Читать книгу Beyond Evil - Inside the Twisted Mind of Ian Huntley - Nathan Yates - Страница 8

Ian Kevin Huntley was born into a life of instability, uncertainty and poverty, and from early childhood his existence was turbulent. When he came into the world, on 31 January 1974 at Grimsby Maternity Hospital, his parents, Kevin and Lynda, were already struggling to get by on pittance wages. His father worked as a gas fitter and the family saved money by lodging with Lynda’s parents at 100 Wintringham Road in Grimsby. The couple had married when they realised Lynda was three months pregnant with their first child. Both were only 18 when they signed the wedding papers on 23 June 1973, and at that point Kevin Huntley was just an apprentice in his chosen trade, while Lynda Huntley held down a poorly paid job in a printing works. With little income and no place of their own, the young couple would struggle to support their newborn child. Kevin would have to work overtime while his wife gave up her job to look after the baby.

Soon the hard work paid off and the family were able to move into their own home, a rented house at 1 Pelhams Road, Immingham, a few miles north of Grimsby. However, their task was made still harder when, on 16 August 1975, the birth of Huntley’s younger brother, Wayne, completed the family. Kevin Huntley found himself weighed down with the responsibility of a wife and two children. Tired and overworked, he was a dour father, strict with his family. Friends remember him as an unsmiling individual, dark and pinched, with a stern aspect, mature for his age. He took his trade very seriously and was a good worker. Despite his dour appearance he was devoted to his wife and would do anything to look after her.

The infant Huntley was also devoted to his mother, and became intensely jealous when this bond was challenged by Wayne’s arrival. With less than two years between the brothers, Lynda’s maternal attentions had to be divided. Huntley reacted to this with jealous furies so uncontrollable that they astonished his parents and their friends. Already his solution was to manipulate; placed in a situation he hated, he hit back by cheating his way to the attention he lacked. He would frequently deceive Lynda into caring for him and ignoring Wayne by bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. On many occasions he kept both parents up all night. A friend of the family remembers: ‘Ian was a handful as a baby. He was always screaming and crying and wanting his mum. He seemed to do it a lot when she was bothering with the younger one, as if he couldn’t stand her giving attention to Wayne.’ This jealousy of his brother was to be a driving force in Huntley’s life, and he would continue to be possessed by it almost 30 years later. Huntley’s former wife, Claire Evans, is among many who believe the envy has marred his whole life.

Another family circumstance which seems to have had a huge impact on him was his father’s sternness. Kevin Huntley’s strict code of behaviour seems to have made a strong impression on the youngster, and he grew up distant from his father, becoming something of a mummy’s boy and taking Lynda’s side in any argument. A friend of the family said: ‘As far as Ian was concerned, Lynda was always in the right and Kevin was always in the wrong. If there were any problems in the family, Ian blamed his father for them.’ The Huntley home during these early years was in a solidly working-class district. Immingham is a town at the mouth of the Humber estuary, and many of its inhabitants are employed in shipping or related industries. In the 1970s the way of life was unchanged in essentials from Victorian days, when the area’s first fish-processing plants and industrialised fishing fleet were established.

Huntley would later become one of Immingham’s many manual labourers, but for the time being his surroundings were restricted at first to the family home and then extended to include the town’s Eastfield Junior School, which he attended from the age of five. Although Huntley was later to make defenceless schoolgirls his own victims, back then he was the one who was the target of abuse. From the moment he walked into the school, classmates regarded him as the first choice if they wanted to hit someone or dish out verbal cruelties. ‘He was the class loner really. If anyone was ever bullied, it was him,’ recalled Matt Walker, 28, an assistant manager of an industrial supplier who had known Huntley since they were both five years old. Huntley’s large pale forehead got him the cruel nickname of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. Children would also call him ‘Spadehead’ because of the strange square shape of his face. Huntley, a sickly child who suffered from asthma, was in no position to defend himself against bullying. Matt remembers him trying to bluff his way through this kind of hostility, obviously having no idea of how to deal with it properly. He added: ‘He was the kind of kid who would give a lot of mouth to people, but if they turned on him he would go running to the teacher.’

Huntley’s tale-telling made him even more of a hate figure with the other pupils and his attempts to make friends were disasters. In a foretaste of his later life of fantasy, he would even make up tittle-tattle to spread as much disruption as possible. Another former pupil at Eastfield said: ‘Everyone hated him. He caused so much trouble making stories up about people who didn’t like him, and that turned out to be pretty much everyone. The teachers didn’t like him much either.’ The result of Huntley’s bizarre behaviour was a total lack of close friends. Carl McLaughlin, another classmate, remembers, ‘He used to get bullied really badly. He was a loner.’ During this period, Huntley encountered another, still more serious form of abuse. He was beaten and sexually abused by an adult. He would later tell friends and acquaintances of this terrible experience. It was, he said, an ordeal which left him scarred for life.

At the age of 11 Huntley moved to Healing Comprehensive School, one of the better schools in the area and later attended by Maxine Carr. Here he proved to be equally unpopular, and classmates remember him as a ‘scruffy outcast’ who always wore a battered, fake-leather jacket and had no friends. One former pupil recalls how he had developed his habit of lying to teachers. He said: ‘Huntley was terrible at football and the other kids would take the mickey out of him for it. So every time we were supposed to play football during a games lesson he would suddenly have a massive asthma attack. It’s true that he did have asthma, but the funny thing was that it always seemed to come on much worse during football, and the attacks happened for example when he let a goal in or made some other cock-up. It was obvious he was faking it, but all the same the way he could do the cough and wheeze was just like it was for real. He was a very good actor, I’ll give him that much.’

