BRITAIN: The trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr was one of the most disturbing and sensational in recent memory. The jury in the Soham trial, as Lynne O'Donnell explains, had to decide who was lying and who wastelling the truth. Yesterday it did.
Sex, the dark and dissonant cloud that was hanging over the Soham murder trial from its beginning a month ago, was presented to the jury as the principle motivation behind the deaths of the two English school friends Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells.
The shadow of paedophilia has stalked the Soham case since the two girls went missing, wearing identical red Manchester United football jerseys, on August 4th last year. Ian Huntley denied that he molested the girls or made any sexual advances towards them before they died in his bathroom on that day.
Maxine Carr tearfully told the court how she was abused as a "nonce" while awaiting trial in prison. She said she had never before heard the term, which is the slang used to describe child sex offenders.
Throughout the month-long trial, the spectre of child sexual abuse was an undeniable presence in Court Number One of London's historic Old Bailey Central Criminal Court.
Sex crimes account for around 10 per cent of all crime committed in Britain, a figure that includes such offences as viewing child pornography on the internet and the very rare incidence of paedophilic murder.
The apparent prevalence of sex crimes against children, according to Mr Alex Hossack, a clinical psychologist and head of services at the Merseyside Forensic Psychology Service, is historic and stems from the male domination of society in which some men seek to establish and reaffirm their dominance through the sexual subjugation of women and children.
It's society's dirty secret, he says. "Society doesn't own the problem, it blames the perpetrators."
Some studies suggest the propensity for sexually abusing children is biological, resulting from abnormalities in the frontal lobe of the brain that governs conscience, free will and the ability to differentiate between right and wrong.
Dr Keith Ashcroft, a forensic psychologist based in Edinburgh, has done research that suggests this abnormal function is at the root of paedophilic behaviour. It is this that leads paedophiles to justify their behaviour with such excuses as the child encouraged sexual contact or that a bona-fide relationship existed, even if the man is 70 and the child 10 years old.
In the Soham murder trial, the Crown prosecutor, Mr Richard Latham QC, sought to firmly plant the idea in the minds of the jurors that Huntley's actions following the girls' deaths - and which Huntley described in detail from the witness box - were those of a man eager to destroy evidence that he had sexually interfered with them.
It was a sex crime gone wrong, Mr Latham told the jury. The only reason Huntley had, for the first time in his three-year relationship with Carr, changed and laundered bed linen while she was away was because he had something to hide and wished to wash away evidence of semen and blood.
Huntley (29) was painted by the Crown as a ruthless, selfish, cold-hearted and calculating killer, a man who was quick to anger and hid his darker side from Carr (26) but was capable of manipulating her so skilfully that she lied to provide him with an alibi and help him get away with murder.
Huntley's defence barrister, Mr Stephen Coward, QC, told the jury in his summation that no murder could be proven in this case until a sexual motive could be established.
The presiding judge, Mr Justice Moses, said this was an argument to be considered and noted that healthy, fit 10-year-old girls did not die simultaneously of natural causes. Huntley, the judge said, was the only person who knew the truth of how they died, yet "he chose to destroy the evidence of how those deaths came about".
After 27 days of evidence and summary, the jury retired on Friday to consider its verdict against Huntley, who was accused of their murder and Carr (26), who was charged with helping him try to cover his tracks.
Huntley pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, but guilty to conspiring to pervert the court of justice. Carr has pleaded not guilty to charges of aiding an offender and conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
For the past month, the jury of seven women and five men listened to detailed, emotive and often scatological evidence surrounding the deaths of the two girls as the prosecution sought to convince them that Holly and Jessica were murdered by Huntley in cold blood.
The trial, one of the most sensational and disturbing in recent memory, captivated the British public as every sordid titbit was splashed across the front pages of national newspapers and television stations provided live minute-by-minute accounts from the courtroom.
