The Sleep
of
Reason
Published by Century in 1994
3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
© 1994 David James Smith
David James Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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For Petal
Acknowledgements
The people who deserve most thanks for any merit in this book had better remain anonymous. They wanted to see the story told truly and without prejudice. They gave me their trust and confidence, and their friendship. Neither money nor favours were ever asked for, offered or given. Many other people on Merseyside were willing to give me their time and cooperation, despite the sensitivity of the subject. I owe them all a thank-you. Merseyside Police offered considerable assistance, within the limits of their own concern about the disclosure of evidence in advance of the trial, when the bulk of this book was researched and written. I’m grateful to all the officers who helped me, but special thanks are due to Jim Fitzsimmons, Albert Kirby, Brian Whitby and Ray Simpson. I’ve characterised one or two police officers in the book. This doesn’t mean they solved the case on their own. I hope readers will see them as representative of the many officers involved in the inquiry. Thanks also to Dominic Lloyd and Jason Lee of Paul Rooney and Co., solicitors for Robert Thompson, and to Sean Sexton who represents the family of James Bulger. I was grateful for the advice and support of the editor of this book, Mark Booth, and my friends Dominic Ozanne and John Pickering. Dominic, more than anyone, contributed to the structure and shape of the narrative. Thanks, randomly, to Jane Gregory, Georgina Capel, Julian Browne, Tim Hulse, Rosie Boycott and Sue Douglas. Thanks to Jamie Bruce, because he deserves it. Some time before James Bulger died, I met Dr Gwyneth Boswell of the University of East Anglia who had produced a report for The Prince’s Trust about young people who commit serious crimes. Gwyneth and the report taught me a great deal and, in a way, her insight was a starting point for The Sleep Of Reason. But my best and wisest ally, as usual, was Petal, who listened, read, transcribed, and tolerated my complete absorption in the case. I wanted to acknowledge the anguish of the parents and wider family of James Bulger. I hope they will appreciate the spirit in which this book was written, and forgive me when I also acknowledge the suffering of the two boys who were responsible for the killing, and their families.
Everything in this book is true to the best of my knowledge. This is a work of non-fiction, and there is no imagining, invention or embellishment of what happened.
There have been some changes of names to protect identities in accordance with the orders of the trial judge.
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Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he tauught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, ‘They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting.’ Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, ‘He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death.’ Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.
from Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762
Introduction
The first time I met Albert Kirby, the officer who led the investigation into the killing of James Bulger, I said that it was not a unique case. He said it was unique: the two boys were the youngest ever to have been accused of murder. He had never encountered anything like it, and hoped he never would again.
Albert was articulating the mood of the moment and a sentiment that was widely shared. A unique case born of a lawless generation. It was a symbol of the age, of declining standards, loss of values, lack of respect, breakdown of the family, too many single mothers, failure of the Welfare State, collapse of society, moral vacuum … moral panic.
If the boys were guilty, what had possessed them to commit such a terrible crime? Were they evil, born bad, led on by adults, influenced by violence on television, desensitising computer games, video nasties? Were they playing a game that went wrong, were they lords of the flies acting out the wickedness of children (the latent cruelty in us all), or were they just plain possessed? These theories were offered less as speculation than as statements of fact. Many people, it seemed, needed to explain James Bulgers death to themselves and to others. And if there was no ready explanation, what then?
Only two people can provide an understanding. Barely eleven years old now, they are unlikely to be able to do this for many years, and unlikely to achieve such an understanding without psychiatric help.
Such limited research as exists in this area suggests that most young people who commit serious crimes — murder, manslaughter, rape, arson — have one thing in common. They have been abused physically or sexually, or both, and emotionally, in childhood. Not all young people who commit serious crimes have been abused. And not all young people who have been abused commit serious crimes. But the pattern is there.
Many people find this idea risible or lame. They detect the making of excuses. They think k
ids pretend they’ve been beaten to get off the hook. A good slap never did them any harm. Anyone who has seen or experienced the effects of this kind of abuse, or spent time observing and listening to young offenders, will not be so dismissive.
