my heart raced in turmoil as I saw that it was a man, not the woman officer I had been expecting! Mum wasn’t very happy, either, because she knew that I would be shy, that I would hold back with a man.
So the ginger-haired policeman came in, but I did not feel reassured or calmed as he started, ‘Right then, what’s your name?’
This male police officer took the details from me and wrote them down. His tone appeared to me to be disconcerting and gruff. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Hailey,’ I tentatively replied.
‘Right, Hailey. How old are you?’
‘Twelve.’
‘What has happened then?’
I was practically lost for words. Here was a male police officer seeking answers to questions from a minor, a female, about a sex attack. I was lured, groomed and abused. I couldn’t just tell this man all of that. I didn’t know where to start because I was really embarrassed. What do I say? I thought. I can’t tell him all that happened.
I remember going through the details and I mentioned with embarrassment about being fingered and he leaned right forward and demanded, ‘Do you know what being fingered means?’
As his question hit me with the grace of an elephant landing on jelly, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I couldn’t get involved in this process because I felt really embarrassed. I didn’t want to say yes, but in my head I was thinking, Well, of course I know what it means if I’ve had it done to me.
I was pleased to see the back of the policeman when he left, as I just didn’t feel comfortable spilling my guts out to a man, not initially, as a female child victim.
The police said to my mum that they would be in touch with her and would stay in touch. After a wait of about three or four weeks, they came back and told her that Huntley had denied it. Well, what did they think he would do? Give a signed confession with a photo? Huntley knew the heat was on. He would now lie through his teeth just to get out of it whenever he could. The proof of this is what happened in Soham in 2002, when he got his partner Maxine Carr to lie for him to the police about his whereabouts right after Holly and Jessica disappeared.
Later on, though, from behind the bars of prison, Huntley would lay the blame at Carr’s door when he accused her of having told him what to say and do to escape conviction for the Soham murders. Here was further proof of how far Huntley would go to exert control over others, even after he was jailed.
In my case, eventually the police arrested Huntley in Cleethorpes and, after questioning, he was subsequently released without charge.
After Huntley was convicted, he admitted to his parents on a prison visit that he had lied under oath about the circumstances of one of the murders, Jessica’s. I wonder what else Huntley is holding back?
A lone female police officer came to see Mum and me to tell us that nothing was being done, basically, because there wasn’t enough evidence.
They had taken statements from my brother Hayden, James Webber, Huntley and me, and I was led to believe that Huntley’s father had given him an alibi by saying that he was with him on the day of my allegation. An alibi given some ten months after the crime was relied upon. I look back on it and I think the tail was wagging the dog.
From the evidence to hand at the time of writing, we can see that he was certainly known to the police for allegations of a sexual nature against him. Under caution, he even admitted to a police constable that he had had sex with a girl of 15.
And that was that. The short inquiry was finished.
But what they did have was a catalogue of allegations: rape, a discontinued rape case, statements from various people. The same can be said of social services: they were aware of the allegations against Huntley and, as a direct result of their failings and even, in some cases, their dereliction of duty, I suffered.
Unbelievably, the chief executive of North East Lincolnshire Council, Jim Leivers, defended social workers’ handling of Huntley when he said, ‘The five cases were from different areas, involved different circumstances and were handled by different people, who had no reason to cross refer with one another.’
And he went on to say, ‘None of the girls would make a complaint about Huntley, to whom they referred as their “boyfriend”. We are not here to arrest offenders; we are interested in protecting youngsters. We were confident these were good parents and we saw no reason to continue involvement. This is a character that, as soon anybody gets a sniff, he was off. He was particularly keen not to get involved with any agencies like social services and police.’
Well, I can tell you, Huntley did have contact with social services, as he phoned them. Social services actually mishandled a number of cases – mine was one of them – and, as a consequence, they were slammed in a report.
I also blame the former Chief Constable of the Humberside Police, David Westwood, for allowing my allegation that Huntley had assaulted me to be wiped from his force’s records after the police had interviewed Huntley but taken no action.
Not long after, at the time the police told us about the case being dropped, Huntley appeared in a newspaper. My mum kept a clipping and she showed me it not long after, when she revealed, ‘You’re not the only person he has done it to. Look in the paper.’
It read: ‘Ian Kevin Huntley arrested for attempted rape’, or something like that. This was a gas-alley rape and then the case was dropped and my mum said, ‘Don’t worry, duck, he’ll get caught one day.’
