by Gitta Sereny
“We go to Butlin’s,” Sue said. “It’s very good. They have everything for the kids . . .”
It was at the very end of our long time together, when they were already putting on their coats, that Sue suddenly said: “Of course, I’ve had a lot of medical troubles . . .”
What sort? I asked.
“Oh, this operation and that . . . Of course, very early on I had myself sterilized. But there were other things . . .”
Could Jon have seen her in pain? I asked.
“Yes, he could that. He did. But . . . I always talk to the kids about everything, frankly you know, so I told them that it was OK, that I’d be OK in the end; and of course Neil was always there for them.”
Later, I was told by a reliable source that Sue’s medical problems included two “traumatic” incidents in 1990 or 1991 which Jon would have been aware of.
Jon’s problematic behaviour at school had not been so conspicuous until then, but the statements later made to the police by his teachers at Broad Square Primary indicate their increasing alarm in 1990 and 1991 at Jon’s “inappropriate” and “aberrant” behaviour.
First, his form teacher:
In September 1990 I had responsibility for the Year 4 Class. In my class at that time were a total of 24 children, one of whom was Jon Venables. I was aware that [in his previous class, in 1989] there had been behaviour problems.
And between September and Christmas of 1990, she said, Jon became a problem in her class, too.
It was after the Christmas break in January 1991 I noticed that Jon was acting very strange. He would sit on his chair and hold his desk with his hands and rock backwards and forwards and start moaning and making strange noises. If, as happened, I moved him from the child next to him and sat him next to my desk, he would then start fiddling with things on my desk and knock them to the floor. He would also bang his head on the furniture to a stage when it must have been hurting him. Jon was always complaining that other children were picking on him whilst he was outside of class and he would then cry. There were other incidents in respect of Jon, who would not do anything that was asked of him. He wasn’t doing any work in his books and, though capable of doing more, he was what is known as a “Low Achiever”.
Susan Venables would later tell me that she had never been informed of any of these problems. The form teacher continued:
Once these incidents started coming to light, I got Mrs. Venables to come into my classroom and I discussed this behaviour with her. She told me that she was having problems with Jon at home at that time. He was being abusive to her. His mother was coming into the school regularly by this time and I told her that Jon could not go on the school weekend trip. As a result of this I had a visit from a male social worker who was already working with the Venables family. [He] wanted to come on the school weekend trip, taking responsibility for Jon, but it was refused.
“All that isn’t true,” Sue exclaimed. “I didn’t want him to go on that trip and I asked for my £8 back.” Interestingly, the teacher added that Susan Venables had told her that Jon had expressed the wish to be in the same school as his siblings. This suggests the possibility that some of his earlier behaviour—for example the rocking and the banging of his head—could have been imitating Paul’s tantrums before Paul was helped by being sent to a caring school and on special holidays. If it was so, this “cry for help” was not heard.
“After March 1991 things got gradually worse,” the teacher continued.
One of the things Jon used to do was to go round the room, revolving along the walls pulling work and objects off the walls or displays. He would also lie down inside the group of desks, lodging himself inside so that it was difficult to get him out. I had other parents coming into class complaining, as Jon was attention-seeking all the time. On occasions Jon has cut himself purposely with the scissors; he also cut holes in his socks, stuck paper all over his face. Anything near him he would use as a weapon to throw across the room at other children. On one occasion I even got Jon and put him outside in the corridor . . . there was an incident when he hung himself upside down on the coat pegs like a bat.
“I knew nothing of any of this,” Sue Venables told me when I read her these statements, “nothing about any of this behaviour. Cut himself? He never had any cuts. Hang himself up like a bat? Never. Oh, he might have rocked in his chair, his desk—we all did naughty things like that, didn’t we? But ‘cover his face with sticky paper’? Why would he do a silly thing like that? And ‘holes in his socks’? Wouldn’t I have seen them? But, most important, his teacher never mentioned any of this to me . . .”
