Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived (2 page)

Cardiff Crown Court heard that over an 18-month period Newell sexually assaulted a girl who was 12 when the assaults began. He abused her at weekends in his bungalow at the school and in the school's main building.

Just as Huntley admitted, in a police interview, his sexual misconduct with a minor, so did Newell. The court also heard how the twice-divorced caretaker lured children other than the girl into the school at weekends when it was empty.

Sentencing Newell to a paltry three years behind bars,
Judge William Gaskell said, ‘You are going to prison. You will now have to expect that you will not be around for a long time.' Incomprehensibly, the judge even bailed Newell over the weekend in what he termed ‘an act of mercy' that would enable the convicted man to speak to his elderly mother before being locked up. What act of mercy did the evil Newell show his young victim?

The same errors that allowed Huntley to kill also allowed Newell to destroy a little girl's life. No lessons at all had been learned from the Soham murders.

Hailey's cries of pain and anguish when she claimed in the summer of 1998 that he had ‘raped' her some months earlier were felt to be insufficient by the police to prosecute on. If only Huntley had been stopped then.

Although the 12-year-old's innocent definition of rape was different from an adult's, Hailey had indeed been sexually assaulted in a nightmarish and drawn-out ordeal. Over several hours, Huntley repeatedly sexually abused Hailey after luring her away from the safety of her street in broad daylight and taking her to a secluded orchard behind a pub.

Although the jailing of Huntley for murder would eventually come, for Hailey, one of his youngest victims, there was no court case and so no justice to bring to an end the pain and humiliation she had suffered at his hands.

On 16 July 1998, Sue Kotenko, of Grimsby East's Assessment and Investigation Team, received from the police Form 547, which alleged Hailey had been
assaulted by a 22-year-old man called ‘Ian'. On 5 August, however, Police Sergeant Tait decided not to prosecute Huntley, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence for there to be a realistic prospect of conviction. Huntley's bail was cancelled.

Seven months after Huntley's conviction for the Soham murders, Sir Christopher Kelly's North East Lincolnshire Area Child Protection Committee Report on the Huntley case, which covered the period 1995 to 2001, robustly criticised both the relevant police and social services for their incompetence. The Kelly Report of July 2004 revealed that a management review by social services acknowledged major concerns over the handling of the case. Further blame was laid firmly at the door of social workers for their failure to seek any additional information about Hailey at the time she reported Huntley's alleged assault on her.

Also commented on by the report were the circumstances of the alleged sexual assault, including Hailey's age, the location of the attack, its violent nature and the time lapse between its occurrence and its being reported. Together, Kelly stated, these should have generated questions in the minds of social services staff about the young girl's welfare.

The report went on to say, ‘There appears to have been no attempt to consider MN [Hailey] as a potential or actual child in need in terms of Section 17 of the Children Act but rather to view the matter as an issue of
crime detection.' And it further shamed social services and police by stating, ‘Apart from anything else, alarm bells should have been rung by the circumstances in which the allegation came to light.'

Important as Kelly's findings were, they provided little consolation for Hailey, whose peace of mind had been shattered by the destruction of her innocence. Despite this, and the consequent harm she inflicted on herself, she earnestly tried to rebuild her faith in life by eventually marrying the man who had become her saviour when she ran away with him at the age of 15.

In a blaze of publicity, Hailey Edwards wed Colin Giblin, then 37, in Humberston, Lincolnshire, less than 18 months after Colin faced charges of unlawful sexual intercourse with the underage Hailey. What might have been merely an escape route from the pain of a stolen childhood seemed to Hailey a divine intervention, rescuing her from the hell she had endured.

Here was sanctuary and security in the arms of a man she trusted and loved. Yet the hell was to continue a little longer after Colin, having admitted unlawful sexual intercourse with Hailey, was, bizarrely, placed on the Sex Offenders' Register. After two weeks, when police accepted that he shouldn't have been on the register, his name was removed.

Here was the very essence of what love was all about being sullied, when the real cause of Hailey's living hell had been the subject of a whole raft of allegations of sex
crimes that had been made known to the police and social services before the tragedy of Soham.

What of Huntley during the years that Hailey was hoping for justice? From July 1999, he seems to have gone to ground until he resurfaced in the Cambridgeshire village in 2002, with Maxine Carr (originally Capp).

It was on Sunday, 4 August that year that best friends Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells walked to a sports centre near their homes to buy sweets. The two ten-year-olds would not be seen alive again.

