THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE could be anybody, returning from a workout at the gym in a red sweatshirt and black tracksuit bottoms. She is skinny and walks with her arms crossed protectively over her chest, but there is nothing special about her — certainly nothing to suggest that we are looking at the most reviled woman in Britain, Maxine Carr.

The former girlfriend of Ian Huntley, the man jailed for life last December for the murder of two schoolgirls, faces a difficult and uncertain future after her release from prison later this week. Threats have been made against her and there has been speculation in the tabloids, sometimes verging on provocation, that she might be the target of vigilante attacks. “No hiding place,” says one headline. “Vigilante fears as Carr rejects police offer of a life in the sun,” says another. The 27-year-old teaching assistant has been described as scheming, manipulative and even as a “killer’s moll”.

While she was in prison it was reported that she was revelling in her notoriety and that she cowered in fear of attacks. She is said to have demanded round-the-clock protection and a new identity at taxpayers’ expense — “She will get identity swap and YOU pick up the bill,” according to the Express — while defiantly refusing the offer of a new identity, according to other reports. The press cannot even agree about the cost of protecting her, with estimates varying from £300,000 to £1 million a year.

What is clear, as the tabloids begin the scramble for the first pictures of Carr in the outside world, is that she has become the subject of some highly imaginative myth-making. Even that photograph of her returning from the gym, taken last month at Foston Hall Prison in Derbyshire, has been interpreted in diametrically opposite ways: the Daily Mail suggested that Carr “didn’t appear to have a care in the world”, while The Sun described her as “little more than skin and bone”.

Whether Carr has been wasting away from anxiety or looking forward to her release, the obsession with her could hardly be more out of proportion to what she did. The disappearance two summers ago of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged ten, transfixed the nation, and the discovery of their bodies prompted a wave of anger and revulsion. Yet Carr had no hand in the killings, as Richard Latham QC, prosecuting counsel at the Soham murder trial, made clear.

Carr was found guilty of two counts of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, but cleared of assisting an offender after the jury accepted that she lied to protect Huntley because she believed him to be innocent. Yesterday she was placed under a three-year supervision order after pleading guilty to 20 charges of benefit fraud and lying in job applications. She is now expected to be released on Friday after serving half of her 42-month sentence. Since her conviction Carr has been discussed in the same breath as Myra Hindley and Rosemary West, who actively participated in two of the most notorious serial murder cases of the 20th century. One paper gleefully reported that Carr had been taken ill in Holloway Prison after being abused by other inmates as “Myra Hindley II”.

“It’s so silly. She didn’t really do anything,” observes Gitta Sereny, who wrote a book about another tabloid hate figure, Mary Bell. Helena Kennedy QC, the barrister and author of a book about the raw deal that women get from British justice, agrees. “There is no evidence at all of this woman participating in or doing anything.”

Indeed, far from being Huntley’s accomplice, there are reasons to think that Carr is a victim of this out-and-out misogynist who turned from rape to murder as his confidence grew. One of the epithets most frequently applied to Huntley is charming, although that is only one side of his character. “He was charming, well-mannered and polite, but strange,” says one woman who allowed Huntley to stay in her house in Grimsby for several weeks. “I’d say manipulative, especially with young girls.” During his stay with her he had relationships with two girls, one aged 14, the other 15.

Carl McLaughlin, who went to school with Huntley in Immingham, on the outskirts of Grimsby, recalls how his personality would alter when he got angry: “One minute he was human, the next he was a monster like the Incredible Hulk.” The combination is familiar to Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge and author of Power and Control: Why Charming Men Can Make Dangerous Lovers. She says that such men use certain techniques to control women, alternating charm and affection with anger and abuse. “The woman never knows what to expect. It has the effect of distorting a woman’s reality. He is so charming and plausible, and gets on with other people. She starts to blame herself.” The notion of Carr as a victim is at odds with her demeanour in court, but that is because we have simplistic notions about how such women should appear, according to Kennedy. “She came over as not being cowed, not the stereotypical victim. People somehow have very narrow notions of what the dynamics of relationships are.”

Horley agrees that abuse of women is often hidden, and the techniques used by controlling men very subtle. “It’s very insidious,” she says. “There are men who systematically isolate women from family and friends. It’s a hidden thing. You can’t see it.” It is only when women finally escape and get some distance from their abuser that they begin to get angry, as Carr did in the courtroom, jabbing her finger at Huntley and describing him as “that thing in the box”. She declared that Huntley had been “abusive and controlling” and protested to Stephen Coward QC, Huntley’s barrister, that “you don’t know the kind of person Ian Huntley was towards me”.

“Maxine is a victim of Huntley like anyone else,” says the mother of a previous girlfriend, Katie Webber, who has a daughter by him. “He is so manipulative and evil. He made Katie leave school, stopped her going out, beat and raped her.”

None of this excuses the fact that Carr provided Huntley with a fake alibi for the evening of the murders of Jessica and Holly, but it has become clear that she is a vulnerable woman who was bullied at school and suffered bouts of anorexia — an ideal target for a controlling man like Huntley.

This history makes the vilification that she has suffered since her arrest and conviction all the more perplexing and distasteful. Sereny sees Carr as a “marginal” figure and suggests that the intense media interest is a symptom of a broader tabloid obsession with violence; Kennedy thinks the fact that Carr is a woman is central to understanding the way she has been demonised.