Читать книгу Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley - Nathan Yates - Страница 6
ОглавлениеThe man responsible for this terrible act, Ian Huntley, was being held at a police station in Ely, Cambridgeshire, when Keith Pryer made his discovery. Huntley was trying to convince officers that he was a man so innocent the accusations against him were driving him mad. The 28-year-old caretaker was dribbling, foaming at the mouth and crying incessantly during questioning. He hardly spoke a word, and the sounds he did make were gibberish. From the moment he came under suspicion, Huntley denied all knowledge of the girls’ disappearance, a façade of innocence which he kept up right through his initial court appearances. Under repeated questioning by officers both before and after his arrest, he continued to claim he had done nothing to hurt the girls.
The appearance of the man languishing in the cells accused of murder betrayed nothing of his lethal nature. He was unremarkable to look at, of medium height and build, with close-cropped dark hair and skin which was also dark but without the healthy glow of a tan. It had an ashen tinge which could have been an indication of infrequent washing. A stubbly growth of beard grew in a patchy fashion at the bottom of his rounded cheeks and on the front of his chin. His unkempt appearance showed the dire straits in which the caretaker found himself. According to those close to him, he was normally very concerned about the way he looked, to the point of being vain. A former colleague from the Heinz factory in his home town of Grimsby remembers: ‘He looked much smarter than the others, even at work. You never saw him wearing old tracksuits and stuff like that, it was always cord trousers and shirts. When he went out on a Saturday night he made a real effort. He saw himself as a ladies’ man.’ Huntley’s habits were to bathe and shave every morning, clean his teeth twice a day and always keep his hair neatly cut, short but not spiky. His dirty-looking skin had nothing to do with lack of hygiene.
Several of Huntley’s many conquests had thought him quite good-looking, in a bland way. The circular face held regular features, and his active life had kept him slim. But what distinguished him from others was less his facial landscape than a permanent look of distance, or even hurt, in his eyes. They were, according to one former girlfriend, the eyes of a wounded animal. ‘At the beginning I thought he had sensitive eyes, but it was really more that he always looked like he felt sorry for himself,’ the woman, now 26, said. ‘The way he would look at me reminded me of a deer or a cow. But when he was mad about something or he wanted to tell me what to do, they were different. He could change completely, so he was really glaring at me. It was scary.’
Since Huntley’s arrest, many have remarked that this split personality was captured in one telling photograph which shows the killer posing in the grounds of Soham Village College. Huntley looks straight into the camera, with an expression which at first sight appears sad and concerned. But detectives noticed a strange quality about the picture. One explained: ‘If you cover the right side of it with your hand and look into his right eye he’s got a look of being sorry for himself. If you cover the left side of the photo and look into his left eye, there’s this expression of absolute cruelty. The first time I did this, the effect was so striking it made me jump.’
After murdering Holly and Jessica 13 days earlier, Huntley’s eyes had become rimmed by deep black shadows, a sign, perhaps, that he hadn’t been getting much sleep. He had lost weight, not more than a few pounds but enough from his already quite spare frame to make his trousers loose around his waist. According to his own version of events, he was being driven headlong towards a breakdown by continual police harassment. This treatment was particularly difficult to deal with, he would explain in letters sent from his cell, for a character like his. For, in his own mind, Huntley was a sensitive soul who found it difficult to cope with emotional turmoil. And certainly he was sensitive to his own pain, though much less so to the pain of others. During his life before killing Holly and Jessica, he had tried to do away with himself three times. As he sat in his temporary cell on Saturday, 17 August, there was little doubt that the pressure was beginning to tell.
With the ongoing burden of lying about his actions and hiding the truth, he was getting worn down, and it showed in his behaviour with police. When he was first questioned before his arrest, his responses had been expansive, his sympathies for the girls strongly uttered. But, after he was arrested, he had refused to say more than the bare minimum. With time he had become more and more morose and withdrawn. As we shall see, such moods were part of Huntley’s personality, but there was no doubt that he was sinking now. He spoke much less often, replying increasingly in monosyllables or not at all. He was spending all of his time locked away entirely by himself.
