The murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman by Ian Huntley horrified the nation. Sean O'Neill, who covered the story, reflects on the impact the case had on those involved.
"I was picking gooseberries in the garden when you called – sorry it's taken a while to call you back," says Chris Stevenson breezily from his home in Lincolnshire.
"Things take a bit longer these days."
It is 10 years since I last spoke to Stevenson. The reason for that call was the murder in Machynlleth, Wales, of five-year-old April Jones who was snatched off the street while playing near her home. Her body was never found, but minute fragments of her bones and specks of her blood were discovered in the home of a local man, Mark Bridger.
It was 2012, I was the Times crime editor and I had been told by a source that Bridger was obsessed with Ian Huntley, the man who murdered the Soham schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells a decade before. Stevenson had caught Huntley and that connection was a reason to call him.
For a crime reporter, it was always an education to speak to Stevenson. He knew where the lines were drawn between confidentiality and candidness, between what the public could (and should) know and what the police needed to keep to themselves.
In the years since Soham – one of those place names that generates instant recall of terrible crimes – Stevenson became a sought-after authority on the macabre patterns of child murders.
Encouraged to share his experience of Soham, "warts and all", he gave lectures to police officers on the lessons, the mistakes and the painstaking construction of the prosecution case that sent Huntley to jail.
He had gained what few detectives ever do, the experience of solving the most devastating and rare of crimes: stranger murders of children. Dyfed-Powys police, investigating little April's death, had indeed been in touch.
Now in 2022, Stevenson, 72, is deep into retirement and I'm calling to disturb his gooseberry-picking because it is 20 years since the murders of Holly and Jessica, a crime that left an indelible mark not only on the residents of Soham, but everyone who went to the fenland village that August.
Stevenson promises to give my interview request some thought and a few days later agrees. This will be, he says, his last word on the case. "My wife would like me to put Soham behind me," he says. "She thinks it aged me. But I explain to her I can't do that – it's there and it's never going to go away."
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The Soham murders held the country in thrall during the summer of 2002.
Holly and Jessica were both 10, friends and classmates at St Andrew's primary school, and disappeared on the evening of Sunday, August 4.
They had been at Holly's house, playing before going out to buy sweets from the vending machine at the sports centre. Before they left the house, they had their picture taken wearing Manchester United shirts with David Beckham on the back. Jessica had borrowed the shirt belonging to Holly's brother.
They stand side by side. Blonde Holly beaming a wide smile; brunette Jessica's eyes engaging the camera. Above their heads, the clock on the wall puts the time at 5.04pm.
Less than two hours later they had been enticed into the house of the local secondary school caretaker, Ian Huntley, and murdered. At 6.46pm Jessica's mobile phone was turned off, automatically sending a signal to a nearby phone mast. Huntley had already begun destroying the evidence of his horrific crime.
When their frantic efforts to find the children produced nothing, the Chapman and Wells families contacted police at 9.55pm. The first officers on the ground suspected this was not a routine "MFH" (missing from home). But their instincts were not shared at Cambridgeshire police headquarters where senior officers parked inquiries until the morning.
That mistake cost detectives what they call "the golden hours" – the crucial period of time when evidence is easier to find, suspects are off guard and memories fresh. But if the police were slow to react, the media was swift. It was August: Tony Blair's government was securely in a second term and politics was in hibernation. The news cycle needed a story.
The unexplained disappearance of two 10-year-old girls would have been a major incident at any time, but that August and with that photograph, Soham became the biggest news story in the world.
Reporters, camera crews and satellite vans flooded into the Fens. Every newspaper sent a team and I was among that Fleet Street pack, the swarm of journalists that descends on a town and strips it bare of every shred of newsworthy information.
My only daughter at the time was about to turn eight, and as that picture of Holly and Jessica appeared on every news bulletin, she had many questions. It was the first time I remember her taking an interest in my job. Where had the girls gone? What did I think had happened? Would they be frightened?
I'd always wanted to be a reporter. I'd ruled out war reporting (too damn dangerous) and political reporting (too much spin).
