Without a trace
Their crime was called an act of ‘unparalleled barbarity’. Now the two boys who murdered James Bulger are men, their freedom and identities protected by the courts. So what has become of them?
By David James Smith
Their crime was called an act of ‘unparalleled barbarity’. Now the two boys who murdered James Bulger are men, their freedom and identities protected by the courts. So what has become of them? By David James SmithNo two children ever grew up under greater scrutiny than the boys who killed James Bulger. Several times a day for eight years, staff at their separate secure units recorded the detail of their detention and their developing lives on a daily log. The logs were summarised for quarterly review meetings, the summaries presented alongside education and psychiatric reports of their progress, the paperwork archived, copied and dispatched to interested and involved parties at the Home Office and elsewhere.
By the time of their parole hearings in 2001, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had become the subjects of an information mountain. None of the experts who sifted through it was in any doubt about their rehabilitation. It is an irony that they had become role models for the younger detainees coming to their units. Many among the battery of officials who met them and read the reports said their progress was remarkable. Even though the authors of those reports have not spoken to The Sunday Times Magazine, it has been possible to build a picture of their time in care. The transformation in the boys’ lives had become a tribute to the regimes by which they had been detained, deprived of their liberty as a punishment, separated from their families and denied the chance of a normal childhood and adolescence. Yet they were still able to learn and evolve and reach maturity as stable young men.
The boys had gone nowhere – well, almost nowhere – for eight years, but somehow they had been on an extraordinary journey of recovery. That, of course, is not what most people want to hear. As the boys well knew, for large swathes of the British public they were and would always be the “evil monsters” who had killed a two-year-old child. The judge at their trial had rightly described their crime as an act of “unparalleled barbarity”. The public mood festered on endless tabloid tales about the boys and accusations by the family of the victim, almost always carrying with them a veiled or overt threat of revenge when the boys were released. The parole board would be as much concerned with the risks faced by Thompson and Venables in the outside world as it would with the risk they posed to others.
The redemption of Thompson and Venables did not mean they had left their crime behind them. Both boys had spoken independently of James’s distress during the events leading to the killing and were evidently haunted by it. Venables could recall how James Bulger seemed to like him and had taken his hand. During the trial in October 1993 he asked his parents if they thought James was in the courtroom too. No, his mother said, James was in heaven. Venables then asked if they thought James could hear what was being said in the courtroom. At the end of each day in court he had taken his clothes off, saying he could “smell the baby” on them or “could smell James like a baby smell”. He wanted the clothes he had worn in court thrown away when the case was over.
This behaviour was far more than an indication of Venables’s guilty feelings, for it also hinted at the lasting traumatic effect of the trial on both boys, who were just 11 when they sat in the raised-up dock before the judge at Preston Crown Court and were forced to listen, in painstaking, repetitive detail to the terrible things they had done, all the while aware of the intensity with which they were being observed by everyone around them.
No wonder Venables counted in his head to avoid listening, or made shapes with his shoes on the floor. You could call this “disassociation” – a way of trying to escape from what was going on. It was the same for Thompson, who spoke afterwards of his determination not to show his feelings to those watching him at the trial.
Two years later, aged 13, Thompson had still been saying he didn’t have feelings. What he meant was, he couldn’t articulate what they were. Perhaps he was afraid to. As it would turn out, he had plenty to disassociate himself from, in the years leading up to the offence. How else could you explain the boys’ imperviousness to James Bulger’s distress? They could have been plain “evil”, of course, or following a “learned” pattern of behaviour – disconnecting from their own feelings, switching off. According to Thompson, they never spoke a word to each other during or after the killing. For years he struggled to explain what had happened. He found it hard to talk about, found it hard to trust anyone enough to tell them the truth. He had good reason to distrust people, especially adults, and clung for a long time to one last secret he kept locked away.
Perhaps the parole board sensed there was more to be told. At their preliminary hearings in the case in London, in February 2001, the three members of the board – a judge and two psychiatrists – raised concerns about gaps in the information on Thompson. Their burden was to make the right decision in a case that could hardly be more controversial: were the Bulger killers, now 18, a suitable risk for release on licence? Despite the paper mountain, there was something missing. Also, a recent psychologist’s report had raised the possibility that Thompson showed signs of “psychopathic” behaviour.
