true crime

The moment Samantha Bryan learned her dad murdered two 10-year-old girls on Google.

The daughter of notorious British murderer, Ian Huntley, may not know her father, but she knows what he did.

She knows that he took the lives of two innocent schoolgirls in 2002, she knows he caused indescribable pain to their families. She knows enough not to want to call him ‘Dad’.

In a rare interview for Soham Revisited, a documentary to be screened on British television network Channel 5, Samantha Bryan said she has no interest in meeting her father, a man better known to the world as ‘the Soham killer’.

“If he was expecting to get some sort of message from me he’d be lucky to get one,” she said, according to The Mirror.

“He doesn’t even deserve to be known or called my biological father and he will never deserve to be called Dad.”

Samantha and her biological father, Ian Huntley, Images: Channel 5 and Getty.

Huntley is currently serving a 40-year sentence for the murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells nearly 15 years ago, in what became one of the UK's most infamous murder cases.

The 10-year-old girls were on their way to buy sweets in their hometown of Soham, England, when they disappeared on August 4, 2002.

daughter of soham killer
Victims Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. Image: Getty.
ADVERTISEMENT

Two weeks later, on August 17, their remains were found in a ditch at an RAF base in Suffolk.

Huntley, who was a caretaker at their school, had invited them in to his home, murdered them and later dumped their bodies.

His motive remains unknown.

Australian mum Nanette Ellis was an unlikely murder victim. This is her story. Post continues...

Bryan was four years old at the time of the murders, but 14 before she learned that her father was behind them. It was a discovery she made by chance, while working on a school project.

"We were doing the crime rates in Grimsby and Cleethorpes," she said on the Channel 5 documentary. "So that’s all I put into Google, and the picture of my Mum came up so I clicked on it, which took me straight to the story."

While the teenager says she was "extremely upset" to learn her father's true identity, she doesn't blame her mother, who left Huntley while pregnant with her, from not sharing it.

"I wasn’t angry at my Mum for not telling me what he’d done because at that age I... I wouldn’t want my children to know that," she said.

While Huntley's minimum prison term will end 2042, it's not expected he will be released.