'Maxine told me to burn bodies'

Maxine Carr knew her boyfriend Ian Huntley had killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and helped him hide the evidence, he claimed today.

In a taped conversation from his prison cell, Huntley claims she knew within 24 hours that he had killed the girls and told him to burn their bodies.

She also cleaned their Soham house to remove forensic evidence, washed bed linen which might contain clues and told him to lie to police, he says.

The 30-year-old former school caretaker has told The Sun that Carr was the mastermind behind his cover-up operation.

"She told me to destroy the evidence," Huntley says on the tapes. "I didn't know what she meant ... then she explained exactly what she meant.

"Which is where the petrol can and everything came in. And that makes me feel 10 times worse, on top of everything else, because to do that was unforgivable.

"She was the one who told me to clean the car, to give the car a good clean. She obviously knew I would have had to get them out of the house and I think she assumed I had to use the car."

Following the double murder, Carr, 27, claimed she played no part in the killings and was not even aware that her boyfriend was involved.

The former classroom assistant was found guilty of perverting the course of justice after lying to police in providing an alibi for him. But she was acquitted by the jury of assisting an offender.

The former classroom assistant has been given a new identity after serving half of her 42-month jail sentence.

Today her lawyer dismissed Huntley's allegations as rubbish. "I have had a chance to speak to Maxine," he said. "She denies what Huntley is suggesting in the strongest terms possible.

"I have grave concerns that repetition of these falsehoods put her at even greater risk than she is at the moment."

Holly and Jessica, both aged 10, went missing on Sunday, 4 August 2002 from Soham in Cambridgeshire. Their badlyburnt bodies were eventually discovered in a ditch near Lakenheath air base in Suffolk.

In the tapes, Huntley claims his girlfriend knew he had killed Holly and Jessica on Monday and had been given every details of how the two girls died by Tuesday evening.

"She knew everything that had happened by Tuesday night." he said. "There were lots of tears on both parts.

"Maxine didn't want to lose everything. She didn't want to lose me, she didn't want to lose her home, she didn't want to lose the new job she'd got.

"Maxine had gone over with me time and again exactly what to say. At the time I didn't see it for what it was. I thought she was trying to help me."

He goes on to say that Carr learnt how to cheat lie detector tests. Once the trial started, he says he was shocked that Maxine distanced herself from him, claiming to be his pawn.

The allegations come a day after Huntley admitted lying at his Old Bailey trial about how Jessica died.

He is said to have revealed on the prison cell tapes for the first time that she died in his living room and not in the bathroom as he had previously insisted.

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