A besotted husband and country walks: Maxine Carr’s life after prison

Maxine Carr was released from prison 20 years ago today.

As the day stretched into night on August 19, 2002, a steady stream of mourners passed through St Andrew’s Church in Soham, Cambridgeshire.

They queued to pay tribute to best friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, whose bodies had been found two days earlier at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk Mildenhall in Suffolk.

‘We have got through hundreds of candles. We keep running out’, the vicar, Tim Alban Jones, said at the time.

While the Soham community came together to remember the ten-year-old girls who had vanished on August 4, police had arrested school caretaker Ian Huntley, 28, along with his teaching assistant girlfriend Maxine Carr, 25, on suspicion of murder.

Detectives had discovered that, shortly after Holly and Jessica left a barbecue in Soham to buy sweets, they had been lured by Huntley into his house. He murdered the two friends not long after they entered his home. Desperately covering his tracks, Huntley joined searches for Holly and Jessica, set up chairs for press conferences and even gave an interview to Sky News. Meanwhile, Carr carefully stuck a missing person’s poster to the window of the couple’s cottage at 5 College Close in Soham.

But the pair soon drew the suspicion of the police. Huntley openly admitted to being the last person to see the girls alive, while Carr referred to one of the girls in the past tense on camera. During a search of their home, police discovered burned items of clothing which matched the Manchester United tops Holly and Jessica had both been wearing when they disappeared.

On 17 December 2003, after a trial, Huntley was ordered to serve a double life sentence for the murder of Holly and Jessica, while Carr was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice and ordered to spend three and a half years in jail. 

It’s been 20 years since her release on May 14, 2004 after serving half her sentence. Upon her release, Carr was granted lifelong anonymity to safeguard her ‘fragile psychological state’. The order was the first of its kind to protect someone who was not directly involved in a killing.

Inside the relationship of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr 

Born 16 February 1977 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, Carr was sentenced to 42 months in jail. The court was told she had met Huntley at a nightclub in Grimsby in 1999, when she was 22 and he was 25. Huntley was said to be emotionally abusive during their relationship. The pair moved in together just four weeks later and relocated from Grimsby to Soham when Huntley got a job at a local college. In 2022, Carr got a job at St Andrew’s Primary School after lying about her qualifications. It was here she met Holly and Jessica.

When the girls vanished, Carr claimed she had been at home with Huntley. She made ‘Yorkshire puddings, cauliflower, cabbage and roast potatoes’ for lunch, she later explained. But after burned clothes were found at his their house, she admitted the lie. She had not been at home on August 4 at all – but visiting her mother 110 miles away in Grimsby. 

Carr was held at the infamous Holloway Prison ahead of the trial, where a warder said of her: ‘She has become a hate figure because there were children involved. There are those who would hurt her if they could get to her.’

At a trial, a jury accepted Carr’s claim she had lied only because she had genuinely believed Huntley’s claims of innocence. During the proceedings, Huntley looked ahead while Carr let her hair hide her face. Carr pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice, but not guilty to the charge of assisting an offender. ‘If, for a minute, I [had known] or believed he’d murdered either of those girls I would have been horrified’, she pleaded.

She was ordered to spend her sentence in Foston Hall prison in Derbyshire. She was kept away from other prisoners where possible, with one inmate throwing burning water at her in 2012. She was branded ‘Myra Hindley mark two’ by prison inmates, the press and the public.

When was Maxine Carr released from prison?

Maxine Carr was released on probation on May 10, 2004 after serving 21 months of her initial 42-month sentence. Upon her release, Carr had applied for anonymity under the Human Rights Act, and argued her right to life was endangered. Her QC, Edward Fitzgerald had warned of ‘a real and significant risk of injury or of worse – killing – if the injunction is not granted.’ The High Court granted the special measure, in a bid to safeguard Carr’s ‘fragile psychological state.’

The anonymity order bans publication of any details which could reveal her new identity, including any description of where she lives and the nature of her work.

Similar protection was granted to Jon Venables and Robert Thompson who murdered toddler James Bulger, and to Mary Bell, who claimed the lives of two boys when she was 11. But Carr’s situation was different, hers was the very first anonymity order granted to a criminal not directly involved in a killing. It will last until Carr dies, unless the courts deem there to be a valid reason to lift it. 

Carr, now 47, reportedly had plastic surgery after being released from prison and changed the colour of her hair, in a bid to not be recognised. 

