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Linking Huntley

What Humberside Police knew


What Humberside Police should have done


Who is Ian Huntley?


Huntley and Carr


Could it happen again?





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Who is Ian Huntley?
Crime



Published: 17-Dec-2003
By: Carl Dinnen



He's a man who has worked hard at covering his tracks. From his days in Grimsby to his job in Soham, to his trial at the old bailey.


Only now that he has been convicted of murder can we reveal the full picture of Ian Huntley, and his partner Maxine Carr, and the mistake that allowed him to work in a school.



HUMBERSIDE POLICE - WHAT THEY KNEW:



What is most shocking about this case is how much Humberside police knew about Ian Huntley before he got the job as school caretaker in Soham.



We know - and Maxine Carr knew - that in May 1998 Huntley was accused of raping a woman in an alleyway in Grimsby. It was in the local paper. The charges were dropped when new evidence came to light.



It was a contact between Huntley and Humberside police which they should have disclosed to his new employers in the school in Soham.



But they didn't.



In fact Humberside Police turned out to know a lot more about Ian Huntley. In all the authorities had come across him eleven times during his years in Grimsby. These are the allegations;



  • 1. August 1995. Unlawful sex with a 15 year old girl. She refused to make a complaint.




  • 2. November 1995. Burglary. It was allowed to lie on file. Cambridgshire Police should have spotted this on the Police National Computer. They entered the wrong name.




  • 3. March 1996. Non payment of a TV licence and failure to appear at court.




  • 4. April 1996. Unlawful sex with an under aged girl. Social Services dropped the case after the girl avoided them, the police were not involved.




  • 5. May 1996. Unlawful sex with a 13 year old girl. She refused to make a complaint.




  • 6. May 1996. Another count of underage sex with a girl, who again refused to complain.




  • 7. September 1997. An eleven year old girl subjected to a serious sexual assault and a threat to kill in Grimsby. She didn't complain until nearly a year later and no further action was taken.




  • 8. April 1998. An 18 year old woman is raped returning from a nightclub.




  • 9. May 1998. An 18 year old woman is raped returning from a nightclub and threatened with murder - this is the attack in the alleyway.




  • 10. February 1999. A seventeen year old girl is raped returning from a nightclub. Huntley claimed it was consensual.




  • 11. July 1999. A seventeen year old girl is raped returning from a nightclub. She later said she thought Huntley wasn't the attacker.




    • None of these resulted in Convictions or Cautions. And when Huntley applied for the job of school caretaker and background checks were made they came back saying 'no trace'.



    Howard Gilbert, head teacher at Soham Village College:

    "When the details of his past became known I felt physically sick, that someone with that past could have been mixing with our youngsters in a position of trust."



    HUMBERSIDE POLICE - WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE DONE:



    So what should Humberside have done when Cambridgeshire Police asked them about Huntley on behalf of the school in Soham?



    The rules on disclosure of police information are laid out in a Home Office Circular; 'Protection of Children; Disclosure of Criminal Background of those with Access to Children'.



    As well as providing information about convictions it says: "Where the police obtain information in other circumstances which leads them to consider that the person concerned may be unfit to work closely with children they are urged to exercise their discretion to disclose it."



    In Huntley's case the ten contacts with police constituted a string of so called 'soft' information. Had it been disclosed to the school they would have gotten rid of their newly appointed caretaker at once.



    But Humberside Police failed to pass the information on and Ian Huntley remained at the school.'



    So what happened?



    We now understand that Humberside were using a computer system which automatically deleted old records. When they searched the computer under the names Ian Huntley and Ian Nixon, which he had also been known as, nothing came up. Anything which had come up would not have revealed the sexual nature of the offences.



    It was only after the murders when they searched through old paper records that they found the ten contacts.





    WHO IS IAN HUNTLEY?



    So who is Ian Huntley; what else do we know about his background?



    Ian Huntley was born in 1974. He grew up in the Humberside port of Immingham. He had a difficult time at school;



    Carl McLaughlin, schoolfriend:

    "He used to get bullied and take it out on others."



    Life after school involved a series of factory jobs around Grimsby. He remained a fairly friendless character.



    It was just seven months after the short marriage Ian Huntley first came to the attention of Humberside Social Services and the Police. It was the first of the alleged relationships with underage girls. The 15-year-old refused to make a formal complaint.



    Becky Bartlett went out with Huntley some years later. She found him to be both controlling and on one occasion violent, punching her in the stomach when she told him she might be pregnant. Huntley also told her he already had a child by another woman to whom he didn't have access.



    Although this is true - Huntley does have a daughter who cannot be identified for legal reasons - there was a side of him that liked to make things up. He used to tell people that he'd been in the RAF, he was something of a fantasist, a bit of a liar.





    HUNTLEY AND CARR:



    So what about Huntley's codefendant, how does Maxine Carr fit into the picture?



    Maxine Carr said she met Huntley in a nightclub in this building in 1999, she moved in with him and they lived in various flats around Grimsby and Scunthorpe.



    In court Maxine was also to paint Huntley as a controlling figure and it has been suggested that he also used her anorexia to manipulate her. Around this time his pattern of alleged sex offending seems to stop.



    In court it emerged that she and Huntley became involved in benefit fraud. Investigations into this side of the couple - now partners in crime - stretch back to their time in Grimsby.



    Maxine was certainly aware of some of the previous allegations against Huntley, if not the whole picture, but she was certainly keen enough to stay with him when in November 2001 he decided to apply for the school caretakers job in Soham.





    COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?



    So could the mistake which allowed Huntley to take that job happen again?



    Since Ian Huntley's employment by the school in Soham the Criminal Records Bureau has come into being. Now if a school caretaker is being hired instead of police forces talking to one another the school asks the CRB for a background check.



    But the CRB only holds hard information, convictions and cautions, and the lists of people already banned from working under the Departments of Education and Health. The CRB still has to gather soft information from individual police forces.



    If one of them makes the same mistake again there is nothing to stop the system failure that brought Ian Huntley into contact with his victims.

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