In the course of an otherwise highly favourable report, observing that Thompson had “shown significantly more progress in terms of general maturity, educational attainment and behaviour than the average child in secure care I come across”, the expert had expressed “some concern” that Thompson showed a degree of superiority, was manipulative and emotionally withdrawn. He had also shown partial features of a psychopathic personality, though certainly not enough to diagnose him as a psychopath.
The parole-board members were not convinced by the psychologist’s findings – the test he had applied was meant to be used on developed adults over 18, yet Thompson had been only 17 at the time of the report. Anyway, such findings were common among young men living in institutions – but they could hardly afford to dismiss the possibilities. They ordered a further report from an even more eminent clinical psychologist, to be carried out in time for the final parole hearings in June 2001.
Seeing them for the first time soon after their arrests, Malcolm Stevens was struck by the ordinariness of the two boys. He did not see then, and never would see in his numerous subsequent encounters, any trace of the evilness so readily ascribed to them by others. Stevens knew what they had done was “evil”, unquestionably, but that did not mean they were evil too. In his experience, Thompson and Venables were little different from the hundreds of other troubled children he had seen over the years.
In spring 1993, Stevens was the home secretary’s special adviser on the care and detention of all Section 53 offenders – young people convicted of grave crimes and detained during Her Majesty’s pleasure. It fell to him to map the future of the two 10-year-olds, devising a plan that would avoid the mistakes of the past when young people in long-term detention had become institutionalised and unable to look after themselves. There was a danger, because of their extremely young ages, that Thompson and Venables might never be fit for release and would end up in adult prisons for the rest of their lives. That might suit those who sought justice based on vengeance but, for Stevens and many of his senior colleagues, it was not acceptable in a humane society that believed in the possibility of rehabilitation. It seems likely, however, that Michael Howard, the Conservative home secretary at the time, wanted vengeance. He initially wanted to set tariffs for 20 years, which meant the boys would be 30 before they could be considered for release. He also wanted to make his crowd-pleasing announcement on the night of the trial verdicts, but abandoned this draconian action and settled for 15-year tariffs. These were still nearly twice as long as those suggested by the trial judge, who had proposed eight years, and half as much again as the lord chief justice, who had proposed 10-year tariffs.
In time, Howard’s bullishness would be his undoing, as the excessive tariff would provoke legal appeals and be overturned in court, and the power of politicians to set tariffs at all would be taken away from them. Thompson and Venables’s tariffs would effectively revert to eight years. In 1993, however, Stevens was planning for the possibility of 15 years. He wanted an outward- looking care programme that embraced the world beyond, allowing the boys to read newspapers, watch news programmes and keep abreast of contemporary issues. From the early stages they would have “mobility”, initially within the grounds of their unit, and later, with careful attention to the boys’ security, to nearby facilities for education and sport. Even so, the boys would struggle to learn some “life skills”. For example, by the time Thompson was 17, in 1999, he had never been on public transport.
Stevens called the regime of care and detention “institutionalised parenting”. He had originally intended that the boys would serve most of their sentences in youth treatment centres such as Glenthorne in Birmingham, or St Charles in Brentwood, Essex. These units were more used to long-term detainees and had a greater range of educational and sporting facilities than the smaller secure units where Thompson and Venables were first held. But he soon decided the boys were better off staying put, so they served out their entire sentences in the same units and, despite many rumours to the contrary, were never moved elsewhere.
Stevens knew the boys liked staying where they were and understood the importance of them being as settled as possible in units where there was good staff continuity. He remembered telling them they had to get on with their education and make the most of the opportunities presented to them. If not, he said, the home secretary might tell him: “I don’t care what you say, Mr Stevens, they’re not working hard, they have to go.” Only once later, with Thompson, did he have to repeat the threat, during a period when Thompson was less attentive to his education and, in Stevens’s eyes, getting a bit lazy. He nipped that in the bud at a quarterly review meeting, with a four-week warning to improve before his next visit.
Venables had been placed at Red Bank secure unit in St Helens in outer Merseyside and stayed in a six-bedroom unit within the Red Bank campus that included a non-secure children’s home. His first “mobility” was to play snooker in the sports hall. Mobility was measured by the ratio of staff required per resident, according to the risk they posed or faced. Venables’s first journeys to the snooker room were 3:1; that is, with three members of staff. Venables was given a false name on arrival at Red Bank and told to say he had been arrested for another offence. He found it hard to talk to other residents when they asked him about his offence, and staff were concerned at the psychological impact of this denial. He got confused giving his name and date of birth to an official visitor.
