James Bulger is buried at Kirkdale Cemetery in Liverpool, which is just about midway between Kirkby, where he lived, and Walton, where he was killed by two ten-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, in February 1993. At his death he was a month short of his third birthday. When I last visited the grave in the early spring of 1996 the substantial white headstone had been inlaid with James’s photograph – an enduring image of a cherubic son, all blond hair and toothy grin. The inscription betrayed nothing of his fate: ‘Goodnight and God bless, little innocent babe.’ The plot and surrounding area were scattered with toys and flowers, one bouquet left with a card signed ‘From a father in Reading: The pain of mourning never goes, the reason for your loss, only God knows.’
God knows, indeed, why James Bulger died. It is as true now as it was then that the murder has never really been explained and the motive for the crime remains a mystery. This book, the result of considerable research and a painstaking, sometimes distressing assembly of the facts, was my attempt to offer some insight and understanding.
I had gone to Liverpool within a few weeks of the murder, rented a small house there for the duration and soon found myself at the heart of the case, well connected to some of the participants. The Sleep of Reason was first published a year later in 1994 and, such was the interest in this case, it went on to be reproduced in numerous editions and translations around the world.
By that spring of 1996, when I went to pay homage at the cemetery, I was getting ready to write a lengthy new magazine article. I was still in contact with Ann Thompson, the mother of Robert, who was then three years into his detention and still only thirteen years old. Ann had knitted bonnets – helmets, she called them – for my newborn daughter, whom I had brought to see her. As we sat talking in her home, the phone rang and it was Robert calling from his secure unit. Ann told him I was there and offered me the phone to speak to him. I held up a flat hand in refusal – that conversation would have got both of us into trouble – and later, when I dropped Ann at the unit for a visit she pointed out the distant figure of Robert, who stood watching from a window.
When my article appeared it described something of Ann’s life – she would often sit watching television clips of Denise Bulger, the mother of the victim, which she had recorded on video. She would imagine going on television herself, setting the world to rights, saying things that really were better left unsaid – ‘If that child had been wearing reins this would never have happened’ was one – and generally letting everyone know how much she cared for and believed in her son and was suffering on his behalf. Ann Thompson had suffered a lot over the years and felt all that suffering acutely.
She had left Liverpool and was living with her family under an assumed name, but she went about in a state of perpetual dread at being unmasked – the guilt and fear were so powerful they seemed visible to her. I said it was as if she felt she had a neon sign on her head: Mother of Bulger Killer. Missing her home, she would become maudlin, listening to Daniel O’Donnell songs such as ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’, and reminded herself of her old life by cooking scouse, which I described as a one-pot dish made with cheap cuts of meat. I also referred to Ann’s VHS player as a ‘tired old video recorder’. She was upset and thought I had patronised her and, after a difficult phone call our contact came to an end. It was a tricky relationship and, perhaps because I liked and respected her in spite of everything, I had often worried that I was simply exploiting her for my journalism. I knew that Ann was always grateful and relieved not to be judged by the people she met and I could see from the start that her own wretched childhood had left her vulnerable and poorly prepared to become a caring adult.
But, of course, the case had provoked a great deal of judgement, not just of Ann and the parents of Jon Venables but of their sons, too. From the beginning I had tried to encourage the view that James Bulger’s murder was a tragedy for three families, but that was not how most people thought, and both politicians and the media seemed keen to exacerbate the furore it had caused. Some police officers would claim to have looked into Robert and Jon’s eyes and seen evil lurking there. (Probably they were looking at fear and trauma in two small children.) The Sun newspaper printed a coupon which over 20,000 readers took the trouble to cut out and complete and post to the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard: ‘Dear Home Secretary, I agree with Ralph and Denise Bulger that the boys who killed their son James should stay in jail for life.’
In fact, as I later discovered, life was not long enough for Howard: he had wanted them to serve a tariff – a minimum sentence – of twenty years, which was two lifetimes for ten-year-olds. He was restrained by advisers and instead set the tariff at fifteen years, still nearly double the recommendation of the trial judge, who had said that eight years would do. Howard’s mistake – and his undoing – was to admit that he had taken note of Sun readers in reaching his decision. In late 1999 the European Court of Human Rights concluded that he had been wrong to take public opinion into account. The decision should have been left to the judiciary.
The European Court also concluded that the two boys’ human rights had been infringed by putting them on trial in an adult court – Preston Crown Court – in October 1993. They were so very clearly too young to cope with such a traumatic experience, on top of the horrors of their crime. But compassion for them was in short supply. Both boys would recall the feeling of being stared at in court: Venables had counted in his head to avoid listening, while Thompson had determined never to betray his feelings to those around him during the trial.
