My dad Ian Huntley sends me dark letters from jail & haunts every second of my life – I can't bear looking in the mirror
DEVIL'S DAUGHTER My dad Ian Huntley sends me dark letters from jail & haunts every second of my life – I can't bear looking in the mirror
LOOKING in the mirror each morning, Samantha Bryan can barely stand it as she sees the eyes of a murderer staring back.
As the traumatised daughter of Soham killer Ian Huntley, just getting through each day is a struggle as she discovers dark new details about her dad and receives twisted letters from him in jail.
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Samantha Bryan is the daughter of killer Ian Huntley
Credit: Glen Minikin
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Evil Huntley has written to Samantha from his cell
Credit: Rex Features
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The sicko murdered 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002
Credit: Collect
Desperate for answers over what drove the former school caretaker to kill 10-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002, Samantha, 28, sent her father a letter over a year ago asking to meet him.
Out of the blue, months later, in neat, black biro he wrote back, heartlessly accusing her of "insincere motives", adding: 'You are still my daughter for whom I have much love. With Love, Ian'.
Care worker Samantha, of Cleethorpes, North East Lincs, has now written to her 'monster' dad one last time asking to meet, explaining it would help her to process a lifetime of trauma that has left her struggling with anxiety and depression.
Speaking to The Sun for our Meeting a Monster series, she says: 'When I first read Ian's letter I was angry, frustrated and upset.
"He told me he loved me as his daughter.
'I felt, 'you have no right to say that'.
'At the time it was so difficult to read. I felt so many emotions.
'All I could think about was how many times over the years he's wished me well but he's still denying that one thing that could really help me move forward.
'How can he say that he loves me when he has not done the one thing that will allow me to move forward with my life?
'Which is to finally reveal the truth.
'I hoped he would agree to meet me. I have written one last time to ask for that. It would really help me to process everything and to try to move forward.'
Why I want to meet my monster dad Ian Huntley
Samantha was 14 years old when she discovered who her father was after she was asked to research "notorious crimes" at school, and stumbled across a pixilated photograph of herself and her mother on Google.
In the aftermath of this revelation, she turned to drink for a year aged 17 and was taken to the brink of a breakdown.
More than a decade on, she is still haunted "every day" by the murders, which shocked the nation and remain among the most notorious in British criminal history.
Samantha says: 'Being the biological daughter of Ian Huntley has impacted my life in ways not many people would understand.
'I've dealt with severe anxiety, depression. I've been in and out of therapy for years.
'I've struggled a lot to come to terms with who I am and where I come from, who Ian is and what he's done.
'It's something that haunts me daily. I think about it all the time and I don't think it's ever something that will leave me.
'Every time I look in the mirror I see how much I look like him. I have his eyes.
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Huntley worked as a caretaker in the school both girls attended
Credit: Alamy
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The murderer has written chilling letters to his daughter
Credit: Supplied
'Someone put up a photo of me next to his online and that's when I realised the similarities.
'People often say to me: 'I know your face from somewhere'.
'My heart sinks when they do, as I know they are referring to him, but they just can't place it. I just say: 'No we haven't met before' but so often they look puzzled.
'I think I have other traits from that side of the family as I'm also the only one in my family that has asthma.
It's so hard to be the child of what everyone says is a monster... I know I'm a good person but at night that haunts me
'I found an article talking about his medical history online as I wanted to see if there was anything I should be worried about and I read that he has asthma too.
'That took me to a dark place.
'I had periods of despair where I have struggled with the fact of who my biological father is and that the only thing I know about him is what I've read - and what my mum has told me and that is that he's a monster.'
Mum's suffering
Samantha's mother Katie first met Huntley when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, running away from home to live with him against her parents' wishes.
Their relationship descended into violence and he subjected her to humiliation - including making her eat cat food - and rape, before Samantha was born.
Katie left him for good when she was pregnant with Samantha and has always told her daughter that becoming pregnant saved her from his abuse.
Samantha admitted her mum does not want her to meet him, but has promised to support her in her decision.
