Original subtitles

HE SIGHS

There's the charge sheet from 20th February.

Can I read the charges? Yeah, yeah.

"On 12th February 1993,

"Bootle, in the county of Merseyside,

"you unlawfully took or carried away James Patrick Bulger

"against his will.

"On 12th February 1993, at Walton in the county of Merseyside...

"murdered James Patrick Bulger."

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If you've got me baby, just bring him back.

If I'd have turned left,

I'd have got James back.

The idea that it could be done by juveniles, or even children,

was...

You know, it was off the scale.

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This could be any child, you know, it could have happened to anybody.

I rememberjust feeling sick to the pit of my stomach.

I thought, oh, please God, this can't be true.

I'm Michael Fergus, James's brother.

We shouldn't be looking at him on the news

about a kid being murdered, he should have been here with us.

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We have a spare chair around the Christmas table,

it's always been empty.

I shouldn't have let go of his hand.

It is hard for me to say, but...

it's the truth.

I shouldn't have let go.

I've always lived in Liverpool.

I think it's a great city.

Basically we're like one big family,

you know, we all look out for each other.

You know, it's just... It's just an amazing place to be.

Even back in the '905 it was the same.

BARKING

Where I lived, in...

Well, everyone knows Kirkby, I think.

Not far from my mum, I'd say a two-minute walk from my mum's.

The area was really nice, nice area to live,

people obviously were friendly.

Nice little flat.

Wasn't big, but, you know, that's the way I wanted.

I had my little family in there.

Always wanted to be a mum.

Coming from a big family, I was one of the babysitters anyway,

so I was always minding one of the kids,

which I always loved doing.

Always loved being around kids.

I couldn't wish for anything better at that point.

James was loved by all.

But as he started taking more and more steps,

he didn't then walk into a room, he'd run into a room.

You knew when James was here because all's you'd see

was the blonde, bouncy hair running as he ran past you.

He wouldn't leave my side, really.

No matter where I sat, where we were all at me mum's,

no matter where I sat, James was always on my knee.

He loved to make people laugh.

He was a little character.

It was a really cold morning.

I did put a big, thick coat on him.

His hat, his gloves, scarf, everything.

A girlfriend of me other brother comes walking in.

She says, I'm going to Bootle Strand, do you want to come?

Said, I won't be long, I'm just taking something back.

I went, yeah, I'll come with you.

The buggy is in the hallway.

That's the only time I left that buggy.

I never left that buggy anywhere.

Whether I folded it up and carried it under my arm,

I never left that buggy anywhere.

That was the only day I left it.

That was the biggest mistake of my life.

The Strand shopping centre in Bootle

is probably the only shopping centre in Bootle, actually.

It's been there since 1966 I think,

and it was beginning to show its age a bit,

in terms of the exterior, and some of the shops are a bit run-down.

I was actually the beat officer for The Strand for about a year

so I got to know all the shops

and all the set out of The Strand really well.

The Strand itself was very, very busy.

I think it was probably used by everybody in Bootle

in terms of their shopping.

We weren't long in The Strand at all.

On my way out, I decided to stop off at the butcher's,

to get that night's tea in.

We were going home from there.

James was starting to run around all the shop

and I thought, this is not good.

Trying to catch him... I mean, he was a lot quicker than me,

they're like little dodgers, aren't they?

And I had hold of his hand,

and within seconds of me reaching for my purse

to pay for the chops that I'd bought,

I looked back down and that's when I discovered he'd gone.

I've run to the reception

and said, you know, me little boy's gone missing,

and they said, OK, we'll put over the Tannoy, and...

we'll get the word out there.

I decided to continue looking for James meself.

The thing that was in them shops then

was all these rides that you put money in.

Cos James loved them rides,

and I thought, I'm going to find him on one of them,

so I went to every ride in that shop.

I was getting told certain shops had him on certain floors

so I was going to that shop and describing him.

No, we haven't got him.

So-and-so's got him in their shop.,

So I was running to that shop, getting told the same.

The longer it gets...

I mean, I think even a minute of losing your child

seems like an hour.