“I did in fact keep my own log of the numerous incidents that had occurred with Jon,” the form teacher noted. “But after leaving the school I destroyed this.”
What had brought things to a head was when Jon apparently attacked another boy in class. Jon had taken a 12-inch ruler and held it against the boy’s throat; the form teacher “and another woman who was in the class at the time” had forcibly to pull Jon away. “I took Jon immediately to the Head and to my knowledge, he was suspended. I have not seen him or any of his family since.”
In the 14 years I have been teaching, I have never come across a boy like Jon . . . He caused me such anxiety . . . It was so stressful trying to contain him. So much happened whilst I was there involving Jon, I am not sure if in fact he was seen by the school psychologist, but I did complete a form for him . . .
“None of this was told to me,” Sue Venables said again. “All I got was a letter from the school—the only one I ever had—saying Jon was suspended for two days for disruptive behaviour. Anyway, after that letter I kept him out of school for ten weeks.”
Did she mean to say he had no schooling then? I asked.
“I taught him myself,” she said. “He was that good a reader, it wasn’t hard. And the school never phoned once to ask where he was.” The Deputy Head of Broad Square School also commented clearly on Jon’s behaviour:
Until September 1990 Jon’s anti-social behaviour was just of an annoying nature, but not apparently serious. However, when he went into [his next] class, this pattern continued and became of much more concern from January 1991 onwards. During this time, with Jon’s mother’s consent, he was referred to the school’s psychology service. I am aware that he was the subject of a report from them in which mention was made of his bizarre behaviour and the need to modify this in the school. This report was dated May 1991. Mention was also made of the possibility of hyperactivity. In this period from January 1991, Mrs. Venables was in school on a regular basis.
And she concludes:
I am aware that there was an incident in the class surrounding Jon Venables which resulted in him not completing his academic year and to my recollection we were not notified as to his whereabouts. He was certainly not expelled from this school.
The Venables’ social worker certainly also seemed to be under the impression that Susan was aware of Jon’s difficulties:
Susan Venables . . . was, in considerable distress over Jon. She saw him as being on the receiving end of a lot of peergroup pressure . . . I was aware of Jon’s behavioural problems in school and, as a result of discussions between myself and his mother, a change of school eventually occurred in
September 1991, when he started at his present school, St. Mary’s in Walton.
The social worker also added that Jon’s behaviour, both at school and at home, became much more manageable then and that, believing the family to be coping, he didn’t see them for more than a year until Christmas 1992.
It is difficult to reconcile Sue Venables’s claim that she had never been told about any of Jon’s troubles at school with the teachers’ statements. She doesn’t lie—I cannot say this firmly enough: she is, I think, someone who is and always was over-taxed, by life, by her own feelings, by two children born with problems.
Depression is the consequence of being unhappy with one’s self; the defence against allowing it to continue and ove
rwhelm one is to deny all that is wrong. My feeling is that Sue—who should have had help for many years—has created a falsely gay and happy exterior to hide, primarily from herself, her sadness inside. Neil, who undoubtedly loves her, has, I think, to her detriment and his diminishment, “enabled” her—assisted her—in this self-deceit.
When Jon finally manifested the trouble which had been building up in him for years, she could not face it: she denied its existence.
Jon changed schools in the autumn term of 1991. “They put Jon one class below his age because there was no room in his real class,” Sue said. “He made friends with those smaller children. And then in September 1992 he started to become friends with Robert. I asked him why. He said he was sorry for him because his mum didn’t care about him. To tell you the truth, sometimes when I saw Robert out in the street without a coat and all that, I felt almost like bringing him in and giving him a good hot bath, feeding him and giving him a coat. I asked Jon once, didn’t Robert have a coat, and he answered ‘His mum doesn’t care’.”
