'Huntley threw our daughter in a ditch like a piece of rubbish. But he won't take anything else from our family': The parents of Holly Wells speak out a decade after she was murdered

By Sarah Oliver

At 11am on Wednesday, August 21, 2002, Kevin and Nicola Wells visited the shallow Fenland grave where the body of their daughter Holly had just been found alongside that of her friend Jessica Chapman. The girls, both ten, had vanished from the peaceful Cambridgeshire village of Soham a fortnight earlier.
For Kevin this pilgrimage marked the end of hope for Holly’s life. It was also, he was wise enough to know, a defining moment in his own. ‘The fact is,’ he whispered to himself, ‘some bastard has thrown my daughter in a ditch as though she were a piece of rubbish.
‘But he will not take anything else away from my family. It is time to stand strong. We will not go under.’

'Our star': Holly wells at a party, aged 7. She and her best friend Jessica Chapman were murdered by Ian Huntley in the summer of 2002

The words were a statement of visceral intent. They said that neither he nor Nicola would be petrified for ever by the grief and rage of those terrible days. Ten years later the hard-won happiness of the couple is proof that some promises are too absolute to be broken.
‘Time doesn’t heal, someone got that wrong,’ says Kevin. ‘It anaesthetises. Grief does not diminish, but you can manage the intensity and learn to live with it.
‘Murder has the capacity to destroy more lives than the one taken. I recognised that from the start, so I tried to take control, to make plans and to exert positive thought.
‘I clung to my family, my community, my work, sometimes to God and sometimes to a late-night tumbler of whisky. I chose to believe in the future, a future that I could craft from the life we once had. Really, all I wanted was for us to be the ones who’d make it out the other side.’
His success in this respect is clear. It is there in the easy-going affection between Kevin, 48, and Nicola, 45, and in their uncomplicated relationship with their son Oliver. It is there in their happy home and a summer social calendar crammed with horse racing, cricket and back-garden barbecues. It is there in the endlessly trilling phone of a thriving business.
But it has been extraordinarily tough. Kevin and Nicola’s marriage has been tested physically and emotionally; they were on the breadline for a time and even today the sight of them together can stun a restaurant into silence. Above all they both still long to see, smell and hold the lost child they loved beyond measure.
‘She was a star, our daughter,’ says Kevin, speaking to mark the tenth anniversary of the murders. ‘She was the kind of girl who would go to bed with a dictionary so that when I read her Harry Potter she could look up any words that she didn’t understand.

Life after Holly: Kevin and Nicola Wells a decade on from losing their little girl

‘We believed she would be the first person from either of our families to go to university. Frankly, I expected Holly to be the one to rise above our mediocrity.’
Mediocrity is an unexpected word, but not one he uses pejoratively. He simply means she was to be the arrow from their bow.
Kevin says: ‘Losing Holly was excruciating, but I have yet to see anything to persuade me that the mother’s loss, Nicola’s, is not the greater. They say 95 per cent of the parents of murdered children split up. We were determined to be among the five per cent who survive but for a year, perhaps 18 months, I couldn’t reach my wife.
'She was lost in a kind of wilderness whereas I was more hard-line about my emotions. I wrote a diary, which was an honest assessment of everything we went through and it took me to acceptance faster than Nicola. Then I resented her for not catching up.
‘For the first five months after Holly died we broke down together, but after that we processed our grief at different speeds. We stopped going to bed at the same time or even sitting down for a meal together. Before then [they were teenage sweethearts] we had never gone to bed on a cross word, but there came a point where Nicola started to go up alone and I would stay downstairs with a tumbler of whisky and my thoughts.
‘The physical side of our marriage died. It is the last thing on your mind, you feel in pain, numb, you don’t want to express yourself sexually. It was one, almost two years before we found each other again, but grief gives you a different sense of the passage of time and it slipped by unnoticed.