While some pontificators have accused the British media of hysteria in its coverage of the case and Judge Moses sought to inject an element of calm with a stream of directives to the scores of journalists in the court, the story of the disappearance and deaths of Jessica and Holly was the stuff of parental nightmares.
But while the evidence was heartbreaking, not least for the parents and siblings of the girls who have been present in court throughout, one of the most poignant questions remains to be answered: just how did the girls die? Only one man, Huntley, knows the answer to that question and the jury decided that his explanation - that the girls' deaths resulted from an unlikely series of accidents that had him paralysed with panic and incapable of saving their lives - was a tissue of lies.
The girls, best friends and classmates at their primary school in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham, were playing together at Holly's home on the afternoon of August 4th, 2002, when they changed into matching red Manchester United football jerseys, had their photograph taken and then, after dinner, went for a walk to buy some sweets.
They didn't tell their parents, probably, the court heard, because they expected to be gone only a matter of minutes and had no need to feel any sense of danger.
They were sensible, intelligent girls, they had been schooled to be aware of potentially threatening situations and would have stuck up for each other had anything untoward happened to them, teachers said.
By the time the alarm was raised and a search launched, about 8.30 p.m. that evening, Holly and Jessica were already dead, their bodies dumped in a ditch, every article of clothing, including their underwear, neatly removed before they were doused in petrol and set alight.
The court heard evidence that would have set the heart of any parent who has worried but for a second about the whereabouts and safety of their children pounding. The mounting fear of their mothers as they sat by their telephones awaiting word; the increasingly desperate efforts of their fathers, who called in friends to help scour Soham and, eventually, its surrounds.
Soon, the conviction that the girls would not have run away was followed by a full-scale police operation complete with national media campaigns, unconfirmed sightings, the involvement of David Beckham whose name was emblazoned on the back of the girls' jerseys.
The photograph of them in the matching jerseys was plastered like an icon across Britain and around the world. The country was united in hope that the girls would turn up safe and stalked by dread that they might not.
For 13 days, until their bodies were stumbled upon by three people walking across a field in Lakenheath, Surrey, drawn by the stench of rotting flesh, Huntley presented himself as a concerned citizen of Soham.
He offered his support and sympathy to their parents, he told anyone who would listen that he was the last to see the girls alive and that they had walked away from his house carefree and happy. How he wished, he told interviewers, that he'd be able to say or do something to keep them safe.
Carr helped with the fantasy, lying to police that she had been at home taking abath when the girls dropped by. In court, she said she had lied because she believed Huntley could not possibly have had anything to do with the disappearance.
The court heard transcripts of interviews with police and taped telephone conversations in which Carr seemed utterly convinced of Huntley's innocence. Only as she put all the facts together, long after her arrest, did it dawn on her, she said, that Huntley may have killed the girls.
Defiantly, she told the jury she would not take the blame for what he had done. She pointed dramatically towards him and referred to him as "that thing," but appeared unable to accept the possibility that Huntley had been motivated by sex.
The suggestion, she said, was "disgusting."
Huntley's plea of not guilty to double murder was complicated by his admissions in court that he was responsible for both deaths.
He was directly responsible for Jessica's death, he said, because he had held his hand over her mouth and nose to stop her screaming. And he was also responsible for Holly's death because he failed to prevent her from drowning after she fell into a bath of water.
These admissions left the jury with a range of options, explained by Mr Justice Moses.
In Jessica's case, he said, "the prosecution must prove that, at the time he killed her, he intended to kill her or to cause her really serious bodily harm. It doesn't matter whether the killing was planned in advance or if it was the spur of the moment. If the prosecution have made you sure that he intended to kill her or cause her really serious bodily harm, then he's guilty of murder."
If, on the other hand, they were sure Huntley had killed Jessica but were unsure that he had intended to or to cause her serious bodily harm, then he was guilty, not of murder, but of manslaughter, the judge said.