According to Huntley, one thing which tortured him was imagining the grief of the Wells and Chapman families. Earlier, during his many conversations with journalists, he had expressed his torment over a disappearance which, he said, ‘beggared belief’. He had watched with a face contorted in sympathy as the families had given a string of emotional press conferences in front of TV cameras, pleading for the return of their children. At this moment in the cells, there is every reason to suppose that he continued to think of these people – without ever admitting he had destroyed their lives.
Later, when police told him the bodies had been found, he would be racked with fear that the detectives were about to discover some incriminating clue. He would also think again of Kevin and Nicola Wells and Leslie and Sharon Chapman and their ordeal. Not only had Huntley known these people almost as neighbours in the small town of Soham, and as parents of children he worked with every day, he also had spent many hours with them during the hunt for the missing girls. As they begged for the abductor to return their children in the assembly hall of Soham Village College, the killer was for much of the time standing only a few feet away.
Much has been written about how the deaths of Holly and Jessica caused unspeakable grief to their parents, and it seems callous to entertain the idea that Huntley himself may have been stricken by guilt. In none of his statements under questioning did he say he was sorry, and he consistently refused to accept responsibility for what he had done. Yet the constant denials could reveal a mind which could not come to terms with the reality of its actions. Before he was unmasked as the killer, Huntley said he imagined what it was like going through the agony of the girls’ parents and pondered the ordeals of the girls themselves. We shall never know for certain how much truth there was in these claims and to what extent they were purely an attempt to put on a face of innocence. He pretended to be, like the rest of the world, wondering how this tragedy came to pass. Yet he was the murderer and could run through the acts from memory. It is possible that Huntley’s bafflement over the crime may have been partly genuine. He may have been tortured by the question: why had he murdered these two innocent girls and left so many lives in ruins? Sitting on his own in his cell, he may well have pondered these issues. Over the course of his coming life sentence, he would have plenty of time to reflect.
Doctors who studied Huntley at Rampton Hospital would diagnose him as a psychopath. By this they meant that he was capable of committing crimes without experiencing a normal person’s feelings of regret. In their view, Huntley had a personality disorder which made him immune to society’s moral code.
Whether Huntley did or did not feel guilt, police and psychiatrists who came into contact with him say there is strong evidence of self-hatred in his character. Since childhood he had experienced huge mood swings. He had described how at times he felt confident, arrogant and better than anyone else around him. He would bolster his self-esteem by a series of pretences designed to make him the subject of others’ admiration. Yet, away from the fantasies, at other times he experienced severe depression, feeling inadequate and rejected, particularly by women. At this, the lowest point in his life, these deep inadequacies were no doubt playing through his consciousness with a renewed force. Now he was one of the most despised people on the planet – even other criminals would hate him and be after his blood.
Always obsessed with getting away with his crimes, Huntley had dreaded capture. He had derived a sense of superiority from deceiving others, and during the murder hunt he had revelled in acting out his innocence. His deceptions had been a tool to control others; he had used his lies to manipulate people from early childhood, for power over others was something he always craved. Now his deception had been demolished; he was left naked without his mask, and utterly under the control of forces far more powerful than himself. He had reached rock bottom.
In a similar cell 30 miles away at Peterborough police station, Huntley’s girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was also in a state of torment. A 25-year-old woman of average looks and greasy appearance, she was so disturbed that she found it impossible to eat and she was losing weight rapidly. Huntley had meant the world to her, and despite his arrest she was still hopelessly bound to him. He was the first man who had wanted to stay with her, and she had invested everything in him. For Carr, Huntley offered the hope of a future with a man she loved; she had been prepared to stand by him through anything in the belief that they would be together for ever and would have a family. Sitting in her cell, she remained utterly emotionally dependent on the man who had landed her there, and talked about Huntley constantly, begging police for news of him. His dominating behaviour, which had driven away many other women, had been for her a sign of the devotion she so desperately needed.
Before Huntley had murdered the girls, Carr had felt she was at the beginning of a better life. Settled in a relationship at last, she had moved with her man to a new area of the country and both had managed to get better jobs than they had had before. Now, all that had been completely destroyed. She had lost her future husband, her home and her life. Carr had hoped for so much from her relationship with this man. How could she, how could they, end up like this? Did the secret lie somewhere in their past?
