YOU MUST DO THE THING YOU THINK YOU CANNOT DO

THE DISPARITY BETWEEN THE WAY THE POLICE HANDLED THE CHARGE OF UNDERAGE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, IN RELATION TO ME, AGAINST MY THEN HUSBAND-TO-BE COLIN AND THE WAY THEY HANDLED MY ALLEGATION AGAINST IAN HUNTLEY IS BEYOND COMPREHENSION.

I believe he was able to get the job as a caretaker at a school because he gave his surname as ‘Nixon’. He had also put at the bottom of the form ‘formerly Huntley’, but they did not check that name. This makes me think that having the nerve to put ‘formerly Huntley’ is a bit like Maxine Carr applying for a credit card and, on being asked, ‘Have you ever used a previous name?’, answering, ‘Maxine Carr.’ I don’t personally think that you would dare do it if you were carrying that sort of baggage. So when Huntley put that on the form, I think he was lining everything up.

I believe that someone did not put all of the access details from that form into the computer, but, even if they did, it wouldn’t show anything anyway. I know the police had apologised for that failure, but that doesn’t bring back the dead! Personally, I don’t think it was a failure. I think it was a major fuck-up, major because Huntley clearly had blood on his hands.

I was startled when they said they couldn’t do anything with forensics or DNA. They said I had left it too long. But they were saying that to a 12-year-old girl. I thought it was my fault;my fault that he couldn’t be prosecuted.

I do feel that I have recourse against the police for their failings prior to what Huntley did to me and during their inquiry into my allegation.

Moving on to September 2002, when it was announced that Huntley was to face prosecution for the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. We had been keeping a close watch on the TV for news of the police investigation and Colin came in and said, ‘Do you mind if I just put the telly on, darling, just to see about these two little girls?’ It was odd because just about two weeks before this, for the first time in maybe six months, the name Ian Huntley came into my head. We were passing under a bridge near our home and I couldn’t remember if it was Huntley or Hunter, or something like that. Just forget about him, I thought. I don’t need that rubbish right now.

I was sitting behind the settee, sorting out a few bits and bobs, and the journalist on the TV announced, ‘Today Ian Huntley has been…’ and I just stood up and my whole body went into involuntary spasm. I was shaking from head to toe. I couldn’t stop.

I could barely get the words out. ‘That’s him, that’s him.’

Colin said, ‘What do you mean, “That’s him”?’

As if to be sure that it was Huntley, I repeated more clearly, ‘That’s him.’

‘That Ian!’ Colin exploded.

I broke into a screaming fit of blind, incoherent rage. ‘That’s him. He’s obviously done it. Oh my God.’ I was going wild. It was as though I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. What made it worse was that the news report showed the cunning monster doing TV interviews. I was just so shocked and I ended up ringing my auntie, saying, ‘I’m trying to get hold of my mum and her phone is off the hook.’ So my uncle went round to my mum’s house and said, ‘Hailey’s trying to get hold of you.’

When I eventually got through to my mum, she started crying and I was just so angry that I burst out, ‘I don’t know what you’re crying for, because nobody gave me the support I needed.’

‘Don’t say that, we did support you,’ she said.

‘No, you didn’t. You didn’t, because you would have had him done, like you tried to have Colin done.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t say that. That could have been me, you know, just like them parents sat there saying, “My daughter is dead.”’

I said, ‘Whoop-de-do, that could have been me in the grave. But I am not thinking, Well, that could have been me he did to what he has done to them.’

It was a really stressful time and, to be honest, I don’t think words can describe how I felt. That whole day I just couldn’t stop shaking. I have never experienced anything like it as an adult. In one way it must have been some sort of spiritual release to know that this now proved that this man was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off, and everybody had the warning signs but I felt they just hadn’t listened to me.

I remember, four weeks after meeting Colin, I revealed to him my secret suffering. ‘I have been sexually abused,’ I said.

Taken aback, he said, ‘Crikey! And what got done about that?’

We got into a deeper conversation about it and I said, ‘I just wanted to tell people and to have them believe me.’

I just wanted him to give me a hug and say, ‘Don’t worry,’ and that is exactly what Colin did, but that wasn’t the reason that I felt love for him.

After we had been together for about a year or so, I asked him, ‘Do you believe me, Colin? Now do you believe me?’

‘Of course I believe you. I believed you from the start,’ he replied.

He was unfaltering, never doubting me once, whereas a few other people had said, ‘Well, are you sure you didn’t imagine this?’

‘No,’ I said to every one of them.

But that is what happened: people thought I had let my imagination run wild. That is one thing Colin never believed. There was not a shadow of a doubt in his mind. Even so, I kept looking for reassurance, or perhaps doubt. ‘Do you believe me? Are you sure?’

At this time the press were keen to run a story. Previously, I had refused every time they asked, so as not to lose my pride and dignity. Yet the ever-increasing threats from them that they would print a story with or without my co-operation left me worried that they would print a half-baked version of their own. So I gave them their precious story, but at least it was the truth.

