MAXINE CARR has been forced to move from a Midlands safe house she was staying in by an angry mob after they discovered her identity.

Carr, who was jailed after lying to protect her boyfriend Ian Huntley, had to leave the market town where she had been living in secret. Huntley was jailed for life for the murders in Soham, Cambridgeshire, of the schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Carr, a former teaching assistant, had been moved to the region after having to leave an earlier safe house under similar circumstances.

She was moved to the town under round-the-clock police guard in late June. A strict injunction means that even the name of the county she stayed in, or the names of any of the local people she came into contact with, cannot be reported.

But local people said that word quickly spread around the town that she had arrived. “I remember it because of the number of police who suddenly arrived almost overnight,” one pub landlady said.

“Round here you can phone for the police and you’ll normally have to wait for an hour for them to turn up. “But in a couple of days there were more than double the number of officers around.

“In a small place like this — where everybody knows everybody — it didn’t take too long for the word to get out that Maxine Carr was here.”

Carr is thought to have been given a home in a house on the edge of the town centre, which boasts an assortment of picture perfect period buildings.

Residents said that a house was hurriedly refurbished in time for her arrival, allowing officers to install alarm systems and panic buttons to protect her from vigilantes.

One said: “I heard she was stopped in a supermarket in a nearby town and driven out of it by shoppers who recognised her. They told her she was not welcome. She held down a job in a local factory for a while. But I don’t blame anybody for not wanting her here. It made a lot of parents angry that we should have anything to do with her.

“Why should we be asked to look after someone who helped that monster Huntley?” From being a place where little happened, suddenly all the talk was of one of the most despised women in Britain being on their doorstep — a topic which divided residents. “Personally I wish she was still in prison,” the local butcher said.

“When she arrived it was the only thing anyone talked about. Why they had to put her here I’ll never know. In my eyes she is as bad as Huntley. She should be strung up for protecting him. She had to know about it, didn’t she.”

Another local resident said: “She lied for her lover. But that’s as bad as it gets. She didn’t cause any trouble while she was here as far as I’m aware.”

Police assigned to protect her decided to act and Carr was taken to another, unspecified, location. The former teaching assistant has already been moved 11 times since her release from Foston Hall prison in Derbyshire in May.

She was jailed for 42 months for lying to police by giving her former boyfriend a false alibi after he murdered Holly and Jessica, who were both 10 at the time.

Even before her release from prison in May, she received death threats in her cell in Foston Hall. One read: “D-Day Maxine Carr. You will get to have six full days of freedom because for you it’s finished after that date.” Another warned her that May 23 was “gun down day”. The threats have forced Carr into an increasingly nomadic existence, sending her from town to town across the country.

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