When the trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr began at the Old Bailey in London on 3 November 2003, Huntley was seen as the primary culprit in the murders. After telling the court how he ‘accidentally' killed the two girls, the accused said he tried to conceal the truth from his family, Carr and the police because of his shame and fear of not being believed.

Both Huntley and Carr were considered convincing liars and it was claimed in court that the girls ‘had to die' in order to serve Huntley's own self-interest.

On 17 December 2003, the jury returned their verdict. Carr was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, yet she was cleared of two counts of assisting an offender. She received a prison sentence of three and a half years.

After rejecting Huntley's story, the jury found him guilty of the murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. He was sentenced to two life terms in prison.

Another 18 months of waiting passed for Hailey Edwards and then, on 8 July 2005, following a further review of Huntley's alleged sex attack against Hailey eight years earlier, Catherine Ainsworth, a lawyer with the CPS in the Grimsby office wrote to advise her that they were not pursuing him over the matter. The three-page unsigned letter brought no comfort to Hailey as she read the lawyer's stark words: ‘I have reviewed all of the evidence against Ian Huntley and have decided that there is not enough evidence to proceed with this case…'

Clearly, in reaching this decision, the CPS did not look at past allegations against Huntley or at the persuasive way in which he had lured Holly and Jessica to their deaths – much as he had sweet-talked Hailey into going to ‘climb trees' when he had something much darker in mind.

And then, on 29 September 2005, the High Court set a 40-year tariff for Huntley, which means he must serve at least that length of time behind bars before even being considered eligible to apply for parole, by which time he will be almost 70.

Understandably, Hailey feels let down by Catherine Ainsworth's decision on behalf of the CPS. Consequently, she plans a civil prosecution against Huntley to prevent any attempt by him to gain freedom through gaining parole after serving his 40-year tariff. Here, in her own words, is Hailey's story.

O
N
16 A
PRIL
1986, I
WAS BORN IN THE FISHING PORT OF
G
RIMSBY
. When I was delivered, in the Princess Diana Hospital, I weighed seven pounds and ten ounces, a little bundle of joy. I am the only girl of six children born to my mother. I have two younger brothers and three elder, all born in Grimsby.

By today's standards, if you go by the early-morning TV misery shows, my broken-home family of
mixed-parentage
siblings was quite normal. When my mum, Amanda Jayne Brown, was 16 she married David Lewis, and went on to give birth to her first child, Ben, and then, two years later, to Adam. After a marriage that lasted five years, she and David split up when they realised they were too young to hold on to the
commitment. Anyway, that is what I was told. The boys kept the name Lewis.

Before long, my mother met David Baxter and soon after marrying him she gave birth to my brother Hayden. I was born next. The four-year marriage was destined for disaster. By this time I was nearly two years old. Even at this early age I was already
broken-home
material, fit for the likes of Jerry Springer's or Trisha's show.

Mum's split from David Baxter was an acrimonious affair that resulted in the family home being taken from us because of financial problems. After this, David Baxter went abroad with a woman.

If that wasn't bad enough, the aftermath of this break-up would follow me around for a few years, as you will see later. During Mum's estrangement from my father, she developed a relationship with a man called Wayne Edwards, and eventually I would accept him as my dad.

My mum's relationship with Wayne, a butcher in Humberston, started when she went into his shop and they got talking, and then, I suppose, it went from there.

At first, Wayne would visit my mum from time to time… he wooed her. He stayed over a few nights and then he would go back to his flat above the shop. After a while, my mum left the house in Northcoates, near Humberston, and moved in with Wayne, bringing me and my three brothers with her.

Once we were all in his flat, Wayne happily looked after his business and we accepted him as our stepfather. After four years, the relationship between him and Mum produced their first child, Joshua, and later their second son, Hadleigh, was born. These two were given the surname Edwards, as I was, because my mother used the name Edwards, although my birth certificate records my surname as Baxter. I remember I was lying down in the front room with my brother Hayden when Mum asked me, ‘Would you like your name changed so that you have got the babies' last name as well?'

Mum asked my two eldest brothers, Ben and Adam Lewis, the same question, but they didn't want to because they were still in contact with their biological father on a friendly basis. He seemed to be a nice dad. All I know about her relationship with her first husband, David Lewis, obviously came from details she told me.

To this very day, Mum has stayed with Wayne. So I think the relationship she has got now with my stepdad is a strong one, a stronger one than those others. It has survived the test of time.