Sue said that Jon had four or five friends he was always with. “He didn’t see Robert outside school. But one evening, soon after Jon got in the church choir, he came out of choir practice and saw Robert waiting for him and ran away back into the church. After that he didn’t want to go to choir practice any more because he was afraid that Robert would pick him up there. He was dead frightened of Robert.”
“He has that good a singing voice,” she said, “but that’s all over, too, isn’t it? He loves reading, our Jon, doesn’t he?”
“Loves it,” said Neil.
What does he read? I asked.
“Roald Dahl,” she answered. “I think he read all of those.”
“Since Christmas 1992,” the Venables’ social worker stated:
I became gradually aware that problems regarding Jon were re-emerging. These were in the form of peer-group relations in his class and truanting. From Susan I was given the impression that another youngster by the name of Robert had a strong hold on Jon leading to his truanting. There were also signs of general disobedience both at home and at school . . .
What about Jon’s truanting? I asked Sue Venables. “When Paul had trouble at school—though that was rare,” she said, “they used to call me-and I would go and pick him up. But nobody ever called or wrote me about Jon.”
The newspapers would later report that Jon had truanted 40 times in the autumn term 1992.
“But Jon was never off 40 times truanting, so I don’t know where they got that from. He had an eye operation—he was off for a few weeks with that and I sent a note.” (Jon had a squint for which he had surgery, the consequences of which could have been a two- to three-week absence from school.) “I went to every open evening the school had,” said Sue. “[The teacher] never told me that he had played truant . . . all we ever knew about were the four times he truanted as of January 1993; before that we never heard of anything—we never had a letter.”
This appears to be quite true. In the police statement given by Robert and Jon’s class teacher, she says that while she had been aware that, prior to Robert Thompson joining her class in September 1992, there had been attendance problems with him, this was not the case for Jon Venables. During the autumn term of 1992 (3 September to 18 December), she stated, out of a total of 140 half-days, Robert missed 49 and Jon 50. But she specifically says that there were (only) five half-days when both boys were missing at the same time. As no one has claimed that Jon ever truanted without Robert, this would suggest that Mrs Venables is right, and that 35 of his absences during the autumn term are accounted for by his operation.
The class teacher went on to state that during the spring term (as of 4 January 1993 to 12 February—the day of the crime) “there were 60 half-days: Robert missed 37 of these; Jon six, for two of which I had a parent’s note. The four occasions Jon truanted in January to February coincided with four of Robert’s truancies.” (The school’s head teacher had stated that “on the first day of term, Jon’s parents actually brought him back into school after picking him up in the district”.)
It would thus seem that Jon truanted altogether nine times between September 1992 and February 1993—Robert 86 times.
“I would like to add,” said the class teacher in her statement:
that the day before Jon and Robert went missing on 12 February 1993, Jon behaved the worst that he had ever behaved for a whole day whilst he was in my class. He was excited and fidgety and appeared as if he couldn’t contain himself. Robert was his normal self. I remember remarking to other members of staff how awful Jon had behaved that day.
“I didn’t realize Jon was upset the day before it happened, like one of his teachers said afterwards,” Sue said. “But on the morning of Friday he said he felt sick and didn’t want to go to school. Much later he told us he felt scared of Robert but not that day.
“I said, of course you are going to school, this very minute. So then he asked whether he could bring the gerbils home from school for half-term and I said all right, and then he asked for a note for the school giving permission.”
What did you do that day? I asked.
“Took care of the kids, like always,” Sue answered.
When the child’s body was found on the afternoon of 14 February, his torso still fully dressed but covered in blood, the lower half naked, the police had immediately suspected a sexually motivated murder and put out an alert for a known sex offender.
“But he turned out to have a firm alibi,” said Superintendent Albert Kirby, who headed the investigation. He has handled, in the past, some of Liverpool’s most complicated homicides, among them, in 1991, a murder investigation codenamed “Operation Clementine”, which involved a satanic child-abuse cult.