In those early years, Venables’s behaviour was volatile and he sometimes had to be physically restrained. He was bullied a little and seemed isolated, spending too much time on Nintendo and PC games, or watching videos. After a visit to the court where his trial was to be held, he became abusive and threw furniture around his room. On many nights, while locked in his room, he would ring the buzzer incessantly, annoying the other residents. At other times he would be no trouble and staff would record this on the daily log: “What a nice pleasant evening for Jon, he has been pleasant & cheerful both to staff and boys watched video early in the evening, then watched the final of the ice skating on T.V. Went to bed in a lovely mood.”
Once, a care worker teased him gently, saying he “couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding”. Jon said, oh yeah? Bring me your baby and I’ll batter it.” He was a child and profoundly traumatised, hence, perhaps, the inappropriate, callous retort. In fact, on examination, a child psychiatrist would assess him as being even younger in emotional development than his years at the time of the offence, making a further diagnosis that he was suffering from attention deficit disorder.
He began art therapy, drawing faces with turned-down mouths and marks on the face, apparently re-creating the appearance of his victim. He was haunted by flashbacks of blood coming from James’s mouth. Venables told the art therapist she could sell the paintings for millions and she had to reassure him she would never do such a thing. He was acutely aware of his own notoriety and became hysterical, after the trial, when his and Thompson’s names became public knowledge for the first time. He said he feared becoming a new Myra Hindley, and spoke of his anxiety that people would break into Red Bank to attack him.
Malcolm Stevens saw correspondence from psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists across the world offering their help in treating the two boys, or asking to interview them for their own researches. These requests were refused, and the correspondence from the public – which was evenly split 50-50, between the kind, gift-laden letters and the unpleasant – was ignored. Stevens felt it could be distorting for Thompson and Venables to see any of it, especially the excess religious material reassuring the boys that Jesus loved them and forgave them. He could see how that might undermine their view of the seriousness of the offence.
He wondered how therapy was supposed to work with such young boys over such a long period. How could you talk about the same thing for an hour every week for 15 years, starting aged 10? After discussions with the Manchester forensic-child-and-adolescent psychiatrist Dr Susan Bailey, he set in place regular sessions, not weekly but often, with the intention of establishing good therapeutic relationships that would be pivotal in the years ahead. It was a dynamic plan that could be reviewed every three months and adjusted as the boys grew up.
Thompson spent the first five minutes of one of his earliest sessions of therapy sobbing over the death of one of the rabbits in his unit, grief-stricken as any 10-year-old might be at such a loss. Later in the same session, as the psychiatrist tried to move on to a more general conversation about death and blame, he became agitated and said: “I want all this taking away out of my head but nothing’s going to.”
Placed outside Liverpool, at Barton Moss secure unit in Salford, Thompson’s disturbed behaviour initially attracted attention. Staff would later say how obnoxious he had been in his early days, verbally abusive and fighting with other boys or, on one occasion, throwing things at staff, banging his head on a radiator cover and writing obscenities on walls, windows and furniture. None of this was unusual behaviour in a young offenders’ unit. He could be polite and settled, and as he grew older the outbursts became fewer as he became less demanding and more independent. He was often uneasy around new residents, maybe waiting to see how they would react to his notoriety, though later he would come forward and offer support to help them settle in. Staff saw he was more at ease with women than men and watched as he grew older and began to evolve into “a caring young man” who could place others’ needs before his own.
His first “mobility” was cycling in the grounds of the unit. He was initially anxious at being outdoors – fearing lurking photographers or attacks from the public. But mobility became more important for both boys as they put on weight, leading such a confined life. Swimming, cycling and walking were useful exercise. Thompson went to activity centres, a museum and a castle in the north. Trips were sometimes abandoned after renewed publicity about the case. Security was a constant concern for staff and a fear for the two boys. Malcolm Stevens remembered even a trip to a dentist being fraught, involving three bookings at different surgeries and two being cancelled at the last minute so almost nobody knew where the boy would be going.