Consequently, when Huntley came to trial, I was asked by the police to give evidence and come forward as a prosecution witness. I received a telephone call, not even a knock at the door, and the conversation was along these lines:

‘Hi, is that Hailey?

‘Who’s calling?’

‘My name’s Kim and I’m calling from the Cambridgeshire Police.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Obviously, we have heard what happened to you, it is on file. Your complaint in 1997 about what Huntley did to you.’

On hearing the name ‘Huntley’, I had to hold myself together as the chill of death once again ran down my spine.

I squeezed my insides and managed to cough out, ‘Yes.’

‘Can I just ask you a few questions?’

‘No, I don’t want to talk about it, sorry. I’m not interested.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Well, are you from the police?’

‘Right, give me your telephone number, give me your special number and wherever you are from and I will call you back just to make sure you are from the police.’ It could be anybody, I was thinking.

Obviously, I told Colin and he asked, ‘Who was on the phone?’

‘It was Kim from the Cambridgeshire Police,’ I told him.

He tried to reassure me, saying, ‘Keep your head, keep cool. Just relax. Nobody is going to hurt you. Nobody is going to force you into doing anything if you don’t want to. If you want to do it, you say yes. If you don’t want to do it, say no.’

Kim gave me her telephone number and I got through to the Cambridgeshire Police and asked, ‘Could I speak to so-and-so?’

After getting the usual runaround, I asked, ‘What’s all this about then?’

Back on the phone, Kim defused my anger by starting with: ‘Hailey, we just want to ask you a few questions.’

I cautiously asked, ‘What about?’

‘About the attack that happened on you.’

‘I only want to ask you a few questions.’

‘And do you expect to get an answer?’

‘You want my help?’

‘Well, tough luck because I needed your help four years ago and you did nothing. Nobody was there for me. I was on my own every single night crying my eyes out. I was the one that wet the bed every single night, cut my hair off and started cutting my arms and everything.’

As I spoke, haunting flashbacks ran through my head like ghosts. I was alone, very lost, and now, after all these years, they wanted my help! Two girls murdered, and they even had my details on file. Funny, isn’t it, how they had them at hand in readiness for Huntley’s trial but not for the vetting of his job application?

No one had cared at that time and here they were now begging for my help. Their barefaced cheek sent shock waves through my system.

‘How dare you call me and ask me this,’ I raged.

‘Why, is there a problem?’ She was pushing her luck.

‘OK, let’s put it into perspective,’ I suggested. ‘If your child was to come home, get sexually abused or something like that by the man down the road, I guarantee you would not call in a special unit, you would go and castrate him.’

‘I can’t comment on that,’ was her evasive response.

‘You see, and that’s because you have got your police badge on. But at the end of the day it’s just a nine-to-five job to you.’

If the police liaison unit had been involved, or if it had been a policewoman telling me, ‘He deserves everything he gets, pet. We will be behind you and we will get this bastard and we will nail him, even if we have got to do it part-time when we are not getting paid for it,’ then I would have stood in the dock for them.

All those years of self-injury, self-abuse, self-denial, self-hatred, self-blame and self-recrimination ruined my childhood, my early teens and my education. Just everything. I have years that can’t be replaced. I am not able to retrieve that.

I used self-injury as a coping mechanism to help me overcome the emotional stress that I was incapable of dealing with in any other way. Self-injury was a means of escape, a way to relieve the numbness, and an expression of the pain within me. Something that the police wouldn’t care about. They just wanted their day in court, they were desperate to stop the shit hitting the fan, but it was too late… it already had, years earlier.

In no uncertain terms, I told the police to sling their hook, but they weren’t having any of it and kept calling me in the hope that I would cave in. They called me on about five occasions in total. This wasn’t the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine; it was a haunting recurrence of when Huntley persistently abused me.

The police were actually adding to my pain and suffering by pursuing me. If it had been Huntley doing that to me and I had the proof, I would have said, ‘Hey, Mr Policeman, Huntley is giving me trouble here,’ and then they might have sent him a letter, at the very least.

In one conversation with the police, I said an emphatic no to their request for me to attend Huntley’s trial as a prosecution witness. The woman calling me probed sneakily, ‘Well, don’t you want to help bring this man to justice for doing what he did to Holly and Jessica?’

I snapped, ‘There’s nothing that would give me more satisfaction than doing that, but, to be honest, there’s nothing like rubbing salt in the wound.’

Suddenly, to the police, I had gone from being the centre of an unprovable case to being worth her weight in gold as a star witness in the trial of the decade.

All of a sudden, they were wanting to kiss the hem of my dress, and I went off on one, telling the woman, ‘There is nothing more I would want than to see him stood in the dock and to see him guilty, guilty, guilty. Right you are, off to prison for however many years.

‘I will come to court the day you prosecute him for what he did to me. Let me stand up there and prove what he did to me and be believed and then I will help you. You help me and I will help in return.’

At this, she soon changed her tune, blurting out, ‘We can’t, because the case file has been misplaced,’ and giving me all these rubbish excuses.