I wanted to write about criminals and terrorists and cops; about human beings at their most extreme, most vulnerable and most complicated. I wanted the inside track, the secrets, the stories behind the stories.
But it was not often the experience I had imagined. Most policing is about process, most police officers are deadly dull and most crimes are humdrum. Soham was entirely different.
The atmosphere was frenetic. Police repeatedly appealed for anyone, anywhere, who had seen the girls to contact them. This generated sightings far and wide. The incident room was sinking under the volume of calls.
The media mood turned against the Cambridgeshire force. The chief constable was abroad on holiday, there was no head of CID (thanks to a cost-cutting reorganisation) and the inquiry was floundering. "Not one clue," screamed a Sun headline.
In the midst of this mayhem, the killer was ever present. Huntley was caretaker at Soham Village College, where the police briefed reporters. He laid out the chairs for those briefings, and gave interviews about how he might have been the last person to speak to Holly and Jessica before they went missing.
On the afternoon of the tenth day of the investigation, the senior investigator, Detective Superintendent David Beck, made a direct televised appeal to the kidnapper.
What struck those of us watching him was not the message but his hollow-eyed, exhausted and visibly strained appearance. It was his last appearance as head of the investigation.
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Away from the cameras, a Scotland Yard review team had been called in to run the rule over the flailing investigation.
Stevenson greeted the man from the Yard, blunt-speaking homicide detective David Begg, and took him to meet the deputy chief constable.
Stevenson recalls, "He said, 'I've got two important questions. Is this the biggest investigation that Cambridgeshire has ever undertaken?'
"Yes, of course."
"Have you got your best trained and most senior detective in charge of it?"
"Probably not."
"I suggest you rethink that, sir. Thank you very much for your time."
The next morning, the Thursday of the inquiry's second week, Stevenson was put in charge and instantly raised to the rank of detective chief superintendent.
"They needed to make it clear from that moment who was in charge and, more importantly, who was now accountable. Colleagues have since said this is the sort of situation they would have run a mile from, but I felt I had the ability to do it."
By 2002 Stevenson had been a policeman for 28 years, but what really made him ready for the challenge in Soham was the "wobbly" he'd had two years before.
In December 2000 he had been discussing an investigation with senior officers "when suddenly I was just completely overwhelmed".
Stevenson says, "I saw my GP. I thought I'd had a heart attack. 'Your heart's fine,' he said. 'The trouble is, your head is full. This is the body reacting. It can't cope any more.'
"I had done child abuse investigations, homicides. They build up over time, but it was my mum's death that tipped me over the edge."
Unusually for the time, the Cambridgeshire force had an enlightened approach to mental health. Officers and their spouses were given counselling tokens so they could seek help if needed. "I had a brilliant counsellor. It enabled me to clear all the detritus that 28 years of service had built up – all the bodies, the inquiries, the trauma of the bereaved relatives.
"When Soham hit me, I'm convinced that was why I was able to cope, because I'd offloaded all those issues."
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Stevenson's first task was to restore order to the "absolute bedlam" around him. Hundreds of officers had been drafted in but were like "headless chickens" with no clear idea what to do. He set aside his predecessor's decision log. This was now a new investigation with a new focus. There were no bodies, but it was a murder inquiry.
He asked to see the statements from the missing girls' families, only to be told none had been taken. "I was told that these families are distressed; you can't expect them to make statements. I reminded colleagues that something like 78 per cent of children killed are killed at the hands of a relative."
The families were not suspects but the absence of statements "indicated to me that we had to go back to square one, so that's what I did".
Then came a breakthrough. An analysis by a forensic communications expert showed the mast that "pinged" when Jessica's phone was turned off could only receive a signal from three places in Soham. One of those places was directly outside Huntley's house.
The caretaker became "priority number one". Until now, Huntley had even been ruled out as a suspect. Yet his account was that he was the last person to speak to them. They had stopped at his house to ask about his partner, Maxine Carr, their teaching assistant.
Stevenson remembers, "I asked what we knew about the caretaker and was told we had a statement that was just a page and a half long. I was shocked – he wasn't a page-and-a-half witness."
Huntley and Carr had not lived in Soham for long, having moved from Grimsby. Humberside police had been contacted but reported they had no information on him.
