BRITAIN: Love and the hope of marrying the man accused of murdering the two Soham schoolgirls led Ms Maxine Carr to help him concoct a false alibi and lie to friends, family, police and the press about her whereabouts when the children died, the Old Bailey heard yesterday.
Had she any inkling that her former boyfriend, Mr Ian Huntley, was involved in the deaths of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, Ms Carr "would have been horrified," the court was told. Ms Carr (26), who was a teaching assistant in the girls' class, described Holly as "the kind of daughter I would want to have" and said Jessica was "smashing". She took the stand to give evidence in her own defence on the 22nd day of a trial that her barrister, Mr Michael Hubbard QC, said had captivated world attention.
Ms Carr is charged with helping Mr Huntley (29), by lying about where she was when Jessica and Holly went missing.
She told police she was at home with Mr Huntley when the girls called. She has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to pervert the course of justice and helping an offender. The court heard that Ms Carr was not in Soham when the girls died because she had left the day before to visit her mother in Grimsby, more than 100 miles away. "She was at that time on the threshold of her life in the sense that she was planning to marry Ian Huntley," Mr Hubbard said. "Whilst she was away from Soham, events unfolded that weekend of which, plainly, she had no control. Within two weeks of arriving back, the course of her life changed forever. She had done no wrong that weekend whilst events were unfolding in Soham. She is here because she lied."
He warned the jury not to succumb to the temptation of judging Carr's morality, but to consider her state of mind leading up to her arrest and decide if her lies constituted a criminal liability for the girls' deaths. Ms Carr has cut a pathetic figure in Court Number One, where she has sat in the dock near Mr Huntley for most of the proceedings. She is slim - an abiding legacy of anorexia nervosa, she said - and has slumped forward with her tight chestnut curls obscuring half her face.
She said she had lied to police, because: "I just knew Ian, I knew he wouldn't have done anything like that."
If she had known he was involved, "I would have been out of that house like a shot.
"Straight to the police or straight to the nearest person to tell them." She will be cross-examined today