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Samantha's mother Katie Bryan left Huntley after he abused her
Credit: Glen Minikin
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Huntley was sentenced to life with a minimum of 40 years
Credit: PA:Press Association
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His girlfriend Maxine Carr was convicted of perverting the course of justice
Credit: Cambridgeshire Police
She said: 'When you look so much like someone you desperately want to know there is something good in them.
'I know I don't have evil in me. There is no way to condone what he has done. All I want from Ian is a conversation.
'Even if he doesn't want to talk about the events of that day, I want to see him for who he is.
'My mum's side of the family are amazing people and I'm so lucky to have been brought up around the people that I have.
'I want to know where that other half of me comes from. I want to know that it's not all bad, it's not all evil and that there is even just a glimmer of something good there.
'It's so hard to be the child of what everyone says is a monster.
'I know I'm a good person but at night that haunts me.'
But that seemed to contradict it all...I just couldn't fathom why he could do such a thing
Samantha reveals the catalyst that led her to make one last attempt to meet Huntley was the death in jail of a killer called Bradley Murdoch, who murdered British backpacker Peter Falconio in 2001.
She said: 'He took his secret to the grave. I couldn't face that if that were to happen here.'
Just a few weeks ago Samantha was also shown The Sun's exclusive story that Huntley had been wearing Holly and Jessica's football tops in his cell.
She tells us: 'It brought it all up again. I was sickened.
'He previously wrote to me hinting at how bad he felt. But that seemed to contradict it all.
"I just couldn't fathom why he could do such a thing.
"I just thought of Holly and Jessica's parents because if I felt bad, what on earth would they be thinking?
"I was upset for weeks and couldn't sleep as it's just so devastating."I was upset for weeks and couldn't sleep as it's just so devastating.
'This has been a constant shadow in my life.'
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The Irish Sun
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I snared evil ‘Manson-like' landlord who sealed tenant in concrete tomb after warped ‘disciples' lured him to his death
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'Bendou looked very dishevelled, very confused,' Anton told The Sun. 'I introduced myself and I said 'Right, tell me in French'. He was quite relieved that I spoke French and started telling me he'd been involved in killing someone and hiding the body. 'Initially he didn't give a lot of detail, he gave a name, a place and a time. 'Looking at the state of him, how he presented and the fact he was confused, of course I had my doubts. Later on it was established he had mental health problems, so it could have been quite easy to dismiss. 'But I did think, let's just check to see if there's any veracity to any of the comments he's making. Why I want to meet my monster dad Ian Huntley 'I just felt there was something in what he was telling me, call it a gut feeling or a sixth sense.' Colleagues ran checks and found Bendou's story correlated with the disappearance of Ryanair flight attendant Christophe, who had been reported missing by a colleague on May 2009. 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'When you're on a murder squad you rarely get someone banging on your door saying, 'Can I show you where I've buried a body?'' 12 Steve Curry, who was senior investigative officer, next to the shed where the tomb was built Credit: Supplied 12 The concrete block where victim Christophe was entombed Credit: Amazon Prime 12 Anton Sullivan, retired inspector at Cheshire Police, used his French skills to help crack the case Credit: Supplied Nevertheless Steve headed straight out to the two addresses on the same street in Ellesmere Port – and was horrified by what he found. 'The first address didn't look like the kind of place a body could be buried," said Steve. 'So I headed to the second and they had a brick built shed at the bottom of the garden, I went into the neighbour's gardens and looked at their sheds, then back to that one and it was clear there was a hand built brick-made 'structure' inside the shed. It didn't fit with the rest of the street. 'We brought Bendou down and, handcuffed to a cop, he went straight to the shed and pointed it out. 'Then we started the three and a half day excavation of Christophe's body from there. 'It was really eerie. Even before we started digging, we brought in experts, forensic archaeologists and entomologists, experts in cement, experts in brick. We don't really 100 per cent know if he was still alive when they dumped them in there. Retired detective Steve Curry 'It was a baking hot day in spring and when we first cracked open the concrete, the first thing that got you was the smell because he'd been airtight for all those years. 