Ian Huntley gave away his own guilt with seven chilling gestures

Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had their whole lives ahead of them when they were brutally murdered by their twisted school caretaker Ian Huntley.

The two 10-year-olds were the closest of friends and utterly inseparable, making the most of their summer holidays playing together and having fun.

On the day they disappeared, August 4, 2002, they had been attending a family barbecue at Holly's house before heading upstairs to play.

However, the popular schoolgirls fancied some treats from the vending machine at the nearby leisure centre and slipped out without Holly's parents realising they had gone.

It would prove to be the last time either Holly or Jessica would ever see their loved ones again.

As they made their way back towards Holly's home, they passed the house occupied by their school caretaker, Ian Huntley.

He spotted them and lured them inside his home, falsely claiming his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was there.

She was employed as a teaching assistant at Holly and Jessica's school and knew both girls well.

While the two young girls were inside, Huntley murdered them both and went on to hide their bodies.

Meanwhile, Holly's parents discovered the two best friends were no longer in the house and launched a frantic search to find them.

When Jessica failed to return home before her 8.30pm curfew, Nicola rang the Chapmans to establish whether the girls were there. Desperate to find the missing youngsters, both families reported Holly and Jessica to the police as missing.

A massive manhunt was launched, with more than 400 officers working relentlessly day and night to track down the two girls.

Alongside door-to-door enquiries, the entire surrounding area was thoroughly combed for any trace of the young girls.

Scores of local volunteers gave up their time, as did US Air Force personnel stationed at a nearby base.

Every registered sex offender across Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire was interviewed, yet investigators appeared no closer to finding the primary school pupils.

An extensive media campaign ensured Holly and Jessica remained front-page news and a fixture on every broadcast, and for 13 days, every possible lead was pursued.

Chillingly, Huntley himself was interviewed by journalists and even took part in the search for Holly and Jessica.

His girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who provided Huntley's alibi for the night the girls disappeared, was equally keen to court the media spotlight.

During one interview, she boasted about her apparent closeness to little Holly.

She showed reporters a card Holly had made for her on the last day of term, thanking her for being such a wonderful teaching assistant.

Speaking to a TV reporter, Carr said: "No one believes they would ever run away. They were very close to their families. This is something that I will keep for the rest of my life.

"It's what Holly gave me on the last day of term and there's a poem written inside saying 'to a special teaching assistant' and that we will miss her and we will see her in the future.

"That was the kind of girl she was, she was just really lovely."

Her chilling mistake was spotted almost instantly - she had spoken of Holly in the past tense.

Doubt started to grow around the pair, who were taken in for interrogation 12 days after Holly and Jessica disappeared.

The following day, a gamekeeper made a harrowing discovery - Holly and Jessica were found lying next to each other in a ditch near an RAF base in Suffolk, 10 miles from Soham.

And it was Huntley himself who unwittingly exposed his own culpability with merely seven gestures to police officers when he was taken in for questioning.

Body language specialist Cliff Lansley has revealed the subtle movements made by Huntley as he was questioned about his connection with Holly and Jessica.

Mr Lansley said: "There are multiple things wrong. He has clamped his hands. He is rubbing and manipulating his fingers to try and comfort himself.

"And his shoulder is raising slightly on the right-hand side. Then when he says, no, the volume of no comes down fifty percent and he synchronises his head one to two seconds afterwards.

"So, there are seven, eight indicators of deception here when he is using just three words." Mr Lansley also highlighted that Huntley's dishonesty was apparent when he "forgot to take the sad expression off his face".

He added: "Indicator two, he is contradicting these affirmative statements with a slight head shake, no.

"And in addition, we have got gestural leakage from his shoulder it is raising a couple of millimetres on his right-hand side which contradicts the positive, affirmative statements he is making. That is a strong signal of deception."

Dawn Archer, a specialist in verbal communication, saw Huntley was "very good at using the truth and then using it to his advantage".

She explained: "The most convincing way to tell a credible lie is to stick closely to the truth.

"This is somebody that history has shown got away with lying for a long time and got away with being abusive for a long time.

"And I think people who get away with that kind of behaviour believe they won't be caught. So they have a certain level of confidence when they tell their lies."

Forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes claims Huntley had been planning his assault "for some time".

She said: "There was no planning on the part of Huntley in terms of him not knowing that Holly and Jessica were going to arrive that day.

"He's already assaulted young girls, so he's rehearsed it behaviourally. So, this isn't something that comes out of the blue.

"This is something that's been in the back of his mind, maybe in the forefront of his mind, for some time." On August 20, Huntley was charged with two counts of murder, while Carr faced charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

She was subsequently charged with two counts of assisting an offender.

Huntley was handed a minimum 40-year sentence before he can be considered for parole, while Carr received a three-and-a-half year term.

Huntley died on March 7 after having his life support switched off. He had been attacked by a fellow inmate in HMP Frankland on February 26.