Original subtitles

I'm Leon Fergus and I'm James' brother.

What happened to him, it's horrid, really.

It's still always there for us.

It doesn't really get easy.

But we've got used to it.

I'm Torn Fergus, James's brother.

It's heart-wrenching, isn't it, really?

I should have had another older brother with me now.

What happened, it is sickening, isn't it?

To my own brother.

REPORTER: Police searching for a missing two-year-old boy

on Merseyside believe he's been abducted.

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

If I'd had turned left, I'd have got James back.

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

...it was off the scale.

I had 24 years police service at that time.

I've arrested quite a few kids

but never dealt with a child who'd committed murder.

REPORTER: Security cameras caught him on film,

leaving the centre with two boys.

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

REPORTER: Inch by inch, the police have searched the railway line

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

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Still, I can't really think about exactly what happened.

I don't really want to know all the details about it.

We do think about him.

What happened to James, it's unimaginable.

É

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The case of trying to extract some kind of information

about how did James get all these injuries.

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.

When you have a murder investigation,

you'll always feel desire and pressure

to get to the truth and get to what happened

as soon as possible.

At the arrest point, they were just two of the suspects that we treat

as we find them, you know, there's no moments of euphoria,

"Yeah, we've got them, because we've got everything we need here now."

We certainly didn't.

There was one desire, and that was to get to the truth.

When you arrest a young child for something horrendous as it was,

you've got to try and build a friendship, otherwise

they'd oppose you and would not speak to you at all.

Robert Thompson's interviews,

he admitted quicker he was at the Strand.

I think at one stage, really early on, he says he saw James

with his mother.

That's all he saw.

You report back to Marsh Lane

and they're all "Did we have the right kids?"

I just said this, "Listen, don't ask me that."

I said, "I haven't got a due at the moment.

"If I get the feeling, I'll tell you."

And then his interviews quite quickly get to the stage

where he has, Jon, taken his hand and taken him out.

There was nothing coming from Venables but he was a different

character altogether.

Well, we knew Venables had been in the Strand

and it was admitted that Venables and Thompson were together,

so we knew, even before we started interviewing them,

that they'd been in the Strand.

The first and second interview, Venables just told us

about how he was playing truant, getting up to mischief

in and around Walton, County Road.

Never been near the Strand.

He's taking us round everywhere they went.

But he's not volunteering anything in relation to the Strand.

When he gets asked about the Strand, he just told us he was basically

here, there and everywhere around Walton,

shoplifting and getting up to no good.

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HE CRIES

My name is Laurie Dalton.

I was a detective constable for 26 years.

Thompson was calculating.

He cried whenever there was an awkward situation

and he was immediately given a Mars bar and a can of Coke,

and he latched onto this because when I say he cried,

there was not a drop of water.

There wasn't a tear.

The boy was streetwise, he was trying to con me.

He thought he was going home

because he kept asking, "When am I going home?"

DETECTIVE: 20:55...

That is a warped mind.

Very rare in kids' minds.

It's a chilling thing to say, with hindsight.

At the time, it simply seemed to be part of a pattern

of desperate lying,

of desperately just trying to talk about anything else other than this.

É

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That's quite a bit cold, very eerie, the fact that he

actually said it in the way James would have said it.

Once he started to admit that he was the one with Venables

to leave the Strand, that's when your heart is pumping

and you feel like punching the air.

Then admitting that he was one of the two boys that was with James,

that's when you're feeling excited by all achievements,

that you've extracted what you want.

Now you want to go further.

At the end of interview three, which was the last interview

on the first night he was arrested, which would be the Thursday,

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.

Jon Venables was frightened of upsetting his mother.

They put it to me that it might be worth having a word

with Susan Venables.

Susan just, you know, said to him, "Look, you know, we'll always

"love you. We'll always support you. You really need to tell the truth."

And so that was the breakthrough then that led to the next interview.

You know, he actually said those words - "I killed him."

In a private room, his mother sat with Jon.

Basically said, "You need to tell the truth, we'll support you.

"Don't be worrying." Ancl basically he said, "I killed James.