I felt that my whole world had fallen to pieces. Why doesn’t anybody believe me, I thought, and why is nobody saying we are going to have him or anything like that? After the police said the case file was passed to the CPS, we found out it was never passed to them. I learned that only recently. They told me that it was never passed to the CPS; it never got through the main doors of the CPS, it was passed to PS Tait, who concluded that there was insufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction.’
Utter bollocks is what I say to that. Although Sir Christopher Kelly slammed the police and social services in a report, I have only just started slamming them myself.
In my view, the law should allow for a man like Huntley to be prosecuted by virtue of having a string of sexual allegations against him and claims of dalliances with underage girls. In the event, he was not prosecuted.
Huntley, an asthma sufferer, bullied and nicknamed ‘Spadehead’ on account of his large forehead, had, as I mentioned earlier, previously admitted to a policeman that he had sexual intercourse with a 15-year-old girl and signed the interview sheet to this effect. Yet he escaped being charged or even having a caution lodged against him because the girl failed to complain. This, the police say, is their reason for not prosecuting Huntley over that little matter of unlawful sexual intercourse! That should have had some influence on the decision makers supposedly concerned with the allegations I made against Huntley.
Naturally, I was not surprised when I learned that his first girlfriend, Amanda Marshall, by the time she was 16, had moved in with the 17-year-old Huntley. Their relationship had started going down the slippery slope when Amanda discovered he had started bringing other girls back to their flat when she was out.
Soon after this, Huntley overdosed and Amanda returned, locked in a dependency on him for her self-esteem and, in turn, his need to control her grew.
Would you be surprised to learn that Amanda, in a bid to make the relationship work, accompanied Huntley to sessions with a psychiatrist! Already, in 1994, the signs were there when she became pregnant with his child but miscarried after he threw her down the stairs. This is the same year that Huntley’s mother left his father for her lesbian lover, Julie Beasley.
In December 1994, Huntley met 18-year-old Claire Evans, an RAF administrator, and after a short affair they married in January 1995. The marriage was doomed to failure when the 21-year-old Huntley claimed his 18-year-old brother Wayne slept with Claire on their wedding night. In a wedding ceremony in 2000, Claire married Wayne.
At the Bichard Inquiry, Detective Chief Superintendent Gavin Baggs acknowledged failure after failure regarding lack of training within the intelligence-saving system of Humberside Police. Under cross-examination by the Inquiry his exact words were: ‘…there was this general misunderstanding which I accept was regrettable … and I do accept that that is a failure.’
Unbelievably, no records of the previous allegations against Huntley 1, 2, 3, 4 and 9 [these numbers refer to the system of numbering incidents in the Inquiry] managed to make it to the police’s CIS Nominals system. There was also an acceptance among police staff that they hadn’t been adequately trained and it was accepted that officers were disgruntled at being ‘overworked and understaffed’, as DCS Gavin Baggs conceded at the Bichard Inquiry.
In what I consider one of the more generously proportioned blunders of the Humberside Police that was not unearthed until the Humberside Police carried out an investigation for the purpose of their submissions to the Bichard Inquiry, DCS Baggs admitted that the Humberside Force knew that Huntley was using the name Nixon, but that information did not get transposed from his manual record on to the CIS Nominals.
In response to being asked, ‘That in your view, I take it, was a pretty serious failing?’ DCS Baggs replied, ‘It was in retrospect a serious failing, yes. It is a failing that had very severe knock-on consequences, yes.’
Unbelievable. A total cock-up was responsible for the fact that Huntley was not correctly vetted for his caretaker’s job.
It was alleged that in August 1995 Huntley had a 13-year-old boy and the boy’s 15-year-old sister living with him in Grimsby. The girl’s father claimed to the police that Huntley had been having unlawful sexual intercourse with the girl, which she appears to have informally confirmed. This resulted in Huntley admitting everything to PC Teasdale under caution when interviewed at his home. Huntley signed the interview statement, and his exact words were: ‘If her parents were OK about it, it was not an offence.’ Why wasn’t Huntley charged?
Which leads me back to the Bichard Inquiry and the questioning of DCS Baggs on 3 March 2004 over this matter.
