Maxine is another one of his victims

Every playground has a child like Maxine Carr. She was the one alone in a corner, watching the others, never taking part. The other children called her "slitty eyes" and taunted her about her weight.

The more they called her "fatty" the more she gorged herself and the fatter she became. Revolted by her own body, she became anorexic. Then suicidal.

Her childhood was filled with disappointments and trauma. As a young adult she nurtured impossible dreams. She was perfect prey for Ian Huntley. Fate, it seemed, had groomed Carr for the role she came to play in the Soham tragedy.

Her childhood was filled with disappointments and trauma.

"I haven't had anything to do with Maxine for more than 20 years," her father Alfred said after her arrest. "She doesn't want to talk to me and we have had nothing to do with each other."

Thus, in a few words, he encapsulated the first and perhaps deepest trauma of her early life.

She was born Maxine Capp, her father, Alfred Capp worked on a farm, her mother worked in a fish processing factory.

When Carr was two and a half, her mother, Shirley, took her and her older sister Hayley away from the family home to a cottage in the Lincolnshire village of Keelby.

The break with Carr's father was sudden and permanent, but to this day, it has remained unexplained. No one on either side will talk about it, but it affected her deeply.

As soon as she was old enough, she changed her name from Capp to Carr and tried to erase all memory of her father.

Bringing up the two girls alone was a struggle. "There were times when we barely had two pennies to rub together," Shirley Capp recalled.

But she worked hard at making their tiny council house a family home, although it was crammed with Elvis memorabilia, including a clock with Elvis legs in place of a pendulum.

AT the age of 10, Carr found a friend with whom she shared some of her happiest childhood moments. Nicola Scott was at Keelby primary school with her and they became close. Mrs Scott, 26, an accounts manager, said: "She was very introverted and could go into a

deep sulk or her lip would quiver and she would be on the verge of tears for the slightest thing.

"When we were 10 we were best friends, always playing in each other's houses. She was very bright and loved going on school trips but she was very quiet. Her home was spotless, almost old-fashioned.

"Her room was always incredibly tidy with the games neatly stacked in boxes or in a wardrobe, not at all like most kids.

"Her favourite toy was a doll's house and I remember her mum would sew tiny blankets for it. We used to make a playhouse by putting a blanket over the climbing frame. We would be in there for hours making rose petal perfume.''

After primary school Maxine went to Caistor Grammar School, but then switched to Healing Comprehensive. It was this point that her anorexia became a serious health problem. Her weight dropped to six stone and her mother force fed her.

"She was very ill," a neighbour recalled. "You could hear her screaming in her bedroom."

She recovered after hospital treatment, but her schooling had suffered irretrievably and she left with a minimum of qualifications. Her mother found her a job at the Bluecrest fish processing plant and they worked there together.

The relationship with her mother was Carr's emotional anchor. As a teenager, she made at least one suicide attempt and she clung to her mother in early adulthood. "She was always with her mother,"

Melanie Hewis, a school contemporary said. "You would see them together in the village, walking the dog. Even when she grew up, she never left her mother's side."

But in her late teens a contradictory side of Carr's personality emerged. At the age of 19 she moved out of her mother's council home and into a rented one-bedroom flat at Comber Place in Grimsby.

This bid for independence was accompanied by an almost hysterical throwing off of her reserve. She fell in with a crowd from a rundown pub called the Wine Pipe in Freeman Street, Grimsby.

At weekends she would drink heavily and her personality would undergo a radical change. From the mousey, quiet and watchful girl of her childhood, she would become extrovert and, at times, outrageous.

Her party trick was to expose her breasts. She was especially proud of the bumble bee tattoo on her left breast and, after a few drinks, needed little encouragement to display it to a pub full of people.

Carr adopted the name Maxine Benson. It seemed she was making a conscious effort to distance herself from the person she had been. Paul Selby, a scaffolder, was an early boyfriend.

HE said: "She told me she was 23 when in fact she was in her late teens. She was really strange and in the end I had enough and finished it."

Another ex-boyfriend, Jason Wink recalled: "She loved being the centre of attention. If you so much as looked at another woman she would go mad. She was really insecure."

Huntley and Carr met in 1999 when she took a job at an insurance company in Market Rasen in Lincolnshire.

Huntley was working nearby. They started going out after a date at Hollywoods nightclub in Grimsby. When Carr came into his life she, too, could be considered a child. Immature and from a sheltered background, she was of precisely the kind of character Huntley could mould.

Within days of setting up home together a profound change came over Carr. "You used to be able to recognise her a mile away," said neighbour June Beneifer.

"She always wore thick make-up and bright red lipstick. Then, when she started going out with Ian Huntley, she began to look totally different.

"She was pale, hardly wore any make-up and I couldn't believe how Plain Jane she had become."

Huntley persuaded her to move in with him. From that moment, when they shared his one-bedroom flat at Abbey Drive East in Grimsby, she was in thrall to him.

It has emerged that Huntley gave her documents to falsely claim benefits over a period of years.

Their landlord Len Smith said: "She was very shy and didn't say much. She would come round and pay his rent. I got the impression she was under his thumb." That was an underestimation of the true position. Huntley, predatory and cunning, was doing to Carr what he had done to others before her - forcing her into complete submission. She knew it was happening but appeared powerless to stop it.

Her hairdresser Chamille Taylor was one of the few people in whom she confided.

She said: "Maxine complained that he was desperately controlling and that it was difficult for her to go out. She said he hated her friends and would not let her see her mother."

Huntley knew that the only other meaningful emotional bond in Carr's life existed between her and her mother.

To gain complete control, he set about breaking it.

When her mother called at the flat Huntley forced Carr to remain silent and pretend that no one was at home. She would cry and sob that he was suffocating her. But she let it happen.

A friend of Carr's mother, Maria Pawson, remembered that time. "Her mother Shirley would come to see me in floods of tears," she said.