BRITAIN: What promises to be one of the most sensational murder trials in recent British history is due to begin at the Old Bailey criminal court today, when a school caretaker and his former girlfriend appear on charges relating to the deaths of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
Ian Huntley (29) is charged with murdering the two 10-year-olds in August last year. He has denied those charges, but has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Maxine Carr (26) has denied three charges against her - two of assisting an offender and one of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
Huntley was a caretaker at the Soham Village College, in Cambridgeshire, attended by the two girls and Carr was a teaching assistant there.
The trial is the culmination of possibly the biggest manhunt in British criminal history. The murder of the girls led to a national outpouring of sympathy and grief. In the week following the discovery of their bodies, at football matches and other sporting events across the country, people observed a minute's silence in memory of the pair, who were avid football fans and were wearing identical red Manchester United jerseys when they disappeared.
In scenes reminiscent of the medieval mob, huge crowds gathered outside court houses and lined streets in the girls' normally tranquil home village of Soham to demand the death penalty for their killers. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, was moved to tighten penalties for child-killers and Huntley now faces up to 50 years in prison if found guilty.
Both the accused have been in custody since their arrest just hours before the bodies of the two girls were discovered in a ditch on August 17th, 2002, 13 days after they went missing.
Huntley and Carr have both spent time in psychiatric hospitals and both have attempted suicide - Huntley with an overdose of anti-depressants and Carr by trying to slash her wrists. Huntley was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and confined to a psychiatric hospital, but subsequent assessments have found him fit to stand trial. Carr is being held in London's Holloway prison and has also been cleared for trial.
The story of the disappearance of the two girls is the stuff of parental nightmares.
It began during a Sunday afternoon barbecue when Holly's mother, Nicola Wells, called the girls downstairs from where they were playing in her daughter's bedroom to say goodbye to the handful of friends who had dropped by for lunch and were leaving as rain threatened.
When the girls failed to appear, Nicola went upstairs and found her daughter's room empty. The girls, inseparable friends since they were four years old, had vanished.
It wasn't until 8.30 p.m., Holly's curfew time, that Nicola became truly concerned. The girls, well-drilled to keep in touch, knew not to stay out late and Jessica had a habit of phoning her mother often throughout the day to let her know where she was. After failing to raise the girls on their mobile phones and following a frantic ring-around of school friends, the Wells and Chapman families decided at 10 o'clock that night to call in the police.
The police took little time to conclude that they were dealing with a possible abduction. The families were considered close, supportive and loving; classmates and teachers confirmed the missing pair were good girls. Police ruled out a prank as Sunday night had been cold and wet and the girls were wearing only light clothing.
As police pieced together the last known movements of Holly and Jessica, news of their disappearance began to filter out. By first light on Monday, August 5th, volunteers were coming forward to help with a search as fears began to take hold that something terrible had happened.
By noon that Monday, hundreds of people were combing the Soham area in what was to become the biggest manhunt Britain had seen, joined by helicopters and tracker dogs. Within hours, American air force personnel from two nearby bases had joined the search. At 3.30 p.m., police called a press conference and appealed for information that would help locate the girls. The next day, David Beckham, then of Manchester United and hero to the girls, joined the calls for help.
Over the following two weeks, a photograph of the girls - taken during that Sunday barbecue and showing them standing close together and smiling in their football jerseys, Jessica wearing a necklace Holly had just given her - was plastered across the country. Behind them, a clock shows the time at 5.04 p.m. What happened to them between that picture being taken and the discovery of their bodies 13 days later remains a mystery.
What does appear sure, however, is that Huntley and Carr, were among the last people to see the girls alive.
The girls are believed to have left Holly's home after 5.35 p.m. and walked past Huntley as he washed his Alsatian dog outside his house. He told police he chatted with the girls about Carr, whom they knew from school and described them as "happy as Larry".
At 6.17 p.m., the girls were picked up by a CCTV camera at a local sports centre and were spotted at 6.45 and 7.20 p.m. Police believe the girls were abducted shortly after that final sighting.
Over the course of the next 13 days, the 8,700 residents of rural Soham were mercilessly buffeted by rumours and false clues and police, exasperated by their failure to find the girls, encouraged villagers to report on each other. The town became the centre of a media frenzy and the families were subject to repeated heartbreak amid false alarms, including misidentification of badger mounds as shallow graves.
When it finally happened, the breakthrough came as a surprise, as police quietly arrested Huntley and Carr on suspicion of murder and for the first time voiced their belief that the girls were dead. Hours later, at 4 a.m. on August 17th, Holly and Jessica's bodies were found in a ditch in a nearby village by a member of the public.