February 12 marks 30 years since the murder of James Bulger. Today, on the eve of the anniversary, crime reporter Jonathan Humphries reflects on a crime which shocked Merseyside. Tomorrow James's mum Denise Fergus shares her memories of the fun, loving little boy she knew, and reporter Elliot Ryder speaks to the people of Bootle about the impact of the murder in 1993 and the effect on the community in the three decades since.
As journalists gathered for a briefing at Marsh Lane police station on a Saturday afternoon in February 1993, something different and something dark was unfolding.
Less than 24 hours earlier, no-one outside his loving family and friends knew two-year-old James Bulger's name. From the moment he vanished from his mum's side at around 3.40pm at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, James was the centre of an escalating horror story that would make headlines around the entire world.
A toddler, missing since the afternoon of Friday, February 12, and still not home the following day would naturally have been a significant story. But only four years on from the horrors of Hillsborough, and with the Heysel disaster and the Toxteth uprising still within recent memory, it would take something truly horrific to have a lasting impact on experienced reporters covering the city at that time.
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Horrific was what they got. In that room in Marsh Lane, the media were shown those now infamous first grainy CCTV images of John Venables and Robert Thompson, leading little James away from his mum Denise as she paid for her shopping in a butcher's shop. Denise, at the very beginning of the hardest journey imaginable, sobbed uncontrollably as she begged to "bring my baby back".
In that gathering of journalists was experienced Press Association (PA) correspondent Mark Thomas, who had previously worked at the Liverpool ECHO and would later become editor of the Liverpool Daily Post and the author of Every Mother's Nightmare, a book about the case.
Speaking in the ECHO offices this week, he said: "That's when we realised something a little more sinister is involved and, in fact, it was interesting because at the time CCTV evidence was still relatively new, so to have evidence like this so crucial in a case was actually new in its own right, so there was something unique there.
"Also at that press conference, Denise Bulger, as she then was, accompanied by her then husband Ralph made an appeal for help from the public in trying to find their son, which was very emotional and quite difficult to watch. She was obviously absolutely distraught by what had happened even at that point.
"There was a hope and I think it was a strange mixture of emotions really, because the thought that two older boys were involved kind of made you think that maybe there was a more innocent explanation than you thought, maybe some sort of really naughty mischief, maybe they had locked him up in a shed somewhere or who knows. All sorts of mad speculation went on, but everybody hoped he would be ok and didn't really dare to believe that boys like that could have done anything worse."
That evening, the Liverpool ECHO ran a front page with that image and the simple headline: "FIND THESE TWO BOYS".
In the ECHO's offices, John Thompson had been recently promoted to the newsdesk after a couple of years as crime reporter. He described how the confusion and desperation to know what happened to James began to spread throughout the city.
John said: "You knew there was something wrong, there was something different about all of this. We had never seen or heard anything like it, so the public would ring in, everybody began to feel it empathetically, the concern for a two-year-old child.
"Nobody felt like the family did, and like poor Denise Fergus as she now is, felt of course, but there was an empathy across the population - as there was after Hillsborough - everybody felt sick, everybody felt grief stricken."
Just under two days after his disappearance, the last vestiges of hope were extinguished.
It was a group of children who came across the horrific scene where James had been left by the two schoolboy killers on a train line in Walton, 2.5 miles away from the New Strand shopping centre. Terence Riley, then 13, was one of that group, and later in his own troubled crime-ridden life a court would hear how the discovery ca.used lasting trauma.
As police and forensic investigators descended on the scene, it was quickly obvious to John and his colleagues there had been a significant, and sickening, development. He said: "We were in the office, heartbroken, shattered that this was the result. There was still hope that he would be found alive.
"While nobody thought for sure, by any means, that there would positive result to this there was still real hope that this was a missing child that would be found safe and well and those hopes were very quickly dashed, and everybody felt the death of the child, poor James, in the pit of their stomach."
Very quickly after the discovery of the body it was obvious that James had not died in a tragic accident. Despite crude attempts to make it appear as if the toddler had been killed by a train, a pathologist found some 42 separate injuries.
In the hours and days after details of what had happened to James began to emerge, the city began to feel different for many people. Mark, who spent hours wearing out shoe leather and speaking to locals in the communities of Bootle, Kirkby and Walton at that time, said: "People were absolutely horrified that a little boy could have been taken and murdered in these circumstances, and one of the extraordinary things was that the toddler reins started to appear everywhere.
"Every time you saw a toddler, particularly in the Strand but all over the place at that time, all of sudden they would be attached to little lead arrangements so that they could not run too far from their parents' grasp. That suddenly became quite a thing.
"It was a strange thing that kind of affected everybody's view of the innocence of children, because people started to think; could children really do something as wicked as what had just happened?"
For John, his network of contacts made during his tenure as crime reporter meant it was not long before he learned where the police were looking for answers.
"I recall finding out that the two boys had been arrested, I believe we didn't report it because we couldn't report it, but I knew their names, I knew their addresses, I knew where they had been arrested, I believe before anybody else. I wrote a story, for the ECHO, later that week saying that two boys were being held...
"It just rocked everybody to their core, nobody could believe it and everybody felt it, we were all sick to the pit of our stomachs at this news, and it seemed to be getting worse all the time. It was, as I say, and unbelievable turn of events.
Those boys, arrested after a witness recognised Venables having spotted him playing truant around the Strand the day of James's disappearance, were questioned by a team under the command of Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby. The two killers did not take long to begin to confess.
At one stage, with prompting from his mum to tell the truth, Venables blurted out: " 'I did kill James, will you tell his mummy I’m sorry'".