In the first form at Healing Huntley became the target of abuse from the older pupils. Fifth- and sixth-formers would frequently beat him up in the playground, and on one occasion he was found hanging by his jumper from a peg in the cloakroom, unable to get down. He was also subjected to a practice known as ‘kegging’, where two older boys would grab his legs and pull his groin into a post in the yard. The punishment seems savage, but classmates felt little pity for Huntley, insisting he deserved it for his devious habits. In the course of this ordeal his school work also suffered. Never the brightest of pupils, Huntley slid behind in key subjects like Maths and English.

After two years at Healing the situation had become so bad that Huntley moved school to Immingham Comprehensive, considered in the area to be a rougher, less middle-class institution. He arrived there at the beginning of the third form, the hope being that he could make a fresh start at an age when he was growing bigger and becoming less easy to victimise. Unfortunately, the escape did not work as well as planned. He again failed to make any friends and was bullied physically and verbally. Known here simply as ‘Huntley’, the nearest he came to any real contact with his fellow pupils was through a nerdish preoccupation with computer games. Former classmate Kevin Scott, 29, said: ‘He was weak-minded and often bullied. I did have the misfortune of hanging around him. We swapped computer games – he was very average and not very popular. He seemed terrified of his dad, who, I think, was quite strict. Once he came round for tea and his plastic computer-game case got broken. He was petrified about what his dad would say.’

Desperate to make friends, Huntley joined the 2nd Immingham Scouts during his first term at his new school. But he left two months later because he couldn’t stand the physical activities and remained unpopular with the others. Then, at the age of 13, he revealed what was to become a lifelong passion for aeroplanes by joining the Air Training Corps. The move was inspired partly by his father, who felt the military ethic would give his son some much-needed discipline, but Huntley grew to like the idea less for the training than for the machines themselves. He dreamt of joining the RAF, and would cling on to that vision for years to come, later boasting in pubs that he had been a pilot. Yet in the event he spent only one year with 866 Squadron – known as the ‘Flying Vikings’ – before leaving the cadets. From then on his contact with real aircraft would be restricted to watching them as he developed the hobby of plane spotting.

Another former classmate, Adrian Good, remembers the beginnings of this pastime. ‘As a child, he was totally obsessed with aeroplanes,’ he said. ‘He would scribble down details and talk about them all the time.’ Huntley’s fantasy world of aeroplanes offered him an escape from teenage problems and insecurities; while dreaming of being a pilot he could imagine himself as a powerful, independent figure in charge of his own destiny. It could be argued that his other hobbies during this period, weightlifting and shooting air rifles, served similar purposes. Huntley liked to feel himself in command of a powerful machine or weapon, he wanted to be physically strong and possess a body which would impress others.

He would spend hours building models of his favourite aircraft, painting them and suspending them from his bedroom ceiling. He would also pore over plane-spotting magazines and put up posters of his favourite jets on the walls. One of these was the Harrier Jump Jet, which had seen much action during the 1983 Falklands War. Huntley remained so smitten with this plane that in his late twenties he would make pilgrimages to airbases to watch it in action. This was how he became familiar with the airbase at Lakenheath and the land around it, where one day the bodies of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman would be discovered.

Back at Immingham Comprehensive, the hostility of his schoolmates and the disappointment caused by his failures with the Scouts and the Air Training Corps were getting to Huntley. He became so desperate for attention that he attempted suicide in what would be the first of at least three such efforts. He stole a box of paracetamol painkillers from his mother’s medicine cabinet and swallowed the lot while his parents were out. Friends say Lynda found him lying on his bed barely conscious, and he was taken by ambulance to Grimsby Hospital for an urgent stomach pump. Huntley’s life may well have been in danger if his mother had not returned in time, but the bid to take his life did not inspire sympathy at school. One classmate said: ‘He did it because he wanted people’s attention, it was as simple as that. I don’t believe for a minute he really wanted to die, it was just a stunt to get people to notice him and feel sorry for him. It was just an act he pulled because he didn’t have any friends.’ Ex-pupils of Immingham have a similar attitude to Huntley’s asthma attacks. Another said: ‘He would take massive puffs of his inhaler so everyone would think he was really sick, but we mostly didn’t believe him because it was Huntley and we all knew he was a liar. He couldn’t bear people not to notice him all the time and he wanted everyone to think he was marvellous. The problem was we all thought he was a prat.’

Some believe the trigger for Huntley’s first suicide attempt was his being rejected by one of the girls in his class. This is quite possible given his precocious sexual behaviour. For from an early age Huntley was a predator. His first sexual adventure occurred when he was 12, when he shared kisses with his classroom sweetheart, and he rapidly progressed to much less innocent behaviour. Later he would boast how he lost his virginity at the age of 14 and, although like all of his statements this must be treated with caution, it is certainly true that he had early sexual successes. Unusually for one so young, he was attracted to girls even younger than himself. One classmate remembers: ‘His technique with girls was to pick on the youngest, most easily conned ones he could find and basically just lie to them. He’d tell them anything just to get in with them, and he’d put on this really cocky manner, acting as though he was great. I could never figure out how they fell for it, but then again he did choose his victims. I can remember at least three girls he went out with at school. They were all younger than him, and none of them lasted very long.’