'The cement had set in around him, so it was a personal tomb around him. 'Clearly what they'd done is built a box with bricks then after attacking him, they'd wrapped him up in his quilt - he was still in his football shirt, jogging bottoms and flip flops. They put a pillow in there and threw their murder weapons in – knives and a hammer. 'Then they tied him into a big ball with bungee cords and dropped him into this tomb and just poured cement over the top, skimmed it off and left him in there. 'I mean, it must have been horrific. We don't really 100 per cent know if he was still alive when they dumped them in there. 'We wanted to X-ray the bundle as a whole unit. So Christophe was transported to the Royal Liverpool Hospital and, lo and behold, you could see the full form of a human, along with the knife and the hammer and everything they had thrown in there, on the X-ray.' Tracing family Anton was then asked to use his French skills to track down victim Christophe's family in France, who at the time – thanks to a forged email by Kocher – believed he had gone travelling to China with a girl he met. 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I explained what information we had. 12 The horrific crime was carried out on this street Credit: Supplied 12 Sebastian Bendou cracked and confessed the murder to police Credit: Cheshire Police 12 Manuel Wagner was freed then re-arrested in 2015 when new evidence came to light Credit: Cheshire Police 'At this point we haven't confirmed this was Christophe, so we had to start the process of getting a formal identification, which again proved a challenge because there were no dental records, there were no medical records, we had no DNA, there was no crime scene at that stage that had usable DNA. 'The offenders had systematically erased every aspect of his life, including his physical belongings, so we had nothing to go on.' Eventually Christophe's family members came over to the UK and used their DNA to confirm the body was his. As the police investigation unfolded, more sordid details of his murder emerged. Horror kill room The calculated killers had built a kill-room in the kitchen, covering all the sides with plastic and tarpaulin under the pretext they were deep cleaning, then lured Christophe downstairs to help. Once defenceless Christophe was down on his knees cleaning, they rained hammer blows down on him followed by knife wounds. 'The attack was absolutely brutal and then they've bagged him up and wrapped him up like a big ball of rubbish. And they clearly already had this tomb built,' Steve said. 'They've bought the knives with a load of shampoo and stuff to clean themselves up after the attack. This is all very, very calculated and pre-meditated.' Through house to house enquiries, police began to unravel the strange dynamic between Kocher - the ringleader, who lived on one side of the road with his family - and the other perpetrators Bendou and Wagner, and victim Christophe, who lived across the road. Christophe and the other two men had their wages directly paid into Kocher's bank account, and Kocher took charge of paying their bills and bringing them food. 'It was very weird how Kocher was controlling all the three of them,' Steve said. 'It was almost like they were his slaves. He took their wages, put them in the house, paid the bills and food was taken across to them. 12 Anton Sullivan's French skills helped to crack the case Credit: Supplied 12 Scenes from the case are reenacted in new documentary Murder in Concrete Credit: Supplied 12 Reconstruction of remorseless ringleader Kocher in the dock during his trial Credit: Supplied 'But essentially they were paying for Kocher's house and living expenses too. "He was a conman, he coerced money out of his football team, he spun this yarn about himself having cancer as a sympathy thing. 'We just didn't understand why people were falling for it. You knew he was lying because his lips were moving. That's the best way to spell it out. He had a knack of manipulating people to his will. 'After he killed Christophe he even used his card to buy his wife an anniversary card. That kind of sums up what kind of a person he was. What kind of sick b*****d does that?' But how did Kocher persuade Bendou and Wagner to go through with the horrific crime against defenceless Christophe, who by this time had been their housemate for 18 months? 'Like Charles Manson' 'I always used to think it's a bit like Charlie Manson. How did he persuade these educated young people to commit such horrible crimes?,' Anton said. 'It reminded me to a degree of that. You've got Kocher who's clearly very manipulative and if you look at all of the people that we interviewed, he comes across as plausible, he's got a bit of a charisma about him and people are drawn in.' Kocher and Wagner were cousins, but had lived together from a young age so were like brothers. Bendou knew the pair from school in France and after getting into trouble as a young adult, had been taken under Kocher's wing. Wagner and Bendou were described as 'doing anything Kocher told them'. Cristophe came into the group by "pure chance". After working in Ireland, he got a job with Ryanair in Liverpool and moved to the city, initially sofa surfing. But a colleague at the airport passed him Kocher's number. 