Soham murderer Ian Huntley has reportedly expressed his remorse for having killed schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Huntley, 44, is serving a life sentence after being found guilty of killing the girls, who went missing from a family barbecue in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002.
After a two-week hunt to find the youngsters, their bodies were found near an air base at Mildenhall in Suffolk.
The Sun reports Huntley has recorded a confession for the killings while behind bars, and has accepted he is “never getting out”.
The paper reports the former caretaker as saying: “I am genuinely, genuinely sorry and it breaks my heart when it is reported I have no remorse; that I relish something. I do not.
“I can’t change anything. I cannot remove that day from history; what I have done. I know those girls would be 26 this year with families of their own, jobs and lives.
“I thought about them when they were turning 21 and when they were turning 18.
“I know no matter what I say that people are not going to think any better of me. I know that, I don’t expect it to but I would much rather people have the truth about how I feel.”
Then 28, Ian Huntley was able to get a job as a secondary school caretaker, despite social services having records of him being accused of having sex with four underage girls – one was just 13 – and an allegation of indecent assault on a 10-year-old. Police investigated three separate claims by women who said Huntley had raped them and he had also been charged with a burglary – though the case was dropped when it came to court.
In spite of all these complaints, Huntley had no convictions, with only the burglary charge being placed on the police national computer on the orders of a judge. After Huntley’s conviction, then-Home Secretary David Blunkett ordered an urgent inquiry into how the vetting system failed to stop him working with children.
Huntley’s then girlfriend Maxine Carr was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison in 2003 after being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice after giving him a false alibi.
Although not implicated in the murders, the former teaching assistant claimed she had been with him at the time of the killings, which delayed the police investigation. That weekend, Carr had actually been in Grimsby. During the search for the girls, Carr revealed a note from Holly in which the girl said she would miss her after she ceased working at her school.
Carr has since given birth to a child and lives under a new identity. She is one of four former UK prisoners to be given secret identities, along with child killer Mary Bell and James Bulger’s murderers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.