Authors: Paul Britton
Yet I know from my clinical work that children are capable of doing dreadful things. When this happens, it would be easier if we went down the pathway that says they were somehow born evil. Primary psychopaths do exist. Very rarely born into the world are people who look like human beings, talk like human beings, but are something quite different; they have a defect; an inability to empathize, to share other people’s emotions, to feel guilt or remorse or real anxiety.
On the basis of what I knew about Jamie’s abductors, this simply wasn’t an option, yet I also knew that their decision to kill didn’t come out of nowhere - it evolved out of their relationships and upbringing. Children, like adults, have a very broad range of temperaments, abilities and inclinations. A goodly number of them would not gratuitously or sadistically hurt anyone or anything but there are some who get a kick out of bullying schoolmates or torturing animals and others who will go along and watch passively.
Even if you start off with the premise that all children are capable of being cruel, the question that arises is not what makes this so, but what it is that stops them. Again we come back to the morals and value systems that come down from their parents and the community. Moral understanding is something which develops slowly.
It seems an enormous leap to make between bullying at school or torturing animals and actually taking and killing another human being. Yet it is no greater than the step taken by, for example, a group of American soldiers who turn from pushing and shoving a group of Vietnamese civilians to suddenly massacring the entire village. This is the power of people combining.
For Jamie’s killers, the idea could have come from a thousand different areas. They may have talked about doing something risky and stupid but not necessarily illegal, such as climbing a water tower or hanging from a balcony, and then started to dare each other. Or perhaps they began talking about someone involved in a fight at school.
‘If someone did that to me, I’d kill ‘em.’
‘No you wouldn’t.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘You haven’t got the bottle.’
‘I wouldn’t bottle out of anything.’
‘You’d be too scared.’
‘Look whose talking.’
‘Not me. I’m not scared of nothing.’
There are so many routes into this that have the most banal beginnings and, contrary to popular opinion, there doesn’t have to be a graphic video or violent television programme laying out the plan.
But if you take a different pair of children - one of them perhaps from a more advantaged background, a little brighter and succeeding at school; a child who is valued as a person and comes to value other people - the conversation may take a different route.
‘If someone did that to me, I’d kill ‘em.’
‘I hope you wouldn’t.’
‘They can’t get away with it.’
‘Yeah, but neither could you.’
It’s a different reasoning process, a different person and a different result.
Although I’d gone over this in Liverpool with Albert, it would be vital to reinforce it for his interviewers.
Two hours later, I called him and was patched through on a speaker phone. ‘I’ve got a dozen points - some of them are self-explanatory,’ I said. ‘To begin with, you have to understand that even though these boys may have killed, they will react like very ordinary, frightened children. This is what they are now; they are no longer in control.’
‘I can believe it,’ said Kirby.
‘Initially they will deny any involvement - as I said in my profile, they are expert deceivers - but eventually they will probably begin to say that the other child was the instigator while they were passive or opposed to the assault.
‘You also have to bear in mind that they will be emotionally traumatized by their actions. They will have tried to block it out but obviously any interview will put them back at the scene and take them through every dreadful detail. This will increase their trauma as they relive what happened.’
Kirby said, ‘How can we avoid it?’
‘Firstly, keep the sessions short with plenty of snack breaks and make them comfortable. Then take it very gently - one step at a time - allowing them to explain what happened. You can’t treat them like adults or go over and over the same point, particularly if they’re upset by it. Let the boys reveal their stories in their own way while you gradually help them unpack the memories but without suggesting things to them. Let them tell you something and then give them the chance to retreat to a subject that is relevant but isn’t so sensitive or upsetting to them.
‘Avoid showing hostility or criticism - even a negative tone of voice or facial expression. You must treat them like victims rather than perpetrators. They have to cope with what they have done and it would be very easy to traumatize them. Their psychological functioning isn’t going to stand up to bang, bang, bang questions - it could push them into a deep psychological breakdown.
