Ian Huntley and the Soham girls

Freedom wrote:Is "Lian" supposedly a female name? I've never heard of it unless it's a dreadful spelling of Leanne.

Maybe it's "lying" as in telling porkies........

Freedom wrote:Is "Lian" supposedly a female name? I've never heard of it unless it's a dreadful spelling of Leanne.

Maybe it's "lying" as in telling porkies........

I've heard Lian used as a shortened form of Gillian before

Freedom wrote:Is "Lian" supposedly a female name? I've never heard of it unless it's a dreadful spelling of Leanne.

Maybe it's "lying" as in telling porkies........

But who is telling porkies I wonder?? The gutter press labour under the illusion that everyone apart from their rather moronic reporters is as thick as two short planks. In actual fact, it is the reporters who are as thick as two short planks..

IMO!

I have a cousin named Liane. My uncle and aunt took the first 2 letters of their names, Linda and Angus and added an e so it looked better.

I haven't seen this programme yet but I understand that Colin Sutton appears in it.

https://www.my5.tv/soham-revisited-15-years-on/season-1/soham-revisted-15-years-on

P.S. I have now seen most of it - the computer threw a wobbler and I missed the last 10 minutes or so. The makers of the Australian "Gone" programme could certainly learn something from the way that it's made clear that most of the interviews come from 2002 or 2003!

One thing that I was unclear about; Huntley's previous offences weren't noticed when he applied for the school caretaker's job because he was using the name Nixon. He was known as Huntley at the time of the girls' disappearance. How did he come to change it back again and didn't anyone think to check him out in that name?

I don't think we can believe a lot of what has been written in the main stream media about Ian Huntley. Tragically, I think the press did what is known as a 'hatchet job'.


http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread231461/pg1

The below pretty much sews it up for me. I think it is also on record that the taxi driver had passengers in the car too. So there would be several witnesses to the erratic driving episode. Surely what the taxi driver reported would be consistent with the abduction of two girls?


5.11pm - 5.35pm: The computer at Holly's house is in use, almost certainly by the girls.

5.45pm: Ian Huntley, the caretaker of a local school and who knows the girls, speaks to them as they pass his house. "They were as happy as Larry ... They didn't have a care in the world," he said.

6.15pm: Another reported sighting puts them in the lower end of the High Street near a Rover garage.

6.17pm: CCTV footage shows the girls crossing the car park of the Ross Peers sports centre in Soham. They did not have their parents' permission to go back to the centre.

6.30pm: Four more reported sightings put the girls in the High Street walking towards the centre of Soham.

6.45pm: Four more reported sightings, this time near the town's war memorial.

7pm: An unconfirmed sighting at the southern edge of Soham, near a roundabout and a Q8 filling station.

6.01pm / 7pm: A taxi driver heading south from the roundabout near the filling station, along the A142 towards Newmarket, apparently sees the motorist in front struggling with two children and swerving across the road. The metallic green saloon car is speeding and being driven "erratically", with a child in the front passenger seat and another - with light brown hair similar to Jessica's - in the back. The motorist is white, of Mediterranean appearance or suntanned, aged between 38 and 45 and has black, wiry hair. He drives all the way to the outskirts of Newmarket.


https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/17/childprotection.children4

Interesting thread.

This case bothers me deeply. So many lives ruined. I also don't think there is any clear motive. The girls just happen to walk past his house while he is washing his car. How was he to know they would walk past at this particular time unless he had been in prior contact with them and there is no evidence of this from phones/computers etc? So presumably it was a coincidence that he saw them. Why would he invite them in? It doesn't make sense. I don't believe he did and there is no evidence as the poster below states.

A man engaged in the task of washing his car outside his house is not, imo, a man who is planning to abduct, molest and murder two girls. He may well have been the last person the girls spoke to before they disappeared and he may have been worried that this would raise suspicions but I see no evidence that his testimony that they skipped off 'happy as Larry' or words to that effect is not the truth. None whatsoever.

Snipped from below:

There was no evidence girls were in his house or car... he walked his dog near the area where they were found and I believe his dad lived there too...

The story was originally that he went back to where bodies were dumped some time after, cut the clothes off them, then set fire to the bodies, then York clothes home and washed them, then put them in a bin in the shelter on the site where he worked, put petrol on them and lit them but then poured water over them after a few seconds, then put a bin bag over the top of them and left them to be found...

I don't buy it!