Huntley’s exploitation of the vulnerable contained an element of savage cruelty. Although he had yet to be violent to girls, as a teenager one of his favourite pastimes was torturing animals. He would roam the streets looking for dogs and cats to feed his perverse craving. A former schoolmate said: ‘The things he did were really sick. He used to strap bangers to dogs and cats to blow them up, or pour paraffin over them and set them on fire. He was always boasting about it, as if everyone would think it was great.’

Huntley finished his unhappy school career as soon as possible, leaving Immingham Comprehensive at the age of 16 having scraped five GCSE passes. He immediately started work gutting fish for a wholesaler in Grimsby. His working life was to show the same pattern seen in his schooldays of failing to fit in, moving from one group who refused to accept him to another, one dead-end job to the next, with bouts of unemployment in between. He would take on an incredible variety of jobs; between the ages of 16 and 20 he worked at Ross’s Fish Wholesalers in Grimsby, stacked shelves at a local branch of Kwik Save, stuffed babies’ nappies at the Kimberly-Clark factory in Grimsby and worked as a barman at a pub in the town.

In 1994, at the age of 20, he embarked on one of his more settled periods of employment, working at the Heinz factory in Grimsby for the next two years. He got the job there because by then both his father and mother were also working on the premises, and during this time all three would be part of the workforce. Here again Huntley was seen as a loner. Ex-colleague Stuart Rowson said: ‘In factories men and women tend to have their own little groups but at break time he would sit on his own or with a very select number of friends.’ All the same, Huntley seemed to be in for a more stable existence at Heinz, not least because his mother and father were with him every day.

However, this promise was not to be fulfilled, for Huntley had severe problems finding somewhere to settle. Just as he moved from job to job, so too he moved from home to home, accumulating a bewildering list of addresses. He liked to move at least every six months, and in each location he would begin anew another life of lies. He would arrive at a new flat and tell landlords and neighbours a string of falsehoods designed to enhance his reputation. Always there was the pretence of having a higher-status job or a glamorous past. He had been invalided out of the RAF, or he had worked as the manager of a large store. When the lies wore thin, Huntley moved on.

In the period 1995 to 1999 he lived in eight different locations in Grimsby and the surrounding area. Starting off at a one-bedroomed rented flat at 50 Heneage Road in 1995, he moved later that year to a room in 41a Algernon Street, a house occupied by his mother, where neighbours remember him as ‘quiet’. He stayed there for less than a year, then in 1996 he was off again, this time to a very similar terraced house in Florence Street. He divided his time between there, another flat in Cleethorpes and a caravan in a girlfriend’s garden. Nine months later, in 1997, he moved out and went to a rented top-floor flat in Legsby Avenue. But he again moved out within months, going to live in a flat in Veal Street in 1998. Later that year he left there and went to a new place in Abbey Drive East.

Landlord Len Smith, 65, remembered how Huntley arrived at the new flat and immediately put on yet another front. This time the future killer, always craving admiration, dressed up smartly and made out he had a professional job. Mr Smith said: ‘My wife and I did not know him very well but he was very presentable and wore a suit and tie all the time. He said he worked as a rep.’ Huntley lived there from August 1998 to June 1999, before he moved away with Carr. Mr Smith and his wife Valerie, 64, remembered Huntley as taking care to make his room ‘very nice’. He never brought drink into the house, and owned a large Alsatian crossbreed called Sadie. Mr Smith said: ‘He had a big dog but it was always well cared for.’ Mrs Smith added: ‘He was a charmer. He was a good-looking lad.’

While Huntley was working at the Heinz factory and living all over town, his family began to disintegrate around him. His parents went through a troubled period in their relationship which ended in their splitting up. In 1993 Lynda, a chubby, blonde woman known for her timid character, finally decided to move away from her husband and set up home alone in Algernon Street. The separation came as a shock to Huntley. As always, he took his mother’s side in the conflict, and blamed his father for what had happened. He told people his father had been carrying on with other women, an accusation which at that stage was not true. Such was the distaste Huntley developed for Kevin, he even took to using his mother’s maiden name, Nixon. He regarded his Irish grandfather, Alwyn Nixon, as a far better man than his own father, who he felt had broken up the family by being too strict with his children and rejecting his wife. After Mr Nixon died, on 23 February 2002, Huntley made a pilgrimage to Ireland to attend his funeral. He always had a soft spot for the old man, a former joiner who had married twice and fathered three girls.

Following the separation from Lynda, Kevin had a series of relationships, each of which Huntley regarded as a betrayal. The quick succession of flings culminated in the most significant affair, with Sandra Brewer, a Grimsby woman four years younger than Kevin. When Kevin met her in 1995 she was 36 and he was 40. She moved in with him almost immediately, and the couple soon left the area to live in East Anglia. They stayed together for eight years, moving between properties in Eriswell and Wangford in west Suffolk and Littleport in Cambridgeshire, seeing the rest of the Huntley family only on an occasional visit. To those who knew them they seemed a happy couple destined for a long future together, but then at Easter 2002 Kevin suddenly decided he wanted his wife back and dumped Sandra in a surprisingly brutal manner. He told her bluntly: ‘I want you out and my wife back’, and that was the end of their relationship.

