Dennis McKenzie helped police solve the murders of Holly and Jessica. I am really sorry – but both the girls are dead.” Clairvoyant Dennis McKenzie has never forgotten breaking the worst possible news that any parent could hear. When Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing in Soham in 2002, Dennis was called in by Holly’s family to help. He knew almost instantly that something “terrible” had happened.
He vividly remembers the day, seven years ago, when he was asked by a friend of the Wells family to help locate Holly. She and Jessica had gone missing from a family barbecue on the afternoon of Sunday August 4, 2002.
“I was really hoping my spirit guide would give me some good news but as I got closer to Soham I had a heavy feeling of foreboding,” he explains. “As I got out of the car, I heard my guide saying in a very clipped, precise voice: ‘They’re dead.’ I felt sick inside.
“When I found myself in Kevin and Nicola’s presence, I asked them how direct they wanted me to be. They begged me to be straight with them. I had no option but to break the news.
“Back then, I had never, ever had to say anything so terrible to anyone. Words cannot describe my feelings.”
Dennis went on to say that the girls were dead by 7.30pm on the day they disappeared. He described a woman with a shrew-like face and brown hair, and a man in his 30s with low intelligence who walked with a swagger. He described their accents as “Northern”. Both Ian Huntley, their murderer, and Maxine Carr, his girlfriend and accomplice, came from Humberside.
Dennis also told the family the girls had been transported in an old red car, wrapped in something like carpet or bubble-wrap. He described the view from the house where they had been killed, with a ditch outside the window and a tall building “like a windmill with no sails” in the distance. There was a grain silo outside Huntley’s cottage, which did have a ditch running alongside it.
Kevin Wells relayed the information to the police. The girls’ bodies were found in shallow water just as Dennis had predicted. Dennis has remained friends with Kevin, who has thanked him for his “remarkable contributions during my darkest days”