Authors: Paul Britton
‘Right, where do we begin?’ the superintendent asked.
‘At the beginning. What happened?’
It always impresses me that by the time the police are this far into an investigation, they have the most meticulous recall for fine details of times, events and sequences. They rarely have to refer to notes or charts; everything flows directly from memory.
I began taking notes. Jamie Bulger, aged two and a half, had disappeared from The Strand shopping precinct in Bootle on Friday 12 February, 1993. He was wearing a Noddy t-shirt, navy anorak with a mustard coloured lining, a blue woollen scarf, silver tracksuit bottoms, socks and white trainers.
Kirby handed me a photograph. Blond-haired Jamie had a face that I knew would elicit protective feelings from almost anyone in our culture. His relatively large forehead and big, widely spaced eyes were certain to pull at the heart-strings. He had slipped from his mother Denise Bulger’s side while she was being served at A.R. Timms butchers at 3.38 p.m. An overhead security camera picked him up three minutes later on the upper floor with two older children nearby. Three minutes later, he was in the esplanade adjacent to Martin’s newsagents, this time holding the hand of one of the older boys. At 3.43 p.m. they were seen leaving an exit leading to Stanley Road.
Kirby slid a cassette into the video recorder. The screen flickered and a grainy, time-coded image appeared. The camera angle was high and the focus uncertain but it was easy to pick out shoppers wandering through the arcade. Mothers pushed strollers, pensioners chatted outside the chemist and a lone gardener tended the greenery.
In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, a toddler stood beside an older boy. A few yards ahead was another lad who turned and beckoned them onwards. It was tantalizing because the film wasn’t sharp enough to pick out the faces or ages of the boys with Jamie, nor to give me any idea of the relationship between them. On the face of it, they could have been two untroubled youngsters taking a little brother for a walk.
Kirby rewound the video. ‘About an hour before this was taken, two unidentified boys tried to entice another baby away from its mother at the shopping centre. We have a statement and descriptions. We also have a number of people who claim to have seen Jamie later that afternoon with two boys. We think we’ve established the route they took.
‘Jamie was found on Sunday afternoon on the Edge Hill to Bootle railway line near the Cherry Lane embankment in Walton. A train had cut his body in half but he was dead well before then.’
‘What were his injuries?’
Kirby slid an envelope across the desk. ‘You’re not going to like these.’
The photographs were in strip-form on several A4-size contact sheets, with a dozen images on each. I used a magnifying glass to study them closely. The first were general location shots of what appeared to almost be a disused railway line showing two sets of tracks. The sleepers were buried in broken stones and at one side of the tracks appeared to be the remnants of a bridge or platform. The other side showed a steep grass embankment. There were sufficient bushes and shrubs around to make it a relatively private place.
I noticed blood on broken bricks and there was a photograph of a single white trainer. Various other objects were taken in sequence as they were found including a tin of blue modelling paint found on the far side of the railway bridge. Then I saw half a child’s body between the rails; the head and upper torso were lying face-down, clad in a blue anorak. A close-up revealed broken bricks around his head and blue paint in his left eye. Several yards further down the track was another bundle. At first it appeared to be almost an artist’s model and it took me a moment to realize that it was Jamie’s naked lower half.
The clothing which had been removed was scattered around the upper half of the body. His blue-striped white socks were slightly bloodstained, as were the grey tracksuit bottoms. More heavily stained were his underpants which were found hidden under a brick. His white scarf was found a distance from the body and several Tandy AA-sized batteries were scattered nearby. The sleepers and ballast around the scarf were bloodstained.
Kirby stood at the window staring at the brightening sky. He didn’t want to see the photographs again. Like many of his team, he was a father who had lived in Merseyside most of his life and he shared the grief of his community.
According to the postmortem report, Jamie’s death had not been quick but it had been painful. There were twenty-two injuries to his head and another twenty to his body. His skull had been fractured by a series of blows with heavy blunt objects. At some point several of the batteries and the tin of modelling paint had come into contact with his body during the attack.
