Holly Wells’ Parents Fought To Stay Together After Her Murder

Two decades ago, 10-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered by their school caretaker Ian Huntley. The killer’s girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who was the girls’ teaching assistant, was jailed for giving him a false alibi. A new Channel 5 documentary Soham: The Murder of Holly & Jessica dives into what happened immediately after their parents declared them missing, and how they achieved justice when Huntley was sentenced to two life sentences. But where are Holly & Jessica’s families now?

Ten years after the murders, in 2012, Holly’s parents Kevin and Nicola Wells opened up about the death of their daughter for the first time, via the Daily Mail. The Wells family had moved out of the house they raised Holly and her younger brother Oliver in, as the memories were too painful. Kevin and Nicola never sold the property, though, and plan on moving back. “Today I accept there was nothing more or different as a parent I could have done to change the outcome,” Kevin said at the time. “Grief does not diminish, but you can manage the intensity and learn to live with it.”

While Kevin and Nicola have remained together since the unimaginable death of their daughter, they struggled for quite some time. “For the first five months after Holly died we broke down together, but after that we processed our grief at different speeds,” Kevin told the Evening Standard. “It was one, almost two years before we found each other again,” he continued, “but grief gives you a different sense of the passage of time and it slipped by unnoticed.” As Kevin says in the ITV documentary, he and Nicola were “determined to be among the 5 per cent” of couples who stay together following the bereavement of a murdered child.

As for Holly’s younger brother Oliver, who was six-years-old at the time of her murder, he’s gone on to have a family of his own with his partner Lydia. They have two children together, and Oliver regularly speaks about his sister to keep her memory alive. “I wish I could see her now, see what she’d have looked like,” he is quoted as telling RadioTimes in 2012 , prior to having his own kids. “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 Chapman’s parents, Leslie and Sharon, have rarely spoken publicly about the murder. However, ten years after their daughter’s death, they gave a statement in support of 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 per the Evening Standard.