I would later learn just how disturbing it has been for Jon Venables, who asked his parents if they thought James was in the courtroom too. No, his mother had told him, James was in heaven. Venables then asked if they thought James could hear what was being said in the courtroom. At the end of each day in court he had taken his clothes off, saying he could ‘smell the baby’ on them or ‘could smell James like a baby smell’. He wanted the clothes he had worn in court thrown away when the case was over. Venables’ remorse was so great that he imagined a baby James growing inside him, waiting to be reborn.
Throughout the trial the two boys’ identities were protected by court order; they were known simply as Child A and Child B. Following their conviction, the judge succumbed to media pressure and agreed they could be named – a decision that had far-reaching implications the judge could not have foreseen. Had he been able to, he might have taken a different decision. The boys’ lawyers have since argued that the naming of them greatly added to their trauma. It also gave focus, and impetus, to the public mood for vengeance, and helped to create a very real threat to their lives, in perpetuity.
As the years progressed through their sentences, I would often hear of people who claimed to have encountered them in secure units up and down the country. A friend training to be a probation officer had a lecturer who had met one of them in Devon. Someone else had met one of them in Essex. They were here, there and everywhere. It was a kind of absurd sideshow, born of their notoriety, I suppose. But as I well knew, they had never actually gone anywhere. Venables had been sent to Red Bank in Newton-le-Willows after he was charged, Thompson had been taken to Barton Moss in Greater Manchester, and that was where they remained, every night for the next eight years.
They started out as the youngest members of their enclosed communities and ended up the eldest, serving far longer sentences than everyone else, kept on beyond the normal time at which they might have been expected to be transferred to Young Offenders’ Institutions. YOIs are tougher establishments and there were rumours that staff and inmates couldn’t wait to get their hands on Thompson and Venables. Staying put, they were apparently transformed from frightened, disturbed children into functioning young adults. They achieved GCSEs and enjoyed graduated mobility, making escorted trips back into the world where they had the chance to compensate for the lack of freedom that might otherwise have meant they could never have the opportunity to lead normal lives. Still, at the time of their release neither Thompson nor Venables had ever made an unaccompanied trip on a bus or bought something in a shop.
The European Court judgment meant they could be freed in 2001 and a series of parole hearings took place with initial assessments for both boys that February, followed by longer hearings six months later. There was some alarm over Thompson when a psychologist claimed to have found evidence of psychopathic personality traits during testing of him. The tests were meant to be done on adults but the results could not be ignored and a new expert report was called for. It echoed an additional concern that Thompson had manipulated the long-term relationship with the psychiatrist who had worked with him during his time at Barton Moss. Thompson had so persuaded her of his anxiety at being betrayed to the media that she never wrote down anything but the barest details of their sessions. As the psychiatrist might have anticipated, this was setting up a serious problem, both for her professional credibility and Thompson’s future release. In the absence of in-depth reports, what were the parole board supposed to work with as evidence of Thompson’s redemption and understanding and remorse for his crime?
The new expert was very thorough and Thompson was now more open. The expert dismissed any suggestion that Thompson was a psychopath but at the same time he talked Thompson through the offence and gave an interpretive account of how and why James Bulger died which has a ring of authenticity about it. The psychologist appeared to agree with the manager of Barton Moss, who described Thompson as one of the most normally adjusted people in his circumstances. Thompson had never shown any trait of dishonesty and had never, despite occasional opportunities at the unit, abused alcohol or drugs. In eight years he had never needed to be significantly disciplined or punished.
Thompson was described in the new report as a child who had learnt to disengage emotionally as a result of earlier traumas, in particular his father leaving home when he was six, but also the violence he had seen at home before and after – especially the sight of his mother lying injured after being attacked by his father, when he was unable to go to her out of fear of his father. With his father gone and his mother struggling to cope, Thompson found himself among a pack of like-minded children in similar circumstances, going shoplifting, truanting, vandalising and breaking into cars. There was never a chosen victim for these crimes, never a plan, never any violence. There was a group dynamic or proposals idly adopted, and a kind of obligation to act on the impulses of the others. Thompson, on his own account, said he only went home when it was late and he hoped the house was asleep. He was ‘an urban feral child’.
Although the psychologist’s report was about Thompson, there were clear parallels with Venables, who had problems at home with conflict between his parents, siblings with learning difficulties, bullying by his peers and a wider family context of domestic violence and alcohol abuse. Thompson always maintained it was Venables who said, on the way to the Strand shopping centre in Bootle on 12 February 1993: ‘Let’s get a kid lost.’ There was no other premeditation. Thompson claimed he was not interested but went along with the abduction of James Bulger and didn’t do anything to stop it, and so accepted his own full responsibility for the crime, even though he could not clearly remember everything that happened.
