OFF TOPIC....
Important Communication: Mr Ian Huntley and Ms Maxine Carr are INNOCENT
Girls' murders transfix Britons
Alan Cowell The New York Times
Thursday, August 22, 2002
Citizens pour their sympathies onto small English town
SOHAM, England In this land once known for veiled emotion, people have gradually come to show their grief more openly, a release highlighted five years ago when millions mourned Diana, Princess of Wales.
Now that same welling of loss and sorrow has poured into this small English town, not for a celebrity but for two smiling 10-year-old girls in red soccer shirts who were abducted and killed just over two weeks ago. The crime, like similar kidnappings recently in the United States, has transfixed the country.
Tuesday, as throughout the long hard hours since the bodies of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were found in dense undergrowth on Saturday, the people of this small town and visitors from far afield arrived at St. Andrew's churchyard clutching flowers to place among the lichen-covered tombstones. Some lined up to sign condolence books lit by 1,000 candles at the church altar. Hundreds of toys sent by children are on the church porch. On a Web site set up by the local police, 14,000 people posted condolences from as far away as Saudi Arabia and Australia.
But it was a tortured, fearful tribute, clouded by two questions. First, postmortem examinations failed to establish the cause of the girls' deaths, raising speculation about the cruelties they suffered. Second, by Wednesday the police had brought formal charges against only one of two suspects. The suspects - Ian Huntley, 28, and Maxine Carr, 25, both from this town of 8,000 that is 70 miles (115 kilometers) northeast of London - were linked to schools here.
Huntley, a school janitor, was charged with murder in both cases and is being held in a prison psychiatric unit.
Prosecutors said Carr, a classroom aide at the victims' school, gave false information to police officers involved in the search for Holly and Jessica. At her first court appearance Wednesday she was remanded in custody for eight days.
"The true awfulness is beginning to sink in, and we are having to come to terms with the outcome," said the Reverend Tim Alban Jones, vicar of St. Andrew's. "This is a place we had all thought of as safe and a nice place to be."
Indeed, some people here said the killings had left them and their children perplexed about whom to trust. "I can't believe that someone the children would have viewed as a teacher could be involved," said Jo Osborne, a classroom aide from Haddenham, as she laid a bouquet of roses among thousands of others.
Another teacher said: "The mood is still one of total disbelief. But then it turns to real sadness, and then anger. What do we say to the children now - don't talk to strangers, or even people you know?"
The suspects were known before their arrest as the last people who saw the girls alive on Aug. 4 as they roamed the modest streets of Soham. Carr's job contract had not been renewed, and the girls sent her a card saying they were sorry she would not be returning.
From that Sunday on, the hunt for the girls gathered steam. The soccer heartthrob David Beckham issued a personal appeal for their safe return because both girls had been wearing the red shirts of his club, Manchester United, and one had his name on the back.
As late as last Friday the suspects were still giving television interviews. News reports since then have depicted Huntley as a loner from a broken family and Carr as an insecure young woman whose burning ambition was to become a teacher.
Then, on Saturday, they were arrested. Apparently by coincidence, at lunch time the same day, a gamekeeper at a nature reserve close to the nearby American air base at Lakenheath stumbled across two decomposed bodies, which the police said were almost certainly those of the missing girls.
This is not the first such crime in Britons' memory. There were the "moors murders" in the 1960s; a massacre of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, and the killing of a young girl, Sarah Payne, in 2000.
But in this land known for intrusive tabloid reporting, the emotions stirred by this story seemed to touch even journalists. On Sunday, reporters for the
British news organizations acceded to requests from the police and the
families to leave the village to its grieving.
"It was not like other stories I have covered," said Jeremy Thompson, a Sky
news anchor. "The journalists lived it, day in and day out, with the people there.
So maybe the media was a bit more sensitive than usual."
Police confirm identity of bodies
The police confirmed Wednesday that the two bodies found Saturday were those of the missing girls, Agence France-Presse reported from London.
iht.com
Important Clue:
uk.news.yahoo.com
G. Jaeger,
Self-appointed Cyber-Attorney of Mr I. Huntley and Ms M. Carr. |
