Enlarge imageLONDON (Reuters) - Maxine Carr, former fiancee of Soham schoolgirls’ murderer Ian Huntley, will learn within days whether she has won early release from jail, the Prison Service says.
Carr, 26, could be freed with an electronic tag after serving half of a three-and-a-half year term for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
"The decision might be today, it might be tomorrow," a Prison Service spokesman said on Thursday.
The former teaching assistant plans to give a television interview after her release in a bid to clear her name, newspapers have reported.
The Daily Mail said Carr told inmates at Holloway Prison that police should have thanked her for helping to convict Huntley, jailed for life on December 17.
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Reports say police and prison officials have advised her to change her name and appearance and stay away from her home town of Grimsby to avoid vigilante attacks.
Carr lied to officers investigating the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002.
She told police she was in the bath at home with Huntley when they disappeared. In fact, she had gone home to Grimsby.
The bodies of the 10-year-old friends were found in a ditch 13 days later.
Huntley and Carr’s house is due to be bulldozed during the Easter holidays, the county council said last week. A building where the girls’ clothes were found, known as the hangar, will also be knocked down.
Former prisons chief Martin Narey, who heads the government’s new National Offender Management Service, will decide on Carr’s bid for early release.
If he rules in Carr’s favour, she would have to wear an electronic tag which would alert police if she left her house during curfew.
She was sentenced last December but had been in jail on remand since August 2002.
