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Joe Vialls — Aug 24, 2002 Updated Nov 6, 2013

British Police torture least likely suspects Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr from Soham Village, while deliberately ignoring thousands of more likely suspects from nearby American Air Force bases

ian Huntley

Ian Huntley

Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi

Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi

Maxine Carr

Maxine Carr

Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi (pictured right) from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to forcibly sodomizing and then murdering an 11-year-old girl during early 2000.
When British police arrested Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr [pictured left and centre above] during the early hours of Saturday 17 August, on suspicion of the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, they did so in the certain knowledge that absolutely no hard evidence existed incriminating either suspect. The reason for the rapid arrests was very simple: Just hours earlier, two small bodies had been found near the perimeter fence at USAF Lakenheath, and the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street was terrified of a massive political scandal involving American servicemen based in, or transiting through, the United Kingdom.
Shortly after the arrests, British and American media organizations demonized Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr so successfully that public attention was diverted away from Lakenheath completely, and focused instead on the young couple from Soham who had earlier willingly spoken to television crews about their concerns for the well being of the two missing 10-year-old girls. Both knew the girls reasonably well. Ian Huntley was the caretaker at their school, and Maxine Carr was a former teaching auxiliary in their class.
Millions of viewers around the world watched Ian and Maxine being interviewed by the media, and most were impressed by the openness of their statements and their genuine willingness to help if possible. Experts in non-verbal communication also noticed that Ian and Maxine’s involuntary body and eye movements perfectly matched what they were saying verbally to the journalists.
In other words, both appeared to be telling the truth both verbally and non-verbally, an almost impossible feat for even a trained liar to fabricate. It is critical to note here also that both came across on television as perfectly normal, sane individuals, a reality later to be inexplicably challenged by police and psychiatrists in Cambridgeshire.
If Huntley and Carr had been involved at all with the abduction and murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, would they have then been stupid enough to run the gauntlet of about 10,000 American servicemen en-route, and dump the two small bodies in a location clearly visible from Lakenheath Control Tower, taxi track, and main runway? A serviceman with detailed knowledge of activities and procedures inside the base might get away with it unseen, but certainly not two civilians from Soham in Cambridgeshire. So the perimeter would be an ideal dumping ground for American servicemen eager to return to safe territory at USAF Lakenheath before either entering their barracks on the base, or catching a shuttle bus to USAF Mildenhall.
Location of the girl's bodies