‘Equally, you must consider the welfare of the interviewing teams who are also at risk of emotional trauma. None of them is going to forget this crime and their burden will become even greater if they become responsible for the emotional destruction of two children who may, or may not, be guilty. They will have to carry that knowledge with them for the rest of their lives.’
We went over the strategy several times until Kirby was satisfied that he understood each point.
I wasn’t present at the interviews or asked to analyse the taped sessions. However, the conversations between the police and the two boys were made public when they were tried for murder at Preston Crown Court in November 1993.
‘Bobby’ Thompson slouched in a chair through most of the interviews, occasionally wetting his knuckles and drawing a finger around his mouth. He seemed bored with the delay. The interview room at Walton Lane police station is quite small with a single reinforced window and a tape recorder fixed to the wall.
Sergeant Phil Roberts and Constable Bob Jacobs, both detectives, sat close to Bobby, trying to establish an intimacy. If anyone in the room wanted a break, for whatever reason, the interview was halted and the tape switched off. Sometimes Bobby wanted drinks or crisps. Sometimes it was his mother, Anne, crying and distraught, who needed a break.
He spoke in a tiny, light voice, admitting he had been at The Strand on Friday afternoon but denying he took Jamie Bulger. He described how he and Jon had walked round the shops for most of the day, later leaving and going to the library before going home.
‘Did you see Jamie?’ asked Roberts.
‘Yeah. In the morning. Me and Jon was going up the escalators. He was with his mum and wearing a blue coat.’
Forty minutes later, the interview ended having concentrated on establishing details of what the two boys had done during the day.
In the second interview, Roberts said, ‘We believe that you left with baby James and with Jon.’
‘Who says?’ Bobby asked.
Roberts replied, ‘We say, now.’
‘No. I never left with him,’ Bobby answered.
Roberts said, ‘Well, tell me what happened, then.’
‘It shows in the paper that Jon had hold of his hand,’ Bobby replied.
This is the first admission that they had been with Jamie, but Bobby insists that they simply walked the baby round The Strand and then let him loose. He began to cry, without tears. ‘I never touched him.’
At Lower Lane police station, Jon Venables was being interviewed by Detective Sergeant Mark Dale and Detective Constable George Scott. It had been Bobby’s idea to ‘sag’ school, Jon said, and he described the day, playing on swings, messing about in lifts and visiting a local football ground. He made no mention of being at The Strand.
It wasn’t until the third interview that Jon was told about Bobby’s different version of events. He started to cry. ‘We never got a kid, Mum … I never took him by the hand, I never even touched the baby …’ He cried quietly, glancing up at his mother and father who sat at his side. Sue and Neil Venables encouraged Jon to be honest.
Meanwhile, the detectives challenged Bobby about being seen on the Breeze Hill reservoir with Jamie.
‘I never took James on the hill. I never went on the hill. I never had no point.’ He said the witness must be lying.
‘Do you want to sort all this out tonight?’ Ann Thompson asked him.
Bobby replied,‘Yeah.’
‘Tell the truth.’
‘I am.’
Finally Bobby admitted to being on the reservoir where Jamie was crying for his mum and had a graze on his head. He said they left him there. ‘Why do I have to stay here? Jon’s the one who took the baby.’
Both boys were interviewed three times on 19 February. The shortest session was only eleven minutes. Bobby, in particular, proved to be a skilful liar, who could steer the questioners away from any subject he didn’t want to talk about. When pushed into a corner about whether he had stolen a tin of blue paint and batteries from The Strand, he finally admitted that ‘Jon might have took them … It wasn’t me … He might have stuck them in his pocket… I never. It weren’t me …’
As I had expected, they pointed the finger of blame at each other.
In his second interrogation that day, Jon admitted for the first time to having taken Jamie from the shopping centre. ‘I never killed him, Mum. Mum, we took him and we left him at the canal, that’s all. I never killed him, Mum.’
To those watching, it was obvious that Jon was holding back. He wanted to tell the truth, but didn’t want to hurt his mother and father. This was explained to Susan Venables, who then spent an hour with her son, reassuring him that she would love him no matter what happened. As she rocked Jon in her arms, he sobbed loudly and finally whispered, ‘I did kill him.’
