page_title: Soham murders
section_title: Discoveries
hierarchical_section_title: Soham murders / Arrest / Discoveries
caption_attribution_description: English: Ely Cathedral (Cathedral of the Holy Trinity)This is a photo of listed building number 1331690.
context_page_description: The Soham Murders are the murders of two 10-year-old girls which occurred in Soham, Cambridgeshire, England on 4 August 2002. The victims, Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Aimee Chapman, were lured into the home of a local resident, Ian Kevin Huntley, who subsequently murdered the children—likely via asphyxiation—before disposing of their bodies in an irrigation ditch close to RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk. The girls' bodies were discovered on 17 August 2002.
  Huntley was convicted of the murder of both girls on 17 December 2003 and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, with the High Court later imposing a minimum term of 40 years. His girlfriend, Maxine Ann Carr—the girls' teaching assistant—had knowingly provided Huntley with a false alibi. She received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for conspiring with Huntley to pervert the course of justice.
  The efforts made to locate Wells and Chapman in the thirteen days of their disappearance have been described as one of the most intense and extensive in British criminal history.
context_section_description: At approximately 12:30 p.m. on 17 August, a 48-year-old gamekeeper named Keith Pryer discovered the bodies of both girls lying side by side in a five feet deep irrigation ditch close to a pheasant pen near the perimeter fence of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk; a location more than 10 miles east of Soham. Pryer had noticed what he later described as an "unusual and unpleasant smell" in the vicinity several days earlier; when returning to the area with two friends on 17 August, he had decided to investigate the cause of this odour. Walking through an overgrown verge approximately 600 yards from a partially tarmacked road, Pryer and one of his companions, Adrian Lawrence, discovered the children's bodies. Immediately upon viewing the corpses, Lawrence turned in the direction of his girlfriend, Helen Sawyer, and shouted: "Don't come any closer, Helen! Get back in the van!" Lawrence immediately reported the discoveries to police.
  Both girls had been missing for thirteen days when their bodies were found, and both corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition. In an apparent effort to destroy forensic evidence, the murderer or murderers had attempted to burn both bodies. In addition, no clear footprints were discovered at the crime scene.
  Despite the perpetrator(s) efforts to destroy evidence and hinder identification, investigators rapidly deduced who the two victims most likely were, and that both had not died at the location of their discovery. Numerous hairs later determined to belong to Chapman were also discovered on a tree branch close to the location of the girls' bodies.
  The following day, a Cambridgeshire Deputy Chief Constable named Keith Hodder released a press statement to the media confirming the discovery of the children's bodies, adding that both families had been informed of the developments and that although positive formal identification would take several days, investigators were as "certain as [they] possibly could be" the bodies were those of Wells and Chapman.
caption: Ely Cathedral. A service to remember and celebrate the lives of the children was held at this location on 30 August 2002[96]
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