Frustrated, Stevenson sent two of his own detectives to Humberside to knock on doors. Within hours they reported back. The caretaker was known to have taken a sexual interest in young girls and had been accused of sexual assaults.
By Friday morning, Stevenson's colleagues were clamouring for an arrest. The senior investigative officer, however, chose to invite him for a video-recorded interview as a "significant witness".
Along with his knowledge of murder and murderers, gnawing at Stevenson's mind was the case of Marc Dutroux. The Belgian paedophile was being held by police in 1995 when two young girls he had abducted starved to death in a secret dungeon in his house.
That Friday afternoon some of us in the press pack were about to drive home after a long week. The police inquiry seemed to have stalled – maybe our newsdesks would let us have a couple of days off.
Then a colleague beckoned me over. He'd just taken a call from a contact who simply said, "Don't go home." Minutes later, Huntley and Carr were being led from their house into waiting police cars.
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Huntley was interviewed at Huntingdon police station. The interviewing officer began by asking him to describe the two girls on the day they spoke to him.
Stevenson watched the video. "He started describing Holly. He said, 'She's fair-haired, blonde, quite tall for her age. She's quite slim – in fact, I'd say thin, really.' That set alarm bells ringing for me because 'slim' to me was a description of an adult. The officer asked, 'So what else?' He looked at her and said, 'Man United tops,' and he looked at her again and his head goes down. Then he lifts his head up and says, 'I can't remember anything else.'
"I knew from that moment it was him – the way he answered that question, it was clear he was visualising his last sighting of Holly, which was after he'd gone back to the deposition site on the Wednesday after he murdered them, removed their clothing and set fire to them. I believe that was the picture that emerged into Huntley's mind when asked to describe her."
The chilling video could never be used in evidence. Huntley was a witness, not a suspect, and had not been cautioned and advised of his right to remain silent. Following his subsequent arrest, Huntley refused to speak to police ever again, even feigning mental illness.
The witness interview was a risky decision that could have jeopardised a prosecution.
"I was told by plenty of peers in the months afterwards that I was in trouble for that one, but it never bothered me," says Stevenson.
"As far as I was concerned, the girls' right to life outweighed Huntley's right to protection. We weren't sure they were dead. He could have been holding them somewhere; I could have been signing their death warrant."
Huntley had been released under covert surveillance but developments were now happening fast. That Friday night, the girls' clothes, shredded and partially burnt, were found in a school outbuilding to which Huntley held a key. The next morning, two bodies were discovered in a drainage ditch close to Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk, a place where Huntley often went plane-spotting. Stevenson now made another contentious decision, refusing to allow a forensic dentist to examine the bodies until crime scene teams had gathered as much evidence as possible.
The following evening, a police officer told reporters that the bodies found were believed to be those of Holly and Jessica.
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For many of us reporters, this was the moment reality crashed home. After intensive days following "the story" – competing with each other for exclusive lines and blotting out the reality with far too much alcohol every night – we had to confront the fact that two young girls had been violently murdered and their bodies dumped in a ditch. I walked to my car to file my copy, eyes stinging with tears.
The town made it clear it no longer wanted an army of journalists intruding on its grief.
Yet for most of the reporters, it had become personal. We became obsessive about details, all too familiar with the forensics, enmeshed in a shared enterprise with the police, lawyers and expert witnesses to ensure justice for Holly and Jessica. Our focus would move to Grimsby, as we pieced together Huntley's background; then on to the Old Bailey, for the trial of Huntley and Carr at the end of 2003.
Stevenson's team had worked flat out building a watertight case. It was not enough to prove Huntley did it; they had to prove that no one else could have done it. Hundreds of men on the inquiry database had to be traced and eliminated. The police and prosecutors were aided by a squad of forensic scientists including a forensic botanist and an entomologist. A geologist proved Huntley had driven to the body deposition site by finding traces of a 97-million-year-old chalk seam on the underside of his Ford Fiesta.
The house where Huntley lived was taken apart in the search for clues. After the trial had concluded, the building was demolished.
