Mark Bridger follows in Soham killer Ian Huntley's sick footsteps with pathetic 'I can't remember' lie

 
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30 May 2013
WEST END FINAL

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Mark Bridger’s pathetic lies to the jury in the face of overwhelming evidence is known around the courts as the Ian Huntley defence.

Like the Soham double killer, both paedophiles based their whole defence on the flimsy, utterly incredible excuse that a terrible accident had happened then “I panicked”.

Earlier this month Stuart Hazel, the killer of his girlfriend’s granddaughter Tia Sharp, tried the same trick until changing his plea to guilty in mid trial.

In Bridger’s case it was nothing more than a cowardly attempt to waste court time and public money and put off the day he faced a life sentence, confining him to the same solitary cell conditions as Huntley himself.

His perverted sexual obsessions, the kidnap and murder of a little girl and his refusal to reveal where her remains lie assures that he will be a marked man inside.

In 2003 Huntley claimed there had been an accident in his bathroom so he panicked and both Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman ended up dead.

He bundled their bodies into the boot of his car, drove to a secluded spot and set fire to them in a ditch.

Nine years later, whatever happened to April Jones, Bridger clearly reacted in the same way, determined not to leave a scrap of evidence of his victim.

He said he had run over April when drunk, and in a daze picked her up, put her in his car and drove her to his house. After that somehow he remembers nothing, he said.

Bridger was a student of child murders, studying case histories on his laptop at home, particularly the Soham case which ended with a double life sentence for Huntley and a 40-year minimum term.

In 2005 a leaked sentencing watchdog report recommended that Huntley should “remain incarcerated for life”.

Huntley had successfully hidden his history of sex with underage girls in his home town on Humberside to get a job as a school caretaker in Cambridgeshire.

Similarly Bridger invented a totally fictitious past life to fool those he lived among when he moved hundreds of miles from London to Mid-Wales 23 years ago.

He claimed he had had a glittering career in the army and been an SAS-trained mercenary, even continuing with the fantasy after being arrested by the police.

As he was forced to admit by the time he got to court, he was nothing more than a failed firefighter and former welder and abattoir worker with a drink habit who had been on anti-depressants for the past 12 years.

Bridger spent two and a half days in the witness box presenting his collection of half-baked claims and flagrant lies.

Why did he have a stash of child porn on his laptop? He replied that he had accidentally stumbled on the images while looking for Spongebob Squarepants cartoons for his daughter.

Why did he have pictures of local girls, including April Jones and her sisters taken from Facebook? He said he had downloaded them for his children “at their request”.

“Were they for your sexual gratification? “No.”

“Have you ever had a sexual interest in young children?” “No.”

Why were saws, knives and hacksaws found in his living room? “I love my bushcraft,” he said, claiming he made knife handles and walking sticks in his living room.

Why did he keep two pairs of handcuffs? “Just decorative,” he replied.

Brought up in South London, he had fallen out with his parents when he got his girlfriend pregnant with his first child and went on to have six children by four different women.

He too had a criminal past, although it was for violence and not sexual offending.

He had appeared at the Old Bailey aged 19 charged with carrying a firearm and in 2004 he was convicted of threatening a police officer with a machete. Three years later he received a suspended sentence for punching a man in a row over a boiler.

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