Location of the girl’s bodies

In an attempt to demonize Ian Huntley still further, police “leaked” the damning information that he had been arrested for rape a number of years earlier. Well, yes, almost. While still a teenager Huntley had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was only 15-years-old at the time, an offence in the United Kingdom known as statutory rape. He was never charged with an offence however, and his former girlfriend [now age 21 years] recently confirmed it was a mutual crush [love affair], with enthusiastic sexual consent on both sides.
So for a while at least, police and media have managed to deflect attention away from the two massive nearby USAF bases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and the political minefield lurking just below the surface if the British public ever find out about the very large numbers of children abused, raped, and sometimes murdered by American servicemen on overseas duty. So let us properly consider the “American Connection”, before returning later in this report to the unbelievable ongoing psychological abuse of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr.
Though earlier in the investigation police declared they would be interviewing “700 known sex offenders” of British nationality, there was no mention of interviewing the 10,000+ US servicemen based in close proximity to Soham Village, or determining which other American servicemen has transited through the two bases, and on which flights, since Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman first disappeared.
The simple fact that Holly and Jessica’s bodies were found within yards of the USAF Lakenheath perimeter fence, which in turn provides access to the American barracks within, should have had British police knocking on Lakenheath’s front door immediately. Unfortunately, any such action might have accidentally undermined Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal slavish dedication to George W Bush’s “War on Terror.”
Though most members of the American military are unquestionably nice people, the small number who are not, are invariably psychotic savages. It is a matter of public record that many American servicemen have habitually carried out sickening attacks against civilians while on overseas duty, happy in the knowledge that the serious assault or murder of women or girls in Japan, Kosovo or England, carries a lesser penalty than at home.
One such case is that of Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi, who on 24 August 2000 pleaded guilty to sodomizing and killing an 11-year-old Kosovar girl in January the same year. A member of his platoon testified that Staff Sergeant Ronghi disdainfully claimed, “It’s easy to get away with this shit in a third-world country.”
The “shit” Ronghi referred to is described here by the US Army Pathologist for Europe. “Her right jaw was fractured, practically bisected,” said Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen Ingwersen, “We found evidence of sperm and semen in her vagina, mouth and rectum,” she testified to a hushed hearing. “There was trauma to the neck muscles, the trachea and the carotid artery,” Colonel Ingwersen said, adding she had found evidence of “blunt trauma” as the child was apparently beaten, choked and forced to kneel, face to the ground, as she was sodomized.
But in a perverse way Ronghi was proved right about the overall American perception of the “lesser worth” of women and children, in what he and others continually refer to as the third world. At his trial the Staff Sergeant was sentenced to life imprisonment, despite the fact that an identical offence against an American woman in the USA, would have resulted in his execution.
It would be impossible to list here all such vile attacks against “locals” by American servicemen overseas because there have been far too many. However, in order to educate the British police [who mercifully are rarely exposed to similar atrocities in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk] it seems prudent to mention a handful, thereby proving that Staff Sergeant Ronghi is far from being an isolated case.
In 1955, an American soldier was sentenced to death for the murder of a six-year-old Okinawan girl, a sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment. During 1966 a US soldier confessed to strangling a young waitress. Then in 1972, US soldiers were sentenced to life imprisonment for strangling local women. Later In 1975, a US soldier was sent to prison for raping two junior high school students. Local Okinawan police arrested two US soldiers during 1985 in the act of raping a woman.
During a spate of crimes in 1995, a US soldier was arrested for the hammering death of a young woman., two children were killed by a drunken soldier, and three US soldiers brutally raped a young schoolgirl. In January 2000 a US seaman was sentenced for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old Japanese girl. Remember this is only a small part of the overall list, nor does it include the many more alleged perpetrators who Japanese and other authorities claim were “spirited out of the country and back to the USA” before they could be apprehended and charged.
The last point to consider before returning to the plight of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, is the strange fate of four wives at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the former home base of Staff Sergeant Ronghi. All four wives were allegedly killed by their Sergeant husbands when they returned from active duty in Afghanistan, during the same week that Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing. US Army authorities are currently trying to establish whether or not an anti-malarial drug all were taking contributed to the murders. The drug is acknowledged to have extra-pyramidal psychotic side-effects, and is prescribed to all US Servicemen in Afghanistan.
There are no direct flights out of Afghanistan to the USA, meaning that all American servicemen including those seriously affected by the drug, and also affected by PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are obliged to change aircraft either in Germany or in England – normally at USAF Mildenhall. As a matter of urgency the British public should shame their local police into establishing accurately how many of these servicemen transited through USAF Mildenhall and USAF Lakenheath during the week that Holly and Jessica vanished.
USAF Lakenheath aerial photo. Click to enlarge

USAF Lakenheath aerial photo. Click to enlarge

Initially on Saturday 17 August, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested “on suspicion” of being involved in the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Each was taken to a different police station in Cambridgeshire for interrogation, which is standard police procedure. However, this is also the point at which standard police procedure vanished completely. Obviously Ian and Maxine were determined to protest their innocence, and refused to provide police with a convenient “confession”, no matter how tired they were, and no matter how much extreme pressure was applied by the big burly threatening policemen. There was also a marked absence of defence lawyers making statements on behalf of the suspects.
USAF Lakenheath perimeter fence. Click to enlarge