Staying strong: Nicola Wells with her 'fantastic daughter' Holly

‘I took great comfort from the letters we received from parents who had also lost a child, to illness or in an accident. They all said their sex lives had ended for a while. It was intimate, yes, but the fact that so many people took the trouble to share that secret, to  tell us it was a simple fact of grief, helped hugely. As did their advice, “just hold on . . .” ’
He laughs and reaches a hand out to Nicola. ‘And then when the time is right you both know and you have a romantic night out, a bottle of wine and a cuddle and cross that bridge. And once it is crossed it is really not an issue any more.
‘Eventually, hard work and routine turned us around. Nicola found her joie de vivre and the woman I fell in love with returned to me. Slowly but surely we came back together as a couple, thank goodness.’
They had been together for 20 happy years when Holly was murdered. It was this shared life, underpinned by a shared understanding of what else murderer Ian Huntley might take from them, which made their relationship robust enough to withstand a crime that destroys  most marriages.
As part of their recovery the couple investigated the possibility of adopting or fostering another child.
Says Nicola: ‘We had a nice house, plenty of room but, most of all, lots of love to give. We slept on it for a long time, six months, and researched it online – we felt we  were still young enough to raise another child.
‘We decided we could not adopt a girl, it would have felt too much like trying to replace Holly. We would have chosen a boy, but even so, it seemed like too great a demand for any child to step into the shoes of such a fantastic daughter.

The last picture: This photograph of Holly with Jessica - posing in their Manchester United football shirts - was taken shortly before they went missing

Guilty: Convicted killer Ian Huntley, left, and his then girlfriend Maxine Carr, right, who now has a secret identity

As for  fostering, I realised I could not face handing over a child I had come to love because I just could not bear any more loss.
‘In the end we revisited the plans we’d made at the very start of our married life, which was to have two children and to have them early so we could be young parents. We decided we should stick to them, despite losing Holly because, well, that’s us.
‘Oliver has recently moved in with his girlfriend, so we hope we may be young grandparents soon enough.’
Kevin and Nicola’s parenting of Oliver into adulthood is one of their greatest comforts and consolations. He was just 12 when Holly was killed.
‘She loved her big brother,’ says Kevin.  ‘I swear the only time his homework was in on time was when she did it for him.’
On the night Holly disappeared, August 4, 2002, Oliver went out on his bike with the adults hunting for her and then lived, second by second, the horror of the next two weeks.

On holiday: A six-year-old Holly in Gran Canaria

Later, during Huntley’s Old Bailey trial, at which the killer claimed Holly had died from toppling accidentally into the bath as he tended to her nosebleed, Oliver conducted secret experiments in the bathroom at home to prove it was impossible.
Says Nicola: ‘Despite us trying to be positive and resourceful, Oliver was extremely withdrawn in the years that followed Holly’s murder. Huntley took his childhood and his innocence too. All he knew was that his sister had gone and his parents couldn’t necessarily keep him safe.
‘We always told our children that if they were scared or in trouble to run to family, friends, a policeman or a teacher. Huntley was the school caretaker; he lived with Maxine Carr, Holly’s classroom teaching assistant, whom she adored.
‘You want to wrap your surviving child in cotton wool after that, but you can’t, you can’t burden them. There has to be normality.’
‘Nicola was soft on him,’ offers Kevin, rolling his eyes at his wife.
‘Ah, but he’s a lovely boy,’ she defends. What they agree on is that even amid their grief, and with every second feeling like a betrayal of Holly’s memory, they still had  a young son who needed two  united parents and things to look forward to.
At the close of Huntley’s trial they took Oliver to New Zealand and tried to ‘unlock’ him, as they put it, with some high-adrenaline treats. To this end they took him go-karting, jet boating, quad biking, pony trekking, bodyboarding and did a bungee-style jump. And then an adult and two children died in a swimming accident on the beach next to them.
‘It was hard,’ says Kevin with some understatement, ‘knowing as parents quite what to do next.’
What succeeded was something far more mundane. At the age of 16 Oliver went to work in Kevin’s contract cleaning business and for two years father and son ‘went up ladders and chit-chatted about life until it felt OK again’.
That business was one started from scratch in 2005. Kevin was forced to sell his original window-cleaning company at a loss in 2003 to devote himself to Huntley and Carr’s forthcoming trial and the subsequent Bichard Inquiry into Britain’s child-protection procedures.
The family survived on Nicola’s salary as a legal secretary, by re-mortgaging their house and by accepting a £6,000 charity hand-out to pay their bills. For a man with a work ethic  as powerful as Kevin’s it was a  difficult time.
Says Kevin: ‘I got going again, I bought some rounds off other window cleaners, I did a lot of door-knocking and leafleting, but we went from being comfortable to being financially stretched for a while. You don’t think about it for days, weeks, months, but then there comes a time when you realise you have to put food on the table.
‘Getting back to work was not just about money in the bank, it was also about what it represented – an everyday life, a familiar pattern, some kind of control.’
There were many things the couple could not control, chief among them the global attention  they received when they enlisted the help of the media in the fortnight the girls were missing, presumed alive.
It opened a kind of Pandora’s box, leaving the Wells family with a public profile they have never been able to escape. It almost goes without saying their details were in the notebooks of shamed News of the World private investigator Glenn Mulcaire – although there is no evidence their phones were hacked.