Your head's just all over the place,

you just want sight of them, you just want to grab hold of them.

I got a call saying that there's a child missing.

And being on The Strand, you get a lot of missing children.

You would normally sort ofjust finish putting details

in your pocket notebook of the child,

alerting the radio room as to what was going on,

and then the child would be found,

and that would be the end of it.

Soon as you heard them words, the police are getting called,

then you know it's serious.

40 minutes, when I got there, was always...

was quite a long time before we even started.

I went into The Strand.

Denise at that time, obviously she was very, very upset

so it was quite difficult at times to make out what she was saying,

and to sort of keep her on the details that we needed from her.

She wanted to say... let's get out there,

and I'm saying, no, we need... We need things off you,

We need some details.

I do remember when I met Mandy and she was trying to calm me down.

"Come on, I'll walk around with you and let's see if we can see him."

I went, he's not in here.

I went, he's not, I've looked everywhere,

I've been in the car park, I've been everywhere.

He's not in here.

Well, I was trying to find out what sort of little boy James was,

you know, would he go with someone? Was he sort of friendly?

Did he know his name and address, things like that, you know,

would he be able to sort of give his name to anybody

if he was stopped or anything?

And whether or not, you know, he would...

he was the sort of kid who would wander off on his own or not.

It was getting out late on as well, started getting dark,

you start getting more and more worried.

With him being so small, he didn't know the area,

and, you know, I had him visions of him being out there

somewhere in the dark, freezing cold,

and I just need to get him back.

You have this thing, this golden hour when you're searching,

and James had been missing for about 40 minutes

so...already we'd eaten into that before we even started,

so things started being geared up at the station, people coming out.

We had the traffic cars out using the Tannoy system,

sort of giving out the messages.

We then gave all the details to all the taxi drivers,

they put it out over their systems.

All the bus drivers were told.

I had dealt with missing children, nothing on this scale.

I can remember, actually, the call,

it was an unusual call, because they were informing me about an incident

that would generally not be escalated to the CID.

The scale of the investigation, even prior to my arrival,

was significantly higher than you would expect.

This wasn't a normal situation.

The helicopter had been out,

the Operational Support Division,

they were actively engaged in the search.

All of the available officers in Bootle

were involved in the search.

Well, we don't treat it as anything other than a missing from home,

and on the balance of probabilities,

James is going to be found.

And we stayed on The Strand for quite a while,

and then eventually we decamped back to the station

because there was nothing we could do,

and Denise really, really didn't want to go, and cut up.

You know, I mean, obviously...

there wasn't that much we could do for her

in terms of sort of calming her down

because, by that time, he'd been missing three hours.

The shops were shutting.

The police asked me to go to the police station...

and I did find it really hard,

cos I thought, once I leave here...

It's leaving that place,

it's leaving the point of where you last seen your child.

And you're leaving that shop without him,

but you walked in with him.

And it's just...

such a hard thing, it was such a hard thing for me to do.

I didn't want to leave it,

I wanted to stay there until I got him back,

I wanted someone to bring him into that shop and go, he's OK.

Well, I asked for all of the key holders

for every shop of The Strand to return to their shop.

They had just short of 200 shops,

so we had to get 200 people back to The Strand,

and get the stores open.

James had gone missing quarter to four,

and he hadn't been seen since,

so there's a strong possibility

that he's wandered into one of the many shops...

TJ Hughes' was quite close.

...and he's hidden.

And as the keyholders were contacted and arrived,

we would then go through...

They would go through every single shop,

and basically do a thorough search.

You get one go at, you know, going in there and doing it properly.

I was really, really worried about James

because of the proximity of the canal.

That was my big fear, actually, at that time,

is if James had have been wandering,

and the thought of, you know, access to that canal is...

is relatively easy.

The Operational Support Division had a full team

of 18 constables, two sergeants, and an inspector.

At that point in time, we were actually searching as best we could,

given the light we had. We were searching the canal.

Me head was everywhere, it just felt it was going to explode.

I thought, you know, this has got to be serious, now.

I remember one of them walking in with a pair of old shoes.

Never said anything to me, just dangled them in me face.

