No one even asked why I never went around to Katie’s. It was as if she had never existed. At some point, I thought, she would have called to see me to ask why I hadn’t been going there. I was quite surprised and thinking, Why hasn’t she come along to see me?
She never even came to see what happened on the Saturday she had called for me, the day she had hurriedly left and said she would see me at her place. Surely that warranted some explanation?
As time went on, I was having flashbacks to the sex attack. I was finding it increasingly difficult to contain it within me. I felt it would only take some stupid thing to trigger the release mechanism within me and I would spill the beans on Huntley’s crimes.
This is exactly what happened one day in July 1998 when a fête was taking place next to our local church in Humberston. The venue was what is called the Paddock, where the swings are, and they usually had bric-a-brac stalls and other attractions.
My friend knocked on the door and asked, ‘Are you coming out to the fête today, Hailey?’
‘Yes,’ I said enthusiastically.
No sooner had I spoken than my mum came out of nowhere and overruled me: ‘No!’
In stark disbelief I pleaded with her, ‘Oh, what’s the matter, why?’
To my relief, Mum said, ‘Not until you’ve tidied your room.’
‘OK,’ I groaned, and told my friend, ‘I’ll meet you there in half an hour.’
‘It’ll take you longer than half an hour to clean your bedroom,’ Mum said.
OK then, I thought. But by this time I had an attitude like: I don’t care what anybody says, I will do what I want and nobody has the upper hand with me. I’m a big girl and, if you want to mess with me now, you mess with me.
I cleaned my bedroom quickly by putting everything under my bed and under my quilt, all my mucky clothes and things, and then cheerfully announced, ‘I’m finished. I’ll walk to the fair now.’
‘No, you are not,’ Mum insisted.
‘Why not?’ I moaned.
She barked back, ‘Your bedroom is still bloody messy and this is getting ridiculous. Keep your room tidy. It used to be nice and tidy, why isn’t it tidy now?’
After the Huntley attack, I must admit, my whole outlook on life seemed to have changed overnight. The experience had a dramatic effect on my character. Whereas once I would be polite and wore party dresses and had long hair, now I was dressing down, trying to make myself as unattractive as possible. I cut my ponytail, shunned dresses in favour of trousers and became a rebellious teenager.
My bedroom was downstairs, facing the garden. The fête was a tantalising thought. So, when Mum was out of sight, I shut my bedroom door, jumped out of the window and scampered off to the Paddock with an arrogant air about me.
There I met up with all my friends, and after about 15 minutes I spotted the local bobby, PC Andy Woods. It turned out that he had been to our house for a coffee to see how my mum was. My dad was a special constable and Andy, as well as being a policeman, was a friend of the family.
Mum had got nattering with him and she had a strop on about the state of my room and how I had slipped away to the fête. She said to Andy, ‘If you see Hailey when you’re at the fête, will you pick her up and bring her home, please, because she shouldn’t have gone.’
‘I’ll get in my car and go now,’ Andy told her.
And this was why he rolled up at the fête. All the school kids knew Andy because he was an all right copper. A girl called Danielle Hattersley knew that I had absconded out of my bedroom window to come to the fête and she went over and greeted Andy, ‘All right, PC Woods, how are things?’
He replied, ‘Oh, great. I’m looking for Hailey.’
Innocently or self-importantly, I don’t know which, Danielle informed him, ‘She’s over there in them bushes with all her mates.’
Andy came over to me and said, ‘Come on, then, Hailey. I’ve got to take you home.’
I was mega-embarrassed in front of all my friends, thinking, Mum has got him to do this. I don’t believe this, it’s a farce. All my mates are here and how embarrassing is that?
After a show of dumb insolence, I got into his little panda car and he drove me home. We’d only just pulled up at the door when all of a sudden my mum began shouting at me. I was at a loss as to why she was going on like this.
PC Woods ordered, ‘Go on, Hailey, go and sit down.’
