THE ill-fated romance between Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr began at Hollywoods, the nightclub he used to prowl, looking for women to rape.

Carr was not a victim, but a willing partner. “I know what Maxine can be like when she has had a few drinks,” Huntley was to tell the Old Bailey. “She gets a bit loud and a bit flirty sometimes.”

Carr’s downfall was to convince herself that she was in love with Huntley and that he loved her. If associating with a monster is a crime, Maxine Carr is as guilty as sin.

They met in February 1999 and once Carr got her hands on Huntley, nothing — not his infidelities, his cruelty, his slobbish exploitation of her vulnerabilities — would persuade her to let go. As she told the jury at his murder trial: “I loved him very, very much.”

“At the start he was a bit of a charmer,” Carr’s sister, Hayley Hodgson, told The Times. “He bought things for her, jewellery, bits of clothing and there was always lots of flowers.”

Not long afterwards, Carr was sharing Huntley’s £40-a-week flat in an ivy-clad house in Abbey Drive East, a once-elegant area of Grimsby that has slowly declined into a slightly seedy bedsitland.

Huntley had just been cleared of raping a girl he met at Hollywoods — one of several women he is suspected of having raped after encounters there. In an attempt to throw off the stigma of the arrest, Huntley began calling himself Nixon, his mother’s maiden name. He also found a job at a nappy factory.

Carr could be said to be, in some unsettling way, an ideal partner for a man who was violent and controlling and endured gnawing doubts about his own sexuality. He made it clear that he expected her to keep their home spotless, and in particular would insist that the flats remained clean of any trace of his alsatian dog, Sadie. “The place always stank of bleach,” Mrs Hodgson said. “And she seemed to be hoovering all the time.”

Carr discovered that Huntley did not like his girlfriends to enjoy close relationships with anyone but himself. He clearly resented her using the telephone, once ripping it from the wall while she was talking to her mother, and even attempted to ration the time that she spent on her own mobile telephone.

A few months into their relationship, Huntley was picked up by police when yet another 17-year-old woman complained of having been raped after walking home from a nightclub with him. Not for the last time, Carr gave her lover an alibi.

Mrs Hodgson recalls that Huntley once decided to eject Carr, and gave her just hours to pack and leave. “She rang me and said, ‘Can you help me to get my things out because he has told me I have to be out by the time he gets home.’ ”

Carr rang Huntley repeatedly, begging him to have her back, and after a short while they were living together again, this time renting a flat in the isolated Lincolnshire village of Scotter.

It was the first of many moves, usually to ever more remote villages where Carr, who could not drive, became ever-more dependent upon him. The two allegedly became embroiled in a dishonest scheme to claim welfare payments.

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