Murder of James Bulger

The murder of James Bulger was one of the most shocking in Britain, not only because of how the victim, only two years old, was killed, but also because the killers were 10.

The abduction

James was a two-year-old boy and on 12 February 1993 he was with his mother, Denise, at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, near Liverpool. Around 15:40, while his mother let go of his hand for a moment to pay at the butcher’s, he wandered a few steps away and two boys took him by the hand and led him out of the shopping centre. CCTV cameras captured the scene at 15:42.

The two boys were Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both 10, who had skipped school that day to go to the shopping centre and steal things. Before abducting James they had stolen a pot of blue paint, batteries, sweets and a troll doll. Then, getting more and more bored, one of them said:

“Why don’t we take a kid?”

Their idea was to lead him onto the busy road next to the shopping centre to cause an accident, but what they did was far more terrible.

First they took him to a canal, where they dropped him on his head, and then they made him walk about four kilometres, hitting and kicking him.

People who saw them thought they were just three brothers, but some, seeing James’s injuries and hearing him crying his eyes out, realised something was wrong.

However, when anyone asked what had happened, the boys said they were taking their little brother home, or that they had found the child alone and crying and were taking him to the police. Incredibly, nobody stopped them.

It later emerged that the three had been seen by 38 people, some of whom had seen the two boys mistreating little James, but nobody stepped in.

This was a typical case of the “bystander effect”, a social psychology phenomenon in which people do not help a victim when other people are present.

The murder of James Bulger

After making him walk about four kilometres, they stopped near a railway line in Walton.

There they tortured little James: first they threw the blue paint in his face, then they hit him with stones and bricks and finally with a 10-kilo iron bar.

They kicked him, and Thompson struck him so hard that the print of his shoe was left on the little body. They also inflicted other abuse that out of respect I will not describe.

When they had finished torturing him they left him on the tracks, covered with rubble, trying to make it look like an accident. Shortly afterwards his body was hit by a train, but James had already died of his injuries.

The body was found on 14 February by four boys looking for footballs.

The arrest

After the police released the CCTV footage showing the two boys leading James by the hand, a woman recognised one of them and alerted the police. The two were arrested and on 20 February were charged with murder.

During questioning they blamed each other and it was impossible to establish who did what. Thompson stayed calm, while Venables became hysterical, crying constantly.

Before long Venables began to confess, but put all the blame on Thompson. He only admitted throwing some stones at James, hurrying to add that they were small and smooth and that he had missed on purpose.

Thompson for his part accused Venables and defended himself by saying:

“I have a little brother who is two; if I had wanted to kill a child I could have killed him.”

He said he had tried to save James and had not touched him, but the shoe print found on the body turned out to be Thompson’s.

Some newspapers blamed the murder on the film “Child’s Play 3”, which Venables’s father had rented in the months before the killing. But the police found no evidence that the boy had watched it, nor any link between the crime and violent films.

The trial

The trial opened on 1 November 1993 in Preston, as if they were adults, and up to 500 protesters gathered outside the court. During the trial the two were called “Child A” and “Child B”, but at the end their names were released because of the seriousness of the crime. The murder had a huge impact on public opinion, causing dismay and outrage.

On 24 November 1993 they were found guilty of abduction and murder: they are the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. They were sentenced to indefinite detention in a young offenders’ facility.

The killers’ parents were forced to change their names and move because of the death threats they received.

The judge set a minimum term of 8 years, which the Lord Chief Justice raised to 10 and Home Secretary Michael Howard to as many as 15. In 1997, however, the House of Lords ruled the Home Secretary’s decision unlawful, and in 2000 the minimum term was set back to 8 years. In June 2001, at 18, they were released with new identities, and are forbidden to see each other.

What happened next

In 2010 Venables was arrested again for possessing indecent images of children and sentenced to two years. Released in 2013, he went back to prison in November 2017 for the same offence. His parole applications were rejected in 2020 and again in December 2023.

James’s parents divorced in 1995 and rebuilt their lives, each with a new family. In 2019 his father, Ralph, lost his legal bid to lift Venables’s anonymity. That same year his mother, Denise, strongly criticised the short film Detainment, based on the police interviews with the two boys, which was nominated for an Oscar without anyone consulting her.

In James’s memory a garden was created at Sacred Heart Primary School in Kirkby, the school he would have attended had he grown up.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Murder of James Bulger