Life after Huntley

Carr reportedly got engaged in 2008. The Daily Mail quoted friends describing her fiance as ‘a nice man from a decent family’, who ‘accepted her past’ and was ‘besotted’ with her.

The source added: ‘They just like doing normal things together like going for walks in the countryside.’

At the time of their engagement, the lovers reportedly lived more than 60 miles apart.

According to the Daily Mail, Carr and her partner enjoyed a three-course wedding breakfast and several bottles of sparkling wine on their wedding day in 2014. The bride wore a £2,000 ivory dress and walked down the aisle by her 71-year-old mother, the newspaper claimed.

They then travelled to a ‘family-friendly’ resort for a honeymoon in the days after. Carr is said to have one son with her husband, telling friends it was her ‘life’s dream’ to have children of her own.

It is illegal to publish specific details of her honeymoon, wedding or family, because doing so could lead to her identification.

Where is Maxine Carr today?

In the wake of Channel 5 TV series Maxine, which starred Jemma Carlton as the main role, people took to social media to detail their alleged encounters with Carr. One woman in the North of England claimed she openly drank in her local pub, while a man near London said Carr was ‘ousted’ from his city after her identity was revealed while working at a popular clothes shop.

In 2014, it was reported that Carr had been relocated to a seaside town in England. She was said to live in the same resort as two of Britain’s most notorious female criminals: Tracey Connelly and Karen Matthews. Connelly was the mother of Baby P who she allowed to be tortured to death, while Matthews faked the kidnap of her own daughter.

One person in the seaside town had told the Sunday People: ‘It’s incredible, even bizarre that they are all living here.’ Another local added: ‘I am not sure why they have ended up living so close to each other.’ Residents had told the paper that Carr had a part time job in the town. The area is believed to be a popular area for rehoming ex-convicts, due to a ‘high turnover’ of tourists and casual workers. 

Carr has reportedly moved between more than 10 different safe houses since her release. In 2010, her family was urgently moved to a safe house after their location was leaked online.

According to the Daily Mail, the cost of her new name, identity and police protection has cost taxpayers £2.5million and counting.

In the years since Carr’s release from prison, debate has raged over the anonymity order granted to protect her. To many, she was a victim of domestic abuse, who lied for murderer Huntley as she was too scared to do otherwise.

‘I don’t think she was evil’, mused one forum user after her trial. ‘She was blatantly stupid and trapped in love. She will have to live with it for the rest of her life.’

What happened to Ian Huntley?

Huntley waited until the eve of his trial to explain the murders of Holly and Jessica. It had all been a ‘terrible accident’ spurred by, he claimed, which took place after Holly fell over and hit her head.

Richard Latham QC, prosecuting, had told the Old Bailey: ‘This whole incident was motivated by something sexual, that whatever he initiated with one or the other or both of the girls plainly went wrong. Thereafter in this ruthless man’s mind both girls simply had to die, they simply had to die in his own selfish self-interest. Each was a witness, a potential complainant. He was quite merciless.’

Huntley was charged with two counts of murder and is currently serving a life sentence at the maximum security Belmarsh jail in Woolwich, with a minimum term of 40 years.

He apparently has asked fellow inmates there to call him by the female name ‘Lian’.

In 2007, a source told The Sun: ‘It’s getting him loads of attention and he feels like a bit of a celebrity inside. He’s taking pleasure in signing everything for as many inmates as possible with his new name.’

Huntley made headlines in 2005 after being attacked by a fellow inmate, then again in 2006 following a failed suicide bid. The killer’s throat was slashed in 2010 and, in early 2018, one newspaper reported he had been recorded saying he ‘genuinely, genuinely sorry’ for Holly and Jessica’s death.

Huntley’s daughter Samantha Bryan, 25, discovered her father was one of Britain’s worst killers by mistake when she was a teen. In 2023, she begged him to give peace to the families of the Soham murder victims.

She asked Huntley in a letter: ‘If my existence means anything to you, I’m pleading with you to finally reveal the whole truth about the murders of Holly and Jessica. It’s time that everyone was given some peace.’

Ms Bryan later told the Mail on Sunday: ‘Nothing can ever change what has happened. There is absolutely no forgiveness at all.

‘But because he has suffered health problems and I’ve read about attacks in prison, I fear he may take his secrets to the grave, like the Yorkshire Ripper or Myra Hindley.’

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