It seems to me that the police had already decided it was Huntley who was going to be charged for it and they manipulated the evidence and story to fit while ignoring everything else that pointed away from Huntley.



http://www.newsfixboard.com/t18634p150-ian-huntley-and-the-soham-murders-was-he-framed

Ian Huntley makes chilling claims about schoolgirls' murders in jail confession

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ian-huntley-claims-holly-wells-12011299#ICID=Android_TMNewsApp_AppShare

Nothing new there - typical of The Sun of course - that's what Huntley said at his trial.

Oh OK Freedom, delete it if you want.

I'm happy to leave it in case anyone needs reminding how wonderful tabloid newspapers are!

Freedom wrote:I'm happy to leave it in case anyone needs reminding how wonderful tabloid newspapers are!

True!

Not sure if this link has been on here but it is an interesting read for those curious about this case:

http://falsificationofhistory.co.uk/geopolitics/the-soham-scapegoats-a-gross-miscarriage-of-justice/

It's easy to forget just how much press coverage this tragic case got. This article is written in very poor taste, imo, without any thought for the girls, or their parents and families. Really disgraceful. And the senior investigating officer does not set the right tone either with his glib comment.

Explaining why it took officers just under two weeks to catch the killer of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Stevenson, said: "It's not like Morse you know."

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/dec/22/mondaymediasection.soham

Just to revisit this desperately tragic case, I think this account of what might have happened is entirely plausible.

The 'badger setts' that police spent all night investigating were initially described as shallow graves.


http://www.justjustice.org/

Interesting use of verb here in The Guardian story to describe how the taxi driver had to persistently contact police who ignored his vital testimony for days and days:

Ian Webster, the taxi driver who spotted a motorist struggling with two children as he drove just south of Soham at the time the girls vanished, gave the police the information last Wednesday, three days after the 10-year-olds went missing, and then badgered them about it on Friday and Saturday.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/14/childprotection.children3

He added that one of his passengers, whom he had driven from Ely to Newmarket, had also contacted police on the Tuesday after the girls' vanished - the day police suggested the girls had been abducted.

Snipped from the link above.

This is FOUR witnesses to erratic driving behaviour. What has been described by the taxi driver sounds like what might happen if someone or several people abducted two girls, one of whom had a mobile phone. The driver put one child in the front and one in the back (rather than both in the back) presumably to separate them, He may not have realized that Jessica had a mobile phone on her but presumably, when in the car, he saw her trying to use her mobile to call her parents (or police?) and swung around to try to stop her and get hold of the mobile.

Why would the taxi driver lie? Who were the three passengers who also witnessed this behaviour? It would be very interesting to hear their accounts of what they saw.

I read that one of the passengers received a call at the time this incident was seen and it was discounted because the phone records showed that the timing was wrong. I'll see if I can find it again.

P.S. It's here.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/17/childprotection.children4

I hope that the driver of that car was traced to check that there was nothing untoward about the incident. It sounds though like a typical journey with feuding siblings.

Wednesday August 14
Wednesday August 14

4am: Police confirm that the areas of disturbed earth is not anything suspicious and are probably badger setts. The families of the girls talk of a "little hope" after their "longest night".

·Det Supt Beck makes a 30-second videotaped appeal, broadcast first at 6pm, speaking directly to the girls' believed abductor to call him on a special hotline and find a "way out". He said he had left him messages on Jessica's mobile phone.
4am: Police confirm that the areas of disturbed earth is not anything suspicious and are probably badger setts. The families of the girls talk of a "little hope" after their "longest night".

·Det Supt Beck makes a 30-second videotaped appeal, broadcast first at 6pm, speaking directly to the girls' believed abductor to call him on a special hotline and find a "way out". He said he had left him messages on Jessica's mobile phone.

Interesting timings here. '

A jogger reports seeing mounds of earth that look a bit like shallow graves. Police arrive and spend all night there. The next day a detective leading the team makes an appeal to  'the girls' believed abductor' to call him on a special line for a 'way out' having left a message on Jessica's phone.

So police believed they knew who the girls' abductor was, following the night which they spent examining disturbed earth which was probably badge setts?

Hmmmm......

ETA: 4am: Police confirm that the areas of disturbed earth is not anything suspicious and are probably badger setts. The families of the girls talk of a "little hope" after their "longest night".

I don't take that to mean that the police had a particular suspect in mind, merely that it was considered now likely that someone had abducted the girls against their will. The messages were aimed at that as yet unknown person.

Freedom wrote:I don't take that to mean that the police had a particular suspect in mind, merely that it was considered now likely that someone had abducted the girls against their will. The messages were aimed at that as yet unknown person.

Oh okay, yes. I wonder what the 'way out' was, though? Did the abductor contact police? Given that Ian Huntley was convicted of the murders was it him or Maxine that contacted the police? Or someone that knew them?