I would say that Mum is the one who wears the trousers in our household. That may well be what has made the relationship last. Wayne, not being a domineering man, is someone my mother can live with, which I mean in a good way. He has lost his temper with me on a few occasions – that's between him and me – but he has been good for my mum.

My first school was Cloverfields Primary and then I moved up to Humberston Comprehensive, which I thought was a lovely school until what happened to me when I was 11.

Just about everyone remembers their first day at school, as either one of happiness or one of sadness or fear. Mine, I'll never forget. I was moving up from day nursery to school. You were allowed to bring a teddy bear, because we had a teddy bears' picnic, and this girl had a toy thing in the shape of a ruler. One whack on your wrist and this thing would wrap itself around it.

We were playing Ring-a-Ring of Roses and this girl – her name was Emma Holmes – kept cracking this toy on her arm and the teacher, Mrs Braithwaite, said, ‘Take that off your arm.' Eventually, the teacher took it off Emma and put it on her teddy bear.

We were going round in a circle and I pulled this toy off the teddy bear and started whacking it against my arm. I was playing with it for about ten minutes, but I didn't really get told off for it. Then Emma started crying and pointing at me, ‘She's got my whip thing, she's got my whip thing.'

After that, I remember, I got a good telling-off for taking this wraparound toy when the other girl had already been told she couldn't have it. Try explaining that to a five-year-old. So my first day at school is etched on my memory, and it wasn't a good one.

That morning I'd tried to claw and scream my way out
of going to school. They said I screamed and screamed and screamed and didn't want to go. But, thankfully, I wasn't an introverted child, and my mum said that, as soon as I got inside the school and saw all the kids with their teddy bears and all that stuff, I was fine.

But Mum told me later that she went home crying because I'd screamed that much and was holding on to her neck. After that, she got my stepdad to take me to school in case I started crying again. Before long, though, I was all right and I progressed well at school. I am a great reader and at school they did an achievement task at the end of the year where you were assessed to find the best reader and the best writer. I was nominated the best reader for two years running.

When I think back to when I was really young, I recollect the bad things in life. I don't know if that is how I mark time – by putting dates to these sporadic events – but that is how history is remembered too: for all the bad things, wars, invasions, plagues, death. I mean, most people will be familiar with the dates of wars, but not with dates when great discoveries were made. Some know 1066 as being the year of the Battle of Hastings, but who can recall when Louis Pasteur discovered penicillin? As much as the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Britain are sacred to some, my past is even more sacred to me. We all recall historical dates connected with some dire act of misery. I'm no different in my personal memories.

One particularly strong memory I have is of the time my brother Hayden was playing with the coal fire. I was very young. That was when we lived in Northcoates with our biological father. I remember him sitting in his chair in the corner and my mum in the kitchen doing the dinner.

Hayden had this roll of sticky tape that he was rolling out and putting on the fire unsupervised. Without warning, he draped a flaming trail of fire on my wrist. As quick as a flash, I darted through the house towards the kitchen. I was a screaming, flaming Chucky doll with this roll of burning sticky tape stuck to my arm.

I can remember the strange, new, intense sensation of being burned by the blazing plastic. When I got to the kitchen, my mum plucked me up from the floor, put me on the sink and doused cold water on the burning flesh of my wrist. Not a fond memory.

This was no accident; call it a stupid prank, but I don't know many people who have suffered from the same sort of joke. The effect it had on me remains with me to this day. My brother's act was deliberate and has scarred my mind to the point where, although I didn't fall into the fire itself, I am very concerned for children going near an open fire.

Putting that negative and painful memory to one side, I do actually have, from time to time, one or two good flashbacks to the past. It's not all gloom and doom. I remember waking up in the morning and
finding a dog on the end of my bed and then going downstairs, where there were even more presents to greet my searching eyes.

I remember the first time I saw Father Christmas, as he walked into the room trailing a black bin liner behind him. But there was something distinctly odd about him: he was wearing the full Father Christmas outfit, but with pointy, high-heeled shoes. Ladies' shoes! Mind you, at that age I still believed he was really Father Christmas. In fact, I didn't pick up on the high heels at first. I think it was Hayden who said, ‘Look at Father Christmas's shoes,' and then my mum pointed it out and shrieked with laughter as she said, ‘Yes, he
has
got funny shoes on.' I remember that, and that Christmas was the time I got a play kitchen.

Would you believe, it was only about a year ago that I learned the true identity of Father Christmas – well, the identity of
this
particular Father Christmas. It was my maternal grandmother, Joan. I found out from my auntie, my mum's sister, when I tricked her into telling me.