And I went, no, they're not James's.

I don't think they knew what to say, or...

were they blaming me?

I don't know. I really don't know.

I just remember him walking in with these shoes,

dangling them in front of me face,

me saying they're not his, and off they went again.

We had to interrogate the CCTV system.

About...ten past one, we were still there.

And I got a message from one of the detectives

who said he'd seen something on cameras

that he really wanted me to look at, as soon as possible.

This was a timelapse system.

It was 16 cameras, I think it was taking an image every three seconds.

Clearly, you could see James, hand-in-hand with...

two other boys,

and being led away, in The Strand.

You had to look twice, because it was surprising.

And I remember...

having to think...

What does that mean?

It was just...

It was just something I just didn't expect to see.

From that moment then,

the focus and the priorities changed.

We knew that James hadn't walked out of The Strand alone.

He had walked or had been certainly guided

away from his mother by two other boys.

It was an abduction.

Denise finds James missing

at something like just before quarter to four.

She's looking around for him.

In less than one and a half minutes,

James is being led out of The Strand.

James is abducted from way over the far end of The Strand,

which is sort of right across the other end, on the ground floor,

and he's marched, at some speed,

from one end of The Strand to the other end of The Strand,

hand-in-hand, walking out through this door.

James has walked across here

and if you go there just before the canal bridge,

there's a Post Office to your right-hand side,

they took him down there.

So this would have been a really busy area,

it's a busy entrance.

James would have walked past lots and lots of shoppers.

CROSSING BEEPING

Denise would just have realised that James had gone missing.

She'd be searching the neighbouring shops,

she'd be asking people, have you seen my...

Have you seen me little boy?

I'd be thinking he's nearby, as everybody would.

Yet the shocking thing for me

is that it would have took just over one and half minutes,

one minute 31 seconds I think it was,

from James to being taken to actually leaving The Strand.

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I do remember the press conference.

I didn't care about the cameras.

I didn't care about the people behind the cameras.

I was just more concerned about getting my voice out there,

to get James back.

I wanted to let people know that he was mine, not theirs,

and if you've got him, I need him back, I want him back.

He was just behind me at the butcher's,

I turned away from him for a minute, and by that time, he'd gone.

I went along with...

other journalists to cover the press conference that morning.

By that time, we were beginning to realise

that something serious had happened...

...but obviously the full details were yet to emerge.

We do have a number of video photographs

from the precinct itself,

showing the boy quite clearly

apparently following two youths

that we're very anxious to trace.

It may well be that the child did follow them,

so it is very important that we do trace these two boys.

That moment, I think, when we went to that press conference

and we were told two boys had led James away,

and we were shown those images,

was when the whole dynamic of the story started to change again,

and we'd moved on from potentially a tragic accident

to something more sinister than that.

Denise, is it possible for you to tell us in your own words

the sequence of events yesterday?

When I lost him, you mean?

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If you've got me baby, just bring him back.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

In that circumstance, you're not nervous of cameras,

you're not nervous of reporters,

you not nervous of anything, you just want one thing.

And nothing else matters.

Your first thought is, well, it's two kids taking him away,

that's good, rather than sort of being an adult.

Two children taking him off,

perhaps they've taken him home,

perhaps they're sort of taking him off to play, something like that,

you know? How bad can it be?

Because they were clearly juveniles...

...I felt in my own mind, I don't know whether it's me being positive,

that...it's likely to be less sinister,

then if it was an adult.

You know, it might be a prank that's gone wrong.

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I felt relieved.

Ithought I'm going to get him back again.

There's no way they're going to be able to hurt him,

they're too young to hurt him.

I had every hope of getting him back.

When I saw the images,

it gave us something to go to.

But it was confusing.

So then I said, we know what we've got, we need a bit more,

but that system wouldn't allow you, then,

to track somebody through The Strand

as you would expect that you could do now.

It had to be the same process of going through.

I said, keep going, and see what else we get,

see how many other images we get, and see whether we can track them,

which way would they be going, what camera?

REPORTER: Close-ups of the security photos

don't reveal the youths' identities,

but police say they're both white teenagers,

one wearing a leather jacket.

