Ian Huntley death: the summer we watched a senseless tragedy unfold in Soham

How the desperate search for two missing girls in 2002 and their now-dead killer claimed its place in the country’s museum of appalling crimes

The death of Ian Huntley is, perhaps, a moment to pause and remember, and not to dwell on the manner and circumstances of his killing.

August 2002 is the time to return to, and the place is Soham: a pretty Cambridgeshire village that few outside the county, and possibly many within it too, knew much about before that summer. Before it happened.

Two young girls go missing on a Sunday evening. It’s still light and warm. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman are 10 years old, best friends and having a great time. It’s a lovely day, there’s a barbecue. They are inseparable – chatting, playing at each other’s homes, listening to music, eating sweets.

They disappear sometime after 6pm.

As the evening closes in, their parents start to worry.

Sharon and Leslie Chapman and Kevin and Nicola Wells call each other. It’s getting late – are they with you?

And with a rising sense of panic, they call the police at just before 10pm.

Most inquiries of this kind end quickly.

The girls are found. They were at a friend’s house, watching TV or walking around the village. They had lost track of time.

There was no such easy explanation in this case, no moment of angry relief from their mums and dads when they popped their heads round the door.

They really had gone.

Over the coming days the focus of the police, the media and the country turned slowly and then more frantically to this village, and to a photograph of the two girls in their Manchester United shirts. Parents and families hugged their own children a little tighter as they waited for news.

This interest became an obsession; an obsession that, as days passed, was sadly inversely proportional to the hope that the girls could still be found safe and well.

The police operation kept expanding. Four hundred officers and countless volunteers were involved in the search; DCI Andy Hebb was leading them – a man whose anxious face and bloodshot eyes could not hide the agonies he was going through as the pressure mounted, and the pain of the girls’ parents became unbearable.

He didn’t know where the children were.

The journalists who followed him around to the daily briefings didn’t know.

But someone there, in the midst of us all, did know.

In the corner of our eyes, you’d catch a glimpse of him.

At the college where the press conferences were held, he’d be in our peripheral vision. We walked past his small, nondescript house to get there.

Small, nondescript Ian Huntley watched it all.

What was the caretaker thinking when he opened the doors to Soham village college to let us in?

Or when we asked, idly, why in the warmth of summer, the radiators in the classrooms were running so hot?

What went through his head when the police began digging at a site in nearby Newmarket Gallops, where a jogger had seen disturbed earth, and thought he might have heard screaming?

Huntley knew the various “sightings” of the girls were false, and that the jogger had inadvertently led the police to the wrong place.

Any relief the girls’ parents might have felt when Hebb announced they had found nothing at this woodland spot was probably momentary.

Their daughters were still missing.

In the media we suspected, but did not write, that after all this time, in all likelihood, they would not see them again.

Accidents rather than acts of evil are often the causes of death.

The simple rather than the sadistic. Mundane not murder.

At Soham, the worst-case scenarios did not cover the cruelty, physical and emotional, that Huntley inflicted on Holly and Jessica, and their parents.

He had killed their girls, who were walking past his ordinary little house that Sunday evening, and did something that was extraordinary in its heartlessness. He had taken them inside and, for reasons still unclear, he had attacked them.

It took almost two weeks before the secrets he had kept started to emerge.

The police arrested him and his girlfriend Maxine Carr and not long after, but entirely coincidentally, Holly and Jessica were found.

They were hidden in a ditch close to RAF Lakenheath, 10 miles away.

A forensic trail from their remains led detectives back to Soham, to that house, to his bathroom – to Huntley.

The summer of 2002 seems like a fever dream now. The police and the media have long gone.

Yet Soham has claimed its place in the country’s museum of appalling crimes.

And two parents, their families and their friends, have been left to grieve, and to try to make sense of it all.

Only Huntley knew what he was thinking. And now he has gone too.

Nick Hopkins was the Guardian’s crime correspondent in 2002 and was in Soham to cover the search