There was increasing tension after the abduction as they could not decide what to do with the child and did not know how to ‘get rid’ of the child without being found out. The child’s distress increased the tension and fear between them. The final assault – the killing of James on the railway line at Walton with stones and sticks and paint and a heavy metal ‘fishplate’ – had been ‘a chaotic destruction’ of the source of the boys’ fear. The psychologist likened those moments to the climax of the novel Lord of the Flies, ‘where one troublesome child is objectified or dehumanised by the others and then killed in a frenzied attack’. This was just a hypothesis, but if it was right it could have been triggered by the unusual combination of those two boys being together, being poorly socialised, having no sense of responsibility for inhibiting the behaviour of the other, and being able to ‘emotionally disengage’ because of their past experiences.
The psychologist noted comments from staff at Barton Moss about the limited feedback from his therapy sessions and the way Thompson had set the terms of his therapy. This had resulted in staff hearing nothing further when one of them had passed on to the therapist a disclosure from Thompson that he had been sexually abused in childhood. Neither the psychologist nor the staff at Barton Moss knew anything more about the abuse, but those references to it in the psychologist’s report obliged the therapist and Thompson to describe it to the parole board.
Meanwhile, although it was not a race, all the indications appeared to be that Venables had made even swifter advances towards rehabilitation. In 1997 his therapist could say he had made exceptional progress in both his personal development and acknowledgment of the enormity of his offence. Around the same time, staff at Red Bank reported that he had become a role model for others in the unit and he had matured into an amiable young man. His recent behaviour had been exemplary. That fitted the widely held view of the two co-murderers, that Thompson was the more thuggish and likely ringleader and Venables the innocent led astray. I had always thought that was a complete misreading of what we knew. If anything, it was the other way around and Venables had seemed to me to be the more disturbed of the pair.
But by now there was a consensus that Venables posed a low risk or no risk at all to the public, although it was also recognised that the shame and remorse he felt at his crime would be with him for ever. So while Thompson was wrestling with his past as a victim of abuse, Venables appeared to be gliding towards a viable future. The two were released in June 2001 and both lived in semi-independent units specially prepared for them in the grounds of the secure units, before moving to live with full independence, some time later. They both took on assumed names and lived with the protection of a far-reaching injunction put in place at the High Court by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, largely in response to plausible evidence that there were people who would like to find them and kill them or, at the very least, cause them harm.
As we later learned, Jon Venables’ new identity required intensive policing and a year to set up, at a cost of over £250,000. He needed everything from passports to examination certificates and medical records – not even his GP knew who he really was. A ‘legacy life’ – a false past – had to be created for him, and presumably for Thompson too. It is hard to imagine how difficult it must be to live within such a phoney construct. The pressure, you have to conclude, must be immense. In 2006 I wrote that both young men had been living quiet settled lives over the five years since their release. How little I knew. Unbeknown to anyone, including his army of minders reaching right into the heart of government, Jon Venables had terrible unresolved problems – issues I now believe he must have kept hidden throughout his time in custody – and was descending into a life of chaos and criminality.
In the first place, as I disclosed in an article in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2011, Venables is believed to have had a brief sexual relationship with a female member of staff at Red Bank, not long before his release. This was, at the least, an abuse of power by the woman, and appears to have reflected an unstable period at Red Bank with poor management being recorded during inspections. Such an incident must have had a profound effect on Venables who, as was observed by his psychiatrist, had been through an abnormal psychosexual development during his adolescence, never free to explore his sexuality as other young men would in the outside world. You wonder, though, at the extent to which that incident shaped the offence that took him back to prison in February 2010, after a long period of instability and increasing abuse of drugs and alcohol.
Venables had seemed settled at first, after his release, under close supervision by the probation service. Both he and Thompson were subject to strict conditions of release, preventing them from visiting Merseyside and associating with children. Venables studied and later worked, but he began to struggle with debt and isolation. Significantly, he spent a lot of time alone on the Internet. His probation officer wondered what games he was playing. In fact, for at least two years before his recall to prison he had been collecting videos and still images of child pornography and in some cases sharing them. Some of the images were among the most obscene available. He had also masqueraded on the Internet as a mother who, together with her husband, was abusing her child and now offering the child for sale to others to abuse. He had expressed a specific interest in looking at images of parents abusing their own children.
How he managed to behave like that for at least two years, while supposedly being one of the most closely supervised individuals ever freed on life licence, has never been fully explained. An investigation into the whole affair, by former civil servant Sir David Omand, seemed superficial and all too ready to blame Venables himself. Others ought to have been culpable too, especially when so many warning signs were missed.
Venables admitted the child pornography offences and received a two-year prison sentence. He became eligible for parole, once more, in July 2011, by which time his new identity had allegedly been widely disclosed on the Internet: another burden, in addition to the honest talking he will have been obliged to do, finally, in relation to his paedophile activities. It now seems probable that, like his co-accused Robert Thompson, Jon Venables may have been the victim of child sexual abuse before the murder of James Bulger.
But that is not something known or proven. Like so much about this case, it exists only in the realms of speculation and, I like to think, emphasises the importance of continuing to review and examine one of the most significant crimes in modern history.
David James Smith,
September 2011