The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (2 page)

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 judgement 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

Introduction

The first time I met Albert Kirby, the officer who led the investigation into the killing of James Bulger, I said that it was not a unique case. He said it
was
unique: the two boys were the youngest ever to have been accused of murder. He had never encountered anything like it, and hoped he never would again.

Albert was articulating the mood of the moment and a sentiment that was widely shared. A unique case born of a lawless generation. It was a symbol of the age, of declining standards, loss of values, lack of respect, breakdown of the family, too many single mothers, failure of the Welfare State, collapse of society, moral vacuum … moral panic.

If the boys were guilty, what had possessed them to commit such a terrible crime? Were they evil, born bad, led on by adults, influenced by violence on television, desensitising computer games, video nasties? Were they playing a game that went wrong, were they lords of the flies acting out the wickedness of children (the latent cruelty in us all), or were they just plain possessed? These theories were offered less as speculation than as statements of fact. Many people, it seemed, needed to explain James Bulger’s death to themselves and to others. And if there was no ready explanation, what then?

Only two people can provide an understanding. Barely eleven years old now, they are unlikely to be able to do this for many years, and unlikely to achieve such an understanding without psychiatric help.

Such limited research as exists in this area suggests that most young people who commit serious crimes – murder, manslaughter, rape, arson – have one thing in common. They have been abused physically or sexually, or both, and emotionally, in childhood. Not all young people who commit serious crimes have been abused. And not all young people who have been abused commit serious crimes. But the pattern is there.

Many people find this idea risible or lame. They detect the making of excuses. They think kids pretend they’ve been beaten to get off the hook. A good slap never did
them
any harm. Anyone who has seen or experienced the effects of this kind of abuse, or spent time observing and listening to young offenders, will not be so dismissive.

Perhaps it is not the two boys who are unhappy products of the television age, but the global audience that watched the security video footage of the
child’s abduction and were provoked by unprecedented media coverage to unprecedented reactions of shock and horror.

The sad truth is that similar cases have happened in Britain in recent times, in not so recent times, and long, long ago. Children have killed, periodically, in the past and who then attributed the killings to wider social ills, or took them to be an emblem of decay? Where was the national debate? What Prime Minister of the day stood to declare, as John Major did in February 1993, that ‘We must condemn a little more, and understand a little less’?