I sat down without a word and she started screaming blue murder. ‘You could get kidnapped. I can’t believe that you are putting me through this. I have already told you, you are not going out until you have tidied your bedroom.’
All this because I didn’t do a good enough job on my room. ‘I have tidied my bedroom,’ I said in mock disbelief.
‘Like what, putting all your crap underneath your bed?’ she ranted.
I brazened it out, then snapped defensively, ‘Well, it’s tidier than what it was this morning, so it is tidier now,’ and lamely finished with a sullen, ‘you know’.
‘Lose the attitude,’ she fumed.
I just sat there and took my telling off with her screeching voice ringing in my ears. As the scolding went on, it filled my head, got louder and built up to a crescendo. She was incandescent as she raged, ‘You could get kidnapped. You could get raped one day. You could get murdered.’
I broke my silence angrily. ‘I don’t care what you’ve got to say.’
At this, Mum seethed, ‘Well, you will care when one day you end up getting really hurt or you end up getting raped.’
By this time, I think I understood what rape was, and maybe that’s what Huntley had done to me. I didn’t need this ear-bashing. After all, my life had been turned upside down and I only had a thin veneer of tolerance.
As soon as the keywords ‘raped’ and ‘murdered’ had been thrown at me, they unlocked the floodgates that had been holding back my secret horror for some ten months, since September 1997. My flashbacks took me into another dimension, one of lurking demons.
I had had this bollocking going on against me for half an hour when I stood up and unleashed my torment. ‘I have been raped,’ I screamed.
This brought a sudden end to her tirade and you could hear a pin drop as, her eyes bulging, she gasped, ‘Eh!’
‘I have been,’ I blurted.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
I got up to walk out and our policeman friend stood there and brusquely ordered, ‘You are not going anywhere. Sit down.’
And by that time, because I’d had to bury the pain deep within me and had lived alone with the agonising torture that was tearing me apart for so long, I exploded with anger, ‘Just get out of my way, just leave me alone. He’ll kill me!’
As far as I was concerned, I had been raped. My interpretation of rape was what had happened to me. As it happens, rape would have been less enduring than a whole afternoon at the hands of Huntley’s repeated and unremitting barrage of sexual assaults. Rape would have been over and done with far quicker than the prolonged and agonising torment that I suffered at Huntley’s evil, filthy hands. So, as far as I was concerned, yes, I had been raped.
Mum’s face was ashen as she searched for a response. ‘Talk to me, Hailey. Who by?’
All this ice was running through my body. I knew by that time that Huntley had moved away. I didn’t know where to, as he had left a month earlier, but I now felt able to reveal the horrific suffering I had undergone.
Then Mum’s face softened as she tentatively asked the heart-wrenching question every mother dreads: ‘Do you know what rape means?’
Not knowing anything other than my definition of the word, I said, ‘Yes.’
As she held back her tears, Mum apologised, ‘Right, sorry. Who by?’
Overcome with the fear of God, I edged my way closer to revealing the name of my secret tormentor, and then I quickly blurted, ‘By that Ian down the road.’
Mum’s demeanour had changed to that of a woman at wa
r, and as the fire came into her eyes she stormed, ‘Ian who?’
I held back the tears of pain as I stuttered, ‘Katie Webber’s boyfriend.’
The fury in my mum’s voice cut through me when she spat out, ‘What’s his last name?’
‘Huntley or Hunter,’ I said timidly.
This news was like a bolt of lightning and she was aghast.
PC Woods was lost for words as he stumbled out. ‘I’m going to call in the special police, the people who deal with this kind of thing, the sexual side of things.’
On hearing that, Mum demanded, ‘I want a special trained police officer that can deal with this.’
She then gathered herself and said in a soothing tone, ‘Do you want me to wait here and comfort you when they call or do you want me to stand in the kitchen out of the way to save your embarrassment?’
Embarrassed at what Mum would overhear, I told her, ‘Will you go in the kitchen, please.’