USAF Lakenheath perimeter fence. Click to enlarge

In an extraordinary move, police then applied to a “Closed Court” for an extension of Huntley and Carr’s detention, though the reasons were not made public. There was actually no need for police to provide us with a reason, because it was blatantly obvious they still had absolutely nothing to connect the two suspects with the two murders. If at that stage police had any hard evidence linking Ian Huntley or Maxine Carr to the murders, or had managed to coerce a confession out of either, they would have been charged immediately.
Then on Tuesday 20 August, just twenty-four hours before the legally extended detention was due to expire at 6.19 am on Wednesday, a complete team of psychiatrists appeared as if by magic, and deemed that Ian Huntley was unfit to appear in court. He was then “sectioned” under the Mental Health Act 1983 and remanded to Rampton high-security psychiatric hospital, at Retford in North Nottinghamshire, without being charged with any offence.
Now think about this carefully people, think about it! When we all saw Ian Huntley on international television he was entirely coherent and unquestionably sane. But apparently, after a mere three days in police custody, he became insane. How? Did the police deprive him of sleep and induce a [predictable and natural] nervous breakdown, or are the all-too-convenient government psychiatrists a pack of liars? You choose…
One thing is certain. We have all just watched the gross violation of Ian Huntley’s legal and human rights on international television, and we have done absolutely nothing about it. Ask yourself: Is it even legal to section a man in England under the Mental Health Act before he is charged? When asked this precise question, Dr Harris of Rampton Psychiatric Hospital was evasive, replying, “It is not unheard of, but it is very unusual.”
Once inside the terrifying Rampton building, a Victorian hulk originally founded as an asylum in 1912 under the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1860, police charged Ian Huntley with murder. He is now at the mercy of a five-man psychiatric team who will assess his “symptoms” night and day over the next month, and shove him full of God-knows-what medication. This is the Gulag Archipelago all over again, and Joe Stalin would have loved it.
If, after a full month at the hands of the medical nutters in Rampton, Ian Huntley should choose to “confess” to everything including the murder of the Princess of Wales, try not to believe him. Stalin’s enemies used to confess all the time in the Gulag, but only after being pumped full of Reserpine by the shrinks.
The next problem for police was Maxine Carr. Clearly no-one would believe that two people had suddenly gone completely insane in police custody at the same time, so senior officers in Cambridgeshire [and at the Home Office] had to think of something a little more creative. They knew Huntley and Carr were both were innocent of course, but somehow Maxine had to be brought under control. In other words Maxine Carr had to be so badly frightened that she would be positively eager to “cooperate” with police when the drugged, perhaps electro-shocked and certainly docile Ian Huntley was finally paraded in front of the courts.
So police formally charged Maxine Carr with “attempting to pervert the course of justice”, i.e. lying to police whether she had or not, and quietly arranged to have her incarcerated in the most brutal and terrifying of Britain’s women’s’ prisons, at Holloway in London. “Attempting to pervert” is not a violent crime requiring a high security establishment of course, and there were certainly prisons closer to Soham, but only Holloway would have the desired devastating effect on Maxine, hopefully bringing her under immediate control.
Although the Victorian Holloway was replaced in a phased rebuilding programme between 1975 and 1985, it has managed to retain its brutal reputation. In 1995 Sir David Ramsbotham, then inspector of prisons, walked out in disgust at the conditions he found inside. He noted that 75% of women at the jail were suffering from some form of identifiable mental disorder, while one in 10 was suicidal. Almost half were drug addicts in need of immediate detoxification, while more than half had serious alcohol problems and nearly 95% were on sleeping pills.
Naturally enough, on its own this would be quite enough to send a quiet country girl like Maxine insane in weeks, but the British authorities wanted to make absolutely sure. So before she left for London, police arranged a court hearing for her in the local town of Peterborough, and made sure the media and “rent a mob” people knew about its exact timing well in advance.
Orwellian media "Rent a Mob" frightening innocent Maxine Carr outside Peterborough Court

Orwellian media “Rent a Mob” frightening innocent Maxine Carr outside Peterborough Court

As the police van approached the court, the commotion started for the innocent woman not yet convicted of any offence at all. Unseen hands banged on the metal van, and several females led an ugly chorus, jeering and shouting at a woman they could not see – a thick grey blanket had been placed over Maxine Carr’s head – for a double murder with which she has not even been charged. “Evil bitch”, screamed one. “Sick cow,” spat another. In the melee, a woman and her two daughters unfurled a home-made banner. “Rot in hell forever”, it said.
The scene outside Peterborough Crown Court

