Huntley ‘tried to burn girl’s clothes’
A jury at the Old Bailey heard today that Ian Huntley’s hair was found mixed in with Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman’s clothes in a bin at their school.
The clothes were discovered on August 16th, nearly two weeks after the ten-year-olds disappeared from their hometown of Soham, Cambridgeshire.
On the second day of opening evidence from the prosecution, the court was told that Mr Huntley, 29, attempted to burn the clothes.
Prosecuting counsel Richard Latham QC said police found the clothes after discovering keys to a hangar at the school while searching Mr Huntley and Maxine Carr’s home.
The prosecution said Mr Huntley behaved like a guilty man after the two girls vanished and tried to throw police off the scent.
Earlier the jury heard that Ian Huntley made a tearful phone call to his girlfriend the morning after the disappearance of the Soham schoolgirls.
Mr Huntley had told Maxine Carr he was afraid he would be ‘fitted up’ for the crime.
The former caretaker is accused of murdering Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Richard Latham QC, prosecuting, is outlining the Crown’s case against 29-year-old Mr Huntley. He told the jury today that Ms Carr had revealed that Mr Huntley had told her: ‘I am going to get fitted up like I did before.’
The significance of this comment would emerge later, Mr Latham said.
Mr Latham told the court that Ian Huntley cleaned his car and changed new tyres on the day after the two girls vanished.
He claimed that Mr Huntley’s behaviour was that of a guilty man calmly ‘calculating his way forward.’
‘If you’ve got a guilty conscience you may be prepared to spend a large sum of money to throw away a perfectly good set of tyres,’ Mr Latham suggested.
The prosecution alleged Mr Huntley was cleaning his red Ford Fiesta while the town searched for Holly and Jessica and said that when police later searched the car they had found a piece of domestic carpet ‘cut to make a rough fit’ replacing the carpet in the boot.
The court also heard that when police searched Mr Huntley’s home it was tidy and ‘smelt of lemon cleaning product’.
Mr Latham also told the jury about several ‘slips of the tongue’ Mr Huntley made after the girls’ disappearance.
He said that three days after the disappearance, Mr Huntley had asked a special constable involved in the search how long DNA could last and how far out of Soham the search would go.
He had asked a BBC journalist “have they found the girls’ clothes?”, a question which meant he had to be the killer, said Mr Latham.
“How did he know on Thursday morning that the girls’ clothing had been parted from their bodies?”, Mr Latham asked.
“The police did not know… the bodies were still a week away from discovery.”
