Crimes That Shocked The World - The Most Chilling True-Life Stories From the Last 40 Years. Danny Collins
the boys became bored with their antics and began to concentrate on their previously concocted plan to steal a child from under the care of its mother. Thompson and Venables were tired of petty, childish crime and were preparing to step into a new dimension of kidnap and murder.
Their first attempt centred on a three-year-old girl and her two-year-old brother in the T J Hughes store. Their mother noticed that the girl and her brother were playing with two older boys who were amusing the children by playing chasing games near the door of the shop. She called her children over to her side but a short while later realised they had strayed again. Running outside she saw Venables and Thompson beckoning to the children to follow them and she shouted for them to return. The boys then waved the children away and lost themselves among nearby shoppers. Their plan had gone badly, but with patience other opportunities would soon present themselves.
Meanwhile, James Bulger had become bored with the shopping expedition. His uncle’s girlfriend seemed to be taking a long time making up her mind about which underwear to buy and his mother was chatting to a shop assistant. Now he joined his young cousin in chasing up and down between the aisles of clothing in a frenzied game of tag. At one point he became lost among the hanging clothes and, struck with terror, called for his mother. Denise was at his side in an instant and warned him not to stray again.
It was now approaching 1.00 pm and they were all ready for lunch – meat patties, which Denise bought in an adjacent delicatessen. As the children nibbled contentedly at their food, all four moved on to Tesco’s where James began to act up again, this time taking items from the shelves and shouting. The final straw was James’s attempt to ride an escalator, which led to a paddy tantrum when Denise hauled him off. The only solution seemed to be to bribe the two children with sweets and head for home – but first Denise needed to visit the butcher’s to buy something for the family’s tea.
Denise was now in a hurry to make her purchases, given James’s fractious behaviour and the need to get him home for a sleep, that panacea so favoured by mothers of overactive children. But there was some delay at the counter when the butcher’s assistant brought her the wrong chops and she had to wait for them to be changed. When she looked around for James – who had been standing near the door contentedly chewing on his sweets – he was nowhere to be seen.
In a panic, she asked his little cousin where he had gone and the little girl pointed to the arcade outside. ‘He went out there,’ she told her aunt timidly. Denise rushed outside and frantically tried to spot her diminutive son in his distinctive blue anorak and yellow hood among the milling crowd. Not seeing him, she ran back into the shop and called to Nicola, who was waiting to be served at the cold meat counter. Together they left the shop and began a desperate search, hampered by the presence of the three-year-old girl, who was dragged, bewildered, in their wake. Within a few minutes of James’s disappearance, the two women split up and Denise continued unhindered to the security office.
As a message was flashed to shoppers over the Centre’s loudspeaker system, Denise began a systematic search of all the shops they had visited previously in the hope that James had wandered back the way they had come. For half an hour she searched in a poorly remembered daze, but to no avail. Nicola Bailey, together with her young charge, was also searching in other directions and questioning passers-by, but no one had seen the little boy. James, it seemed, had disappeared into thin air.
At that moment, James was being led by Jon Venables – later to be seen on the Centre’s CCTV holding the toddler by the hand while Robert Thompson walked ahead – out onto Stanley Road. The innocent-looking trio, easily mistaken by passers-by for two young lads and their younger brother, were captured on the camera leaving the shopping centre at 1.42 pm, about the same time that Denise had noticed her son’s absence. ‘C’mon baby,’ said Venables, ‘we’re going to have some fun.’
In the shopping centre, pandemonium was rife. Police Constable Mandy Walker had arrived in response to a message that a child was missing in the Strand and immediately began to coordinate another search by security officers and other policemen responding to the scene. She also accompanied Denise around the Centre in the hope that the mother would spot her child, pale-faced and panicked, as he searched for his mother. James had been missing now for 40 minutes, and locating a lost child in the Strand usually took no more than 15 minutes. PC Mandy Walker was justifiably concerned.
James was tired. The trio had walked a mile along Stanley Road and his little legs hurt. It was way past his nap time and he was becoming increasingly irritable, a fact that didn’t please his kidnappers who were possibly now beginning to regret their impetuous behaviour in snatching the child from under his mother’s nose. That had been cool, real grown-up stuff, but the crying toddler was beginning to annoy them.
A passer-by would recall how she saw the two boys with the crying toddler near the canal bank in Stanley Road and thought the child was ‘extremely distressed’. She noticed ‘a large bruise’ on his forehead, caused, it would later be revealed, when one of the boys had attempted to lift him and dropped him on his head. Unaware of the drama – soon to turn to tragedy – befalling the child, she did not intervene.
In all, the police investigation would reveal that there were 28 sightings of James Bulger with his juvenile kidnappers that day. Although many of the eyewitnesses reported a small child apparently unhappy in the company of two older boys, no one felt compelled to ask why the child was so upset. A motorist driving along Merton Road recalled a child crying as he was pulled along by the arms by two older boys. A woman passing on a bus saw two boys swinging a child by his arms. The child, she reported, was alternately laughing and crying. She identified the boys as about nine years old. The child, she told police, was ‘just a baby’.
By the time Thompson and Venables had reached the raised, grassed-over site of the Breeze Hill Reservoir it was about 4.20 pm, approximately around the same time police were alerted to James’s disappearance by Strand security staff. The boys with their tiny victim in tow then left the reservoir area and turned into nearby Stuart Street, which they followed to its junction with County Road, a busy main route out of the city that would eventually bring them to the scene of James’s eventual murder at Walton. Did they have a goal in mind? Neither has ever said if the route was planned.
James was becoming more irritable and tired. They were now nearly two miles from the Strand Shopping Centre, a long way for a two-year-old to walk. His distressed behaviour was attracting the attention of more and more eyewitnesses who would come forward after the body was discovered to tell investigators varying stories of a sobbing toddler and his two ‘brothers’. But again, nobody intervened. It is not in the English nature to enquire too deeply of a spectacle witnessed in the street. Look no further than how abusive thugs on public transport are ignored as commuters become deeply involved behind their newspapers.
Back in Kirkby, the news of James’s disappearance began to circulate among the Bulger and the Matthews clans, and the menfolk started to tour the area around the Strand in their cars, looking for the child. By now consumed by guilt, Denise wept as she was comforted by the womenfolk. ‘You can’t watch them forever,’ was a constant phrase given in assurance to the distressed mother. How far could a two-year-old have gone, after all? He’d be found curled up asleep somewhere – of course he would.
On the way to Walton, Jon Venables had grabbed James’s anorak by the hood and attempted to drag the child along. The material tore and, giving the fallen toddler a kick to get him to his feet, Venables hurled the hood into the branches of a tree where it would later be recovered by police. Finally, the duo and their victim arrived at the site of the old Walton railway station which had been demolished following the conversion of the old passenger line to freight. Low brick walls on either side of the double track still mark the original sites of the passenger platforms. It was here that the final torment of little James Bulger began. Throughout their statements to police following their arrests, neither boy would admit to physically harming the toddler and laid the blame for each injury firmly against the other.
What is evident from forensic and Scene of Crime reports is that James Bulger was used as a target for house bricks, beaten about the head and body with wooden sticks and an iron tie bar, and stripped of his underclothes.