‘There are several things I need to know, Paul,’ said Kirby. ‘Is it possible that injuries of this magnitude were inflicted by children? Or is it more likely that Jamie was taken by boys and then left with an adult, or abandoned and later found by an adult?’
He paused and found his next question.
‘Secondly, I’d be grateful if you can tell us anything about the person or people who are responsible.’
Still glancing through the photographs, I felt profoundly sorry for anyone who had stumbled upon the scene and discovered Jamie’s body. The memory would stay with them forever.
‘I’d like to see where it happened,’ I said. ‘And if it’s OK with you, I want to retrace Jamie’s last walk.’
The Strand shopping centre is a bland concrete building bounded by railway lines and flats. When it opened in 1968 it was called ‘The New Strand’ and was a model for the newly imported American concept of shopping malls. Although redeveloped in the late eighties, with attempts made to brighten the interiors with sculptures and ferns, it would never be truly attractive, particularly after what had happened five days earlier. From now on, it would always be the place were Jamie Bulger was taken; the last place he saw his mother.
A mound of flowers and cuddly toys marked the entrance and nearby was a poster bearing the legend ‘Merseyside Police. Have you seen these boys?’ It had four large colour photographs, one of Jamie in his Teenage Mutant Hero T-shirt with ice-cream plastered around his mouth. Other pictures, taken from the video, showed Jamie being led away and the enlarged faces of the teenage boys, still unrecognizable.
Outside the butcher’s shop I began trying to relate the grainy video images to the real world of benches, potted ferns and children’s rides. It would have been busy on Friday afternoon, with people shopping for the weekend. Of the 114 shops, the biggest three were Woolworths, T.J. Hughes and Marks & Spencer. There were also a number of discount stores - a sign of the economic times.
Shoplifting had proved to be a problem for traders and security had been tightened during the refurbishment in 1989. There were sixteen security cameras trained on the walkways and arcades, each recording a single image every two seconds. In addition, uniformed guards had been employed from a private security firm.
At A.R. Timms butchers, the brightly lit window was decorated with signs of daily specials. James had last been seen in the doorway eating a packet of Smarties while his mother fumbled through her purse to pay the butcher. Abducting him from such a place involved enormous risk - at any moment Denise could have turned and realized what was happening.
Walking through the main square, past Mothercare and towards Marks & Spencer, I reached the point where the cameras first picked up Jamie and the two boys. In all likelihood they left the complex through Marks & Spencer and then crossed Stanley Road towards the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Frogmen had searched it five days earlier after a witness reported seeing Jamie standing on the canal towpath crying. She thought he was being minded by three or four older children further along the path.
Returning to Stanley Road, I turned down Park Street, past a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ hall and eventually emerged onto busy Merton Road. A half-mile further on, at a roundabout, my police chaperons took the left fork up Oxford Road past the offices of the AMEC Construction company. It was here on Monday morning that a caretaker, alerted by the publicity about Jamie, had reviewed the tapes from a surveillance camera trained on the carpark. As he searched through the footage from Friday afternoon, he saw the grainy image of two boys holding the hands of a toddler and swinging him between them as they walked. The time-code indicated it was 4.03 p.m.
Again the images were too poor to identify any of the subjects, but the brick wall pictured in the video gave some indication of how tall the boys were. For the first time it seemed possible that they were pre-adolescent.
Walking onwards we reached an odd landmark, a raised area like a flattened pyramid the size of several football fields.
‘It used to be a covered reservoir,’ explained a detective.
‘Wasn’t there a witness’ I didn’t finish.
‘Yes, a pensioner. She was out walking her dog. The two boys were pulling him up the slope and he had bumps and bruises on either side of his head and was crying. She asked them what was wrong and they said Jamie had fallen over and was lost. She offered to look after him but they said they were taking him to the local police station.’
Climbing the big stone steps onto the reservoir, I surveyed the grassy plateau which was strewn with broken glass and dog muck. Another witness had seen the boys sitting on the steps with Jamie in between them. Later she saw them standing on the far embankment, looking down over a row of houses.