Given that Ian Huntley was given two life sentences, I don't see that he had much of a 'way out' though?

Or am I missing something?

The timings are interesting however.

The taxi driver sighting was made public on 13th August. That evening a dog walker alerted the police to two mounds of earth at Warren Hill, just outside Newmarket. According to Wilkipedia, the suggestion was that these two mounds of earth could be the graves of the missing girls however an overnight examination of the site revealed that the mounds of earth were badger setts and 'no trace of either girl was found'.

I still maintain that it is quite odd that police had to spend all night examining badger setts, particularly as the girls at this time were still supposedly missing and their whereabouts unknown. Why waste so much time at a site that was apparently not relevant to the investigation?

It is also on record that the taxi driver was annoyed that police took so long to interview him and I think he had to contact them three times. Given how important his sighting was in terms of time location and what he saw and given that he had three witnesses, this seems to be an extraordinary failure on the part of the police. The taxi driver also went public after there were allegations that he had delayed approaching police. He was very irritated, apparently, as the opposite was true. Given that the taxi driver and his three passengers had witnessed a car being driven very erratically with the driver struggling with two girls at an important time and place on the evening that they disappeared I can quite understand his frustration.

It was only on 17th August when Huntley and Carr were arrested that the police announced that they feared the girls were now dead. It was on that afternoon that the bodies of both the girls were found near the perimeter fence of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, 12 miles from Soham.

On 16th August Huntley and Carr were first questioned and they were arrested in the early hours of 17th August on suspicion of murder.

Link: Wilkipedia - Soham murders

From memory - not looking it up as I'm just off to my darkened room for the afternoon - the police were first alerted to Ian Huntley after he appeared on TV saying that he was possibly the last person to see them before they disappeared. Someone recognised him from where he had lived previously under a different name and told the police of his history of relations with underage girls.

Freedom wrote:From memory - not looking it up as I'm just off to my darkened room for the afternoon - the police were first alerted to Ian Huntley after he appeared on TV saying that he was possibly the last person to see them before they disappeared. Someone recognised him from where he had lived previously under a different name and told the police of his history of relations with underage girls.

I think Huntley was in frequent contact with police which would not be odd at all given that his girlfriend knew the girls and he was a local resident and the last person - allegedly (ahem!) to see them alive. Police were swarming around the area and it is completely normal that he would talk to them, imo. I would suggest this is an indication of innocence, rather than guilt. Why didn't he keep his head down or even leave the area for a bit? I know killers do sometimes hang around the scene but I never saw anything suspicious in his behaviour.

While it was alleged he had a history of relations with underage girls as far as I am aware there were no convictions and at least one of the allegations was false I do believe. The allegations all look quite flaky to me - where are the hoards of women he has supposed to have molested? He's not exactly Harvey Weinstein as far as I can see.

I'm unable to copy and paste on the computer I'm using but it seems to be from various reports in the MSM (yeah - I know...) that Huntley asked some quite pertinent questions. Why wouldn't he? The girls skipped past his house 'without a care in the world' on the evening that they disappeared.

I would imagine that Huntley and his girlfriend were desperately worried about them and wanted to know what had happened and who was responsible. It also strikes me, from various reports I have read in the MSM, the Huntley and Carr probably got wind relatively early on that they might get stitched up blamed for what had happened.

QC Richard Latham is quoted in the press as saying that the fact that Huntley asked questions about DNA was some kind of indication of his guilt. Really? Why? There was no DNA linking Huntley with the murders as far as I can see so I would suggest that Huntley was asking the right questions and QC Richard Latham was wondering how to find any DNA linking Huntley with the crime.

It is alleged there were fibres from a Manchester United football shirt found in his apartment. Is that as good as they could come up with?

In the end, they were reduced to getting evidence from - wait for it - a 'forensic ecologist, botanist and palynologist' Patricia Wiltshire. Apparently she identified the approximate tine the bodies were placed and provided evidence that proved that Huntley was the killer based on analysis of the soil environment.

No wonder Huntley was asking about DNA. Was any DNA from the girls found in his apartment? Was his DNA found on the girls clothes? Was the girls' DNA found on the Alsation that he was brushing when the girls stopped to talk to him outside his and Maxine's house? When a police officer arrived on the scene shortly after Huntley had allegedly murdered the girls, how did she find Huntley? Flustered, worried, weird, crazy, guilty, freshly washed with a change of clothes? Hair freshly washed? Scrubbing his house from top to toe? Wringing his hands?

Not at all. Cool, calm and collected and very helpful showing her around the campus. The police dog had no reaction at all to the man who had allegedly just murdered the two girls.

