Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived by Hailey Giblin Page A

threatening; there was no air of menace in his voice: it was more like pleading with me.
    Then, about 20 minutes after he had first knelt down beside me, it all ended. I think he left the room and I came out from beneath the bunk bed.
    Soon afterwards, in the typical way a perpetrator of such crimes acts, he came up to me and asked me not to tell anyone about what had happened. ‘Don’t tell your mum or dad or anything,’ I think he said.
    â€˜No, I won’t,’ I replied innocently. And then he left.
    He didn’t say why I shouldn’t tell Mum and I didn’t fully understand the implications of what he had just done, other than that it was dirty. When I was older, of course, I realised what had happened:my innocence had been taken advantage of by this older boy.
    It was some seven years after that day before I divulged the details to anyone. I had been asked to attend a meeting with social services, because I was continually leaving home without my parents’ permission. Some might have argued at the time that I had invented the whole thing just to get attention, but I could have thought of better ways than raising such an embarrassing issue, especially as it concerned someone close to my family committing an indecent act in front of me.
    In view of what I said about the boy to social services, the police had him in for questioning. I couldn’t tell you if they came and arrested him, but I do know that he was in the police station with his solicitor and his mother was present during his interview.
    When he was interviewed – and this is only what I heard about a year ago – he just started crying and saying, ‘I love Hailey, I would never do anything to hurt her.’
    He also sent a text message to Colin about what Huntley did to me. It read: ‘I could have killed him after what he did to Hailey. I would never do anything to hurt her.’ And in a text message to me he wrote: ‘You ripped me to pieces when you said that about me.’
    I recall that, in a phone conversation in which I spoke to Mum and Dad about it, I said, ‘I’m not going to dragit through the courts. I can’t anyway, but obviously the police have decided what they are going to do and what they are not going to do.’
    In some text messages he sent, and in particular the one where he writes about what he will do to Huntley, he went on to write: ‘…she killed me when she said that about me and all this.’
    So I put it to him that he should take a lie-detector test. ‘I am going to pay for it. I will sit and have mine done. Come on, you want to prove that you are not lying, prove your innocence or whatever. You come with me, you don’t have to speak to me if you don’t want to; you can go on your own. I will go and have mine done and you go and have yours done.
    â€˜I’ve got nothing to prove, you know,’ I added. ‘You are saying you want to prove your innocence and you are stating that you never did what you did to me, so go for a lie-detector test.
    â€˜I’ll pay for it but, boy, you had better have a damn good memory, because I have got a good memory. Because I have got no reason to lie about what happened and I remember it as if it was yesterday. I can remember details, word for word. I bet you don’t, because you are the one that is lying about it.
    â€˜You know whether I am telling the truth or not. How about you?’
    And he said to me, ‘I’m not having one of them done. You can’t force me to.’
    I rejected what he said with, ‘Well, that is guilt over and done with then, but I would still go for one, even if you didn’t. I would still be prepared to go for one tomorrow.’
    I know a lie-detector test is not like a judge and jury examining a case, but I believe that it can prove whether you are lying or not, so I would be happy to go for one to show that I have not just been fantasising about it