So young and so innocent: Holly aged 18 months, playfully sitting in a cardboard box

Precious memories: Holly, aged five, on her bike at home. Her parents described her as their 'star'

They also suffered from abusive phone calls and letters claiming, for example, that Holly deserved to die for ‘playing out on the Sabbath’ and were the victims of internet trolls who offered fake versions of  the girls’ famous red Manchester United football shirts as competition prizes.
Prior to Holly’s death Kevin had appeared once in his local paper for throwing a wet sponge at the vicar at a church fete. Ten years after the Soham killings, with his shaven head and intensely blue eyes, he remains instantly recognisable to a generation of parents who spent two weeks in August 2002 willing Holly and Jessica to be found alive. Just last summer on holiday in Rhodes they silenced a restaurant.
Kevin says: ‘The hotel was filled with British couples just like us. They would have followed Holly’s story and spent that summer thinking, “There but for the grace of God go I.” We don’t find their silence hurtful, but it means Nicola and I have to appear engrossed in each other or stare at our feet and the menu for ten minutes.
‘On the plane on the way out a woman spent an hour saying, “I know I know you, but I can’t think where from.” Eventually I simply said, “We’re from Soham” and then she burst into tears.
‘So we can still put gaps in an airport queue or clear a space around sun loungers. We are the only British people who seek out German tourists on holiday because they don’t recognise us . . . ’ he guffaws.
‘Look, we were a fun family, we are still a fun family, and sometimes it was our sense of humour which kept us going.’
I am reminded about his visit to Cambridgeshire police’s operations room at the height of the hunt for Holly. Officers were demonstrating the logging of intelligence gleaned from the torrent of calls from the public and, as Kevin leaned in to inspect the equipment, the words ‘The Dad did it,’ scrolled across the computer screen, followed by ‘Check his shed’. Can you laugh about that now? I ask.

Holly as a toddler with her brother Oliver. The pair were inseparable when they were growing up

Best of friends: Holly with brother Oliver in December 2000. Kevin said they were a fun family

‘I did then,’ he says. ‘Because it was funny. Look, murder embarrasses people terribly. But often they know just what to do. Last year at the races a man in a topper tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Mr Wells, isn’t it?” I thought he must be a client, but when I said yes he took me in his arms, cuddled me into his chest and walked away.
‘I don’t think too deeply about whether he was meeting his own needs or mine. I just accept human kindness as the balance to the evil we have known in our lives.’
It is good to hear him describe Holly’s murder in those terms, as a random act of wickedness. Ten years ago he profoundly felt he had failed to keep his daughter safe and even wrote a letter apologising to her which he placed inside her coffin. It was surely a path to madness. So he doesn’t feel that way now?
‘No, of course I don’t. Holly had boundaries that were appropriate to a ten-year-old girl on a light night in a peaceful English village. She was within one minute’s bike ride from her home, she was with a friend. She thought she was going to see Miss Carr, her classroom assistant.
‘The failure is that of police intelligence and of society for permitting Huntley the freedom to prey on children. Today I accept there was nothing more or different as a  parent that I could have done to change the outcome.’
What Kevin and Nicola have done however, is to help create a legal legacy that will protect other people’s children. Kevin devoted a year of his life to assisting the Bichard Inquiry, which was set up in the wake of the Soham killings.
It resulted in investment in the Police National Computer and created a national IT system for forces in England and Wales. It drew up a register of people working with children or vulnerable adults and added a demand for enhanced disclosure on all those seeking to work in schools.

Posing with trophies - and some stuffed animals - Holly is pictured here aged 9

Aged 10 and pictured on her last sports day. The little girl would soon be dead at the hands of Ian Huntley

It codified good practice for the recording and keeping of records by police forces. In this way a man such as Huntley, with several allegations of burglary, underage sex and rape against him – none of which had ever resulted in a conviction – would never have been allowed to hold down a job as a school caretaker.
The recommendations of the 2004 inquiry are coming to fruition at present, much to the delight of the Wells family.
‘We see it as a line in the sand. It is a good way for us to sign off,’ says Kevin. ‘It makes it far harder for people like Huntley to slip through the net, we cannot change our parenting but maybe we have changed society.’
Bichard exhausted him and added to the extraordinary strain of Huntley and Carr’s 2003 trial. But in its intellectual rigour and its practicalities, Kevin found solace. The same urgent need to help and protect others also led him to a charity, Grief Encounter, for whom he became a patron in 2004. The charity supports bereaved children and this year alone he has raised £15,000 for it by running the London Marathon.
Says Kevin: ‘We believe profoundly in their work. Even though it is a children’s charity it taught Nicola and me a great deal about the evolution of grief.’
The couple’s work for the inquiry and the charity has been done without them speaking publicly. Indeed, they have not given an interview since Huntley was jailed and are doing so now only to ensure  their voices are heard amid the cacophony of comment which will mark the tenth anniversary of the girls’ murders.
They are facing next month with trepidation. ‘It gives rise to questions about all that Holly might have been by now,’ says Kevin. ‘I will never walk a daughter down the aisle, never see her off to another life, she will remain as she was a decade ago.