In Holly's case, if the jury accepted Huntley's version of events - that she apparently drowned in the bath after he accidentally knocked her backwards - "you would be entitled to conclude that he is guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence," the judge said.
Sifting through lies would be the jury's most arduous task, the judge said, and no less so in judging Carr.
She had admitted in court that she lied when she told police she was at home with Huntley in Soham at the time the girls died, rather than at her mother's home more than 100 miles away, as was the case.
That Carr had assisted an offender with her lies was not in dispute, the judge told the jury. What was vital, he said, was that "the prosecution must make you sure that she knew or believed at the time she told the lies that he was guilty of murder or manslaughter".
The truth of what happened to Jessica and Holly after they entered Huntley's home around 6.30 p.m. on August 4th last year may never be known.
Huntley said that he could not remember exactly what led to the girls' deaths, though he provided an explicit description of how he bundled the bodies into the boot of his car - bending their legs to force them in - and drove to the field where he rolled them into a ditch.
Then, he said, he covered his feet with plastic bags, climbed into the watery ditch and methodically cut the clothes from the girls' bodies. Then he poured petrol over them and set them on fire.
When they were found 13 days later, the remains had been reduced to bits of charred skin and hair clinging to skeletons, so badly decomposed that the forensic pathologist charged with examining them, Dr Nat Cary, could not say for certain how they had died. He ruled out blunt instruments and body blows - a point emphasised by Mr Justice Moses in relation to Huntley's evidence that Holly had fallen into the bath - as well as a variety of drugs.
Dr Cary concluded the girls had been strangled or suffocated, but noted the human instinct to struggle against suffocation and said two hands would have been needed to subdue a healthy pre-teen child. Huntley said he held one hand over Jessica's face, but couldn't remember what the other hand was doing.
He said he had only wanted to stop her screaming at him that he had pushed Holly into the bath.
Force was the only way to smother a person to death, the judge said.
"All he remembers clearly is holding her mouth. When he let go, she collapses and appears dead," Mr Justice Moses told the jurors.
"You have to decide whether that account of how Jessica Chapman came to die is the truth. You must judge his account of the death of Jessica Chapman in the context of the evidence as a whole and, in particular, in the context of his description of how Holly Wells came to die.
"If you thought that the defendant's account of Holly's death was plainly unbelievable, bearing in mind that the burden is on the prosecution to make you sure that his account is not the truth, if you thought his account of what led him to turn to Jessica was plainly unbelievable, then - but it is a matter for your judgment - you may think he was not telling the truth about the death of Jessica."
Chronology:
August 4th, 2002: Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, wearing red Manchester United shirts, go missing from their homes in Soham, Cambridgeshire, eastern England, after last being seen at a family barbecue at Holly's house.
August 5th: Both girls' parents make an emotional appeal for their daughters to come home. "It's a complete mystery. It's so out of character," said Jessica's father Leslie.
August 6th: Woman contacts officers to say she saw girls walking down a main road to Cambridge the day before. England soccer captain David Beckham appeals for girls to come home.
August 7th: Detectives say they fear the girls have been abducted.
August 9th: The officer in charge of the hunt for the girls, Det Supt David Hankins, says he believes they are alive but that they are being held captive.
August 14th: Police make video appeal to "abductor" to call them.
August 16th: Police question Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, and release them after they have given statements.
August 17th: Huntley and Carr arrested for murder of the two girls. Holly and Jessica's bodies found hours later near Lakenheath, about 24km from Soham.
August 19th: Huntley admitted to top-security psychiatric hospital.
August 20th: Huntley charged with girls' murder; Carr charged with perverting the course of justice.
October 8th: Huntley ruled fit to stand trial after court hears he is not mentally ill.
June 9th, 2003: Huntley taken to hospital after suicide bid.
November 3th: Old Bailey trial of Huntley and Carr begins.
December 17th: Huntley found guilty by majority verdict of murder; Carr guilty of perverting course of justice, cleared of assisting an offender.