Twenty years ago today, the bodies of friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were found in a ditch in Suffolk.

On August 4, 2002, 10-year-olds Holly and Jessica were enjoying a family barbecue at Jessica's family home just over the border in Cambridgeshire.

The school friends were dressed in matching Manchester United football shirts when they left the home to buy some sweets, but did not return.

On August 17, 2002, almost two weeks after the two friends went missing, their bodies were discovered by a farmworker in a ditch close to RAF Lakenheath.

Former school caretaker Ian Huntley, 48, was found guilty of the murder of Holly and Jessica. He is currently serving a life sentence.

Maxine Carr, Huntley's former partner, was cleared of any involvement in the killings.

She was jailed for three and a half years after being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

In 2012 the family members of Holly Wells told their story in an ITV documentary focussing on how they have remained together as a family, united by grief and a determination to keep going and not allow themselves to be destroyed by Huntley.

Holly's father Kevin Wells said: "The intensity of grief in 2002 through the early stages was absolutely debilitating but of course Holly doesn't go away and our thoughts and the memories of Holly don't go away, the effects of that grieving process don't go away.

"We had a 12-year-old son Oliver who we wanted to provide a really strong future for, so our thoughts were with him right from the very early days."

Mr Wells said his strongest memory of the time was how Soham pulled together after the girls went missing, as villagers joined the search for them.

"When the girls went missing we had enormous numbers of police teams here, enormous numbers of media but in amongst that were enormous numbers of local people who just took the time off work or changed their leisure time and wanted to be proactive and do something to help in the search for two girls," he said.

"And that's a great feeling, when you're the father of one of those girls, to see so many people - it was an amazing coming together."

A journalist recently recalled distributing posters made by the newspaper around Soham four days after the girls were last seen.

Debbie Davies, 62, said she knocked on the door of the home shared by Huntley and Carr, with Carr answering the door and taking a poster, then promptly putting it up in their front window.