Huntley was 'laughing' at police
Soham accused Ian Huntley was “laughing” at police hunting for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman while he told “a pack of lies”, it was suggested to him today.
Richard Latham QC, prosecuting, said Huntley had cynically told a version of events to benefit himself, and had proved he was capable of lying.
He said: “Holly wasn’t an accident, was she?”
Huntley: “Oh yes, she was.”
Mr Latham: “And Jessica was killed quite deliberately by you because of what you had done to Holly?”
Huntley: “No.”
Mr Latham: “And ever since that Sunday night you have lied to everyone, haven’t you?”
Huntley: “I have told lies, yes.”
Mr Latham said Huntley had lied for the fortnight after the 10-year-olds died in his house, “running rings” around police and trying to stay “one step ahead”.
He was “scrabbling around looking for a defence,” the QC said, and had invented one by the time he spoke to his mother in October last year, a year before the case came to trial.
“You have carried on lying right up until now,” Mr Latham said.
The defendant replied: “That’s your opinion, to which you’re entitled.”
Mr Latham: “You’re certainly capable of telling lies, aren’t you Mr Huntley?”
“I have lied,” Huntley said.
“Over and over again,” Mr Latham responded.
The exchange completed the prosecution cross-examination of the 29-year-old former caretaker at Soham Village College, who has been in the witness box since Monday morning.
His lawyer Stephen Coward QC then began his re-examination of his client.
Huntley denies murdering the girls at his home in Soham, Cambridgeshire, on Sunday August 4 last year but has admitted conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
His then girlfriend Maxine Carr, 26, a former teaching assistant at the girls’ primary school, denies the conspiracy charge and two counts of assisting an offender.
The prosecution alleges she gave him a false alibi by claiming she was in Soham on the day the girls died, when she was really in Grimsby.