A friend of Sandra’s describes how she was immediately kicked out of the cottage in Littleport she had shared with Kevin and had to go back to Lincolnshire to find somewhere to stay. A few days later she came back to get some of her possessions. ‘Kevin wouldn’t even let her in the house,’ the friend said. ‘She had lived with him for eight years. She was shocked.’ However, Sandra’s shock was to turn to relief just over a year later when she discovered Kevin’s son had been charged with murder. ‘I’m so glad I’m not mixed up with him any more,’ she told a friend. Kevin’s reunion with Lynda was also to prove short-lived, for in the aftermath of their son’s arrest the couple split up yet again, blaming the turmoil of events for the separation. The Sandra Brewer saga was regarded with a distaste bordering on contempt by Huntley, who saw the whole situation as an affront to his mother and therefore to himself.

Yet, while his father’s extramarital adventures were to cause him problems, it is fair to say that his mother’s behaviour also came as a jolt to the system. For in 1994 she met security guard Julie Beasley, who, at 21, was four months younger than her elder son. A close friendship developed which turned into a full-blown lesbian affair. This was a situation which nobody had expected; Lynda had felt no attraction towards members of her own sex before. Huntley was surprisingly accepting of his mother’s new-found homosexuality. He even moved in with the lovers shortly after they began their affair, and the three became unusual housemates. They caused quite a stir among the neighbours in Algernon Street. One said: ‘It wasn’t the sort of thing you come across much in Grimsby. Everyone was talking about them, although they seemed nice enough to me.’

Julie, with her short, straight, brown hair and bulky figure, appeared the more masculine of the pair, with Lynda taking on the weaker role in the relationship, as she had done with Kevin. The young woman developed a good rapport with Huntley and became a popular figure with the family as a whole. The neighbour said: ‘To Julie, Ian was just Lynda’s son. They shared an interest in computer games and his mother’s relationship didn’t seem to be a problem for him.’ However, Huntley still found the break-up of his parents’ marriage shattering. He suffered another period of breakdown as the last pillar of his emotional security was removed. He now began to put on weight, ballooning to 14 stone and having to buy a whole wardrobe of new clothes. His medium-built, five-foot-eleven frame did not carry the extra flab well, and he looked more than a little chubby. He spent his leisure time drinking, riding a small motorcycle and playing snooker regularly. He was drifting through life.

Away from the factory floor, Huntley continued his search for vulnerable girls with a tireless trawl of the Grimsby pubs. At this time his lack of confidence led to his telling the most outrageous lies in the hope of impressing women. Too insecure to let them know he was a humble factory worker, he put on a front of arrogance and pretended to be someone else. This skill in the art of pretence was a feature of Huntley’s highly manipulative character, and reflected his desire to have an impact on others by whatever devious means he could. Many who knew him felt he became so good at putting on a front that he even started to believe his own lies. Friends remember how he convincingly pretended to have been an RAF officer and slept with several girls on the strength of it. Of course, in reality the nearest he got to an aircraft was watching it through a pair of binoculars during his days spent plane spotting. Carrying out the illusion was some feat, even among the less discerning of Grimsby’s young females. As one of his conquests put it: ‘It sounds daft but it was easy to believe him. I think he even believed it himself, he was so into the planes and all that.’

Huntley, it seems, wanted to be someone else, and he created a fantasy world around himself in order to satisfy that craving. However transparent his lies, such was his rate of sexual success that, shortly before meeting Maxine Carr at the age of 24, he was to boast that he had slept with more than 100 women. Like everything Huntley said about himself, this was probably another lie, but there was an element of truth in it. He was enjoying what he considered to be a good hit rate, and he didn’t care what extremes he resorted to in order to achieve it.

In fact, Huntley was willing to do far more than lie in order to get sex, and the sexual activities he craved were becoming increasingly abnormal. From an early age he found that the more violent and forceful his conquests the better he enjoyed the experience. Ex-girlfriends speak of a control freak who loved to dominate and abuse women. At the age of 18 Huntley seduced a 12-year-old girl and took her virginity. The child was far too young to consent; he had made a grab for her after luring her away on her own. Once he had the girl in his flat, he gave her strong alcopops until she was drunk and did not know what she was doing. He then led the staggering child upstairs to his bedroom, undressed her and took advantage of her powerless state. For her, their intercourse was painful and terrifying; for him it was an enormous sadistic thrill. Although still barely into adulthood himself, Huntley was already displaying the urges of a paedophile, desire perverted into a thirst for extreme dominance and control. Huntley liked nothing more than to force a woman to have sex with him; he was a specialist in pressurising them in a manner which bordered on rape.

Huntley met a girl called Suzanne when he was 18. She was 16 at the time. She said: ‘I met Ian through a friend and I was initially very attracted to him, but he wanted to take things further sexually and I just wasn’t ready. He was a controlling, dominant personality and wanted everything his own way. He encouraged me to have sex with him.’ Suzanne went out with Huntley on and off for about nine months, before dumping him for another local man in his late teens. But five years later, and while she was still seeing her new boyfriend, she would sleep with Huntley again in a drunken one-night stand. She added: ‘We had been out for a few drinks and he invited me back to his place. One thing led to another and we ended up having sex. I told my boyfriend about my one-night stand and he forgave me but refused to speak to Ian again.’ Huntley no doubt got a thrill out of sleeping with someone else’s girlfriend; it was another example of his sexual dominance he could store away in his mind. He achieved a similar boost by burgling the flat of one of his neighbours, Lee Wood. Huntley stole jewellery and cash worth £700 from Mrs Wood’s house while she and her daughter were out. He was charged with burglary after confessing the offence to police, and appeared at Grimsby Crown Court in January 1998. However, the prosecution offered no evidence and the case was allowed to lie on file. Mrs Wood believed Huntley’s motive was as much malice as greed.