I'm Jonathan Munro, and at the time of the James Bulger murder,

I was the North of England correspondent for ITN.

In many ways, those images prompted a massive public interest

in the story, but of course that also led to a lot of false leads.

PHONES RINGING

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Throughout Saturday... it was just reacting

to the high volume of information we had.

There was a lot of information coming in.

Too much information for our team to process.

You know, we had so many people coming forward,

sightings in Chester, we had sightings in Stockport.

We had sightings in the West Midlands.

We had, you know, people who were genuinely...

had seen the footage,

genuinely trying to support the investigation.

The log...

incident log was inundated by people calling,

volunteers calling, you know, to search.

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Parents were keeping tight hold of their children today

outside the shopping centre from where two-year-old James Bulger

was apparently abducted.

They were extremely concerned

that the people who were taking him away on camera

were obviously very young themselves,

and questioning about whether they were from the same community,

and who might they be?

All day, police divers have been searching

the Leeds Liverpool waterway.

The already serious fears for James are increasing further

as he faces his second night away from his parents.

So far, the underwater search has been fruitless.

But the fact that frogmen have been called in at such an early stage

is an indication of the level of concern for his safety.

Through that day, then,

we were really analysing everything that was coming in,

and looking at the CCTV.

Well, we've got, you know, James...

James being led away by two boys.

Who have we got around them?

We need to get those images out

because we need to identify the people who were the witnesses,

because they're seeing them full on.

But at the same time, our focus was on really searching.

There were police everywhere in Bootle.

They were searching the tunnels, the roads,

the drains, the shops...

You couldn't move without seeing police officers,

all very stern-faced, all very, very determined...

to make progress on this enquiry.

I got a feeling it wasn't looking good as the days were going on.

I thought if two lads had him,

what if they're too scared to pass him back, now,

because it's gone out there?

You know, it's all over the news, all over the papers...

Were they too frightened to now pass him back?

I remember we were looking out the window,

and Denise said there's a girl, there, or a boy, there,

with a little child, sort of thing, it could be James.

So we had to send somebody out to see who it was,

but obviously, it wasn't James.

She was just sort of clutching at straws by that time.

So all these thoughts were going around in me head,

and in the end, I didn't know what to think.

All that I wanted was to get him back safe and sound.

It's now well over 30 hours

since James went missing from this shopping centre.

The already serious concerns for his safety

have been further heightened

as he faces his second night away from his parents.

I sort of...

had this view that, you know...

that he could still be found.

Despite the fact that we'd seen him taken away,

I really believed that we'd... we'd find James on Saturday.

I really did.

And then...

And then on the Sunday,

they just said you need to go up to Walton Lane, because...

...they found a body.

Police officers combed wasteground near a reservoir this morning.

A member of the public said she saw a boy like James

with some youths here yesterday.

Local residents were asked to check their gardens,

but so far there's no sign of the missing toddler.

We were informed of a missing child at 20 past four.

At 20 past four, James was not far short of the reservoir.

So at 20 past four,

everybody is looking round in shops for a boy that's missing,

and these boys,

with purpose,

with determination,

with speed,

are a mile away!

We were told of

the first significant sighting of James

after The Strand shopping centre.

And that was him being seen by a woman

with two boys in the Breeze Hill area...

...close to what was described as an enclosed reservoir.

One of the things that did strike me

was that it did seem to be an extraordinarily long distance

from The Strand,

and you begin to think to yourself...

Just how far have they taken him?

And how did they manage to take him that far?

That makes you start thinking is there another person involved,

because...how could these two boys possibly have transported

this little boy that distance in that space of time?

And yet, there they were, just the three of them, seen by the witness.

We were still trying to understand what was their motivation.

Who was telling them to do this?

Was there someone else involved?

What on earth were they doing? And where on earth was James?

That was still very much the thought

that was running through all our heads at this point.

I decided that I would take Denise out in a police car,

and just give her some fresh air, basically,

just to sort of keep her occupied for a while.

Mandy said, come on, we'll go for a little drive round,

just to see if we can see him.