Kirby is tall, slim and articulate. He detests violence in films and on television and believes firmly in a disciplined and structured family life: he and his wife Susan have a son in his third year at university. He is teetotal, a devout Christian and active in his church.
“I don’t have words to describe what I felt when I saw what had been done to that baby,” he said to me one night in Preston during the trial. “I think it’s fair to say that few of us slept that night, or very much for weeks afterwards.
“Perhaps an adult perpetrator would have been easier . . .” he hesitated, then went on “. . . to bear.” He was talking about the psychological and emotional aspect, not a moral one. He shook his head. “I just don’t think that any of us will ever get over it: the violence done to the baby, the suffering of his parents and . . . well . . . the confrontations with the two boys. They were so . . .” he still sounded surprised “. . . so small; they had these young, young voices. When I looked at them the first time, I just thought ‘it’s impossible’. And in spite of the videos, we kept thinking, yes, perhaps hoping, that others . . . adults, had been involved.”
Those security videos, taken on the afternoon of 12 February last year—on the face of it of two untroubled young boys taking a little brother for a walk—appeared on TV screens all over the world and elicited an enormous response in Liverpool. Hundreds of people phoned through to the special murder line the police had set up.
“That one doesn’t half look like you,” Ann Thompson had said to her ten-year-old son Robert that Saturday, pointing at the flickering image on the screen, “Were youse in the Strand yesterday?” “No,” Robert had replied, staring at the television.
When Ann Thompson came to meet me 11 months later it was at the comfortable house of her young solicitor, Dominic Lloyd, and his wife, Lori. She brought three of her seven sons. Two others, Malcolm, now 16, and Brian, 15, have been in voluntary care since 1992; 18-year-old Richard works in another part of England.
Eleven-year-old Robert Thompson is, of course, now locked up in a secure unit where, his mother told me, he keeps things he likes in his room: Airfix kits, clay models he has made, and his collection of trolls. Some of them are on a table opposite his bed so he can l
ook at them, others are “standing guard”—peeping out in a line from under the bed. Six other boys, all older than Robert, share his new home, but they don’t bug him: “They’ve got their own troubles and the staff are very good.” Robert has flashbacks about the scene at the railway and nightmares about James. “But he’s said from the start, he didn’t do it,” Ann Thompson’s voice was stubborn. “And I know what’s in his heart and believe him.”
(Jon Venables is in a much larger unit, with more boys, though they, too, are all older than he. Jon also has dreams, according to his mother, Susan, but they are of saving James and of the world becoming a “chocolate factory”. “He has a collection of teddy bears in his room,” she laughed, “he has them lined up around his bed, to keep the baddies away.”)
The three boys who arrived with Ann Thompson live with her in the house on an estate in another county she was moved to after Robert’s arrest. Her oldest, 20-year-old Michael, is a pale, thin, desperately diffident young man who has not yet held a job and despairs now of ever being able to go into catering, his only interest. He is manifestly in charge of the children. “He took on the father’s role years ago,” Ann said.
Nine-year-old Christopher, closest in age to Robert, has not been back to school all year and will hardly leave the house. He now has a tutor. An otherwise nice-looking little boy, he has gained about 35 pounds since the murder. “I can’t find any trousers for him,” Anne said, “so they just have to gape.”
He seemed to me almost an indescribably unhappy boy, lost by events which only allow him obvious reactions: “I hate him,” he says conversationally about Robbie during lunch when he shovels in prodigious amounts of carbohydrate and cholesterol. Can’t you control what he eats? I asked Ann. She shrugged. “Do you want me to take that away from him, too?”
Her youngest, 18-month-old Tom, her only child born outside her marriage, is a cheerful smiling baby. In the 11 hours Ann and I spent together that day, he hardly slept but didn’t cry once.
Ann Thompson, like Sue Venables, looked enormously better. Her hair freshly washed, she had lost some weight and wore well-cut fawn trousers and a loose black top.