Huntley liked his activities to cause damage; in particular he enjoyed it when girls were frightened of him. On one occasion when he was 20 he managed to lure an 11-year-old girl into his bedroom. He had met the impressionable blonde child while on the prowl at a fun fair, and had managed to persuade her that he was her boyfriend. After enticing the besotted girl back to his flat, he kissed her and tried to pet her. When she resisted, he became enraged and locked the door, saying he would not let her out unless she let him take her virginity. He only let her go when she started to scream and he feared the noise might alert neighbours. The girl, now 20, remembers the incident with terror. Unlike Holly and Jessica, she was lucky enough to escape with her life and without being violated after Huntley, in a rare moment of compassion, relented and let her go. Another girl was 16 when Huntley managed to entice her into his flat. Again he locked her in and demanded sex, and because she refused he kept her there for two weeks. He starved her, not allowing her food or water, and after the ordeal was over she had to go to hospital. She was suffering from acute dehydration and malnutrition. The fortnight of fear had reduced her to a wreck.

Years later, following Huntley’s arrest, many women came forward to tell of their horrific experiences with him. One described how she was raped by Huntley after he chatted her up during a night on the town; another told how she was also raped and reported the offence to police, only for the case to be dropped. While working at the Heinz plant Huntley became known as the factory sex pest, and at least one female colleague made complaints of harassment against him.

During his twenties, Huntley was targeting young girls with a terrifying ruthlessness, sleeping with dozens who were under the age of 16. Detectives believe he had illegal sex with up to 60 girls, the youngest being only eleven. He carried out his assaults carefully so he would not get caught. His habit was to groom his victims in a flattering, friendly manner. He would use every form of manipulation to coax them into being alone with him. In several cases he used physical force to make the girls sleep with him. Afterwards, he frightened them into keeping quiet. During this spree of sexual abuse he was reported to police eight times. He was investigated for rape four times, and on a further three occasions for having sex with an underage girl. One girl who he was accused of abusing in May 1996 was just 13. He was said to have indecently assaulted an 11-year-old girl in September 1997. Huntley was so devious that none of the claims against him stuck. When police dug up these allegations after his arrest for murder, a clear picture emerged of Huntley the serial sex attacker. But the information came too late to save Holly and Jessica.

Despite his addiction to violent sex with children, Huntley craved a stable relationship and was desperate to get married. On the face of it this seems strange but the urge for a partner was born of the same gaping flaws in Huntley’s character. He needed someone he could dominate on a day-to-day basis. During his early twenties he made marriage proposals to several girls almost immediately after meeting them. At least two were turned down on the spot. Others slept with Huntley on the strength of his vows of undying love, but left him soon afterwards. Then in 1994, at the Heinz factory, he met Claire Evans, an 18-year-old with blue eyes and curly, reddish-brown hair.

The daughter of a textile factory worker, Claire was an attractive young woman who could take her pick of men in Grimsby. She had recently been through a family crisis which left her feeling vulnerable, insecure and in need of affection. In this state she was perfect material for Huntley, who had an uncanny ability to sniff out a woman in a weakened position. The 20-year-old put on his best charm act, chatting to Claire confidently and portraying himself as a thoroughly decent young man. He asked her out and spent a large slice of his week’s wage taking her on a Friday-night drinking session in the town. Friends say Claire fell for him completely; she told them she had met a man who was ‘every girl’s dream’, fun and exciting to be with. As usual during this time of his life, Huntley proposed within days of meeting her. In a decision she would later regard as ‘stupid’, she accepted.

Huntley and Claire were married at Grimsby Registry Office on 28 January 1995, three days before Huntley’s twenty-first birthday. The wedding was witnessed by Huntley’s mother, Lynda, and the best man was his brother Wayne. By all accounts it was a low-key affair and the reception was held in a nearby pub. The couple, who had known each other for less than six months, went to live at another of the many addresses Huntley had already accumulated: a one-bedroomed flat at 50 Heneage Road, Grimsby.

Huntley began battering Claire almost from the moment he got her home. The girl, just 19 at the time, was subjected to the most horrifying ordeal of domestic violence as Huntley flew into daily rages. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his violence, which could erupt without warning. He would use his fists against his wife, and sometimes his feet. Her friends say he left her covered in bruises, and the only person who could protect her during the first few days was Huntley’s father, Kevin. A family friend said: ‘She literally had no one else to turn to, because Ian wouldn’t take any notice of anyone else. He went bonkers, beating her up every day. I still can’t understand why he did it, she was as good as gold to him. He must have just enjoyed hurting her, and he thought he could do that as soon as they got married. Before then he hadn’t laid a finger on her, even though they had the odd row.’

Wife-battering seems to have been part of Huntley’s version of a committed relationship. Although several girlfriends have said he was well capable of turning on the charm during the early stages, he almost always became violent once he thought he was in control. Later on he would commit similar acts of savagery against Carr. Unlike her, though, Claire could not put up with it, and within two weeks she had left. Huntley begged her not to go, and once more he even feigned illness, as he had done as a child, in a bid to make her stay. One night shortly before the split, he started dribbling and faked a fit. He ended up lying on the floor, his body contorted. Worried, Claire called an ambulance, but when it arrived paramedics found there was nothing wrong with Huntley.