Over the next two hours, Jon slowly revealed what had happened. He was excited on that Friday morning because it was the last day before half term holidays and a teacher had said he could take some pet gerbils home for the week. He met Bobby at the school gates and they decided to sag off together. It was not the first time. Normally, they would hide their school satchels under a subway and set off for a day revolving around shoplifting - sweets, toys, tins of modelling paint, drinks, candles; anything really. Or sometimes they would simply mess around in shops, playing on computer games or sliding on the polished floors of The Strand.
They came across Jamie outside the butchers. According to Jon, Bobby said, ‘Let’s get this kid lost.’
‘We walked through T.J. Hughes and he [Jamie] was following us. Robbie went, “Come on, mate.” The baby followed us down the stairs. Robbie said, “Let’s get him lost outside, so when he goes into the road he’ll get knocked over.”
‘I said, “It’s a very bad thing to do, isn’t it?”’
Jon identified himself as the boy filmed holding Jamie’s hand as they left the mall. Together they carried the toddler across Stanley Road, Jon gripping his legs and Bobby holding his chest. According to Jon, when they reached the canal Bobby picked Jamie up and ‘slammed him down and put a bump on his head’.
Describing the fatal attack, he said, ‘We took him to the railway track and started throwing bricks at him …
‘Robbie threw a brick into his face. Robbie said, “Pick up a brick and throw it.” I just threw it to the floor. I just picked little stones up because I would not throw bricks at him. He did fall over. But he kept getting back up again and would not stay down. Robbie kept picking them up and throwing them. I was holding him back. I took some stones and I missed deliberately. I hit him about two times on the arm because I wanted to get the bricks at the side of him.
‘Robbie hit him once with a bar and then we threw a few bricks at him. We ran away then. We got off the railway line the way we had come and went to the video shop…’
This is where Susan Venables had found the boys at 7.30 p.m. that night. Their hands and clothes were covered in mud and there were large splashes of light blue enamel paint on their jackets. Sue was furious and screamed at Bobby to keep away from her son. He ran home and told his mother that Mrs Venables had hit him. As proof, he showed a bleeding scratch he had sustained in the railway yard. Ann Thompson marched him to the police station to put in a complaint of assault. Similarly, Susan had taken Jon to the police and asked a constable to give him a warning about ‘sagging’. Ironically, this put both boys in the Walton Lane police station within an hour of the killing.
It was not until the third day of questioning that Bobby finally admitted to having touched Jamie. For a brief moment his jaunty, devil-may-care manner dissipated and he said, ‘I did touch the baby. I tried to get him off the track. I lifted him up by the belly. Then I put him back because I was going to get full of blood.’ It was a clever explanation of the bloodstains that would link him to the crime.
‘Jon sat on the wall throwing a brick in his face. Jon threw a brick on his belly. He fell on the floor, onto the railway. Jon then picked the metal bar up and hit him over the head … I never touched him except for getting him under the fence and seeing if he was breathing. So I’ve nothing to bother about. If I wanted to kill a baby I would kill my own, wouldn’t I?’
There were few signs of contrition or remorse. Only Jon said, ‘Tell his mum that I’m sorry.’
On Saturday 20 February, a short statement was released by Liverpool police:
Following tremendous public response, at 6.40 p.m. today two 10-year-old boys from the Walton area have been charged with the abduction and murder of James Bulger. The two boys have also been charged with the attempted abduction of another boy, aged two. They will be kept under police detention under section 59 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 and appear before juvenile court on Monday.
A deep melancholia rolled like a fog over the following days. Many people felt it - a national sadness that couldn’t quite be explained but I knew it was associated with Jamie. A little part of everyone’s childhood had died on that railway line.
People sometimes ask me how I cope with the sadness and stop myself bringing my work home and affecting my family. The truth is, it doesn’t happen that way. Instead of bringing my work home, I leave a small part of myself behind at every crime scene and each time I wonder whether one day there won’t be anything left of myself to bring home.