Detective Superintendent Kirby has spoken of the case over the years, but he told the ECHO this week: "I feel after 30 years it is time to leave it in the past. When you have seen and heard the things I did, you don't want it constantly being dragged up."
For John, what reporters had been able to gather about their backgrounds offered few clues as to what compelled such an inhuman level of cruelty. He said: "They were both from ordinary, working class families in Liverpool. I was aware certainly that there were problems of a type in one of the families but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that would indicate anything like this might be about to happen with the boys.
"You know, they were known to be truants from school, they skipped school both of them. But there was no joining the dots together on this on why this could possibly have happened. It was still unfathomable."
Mark was among the first reporters to catch a glimpse of the two young killers when they were charged with murder and sent to appear at South Sefton Magistrates' Court - in a highly-charged and febrile atmosphere.
As a PA correspondent working on a pooled basis, Mark was one of a handful of journalists out of hundreds of the world's media to be allowed inside the courtroom.
He said: "It was a very modern, light and airy courtroom, and I'll never forget to my dying day the moment when the two boys were actually brought into court, because the thing that struck you immediately was, how small they were.
"They were 10-year-old boys but they were actually quite small for 10-year-olds. They looked bewildered, they looked confused. They looked like little children. I don't know what I expected, whether I expected a sort of creature with horns on their head to emerge or whatever, because of what they'd done.
"I just thought you wouldn't give those kids a second glance if you passed them on the street. It was an extraordinary thing to see."
The initial hearing was brief, with the young defendants only asked to confirm their names and details. But, as Mark describes, things heated up outside. "Outside the court a huge crowd was gathering of members of the public and emotions were running very high as well. There was a lot of anger."
The case was moved out of Liverpool and sent to Preston Crown Court, where the two boys, now aged 11, stood trial on November 1 the same year as the murder.
The atmosphere this time was very different.
"It's another scene that I'll never ever forget. I was a very different setting to South Sefton Magistrates' Court. This was a proper old fashioned quite ornate oak-carved courtroom with all that sort of weight of the power of the law about it. It was designed almost a century earlier probably, with the express purpose of putting the fear of God into hardened criminals and it had that vibe to it. It was a very oppressive atmosphere in that courtroom", said Mark.
The court heard from 38 witnesses, some in person and some via statements read into the record, who had spotted the three young boys on that two and a half mile journey.
Mark recalled: "It was one of those situations where you heard each one, and you could see they were genuinely upset, and were blaming themselves and would probably never quite forgive themselves for not having stepped in and doing something to intervene.
"But I know Denise at the time very quickly came out and said I don't blame any of those people because how on Earth could you have known that those little boys had such wickedness in their hearts."
Little of the factual evidence was in dispute during the trial. Rather, the defence case rested on whether the boys could understand the full gravity of their actions due to their youth.
Thompson and Venables did not give evidence, but the jury heard around 20 hours of tape recordings from their police interviews.
Just over three weeks later, on November 24, and just as they were due to be sent home for the evening, the jurors indicated to High Court judge Mr Justice Morland that they had reached a verdict on the murder charge.
Mark was in court for that dramatic, emotionally charged moment.
He said: "Denise was in court to hear that. There was a gasp, one of the uncles basically sort of hissed 'Yes', it's hard to sum up how emotional that courtroom was. The boys were crying, and looking confused, the social workers were trying to comfort them.
"[Thompson] was choking for breath as though he was having some sort of asthma attack or something. [Venables] perhaps looked more bewildered like he wasn't quite sure what had just happened."
The two boys had become the youngest convicted murderers in a century.
But for James's family, the years of grief stretched out ahead of them. Mark, who spoke to Denise and Ralph on a number of occasions. He said: "In the early days it was complete and utter devastation and they would find it very hard even to speak about it.
"I wrote a book about the case and when I was interviewing them for the book, Ralph couldn't really sit and talk for more than five or 10 minutes without having to leave the room and just go and go for a walk and get some fresh air. Everything came back so vividly to him.
"Denise and Ralph eventually went their separate ways, it's not for me to say but who knows how much of that was because of this awful ordeal that they had gone through. It was certainly a huge and terrible tragedy for both of them."
The one question that remains more than any other, perhaps, is why. How could two boys of that age go down a path leading to the most horrific of murders?
For Mark, a satisfactory answer is unlikely to ever come. He said: "It's the big question, that hung over the case then and has always hung over the case since. It's a very important question. I don't think we will ever have a full and satisfactory answer to it.
"There was something in the psyche of those two boys. They were both tearaway young kids, running wild, sagging off school, getting up to all sorts of mischief. There was nothing to suggest that they would commit anything like this. No-one could have been forewarned about it.
"At the time I was researching the book I interviewed psychologists and psychiatrists and all sorts of people. And there was the suggestion there might have been something unique in that combination of personalities and if they hadn't come together in that way at that particular time, individually they would never have done anything as wicked as what they did. It's pure speculation and we will probably never know.
"The awful thing is even if [Venables and Thompson] were sat being interviewed by you, they wouldn't be able to tell you now, because they were 10 at the time, they then went through years when they were held in secure accommodation where they would be given all sorts of psychiatric intervention and counselling and so on."
For John, the dad of a two-year-old boy who "looked remarkably like James", the murder was a palpable presence in the city especially for parents.
He told the ECHO: "No parent ever let go of their child for a second in the weeks and months following the murder of James Bulger...
"To think that could have happened to my boy, at and from a place where I used to work and knew well, the Bootle Strand? You just couldn't begin to get your head around it. But I know I went home every night that week and held him that bit tighter, and loved him that bit more.
"Yeah it did affect you in a personal sense, in that way. I am sure there were many people across Merseyside with young children, I know there were, who held them tighter in their arms and kept them closer when they were out."
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