Friends of Claire insist that it was only after leaving Huntley that she began a relationship with his younger brother. According to them, Wayne tried to help her because he was concerned at the ordeal she had suffered. He comforted her and tried to make sure she was all right, and during that process the pair fell for each other. Julie Beasley, Huntley’s mother’s lover, said: ‘From the moment Claire and Ian met, they were always rowing. They argued more than they ever saw eye to eye. Wayne was a softy. He was sensible, had a good job as an engineer and treated Claire right, as opposed to Ian, who was a fish-factory worker and had a temper. I think in Wayne she saw what she never had in Ian, and she always got her own way. She could have anything she wanted with Wayne because he felt so much for her. It is real love between Wayne and Claire. With Ian and Claire I think it was a novelty and was never going to last. I think it hurt Ian.’

The fact that Claire left him for Wayne caused Huntley immense anguish. From the moment Wayne had come into the world Huntley had been jealous, and these feelings had grown stronger over the years; where Huntley drifted from job to job and lied to girls about being in the RAF, Wayne had forged a career with the Air Force as an engineer. Now the subject of his envy had left Huntley exposed as a failure for all to see. And that failure consisted of a rejection by a woman, something Huntley could never stand at the best of times. The humiliation hit him like a brick to the forehead.

According to Julie, Wayne and Claire kept their relationship secret from the rest of the family for a month. Then, realising he could hide it no longer, Wayne confessed to his brother at the home his mother Lynda shared with her girlfriend. Julie said: ‘Wayne came round to the flat. I don’t have a clue what was said. I just remember there was a lot of shouting and bellowing in the hall. Ian went mad. He went bonkers mad. He kept saying he was going to kick his brother’s head in. He wanted to go after him. Wayne finally came clean and told Ian about the affair face to face because he was an honest man, and that is when the secret was out. I had been at Ian and Claire’s wedding when Wayne was best man. I don’t think any of us could believe what was happening. I didn’t want to stick around and see them come to blows. I don’t think they hit each other, but there was a lot of shouting and threats, and then Wayne left. It caused a real rift in the family. The brothers didn’t speak for about a year and Ian said he wanted nothing to do with Claire ever again. I just felt sorry for Lynda because her family was never going to be the same again. She always tried to keep the peace. She hated knowing her two sons were rowing.’

Huntley was so furious over the situation that he refused to exchange a word with Claire for four years. The feud delayed the divorce as Huntley used every means he could legally to punish the couple, refusing to clear the way for them to marry. In the end Wayne and Claire had to wait until 13 January 1999 before the decree absolute was issued by East Grimsby County Court. In the meantime Huntley went round telling everyone who would listen that Claire was a ‘slag’ and that his brother had betrayed him. Years later, while on remand at Woodhill Prison, near Milton Keynes, Huntley would develop a paranoid belief that Wayne was poised to steal the love of his life, Maxine Carr, as well. In a bizarre suicide note written before he tried to take his life, Huntley claimed Wayne was trying to control his fiancée. It was an odd suggestion since Carr was at that time behind bars at Holloway Prison, but Huntley was deadly serious. He also wrote in the note: ‘On no account can Wayne come to my funeral.’

The fallout from a domestic situation which could hardly have been worse for a man like Huntley was to leave him profoundly disturbed. A former flatmate said: ‘He was totally shattered when his wife went off with his brother. He virtually had a breakdown. He was on medication. He couldn’t believe what was happening to his life. Everything he loved was upside down.’ Huntley complained of several classic symptoms of depression: listlessness, an inability to get out of bed or be moved to care about anything, his own well-being included. Of course, he was a master at feigning physical and mental illness in pursuit of sympathy. His ex-wife would later tell friends that in reality his feelings were not so badly hurt. According to her, Huntley did not care so much about losing her as about losing control over her. But doctors were sufficiently worried about his state of mind to prescribe him antidepressants. He was dismayed to find the startling news of his unusual marital break-up was all over Grimsby. Another friend of the family commented: ‘It was the talk of the town – everyone knew what he was going through.’ Despite Huntley’s obstructive behaviour, the couple did manage to marry; five years later they were joined in a ceremony at Thetford United Reform Church in Norfolk.

The elder brother must have resented the vastly different circumstances Wayne could provide. Instead of a registry office they used a country church; the groom appeared in a black morning suit with pinstriped trousers, cream waistcoat and red cravat. Claire emerged from a chauffeur-driven limousine in a white dress with long train, wispy veil, gold tiara, silver earrings and pearls. Their reception was held at the £90-a-night Bell Hotel, where the honeymoon suite contained a four-poster bed. Claire, holding her bouquet of white lilies, beamed with pride as the guests sipped champagne. Those at the ceremony managed as far as possible to ignore Huntley’s pointed absence.

Huntley’s method of dealing with losing Claire to his brother involved renewed attempts to seduce and dominate young girls. His delicate ego wounded, he took it out on another series of conquests, whom he treated in his normal callous manner. Friends of Claire would later point out that he made a 15-year-old girl pregnant soon after his wife left him. Two years later he seduced Katie Webber, another 15-year-old still at secondary school. Katie met Huntley, then 23, when he had left the Heinz factory and embarked on another period of moving from job to job, the work being arranged by the Maindate Employment Agency in Grimsby. Administrator Sue Penney, who used to pick Huntley up to take him to work, said he had seemed a lonely person who did a huge range of jobs before he was sacked for a ‘variety of reasons’, one of which was his overbearing arrogance. One of the jobs he did for a few months of 1996 was working as a door-to-door salesman selling scratch cards to raise funds for a local charity, the Handicapped Children Action Group. Katie’s mother, Jacqueline, was a colleague, her role being to organise the ticket sales. As soon as he realised she had a teenage daughter, Huntley was keen to spend time with her. Before long he had made use of his connection with the family to worm his way into Katie’s affections. He even moved into the four-berth caravan in the Webbers’ garden.

