Last hours of Holly and Jessica

The last, tragic hours of Holly and Jessica's short lives were detailed to the Old Bailey jury yesterday.

The day had centred on a happy family barbecue - and ended with the tenyearold friends walking innocently to their deaths.

In a complex outline of the prosecution case for what happened that day, the jury was told how the girls posed in Holly's house for a photograph in their Manchester United shirts, how they walked side-by-side through the town - and how their parents began a frantic search when they discovered their daughters had vanished.

They died, the Crown claimed, after falling into the hands of school caretaker Ian Huntley. And only one person knew what happened after they went into the house, said prosecutor Richard Latham QC.

For more than three hours yesterday, the girls' parents relived their nightmare of August last year as they steeled themselves to listen to the prosecution opening.

The account was deliberately stripped bare of unnecessary emotion, which the judge repeatedly stressed should be put aside.

But the sight of the two little friends on screens around the court reduced the entire room to such silence that a ticking clock could be heard on the video broadcast which relayed the proceedings to an annexe.

MR LATHAM painted a poignant image of the two girls playing together at a family barbecue on what was to prove the last day of their lives.

Jessica phoned Holly in the morning of August 4 and left her home in Brook Street, Soham, at 11.45am. She told her parents she was going to Holly's house to take her a necklace she had bought her as a present on holiday in Menorca, from which she had just returned. The necklace, said Mr Latham, had a pendant with a letter H in a circle, decorated with two dolphins.

Jessica walked the 700 yards to Holly's home in Redhouse Gardens and, once there, she and Holly played on a computer with another friend, Natalie Parr, who went home at lunchtime.

After lunch, the two girls went back to playing on the computer. By 3.15pm the girls had changed into identical Manchester United shirts, each with the name Beckham on the back, one belonging to Holly and one to her 12-year- old brother Oliver.

Holly asked her mother Nicola to take a picture of them. It would be the last photo of either of the two girls alive, and was published worldwide after they went missing.

The girls sat down to their barbecue dinner at 5.30 and left the table at 6.15. It was raining that evening - the people doing the barbecue had to shelter in the doorway of the garage.

Mr Latham said: 'Kevin and Nicola Wells described the girls going upstairs.

'They didn't see what they were going to do. Kevin Wells recalls hearing them initially in Holly's bedroom because the floorboards are thin.

'He was conscious they were in Holly's bedroom. This was the last that Nicola and Kevin Wells saw and heard of the girls.'

THE jigsaw of events was not complete, said Mr Latham.

But witness accounts, sightings and other information had built up a detailed picture.

Holly and Jessica left Holly's home at 6.15pm without telling anyone where they were going, but 'no doubt they felt secure and confident in an area with which they were entirely familiar. 'They lived there, they went to school there, they would have no doubt thought they were surrounded by faces they knew.

'Shortly after 6.30pm, they simply vanished.

'There ensued one of the largest and most public missing persons inquiries that has ever taken place in this country.

'Everyone concerned in the search clung to the hope that sooner or later they would be found alive.

'Running concurrently was a police investigation designed to find them and find whoever it was that was responsible for their disappearance.'

Between 8.00 and 8.30 that evening, when guests Trudi and Robert Wright left the Wells home, 'it was discovered that the girls weren't in the house', said Mr Latham.

'It seems likely they left by the front door.' He said some of the adults were washing up and others were watching television, and no one noticed the girls leave.

Shortly after 8.30, Kevin and Oliver Wells went on their bicycles to look for the girls, and at

8.40 Nicola Wells phoned the Chapmans to see if they were there.

'The telephone calls to the Chapmans' home caused them to be concerned and Mrs Chapman made an attempt to contact Jessica's mobile,' said Mr Latham. 'The phone was switched off. This increased the cause for alarm and Mr and Mrs Chapman went out in their car.'

The girls were reported missing at 9.55pm.

When the police arrived at the Wells home at 10.30, the family told the officers that the girls 'had not said they were going to meet anyone or go to any particular place'.

THE girls were seen by several witnesses after they left the Wells house, and were picked up on CCTV. They doubled back on themselves more than once and were, said the prosecutor, ' wandering about'.

The jurors were told they would be walking the girls' route themselves during a site visit next week.

Because of the girls' matching red shirts, 'they stuck out, they were memorable', said Mr Latham. 'One witness, a Mr

Tuck, said to the passenger in his car, "Look! Two little Beckhams".'

Mr Latham said various witnesses had seen the girls walking up Soham's main street, Sand Street, and across the River Lode to the village war memorial.

Then they had doubled back and walked to the sports centre on the Soham Village College site.

The jury was shown a series of still pictures, each a few seconds apart, taken by a closed circuit television camera mounted on the roof of the Ross Peers Sports Centre at

6.28 that evening.

The images showed that the girls 'were on their own, they were walking perfectly normally', Mr Latham told the Old Bailey jury.

Less than a minute after the last CCTV image was taken the girls went into the reception

area of the sports centre where they bought sweets from a vending machine.

It was two and a half hours later, at 9pm, Kevin Wells went into the same reception area to ask if the girls were at the sports centre - but by then, as Mr Latham had earlier explained, they might already have been dead.

Another witness, Karen Greenwood, who saw the girls in the reception area, saw them again two minutes later, at around 6.32, walking in College Road near Huntley's house in College Lane.

'Their arms were linked and she noticed their red shirts with Beckham on the back,' said Mr Latham.

He added: 'Their route would have taken them right past 5, College Close.

' More particularly, they