Soham murderer Ian Huntley died from ‘blunt head injury’, inquest told

An inquest into the death of the Soham murderer, Ian Huntley, has heard he was struck over the head multiple times with a metal bar in prison.

Huntley, 52, was an inmate in the maximum security prison HMP Frankland in Durham, where he was allegedly attacked in a workshop on 26 February.

The double child killer was put on life support in hospital and died on 7 March.

Jeremy Chipperfield, a senior coroner sitting in Crook, County Durham, on Tuesday formally opened and adjourned the inquest into Huntley’s death. The proceedings took less than five minutes.

The coroner’s officer Bradley King said, after a postmortem conducted by Dr Jennifer Bolton, that the provisional cause of death was “blunt head injury".

He said: “I understand the circumstances to be that Mr Huntley was struck over the head multiple times by another prisoner with an object described as a metal bar.

“The assault left Mr Huntley with significant head injuries. He would later pass away at the Royal Victoria Infirmary hospital in Newcastle on 7 March 2026.”

After Huntley’s death the Ministry of Justice said his crime “remains one of the most shocking and devastating cases in our nation’s history, and our thoughts are with their families”.

Huntley abducted and murdered two 10-year-old best friends, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The girls disappeared in August 2002 after leaving a family barbecue in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham. It was thought that, without telling their parents, they were on their way to buy sweets.

The resulting search dominated headlines, with about 400 police officers assigned full-time to the case. Investigators questioned every registered sex offender in Cambridgeshire and neighbouring Lincolnshire.

The photograph of the two girls taken shortly before they went missing, smiling and wearing Manchester United football shirts, is still vividly remembered more than two decades after their murders.

Their were found a fortnight later hidden in a ditch close to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, 10 miles away. Huntley, a school caretaker, was arrested the same day.

At his trial, Huntley tried to argue that the girls died accidentally but the Old Bailey jury rejected his testimony and found him guilty of murder. He was jailed for life with a recommended minimum term of 40 years.

His girlfriend, Maxine Carr, gave him a false alibi and was jailed for 21 months for perverting the course of justice. She is now living under a new identity.

After Huntley’s trial, Jessica’s father, Leslie Chapman, said: “I think he was a timebomb waiting to go off, and both our girls were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope the next time I see him, it will be like we saw our daughters – and it will be in a coffin.”

The prison where Huntley died, HMP Frankland, opened in 1983 and is a category A prison, meaning it has the highest level of security.

It holds more than 800 male prisoners over the age of 21, including high-risk remand prisoners and category A inmates thought to pose the greatest threat to the public, police or national security. Many are serving life sentences and whole-life tariffs. They include convicted terrorists, murderers and sex offenders.

Among the current inmates are thought to be the serial killer Levi Bellfield; the Soho nailbomber David Copeland; and Wayne Couzens, the Metropolitan police officer who raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021.

Previous inmates have included Charles Bronson, Peter Sutcliffe and Harold Shipman.

Anthony Russell, 43, has been charged with murdering Huntley and is due to appear at Newcastle crown court on 24 April for a pre-trial preparation hearing.