"I killed him."

And that was the first and probably only admission.

It was really difficult to consider that anybody could carry out

those type of injuries to another individual.

The idea that it could be someone as young as ten

was difficult to comprehend.

That was the breakthrough then

that led to the next interview,

which was interview six, I think, which then probably was as close

as you're going to get to the truth,

where Jon Venables then took the interviewers through the Friday

when they took James.

This then became a difficult path

because now we've got two ten-year-olds

who have killed a two-year-old, and we have to then make sure

that we provide all the evidence that we can to show what happened.

We got a sense of what sort of went on on the journey.

They walked him past Queen's Drive, past Christchurch,

took him on to the reservoir.

We've got no witnesses whatsoever to the final, violent act.

Our priority was solely to discover what happened to James.

Venables sought to remove himself

from any of the most violent actions,

putting them all down to Robert Thompson, saying,

"I only hit him a few times because Robbie told me to do it.

"But, you know, I didn't do it really hard."

We were getting information coming through from Lower Lane

where Venables was being held

that he was now blaming Thompson.

They both started blaming each other.

Because he knew there was only him, Venables and James,

he knew that it would be hard for me to say who did what, and that's why

it was easier for him to blame it all on Venables.

These are the boys that took James from Denise outside the Strand

and then left him

where he died, and, actually, ultimately killed him.

We had the individuals responsible.

By time, the interviews are over,

Jon has made an admission, Robert hasn't and said it was allJon,

and Jon has tried to push and blame in Robert's direction.

And that was the point at which we left the police interviews

and that remained the case throughout the time

I was acting for them through the trial,

that story didn't change.

We had enough evidence.

Once we have enough evidence, we charge.

We've got a ten-year-old boy standing on the other side

of the charge desk.

He can't even reach the top of the desk.

And when he got charged, I thought,

"How could you, as a ten-year-old boy,

"cause so much misery to a person's life?"

The name's Ray Simpson.

I was the inspector in Merseyside Police press office at the time.

It was just solid with reporters,

camera crews, all the satellites were outside.

By this time, I mean, it was worldwide.

Two ten-year-old boys from the Walton area have been charged

with the abduction and murder of James Bulger.

DENISE: Well, I was kind of relieved

because I knew that they couldn't go take another

child because I strongly believe

that they were on course, when they were,

they would have gone on to do

because they would have got away with it.

REPORTER: From early this morning,

local people, still furious at the death of James Bulger,

began to gather outside South Sefton Magistrates' Court.

50, less than two weeks since James had been abducted,

there was a degree of anger on the streets,

which was frightening. It was frightening.

You want to give them to the people and let them sort them out!

I've heard reports between 300 and 500.

It's not far off. And they wanted blood.

They really did.

REPORTER: "Let them go," they chanted.

To say that emotions ran high would be an understatement.

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There were some fairly violent scenes as people tried to rush

at the police vans and arrests were made,

it was generally a very difficult scene.

My name is Diane Halliwell, and, at the time of the investigation,

I was a press officer for Merseyside Police.

We went into the court and then the boys were brought in.

Jon Venables was with his father,

and Robert Thompson was with a social worker.

And, as we sat at the back, I think we were shocked

that they were only ten. But, actually seeing the boys,

they were tiny - you could barely see them above the desk.

I don't know what I imagined I was going to see when those two

boys came into court and what kind of monsters

I conjured up in my mind,

but you couldn't have expected to see anything

more ordinary and more unprepossessing

than these two tiny little boys, looking very lost and bewildered

who were led into the courtroom.

And that was a shocking thing.

You couldn't believe, looking at little boys like that,

that they'd clone that to James.

It was just so hard to believe.

My name is Sean Sexton.

I'm a solicitor in Liverpool.

I was brought in to help Denise and the family.

It was the Friday before James' funeral on the Monday,

and I got a phone call from a Sunday tabloid newspaper.

Er, and they told me they were going to run a story on the Sunday

that, erm,

Denise had been shoplifting on the day of James' abduction,

and she delayed reporting James missing so she could stash the loot.