And as we're driving round, Mandy gets a call...

We hadn't been out very long, actually,

we were just sort of driving round Bootle,

and I got a call saying, come back to the police station immediately,

and switch your radio off.

So obviously I'm sitting next to her so I'm hearing what's going on,

and I went, how come you're being called back to the station?

She went, I don't know. I went, you do.

She went, no, I don't. She went, honestly, I don't know.

I went, you do. I said, because I know. I said, they've found him.

And I knew, I knew then

that he'd been found.

And I knew it wasn't going to be good.

Lying protected under a police tent,

the body of a boy found this afternoon by officers

hunting for two-year-old James Bulger.

The body was discovered on a railway line

right next to a police station in Walton, Liverpool,

over two miles from where he disappeared.

They just said, you know...

you need to go up to Walton Lane, because...

there's a body on the railway.

The scene was...

was kept contained,

you know, on... on...

Where there's a body like that.

And I must admit, I... I... I went...

...assuming it was going to be... an accident.

Really did.

But very, very quickly, you know, you realised that...

...it certainly wasn't an accident.

Inch by inch, the police have searched the railway line

where two-year-old James Bulger's body was found.

It had been spotted earlier by four schoolboys, playing.

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Cos I said, it's a baby!

I was praying it wasn't James.

I still wasn't convinced until I actually saw it with my own eyes.

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It must have been about four o'clock, my bleeper went off again.

And I remember my husband thinking

oh, not again, you've already been out once today, what is it now?

But then he knew.

He said, that's not going to be good news.

I contacted force control room, and...

the words, "We found him."

And I said, "Alive?"

"No." It was just no.

So...you have to go and tell the family.

People were coming in to see me, they were talking to me,

but I couldn't hear a word they were saying.

It's almost like someone places a veil over your face,

a black veil, and you can't see beyond that veil.

You... You hear voices, but you...

You can't hear their words.

It's... It's an experience that...

I would never wish on me worst enemy.

She let out this terrific scream,

and then just sort of...

Just sort of collapsed in on herself.

But it was just terrible to hear.

Ijust...

felt numbness.

KIDS SQUAWK

I was a mum without her baby.

But even then, I think I was still in denial,

I think I thought, you know, they got it wrong,

it...can't be, this can't be true.

Your ultimate objective was always to return James safe and well

to the family.

And...

Yeah, the realisation that wasn't going to happen was...

Yeah, it was...

Yeah, it was devastating.

SIRENS WAIL FAINTLY

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A lot of the bobbies have got kids of their own.

Everybody's lost their own kids at some time in a shopping centre or...

on the beach or something like that, so it could be anybody.

And I think that was it.

This could be any child, you know,

it could have happened to anybody.

I did go for the identification of James's body when...

James's uncle went to identify him.

And he came out of the identification a broken man.

An absolutely broken man.

I think he thought he was tough enough to do it,

and the realisation of what he'd actually seen was just...

He came out, and he was just speechless and broken.

It was... It was terrible to see.

The circumstances surrounding the way the body was left...

...at that time, we couldn't really have an opinion

on what had happened.

What was clear, though, you know, it was...

Yeah, it was devastating, devastating injuries...

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So once we had a positive identification,

there was a lot of anger in the city.

Who could do such a thing?

Why haven't they been caught yet?

Somewhere, some parent must know the time their children were out,

the time they've come back, and the clothes they were wearing.

It's got to be, somebody must know.

At this point,

the gravity of what was occurring really struck home to everybody,

that here we had a situation where we knew

two boys had led this toddler away from his mother

in a shopping centre,

and here, now, virtually two days later,

we're confronted with the news that his body's been found,

and he's been brutally murdered, and...

the question then is could it have been the boys that did it?

Or was there somebody else involved?

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Six o'clock on the...

Monday morning, and then all hell broke loose.

PHONES RINGING

Phones constantly ringing,

and it was all hands on deck as well

just to deal with the constant barrage of media enquiries.

The blurred images of two youths seen taking James away

are now all over the city.

The public say detectives hold the key to finding them.

You know, you have a situation where we see

two boys taking James away.

