Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman had their whole lives ahead of them when they were killed by their twisted school caretaker Ian Huntley.
The two 10-year-olds were best friends and inseperable, enjoying spending their summer holidays playing and having fun.
On the day the disappeared, on August 4, 2002, they had been at a family barbecue at Holly's house before going upstairs to play.
But the popular schoolgirls decided they wanted some snacks from the vending machine at the local leisure centre and popped out without Holly's parents realising they were gone.
It was the last time either Holly or Jessica would see their families again.
As they made their way back to Holly's house, they walked past the home used by their school caretaker, Ian Huntley.
He spotted them and lured them into his house, claiming his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was at home.
She worked as a teaching assistant at Holly and Jessica's school and was close to both the girls.
While the two little girls were inside, Huntley murdered them both and hid their bodies.
Meanwhile, Holly's parents realised the best friends were no longer in the house and launched a frantic search to find them.
When Jessica wasn't home in time for her 8:30pm curfew, Nicola called the Chapmans to see if the girls were there.
Desperate, both families were now searching for the missing 10-year-olds and Holly and Jessica were reported missing to police.
A huge manhunt was launched with more than 400 officers working full-time and round the clock to find Holly and Jessica.
As well as house to house enquiries, the entire local area was combed for any trace of the youngsters.
Hundreds of local people volunteered along with US Air Force staff from a nearby base.
Every registered sex offender in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire was interviewed but there seemed to be no trace of the primary school pupils.
A massive media appeal kept Holly and Jessica on the front pages of every paper and in every news bulletin and for 13 days no stone was left unturned.
Chillingly, Huntley himself was interviewed by reporters and even helped in the search for Holly and Jessica.
His girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who was Huntley's alibi for the evening the girls went missing, was also keen to speak to the press.
In one interview she bragged about how much she had clearly meant to little Holly especially.
She showed reporters a card Holly had made for her on the last day of term to thank her for being such a good teaching asssistant.
Speaking to a TV reporter, Carr says: "No one believes they would ever run away. They were very close to their families. This is something that I will keep for the rest of my life.
"It's what Holly gave me on the last day of term and there's a poem written inside saying 'to a special teaching assistant' and that we will miss her and we will see her in the future.
"That was the kind of girl she was, she was just really lovely."
Her chilling slip was spotted almost instantly - she had referred to Holly in the past tense.
Suspicion was now starting to fall on the pair, who were taken in for questioning 12 days after Holly and Jessica disappeared.
The following day a gamekeeper made harrowing discovery - Holly and Jessica were found lying side by side in a ditch close to an RAF base in Suffolk, 10 miles from Soham.
And it was Huntley himself who gave away his own guilt with just seven gestures to police officers when he was taken in for questioning.
Body language expert Cliff Lansley has revealed the tiny movements made by Huntley as he was quizzed about his relationship with Holly and Jessica.
Mr Lansley said: "There are multiple things wrong. He has clamped his hands. He is rubbing and manipulating his fingers to try and comfort himself.
"And his shoulder is raising slightly on the right-hand side. Then when he says, no, the volume of no comes down fifty percent and he synchronises his head one to two seconds afterwards.
"So, there are seven, eight indicators of deception here when he is using just three words.”
Mr Lansley also says Huntley's deception was clear when he "forgot to take the sad expression off his face".
He added: "Indicator two, he is contradicting these affirmative statements with a slight head shake, no.
"And in addition, we have got gestural leakage from his shoulder it is raising a couple of millimetres on his right-hand side which contradicts the positive, affirmative statements he is making. That is a strong signal of deception.”
Verbal communication expert Dawn Archer said Huntley was "very good at using the truth and then using it to his advantage".
She added: “The most convincing way to tell a credible lie is to stick closely to the truth.
"This is somebody that history has shown got away with lying for a long time and got away with being abusive for a long time.
"And I think people who get away with that kind of behaviour believe they won’t be caught. So they have a certain level of confidence when they tell their lies.”
And forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes claims Huntely had been planning his attack "for some time".
She said: “There was no planning on the part of Huntley in terms of him not knowing that Holly and Jessica were going to arrive that day.
"He’s already assaulted young girls, so he’s rehearsed it behaviourally. So, this isn’t something that comes out of the blue.
"This is something that’s been in the back of his mind, maybe in the forefront of his mind, for some time.”
On August 20 Huntley was charged with two counts of murder and Carr was charged with attempting to perverse the course of justice.
She was later charged with two counts of assissting an offender.
Huntley was jailed for at least 40 years before he is eligible for parole while Carr was jailed for three-and-a-half years.
He will not be considered for release until 2042 at the earliest.
