Ian Huntley gets life

Huntley and Carr: the full story

Huntley stood with his head bowed in the dock at the Old Bailey as the verdicts were read out. He was given two life sentences.

Carr was just a few feet away. She had her hands clasped in front of her and showed no visible reaction. They had both denied all charges.

Carr was sentenced to three and a half years. She has already spent 475 days on remand and will be released at the halfway point in her sentence - May next year.

Mr Justice Moses told Huntley he had showed "no mercy and no regret". He added: "Only you know why you murdered them."

After four days of deliberations the jury rejected Huntley's claims that the two friends died accidentally in August last year.

They accepted the prosecution case that he tricked the girls into No5 College Close "for something sexual" and then killed them probably by smothering or strangling them.

All the guilty verdicts were reached by a majority of 11-1 by the jury within an hour of the judge telling them he would accept majority decisions today.

The girls' parents Nicola and Kevin Wells and Leslie and Sharon Chapman watched as Huntley was led to the cells. As Huntley, 29, begins his sentence tonight, it can be revealed for the first time that:

Two major inquiries were announced into the catalogue of errors surrounding the case, including the chronic failure of background checks on Huntley.

Cambridgeshire Chief Constable Tom Lloyd will come under pressure to resign. He had to be ordered back from holiday by the Home Secretary as his force became bogged down in the biggest operation of its kind in British history.

For six weeks the girls' parents have been driven from their Soham homes to the Old Bailey to hear every moment of the harrowing evidence. Huntley's decision to seize the girls hinged on a row he had over the phone with Carr who was staying with her mother in Grimsby.

He was furious that his girlfriend was going out for a second night without him.

Moments later the two girls in their Manchester United shirts walked past his house at No5 College Close. He may have lured them in by pretending Carr, a teaching assistant at the girls' primary school, was upstairs. Whatever the case, Huntley had them in his power. Huntley claimed that Holly drowned in the bath after he invited the girls in to stem her nosebleed.

Huntley told the court he froze with terror. He said he smothered Jessica as he tried to stifle her cries of horror when she saw what was happening to Holly but did not mean to kill her.

Detectives believe he tried to sexually assault one of the girls, possibly Holly and probably in the bedroom.

They think he had to smother her when she started screaming. Her cries alerted Jessica and Huntley had to strangle her, either against the wall or on the floor, before ensuring Holly was dead too.

Huntley put his cover-up into operation, carrying the bodies downstairs, checking no one was around and placing them in the boot of his red Ford Fiesta. He said he had to bend their legs to make the bodies fit. He then went over to the college for black bin bags to cover his shoes to prevent footprints.

Collecting petrol in a red jerry can, he set off for an isolated area outside the perimeter of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. It was close to where his father had once lived and his grandmother's bungalow.

Having dumped and burned the bodies, he returned to Soham and set about helping police in their vain search. He admitted that he was the last person to see them while keeping a close eye on developments.

Two days later he collected Carr from Grimsby and she agreed to lie for him by claiming she had been in Soham all weekend to support his alibi.

They started a series of interviews for TV, radio and the press about how they desperately hoped the girls would be found alive and well. Huntley even made a public show of consoling Holly's father, telling him: "I'm sorry, I didn't know she was your daughter."

After 13 days police eventually found the charred remains of the Manchester United shirts, the girls underwear and trainers in bin bags covered in Huntley's fingerprints in the storage hangar at Soham Village College.

Huntley and Carr were arrested in pre-dawn raids. Carr soon admitted she had lied when she claimed she had been in the house when the girls had called around.

But she insisted she had no idea that her boyfriend had killed them.

In the most dramatic moment of the trial she pointed at him in the dock and shouted: "I won't take the blame for what that thing in that box did to those girls."

Today's verdict means that the jury decided that although she had lied to protect Huntley she had no idea that he had murdered the two girls. Huntley never spoke to the police.

He was sent to Rampton high security hospital but doctors were unable to find anything wrong with his mental state and he was returned to prison. In April this year his lawyers sent a statement to the Crown in which Huntley denied any involvement at all in the girls' deaths. It was only two weeks before the trial started that he finally admitted they had died in his house.