First reporter to interview Soham killer was suspicious from start

The first reporter to interview Ian Huntley before he was arrested on suspicion of murdering two 10-year-olds has told of what led him to report the former school caretaker to the police.

Journalist Brian Farmer, who worked for the Press Association in East Anglia at the time and had been reporting on the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman on August 4 2002, told BBC News he went to speak to Huntley after police issued a list of last sightings of the girls.

He interviewed Huntley, then 28, and his partner Maxine Carr, then 25, who was a teaching assistant in Holly and Jessica’s primary school class at St Andrews Primary School in Soham, Cambridgeshire.

“I knew where the caretaker’s house was, and it’s quite nearby, and also he seemed to be the last man to see them,” Mr Farmer told BBC News on Saturday, when Huntley died following an attack at high-security prison HMP Frankland.

“Though, it’s always possible that the last man to see missing children or missing women is the culprit.

“So for those two reasons, I went to knock on the door.”

The reporter said it struck him that Carr and Huntley took a bit of persuading to agree to talk to him.

“What first took me by surprise was that both Maxine Carr and Ian Huntley seemed a little reluctant to let me in to talk about it, and it took a little bit of persuasion for them to allow me to go in and sit down and talk.”

Mr Farmer, who now works for the BBC, said Huntley had painted a picture of himself washing his Alsatian, Sadie, on a Sunday evening after being on a muddy walk, but had claimed Holly and Jessica had asked about their teaching assistant.

“It wasn’t what they’d said that I thought was strange. It was what they hadn’t said,” Mr Farmer said of the interview on August 8 2002.

“They didn’t seem to have mentioned the dog, and I couldn’t really believe that there would be two 10–year-old girls anywhere on Earth who would be wandering about carefree on a summer’s day, who come across a man washing the dog with soap and water, who wouldn’t see the dog.

“There were no: ‘How cute is that dog’ or oohs and aahs. Nothing like that.

“I simply didn’t believe what he was saying. It simply didn’t seem possible.”

Mr Farmer’s concern grew when, after asking Carr if the girls had been taught about stranger danger in school, or how they might react if a man opened a door and asked them to come in, Huntley jumped in to answer the question, despite apparently not knowing the girls.

He said: “To my astonishment, really, Ian Huntley answered the question, and he said that Holly would probably go quietly, but Jessica would put up a fight.

“I didn’t show it at the time, but I couldn’t understand how he could know that.

“He was the caretaker at a secondary school, a school they didn’t go to. Their parents might know how they’d react. Maybe a teacher could speculate on how they’d react.

“But how could the caretaker at another school possibly know how they’d react?

“I came to the conclusion fairly quickly that I didn’t think he was telling the truth.”

In his report from the time Mr Farmer wrote of Huntley weeping when he spoke of the girls’ “disappearance”.

“It seems they have just disappeared off the face of the earth,” the murderer told Mr Farmer.

“How can two girls go missing in broad daylight, then nothing? No sighting. No nothing. It beggars belief.”

After interviewing the couple, Mr Farmer filed a story before calling his elder brother, a retired senior detective.

“My brother Derek told me that I should contact the police and he agreed that what Huntley had said was very strange and maybe even grounds for arrest if he’d been there himself,” Mr Farmer said.

“So, with his advice, I contacted Cambridgeshire Police and told them why I thought what Huntley had said was strange and not true.”

The pair were arrested on August 17 2002.

Mr Farmer was called to give evidence at Huntley and Carr’s Old Bailey trial in 2003.

Huntley denied murdering the two 10-year-olds but was convicted after the trial.

Carr gave Huntley a false alibi and was jailed for 21 months for perverting the course of justice.

She is now living under a new identity.

The former school caretaker’s life sentence recommended he serve at least 40 years for the Soham murders, meaning he would not have been eligible for parole until the 2040s.

Mr Farmer added: “I’ve been thinking today about the parents, not about me or about my experiences.

“It simply can never go away for them, and this must be a day that’s just beyond belief for them, isn’t it, that they have to go through it again.”