This is what DCS Baggs said about why Huntley was not charged or even cautioned over the matter of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor in August 1995: ‘The test that is applied in terms of whether or not someone should be cautioned for any offence is initially the sufficiency of evidence test, as has been alluded to. The sufficiency of evidence test is based on whether or not there is sufficient evidence for there to be a likelihood of a successful prosecution. In considering this particular crime, at the time that Mr Billam made his decision, it is my view – and of course this might not be the same view as everyone else – but it is my view that there was not sufficient evidence to make it likely that there could be a successful prosecution because there was no signed statement from the victim in this case. The evidence in the Officer’s notebook was hearsay evidence and could not have been introduced into a court case, as I understand it, so we are left with a situation where the only evidence that is in a suitable format for introduction in a potential court case is the confession evidence in the interview record which Huntley had himself signed. So it is my opinion – and I have in the past been the head of the Admin and Justice Unit where these policies are set – it is my opinion that there was insufficient evidence as it stood at that time to properly authorise a caution.’
To the credit of the Bichard team, I should add that one of them said to DCS Baggs, ‘I am grateful for that. You are aware, of course, that others within the force and HMIC take a potentially different view in relation to incident 1 and the appropriateness or otherwise of issuing a caution?’
DCS Baggs answered, ‘I am aware of that. Certainly within the force, at the time of the chronology document being put together, there were divided opinions. I think that, within the force now, those divided opinions are much more reconciled along the view that I have just expressed. I am aware that the HMIC also takes a different view. Perhaps I could just take it one stage further. Although at the moment, at the time when Mr Billam made his decision, it is certainly my opinion that there was insufficient evidence to justify an appropriate caution, it is possible – and we will never know now, I expect – but it is possible that by doing some further work we could have reached a situation where a caution could have been justified because, although the complainant in that case had expressed a view that there should be no action taken against her boyfriend, it does appear to me, at least, that she was not being obstructive insofar as she has actually given a verbal account and signed the pocket book. Whether she would have been prepared to go that one stage further and sign the written statement, I do not know, but it is possible that with some more work we could have reached that situation where a caution would have been appropriate.’
Had Huntley received a police caution, he would have been more detectable in future searches on the police’s criminal intelligence database. Personally, I am less than happy at what I have learned about police incompetence in this matter.
In response to DCS Baggs’s answer just quoted, a further question was put to him at the Bichard Inquiry: ‘In your view, with the benefit of hindsight, is that work that you think should desirably have been taken?’
DCS Baggs replied, ‘I do not know exactly what Mr Billam was presented with and he made a decision on all of the facts before him at the time, and maybe he had information before him that I am not in possession of.’
A follow-up question was put to DCS Baggs: ‘Thank you. Let us go to contact three, the incident number 3, which is the second of the unlawful sexual intercourse allegations that appears to have come to the attention of the police on 22 May 1996. Again, I want to concentrate on the record-keeping and creation so far as this is concerned. You have already expressed the view that it would have been desirable and helpful to have created a record on CIS Nominals in relation to incident 1. Does it follow that the substance of your answer is the same in relation to this incident, namely that although you say in 12.1: “With the information obtained from the original police officers … [Reading to the words] … in relation to this contract”, and so on, your view is that a record should have been made on CIS Nominals in relation to this incident also? Paragraph 12, 0070 0086.’
DCS Baggs: ‘I am just trying to remind myself of the full details of contact. It is contact three we are referring to, is it not?’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘It is. You will see in 12.1 how you deal with it. You do not express a view one way or the other. In relation to the earlier incident you had said you would not have expected it and it was not normal practice but that matter does not…’
DCS Baggs: ‘No, I remained silent on this one.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘Sorry, at 14.1 you say “would not be expected”. If you want to have a look at that as well, 14.1?’
DCS Baggs: ‘Yes. I say it will not be expected in this case because we did not actually get involved in the investigation at all and the decision was made by Mr Billam again to leave this matter with the Social Services, so on that basis I would not expect anyone within my organisation to submit that intelligence for entry on our criminal-intelligence system.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘The fact of the allegation though, in retrospect, surely, would have been information which it was important to recall? It was information about an allegation of the sort of offence in relation to which he had already made a confession nine months earlier. He had been given the sternest warning. Even though he had not been formally cautioned, he knew the form in relation to having sex with underage girls and here he was alleged to have done it again.’
DCS Baggs: ‘Yes.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘It would surely have been helpful to have had some record, if only of the allegation, and with whatever specific reliability grade you chose to put on it, but some record surely would have been helpful in relation to incident 3?’