'Kocher says to Christophe, 'Look, you get the best room in the house with an en-suite, you just pay your money into my bank, so you don't have to mess around with English bank accounts because you can't trust them," says Anton. 'I will cook for you, clean for you. I'll have meals ready for you when you come in, all you have to do is work, enjoy your life, travel, do whatever you want and I will provide anything that you need. 'And Christophe, being relative naive, probably thought, 'What nice people'. When you speak to his family, that was a trait of Christophe. He took people on face value, he took them at their word, he trusted people. 'For 18 months everything goes swimmingly but at some point Christophe decides he wants to move to Brussels and starts making arrangements to leave. Christophe took people on face value, he took them at their word, he trusted people. Retired inspector Anton Sullivan 'However for Kocher that means having to explain where all his money's gone because Christophe was actually paying for everything in that house. He was paying the rent, he was paying the council tax, the electricity bills, Kocher was using the victim's money to fund his own home and his life." Christophe was due to fly to Dublin to meet with his company's HR department on April 26, 2009. The brutal attack occurred three days before, on April 23 - but it had been a long time in the planning. 'If you look at the chronology, the plan to deal with Christophe in Kocher's mind had started some time before," says Anton. "He had been drip feeding Wagner and Bendou a story that 'This guy's evil, he's working for the authorities, he's working as a spy for the Americans and for the French, he's got an alter ego' – all false allegations of course. 'You can convince anybody to believe anything if you drip feed them enough information.' Steve recalls how some 'lucky' detective work uncovered more evidence against the three – including tracing the knives used in the attack to the local Asda who painstakingly went through files to find Kocher's card being used to buy three of the exact same knives. A neighbour recalled seeing the three men take a large package of some kind to the shed, from her window, around the time of Christophe's disappearance. Then in July 2013, after a painstaking first investigation, Kocher and Bendou were charged with murder and Wagner with assisting an offender and preventing a lawful burial. Anton spent every day in the trial, translating everything into French and relaying it to Christophe's family. 'No justice' Bendou and Kocher were convicted of murder but disappointingly Wagner was cleared and set free. Anton and Steve said they were 'absolutely gutted' that only two of the three were convicted as 'everything pointed to three men being involved'. Anton recalls Christophe's sister Aurelie looking at him in court after the verdict and saying in French, 'Wagner got away with it. How's that justice?' Over the months that followed, Aurelie's comments began to 'gnaw' away at him. 'It was a conversation I had in a pub one night with one of my colleagues from the team saying 'This isn't right. I wonder if given the relationship I've developed with Bendou, he can give us something that might allow us to have another crack at Wagner''. 'So we then had to persuade the senior officers that this was of value because these inquiries take tremendous amounts of time, resources and money. 'And thankfully Cheshire Police gave us a second shot.' Prison confession Anton went to see Bendou in prison and tried to persuade him to tell the whole story in its entirety. 'At first he said he would talk if he could get something out of it – like a transfer to France so he could be closer to his family,' Anton said. 'But I said 'No you either tell us because it's the right thing to do or you don't'. 'And he agreed, he allowed us to access his records from the law firm that represented him. 'And we start to learn things about Christophe's murder that we did not know during the initial investigation. 'Bendou describes in graphic detail how he had hit the victim's head with a hammer but the hammer had slipped in his hand with the blood and it was the claw end that went into his skull. I remember the room closing in on me and I started feeling a bit queasy. Retired inspector Anton Sullivan 'You could see distinctive hammer claw injuries in Christophe's skull. 'The first one, they miss and it hits the Formica top that later panicked Kocher painted over. Then we go back and find the exact divot in the Formica that forensically matches the hammer. 