Maxine Carr will be celebrating Christmas with her husband and son – while the parents of Soham victims Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman will tragically go another year without their daughters by their side.
For the past 20 years, Maxine has lived a protected life after being released from prison for providing her killer boyfriend, Ian Huntley, a false alibi. In 2009, it was reported that Maxine, who has a new identity, demanded that taxpayers buy her a Santa outfit and help pay for her Christmas knees-up.
She said she needed the cash to make her festive season “happy and stress-free” and deserves the cash from hardworking taxpayers because she couldn’t get a full-time job and the state has a “duty of care”. She wanted at least £500 to cover food, drink, a microwave, Christmas decorations and gifts for her “family, friends and boyfriends”.
After being freed halfway through her sentence, she was allocated round-the-clock police protection, which has reportedly cost millions. The public has also funded £8,000 worth of dental work and a range of plastic surgery – including a boob job – to change her appearance as she tries to begin a new life.
And as The People revealed in 2008, the former teaching assistant was given a £1,000 Christmas “bonus” in years gone by. On August 4, 2002, she lied to police when asked about her whereabouts in relation to the two missing schoolgirls.
She claimed she had been at home and in the bath when the 10-year-olds had stopped outside their property, provided by the school where Huntley worked, to speak with him. But she had actually been miles away from Soham, Cambridgeshire, in her hometown of Grimsby, where the couple had met.
Friends Holly and Jessica left a family barbecue to get sweets when they vanished, with their bodies later found in an irrigated ditch close to the RAF base about 10 miles away. Both Carr and Huntley spoke to the press and joined locals, along with 400 police officers, in the desperate search for the best pals.
It was revealed that Huntley, who had already been taken in for questioning, had gone back to where he dumped the bodies to cut off the girls’ distinctive Manchester United shirts and tried to burn them in a bid to destroy any DNA evidence. He then discarded the shirts in a bin at the school where he worked, covering them with another bag of rubbish, but the police found them in a watershed moment for the case.
On August 20, Huntley was charged with two counts of murder and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, with a minimum of 40 years behind bars. Carr was jailed for three-and-a-half years for perverting the course of justice. Upon her release from Foston Hall prison in Derbyshire in May 2004, the strength of public hatred meant she had to be given a new identity by the courts, along with round-the-clock protection.
Over the course of two years, Carr was moved to more than 10 different safe houses for her safety and in 2011, it was reported that she had given birth to her first child – a son – in a secret safe house. In 2012, she was believed to have started a serious relationship with a man who is aware of her horrifying past.
As of 2014, she was said to have been living in a seaside town. And in Channel 5 true crime drama – titled Maxine – she is depicted living by the sea, with someone calling her name, saying they knew it was her. The town cannot be named by officials because of the lifetime anonymity order granted to Carr by the High Court more than 10 years ago.
She is just one of four ex-UK prisoners protected by lifelong anonymity – along with James Bulger’s murderers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables and child killer Mary Bell. In the same year she started a life by the sea, she reportedly married a man in a £2,000 wedding with all the trimmings.
According to the Daily Mail, the pair tied the knot at a secret hotel, with the bride wearing an ivory dress. Her husband-to-be walked her down the aisle, sources said, adding that they feasted on a three-course wedding breakfast and drank £10 bottles of sparkling wine before honeymooning at a family-friendly resort.
Insiders claimed her husband was fully aware of who she is and was ‘absolutely besotted’ with her. However, the news is said to have been a bitter pill for the heartbroken mothers of Holly and Jessica, who never got to see their daughters grow up and build a life of their own.
“The families of Holly and Jessica will never get to see their daughters marry,” a source told the newspaper. “They will never get to enjoy their big day. They have nothing to look forward. Why should she?”
The search for Holly and Jessica was one of the biggest the country has ever seen. Hundreds of local people volunteered along with US Air Force staff from a nearby base to trawl the countryside. Every registered sex offender in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire was interviewed but there seemed to be no trace of the primary school pupils.
A massive media appeal kept Holly and Jessica on the front pages of every paper and in every news bulletin and for 13 days so no stone was left unturned. Carr was keen to speak to the press and in one interview, she bragged about how much she had clearly meant to little Holly especially.
She showed reporters a card Holly had made for her on the last day of term to thank her for being such a good teaching assistant. Speaking to a TV reporter, Carr said: “No one believes they would ever run away. They were very close to their families. This is something that I will keep for the rest of my life.
“It’s what Holly gave me on the last day of term and there’s a poem written inside saying ‘to a special teaching assistant’ and that we will miss her and we will see her in the future. That was the kind of girl she was, she was just really lovely.”