DCS Baggs: ‘Again, clearly with the benefit of hindsight then some record would have been very helpful, but at the time – and in this document I have tried to comment on what people did at the time and whether it was appropriate or not – and at that time, of course, as far as we could tell, there was no recognition of a previous incident because there was no URN, no record from the previous contact created.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘But it was no record, was it not? You started saying “No URN”, and corrected yourself rightly, because there was no record on CIS Nominals?’
DCS Baggs: ‘That is quite right, yes.’
When I look at all these failings and how Huntley was able to get a job working in a Cambridgeshire school with children after having been investigated over my allegation and further allegations, I am filled with disbelief. From the onset of the Soham investigation, it took the police nearly two weeks to become aware of the previous sexual allegations against Ian Huntley. Also, early on during the investigation, his story was not even checked out as regards his whereabouts.
But this can lead on to things such as when I made the complaint to the police. I have said to this day that it was always questioned that when it came out they said they were going to get a special unit in from the police department, a lady that would come and chat with me. After all this, I thought, Thank God I am speaking to a woman or girl or whatever, and then this man rolled up and he just sat there with his notebook.
In 2004, when the investigation into my allegation was brought to light again, in tears I said to the lady, ‘What happens if I’m not believed?’
She asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘I can’t remember whether I told this copper that was interviewing me or taking notes, whether he [Huntley] had inserted his fingers into me or not, because I can remember feeling embarrassed with him being a man.’
After the attack was reported to the police, to some of my family members I was the biggest whore walking. But, if that was the case, I was a dead whore walking. My soul had become pickled and lost. I endured quite a bit of spitefulness, and I don’t know why. This isn’t just about Huntley, it is about the whole lot of them. All are as bad as each other. I was goaded by my brothers and even branded a cow and similar names. I saw myself as worthless and saw no way out of the mess in which I had become embedded.
Really, though, there was only one person that was able to lift me from my quagmire of misery. Nobody could make me feel the love of mankind as much as my granddad could. Forget therapists and child psychologists. What happened to the old shoulder to cry on? People have grown apart and modern living has killed off the old-style doorstep counselling.
Thinking back to when I was about 14, I don’t know if Granddad knew about Huntley’s attack on me. Maybe Mum told him in confidence and, if she did, he never let on. I feel, in retrospect, that he could have changed something but then sometimes I’m glad that he didn’t know because it would have broken his heart knowing that somebody had done that to me.
Anyway, returning to how things have gone wrong in terms of law and order: murders, stabbings, shootings, drinking, drugging, raping, mugging. Ideally, you are brought up to learn how to respect people and their possessions and to respect and look after your own. People who are doing those bad things have not learned respect for others or themselves. They have not been mentored or shown the right way. I know that if I kicked someone’s car window in I would get a fine. But these people aren’t getting the right message.
By this, I mean the justice system in this country stinks. I think they would rather punish the innocent and let the guilty just go away and carry on. I am able to say that after what has happened to me, and my experience has brought the issue to the fore for me. More understanding is given to the criminal than the victim.
Criminals should be made to pay for their crimes and made to show respect to their victim. But instead, the way the justice system works now, I think the people whose job it is to punish crime are too worried about people like Ian Huntley; they are too worried about his rights and his needs. The European Court protects that bastard’s rights. Who protects mine?
He has committed a crime and he is in prison, where nobody from outside can get to him. Now if somebody from outside wanted to stab him, they wouldn’t get the chance because they can’t get close enough to him. Others behind bars can get him, but with every attack that is made on him – whether it’s hot water thrown over him or whatever – he will sue the Prison Service and come up smelling of roses as well as receiving a big payout.
But what’s to stop that sort of attack from happening to me? Who is there to protect me if anything like that happens? I know things will happen to Huntley in prison, but I would not like to see him murdered, as that is too good for him. Leave him to suffer behind bars as I am suffering, in a prison of his making. Let us see who lasts the longest. Maybe I could sue him for the money he will win from being attacked. There’s poetic justice for you.
Huntley and other supermonsters, like Ian Brady, make me feel sick. These criminals are mentally flawed by a weakness that controls them and they will never be cured, no matter how much therapy, medication or shock treatment they get. I have looked into the eyes of Huntley and survived. I know what makes him tick.
