Beyond Evil [Paperback]

It's certainly a tragic story, but the whole book is written in such a sensationalist way that you forget you're supposed to be reading a factual book, it's like reading a tabloid report. All through the book we are constantly reminded that Huntley is "sick", "twisted", "evil" etc. Personally I prefer to read the facts and make up my own mind. The book offers no new information on the case, and it seems to me like a ploy by the author to prise open the wallets and purses of the bleeding hearts, what with all the heartfelt warbling about the two "perfect little angels" and the "sinister evil man who killed them in cold blood".

The author puts across largely fictional accounts of what happened, describing Huntley's feelings / fears while committing the murders and disposing of the bodies etc when there were absolutely no witnesses to testify as to how he was feeling or what he was thinking at any of these times, and he's never confessed any of it.

Nobody relevant to the case was interviewed in the book. The quotes all come from "a person close to the familes", or "An old school pal". In fact I am of the opinion that most of the quotes were made up.

There are other books out there that offer a much better insight and will give you fact instead of opinion and speculation, this is just utter tripe.

This is the true account of the murder of Jessica and Holly, a murder that i remember at the time managed to shock the world. I come from Malta and even here on the local news i recall that the story was making the headlines from the day of their disappearance to the day their bodies were found burned beyond recognition. It was a sad day as everone was hoping against all odds that they would be found safe and sound. The outrageous thing of it all was that their killer was the school caretaker, who was taking part in the searches and helping the police in their investigation. A part obviously played with the aid of his girlfriend to avoid suspicion from falling upon him but that eventually brought his downfall.
In this book, author Nathan Yates does a very good job in my opinion of taking us step by step through what happened in those dreadful days to what happened from the time the two girls vanished seemingly from the face of the earth until the case was solved. Plus he gives us some detailed background of Huntley and his girlfriend 's past that i found really interesting. Although this being sadly a true story, it still remains a mystery that only the evil Huntley himself knows the why and how it was done, since he never actually said what really happened on that fateful afternoon. What 'beggars belief' to use Huntley' s own words is that someone with his violent past, although he was never convicted before, was allowed to work in close proximity to kids.
I cannot say that i enjoyed this book, cause naturally it is not meant to. In actual fact it moved me to tears. Really admire their parents for the courage demonstrated which is truly beyond belief.

I have already read Holly Wells' Fathers own book on the Soham Murders in 2002, so I decided to read this book to see the tragedy from another point of view. Author Nathan Yates is a tabloid journalist from The Daily Mirror, who like many others in his profession, witnessed the investigation first hand. On several occasions he encountered both Huntley and Carr, and once even interviewed them in their own home.

While this book delves deep into the past of both the murderer and his accomplice and carefully peices together Huntley and Carr's upbringings, their relationships, and Huntley's previous catalogue of violence, it also details the murder, the athermarth and Huntley's meticulous cover-up as if Yates was there, inside the Head of Huntley while he was carrying out his evil plan. Yates documents what Huntley would have been thinking and feeling when he murdered the girls, when he was hiding the bodies and subsequently trying to return to his normal life. All the time I was reading this I couldn't help thinking 'how would Nathan know what was going on inside Huntley's head?'. Huntley has never spoken out about the murders or the reasons why he commited such dispicable crimes, so I doubt than anyone but Huntley himself knows the truth about what really went through his head that day. Yates also persists in detailing just HOW Huntley killed the girls, which is something even the pathologists couldn't be 100% sure of, so how can an ordinary tabloid Hack know exactly what went on in the House of Horrors and how Holly and Jessica died when he wasn't even there?! This only serves to upset you more, and you can't help but relive their last moments in your head, something which upset me greatly when I read it.

This book reads like it should be written by a phychologist, someone qualified to know what Huntley would REALLY have been thinking, maybe someone who spent time anaylsing his state of mind in prison, not a tabloid hack whose job is to document the investigation - not to try to get into Huntley's phyche! I am sure this would have made for a very disturbing and upsetting read for anyone connected to Holly and Jessica on a personal level.

Also there are several glaring inconsitancies in the book, which shows that the author hasn't done his research thoroughly enough. At the beginning of the book, whilst describing the Wells family, Nathan states that Holly's parents were in the habit of attending church regularly. Having read 'Goodbye Dearest Holly' by Kevin Wells himself, I know this to be wrong. Nowhere does Kevin state that his family go to church regularly, and he himself is a self-proclaimed skeptic until he meets the medium Dennis McKenzie whose spookily accurate predictions turn his religious beliefs on their head. Also Nathan also claims that he believes Huntley may have used a drug simular to GHD to subdue the two girls, or may have given them alcohol. Again, having read Kevin's book, I know this is inaccurate as the girls stomach content analysis prooved that they had not been given drugs or alcohol as their stomachs were devoid of any alcohol or drug related substances.

But inaccuracies aside, all the same I did enjoy the book, told from a different perspective, from people who saw the investigation from the outside, and actually spent a fair amount of time with Ian Huntley. One of whom I might add was my own Uncle, a Military Policeman who was called out to search for Holly and Jessica. He encounted Huntley on the night he had committed the murders and later told me that he came across as completely plausable! It just goes to show what a master manipulator Huntley was.

By the end, knowing what I now know, this book only served to make me dispise Huntley even more than I already did, while the jury is still out on Maxine Carr. This book is worth a read if you can keep an open mind and remember that it is written by a journalist whose job is to sensasionalise the facts, and not a hardered phychologist who really did get inside the twisted head of Ian Huntley.