'We think about the things she'll never know; sitting her driving test, attending her school prom, her 21st birthday. It's a lifetime of loss'

 

'We think about the things she’ll never know, sitting her driving test, attending her school prom, her 21st birthday, it’s a lifetime of loss. One of Holly’s closest friends is already a mother which gives us pause for thought.’
Nicola is more emotional. The question: ‘What do you miss most about Holly?’ brings instant tears.
‘The busyness of her,’ she says softly. ‘The music and dancing and drawing, the reading, the homework, the friends, the Brownies, the Majorettes. I used to grind my teeth at the hours I spent driving her to activities. Now I long to be able to do it.’
And how does she feel about the fact that Maxine Carr has become a mother herself since being released from jail?
‘I don’t think about her. We do not speak her name – or his – in this house. My only thought would be that perhaps now she has had a baby she has a fuller understanding of the bond between mother and child and can reflect with more emotional subtlety on what she did. But whatever the crime of Maxine Carr, her child is innocent.’
The couple do not permit themselves to be distressed by stories chronicling Huntley’s life behind bars or the regular letters from well-meaning members of the public saying Maxine Carr has moved into their neighbourhood. ‘They write to say they’ve seen her in Homebase,’ says Kevin.
It is the inconsequential things that trip them up. The sound of Holly’s favourite Robbie Williams song Angels on the radio is one, as is the sight of a mother and daughter browsing for clothes. Bureaucracy, too, has the power to wound.
When Nicola sent off her passport to have her daughter’s name removed she expected it to be re-issued. Instead, the original was returned with the words Holly Marie Wells crossed out in black felt tip.
In 2006 they did choose to move house, although their new home is just five minutes from their old one. Holly is still present. By the front door grows a Soham Rose bush – a pearl-pink flower specially grown by a Hertfordshire nursery in memory of Holly and Jessica. In the hallway stands an iron bench with her name wrought in gold. A dining-room cabinet contains an assortment of photographs, trinkets and artwork, the treasured fragments of an unfinished childhood.
It also holds a tiny enamel box bearing Holly’s name in which forensic officers placed a lock  of blonde hair salvaged from her burnt body.
It says everything about the resilience of Kevin and Nicola that they are now planning to move back into the house where they raised their beloved daughter. They never sold it, just rented it out, an act of faith in the future – and another example of achieving Kevin’s heartfelt desire ‘to make it out the other side’.
They have even made peace with the two great unanswered questions of the Soham murders: how Holly and Jessica died, and why.
But there is one thing that still hurts and it is the iconic image of the crime, the picture of the girls in their matching Manchester United football shirts standing beneath a ticking clock. It was taken by Nicola at 5.04pm when the girls had maybe an hour-and-a-half left to live.
Says Nicola: ‘The police asked for an up-to-date shot and here was one that was just hours old. Then it became the symbol of the Soham murders and it still accompanies stories about Huntley in prison and Maxine Carr having a child. It is our last picture of our daughter, yet it represents something evil – that is exquisitely painful. We would love to reclaim that image for ourselves.
‘Being unable to do so is, I think, the one last thing we have to deal with . . . ’ she looks at Kevin and  he concurs.
Halfway through the hunt for Holly, Kevin asked rhetorically in his diary what the outcome would be. ‘Everything’, he wrote, ‘is dwarfed by loss, unfairness, grief and confusion.’
Ten years on from the tragedy of Soham, those painful sentiments are unalterably part of Kevin and Nicola Wells. But in the manner of their living after the death of their daughter they have proved that it is  possible for hope, decency, love and courage to prevail. Theirs is a  powerful advocacy for life.

Soham: A Parents’ Tale will  be screened on ITV1 on  Friday, August 3 at 9pm. Goodbye, Dearest Holly – Ten Years On by Kevin Wells will be published as an ebook available only from Amazon on August 3.

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