We don't know what's happened to James, but clearly it's...

going to be a bad situation.

And as a result of that the media were very, very quick to respond.

The story became who were the boys in the CCTV?

That was what the police were focused on,

it's what the media were focused on,

and it led to...

a real suspicion in the area

about anybody who could have fitted that description.

You saw children of James's age, and maybe a little bit older,

being led by reins, so that they couldn't run away.

You saw them having their hands held incredibly tightly

by their mums and their dads.

SIRENS WAIL FAINTLY

We were working our way through any leads.

The different photographs, the different images,

working on the CCTV.

It was bringing together all of those images,

but there was so much going on,

the images were such that you couldn't make out any detail.

When I gave the description, I think I said something between 12 and 15.

Then we were just looking at any child

that was either flagged up through our own police systems

as somebody who... could be either one of the boys.

I think a lot of people were thinking,

well, maybe it's this person or that person,

or this group of boys or that group of boys.

It's natural, because it's a vacuum,

and it's therefore being filled by uncertainty,

and, you know, frankly, gossip.

There's nothing wrong with that, in the sense that it's human nature,

but it's a very, very difficult thing.

People were looking at, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old boys

just half thinking, I wonder...

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There was massive pressure on the police to solve it,

there wasn't a television bulletin or a newspaper in this country

that wasn't leading on the James Bulger murder,

and that is pressure, you know, there's no question about that.

They were following up leads, tips,

information from members of the public all over Merseyside

and even beyond.

I think, over the course of the investigation,

over 60 individuals,

60 boys were either brought in for questioning, or questioned.

So I repeat the appeal that we've made.

Anyone, friends, family or whatever,

you know, we must interview these two boys,

because if we don't, we can't guarantee anyone's safety

until they've been arrested.

You know, I wasn't concentrating

on what was going on in the outside world.

You just don't know where you are, you...

You don't know who you're talking to, or...

You don't know what's going on,

and although you're getting told what's going on,

nothing's sinking in. You just want to shut yourself away

from the outside world. I just locked myself in a room,

and when I finally got to watch the news, I could see their...

You know, how angry people were, and, you know...

I felt and I sensed the love for James in the city.

One of the points in where James's body was found,

that evidence meant that James had travelled probably on foot

from The Strand...

...to Walton Lane.

The appeal went out to anybody... within that route to come forward.

There was a business called Amec on the corner of Hawthorne Road

at the roundabout with Breeze Hill.

They had a camera that was covering their car park,

and when the...owner returned to work, he had a look at it.

He saw the images of James with two boys walking past.

When the images came back to us,

there's a small wall, and we thought...

...that gives us a benchmark, maybe, for height.

We thought that...

perhaps the height of the two boys who'd abducted James...

...might be not as tall as that we might have considered.

You know, it's what not 100%,

because of the poor images,

but we had to open our mind to the fact

that instead of looking at a 12 to 15-year-old,

you know, we might be dealing with smaller children here.

It was difficult to consider that anybody could carry out

those type of injuries to another individual,

certainly someone as helpless as James,

but the idea that it could be done by juveniles...

or even children,

was...

You know, it was off the scale.

I was in Marsh Lane, in the office going through

some of the information that had come in.

And...

we got a breakthrough.

I got a call from a police officer in Walton Lane

who told me somebody had been into Walton Lane.

She was a bit beside herself, really.

She'd been...at a family friend's on Friday 12th,

and their son, he'd come home...

in a right mess.

Dirty, bits of paint on his jacket,

and he'd been sagging with another lad from the same school.

He's only ten.

He looks a bit like it could have been him on the photo,

but you know, it's probably not.

That's all she said. "I just want to let you know."

And his name is Jon Venables.

So we were constantly getting really good information

from various sources,

from, you know, people who had just seen people,

people who knew people.

A neighbour, I believe it was, called in to say that

she thought that Jon Venables might have had something to do with it.

Jon had been out playing truant

on the day of the murder case,

and he'd come home with his coat covered in paint.

She said he went to St Mary's School in Bedford Road,

so I got the number of the headmistress.

And she told me a bit about his background,

he hadn't been there that long.

