The Case Of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered

by Gitta Sereny

  Social services in these economically deprived cities deal, of course, with countless similar situations and, understaffed and—more important—undertrained, frequently go wrong in their choice of priorities and assignments of individual social workers to a case. The “doctor’s daughter” first sent to Ann Thompson by the Liverpool social services may have been quite as committed to her calling as the Family Service Unit’s Jackie: she just didn’t suit Ann Thompson—she was in the wrong slot. Mrs. Thompson was evidently both very thorny and very vulnerable—the two often go together—and, feeling bad enough about herself, reacted negatively to censure. “Three months later,” she said, “one of the social workers came and said my sister-in-law had reported that I had battered my children with a stick. I made the kids strip then and there—there was not a mark on them.” If the mind boggles at this thought, it is true, too, that confronted with what were doubtless outraged social workers—Malcolm had repeatedly complained about Michael beating him, and so had Brian—she didn’t have many choices. “But I did have a terribly difficult time managing Brian,” she said, “so I finally asked for him to be taken into care and not long afterwards Malcolm went into voluntary care—I think Brian told him about his comfortable room and all the clothes he got and attention and pocket money so he thought why not me, too. But it was all right with me; those were the two who fought most, and the places they got sent to were good.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” she then said. “They all loved each other, but they all paired off, age-wise.”

  None of this is quite as others describe it: first of all, it doesn’t sound to me as if there was much, if any, love between these brothers. When I asked Ann to tell me about each of the boys, she could only say they were good kids, really, and remind me of Bobby’s concern for her migraine. She couldn’t really speak about them as individuals. The children doubtless mirror her emotional confusions—as children will—and are equally bereft.

  Brian and Malcolm went into voluntary care, but not until 1992, much later than Ann recalls or admits. And in the children’s homes, too, they remained troubled: both, Ann said, at some point took overdoses of Paracetamol. As for Robert, he was now swiftly approaching crisis point.

  Teachers from the boys’ school, and neighbours, all noted the amount of bullying in the family, with each pair of older boys bullying the pair next to them down the line in age. Thus Michael, 14 when his father left, lorded it over ten-year-old Malcolm and nine-year-old Brian. Malcolm and Brian in turn bullied Robbie between the age of five and seven; and Robbie, by the time he was eight and nine, bullied his little brother Christopher. There is a confusing story, which Ann denies, but others confirm, that towards the end of 1991 or the beginning of 1992, Richard, back home at that point, called the neighbours for help because Michael, then 17, had “chained him, tarred and feathered him, and hung him upside down in the back garden”. It is difficult to visualize this, looking at the thin, limpid figure of 20-year-old Michael, who appears absent even when he is there. Still, whatever happened, Richard left soon afterwards. This incident is also supposed to have led to a further break between Ann and her parents, who have claimed to have felt increasingly embarrassed by the family’s conspicuous conduct.

  The teachers of St. Mary’s Church of England Primary School in Walton, Liverpool, commented on the bullying tactics of the Thompson boys in statements to the police after the murder. “To my knowledge,” said one of them:

  I first came into contact with Robert Thompson in September 1989 although I had contact with the family as far back as 1982. During this period of time it has been a continual battle to bring to the attention of the social services and other services, the problems surrounding these children in the Thompson family. I have on a number of occasions informed the social services about the bullying tactics that have applied to each of the boys in the family in relation to the direct younger brother. In respect of Robert, there have been a number of occasions when it has been reported to me that he has been bullying his younger brother, Christopher, telling him that if he didn’t truant from school with him that he would break Christopher’s glasses . . . Mrs. Thompson is aware that this has been going on, because a meeting took place between her, her social services worker and the Educational Welfare Officer on the 4th of February 1993.

  Reading this report, which specifically says that Ann Thompson was aware of what had been going on, must make one wonder why, if the Thompson boys’ bullying was known to the school for years, Robert’s bad behaviour was known as of 1989, and his truanting habit specifically as of September 1992, it took until 4 February 1993 (only eight days before James Bulger’s murder), to set up a meeting with the boy’s mother.

  As in all family tales, there is a good deal of confusion about exact dates, but it is established that when Ann Thompson became pregnant with her last baby, Tom, around November–December 1991, she stopped drinking.

  “How did you manage that?” I asked her.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be good for a baby, would it?” she said, and added, “I wasn’t an alcoholic, you know. I just drank.”

  Had it never occurred to her before she became pregnant that her drinking was bad for her other children?

  “I know what you mean,” she said slowly. “Yes, I think I knew that in my mind. But when I got pregnant, I knew it in my body, and that’s different.”

  I think, quite aside from “wanting a daughter”, it has always been Ann’s body which knew that she felt well—perhaps safer—when she was pregnant; many women do. And life in the Thompson household may always have been calmer and even more orderly in those months, possibly another instinctive reason why she continually became pregnant.

  By September 1991, Jon Venables had been moved to St. Mary’s, and he and Robbie Thompson—both held back a year because they were academic “under-achievers”—had been put in a class where they were the oldest boys, perhaps a natural link. That first year, however, their class teacher was a man who had previously worked with maladjusted children and believed strongly in structure and discipline. Although all the teachers’ statements mention Robert’s tendency to lie, and Jon’s “frequent . . . odd and . . . inappropriate behaviour”, there is nothing in any of the statements that indicates any specific trouble that year.