I finished curtly, ‘In which case, the answer is no. I needed your help many years ago and I didn’t get anything.’

By this time, Colin was facing abduction charges – the unlawful sexual intercourse charge had not yet been put to him – relating to when we had gone off for a couple of weeks. The fact that the police were causing more unnecessary turmoil in my life by prosecuting the man I love caused me a lot of additional anger. I would lick mud off his boots and, to be honest, he would do the same for me because we are as close as that and nobody can come between us. People keep trying to but it just makes our resolve to ride it out stronger.

There is a major thing that happened in Colin’s life when he was younger that he can’t understand, but he can see where I am coming from because what happened to me was like what happened to him and, be assured, the man I love will take that to his grave.

How I take things now is that I try to look to the future, but I am best dealing with things day by day. How I suffered at the hands of a family friend. How I coped with the immense pain of feeling dramatically let down and for Colin to have been pursued over a matter I had not complained of, when Huntley escaped similar charges, albeit he had not been pursued by a complainant, I do not know.

The impact on my life and other people’s lives is immeasurable. How do you make the police change? How do you make them pay? How on earth could they make it right for me? I’ll tell you how: by getting off their backsides. The police at ground level do a grand job, but the decision makers need to be taken to task for what happened in my case. If I sound bitter, that’s because I am bitter.

Although they have punished and sent Huntley to prison for what he did to Holly and Jessica, are all the other victims just supposed to go, ‘Oh well, he’s not going to do that any more, he’s in prison for the rest of his life’? Because of that, are we supposed to just forget about it and not worry about it?

I will have my day with Huntley, mark my words. I want him to be as scared and as frightened and worried thinking about what’s going to happen to him as I was that day that he was doing that to me.

I want to see the whites of his eyeballs when I bring that action against him, for I must do what the police and the CPS failed to do. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘You must do the thing you think you cannot do.’

How scared do I think Huntley will be to be taken from the safety of his prison? As fucking scared as I was when he said he would kill me. I think in his psychotic little mind that he believes that one day he is going to get out of prison. I too honestly believe that one day he will walk away from that prison. And it is now my mission to stop him. I believe that is possible.

I still have nightmares. In fact, I had one that was the most real-to-life feeling. Huntley had been released because he had been given a drug that had rehabilitated him. He was back, working in society, and he had built himself up. He was given this drug, let out for the weekend and had to be brought back on the Monday morning, and this was the Saturday night. Somehow, the scheming molester had found out my address and he came to my house.

Unaware of his weekend out of prison, I was at home alone. I think it was scarier because Colin wasn’t there. I was upstairs. I pushed the bedroom door shut, pulled the curtains across the window and I was just lying in bed watching the telly when, all of sudden, I heard the floor downstairs creak. I jumped up and my whole body started shaking uncontrollably, the same shake as that day I found out that Huntley had been arrested over Holly and Jessica. I opened the door and I stood there thinking, Is it just me being paranoid? Don’t worry about it, it is just me being paranoid, I’m always doing this.

I heard another creak and I jumped out of my skin. It was him and he came up the stairs. The crazed, ghoulish look was back in his eyes and I had nothing but abject fear in mine. I managed to gasp, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m here to be your friend now.’ He was coming out with all this Jekyll and Hyde rubbish. ‘I’m sorry for what I did, mate. I’ll be your mate now, your best friend. I’ve been taking these special drugs and, you know, I’m going to get a job now. I’m really sorry.’

Suddenly, I just pushed him and blasted at him, ‘Get away from me,’ and then he turned on me, dragged me into the bedroom and did what he had done to me in real life, and then he got up.

To some degree, and I know this sounds strange, I think the evil essence of Huntley still pervades places where I am. Call it autosuggestion, call it what you want, but that is how evil Huntley is.

When he enticed Holly and Jessica into his caretaker’s house, I reckon they scratched and kicked and screamed to get away, whereas I cowered in the corner begging for my life. In my opinion, Huntley sexually abused those girls. With Huntley, it was all about control; the sexual acts were secondary to that. This, I believe, was the only way he could become aroused. I think he has some sort of physical or psychological problem where he could only physically abuse, sexually abuse, before he could get any gratification. This is what I felt when he was abusing me, that he was not becoming aroused and he was not genuinely gaining anything for himself other than getting the power, through sexual abuse, that in turn aroused him. It was sexual power.

In the two agonising hours in that secluded orchard, he tried to brainwash me in order to get that control, to have that power over me.

I felt that tightening grip of his evil persistence, wearing and grinding me down. This, I think, is what he could have done with Holly and Jessica. That he would have tried to grind them down. He could have said to one of them, ‘If you leave, I’ll strangle her right now.’ I think he did that to those girls.

I believe that the fact that Huntley escaped the consequences of his vile attack on me allowed him to penetrate deep into the heart of his obsessions without fear of being caught. He convinced himself that there was no way he could be caught and he went ahead and disposed of his victims’ bodies. He must have been laughing at the police. Well, let’s see who has the last laugh now.