A grooming victim of Soham murderer Ian Huntley has spoken of her guilt after refusing to report the killer when he had sex with her at 15.
The Mirror reported that Emma Rawson admitted she lied to social services about her fling with “first love” Huntley seven years earlier. She said she feared her silence left him free to go on to kill Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002. Now 42, she was so under the spell of her manipulative lover she even lied to social workers who asked if she was having sex with him.
She said: "Had I said we were sleeping together, things might be different. I feel guilty, he’s evil.”
Ms Rawson said she became pregnant by the murdering monster but when she told him he gripped her by the throat and warned: “I’ll kill you.”
She started dating Huntley, now 47, in 1995 after being kicked out of her abusive family’s home. The mum-of-three said: “I’m sorry for lying to social services and saying we weren’t in a relationship. Had I said we were sleeping together, things might be different, he might not have been free to kill those girls. I feel guilty, I’m also angry that no-one stopped him. He’s evil. He’ll be grinning about how many lives he’s ruined. That’s the sort of person he is. He’s clever, manipulative. He preyed on me because I was vulnerable.”
Ms Rawson said that within weeks of moving in with former school caretaker Huntley and his then partner, he moved her to his mother’s home. She added: “He was a really, really nice guy. He couldn’t do enough for me. He said, ‘If you ever need to talk I’m always there for you'. For some reason we all slept in the same bed. It was just a living arrangement.
“The next thing I know he had split up with his girlfriend and we’d moved into his mum’s flat where he had a proper bedroom.”
She said that one time Huntley convinced her to play cards, which turned into a “strip game”, sparking a 12-month campaign of abuse. Ms Rawson continued: “All of sudden he just started kissing me. I had never been intimate with anyone before and I wasn’t expecting anything. I thought I was in love and this was a relationship. This guy had taken me in and I was super grateful to him. We’d hold hands down the street and go shopping together. He didn’t care that everyone knew he was with a 15-year-old.
“He was helping me. I had nothing, I had no clothes. His mum went out and bought me stuff. I felt fortunate. He never asked anything of me.”
Social workers reportedly later found themselves investigating a “rumour” that the teenager was sleeping with Huntley. But without the cooperation of her or her parents they were powerless to act.
Ms Rawson told how Huntley set up a bed for her in a spare room at the flat in Immingham, Lincolnshire, to dupe social services into thinking they were not together. She said: “It was so calculating. I was happy to go along with it, because I had a roof over my head and I was in love.
“It was easy to deceive social services. Easy. How can a 15-year-old girl make them believe I wasn’t in a sexual relationship? Looking back, the police should have been banging the door down. It was a missed opportunity to stop him."
Their relationship halted when Huntley began working at a Grimsby fish factory and came home one night to tell her: “I’ve met someone else.”
She said: “I thought everything was hunky dory. Then this woman moved in and I had to pretend that I was his sister. My heart ripped in two.” Weeks later Emma discovered she was carrying Huntley’s baby.
But when she told him he said: “If you spoil this for me, I’ll kill you." Emma then left the home but had a miscarriage. She said: “I’m very happy I lost the child. I wasn’t devastated. At that point I was 16 and pregnant to a scumbag. I hated him."“
Holly and Jessica, who were wearing replica Manchester United strips, disappeared at Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002. Huntley killed them after they called in to see his girlfriend Maxine Carr, a teaching assistant at their school. Carr was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for giving him a false alibi. She served 21 months.
Carr had bragged about how much she had meant to Holly especially, and showed off a card the girl had made for her on the last day of term. Two weeks later the girls’ burnt remains were discovered in a ditch at an air base 14 miles away at Mildenhall, Suffolk. Huntley was given life for the murders and told he would serve at least 40 years.