I can also say that, if Huntley had been prosecuted over one of the sexual allegations but not sent to prison, or if he had just been put on file or on the Sex Offenders’ Register, he would never have got that job in that school, as he would have been more closely monitored and probably would not have had that opportunity to kill. Even so, I do believe that, given the chance, Huntley would have killed or tried to kill in order to silence his victim – it was only a matter of when – but it may not have been a double killing.
In a nutshell, Huntley was born evil. Obviously, that’s easy for me to say, but I do think about society and, if he had been punished for a crime that he did to me nine years ago, would he have gone on to murder Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in 2002? There are people who are inherently evil and no amount of badgering and cajoling, or respect or education, by society does any good when they are determined to commit evil acts.
My task now is to prevent Huntley from ever being unleashed on society again. If ever he is released, he will still be an evil person; he will still have the same evil within him in 40 years’ time as he had when he assaulted me. His evilness was there from day one. His soul and his whole character are evil. But I do believe that his childhood played a major part in what he has become. I think that when he was a child he was never given any control, no say in what happened in his life. That is why I think he is now such a control freak, crazed by power.
In his mind he made me into his possession. He wanted to control me, like the others in his life, like turning a tap on and off. But, in the end, he just couldn’t stop his own dark heart doing what it wanted and going even further in this quest for power over others.
In addition to my aim to see this murderer stay locked up, I’m still determined that lessons should be learned by those who made massive blunders in the Huntley case. What really angers me is that the police logged the allegation I made against Huntley as ‘stranger abuse’. I only found this out near the end of 2005. Can you imagine how I feel now at the failings of those in power? This terminology, ‘stranger abuse’, even if in police terms technically accurate to distinguish from an attack by a family member, for example, seemed to me to be completely misplaced in my case. Huntley was known to me, known for some time. The damning North East Lincolnshire Area Child Protection Committee Report into Ian Huntley (for the period 1995 to 2001), headed by Sir Christopher Kelly, suggests that I might have been at further risk of harm from Huntley. Too right. For years I lived in fear that he would come crashing through my window and murder me. Even now, I awake with a start at the slightest unfamiliar noise.
The 2004 report also noted ‘the apparently very hands-off approach taken by social services to what was obviously a very troubled time for MN [me] after the assault’.
Earlier that year the Bichard Inquiry, conducted by Sir Michael Bichard, was also highly critical of the investigation into Huntley’s previous allegations and suggested that the intelligence system of the Humberside Police, which dealt with some of the cases, was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and that the force’s child-protection database was ‘largely worthless’.
The then Chief Constable of the Humberside Police, David Westwood, has much to answer for in the systems failure, which allegedly ‘failed to identify Ian Huntley as a danger’.
I just wish those that I told about Huntley had said that they believed me and taken a more proactive approach. I can’t get rid of this bitterness within me. Why am I left feeling that my allegation could have been dealt with more thoroughly and sensitively? I wish with all my heart that the police had prosecuted on the basis of my complaint and those of the other girls allegedly assaulted by Ian Huntley.
What also infuriates me is how, in one of the reports after Soham, the 15-year-old-girls Huntley had sex with were referred to as ‘young women’, as if, somehow, their maturity being exaggerated in this way would make them look less vulnerable and so make the offence seem less than it was. In the eyes of the law they were minors: girls, not young women.
Huntley’s pattern of behaviour deviated from his predatory, exploitative relationships with girls in their mid-teens when he carried out that brutal sex attack against me. I was supposedly the first much younger girl that he sexually assaulted. But had he carried out this sort of attack on other girls of my age and younger before he did what he did to me?
The dark cloud of paedophilia that has stalked the Soham case has revealed how easy it was for Huntley to work with children. While the police and the government were at war over who was to blame for the shocking situation in which information about Huntley’s history of sex allegations was not included in any of his police files, parents mourned the loss of their loved ones.
When I learned of another gigantic blunder made by the Humberside Police – PC Michel Harding recorded allegations that Huntley was a serial sex attacker and on the basis of these allegations added that he was ‘likely to continue his activities’; this was put on the force’s computer in 1999 by a police officer and wiped off in 2000 – I thought, Clever or what? What a bunch of incompetents!
A leaked report prepared by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary revealed a catalogue of incompetence surrounding the Police National Computer. It was taking many forces almost two months to enter details of convictions and arrests on the system: something that should have taken just a week.