Now a 22-year-old mother of two girls living in Cleethorpes, Katie said her first impressions of Huntley were favourable. ‘Ian was nice,’ she said. ‘He was friendly and quite good-looking. He was a bit above himself, but he seemed interested in me. He asked me out and we started out going to pubs. He told me I was pretty and clever and that he liked me a lot. We held hands and when we sat down he rested his hand on my leg. I guess I was infatuated and young, so I was easily impressed, but I thought he was a pleasant person.’ Katie felt grown-up in Huntley’s presence; he took her out and treated her like an adult woman. Though she looked mature for her age, Katie was young enough mentally to find his attentions flattering. Huntley struck her as a sensitive man; he fostered this image by talking endlessly about a nervous breakdown he claimed to have suffered. He also impressed the girl by making out he used to have an important job as manager of a food store in Cleethorpes. In Huntley’s fantasy world, the breakdown had forced him to give up that position.

Katie said she was totally beguiled by Huntley’s act. Within just a few weeks of meeting they were having sex in Huntley’s small and scruffy bedsit. Though this was a new experience for Katie, it was less exciting than she had expected. She later described the sex as ‘unexceptional’, ‘swift’ and ‘ordinary’. She added: ‘He seemed less interested in sex than in being in control.’ Along with many of Huntley’s girlfriends, she found him inadequate as a lover. Away from his preferred excitements of sadism and paedophilia, he seemed incapable of sustaining himself for more than a couple of minutes and often had trouble getting an erection in the first place.

What Huntley did get out of sex, though, was a sense of dominance. Once he had slept with Katie, his manner with her changed immediately. He became controlling and dominating, as if Katie had become his possession. She said: ‘Once we’d had sex he seemed to treat me like a child; to bully me. He’d tell me who I could talk to, what I could and could not do.’ Huntley tried to keep her shut away in his flat in Cleethorpes, even telling her not to go to school. He told her school would not teach her anything, and she didn’t need it, because she had him. After he had kept her away from school for a week, Katie’s family were visited by truancy officers and her parents appealed to Huntley to release his emotional grip on their daughter. But Huntley was having none of it. He frightened the girl into abandoning her education altogether; she left school at 15 with no qualifications and started to work packing cold cuts at a local seafood factory. ‘The job was horrible,’ Katie said. ‘But it was what Ian wanted. He never worked, although he said I should. And he wanted me to do all the cooking and cleaning. He would lose his temper when I got it wrong. Then he started calling me stupid. I lost all my confidence as I just tried to please him.’

Katie was very close to her mother Jacqueline and her father Brian, but Huntley became insanely jealous of these bonds. He could not bear his woman to have any affection for anyone other than himself. So, if members of Katie’s family called round at the flat, he would tell them she did not want to see them. If they rang, he told them she could not come to the phone. One day Katie’s aunt arrived at the door. He locked his young girlfriend in the bedroom and told her aunt she never wanted to see any of her family again. After that he moved with Katie to Immingham to live once more with his mother and Julie Beasley. ‘I didn’t know anybody there and became totally dependent on him,’ Katie said.

Huntley’s father took Katie to one side and told her she should stay away from his son. His mother also told her she should leave Huntley for her own good. Always restless, Huntley soon took Katie back to Cleethorpes, where they shared a small flat. For her it felt more like a prison; he would not allow her out and he rarely had a visitor. He did not appear to have any friends, instead spending his time leafing through the pages of his many plane-spotting books or scanning the skies for different types of craft. Like many depressives, Huntley talked constantly about his past and the problems he had encountered. He hardly ever spoke of the future, never discussing what he would like to do as a job or where he would like to live.

Katie’s parents insisted they were open-minded about her relationship with her older lover. According to her father, both he and Jacqueline thought Huntley seemed all right at first, despite their misgivings about Katie being only 15. But they noticed him becoming more and more possessive. Retired factory worker Brian, 64, said: ‘We tried to tell her to slow it down but Katie became besotted with him. They would row and bicker over every petty thing. He would use emotional blackmail to control her.’

In a new and sinister twist, Huntley began to beat Katie. She said: ‘I remember one time when I’d put a pizza in the oven but forgotten to turn the temperature down after it had heated up. The pizza came out black and burnt. Ian went crazy and started yelling that I was stupid and useless and should be able to cook by now. Then he slapped me in the face.’ Once he had started hitting her, Huntley couldn’t stop. Afterwards he always said he was sorry, and pledged dozens of times to never hurt her again, but within days the promise was broken yet again and his apologies exposed as a sham. Finally, after she had been with Huntley for a year, Katie summoned up the courage to leave him. The couple had a huge row, and she lost her temper and emptied bottles of wine all over the flat. She ran outside to a phone box and called her father. She waited in the kiosk until he arrived by car to pick her up. This time Huntley did nothing to stop her from going, and she escaped from his clutches with only her pride in tatters. She did not realise how lucky she had been.