Although I considered myself to be a clever girl in the academic sense, I wasn't clever enough to question Father Christmas's high-heeled shoes. I was still pretty naïve and innocent in the ways of the world.

I always wanted to learn things. I was even keen to learn how to make a pot of tea. My nature was a giving one; I always wanted to do things to help people. I
remember asking my mum and stepfather – from now on I'll call him my dad – for years, ‘Can I make you both a cup of tea?' Every time they sternly said no because ‘the kettle is hot' and ‘the water is hot'.

Not one to be daunted by the prospect of a scalding, I kept suggesting that I make them a cup of tea, so when I got a little bit older and more able – I think I was about ten – I was allowed to. I skipped into the kitchen, joyful at the prospect of making my very first pot of tea. After I became competent, I would take an early-morning cup up to my mum in bed, and a coffee for my dad.

Mum would get up, put on her dressing gown and come downstairs and tidy up, whereas Dad would end up falling back to sleep and leave his coffee there to go cold for an hour. I would go to my bedroom and he would call out, ‘Hailey, do me a favour, duck.'

‘Yes, what's the matter?' I would ask enthusiastically.

‘Will you make me a fresh cup of coffee? I'm sorry, I forgot that one,' my dad would groan.

‘Yes, all right then,' I would chirp.

But after a couple of weeks I got bored with making hot drinks and Dad wasting his. So in the end, when he kept saying, ‘Will you make me a fresh cup of coffee?', I would put on the kettle and while it was boiling I would place the cold cup of coffee in the microwave for 30 seconds to heat up. With the kettle boiling, they couldn't hear the noise of the microwave. I only told him about a year ago that I used to do this. I was a fast learner.

Although I was always looking to please people and was doing well at school, I always fell short of pleasing my mum in the sense that I didn't make her totally happy. Her disappointed outlook on life I put down to the fact that she may not have been wholly happy with her own lot, as she was really stressed with work. Mum is a workaholic.

Her job was as a care assistant, working in an old people's home all hours of the day and night. On reflection, I suppose juggling your life between work and your husband and six children must have been a bit of a balancing act. As a grown-up, I can see that nothing makes my mum happy. I don't want to sound like I'm attacking Mum's integrity, as she did congratulate me on my academic achievements, and she did attend school from time to time to see my work. But my gaining these qualifications didn't really please her in the way I felt it should have done.

In a way, I felt Mum never really supported me enough with homework, with subjects like maths. I used to enjoy maths until I was ten or eleven years old, but after that people used to say, ‘You don't like maths, do you?' I would steadfastly defend myself, ‘Yes, I really like maths and my maths teacher and everything.' I used to go home with homework and Mum used to say, with defeatism in her voice, ‘Go and ask your dad… I'm not great at this, but your dad is good at maths.'

So Dad would sit there and say, ‘I'll do it for you,' and he would do the work for me. But I look back on this now as the easy way out. You are supposed to say, ‘Sit down and I will read the question out and you try and work out the answer,' instead of having someone else just write it down for you.

Mum was very busy with her work and I was the only girl. I felt that my brothers got everything and that my being asked to make the tea for everyone was a poor consolation prize. But then, for a while, things changed and for a good few years Mum and I became best friends and developed a loving relationship; we were inseparable.

Dad and Hayden used to do the father-and-son bonding routine of going to the football on a Saturday. Mum would get a can of Coke and a bag of bonbons and the two of us would sit there and watch repeats of
EastEnders
, do each other's hair or go out shopping. That's the sort of thing mums and daughters are supposed to do together, isn't it?

As I became older and more self-reliant, I fitted in with Mum's routine. At that stage I didn't feel neglected.

In trying to recall a spontaneous memory from that time, I remember the times I would be out in the street near to home. It's in part simply a fond memory and in part a growing-up memory that shows how I was starting to think for myself. The ice-cream man used to always come about ten minutes before teatime. Often
Mum would comfort me by saying, ‘You can have an ice-cream tomorrow night, OK?' and then, ‘Go on, you can go and play outside for ten or fifteen minutes and I'll shout for you when your dinner is done.'

Of course, I would catch sight of the ice-cream van and without hesitation I would saunter up to the van. Feasting my eyes on what was on offer, I'd have the brazen brainwave of saying to Don, the man serving, ‘Oh, yeah, my mum hasn't got any change today, but she said, if she gives you the money tomorrow, could I, you know, have a cornet?'

Don would give in and say, ‘Go on then, I'll give you an ice-cream.'