  Robert is cunning, [said one of them] Jon . . . would never have eye contact during conversation, showed very little emotion and could turn on the tears as he wished . . . He is often involved in fights and has a very short temper.

  The male class teacher found Robert “a quiet, often shy little boy making the bullets for the others to shoot . . . I knew he was from a problem family.” And the boys’ second class teacher, who had their care from September 1992 on, stated:

  Prior to Robert and Jon coming into my class, I was aware that Jon had behavioural problems and that Robert had a non-attendance problem. In respect of the two, I would say that Robert was the motivator of any minor problems or any truancy, and that Jon is the type of boy that would go along with that. [But then she contradicts herself . . .] It is Jon that has caused me the most trouble in the class with his behaviour, not generally naughty but . . . disruptive and awkward. Robert was fairly easy to handle.

  From her dealings with both boys she could say that she never saw them involved in any violence in school and that neither boy showed any “inclination to violence or aggressive tendencies”.

  Their playground supervisor agreed. Robbie, she stated, was “a normal child, who never gave any trouble.” But her remarks about Jon suggest that, contrary to Sue and Neil Venables’s belief, the symptoms of Jon’s problems had not abated after changing schools:

  When [Jon] first arrived at the school he reacted in a strange way [to being reprimanded] he would turn around and butt the wall with his head, fall onto the ground throwing his arms around . . . I personally think that Jon had a problem and shouldn’t have been in the school.

  (Much later, I would hear from police and lawyers that during
pre-trial interrogations and meetings in the detention room below the Court during breaks, when asked difficult questions, Jon would show the same symptoms of disturbance he had manifested in both his schools: throwing himself on the floor, throwing his arms and legs about and banging his head against the wall or floor. “It was really quite alarming,” said one of the lawyers.)

  According to Ann Thompson—and the school reports appear to confirm this—the truanting only started in September 1992, which, according to both the school and the parents, was the time Robert and Jon had become friends.

  “Robbie did truant without Venables,” Ann said, “but only after Venables came to the school. He was more out of school than in. When they told me, I asked that he be sent to another school where he could be monitored. The head said ‘He’d have to see a child psychiatrist for that’, and I said, ‘Fine, he can see one’. And then she said, ‘He wouldn’t pass the test to get into one of these schools’, so I asked why, and she said ‘Because he is a normal ten-year-old child.’ I’ve thought and thought about that answer,” Ann said, “about their indifference; about their negligence; but most of all about their obvious ignorance about children such as Robbie.”

  Had it not occurred to her, I asked, that she herself perhaps didn’t do enough for the boys, and, as we have seen, especially for Robbie? She answered only indirectly. “When, at that school meeting I went to, nobody thought of anything to do,” she said, “I thought I’d try another way: I said to Robbie, ‘If you stay in school all week I’ll give you a present at the end of it.’ That was just that week—when it happened.”

  So much has been written about the people of Liverpool, the police, and of course the dreadful unhappiness of the Bulger family in those five days after 12 February last year before the boys were arrested, it is almost strange how much of a grey area it remains as far as the boys themselves are concerned.

  We have all read that the two boys were found at about 7.30 pm that night by Susan Venables in the video shop where they had just earned £1 by doing an errand for the girl who looked after it. We know—and both Sue Venables and Ann Thompson have now confirmed it to me—that they were filthy, their hands and clothes “covered in mud”, with large splashes of light-blue enamel paint on their jackets. “I was livid,” Susan said. “It was never going to come out.” But more than that. She was so furious, she said, at Jon’s having again sagged off, with Robert, she screamed at Robert to get away from Jon.

  Robert would run home and tell his mother that Susan had hit him, and, as proof, showed a bleeding scratch he had sustained earlier on in the railway yard. Ann, furiously, supported by a neighbour, marched him to the police station to put in a complaint of assault against Susan. The police told her there probably weren’t grounds. Susan, too, had pulled Jon along the street to the police and told the constable on duty to give him a warning about sagging. “I really was beside myself,” Sue said. Ironically, this meant that both boys appeared in Walton Police Station within an hour of the killing. “When I got him home,” said Sue Venables, “the television was on, and they were showing that photo of missing baby James. I was hitting Jon—yes, I was—he was crying and both of us, Neil too, were yelling at him. He was on the floor and I still beat on him and I pointed at the screen and said, ‘Look. Look at that. Here’s that little baby missing and you, you, you are out in the street with that Robert!’ I didn’t know any more what I was saying, but I told him to get upstairs to bed, and he snivelled and said, ‘But I haven’t had my tea’, and Neil said ‘And you won’t get any tea, either. Go to bed and think.’ Well,” she said, “then he cried and cried in bed, so I got sorry for him and brought him a cup of tea. Then he went to sleep.”