I wasn't aware that people were saying nasty things about me.

I've never shoplifted or anything like that, and anyone who knows me

knows that.

So all these people, all the people that are claiming these nasty things

about me, they weren't there.

You look at the CCTV,

Denise is paying at the counter, erm, or whatever.

She turns round and James is gone.

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It was a really cold morning.

Bitterly cold.

I was travelling in the car and the crowds are sort of, like,

two or three deep all the way along.

It was a massive funeral.

There were people lining the route.

When I got out the funeral car I just seen two sides of the road

lined with people, but I just put me head back down because I just

wanted the day to be over.

When the tiny white coffin came in, it was just really, really moving.

And at the front of the church, there was a red armchair

that the dad had made, Ralph had made, erm, for James,

and that was just really, really sad. And Father Michael's address

was, you know, sitting there and you'll be sitting

with Our Lord now, in heaven.

It was just really, really sad.

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Tragic.

Erm, I mean...

...y0U can see

the pictures of the actual funeral itself

and there's rows and rows of people

just in tears.

It was a beautiful service.

Erm, Denise was very dignified.

She'd been told probably best to buy a hat

so she could be private in her grief,

and throughout it all, she had a wide-brimmed hat on.

She kept her head down.

Alls I kept thinking was, "I shouldn't be doing this,

"I shouldn't have to do this.

"I should not be putting my child down there."

I think the Kirkby community, you know, James was from Kirby,

it was a real sense of loss

because you felt he was like your own, really.

That's the way I felt.

There were times when you just look back at it and thought,

what a waste.

And it was.

ARCHIVE:

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We all knew and the court officials all knew

that this wasn't an everyday court case

that would get reported in the local paper.

This was a major international story of the grimmest sort.

I felt that the boys had to go to trial

regardless of the ages, because the family deserved that.

The family deserved the fact that they could be seen

to be on trial.

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I just wanted them to spend many years behind bars.

That's someone's child that they've taken

and they can't get away with it.

ARCHIVE:

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We'd done everything we could do. We presented the file of evidence

to the best of our ability.

Richard Henriques, Queen's Counsel.

Leading Prosecuting Counsel.

I felt more emotionally involved than I have done in any other case.

It was a courtroom I was very familiar with.

And seeing two 11-year-olds in that dock

was a shock in itself.

It was an extraordinary spectacle, really, to see all this legal

majesty surround these two little tiny boys.

The fact that the boys were intimidated, well, at the end

of the day, they did what they did, and if they were then scared

by going into court, well...

...tough. You know.

It just didn't...l've got very little sympathy

with them in terms of,

oh, it was such a terrible time, I felt so scared in court,

and everything. Well, they brought it on themselves and...

...hard lines.

Strangely, the critical evidence of joint enterprise and involvement

in the crime didn't come from the railway line at all,

but it came from that very long walk from Bootle to Walton,

two-and-a-half miles through a residential area.

And decent, responsible people

wanted to help and offered help.

The witnesses that appeared got very, very upset because I think

they felt such guilt at not being able to stop it,

and the fact that they hadn't actually intervened to the point

where they'd taken James off these two boys.

ARCHIVE:

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I don't blame them witnesses whatsoever.

Yeah, he could have been saved by one, maybe more.

But no-one expects two ten-year-olds to take a child

and do what they done.

Every time that they were actually questioned as to what they were

doing, or where they were going, or who James was,

they had stories ready.

The story changed along the way,

but they would give explanations to the people who were actually

speaking to them as to what they were doing with James,

where they were going, why he was crying,

why he'd got a graze on his head.

And they had so many opportunities along the way

to perhaps give James up to the people.

I am convinced

that they had one intention

and that was intention to kill him.

They'd walked James for three miles.

And then taken him to the railway track.

They're just...

...plain evil.

The forensic evidence was chilling.

The pathologist evidence was

that, I think, 42 separate injuries

to James, a minimum of 30 separate blows,

either with bricks,

stones,

a metal object,

or feet to the body of James.

So it was a prolonged, shockingly violent attack,

which, frankly,

could have had no other purpose other than to kill.

