Ian Huntley dies: Families of Holly and Jessica now from marriage struggle to grandkids

Soham killer Ian Huntley is now confirmed dead after he was beaten in prison last week. The criminal, who was a school caretaker found guilty of murdering two ten-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in 2002, was attacked with a metal bar by a fellow inmate in a maximum security jail's workshop. It is understood that he was left severely ill following the attack.

Durham Constabulary said on Sunday that his condition was unchanged following the attack on Thursday, February 26. Triple killer Anthony Russell, 43, is suspected of being responsible for the attack. The incident happened at County Durham's infamous HMP Frankland, which is known as the 'Monster Mansion'. Huntley has been assaulted a number of times during his prison time. He had been previously doused with boiling water and slashed across the neck. The families of the two young girls have had to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives following Huntley's violent crime. Holly and Jessica vanished during a family barbecue in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham on August 4, 2002.

They were never seen alive again. Huntley was among the people to help search parties looking for the girls. He was a caretaker at a local school and was 28 years old at the time.

It later came to light that Huntley, who has a daughter himself, enticed the girls into his home, telling them that his girlfriend, teaching assistant Maxine Carr, was there. He then murdered them, concealed their bodies and attempted to dispose of their matching Man Utd shirts at his workplace.

In August of the same year, Huntley was charged with two counts of murder and, in December 2003, was handed two life sentences, with a minimum term of 40 years behind bars.

Sharon and Leslie Chapman, Jessica's parents, have rarely spoken about the experience and their life after the terrible ordeal. However, Holly's parents, Kevin and Nicola Wells, have spoken about it.

The couple appeared in the 2012 ITV documentary, Soham: A Parents' Tale, which aired ten years following the brutal murder. Kevin revealed that he thought he and his wife might separate after the ordeal.

"She [Nicola] was lost in a kind of wilderness, whereas I was more hard-line about my emotions. For the first five months after Holly died, we broke down together, but after that, we processed our grief at different speeds. It was one, almost two years before we found each other again, but grief gives you a different sense of the passage of time, and it slipped by unnoticed."

He continued: "They say 95 per cent of the parents of murdered children split up. We were determined to be among the five per cent who survive, but for a year, perhaps 18 months, I couldn't reach my wife."

The family eventually moved out of their home as they found the memories of Holly too painful.

They also had to sell Kevin's business at a loss as it was struggling. They were also forced to remortgage their house and accept £6,000 from a charity to cover bills.

However, they eventually managed to get back on their feet. In 2005, Kevin launched his contract cleaning business from scratch. He was eventually joined by his 12-year-old son Oliver.

"Getting back to work was not just about money in the bank, it was also about what it represented – an everyday life, a familiar pattern, some kind of control," he said. In 2012, he ran the London Marathon in memory of his daughter and her best friend.

He raised almost £8,000 for the Grief Encounter Project, which helped the family following Holly's brutal killing. Additionally, the family eventually moved back into their Soham home.

In 2015, Kevin said during an interview with Good Morning Britain: "We still think of Holly every day; we have her pictures in and around the house, but it's not a shrine - we don't live in the past."

He added: "Murder has the capacity to destroy more lives than the one taken. I recognised that from the start, so I tried to take control, to make plans and to exert positive thought. I clung to my family, my community, my work, sometimes to God and sometimes to a late-night tumbler of whisky. I chose to believe in the future, a future that I could craft from the life we once had. Really, all I wanted was for us to be the ones who'd make it out the other side."

Holly's brother Oliver opened up about the loss in 2012, when he himself had two children. He revealed: "I wish I could see her now, see what she'd have looked like. We do chat about her quite regularly, which I think is a very nice thing. It's strange being three of us, when there used to be a fourth."

Jessica's parents have kept a low profile, but did release a statement on the tenth anniversary of their daughter's death. They announced their support for police plans to create a national database for sex offenders. "We hope [the database’s] use will mean other families don’t suffer the same loss and heartbreak as we did," they said.