Perhaps it is not the two boys who are unhappy products of the television age, but the global audience that watched the security video footage of the child’s abduction and were provoked by unprecedented media coverage to unprecedented reactions of shock and horror.
The sad truth is that similar cases have happened in Britain in recent times, in not so recent times, and long, long ago. Children have killed, periodically, in the past and who then attributed the killings to wider social ills, or took them to be an emblem of decay? Where was the national debate? What Prime Minister of the day stood to declare, as John Major did in February 1993, that ‘We must condemn a little more, and understand a little less’?
By way of recovering a perspective, this book begins with a catalogue of all the British cases I have been able to find of killings, or alleged killings, by children. With the exception of the first boy, the last child to be hanged, all were under the age of fourteen. The older records are the fruit of someone else’s research: in 1973 Patrick Wilson, spurred on perhaps by the Mary Bell case, wrote Children Who Kill, a book long since out of print. The more recent examples I found filed in the news library of the Sunday Times.
The age of criminal responsibility in Britain was fixed at ten years by the 1963 revision of the Children and Young Persons Act. When implemented 30 years earlier, this Act had raised the minimum age to eight from seven, at which it had been fixed since the middle ages.
The law has also determined that a child becomes a young person on his or her fourteenth birthday. Between the ages of ten and fourteen children are presumed to be doli incapax, which literally means incapable of doing wrong. In practice, this means that the law presumes they are unable to understand the seriousness of their actions. To obtain a conviction the prosecution must rebut this presumption, proving to the court’s satisfaction that the child would have known the action to be seriously wrong, and not just mischievous or naughty.
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In March 1831 John Any Bird Bell, aged fourteen, robbed and cut the throat of a thirteen-year-old boy who was collecting money for his father. Tried at Maidstone, Bell was found guilty of murder after two minutes’ discussion by the jury, who did not leave the box. The jury made a recommendation for mercy, on account of the dreadful state of ignorance he was in and the barbarous manner in which he had been brought up by his parents. The judge said it was his imperative duty to pass the death sentence. Bell was sentenced on a Friday and hanged on the Monday morning, outside Maidstone Gaol. Before he dropped, Bell cried, ‘All you people take heed by me!’ This to the crowd of 5000 who had come to see him go. There were 52 hangings in Britain that year. Bell was the last child to be hanged.
The earliest recorded killing by a child under the age of fourteen was in 1748, when William York, aged ten, was living in a Suffolk workhouse and sharing a bed with a five-year-old girl. He cut the girl with a knife and a billhook after she had fouled the bed, and stated in his confession that the devil put him up to committing the deed. Found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, York was granted a Royal pardon on condition that he enlist immediately in the Navy.
In 1778 at Huntingdon three girls aged eight, nine and ten were tried for the murder of a three-year-old girl. It was said that ‘the manner in which they committed this act was by fixing three pins at the end of a stick, which they thrust into the child’s body, which lacerated the private parts and soon turned to a mortification of which she languished for a few days and then died’. The girls were found to be doli incapax and acquitted.
In 1847 in Hackney, a twelve-year-old, William Allnut Brown, stole ten sovereigns from his home, fired a gun near his grandfather, then poisoned the old man with his own arsenic. Brown was said to be a sickly and difficult boy. He was charged with murder and found guilty by the jury despite a plea of insanity. He was sentenced to death but reprieved.
In 1854, Alice Levick, aged ten, was living with an aunt and caring for the aunt’s baby. She was sent on an errand with the baby to collect some knives and forks. When found by a group of men, she was crying and carrying the baby, whose throat had been cut. She said a stranger had come up behind her in the woods and killed the baby. The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder by Levick, but she was acquitted at her subsequent trial.