I said to her, look, was John Venables...

at school on Friday? And she said, no,

he was sagging with Robert Thompson.

I said, can you tell me about the Thompson family?

Who she knew really well. The fact that he was a persistent truanter...

The Thompson family lived in Walton village, there.

Relatively close to where James was found.

So there was enough in that, really, to make me think,

hmm, this is something that I need to look at a little bit closer.

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We went to the home address as we had it from the school.

And his father was there, and basically said that...

that Jon wasn't there, but he was in his mother's address,

which was in Norris Green.

And a couple of members of the team went up to Norris Green

and said, listen, this is why we're here.

We want you to come to Lower Lane, ask some questions.

Have you got the coat you were wearing when you went...

you know, when you were sagging on Friday?

A few things are said, odd things,

not necessarily admitting being in The Strand but...

I think Venables said at one stage, you know,

are you going to speak to Robert?

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And then I see Thompson.

And his eyes are everywhere.

And never did I ever see,

from the moment I met him

to all the time I was dealing with him with Phil

and the other detective sergeant

did I ever see him in fear.

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I got a call off Phil,

and I remember him saying, Jim, these are...

these are little children.

He said, I can't consider that this little lad'd do this.

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So they were arrested at seven. The first interviews...

didn't take place until five PM.

There was a lot of work seeing and analysing what we already had.

But from the first moments that they were brought in,

Venables mother had said what Venables had said.

He was going to say he wasn't in The Strand.

We knew Venables had been in The Strand,

even before we started interviewing them,

that they'd been in The Strand.

The boys were together.

We knew they'd been together, we knew they were in The Strand.

We knew we had the boys who had abducted James.

BEEP

There was a bit of evidence that was vital

in how we developed our interview strategy,

following evidence we got from this shop here,

which was formerly the Bradford & Bingley Building Society.

The manager reported to the police that on the morning of the 12th,

two boys, whom they were 100% convinced

were the same boys who abducted James,

they were hanging about by the door

and they had their fingers all over this pane of glass,

so what the detective did when fingerprinting,

take all the marks from all of the glass at the front,

and as a result of those lifts, those fingerprint lifts,

we were able, then, to match them immediately

to Jon Venables' fingerprints.

Despite what he said, he was in The Strand.

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I'm Dominic Lloyd,

and I was Robert Thompson's solicitor at the time of the case.

A solicitor arriving at a police station

can normally expect to do a lot of waiting.

In this case, there was none of that.

We started work straight away,

cos that's the only work that was being done there.

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You've got a social worker

and a defence solicitor...

and then you've got two big, burly detective sergeants

all in a room.

He wasn't frightened.

He wasn't fazed by any of it.

Some people might say, cos he didn't understand what was going on.

He knew what was going on.

THOMPSON LAUGHS

I really could not bring myself to believe

that he had any involvement in this,

just from his youth, just from how small,

how young, how childlike he was.

Robert Thompson's interviews,

he admitted quicker he was in The Strand.

I think at one stage really early on

he says he saw James with his mother.

And then his interviews quite quickly get to the stage

where he has Jon taking his hand and taking him out.

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INTERVIEWER: No, just a second, listen to me, Bobby...

We knew, even before we started interviewing him,

that he'd been in The Strand

because the fingerprints on Bradford & Bingley,

they put him there.

WAILING

At the end of interview three,

we tell him that Robert Thompson has already told us

that he's been in The Strand.

And then he admits being in The Strand.

And then he admits, you know, being with James,

and...

and then taking James.

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They wanted blood, they really did.

I think they'd have ripped him to pieces.

Bastards!

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It's horrid, really.

I... Still now,

I can't really fathom thinking about exactly what happened.

I'm not going to stop at this, I am going to keep fighting for my son.

He's not here to defend himself, so I'm going to do it for him.

The forensic evidence was chilling.

The youngest defendants to face murder charges this century

arrived at Preston Crown Court this morning.

He just kept on getting back up again...

He wouldn't stay down.

For everyone who says, you know, you should let it go,

why should I let it go?

I'm never going to let this go.

It was my son that they took.

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