  Susan Venables told me that Jon stayed in bed late the next morning and that they had then, as always on Saturdays, driven out to see her mother for the day. “He did watch all the news about the baby,” she said, “and he talked about him a lot. But otherwise, he wasn’t any different from other days. He certainly didn’t see that Robert. After what I done to him the night before, he wouldn’t have dared.”

  Well, perhaps not. But Ann Thompson remembers clearly that Jon came round on his bicycle about 8.30 or 9.00 on Saturday morning, wanting to know where Robbie was and could he come in. “I told him to go away, and that his mum was apt to hit Robbie if he played with him. I shooed him out and he turned around on his bike and went. Then I told Robbie he had been.”

  Is it likely that these two boys didn’t meet during the five days they had left? Jon would later say Robbie had told him that if anybody asked, to say Christopher had been with them all of Friday. So when he was questioned, that’s what he did. Robert, however, did not mention Christopher in his interrogations. He knew quite well that that lie was pointless: Christopher had been in school and everybody knew it.

  Police officers were called in from all over the Liverpool area. Detective Constable David Tanner, who had worked with Kirby on previous occasions, was one of them. He is 6ft 4in, a gentle giant, and was on the detail sent out to arrest Jon Venables that Thursday, 18 February, at 7.30 in the morning.

  “When he came down those stairs in his pyjamas,” Tanner said, “I thought it had to be a mistake.” A few minutes later, when the officers asked to see the clothes Jon had worn the previous Friday, he threw his mustard-coloured anorak to the floor at their feet. His mother promptly reprimanded him, but this expression of childish anger didn’t worry Tanner. “I’d seen worse,” he said. When they got back to Lower Lane Police Station (the boys were to be held at different stations, later at different special units, and never allowed to speak to each other) and colleagues asked Tanner what he thought, he told them it couldn’t be this boy.

  “That morning,” David Tanner said, “we went through both the Venables’ flats, searching for anything relevant.” (In his final words at the trial, the Judge, indicating his understanding that the two boys had watched a violent video called Child’s Play III, which, he said, could have affected their actions, had issued what was probably the most impressive warning ever pronounced publicly in Britain against violent and suggestive videos in the home.)

  Having learned of Neil Venables’ addictions to videos—he was said to have rented 400 of them in the course of the past year—and knowing of the police suspicions about the motivations for Jamie’s murder, I asked David Tanner whether, in their search of the Venables’ homes, they had found anything indicating any kind of perversion, including pornographic films.

  “Nothing,” he said. “And believe me we were looking for it. But the films Neil had there were quite innocuous.”

  Neil Venables told me that although he had indeed seen the film the Judge’s remarks had made so notorious, a neighbour had rented it, not he, and that, anyway, Jon could never have seen anything violent without his knowledge.

  This, of course, is nonsense—and not only in Jon’s case; it applies to most of our children. Jon told the police that he had often seen satellite films while his dad slept in the morning. I think it is very likely that Jon—and Robert—saw that particular film . . . many children I questioned later had. But when I watched it myself, I did not find it so very terrible, nor could I detect the particularly clear parallels to the crime the tabloids made a great deal of. And, oddly enough, just like the often frightening Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Child’s Play III had—though it was perhaps not very strong—a moral aspect.

  But I think Mr Justice Morland had a very clear purpose when he brought up the point of violent videos in the home: he wanted to remind us that children are malleable and highly subject to influences, particularly now from films. Stable children—and adults—exposed to violent films, run the danger of becoming emotionally desensitized by a surfeit of such visual experiences, but they are unlikely to be permanently harmed by them. Unstable children, however, from chaotic backgrounds, are extremely susceptible to their mesmerizing effect. It was about this vulnerability to visual violence, I think, that the Judge was trying to issue a w
arning and provoke a debate.

  Almost from the very beginning, after James’s body had been found, Superintendent Kirby had arranged for cousellors to be available to support his team. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “Morale, as far as determination was concerned, was very high, never higher. But at the same time, there was an enormous sense of . . . distress doesn’t describe it; it was more than that: dismay.”

  What they felt, he and others told me, was a terrible unease, about human beings, about life, about themselves and about their own children. From the moment it began to look likely that a child or children had committed the crime, meetings had been arranged with psychologists and psychiatrists who prepared the team for what they might have to expect; how to conduct themselves with children and parents, and where to draw the line between accusation and compassion.

  After the boys’ arrest, agreement was obtained from their families and legal advisers to install downstream monitoring equipment to enable the interviews with the children to be listened to from outside. It was this that would enable David Tanner and Detective Sergeant Michelle Bennett, who were assigned to listen to the interviews with Jon Venables, to realize on the afternoon of the second day, 19 February, that the boy’s desperate need to confess was being hampered by his mother’s constant reassurances.

  Robert Thompson—his police interrogators were to call him Bobbie—and Jonathan Venables, known as Jon, had been arrested at 7.30 a.m. on Thursday, 18 February. During that afternoon and evening, and on the subsequent two days, each boy was interrogated three or four times every day, for about 40 minutes at a time. The police were extremely careful with the two children, before every interview meticulously repeating the prescribed cautions. The interviews with Jon were conducted by Detective Sergeant Mark Dale and Detective Constable George Scott, with his mother or father and solicitor Laurence Lee present.