Were cadaver dogs ever sent into the house where the girls were murdered? If not, why not? Surely that should have happened early on just to rule out Huntley? Having ruled out Huntley, the police could then follow the trail that lead AWAY from his house and towards the route taken by the girls which lead, tragically, to their murder and death quite possibly, if the screams heard in the area of Warren Hill are anything to go by, that very evening.

The way I look at it, Huntley was convicted based on soil analysis and hearsay.

In any event, whether or not he had a history of wrongdoing with under-age girls, that does not make him guilty of this particular crime. Innocent until proven guilty.

That's how it looks to me anyway. Purely my own opinion.

Source: Wilkipedia Soham murders.

Thank you for linking that case. How incredible. Surely the police were being a bit dense if they did not consider that there might be some connection between the case they were investigating and the two missing girls? Or have I missed something? Eastbourne isn't that far away from Hastings.

You cannot help but compare the outcome of that case to the outcome in the Soham case.

It is my sad belief that the Soham girls did not die when it is claimed they died. I think Ian Huntley was telling the truth when he told the police that they skipped happily away from him after they spoke to him as he was washing his alsatian dog outside his house. I

In the case above where the girls were found alive, notice how police talk about finding evidence in the abductor's house. There is obviously the evidence from the girls themselves but police do not talk about this - the girls are allowed to speak for themselves and they do so remarkably eloquently, imo.

The police in that case found, as one would expect,  considerable  evidence of the planning of an abduction. Right down to maps with schools located and nearby roads. And of course they will have also found other evidence inside the flat which will have corroborated with what the girls said.

Therein lies the problem with the Huntley conviction, imo. I just don't think the evidence is there. (Should this be on a different thread?) The forensics don't add up to my mind.  There is also no evidence of planning.  Did Huntley know the girls were going to walk by his house that Sunday as he was washing his dog outside his home? If he didn't then are we really supposed to believe he committed a double murder on the spur of the moment? And that the girls died around the time of 6.46pm when we are supposed to believe, I presume, that Huntley switched off Jessica's mobile phone? On the subject of Jessica's mobile, what happened to this? Is Huntley supposed to have disposed of it? Or what?

I find it impossible to believe that Huntley would be so cool, calm and collected when he helpfully showed a police woman with a police dog (alsation?) around the school premises after he had supposedly committed a double murder?  Really? It's not as though he has a past history of committing murders.

And the police dog does not react to Huntley at all. Uhh? (I can also see from one of the threads below that Holly's father encountered Huntley on several occasions not long after the disappearance and Huntley behaved in a way that, imo, a concerned person would,  and not in the way that someone who had just committed a murder would. Not that I am any kind of expert on how murderers behave but I do like to think I can recognise how genuine people behave.)

I think the Telegraph story linked below describes how and when the girls were abducted. I do not believe for one minute that the police did not trace this erratically-driven car and find out who owned it and who was likely to have been in it at the time the taxi driver made this incredibly important sighting in a crucial place at a crucial time.

The taxi driver saw the green car at around 7pm on Sunday August 4, which would be around half an hour after the last positive sighting of the 10-year-old girls.

Look at those timings. I reckon that the taxi driver -  who had two or three other people in his car (depending on which story you read) so there are several other impartial witnesses to this  - saw the girls being abducted by car. A car would be an obvious vehicle for an abduction because it would be quite difficult to control two children of that age if they started to panic and tried get away.

A taxi driver will be clear on timings because he has client bookings for that day. The two or three other people in his car will be clear on timings because they will have booked a taxi for a specific purpose. You don't just book a taxi and then get the driver to drive around aimlessly with no idea of time. Time is money and you are in a taxi to get from a to b in as fast a time as is safely possible. Notice how the taxi driver is so concerned about the erratic driving of what sounds like the girls' abductor that he slows down so as not to be involved in an accident. (This tells you how a normal person behaves - he takes responsibility for his actions and responsibility for the people who are trusting him.) The taxi-driver  even describes the driver's behaviour as 'suicidal'. This is an extremely emotive word. But it wasn't just the driver in the car who could have died as a result of the erratic driving, it is also the two children in the car who could have died. So it wouldn't then be suicide would it, but it would be homicide too. Why would someone want to endanger the lives of two children in this way? Perhaps someone on drugs (the taxi driver assumed the driver was drunk) or someone suffering from some kind of mental illness or condition which does not of course rule out the driver as the possible abductor of Holly and Jessica. Far from it, imo.

Notice for how long the taxi driver follows this car. He is able to give a good description not just of the car but of the man driving it. This would be I presume because the man was turning around and waving his hands towards the child with brown hair sitting in the back seat. The man driving wasn't Huntley (although this would be the logical person to be driving, given that he was convicted of the murders)  because at the time of this sighting Huntley - according to his conviction - had lured the children into his home to meet their deaths.