There were moments of high drama in Court One where Carr's evidence was keenly awaited. She had covered for Huntley by saying she had been home with him that fateful weekend. Now she admitted she had been lying; when the girls were lured inside and killed, she was in Grimsby visiting her mother. When she returned, she was surprised to find the house spotless. Jabbing her finger from the witness stand at Huntley in the dock, Carr shouted, "I am not going to be blamed for what that thing in that box has done to me or those children."
There were moments of personal drama outside the courtroom too. A key issue not admissible in evidence was Huntley's police intelligence record, which had been "weeded out" from Humberside police's database for data protection reasons. One morning, as I ate breakfast in a café near the Old Bailey, someone walked past and dropped an envelope on my table. Inside was a police memo that covered 1995-99 and listed four rape allegations, an alleged indecent assault on an 11-year-old girl and four incidents of sex with girls under 16.
It would be the cornerstone of my reporting at the end of the trial. But first there was the matter of a guilty verdict. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Huntley, the jurors deliberated for three and a half days. Could they really doubt his guilt?
Stevenson was typically unflustered. A week before Christmas, Huntley was convicted by an 11-1 majority verdict and sentenced to a minimum of 40 years. Now aged 48, he's being held in HMP Frankland, County Durham.
Carr was jailed for perverting the course of justice. She was released in 2004 and lives with a new identity under the terms of a blanket anonymity order. She is 45.
Holly and Jessica would have been 30-year-olds today. Instead, they are frozen, aged 10, at 5.04pm on August 4, 2002 – two innocent friends in that eternal photograph.
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That image, the memories of Soham in the summer in 2002, will, as Stevenson says, "never go away". Soham marked everyone who went there and followed the case intently.
People who were Fleet Street colleagues (or rivals) have remained trusted friends. And Soham would teach me valuable lessons about reporting. Until then, it had been an adventure, a rush, better than a real job. It was in Soham where I realised the reporter has a duty to tread softly when trampling into the middle of grief and trauma this raw.
Chris Stevenson has written a 110,000-word memoir – mostly about Soham – but he has never published it. He felt it just wasn't right.
His combination of stubborn modesty and quiet self-belief makes him one of the standouts among the detectives I met as a crime reporter. He is one of a rare breed.
Stevenson joined the police late, at the age of 25. Leaving school with three O-levels, he believed he could not be a policeman, having lost three fingers in a childhood accident at his father's butcher's shop. A beer with a recruiting sergeant changed his mind.
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For the past 12 years, Stevenson has lived with Parkinson's disease and it has diminished him. Where he was tall and commanding, he is now slightly stooped, has mobility problems, struggles when tired to grasp names and words and depends on 20 pills each day. Parkinson's is the reason the gooseberry-picking takes longer than it used to.
But he refuses to be cowed. He tends his garden with his wife, Pat – to whom he has been married for 52 years – is a stalwart of his local Methodist church and is devoted to his children and grandchildren. Long-term illness, he says, is a state of mind. When he was diagnosed, his first emotion was not despair but relief it was not a worse condition.
People still ask him about Soham – "It has made me a more interesting person" – and there are itches that no amount of scratching will attenuate, especially the refusal of Huntley to tell the truth about what happened on that Sunday evening.
"I've been reassured that all efforts to obtain his account have failed," Stevenson says. "I would have loved to talk it through with him, but I don't think he's that sort of guy."
Huntley was reported in 2018 to have apologised for his crimes and said he thought about Holly and Jessica every day. Is it time, I ask, for a measure of forgiveness?
"Should Huntley be forgiven if he says sorry? That's a difficult question and I still haven't got an answer. I've spoken to lots of people about it and some think he should and some think he shouldn't. At the moment I'm in the 'shouldn't' team. How can you ever forgive him for doing what he did? Christian teaching says you should, but I personally can't bring myself to forgive him.
"I think Huntley should spend 40 years getting up day after day after day knowing that he can't go anywhere. He's got 40 years, 40 x 365 days, to look forward to. When he looks back and thinks 20 years have gone and he's still got another 20 to go, the light at the end of the tunnel must seem a long way away.
"Should he ever be released? No, no, not in my view."
Written by: Sean O'Neill
© The Times of London