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Huntley: The child he has never seen

Nick Allen,Crime Correspondent,Pa News
Wednesday 17 December 2003 01:00 GMT

Ian Huntley has a five-year-old child he has never seen.

She was born following his turbulent relationship with a teenage girl who was eight years younger than him.

The mother moved in with Huntley when she was only 15 and he was 23.

They split up before the girl was born as Huntley turned into a violent abuser.

Soon after the teenager fled from him, Huntley was charged with raping another 18-year-old woman near Hollywoods nightclub in Grimsby.

The charge was later dropped but the girl, by now a mother, and her family decided not to allow Huntley to see the child.

He was not named on the birth certificate and has had no contact with his daughter, although his father Kevin has seen her.

The child, who has now started school, has been described by friends of the mother as "a lovely little girl".

Huntley met the teenager while he was working for her mother in Lincolnshire seaside resort, in a job which involved collecting money for charity.

He would go door-to-door to pick up payments for scratchcards which raised funds for the local group which helped disabled youngsters.

At one point Huntley lived in a caravan in the teenager's mother's garden.

He met the teenager after the breakdown of his marriage to Claire Evans, who went on to marry Huntley's brother Wayne.

The girl, who was still at school, became infatuated with the older man.

Her family and friends initially saw nothing wrong with Huntley but he then began to show his manipulative, aggressive side.

The teenager ran away from home and moved into a dingy bedsit in the resort with him.

But Huntley became a control freak and hit her. He also encouraged her to stop going to school, and she left before her GCSE exams.

Instead, she went to work at a local fish packing factory.

At one point the couple moved in with Huntley's mother Lynda Nixon near Grimsby, spending several months there before returning to the resort town.

As the relationship turned sour, and Huntley tried to stop the teenager seeing her family, there was a series of huge rows.

On one occasion she burned a pizza and Huntley slapped her.

She eventually fled from the flat following a bust-up, calling her father from a telephone box to come and rescue her.

Maxine Carr later revealed when she was interviewed by police that Huntley still wanted to see his daughter.

She said that after Huntley was charged with rape it was the teenager's mother - the child's grandmother - who stopped him seeing his child.

Carr told officers: "That was it. You know, 'he's not having anything to do with my granddaughter, he's never seeing her again, blah blah blah', and she was forever ringing the press up and saying he shouldn't be around here, even though he got let off.

"It bothers him, because he wants to see his daughter."

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