I presume that the taxi driver is unable to give much of a description of the two children, apart from the fact that the one in the back had brown hair, because, if it was indeed a terrified Holly and Jessica then poor Holly would have been focused on the driver and where he was taking them and what she could do. And poor Jessica would presumably have been desperately trying to use her mobile phone to contact her parents and/or the police and get help.

Commonsense would suggest that the taxi driver could have seen the girls' abductor taking them away. And what he saw when he described the man turning around and flapping his hands towards the back seat was the abductor trying to wrestle Jessica's mobile from her hands.

Who was this man? Was this man ever ruled out?  If it was an innocent man transporting two girls who were friends or related to each other somewhere then why didn't he just stop the car and talk to the girl in the back seat? Adults tend not to drive children around in their cars unless they are related to the child or they are transporting their child's friends.

Why would you recklessly put the lives of two children in danger, especially if they were your children or their friends? Notice how police say there were other reports of this green car in the Soham area. Presumably other people noticed the car being driven so badly and maybe feared for the safety of the children inside. The driver of the car is described by the taxi-driver as a dark man with collar-length hair of Mediterranean appearance (that sounds weirdly familiar). I wonder if the passengers in the taxi and any of the other witnesses  to this event were able to also give a description of this man? Or indeed a better description of the two children inside the car?

IMO both Holly and Jessica were quite distinctive-looking. Holly was very blond and they are both quite striking looking. Plus what they were wearing on the day they disappeared was also very distinctive looking.  Surely there would have been other witnesses to this 'suicidal' driving and those witnesses might have been able to give a better description of the two children in the car?

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said that there were 103 green 4-door Vectras and 71 green 4-door Peugeot 405s registered to drivers in the Cambridgeshire area.

Mr Hebb said the police had received other reports of a green car in the Soham area. Mr Hebb said: "As a matter of urgency we need to trace this vehicle and driver and establish what relevance, if any, it has to the investigation."

IMO Ian Huntley is of course a crucial person in this case because he can pinpoint exactly what time the girls were heading off to the village. He knows what route they were taking. He knows what they were wearing. He knows that they were 'happy as Larry' or whatever expression he used.  In other words, they were not furtive or secretive but happy to stop and talk to him, probably attracted by his dog as children often are. And maybe wanting to pet his dog - this would be consistent with how children of that age would behave. (Was the dog tested for the girls' DNA?)

There were also other sightings of the girls - quite a few I think -  after they stopped and talked to Huntley and before the were, imo, forced into that  green car or tricked into it. I think one of the last 'sightings' was of them at a garage forecourt. Could this possibly have been where they entered that car?

I do not believe for one minute that the police were not able to trace this car, find out who owned it and also who was likely to be driving it, for what purpose and where they were heading. If the girls were in the car, their DNA would be in it too and there could also have been signs of a struggle - which is in fact what the taxi driver is describing.

Notice how the question in the title of the article in the Telegraph story linked below is not answered.  IMO that is because it cannot be answered. There is no logical explanation. But who cares about logic?

I wonder who gave the 'credible sighting' of the girls walking along a main road early the morning after they disappeared 13 miles away from when they were last seen? It was this sighting I do believe that persuaded the taxi driver to dismiss what he had seen the previous day, preventing him from going to the police for several days I think he said.  (However, who is to say that other witnesses did not report the erratically-driven car earlier on?)

I don't see how the above  could be a 'credible sighting' in the context of the circumstances of the disappearance and the characters of the girls. 'Prank gone wrong' was apparently the line that was being taken in the context of that sighting. Hmmmm.

The final link below is quite interesting, imo, as it shows how Holly Well's father saw and spoke to Huntley quite early on after the disappearances of the girls.

One further thought: where was Huntley's alsation dog supposed to have been when the crime was carried out supposedly in Huntley's house? Anyone who has any knowledge of alsations knows they are highly intelligent and very good guard dogs. They can sniff out, quite literally, when things are 'not right'. And they become agitated around situations they are not comfortable with. It is no coincidence that they are used as police dogs. Shame Huntley's dog can't talk, we could ask him what happened that night.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/soham-murders-ian-huntley/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/14/childprotection.children3
http://falsificationofhistory.co.uk/geopolitics/the-soham-scapegoats-a-gross-miscarriage-of-justice/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-day-holly-and-jessica-disappeared-78161.html

Previous post transferred from the various missing children topic. The other case referred to is one 3 years before the Soham case where two 10-year-old girls were kidnapped but found alive.