Ian Huntley’s daughter has today branded him a ‘twisted, manipulative coward’ after he refused to meet her about the Soham murders.
Samantha Bryan, 26, hoped a face-to-face visit at Frankland prison – where the double child killer is serving a minimum 40-year prison sentence – would uncover the truth about the 2002 murders of 10-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.
But in a chilling handwritten letter, reported by The Sun on Sunday, Huntley has outright turned down a meeting as ‘I doubt there will be enough time for a significant shift in circumstances in order for us to ever meet’.
Samantha, of Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, has now given up any hope of ever finding out the truth and has stepped away ‘for the sake of my sanity and my future’ and said the letter had confirmed his ‘sh**ty character’.
In court, Huntley, now 50, said both girls died accidentally, claiming Holly drowned in his bath and that he inadvertently suffocated Jessica while trying to stifle her screams.
But in 2018 he confessed to deliberately killing Jessica to stop her from raising the alarm. He still insists Holly’s death was an accident.
Samantha Bryan, 26, hoped a face-to-face visit at Frankland prison – where Ian Huntley is serving a minimum 40-year prison sentence – would uncover the truth about the 2002 murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman
But in a chilling handwritten letter, Huntley has outright turned down a meeting as ‘I doubt there will be enough time for a significant shift in circumstances in order for us to ever meet’
Samantha told MailOnline in December she feared Huntley would take his secrets to the grave after suffering health problems and being subject to violent attacks in jail. He has also attempted suicide.
Today, she said any meeting was never about forgiveness and suggested he did not want to give any answers as ‘that’s the only way he can get attention’.
But she left no doubt about her feelings for the double murderer.
‘He’s shown he’s a pitiful, twisted, manipulative coward,’ she said.
She first discovered that Huntley was her father when she was 14 – by an extraordinary quirk of chance. She was asked to work on a school project on murderers – she was given Huntley to research – and it was while looking online that she saw an image of herself.
Samantha has had counselling in the past and says she still has nightmares about him.
Although relieved that she will never meet him, she is also angry and sad she will never get the answers she craved for Holly and Jessica’s families.
Holly Wells (right) and Jessica Chapman (left), both 10, were killed by Huntley in 2002 in a double murder which horrified the nation
Huntley is serving his sentence at HMP Frankland. Here, he is pictured being interviewed by police in August 2002 after the girls went missing
Samantha wanted to get answers for the families of Holly (left) and her best friend Jessica (right)
School caretaker Ian Huntley (pictured), 45, was sentenced to two life terms over the murders
Even more distressing was learning of how Huntley subjected her mother Katie – who fell pregnant with Samantha aged just 15 – to terrifying violence before making her pregnant. They split when Samantha was born and she remarried.
Huntley pours scorn over Katie’s account in his letter to Samantha, denying he ever laid a finger on her.
It left Samantha stunned when she read it but she said she would never doubt her mother and feels he was trying to manipulate her.
‘It had nothing to do with my mum and there was no need to bring her into it at all,’ she said.
‘It confirms his sh**ty character.’
In 2023 Samantha told MailOnline she was ‘begging him to find the courage to finally tell the truth. I have asked to meet face-to-face so he can tell me in his own words’.
She told how her life had been poisoned by the Soham murders.
‘I’ve undergone counselling and it has impacted everything from my jobs to relationships,’ she says. ‘I have suffered constant nightmares. People still stop me in the street and say, ‘Your father is a monster’ or ‘I know who your dad is’, so by meeting him I have nothing to lose.
Huntley (left) was convicted of the murders after pleading not guilty. His girlfriend at the time Maxine Carr (right) gave him a false alibi. She was sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ jail for perverting the course of justice and issued with a new identity on release
Huntley is pictured sitting his his car outside his home on August 8, 2002. He used the car to go and hide their bodies near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, six miles away, and later returned to set fire to them
‘The main comment that I used to get was, ‘the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ which has always cut very deeply because I am the absolute opposite. When I was younger I worried that everyone would think that and I would become isolated. Even with relationships, I’ve had people leave me and make comments about him [Huntley] and my connection to him. It was hard.
‘From the moment I discovered the connection he has become a bogeyman, like the Yorkshire Ripper or Fred West.’
She said she wanted to ‘know for myself’ if her father feels any remorse. ‘I want him to tell the truth, so I can pass that on to the families of Holly and Jessica as they are very much on my mind.
‘Knowing their families have never been given the truth causes me profound sadness, I think about it far more than I should.’
In a 2003 interview with the MoS, Holly’s parents Kevin and Nicola Wells said his cowardly refusal to tell the truth had left them in a never-ending torment of uncertainty as to what really happened in their daughter’s final minutes. They had many questions, the kind which – unanswered – can eat away at one’s soul.
Samantha was just four years old when Huntley killed Holly and Jessica. They had been at a family barbecue at Holly’s home on August 4, 2002, wearing matching football shirts, before walking to a nearby shop for sweets. Then they vanished.
For 13 days their frantic parents prayed and police launched one of the biggest inquiries ever mounted. Thousands searched for the girls and Soham became a sombre, haunted town.
Samantha’s mother Katie (pictured with Huntley) had left Huntley while still pregnant with her daughter, after being subjected to an appalling catalogue of abuse
Throughout, Huntley, a caretaker at the girls’ school, and his partner, their teaching assistant Maxine Carr, gave endless media interviews appealing for the safe return of ‘two of the brightest, loveliest little girls in the world’.
Carr even showed off an end-of-term card the girls had sent her, covered in loving comments and kisses. A wan-faced Huntley befriended the media because he had a sinister motive: his need to know the details of the police inquiry. For the truth was that he had lured the girls into the home he shared with Carr, as they passed by. He has never fully revealed what took place there, but within an hour both girls were dead.
Then he hid their bodies near RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, six miles away, and later returned to set fire to them. Huntley was convicted of the murders after pleading not guilty. Carr gave him a false alibi. She was sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ jail for perverting the course of justice and issued with a new identity on release.
Huntley will not be considered for release until he is 71.
