The Soham murders were a double child murder committed in Soham, Cambridgeshire, England on 4 August 2002. The victims were two 10-year-old girls, Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Aimee Chapman, who were lured into the home of a local resident and school caretaker, Ian Kevin Huntley, who subsequently murdered the children—likely via asphyxiation—before disposing of their bodies in an irrigation ditch close to RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk. The girls' bodies were discovered on 17 August 2002.Huntley was convicted of the murder of both girls on 17 December 2003 and sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment, with the High Court later imposing a minimum term of 40 years. His girlfriend, Maxine Ann Carr—the girls' teaching assistant—had knowingly provided Huntley with a false alibi. She received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for conspiring with Huntley to pervert the course of justice.The efforts made to locate Holly and Jessica in the thirteen days of their disappearance have been described as one of the most intense and extensive in British criminal history.