Carr 'lied to save Huntley'

Maxine Carr claimed this afternoon that she lied to protect the man she loved.

But when she gave Ian Huntley an alibi she said she did not know that the Soham schoolgirls had died in their house.

Her QC Michael Hubbard told the Old Bailey jury: "She is here because she lied. But your task is not to judge her morally - however tempting that is - your task will be to decide whether criminal liability attaches to her for the lies she told."

Carr, 26, denies conspiring to pervert the course of justice and assisting an offender. She claims she lied about being with him on the day Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared because a previous rape allegation against him had caused him to have a nervous breakdown.

Mr Hubbard said she would say: "If for a moment I knew or believed he had murdered either of those two girls I would have been horrified."

Carr said she flew into a rage when Huntley told her one of the girls sat on the edge of their bed at the house they shared in Soham. Carr was still in Grimsby when the conversation took place the morning after the girls died.

Carr said: "He was really funny on the phone. He wasn't making complete sentences.

"Then he said one of them sat on the edge of the bed and that's when I flew into him. I said, 'What do you mean, the edge of the bed?'

"The first thing that came into my head was that these children are going to go and tell everyone... they've sat on the edge of Miss Carr's bed."

Carr said she asked Huntley what happened there next and he told her that the nosebleed stopped and the children went off. "He just said he wished I'd been there."

Carr told the court of her time in the segregation unit at Holloway awaiting trial. She said: "I was being branded Myra Hindley Mark II."

Huntley, 29, denies murder but admits conspiring with Carr to pervert the course of justice by giving a false alibi to the police.

He has told the court that the girls died in his house but insists they were accidents. Carr told the jury this afternoon that she had never heard anything like it before and nothing like it had ever crossed her mind.

She added: "If I had had any inkling I would have been out of that house like a shot straight to the police or the nearest person I could talk to to tell them."

Carr then told of the moment the plan was made for her to lie about being in Soham when Holly and Jessica disappeared.

She said that after being driven back from her mother's by Huntley he had been "pacing up and down" in their living room because he had been the last person to see the girls alive. He was saying, 'Oh God, Oh God I was the last person to see them. I am going to be a suspect for this. They are going to be after me for this'.

"He was pacing up and down like he was really fretting about it.

"He kept saying he thought he was a suspect."

Carr said: "I had already had a go at him about letting the children in the house.

"He then brought up the previous rape allegation. He said he was going to be fitted up if they found out about the allegation of rape against him it upset me. I said that isn't going to happen."

She tried to tell him that he should go to the police and explain that he saw the girls and that he had been accused of rape in the past. She said: "He said, 'No way because I will lose my job'. He was saying, 'It would be so much easier if you had been here'. I said if I had been in the house I would have had to speak to the girls."

Huntley told her they could say she had been in bed or in the bathroom.

"I said, 'In bed in the afternoon - basically the bathroom was the alternative."

Carr told how they had arrived back in Soham to find the village taken over by police, press and satellite vans.

Immediately she went in the house she noticed that the quilt and cover, which had been on their bed upstairs were in the washing machine. Was she surprised? asked Mr Hubbard.

"I was because Ian doesn't use the washing machine. He isn't domesticated at all," said Carr.

"The first thing that came into my head was, 'He has had a woman in my house.' "

They made a cup of tea and as they drank it in the living room she pressed Huntley for more details about how Jessica and Holly called at the house and what they said.

She realised Huntley was upset. "He wouldn't sit still," she said.

Carr told the jury that when she was discussing the false alibi with Huntley "he said you don't have to do it but I could tell by the way he was that I had."

The trial continues.