Vicar attacks 'screaming harridans'

The vicar of Soham has attacked the mobs who barracked murder suspect Ian Huntley and his girlfriend Maxine Carr at court, calling them "screaming harridans".

In a newspaper interview, the Rev Tim Alban Jones compared their behaviour with the restraint of the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

He said: "Look at the behaviour of those screaming harridans with their children, and compare it with the dignified composure of the parents themselves, who have the most right to feel upset and angry."

Mr Alban Jones, 38, who is close to both families and spoke at the girls' remembrance service in Ely Cathedral, expressed his disgust at the voyeurs and ghouls who made special trips to see Huntley's house and the college where he worked.

He told The Daily Telegraph: "What inspires people to have their photo taken in front of a picture of two little girls on a stone shelf in a church? I cannot begin to get my mind round that."

But he said he understood the reaction of members of the public who were simply upset by the tragedy. "This tragedy put people in touch with their own hurt. When they wrote letters, they would begin by expressing horror at the tragedy, but then they would go on to talk about things that had happened in their own lives.

"We had a flood of visitors to this church who were in floods of tears and, at one level, I had to wonder what on earth was going on. But at another level, I realised that this was something very real and painful to them."

The vicar said wellwishers had sent so many letters both to the Wells and Chapman parents that his Macmillan nurse wife Cathy was given time off work to open them. Some of the letters were addressed to Mr Alban Jones, thanking him for his handling of the tragedy in his parish.

"Complete strangers of low and high estate wrote to me to thank me, which I found extremely moving."

Mr Alban Jones said he heard the girls were missing in the middle of the night, just hours after they were last seen. "It was 1.30 on the Monday morning. We were in bed, and somebody who was out hunting for the girls rang our doorbell and asked if there was any chance that they might have been locked in the church. We knew that couldn't have happened, so there didn't seem any need to get up. The next morning I expected it all to have been resolved, and I was alarmed to learn that they hadn't been found."

He said he understood why the murders of Holly and Jessica had struck such a chord around the country.

"One of the reasons there was such an outpouring of grief was that it was a human tragedy on a human scale," he said. "The loss of a child is something that every parent fears, and, of course, in this case there were two girls. Also, remember that this is a small town."

He added that people felt if such a tragedy could happen in Soham it could happen in their own towns as well.