This damning document also underlined the ease with which another Huntley could slip through the net! It said, ‘There is the potential for known offenders or those suspected of serious offending to be overlooked during the Criminal Review Bureau checks.’ This situation left the way open for newly convicted paedophiles to apply for jobs knowing that they were safe from being discovered and so put them in a position to strike undetected, although this flawed system was due to change in 2005. To date, I am unsure whether it has changed or not.
Apart from locking him up, of course, what Huntley’s conviction has done is to open a can of worms. It has revealed a grim picture of confusion created by the Data Protection Act and exacerbated by the Human Rights Act over what information police can keep about suspected paedophiles.
In my opinion, blame was fairly apportioned to the two Chief Constables at the centre of the Huntley case: Tom Lloyd of Cambridgeshire and David Westwood of Humberside. After all, it was ‘check system’ mistakes made by the Cambridgeshire Force that resulted in Huntley getting a job at Soham Village College. During police background checks into Huntley on a national police database, his name and date of birth were entered incorrectly. And, like others, I blame many of the investigative problems on David Westwood, formerly Chief Constable of Humberside, who failed to identify Huntley as a danger, even though I had said in a police video interview in 1998, when I was 12, that Huntley had sexually assaulted me. I hope this extract from that interview will convince you of my sincerity about my allegation:
Police officer: Can you tell me, what do you think made Huntley allow you to leave the woods?
Hailey: Because I told him that my mum worked at the Grosvenor and that I had agreed to meet her there.
Police officer: So what did he say when you left him in the woods?
Hailey: He said if I told anyone what had happened or wrote anything in a diary that he would come and kill me and I then ran away from him and he chased me.
Police officer: Had you had any problems with him in the past, I mean did he ever hurt you before?
Hailey: No, never, he was always kind to me.
Police officer: How did you feel when all this was happening to you, Hailey?
Hailey: I kept on saying to myself, ‘Oh, why, oh why is this happening to me,’ and hoped someone would come and help me, but nobody came.
Police officer: You tell me, Hailey, that you told your brother Hayden about what happened to you three weeks after; what was his reply?
Hailey: He said, ‘Oh, you do make up such big lies,’ and I said, ‘No, honestly. It did really happen.’
Police officer: How do you feel about Ian now?
Hailey: I don’t like him very much at all and he makes me feel sick.
Police officer: What do you think should happen to Ian now?
Hailey: I would like to see him prosecuted, for him to understand what he has done to me and to stop him from doing it to anyone else.
Police officer: So you were good friends with Katie Webber, you say. Are you still close now?
Hailey: No, I don’t see her now because she stopped seeing me after he did that to me.
Police officer: So you mean, after Ian did that to you, Katie stopped coming to see you, right, after what he did?
Hailey: Yep.
What I can’t understand is how easily heads could roll because the government didn’t want egg on their face, while I can be walked all over by everyone that has failed me without any recourse.
David Westwood claimed his force had been obliged to ‘weed out’ accusations against Huntley which did not lead to convictions. The office of the Information Commissioner, the government’s data protection watchdog, condemned this claim and for this reason I feel I have recourse against the Humberside Police Force.
Assistant Commissioner David Smith said, ‘Their explanation appears to be nonsense from what we know of the information they were keeping.
‘The information was clearly relevant to protecting the public and there’s nothing in the Data Protection Act or in any guidance we’ve issued that required them to delete information of such obvious value.’
That is where I rest my case. The police knew of allegations against Huntley and they decided he wasn’t even worthy of a few minutes’ time and effort to keep his details logged, but they could apply the time and effort, they admit, to ‘weed out’ his details. This, I say, is an excuse. It would not have been all weeded out back in July 1998, when I made my allegation. Why didn’t they act then?
Another thing strikes me as bizarre. The police claim to be deluged with complex guidance on data protection, which they have to pass to their own lawyers, and the police must comply with the legal minefield of the Human Rights Act.
The Humberside Police claimed that, in a case of alleged underage sexual intercourse, they did not prosecute unless a complainant brought a charge. This is rubbish. They prosecuted my prospective husband over that very charge, and named me as the victim. Yet I never raised a complaint – it was my parents that did. The very same police force that failed me has made my life a hell.
To end this chapter, I leave the final words to the Bichard Inquiry, which determined that the Humberside Police Force prepared a file on my case in which there was a confidential disclosure form that was ‘inaccurate in almost every respect.’