On 12 February 1993 in Merseyside, England, two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, abducted, tortured, and murdered a two-year-old boy, James Patrick Bulger (16 March 1990 – 12 February 1993). Thompson and Venables led Bulger away from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, where Bulger was visiting shops with his mother. His mutilated body was found on a railway line 2+1⁄2 miles (4 kilometres) away in Walton, Liverpool, two days later.
Thompson and Venables were found guilty of abduction and murder on 24 November, making them the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. They were sentenced to indefinite detention at Her Majesty's pleasure, and remained in custody until a Parole Board decision in June 2001 recommended their release on a life licence at age 18. Venables was sent to prison in 2010 for possessing indecent images of children on his computer, was released on parole again in 2013, before being returned to prison in November 2017 for the same offence. His 2023 appeals for parole were rejected.
The case has prompted widespread debate about how to handle young offenders when they are sentenced or released from custody.
Abduction
On the morning of 12 February 1993, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables visited the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle while playing truant. Throughout the day, they were seen shoplifting various items, including batteries, paint, sweets and a troll doll. One of the boys later said that before they abducted Bulger, they were planning to abduct a child, lead him to the busy road alongside the shopping centre, and push him into the oncoming traffic.
That same afternoon, two-year-old James Bulger, from Kirkby, was at the New Strand Shopping Centre with his mother, Denise. At approximately 15:40, while in A.R. Tym's butcher's shop on the lower floor, Denise momentarily let go of James's hand to pay for her shopping and discovered he was missing. Thompson and Venables had approached Bulger, taken him by the hand, and led him out of the shopping centre. This act was captured on closed-circuit television (CCTV) at 15:42.
Thompson and Venables took Bulger to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, around 1⁄4 mile (400 metres) from the New Strand Shopping Centre. There, they dropped him on his head, causing facial injuries, and joked about pushing him into the canal. An eyewitness later described Bulger at the canal as "crying his eyes out". The boys took Bulger on a 2+1⁄2-mile (4-kilometre) walk across Liverpool, during which they were seen by around 38 people; however, most bystanders did not intervene. When questioned, Thompson and Venables claimed that Bulger was either their brother or a lost child they were taking to a police station. At one point, the boys took Bulger into a pet shop, from which they were ejected.
Torture and murder
Eventually, the boys arrived in Walton. With Walton Lane Police Station across the road, they hesitated, then led Bulger up a steep bank to a railway line near the former Walton & Anfield railway station. One of the boys threw the blue paint that they had shoplifted earlier into Bulger's left eye. They kicked him, stamped on him, and threw bricks and stones at him. They forced batteries into Bulger's mouth and may have inserted some into his anus, though none were found there. Finally, the boys dropped a 10 kg (22 lb) railway fishplate on Bulger, resulting in ten skull fractures. Pathologist Alan Williams concluded that Bulger sustained a total of 42 injuries, none of which could be identified as the fatal blow.
Thompson and Venables laid Bulger across the railway tracks and weighted his head down with rubble. Their intention was for a passing train to strike him, making his death appear accidental. His body was severed by a train after they had departed the scene. Bulger's remains were discovered by four boys looking for footballs two days later. Forensic examination later determined that Bulger had died from his injuries before being struck by the train.
Investigation
Upon discovering Bulger's body, police suspected sexual assault, as Bulger's shoes, socks, trousers, and underpants had been removed. The pathologist's report, which was read out in court, noted that Bulger's foreskin had been forcibly retracted. When questioned about this aspect of the attack, Thompson and Venables were reluctant to provide details. Years later, after Venables was released, his psychiatrist, Susan Bailey, reported his continued denial of any sexual element to the crime.
The police investigation quickly yielded low-resolution CCTV images showing two unidentified boys abducting Bulger from the New Strand Shopping Centre. The following search for the suspects turned into a state of hysteria, forcing officers to check school attendance records and, in some cases, urging parents to report their own children as potential perpetrators. One boy's arrest provoked such fury that vigilantes attacked his home and his family had to be relocated, despite him not being formally charged. The breakthrough came when a woman, upon seeing enhanced images of the two boys on national television, recognised Venables. She recalled seeing him that day playing truant with Thompson in the Bootle area, and her call to the police led directly to their arrest.
Legal proceedings
Arrest
Forensic tests confirmed that both boys had the same blue paint on their clothing as was found on Bulger's body. Both had blood on their shoes; the blood on Thompson's shoe was matched to Bulger's through DNA profiling. A pattern of bruising on Bulger's right cheek matched the features of the upper part of a shoe worn by Thompson; a paint mark in the toecap of one of Venables's shoes indicated he must have used "some force" when he kicked Bulger. Thompson is said to have asked the police if they had taken Bulger to a hospital to "get him alive again".
The boys were each charged with the murder of James Bulger on 20 February 1993, and they appeared at South Sefton Youth Court on 22 February 1993, where they were remanded in custody to await trial. In the aftermath of their arrest, and throughout the media accounts of their trial, the boys were anonymised as "Child A" (Thompson) and "Child B" (Venables). Awaiting trial, they were held in the secure units where they would eventually be sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.
