An Old Bailey jury has been told Ian Huntley accepts that schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman died in his house but that he did not murder them.
The prosecution said today that Huntley, who is charged with the girls' murder in Soham in Cambridgeshire in August last year, was a calculating and manipulative individual.
Huntley, 29, denies the double child murder but has pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
His ex-girlfriend Maxine Carr, 26, a former classroom assistant at the girls' primary school in Soham denies one charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and two charges of assisting an offender.
Outlining their final movements, Richard Latham QC told the jury: At 6.15 in the evening of Sunday 4 August last year the two girls walked out onto the streets of the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham.
They were good friends, they went to the same school, they were in the same class.
The girls vanished shortly after 6.30pm, Mr Latham said.
Just under a fortnight later, in the early hours of Saturday August 17, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, who lived together at 5 College Close, were arrested on suspicion of the murder of the two girls.
The families of both girls were in court to hear the prosecution open its case and sat just a few feet from the dock.