That was a really difficult thing to listen to

and there was real emotion.

I mean, I think a lot of the forensic experts had given evidence

in dozens, if not hundreds of trials.

And it's pretty matter-of-fact for them,

but it's not matter-of-fact if the victim is two-years-old.

I don't think any of them tried to hide the fact

this was an unusually distressing experience

to give evidence.

Thompson's trainers had been removed

without untying the laces.

The police had seized his trainers.

They were able to take an imprint of the laces as they were tied

with a double bow.

There were some very marked, erm,

D rings, they were called,

through which the laces had been laced.

The evidence as to why these marks were made by Robert's footwear

and ultimately the evidence concluded where the scientist

had taken a life-sized doll

and the footwear, and placed

the footwear in contact with the doll's head,

where it would make the impression that was visible.

That was a moment of clarity for me, yeah. Yeah.

I had had by that time, quite a long relationship with him

and during which time he had denied all involvement

and to be presented with a picture

like that didn't break my relationship.

Erm...

...it just meant that I had to...

...I had to be aware that there was something else in it now.

Yeah.

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No-one could believe that two ten-year-olds could do something

like that, be so evil on another child.

The two of them are as evil as each other.

So I strongly believe if they would have got away with James's murder,

they would have gone on to commit another crime.

They would have gone on to take another child

and do the same to that child.

ARCHIVE:

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I wanted to hear the sentence that they were given.

That experience in itself, you know,

sitting so close to the two that took my son's life,

took my world away from me, destroyed my life.

So close to me.

I couldn't believe that they were standing there laughing.

You just want to see the ones who took your world away from you

go down.

It was an absolutely packed court.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.

There was always a worry at the back of their minds that, you know,

maybe the jury couldn't get beyond their age.

Maybe the jury would try and find some way to avoid

an actual conviction for murder.

You could see in the jury

the weight of responsibility.

Some of the faces were really,

they were carrying the weight of the world

on their shoulders.

The foreman of the jury was asked if they had reached verdicts

on the abduction of James Bulger, on the murder of James Bulger.

"Have you reached verdicts?"

Yes, they had.

Had there been an acquittal,

the competence of our criminal justice process would have been

seriously questioned.

At that point, the judge decided that was, you know,

enough to proceed

and he took the verdict.

Guilty.

They found them guilty.

You could almost feel the breath that had been held in

which exhaled throughout that courtroom.

I remember the family at the back. You know, "Yes",

when the verdict came in.

I remember just feeling a big sense of relief.

Robert Thompson was gasping for air.

He was in a state of absolute shock,

Jon Venables was crying.

It was a moment of the most terrible drama.

The verdict coming was a relief

because it gave the Bulger family

the justice that, you know, I think they deserved.

And I think it was the right verdict.

ARCHIVE:

We were very happy that they were named

because what they did, they deserved to be named.

They could have been allowed to fade into obscurity,

but the family didn't want that.

ARCHIVE:

I remember the judge, at the end of it, he said,

"You will both serve very, very many years in prison."

And I was pleased at that outcome.

I found out a few weeks later

that "very, very many years" meant eight years.

That's not what I thought was going to happen.

I do remember thinking, "How am I going to tell Denise this?"

Like, that's not "very, very many years".

Then I said, "Well, don't worry, because the Lord ChiefJustice

"is going to have his say now",

and you know, I can't believe

he'll go along with eight years too.

And the Lord ChiefJustice came back with ten years...

...and that just, you know, it really felt like an insult for...

...for the family. So that's when they decided that they were going to

raise this petition because the final decision was going to be made

by the Home Secretary.

Michael Howard. I was Home Secretary.

ARCHIVE:

I had to consider what I thought was the appropriate sentence.

Trialjudge said eight years.

The Lord ChiefJustice had said ten years.

I had in the forefront of my mind

those words of the trialjudge.

This was an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity.

I tried to work out what an adult would have had as the sentence.

I thought would have been well in excess of 20 years.

Obviously, you had to discount from that because the offenders

were very young and you obviously had to take that into account,

and I thought 15 years was the right sentence.