It will be fine, I thought, if it’s just me and this police officer that calls; it’s not going to go any further.
Later, when the police officer arrived, my heart raced in turmoil as I saw that it was a man, not the woman officer I had been expecting! Mum wasn’t very happy, either, because she knew that I would be shy, that I would hold back with a man.
So the ginger-haired policeman came in, but I did not feel reassured or calmed as he started, ‘Right then, what’s your name?’
This male police officer took the details from me and wrote them down. His tone appeared to me to be disconcerting and gruff. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Hailey,’ I tentatively replied.
‘Right, Hailey. How old are you?’
‘Twelve.’
‘What has happened then?’
I was practically lost for words. Here was a male police officer seeking answers to questions from a minor, a female, about a sex attack. I was lured, groomed and abused. I couldn’t just tell this man all of that. I didn’t know where to start because I was really embarrassed. What do I say? I thought. I can’t tell him all that happened.
I remember going through the details and I mentioned with embarrassment about being fingered and he leaned right forward and demanded, ‘Do you know what being fingered means?’
As his question hit me with the grace of an elephant landing on jelly, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me whole. I couldn’t get involved in this process because I felt really embarrassed. I didn’t want to say yes, but in my head I was thinking, Well, of course I know what it means if I’ve had it done to me.
I was pleased to see the back of the policeman when he left, as I just didn’t feel comfortable spilling my guts out to a man, not initially, as a female child victim.
The police said to my mum that they would be in touch with her and would stay in touch. After a wait of about three or four weeks, they came back and told her that Huntley had denied it. Well, what did they think he would do? Give a signed confession with a photo? Huntley knew the heat was on. He would now lie through his teeth just to get out of it whenever he could. The proof of this is what happened in Soham in 2002, when he got his partner Maxine Carr to lie for him to the police about his whereabouts right after Holly and Jessica disappeared.
Later on, though, from behind the bars of prison, Huntley would lay the blame at Carr’s door when he accused her of having told him what to say and do to escape conviction for the Soham murders. Here was further proof of how far Huntley would go to exert control over others, even after he was jailed.
In my case, eventually the police arrested Huntley in Cleethorpes and, after questioning, he was subsequently released without charge.
After Huntley was convicted, he admitted to his parents on a prison visit that he had lied under oath about the circumstances of one of the murders, Jessica’s. I wonder what else Huntley is holding back?
A lone female police officer came to see Mum and me to tell us that nothing was being done, basically, because there wasn’t enough evidence.
They had taken statements from my brother Hayden, James Webber, Huntley and me, and I was led to believe that Huntley’s father had given him an alibi by saying that he was with him on the day of my allegation. An alibi given some ten months after the crime was relied upon. I look back on it and I think the tail was wagging the dog.
From the evidence to hand at the time of writing, we can see that he was certainly known to the police for allegations of a sexual nature against him. Under caution, he even admitted to a police constable that he had had sex with a girl of 15.
And that was that. The short inquiry was finished.
But what they did have was a catalogue of allegations: rape, a discontinued rape case, statements from various people. The same can be said of social services: they were aware of the allegations against Huntley and, as a direct result of their failings and even, in some cases, their dereliction of duty, I suffered.
Unbelievably, the chief executive of North East Lincolnshire Council, Jim Leivers, defended social workers’ handling of Huntley when he said, ‘The five cases were from different areas, involved different circumstances and were handled by different people, who had no reason to cross refer with one another.’
And he went on to say, ‘None of the girls would make a complaint about Huntley, to whom they referred as their “boyfriend”. We are not here to arrest offenders; we are interested in protecting youngsters. We were confident these were good parents and we saw no reason to continue involvement. This is a character that, as soon anybody gets a sniff, he was off. He was particularly keen not to get involved with any agencies like social services and police.’
Well, I can tell you, Huntley did have contact with social services, as he phoned them. Social services actually mishandled a number of cases – mine was one of them – and, as a consequence, they were slammed in a report.