Trial
Up to 500 protesters gathered at the Magistrates' Court in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton during the boys' initial court appearances. The full trial opened at Sessions House, Preston, on 1 November 1993, and was conducted as an adult trial with the accused in the dock away from their parents, and the judge and court officials in legal regalia. The boys denied the charges of murder, abduction and attempted abduction. The attempted abduction charge related to an incident at the New Strand Shopping Centre earlier on 12 February 1993, the day of Bulger's death. Thompson and Venables had attempted to lead away another two-year-old boy, but had been prevented from doing so by the boy's mother.
Each boy sat in view of the court on raised chairs so that they could see out of the dock designed for adults, and were accompanied by two social workers and guards. Although they were separated from their parents, they were within touching distance when their families attended the trial. News stories reported the demeanour of the defendants. These aspects of the trial were later criticised by the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in 1999 that they had not received a fair trial by being tried in public in an adult court. At the trial, the lead prosecution counsel Richard Henriques successfully rebutted the principle of doli incapax, which presumes that young children cannot be held legally responsible for their actions.
Thompson and Venables were considered by the court to be capable of "mischievous discretion", meaning an ability to act with criminal intent as they were mature enough to understand that they were doing something seriously wrong. A child psychiatrist, Eileen Vizard, who interviewed Thompson before the trial, was asked in court whether he would know the difference between right and wrong, that it was wrong to take a young child away from his mother, and that it was wrong to cause injury to a child. Vizard replied, "If the issue is on the balance of probabilities, I think I can answer with certainty," that he did. Vizard also said that Thompson was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the attack on Bulger. Susan Bailey, the Home Office's forensic psychiatrist who had interviewed Venables, said unequivocally that he knew the difference between right and wrong.
Thompson and Venables did not speak during the trial, and the case against them was largely based on the more than 20 hours of tape-recorded police interviews with the boys, which were played back in court. Thompson was presented as having taken the leading role in the abduction, though it was Venables who had apparently initiated the idea of taking Bulger to the railway line. Venables later described how Bulger seemed to like him, holding his hand and allowing him to pick him up on the meandering journey to the scene of his murder. Laurence Lee, who acted as solicitor for Venables during the trial, later said that Thompson was one of the most frightening children he had seen, and compared him to the Pied Piper. After his appearances in court, Venables would strip off his clothes, saying: "I can smell James like a baby smell." The prosecution admitted a number of exhibits during the trial, including a box of 27 bricks, a blood-stained stone, Bulger's underpants, and the rusty iron bar described as a railway fishplate. The pathologist spent 33 minutes outlining the injuries sustained by Bulger; many of those to his legs had been inflicted after he was stripped from the waist down. Brain damage was extensive and included a haemorrhage.
The boys, by then aged 11, were found guilty of Bulger's murder at the Preston court on 24 November 1993, becoming the youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century. The judge, Mr Justice Morland, told Thompson and Venables that they had committed a crime of "unparalleled evil and barbarity ... In my judgment, your conduct was both cunning and very wicked." Morland sentenced them to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, with a recommendation that they should be kept in custody for "very, very many years to come", recommending a minimum term of eight years. At the close of the trial, the judge lifted reporting restrictions and allowed the names of the killers to be released, saying: "I did this because the public interest overrode the interest of the defendants ... There was a need for an informed public debate on crimes committed by young children." David Omand later criticised this decision and outlined the difficulties created by it in his 2010 review of the probation service's handling of the case.
Post-trial
Shortly after the trial, and after the judge had recommended a minimum sentence of eight years, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, the Lord Chief Justice, recommended that the two boys should serve a minimum of ten years, which would have made them eligible for release in February 2003 at the age of 20. The editors of The Sun handed a petition bearing nearly 280,000 signatures to Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, in a bid to increase the time spent by both boys in custody. This campaign was successful, and Howard announced in July 1994 that the boys would be kept in custody for a minimum of 15 years, meaning that they would not be considered for release until February 2008, by which time they would be 25 years old.
Lord Donaldson criticised Howard's intervention, describing the increased tariff as "institutionalised vengeance ... [by] a politician playing to the gallery". The increased minimum term was overturned in 1997 by the House of Lords that ruled it "unlawful" for the Home Secretary to decide on minimum sentences for young offenders. The High Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights have since ruled that although the parliament may set minimum and maximum terms for individual categories of crime, it is the responsibility of the trial judge, with the benefit of all the evidence and argument from both prosecution and defence counsel, to determine the minimum term in individual criminal cases.
Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, gave a speech in Wellingborough during which he said: "We hear of crimes so horrific they provoke anger and disbelief in equal proportions ... These are the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name." The Prime Minister, John Major, said that "society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less." The trial judge Mr Justice Morland stated that exposure to violent videos might have encouraged the actions of Thompson and Venables; this was disputed by David Maclean, the Minister of State at the Home Office at the time, who said that police had found no evidence linking the case with "video nasties".