The scene outside Peterborough Crown Court

Trial by television media had well and truly started, and the trembling Maxine Carr had not yet even reached that special part of hell called Holloway. But a week or two in there with the deranged and the druggies should have her “cooperating” with anything and everything the Cambridgeshire Police Service wants.
But is that really the point here? The Chief Constable and all of his officers at Cambridgeshire Constabulary should be mortally ashamed of their blatant abuse of police powers, abuse of the judicial process, and abuse of the Mental Health Act. In turn it goes almost without saying that we the public should not believe a word of any subsequent “confession” that Maxine Carr is coerced into making, during or after her terrifying ordeal at Holloway.
Nor should we necessarily believe that the little Cambridgeshire Constabulary [1,307 proud officers and still recruiting] had the overall power to pull off these impressive stunts without some very heavy political assistance. Think about it carefully. The original players in a tight little Cambridgeshire county investigation have been scattered to the four winds. Ian Huntley is 100 miles away to the north in Rampton, Nottinghamshire, and Maxine Carr is 100 miles away to the south in Holloway, London. The bodies of the girls were actually found in Suffolk, directly involving a third force, the Suffolk Constabulary. And oh, yes, police investigators from the Norfolk Constabulary did quite a lot of the leg work on this case.
So the Cambridgeshire Holly and Jessica Case, is no longer really the Cambridgeshire Holly and Jessica case at all, is it? The only people who will know exactly what is going on in London, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire in the future, will be the small group of powerful manipulators who set the scene. This is the same small group who had sufficient power to arrange special closed courts, send a truckload of wobbly shrinks to Cambridgeshire, subvert the Mental Health Act, and personally arrange the twin hells of Rampton and Holloway for suspects Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr. Believe me, only senior bureaucrats at the Home Office in London have sufficient raw power to arrange all of this.
There is a final point to consider about the case itself. A newspaper report states “The bodies of murdered 10-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were discovered in a ‘severely decomposed and partially skeletonised’ state, and the pair were almost certainly not killed where they were discovered, a coroner’s inquest was told yesterday. Their remains were found last Saturday in woodlands outside a United States air base at Lakenheath, Suffolk.” Even now, the cause or place of death cannot be established, and the Coroner has released the bodies to the parents for burial.
The reason for the importance of this statement will be obvious to residents in the Lakenheath area, whose local newspapers have saturated them for weeks with the information that Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr once lived years ago in a house owned by relatives less than a half-mile away from where the bodies were found. So this information allowing police to “point the finger” at the pair has long been in the public domain, and would be of enormous value to anyone wishing to deflect attention away from the real killers. Adding real substance to this claim is the fact that the path beside which the bodies were located is well used by walkers, but the bodies were not “found” until the very morning of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr’s arrests.
Now ask yourself what you would do if you were Ian Huntley and had really been involved in the murder of the two little girls. Would you deliberately move their bodies close to a residence that you had lived in some years before, thereby tacitly pointing the finger of guilt at yourself, or would you move the bodies well away from any such residence? You choose, though even a deranged person in Holloway should be able to select the correct answer to this elementary question.
Taking the opposite view, what would you do if you were a deranged American serviceman who managed to smuggle the two little girls inside USAF Lakenheath, and then murdered them at some remote location inside the very large airfield boundary, with its multitude of convenient empty buildings? Would you leave the bodies where they lay until the smell of putrefaction attracted the attention of the Military Police at the base, or would you toss the pathetic remains over the perimeter fence one dark night, as close as possible to the former Huntley residence you learned about in the local Suffolk newspaper, and then tip off police? Once again, you choose.
No matter what you choose and no matter what you think, it will probably make no difference to the final outcome. The atmosphere surrounding this case is so heavily laden with political fog that you could cut it with a knife. At the national level you cannot afford to rock the boat because of Tony Blair’s “special relationship” with the White House, and all this entails for his personal prestige and the “War on Terror”. That said, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie is apparently a leading human rights lawyer, who might decide to take independent personal action where this gross abuse of human rights in her own back yard is concerned.
At the county level you cannot rock the boat because, as the Chamber of Commerce will eagerly explain, those thousands of nice American servicemen at USAF Lakenheath and USAF Mildenhall spend millions of pounds each year with local businesses in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. You remember the people at the Chamber of Commerce don’t you? Masons, Rotarians, Buffs and the rest, guzzling free Budweiser Beer at the Lakenheath Officer’s Club, while looking down their noses at the Base Commander.
If you live in Britain and really care about legal and human rights for everyone including Ian Huntley, Maxine Carr, your own children and yourself, there is probably only one thing you can do: Call or fax the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire Constabulary, expressing your disgust at the actions of his officers where this matter is concerned, and seeking his personal assurance that the illegal and immoral psychological assault on Huntley and Carr will be discontinued immediately.
Though it may seem pointless phoning or writing to a Chief Constable who is visibly not really in charge of events, he is nonetheless the only visible “front end” who can be directly and officially approached on the matter. If you keep pressing the right buttons often enough, you can and will make a difference. More than a decade ago matters were seriously mismanaged in a case involving myself, and I took exactly this action. The last time I bothered to check, I still held the record for receiving three written apologies in a single week regarding the same mismanaged case: The first was from the Home Office, the second from Special Branch, and the third from the Chief Constable of Suffolk Constabulary. If I can make a difference, so can you. Get on with it!

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