'Then he tells us when he pulled the the hammer out of Christophe's skull, because it was stuck there was a jet of blood that went all over the walls and the ceiling. That's why Kocher decided to paint the kitchen red because he thought it would help mask the colour. 'Also as he's pulling the claw out of Christophe's skull, Wagner is looking over his shoulder because they're in this killing frenzy, and he cracks Wagner on the side of the face by accident with the blunt end of the hammer, giving him a big bruise.' Investigators started going through Facebook pictures and found a selfie Wagner took while he was working in a bar at Cheshire Oaks, sporting a big bruise on the side of his face, which was verified and used as evidence in the second trial. Anton, who had by this point become close with Christophe's father Yves, and his brother and sister Noel and Aurelie, said hearing Bendou talking so nonchalantly about the savage murder made him feel sick to his stomach. 'From a personal note, it's really difficult as police officer deal with an offender and not be disgusted, we're humans first and police officers second,' he said. Timeline of the Christophe Borgye case The case was one of the most chilling and unusual Cheshire police had ever dealt with, here is a timeline of key events: April 2009: Christophe Borgye is killed by three men and his body is sealed in a concrete tomb under a shed. May 2009: A colleague reports his disappearance. A housemate, Dominik Kocher, sends a fake email to Borgye's family to make them believe he is safe. November 2012: The three men involved in the murder, Dominik Kocher, Sebastian Bendou, and Manuel Wagner, move from Ellesmere Port to Dumfries, Scotland. April 13, 2013: Sebastian Bendou confesses to the crime to the police, initially claiming he acted alone in self-defence. April 17, 2013: Wagner and Kocher are questioned as witnesses. May 2013: Bendou changes his statement, revealing Kocher's and Wagner's involvement. Both are re-arrested on suspicion of murder. July 2013: Kocher and Bendou are charged with murder, and Wagner is charged with two lesser offenses. March 2014: Kocher is convicted of murder. May 2014: Bendou is convicted of murder and sentenced to life with a minimum of 14 years. June 2014: An appeal to increase Kocher's sentence is rejected; he is to serve life with a minimum of 23 years. September 2016: Wagner is charged again with murder. June 12, 2017: Wagner's trial begins. June 28, 2017: Wagner is convicted of murder and given a life sentence with a minimum of 16 years. 'I remember sitting in the room as Bendou described murdering Christophe in graphic detail and by this point I know his family and it's heartbreaking to listen to. 'You've got to have this professional attitude, but I remember the room closing in on me and I started feeling a bit queasy. 'I said to my colleague who's a highly experienced murder investigator ''How do you sit there and listen to that?' 'He said 'I've dealt with death all my life in the job but I've never had anybody sit there and tell me, as if I'm telling you how to make a cake, how they killed somebody with a hammer and a knife and how they coerced him into being in that position. 'It's actually quite unusual to get somebody to openly admit how they killed somebody.' Eventually, the exhaustive second investigation concluded and Wagner was convicted of murder and jailed for 16 years on June 28, 2017. The jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict. Christophe's three murderers were all finally in prison. Steve, who has a career spanning 30 years of murders across London and the North West, says it's one of the most unusual cases he's worked on. 'As a standalone single victim, what Christophe went through is absolutely horrendous. Plus the dynamic between the three of them is just definitely the weirdest thing I've ever been involved in," he said. For Anton, he was just glad the family finally had closure. 'I always felt that this was a story that needed to be told so that there was some legacy for the family, for the victim, and that they were remembered," he said. 'It's a case that will stay with me for a long time. I've left the police this year and I retired in order to help tell this story. 'If it hadn't have been for Bendou coming forward, I think Christophe would still be there to this day, I'm convinced of it. 'And if somebody had written this story as a drama purely fictitious, you'd say 'No it's too far-fetched, I don't get the plot line'. 'Truth is always stranger than fiction and in 32 years of policing I've seen the worst of people and I've seen the best of people and this case went from one polar opposite to the other. 'But the stoicism and the strength of Christophe's family and the lengths which police officers dedicated their time and effort to seeking justice really stay with me from this case." Murder in Concrete will be streaming on Prime Video from August 31
Sunday World
14 hours ago
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Man tried to punch garda after being caught with cocaine at Iron Maiden gig
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