Huntley told detective - You think I did it
Soham accused Ian Huntley burst into tears as he told a police officer “You think I’ve done it”, his Old Bailey murder trial heard today.
Huntley cried when he spoke to Detective Constable Jonathan Taylor near his home three days after Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman vanished.
The officer told the jury: “He said: ’You think I have done it. I was the last person to see them or to speak to them’. Then he started to cry.
“I told him not to persecute himself, to pull himself together.
“I told him other people had seen the girls in that area and in the high street.
“That seemed to cheer him up a bit.”
Det Con Taylor had gone to Huntley’s house at 5 College Close in Soham, Cambridgeshire on Wednesday August 7 last year.
He wanted to get him to sign a consent form for a search that had been carried out there two days before.
Det Con Taylor and Det Con Andrea Warren searched the house the day after the disappearance of the girls after it emerged Huntley might have been one of the last people to see them.
Det Con Warren also took a statement from Huntley during that visit.
She told the court: “He asked me why I had to take a statement and was he a suspect?”
The officer explained to Huntley he was not a suspect and police had to speak to people who might have seen the missing girls.
She said Huntley asked her: “Will you be taking a statement from everybody then and are they all suspects?”
Det Con Warren said when she arrived Huntley looked “quite pale, clammy”.
As he was giving his statement, he was “a little bit agitated, as though his hands had got clammy, and he brushed them down the side of the chair arm”.
He agreed to allow his home to be searched and was mostly “very calm and very relaxed” but became “agitated” as the search went into a bathroom and a cupboard under the stairs.
The court heard neither officer took a note – apart from the witness statement - of their conversations with Huntley and his behaviour because, according to Det Con Taylor, “none of it seemed pertinent at the time”.
In the witness statement, which was read to the court, Huntley said his alsatian, Sadie, had got out of the house, perhaps because she was on heat, and had come back dirty.
He said he washed the dog in the bath and then went outside to dry it with a towel when the girls approached him and asked after his ex-girlfriend Maxine Carr who was their classroom assistant.
He told them she had not got a permanent job at their school. They said they were sorry and asked him to pass the message on before they set off towards College Road.
Huntley described the girls as wearing Manchester United football shirts with Beckham on the back.
Det Con Warren said Huntley put his sighting at around 6.30pm and after they left, he watched television, referring to “we”.
“I drew the conclusion that his partner had been there,” said Det Con Warren.
The court has heard that Carr was more than 100 miles away in Grimsby that night.
Det Con Warren said that when his statement was read back to him, Huntley asked to change the time he had seen the girls to 6.15pm.
He said he later became aware of the search and was asked if he had seen two girls but did not realise they were the same two girls he had seen.
Huntley said he only realised the connection when he heard the girls were wearing Manchester United shirts.
Michael Gee, the assistant site manager for Soham Village College, said on Wednesday August 7 he went round to Huntley’s for a cold drink after searching for the girls.
He saw Carr scrubbing wall tiles in the kitchen and preparing to wash the floor.
He said: “She was complaining that the tile paint was coming off as she was scrubbing too hard.”
Under cross examination by Carr’s barrister Michael Hubbard QC, Mr Gee accepted that Carr had not tried to hide the fact that she was cleaning.
Mr Gee said Huntley’s attitude to the press changed dramatically as the hunt went on.
“The first week he was quite nervous about them, trying to keep away, hide from them.
“At one point he even said he was me and I was him to avoid the press.”
But in the second week it was “almost seemed as if he was courting the press, making himself seen at press conferences”.
Soham Village College prinicipal Howard Gilbert said Huntley told him on August 15 that he knew of people claiming to be mediums who said they knew where the girls were, and one in particular claimed they were in Mildenhall.
Huntley, 29, denies murdering the 10-year-old friends but has admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Carr, 26, a former classroom assistant at the girls’ primary school, denies conspiring to pervert the course of justice and two charges of assisting an offender.
The prosecution alleges she gave Huntley a false alibi for the day the girls went missing, Sunday August 4 last year. Their bodies were found in a remote ditch near Lakenheath, Suffolk, 13 days later.
