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Child killer Ian Huntley will likely die after he was beaten with a metal pole in a prison attack – and if he lives he will be blind, sources claim.
The 52-year-old is on life support in critical condition with catastrophic skull injuries after a fellow inmate left him ‘ripped apart like a rat’, a woman who visited the prison previously told the Daily Mail.
Huntley is serving at least 40 years in HMP Frankland, County Durham for murdering ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002.
Triple killer and rapist Anthony Russell, 43, is suspected of carrying out the savage beating in the prison workshop at 9.30am on Thursday last week.
Huntley is not expected to regain consciousness after doctors declared him blind after being hit in the eyes and suffering severe brain trauma.
A source said: ‘It is now looking like he will not pull through, barring a miracle.
‘Huntley never recovered from the battering and never stood much of a chance of doing so. His condition has not really improved since day one despite the best efforts of doctors.
‘It looks like it’s only a matter of time. It could be days, it could be weeks. It is probably for the best. Few people will shed a tear.’
Doctors are considering switching off Huntley’s ventilator after he did not respond to treatment, with the source saying doctors ‘have worked wonders’ to even keep him in this state, The Sun reports.
Inmates were said to be cheering as the attacker reportedly shouted: ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done it. I’ve killed him, I’ve killed him.’
I’m Sam Greenhill, Chief Reporter, and nearly 25 years ago I had an encounter with killer Ian Huntley that still sends shivers down my spine.
Huntley is one Britain¿s most notorious child murderers. But when I was invited into his home for tea and biscuits days before he was arrested for the Soham Murders, this was the last thing on my mind. I’ve written about it in The Crime Desk newsletter – sign up to read it for free.
A source previously told the Daily Mail that a fight had broken out between Huntley and a fellow inmate on his wing, who then ‘got a metal bar from the waste metal crates and smashed Huntley three times in the head with it’.
They added: ‘It was a very, very serious injury, having been struck on the skull like that.’
He was left in a pool of his own blood and prison officers believed he had died then and there because he was ‘not breathing’, but paramedics were able to put him into a medically induced coma and transport him to hospital.
After unconvincing brain stem testing, doctors say it doesn’t look good for Huntley’s survival.
‘If, by some miracle, he does survive he is likely to be blind and there won’t be much of him left,’ The Sun’s source added, saying his head had been ‘split in two’.
His mother, Lynda Richards, 71, travelled 175 miles from her Lincolnshire home to his bedside and said he looked ‘unrecognisable’.
She confessed, ‘part of me hopes he dies’ as he had been attacked so many times while serving his sentence, The Sun said.
Medics gave Huntley, a former school caretaker, a five per cent chance of survival.
This is the latest in a slew of serious attacks that Huntley has been subjected to by his fellow inmates.
His throat was slit by robber Damien Fowkes in 2010 but he survived and needed 21 stitches.
Another inmate tried to kill him in his cell with a makeshift ‘shank’ knife made from a razor blade on a toothbrush in 2018, a leaked prison recording revealed.
He was also doused in boiling water by another inmate in 2005.
In 2006, he tried to kill himself at Wakefield Prison and needed hospital treatment.
Police are yet to make an arrest following the attack, but have said they have a suspect and confirmed that Huntley remained in hospital in a ‘serious condition’.
Huntley was charged with the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002 after the pair of best friends disappeared from a family barbecue in Cambridge on August 4.
He had lured them to his house where he murdered them before dumping their bodies in a ditch 12 miles away. He would later return and attempt to burn them.
A desperate search gripped the country, with a picture taken on the day of the girls wearing matching Manchester United football shirts being circulated.
Their bodies were not discovered for more than a week after their disappearance.
Huntley was seen wearing a Manchester United top and strutting around prison last year as an apparent vile taunt about his victims. He was kept in a segregated wing for those at risk of being attacked.
The girls had gone off to buy sweets together when they were intercepted by Huntley. Suspicions were raised about him as a suspect when he appeared to tell one journalist in morbid detail how the girls might react to being taken by a stranger.
He was convicted in 2003 after pleading not guilty and sentenced to prison for a minimum of 40 years.
His then-fiancée Maxine Carr, who was a teaching assistant at the girls’ school, would also be jailed for three-and-a-half years after giving her partner a false alibi in a bid to help him evade justice.
Huntley’s suspected attacker Russell was convicted of the murder of Julie Williams and her son David Williams, as well as the rape and murder of pregnant Nicole McGregor near Leamington Spa in 2022.
At the time West Midlands Police believed Mr Williams was strangled with a lanyard due to Russell’s ‘mistaken belief that he was in a relationship with his girlfriend’.
He then went on to kill Mr Williams’ 58-year-old mother in an attack that inflicted 113 separate injuries.
Before later assaulting Ms McGregor, who was five months pregnant, just hours after she showed him a picture of her baby scan and then pretending to help Ms McGregor’s partner look for her.