I also blame the former Chief Constable of the Humberside Police, David Westwood, for allowing my allegation that Huntley had assaulted me to be wiped from his force’s records after the police had interviewed Huntley but taken no action.
Not long after, at the time the police told us about the case being dropped, Huntley appeared in a newspaper. My mum kept a clipping and she showed me it not long after, when she revealed, ‘You’re not the only person he has done it to. Look in the paper.’
It read: ‘Ian Kevin Huntley arrested for attempted rape’, or something like that. This was a gas-alley rape and then the case was dropped and my mum said, ‘Don’t worry, duck, he’ll get caught one day.’
I felt that my whole world had fallen to pieces. Why doesn’t anybody believe me, I thought, and why is nobody saying we are going to have him or anything like that? After the police said the case file was passed to the CPS, we found out it was never passed to them. I learned that only recently. They told me that it was never passed to the CPS; it never got through the main doors of the CPS, it was passed to PS Tait, who concluded that there was insufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction.’
Utter bollocks is what I say to that. Although Sir Christopher Kelly slammed the police and social services in a report, I have only just started slamming them myself.
In my view, the law should allow for a man like Huntley to be prosecuted by virtue of having a string of sexual allegations against him and claims of dalliances with underage girls. In the event, he was not prosecuted.
Huntley, an asthma sufferer, bullied and nicknamed ‘Spadehead’ on account of his large forehead, had, as I mentioned earlier, previously admitted to a policeman that he had sexual intercourse with a 15-year-old girl and signed the interview sheet to this effect. Yet he escaped being charged or even having a caution lodged against him because the girl failed to complain. This, the police say, is their reason for not prosecuting Huntley over that little matter of unlawful sexual intercourse! That should have had some influence on the decision makers supposedly concerned with the allegations I made against Huntley.
&nb
sp; Naturally, I was not surprised when I learned that his first girlfriend, Amanda Marshall, by the time she was 16, had moved in with the 17-year-old Huntley. Their relationship had started going down the slippery slope when Amanda discovered he had started bringing other girls back to their flat when she was out.
Soon after this, Huntley overdosed and Amanda returned, locked in a dependency on him for her self-esteem and, in turn, his need to control her grew.
Would you be surprised to learn that Amanda, in a bid to make the relationship work, accompanied Huntley to sessions with a psychiatrist! Already, in 1994, the signs were there when she became pregnant with his child but miscarried after he threw her down the stairs. This is the same year that Huntley’s mother left his father for her lesbian lover, Julie Beasley.
In December 1994, Huntley met 18-year-old Claire Evans, an RAF administrator, and after a short affair they married in January 1995. The marriage was doomed to failure when the 21-year-old Huntley claimed his 18-year-old brother Wayne slept with Claire on their wedding night. In a wedding ceremony in 2000, Claire married Wayne.
At the Bichard Inquiry, Detective Chief Superintendent Gavin Baggs acknowledged failure after failure regarding lack of training within the intelligence-saving system of Humberside Police. Under cross-examination by the Inquiry his exact words were: ‘…there was this general misunderstanding which I accept was regrettable … and I do accept that that is a failure.’
Unbelievably, no records of the previous allegations against Huntley 1, 2, 3, 4 and 9 [these numbers refer to the system of numbering incidents in the Inquiry] managed to make it to the police’s CIS Nominals system. There was also an acceptance among police staff that they hadn’t been adequately trained and it was accepted that officers were disgruntled at being ‘overworked and understaffed’, as DCS Gavin Baggs conceded at the Bichard Inquiry.
In what I consider one of the more generously proportioned blunders of the Humberside Police that was not unearthed until the Humberside Police carried out an investigation for the purpose of their submissions to the Bichard Inquiry, DCS Baggs admitted that the Humberside Force knew that Huntley was using the name Nixon, but that information did not get transposed from his manual record on to the CIS Nominals.
Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived Page 9