Although Huntley had claimed to be in love with Katie, he was seeing another woman within weeks. His next girlfriend was Becky Bartlett, a petite 19-year-old who had no idea what she was letting herself in for. She was shocked by how Huntley erupted into a fit of fury when she told him she might be pregnant. Becky was a next-door neighbour of Huntley’s at Abbey Drive East in Grimsby when he seduced her. She said: ‘He was Mr Charming when we met. I’d just split up with my boyfriend. He started taking me out and then I moved into his place. It was nice being with an older man – he was very confident. We started having sex together, but it was nothing very special. Then I realised I might be pregnant and decided to tell him. He was so angry. As it turned out, luckily I wasn’t pregnant.’

Although Becky was relieved to find she was not expecting Huntley’s child, another of his conquests did become pregnant and went on to give birth to a baby girl. In order to protect the child, her identity is not revealed in this book. She and her mother are among the victims of Huntley’s crimes, their lives marred forever by an innocent association with his terrible acts.

While Becky and Katie felt lucky to escape from Huntley’s clutches, others were not quite so fortunate. On Saturday, 16 May 1998 Huntley had been drinking his usual pints of bitter in the pubs of Grimsby, going on a crawl round his favourite haunts, including the Wine Pipe and the Mortar and Pestle. As usual, he was trawling for a girl to spend the night with, so he made sure he did not drink too much. He wanted to be in control and fully focused, ready to take advantage of any opportunity that presented itself. For Huntley, the best chance usually came in the shape of a woman who had been drinking heavily all night in the pubs that stayed open late. He would deliberately seek out those who were the worse for wear, hanging around outside the pubs around closing time and afterwards, ready to pounce on girls in a vulnerable state.

This Saturday night was no exception. Huntley was loitering in the Hollywood nightclub in Grimsby, waiting by the bar with the intent of making use of a woman under the influence of alcohol. As on many previous occasions, he managed to find a target. His eyes were drawn to an attractive blonde just 18 years old who he spotted on the dance floor. He had seen the girl out on the town the previous night, and had tried to chat her up without any success. This time he was determined to possess her by whatever methods were needed.

Although he was normally not keen on dancing, Huntley made straight for the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and began gyrating clumsily next to her. She attempted to ignore him and moved away to the other side of the area, but Huntley stuck close by her and wouldn’t be shaken off. Soon the slower rhythms of a love song signalled the club was about to close, and the girl made for the door. She said goodbye to a group of friends and decided to walk home alone. She had had a lot to drink, and did not notice that the man who had tried to dance with her in the club had followed her outside. The time was 2.00 am. The girl’s route home was down a passageway known as Gas Alley, a cycle path which led from the Hollywood club across an area of waste ground, the site of an old railway line. It was a fine, cloudless night and the girl was in good spirits, feeling confident and unafraid despite the fact that the spot was deserted. Huntley, who had crept up silently behind her, pounced. He grabbed the girl from behind and gripped her throat with his right hand. His eyes bulging wildly, he swore at her and threatened to beat her head with a brick. He punched her in the face, yanked up her dress and tore off her tights and underwear. The girl, who was little more than five feet tall and weighed less than eight stone, tried to fight back but was overpowered by the frenzied attack. She tried to scream, but Huntley jammed his hand across her mouth as he raped her brutally. His anger satisfied, Huntley tried to persuade the girl not to report the rape, threatening to kill her if she told anyone. He began to chat more calmly, pretending nothing had happened. As he wheedled away, the girl saw her opportunity to escape and ran. Huntley decided not to pursue her, and instead walked back to his squalid flat in Veal Street. Minutes after arriving home, the girl and her distraught parents rang the police to report her ordeal.

The next day, the attack made front page news in the local newspaper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, as officers launched an appeal for witnesses. Five days later Huntley gave himself up at a local police station. He was interviewed then charged with rape. He appeared at Grimsby and Cleethorpes Magistrates’ Court the following day, and was remanded in custody to Wolds Prison in Lincolnshire. A week later, at his second court appearance, he was released on bail. After another fortnight of investigation, police decided to drop the case. The decision not to prosecute Huntley left the victim, now a 23-year-old mother of one, furious and dismayed.

The publicity surrounding the case had a heavy impact on Huntley’s life. Friends, colleagues and neighbours alike began to whisper that Huntley was a rapist who had got away with it. His father was later to claim that his son had suffered terribly as a result of the allegations, becoming the target of hatred and abuse from local people. Kevin said: ‘It ruined his life. He lost his job, his house and everything else. He had nothing. His mother had to clothe him.’ According to Kevin, the case collapsed because CCTV footage from another part of the town showed his son to have been elsewhere at the time of the rape. In reality, the case was dropped because police believed there was insufficient evidence to achieve a conviction.

What happened on the waste ground in Gas Alley was witnessed only by the rapist and his victim. And the only witnesses to any part of the night’s events had seen Huntley apparently dancing with the girl in the club. Lynda Huntley claimed her son was on the verge of a nervous breakdown while on remand at Wolds, but made a sudden recovery when he was released without trial. She said, ‘Someone just came up and said to him: “You are OK to go.” I’ve never seen a man cry so much. He sobbed his heart out. He has no luck.’ Although Huntley walked free amid tears of relief, the victim remained adamant that he raped her and that she was traumatised by the terror of her ordeal. Huntley had got away with it again.