Jessica Chapman

**Jessica Chapman** (September 1, 1991 - August 4, 2002) was a British girl.

## Disappearance and Discovery

At 11:45 a.m. on Sunday, 4 August 2002, Jessica Chapman left her home in Brook Street, Soham, to attend a barbecue at the home of her best friend, Holly Wells, in nearby Redhouse Gardens. Prior to leaving her home, Chapman informed her parents of her intention to also give her friend a necklace engraved with the letter *H* she had purchased for her on a recent family holiday to Menorca.

The two girls and a friend named Natalie Parr played computer games and listened to music for approximately half an hour before Parr returned home. By 3:15 p.m., both girls had changed into distinctive replica Manchester United football shirts: one of which belonged to Wells; the other to her older brother, Oliver. At 5:04 p.m., a photograph of the two friends was taken by Wells' mother before the children ate dinner with the other house guests. They then returned to playing in Wells' bedroom at approximately 6:10 p.m.

At approximately 6:15 p.m., the two girls left the Wells residence without informing any of the house guests to purchase sweets from a vending machine at the local sports centre. While returning to 4 Redhouse Gardens, Wells and Chapman walked past the College Close home of Ian Huntley, the senior caretaker at the local secondary school. Huntley evidently lured the girls into his house, stating that his girlfriend, Maxine Carr—the girls' teaching assistant at St Andrew's Primary School—was also present in the house; Carr was in fact visiting her mother in Grimsby, Lincolnshire on this date.

The precise chain of events to occur after the girls entered 5 College Close is unknown, although investigators believe sections of Huntley's later claims in initial interviews granted to the media prior to his arrest and his later trial testimony—such as that he had been cleaning his dog at the time the girls passed by his house at approximately 6:30 p.m. and that one girl had been suffering from a mild nosebleed—may have actually been true. In any event, the cause of death of both girls was later ruled to be asphyxiation. Chapman's Nokia mobile phone was switched off at 6:46 p.m.

At 8:00 p.m., Nicola Wells entered her daughter's bedroom to invite the girls to say goodbye to her house guests, only to discover both children were missing from their home. Alarmed, she and her husband, Kevin, searched their house and nearby streets. Minutes after their daughter's 8:30 p.m. curfew had expired, Nicola Wells phoned the Chapman residence to determine if the girls were at this location, only to learn Leslie and Sharon Chapman were becoming concerned why their youngest daughter had not returned home. Following subsequent frantic efforts by the families of both girls to locate their daughters, Wells and Chapman were reported missing by their parents at 9.55 p.m.

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.