In 1855, in Liverpool, nine small boys were playing ‘cap on back’, a kind of leapfrog, in a brickfield. There was an argument over fair play between Alfred Fitz, aged nine, and a seven-year-old. Fitz hit the other boy with a half-brick. When he fell down, Fitz hit him again. Fitz called to John Breen, also aged nine, ‘Let’s throw him into the canal, or else we’ll be cotched.’ They carried the seven-year-old 40 yards to the Leeds—Liverpool Canal and threw him in, while the others watched. They all stood there until the boy disappeared. The body was found four days later in Stanley Dock. Fitz and Breen were tried for murder at Liverpool Crown Court. They were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve months at Liverpool Gaol where, the judge said, they would have a schoolmaster and a chaplain to instruct them, and be taught to earn their living.
In 1861, near Stockport, a two-year-old disappeared while playing near his home. His body was found the next day, a mile away in a field near Love Lane, face down in a brook and naked except for his clogs. A woman said she had seen two boys aged about eight walking with a child who was crying. One of the boys had been leading the child by the hand. She had asked them where they were going, and they had said they were going down Love Lane. Another woman had seen them in the field, when the child was naked. She asked what they were doing with the child undressed, but they ignored her and moved away. Her son said he saw one of the boys hit the child with a twig.
James Bradley and Peter Barratt, both aged eight, were interviewed by a police officer. They admitted undressing the child, pushing him into the water and hitting him with sticks until he was dead. They referred to the child only as ‘it’. At Chester Assizes they became the youngest children to have faced a murder trial and the death sentence. Defence counsel said, ‘it must have happened in boyish mischief, they being unable to know right from wrong’. They were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to one month in gaol, and five years in a reformatory.
In 1861, in County Durham, John Little, aged twelve and employed to do odd jobs at a farm, shot a young woman housekeeper with his master’s shotgun after an argument. He was charged with manslaughter, but acquitted on evidence that he did not understand firearms.
In 1881, in Carlisle, a thirteen-year-old girl was employed by a farming family to look after their three children. The two-year-old drowned suddenly, without explanation, and, not long after, the family’s baby drowned in some mud. At first the girl claimed a man had snatched the baby from her, but eventually she admitted, ‘I took the baby and put it in and nobody helped me.’ She was charged with murder and found guilty, with a recommendation to mercy. The death sentence was passed, then commuted to life imprisonment. No charge was ever brought over the death of the two-year-old.
In 1920, in London, a boy aged seven told a child he would drown him if the child did not hand over his toy aeroplane. When the child refused the boy pushed him into the canal and kicked his hands away while he tried to climb up the bank, until he drowned. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death, and the truth only emerged later, when the boy was sent to a psychologist for the treatment of rages. There was no trial, and the boy was placed in care.
In 1921, in Redbourn, Hertfordshire, a boy aged thirteen beat his next-door neighbour to death with a hammer and a poker, while trying to steal money from her home. He climbed into a well to drown himself, but changed his mind and climbed out again. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.
In 1938 a
four-year-old girl disappeared while playing near her home. Her body was found the following morning in the conservatory of the house next door by the widowed mother of five children who lived there. The girl had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The widow’s 13–year-old son was questioned and denied involvement until his mother told him to tell the truth. He then admitted telling the girl to undress, and strangling her when she began to cry. He was said to be ‘retarded’ and a frequent truant. The trial considered whether or not the boy knew that what he was doing was seriously and gravely wrong’. He was acquitted, and placed in an Approved School.
In 1947, in a Welsh mining village, a four-year-old boy disappeared while out playing, and was found later that evening, drowned in the nearby river, his hands and ankles bound together. Three weeks after the killing, the boy’s nine-year-old playmate was questioned by police and said, ‘I tied him up with the cords of his shoes and threw him off the manhole into the river and he was drowned. I went home and was afraid to tell anyone.’ When charged, he replied, ‘I won’t do it again.’ He was acquitted of murder but found guilty of manslaughter, and ordered to be detained for ten years.
In 1947, in a Northern coastal town, a woman left her baby in a pram outside her husband’s shop while she was serving. When the pram and baby disappeared, a search was made and the baby was found drowned in a water-filled pit. A nine-year-old boy was questioned and admitted, ‘I took the pram from outside the shop. There was a baby in the pram and I threw it in the water. I just wanted to do it.’ The boy pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter, and was ordered to be detained for a maximum of five years.
The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case Page 1