Michael Howard did up the sentence to 15 years,

although I still wasn't happy, but I was prepared to accept

because they would have been spending time in a proper prison,

erm, once they come out of the Young Offenders.

The petition backfired. The boys challenged it.

ARCHIVE:

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The petition, people forget,

called for, erm...

...Venables and Thompson to be imprisoned for life.

So it didn't really take the petition for me to know

what kind of reaction this terrible crime had evoked.

It was decided the Lord Chief Justice would decide the tariff

in those cases,

and he came out with seven years, eight months.

That wasn't just a kick in the teeth, it was a stab in the back.

I thought, you know,

James's life didn't mean anything then.

15 years would have meant that they did some time in jail,

and if that had happened...

...I think a lot of the pain that is still there

wouldn't be there now.

If they'd done some time in jail,

if they'd heard the clang of the prison gates,

then I think there would have been some feeling

that, well, you know what, they were punished.

But all they did was spend time in a secure children's home.

They were in a children's home.

They never spent one day in a Young Offenders institution,

never mind an adult prison.

I wanted justice for James.

I wanted them two to serve a long time in an adult prison.

Young Offenders is not going to learn them

that what they done was wrong.

They can't get away with murder.

That's someone's child that they've taken.

And they can't get away with it.

I thought, you know, James's life didn't mean anything then.

You know, they're not even going to reach an adult prison.

They should have gone to an adult prison.

My name is Amanda Knowles

and I was the Children's Resource Centre Manager at Barton Moss.

I would see Robert on the unit

but every month, I would see him

in that formal setting of a secure unit review.

He would sit curled up in his chair, sucking his thumb.

It's like he'd regressed,

you know, because he knew that what he'd done was very serious

and he wouldn't be going back to his mum any time soon.

My name is David James Smith.

I did a great deal of research,

tracking back into the boys' backgrounds.

In Robert's case, he was truanting a lot,

and I think he's been described as an "urban, feral child",

just left to, you know, roam around the streets,

in and out of the shops and the pubs and, you know,

just, generally, out of control.

I don't hold the view that children are born evil.

Some staff had real difficulties with that in the beginning,

coming to terms with, you know, what Robert had done.

But with the help and support of psychologists,

they were able to provide the care

that enabled Robert to be successfully rehabilitated

and returned to, you know, to society.

I did spend a little bit of time at Red Bank

and came into contact with Jon.

He definitely appeared to have more complex needs.

As a professional that worked with children for a long time,

I would have been questioning things like learning difficulties,

history of abuse,

how this might be manifesting in his behaviour,

because that was visible in his appearance.

When I looked at Robert and Jon,

I saw, in Jon,

a boy that was more troubled than Robert.

I suppose the word you'd use is, he looked more disturbed.

He and Robert would both have been so unbelievably scrutinised,

so their every actions were kind of recorded, there are all these sort

of tear sheets, daily sheets where, you know, almost hour by hour,

people are making notes about what they're up to.

I sat at the dining table with Jon.

We were joking about fighting.

And I said something to the effect that he couldn't pull the skin

off a rice pudding.

He replied, "Oh, yeah? Bring your baby here and I'll batter it."

Jon Venables' parents had had difficulties with depression.

The police had been called once because Susan Venables

had left her children unattended.

She had issues with alcohol

and she came from a family in which there was, you know,

known to be domestic violence.

There's loads of kids out there who come from bad upbringings

and, you know, bad family backgrounds and stuff like that.

I don't care whether they were badly brought up.

That didn't give them the right

to go out and take the life of a child.

My child.

I was just crying uncontrollably, it's just, I couldn't believe it.

Ithought

yous haven't been punished for murdering my son,

and yet, there yous are, about to live new lives now.

I just couldn't believe it.

I didn't think they would have been released so soon.

I felt like I'd let James down.

I didn't think I fought hard enough.

ARCHIVE:

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The first thought I had is, I've got a lot of nieces that go into town.

You know, one of them could have been getting chatted up by them.

Who knows?

He could have took her to his house, or vice versa.

And it was a scary thought thatl had.

