Samantha Bryan asked to visit Ian Huntley at Frankland prison to try and get more details on the brutal murders he carried out – but instead just received a cryptic response
Twisted child killer Ian Huntley wrote his daughter a chilling letter after she asked to meet him in prison.
The monster is behind bars for the double murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in August 2002. The 10-year-old best mates disappeared after they went to get some sweets from the local leisure centre vending machine. More than 400 officers were involved in the hunt to find them in the quiet town of Soham, Cambridgeshire.
Huntley initially gave media interviews and even joined in the desperate search for the little girls. Little did officers know, he had lured them into his home by telling them his girlfriend Maxine Carr, who was a teaching assistant at their school, was inside. He murdered the girls and then hid their bodies in an irrigated ditch close to the RAF base about 10 miles from their home.
Later that month, he was charged with two counts of murder and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment with a minimum of 40 years. Samantha Bryan asked to visit her dad at Frankland prison to try and get more details on the brutal murders. However, he sent her a blunt letter saying: “Given the probable length of my future and your current motives I doubt there will be enough time for a significant shift in circumstances in order for us to ever meet”.
Samantha, from Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, slammed his response. She told The Sun on Sunday: “He’s shown he’s a pitiful, twisted, manipulative coward. There’s so many other things I could call him. I feel contempt. His letter has left me with even more questions than I had before. He might be ill but I don’t know for sure given he’s written about the probable length of his future. I don’t know what that means. But surely if he is sick you’d want to give some answers — you’d have nothing left to lose. Or maybe he is referring to the length of his sentence.”
Samantha found out by accident that Huntley was her father when she was 14. Her mother Katie had been 15 when she had a relationship with Huntley, who was 23 at the time. Carr was also put behind bars for providing her killer boyfriend with a false alibi on the night of the murders.
She said she was at home on that fateful night, taking a bath whilst he spoke to the friends at the front of the property, adding it had been a “shame” that she had missed them in interviews with police and the press. It transpired that she had in fact been home in Grimsby, where the couple met, but she denied knowing anything of Huntley’s sick crimes and claimed she thought she was protecting him from getting set up.
Following the investigation, the Bichard inquiry was set up into how Huntley managed to get a job at a school after being suspected of nine sex crimes, many involving underage girls. The school principal, Howard Gilbert, had employed the killer in November 2001 – just 10 months before the double murder – after Cambridgeshire police checks gave him the all-clear. However in the 2004 inquiry, Mr Gilbert explained how vetting procedures failed to identify the risk Huntley posed to young girls.