Leaving the reservoir, we followed Breeze Hill Road towards the flyover and then turned down County Road with its back-to-back terraces, some well-kept and others with torn net curtains and grubby windows. At a florist shop a woman had seen Jamie at 4.30 p.m. She, too, had asked about the toddler who seemed tired and distressed. One of the boys said they’d found him by The Strand and were taking him to Walton Lane Police Station.
Having watched to make sure they safely crossed the road, the woman lost sight of the boys as they headed down County Road. A few minutes later, they doubled back and turned right into Church Road West and then into City Road where they crossed a railway bridge. Within a few yards, a footpath emerged onto the roadway. It ran alongside the railway line behind a row of terraced houses. I looked at my watch. It had taken forty minutes. Dragging a tired and frightened toddler, the boys had needed almost two hours.
The footpath was similar to many that exist in metropolitan wastelands; a trail that seemed to start nowhere and go nowhere; without signposts, neither clean nor dirty; but used very frequently. It was protected from the railway tracks by a miscellany of fencing, chain-link, stone and paling.
‘That’s where we found the missing hood from his anorak,’ said a detective. ‘In the branches of that tree.’ He pointed through the chain-link fence.
‘How did it get there?’ I wondered out loud.
‘We think it was thrown from here,’ he said, indicating the path.
I weighed up the likelihood. Why strip Jamie on a public footpath and risk discovery? It didn’t make sense. Children and adults have different mental maps of the same geographical areas. Adults think in terms of particular streets, but a child considers the shortcuts under fences and across fields.
‘Not from here,’ I whispered.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Remember the hole in the fence, further back?’
‘It was too small,’ argued the detective.
‘Not for the boys. That’s how they got Jamie down to the tracks. The hood was thrown from below.’
As we came to the end of the path, I looked up and saw Walton Hill Police Station. This is how close they came to being able to give Jamie up, if that had truly been their aim.
Yellow and black police tape marked the boundary of the crime scene and a mound of flowers was piled against a low stone wall. A dozen residents had gathered nearby; not sightseeing but simply knowing that they had to be there.
Forensic experts were still at work as I began walking across the broken ballast, following the railway line. A row of houses flanked one side of the embankment and the local cemetery lay opposite - a popular playground for the local children who used the railway line as a shortcut. Headstones were occasionally damaged and soft drink cans littered the grass pathways between the graves.
Looking up, I saw the police station. Ironically, the police canteen offered the perfect viewpoint, although until branches and bushes were cut down during the later search, it is likely that the line of sight was obscured.
Silently I began relating the surroundings to the crime-scene photographs. The railway line was grey and dirty from years of use but had obviously seen more productive days. The drabness and sadness of the place reminded me of the old newsreel footage of the final approaches to Auschwitz. Although the horrors of the Holocaust are incomparable to almost anything we can imagine, for Jamie it had been just as terrifying.
On either side of the tracks crumbling stone walls indicated an old platform or the foundations of a bridge. Later I learned that these were once part of a station known as Walton Lane Bridge and that during the Second World War, US servicemen arriving in Britain by sea had been transported down the line.
Detectives pointed out where the small tin of paint had been found and various pieces of clothing. I contemplated where Jamie had been undressed and how far he’d walked across the sharp, granite-like ballast. At the point where the final assault occurred, there was far more blood on the bricks and stones.
The lower half of the body had been found between the track and the embankment on the side nearest the police station. The upper half was five yards further down towards Edge Hill, lying between the same tracks. The train had obviously hit Jamie with an enormous impact - mercifully, he was dead by then - but I could see how the photographs had distorted the distance his body had been carried. Only by counting the sleepers, seven in all, did I realize exactly how far.
The light was beginning to fade as we drove back to the station. Passing various pedestrians, rugged up against the cold, I thought about the people who’d seen Jamie on his final walk. Although they bore no responsibility for what happened, I knew that for the rest of their lives they wouldn’t escape the feeling of, ‘If only!’ Some would suffer sleepless nights and never be able to look at another child without thinking of that little boy, crying and frightened, being led to his death.