And when I had the conversation with me nieces,

they were all taken aback by it, going,

"Never even thought about that."

So, yeah, it was a big concern for my family.

ARCHIVE:

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When he was released, he was in the charge

of a probation officer.

And his life was, you know, began to descend into chaos.

He was collecting child abuse, pornography online

and going online, pretending to be a woman with a child

who they were offering up for other people to abuse.

ARCHIVE:

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Yeah, definitely did say, "I told you so"

when he reoffended. I knew all along it was going to happen.

I didn't know when it was going to happen,

but I did know it would happen.

It took him a bit of time but he got there.

As I knew he would.

I'm hoping they are seeing through him now and I'm hoping that they

are realising that he is a danger, and he is a danger to society.

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

why should I let it go?

It was my son that they took.

I'm never going to let this go.

We just had all this done up for his birthday.

It's just our little way of giving him something, really, isn't it?

It just makes us feel better as a family as well,

because he knows he's not forgotten.

He'll never be forgotten by us.

I didn't think for one minute I'd be standing with a new family

looking over the son that I lost.

In the beginning, I didn't think I'd meet anyone else.

When I first met Stewie,

he didn't know I was James's mum,

but once the wall come down,

you know, I couldn't have met a better man.

He's just pulled me through so much.

The day I married Stewie,

Thomas was three months old

and obviously, we had Michael, and it was such a lovely day,

and, you know, that day I couldn't stop smiling

because I could see my family growing again.

I'm Leon Fergus and I'm James's brother.

I'm Torn Fergus, James's brother.

It still is weird seeing about James on the news to this day, obviously.

It always will be, so obviously, I just, like...

He should have been here with us.

We shouldn't be looking at him on the news about a kid being murdered.

We'd rather him be sat next to us.

When I learnt that them two were getting released,

that was hard for me, for them to go to school then,

because I thought, you know,

what happens if they're outside the school,

waiting for them, or whatever?

Going off places, if we was, like,

walking round shopping and that, she'd always make sure

she's at the back so that she can watch us walk forward

in front of her. She'd want to know where we were at all times.

É

As a kid, you're a bit like, ah, I want to do this, I want to do that.

But obviously, growing up now, you'd understand why,

why she was like that.

But he'll do it. He'll get there.

I've seen him growing into a young man now,

who's going to become a dad himself.

So, yeah, it is a new chapter in our book.

Through what's happened with me mum and James, as becoming a dad,

seeing it from me mum's...seeing me mum's eyes, really,

it is, it's going to make me more protective

and hold the baby closer

than you'd think anyone could.

Well, I wanted James to be remembered as a little boy

and not just the murdered child,

so we set up a charity in his name.

We started off with a caravan,

but we've upgraded that now to a lodge.

When we first set up the charity,

we were, like, deciding what's the best way to go

about it and to make it easier.

We had, like, such a wide spectrum, didn't we?

50, families going through bereavement, a parent, a child,

er, kids that have been bullied,

er, kids that have been victims of crime.

We just wanted to give them a free holiday.

I think James would be running up and down here because the first

family holiday that we had with James, was a caravan

and he absolutely loved it. Loved it.

So, I mean, just seeing the smiles on his face, remembering the smiles

on his face, I'm hoping that works, spreading that to a lot of other

kids that come here.

I look back on this whole case with enormous sadness.

James was let down by us, really, because, you know,

his innocence was there for everyone to see.

He was a two-year-old, so to see his innocence taken away from him

like that is really, really sad when I think about it.

I felt so totally helpless

and I remember trying to keep it together.

I think people feel guilty that they didn't stop it.

It was just really, really sad.

People could, like, look at their kids and think,

maybe, just like, hug them tighter or something because you don't

know what could happen to that kid or to their child.

He's always there with us,

we're always there for him.

I think if there is such a thing as closure,

I don't think I'm going to get it sometime soon.

At this moment in time, I don't see closure.

Every single day, even after all these years, I miss him.

I miss him growing up, I miss him, you know,

going on his own little venture, whatever he'd become,

do or whatever.

Every single day without James, he's missed.

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