by Gitta Sereny
The police officers who interviewed Robert were Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts and Detective Constable (now Sergeant) Bob Jacobs. Robbie’s mother and his solicitor, Dominic Lloyd, or his assistant, Jason Lee, were always present, except when Ann Thompson felt ill, when a policewoman replaced her.
The police’s preoccupation with the sexual element of the crime had manifestly not escaped Robert’s attention. On the second day when Anne came to see him in the child detention cell, Robert said at once: “He [meaning a police officer] said I’m a pervert. They said I’ve played with his willy.”
His mother had, of course, initiated such talk between them, by telling him the previous day what was being said about her; even so, it seemed surprising that he should bring the subject up about himself.
There was to be an enormous difference between the two boys’ approach to the interrogations. Both their voices were tiny, light, almost toddler-age. But while in Jon one heard mainly his terror, in Robert, despite the infantile sound of his voice, there was energy. “I found it . . .” tall, handsome Phil Roberts hesitated, “frightening at times,” he said. “Yes, frightening.”
As it started, Robert’s story was not very frightening. Moreover, as far as it went (here again, an interesting parallel between Mary Bell’s and Robert Thompson’s response to interrogation) it was, quite carefully, almost true. “He really was very intelligent,” said Phil Roberts. “Very canny.”
They had sagged off from school on Jon’s initiative, Robert said, gone walking along this road and that road, over a bridge, over a flyover on a backway to the Strand (Bootle Strand, the big modern shopping centre). Sometimes it took just an hour to get to the Strand, sometimes, like that day, he said, much more. Once they got there, they went to McDonald’s—not to eat, just to keep warm and sit down. “We went to about five shops, the Buckingham Bingo and the library.”
They had spent half an hour at the library, he said. They were allowed to read books there. He read nursery rhymes.
Jon, talking primarily to Detective Sergeant Dale, was more expansive and quite breathless in his descriptions. He’d been walking to school that Friday, he said, “and then he [Robert] came the back of me and . . . said do you want to sag off and I went ‘all right’ . . .” And Robert’s brother, little Christopher, had been along, too, he said, until six that night.
They had played “in the subways” and in derelict factories, and in a park (he went on without pauses) and under a bridge, and on swings, and in a big block of flats where they’d gone on the lifts, and then they’d gone “robbing” in stores—Mars Bars, which he liked, and trolls which Robert collected—and then they’d gone to the Liverpool football ground and then the cemetery, “and Robert said, ‘let’s look at the names’ and he said, ‘do you want to get that flower,’ and I said ‘no, no, it’s people’s memories . . .’ and then I showed Robert me nan’s and grandad’s [graves] and then he showed me his uncle’s, his nan, his mum’s uncle [gradually he gets confused] his dad’s, dad’s grave and his mum’s, mum’s grave . . . then there was a fire and then it was going darker and then we went to the video shop . . . and, I forgot: before that, we’d got the paint and he threw it over me . . . paint all over me arm and on me school pants and I said me mum’s going to kill me . . .” (here he had realized that the police would have found the blue paint on his clothes which they had thrown at little James and tried, nowhere near as adroitly as Robert, to adapt his story accordingly) “. . . and Christopher was laughing and then we went back to Walton Village and . . . Christopher said it was six o’clock and he was going in now.”
And then, he said, they still went on for another hour, ending up in the video shop where his mum (who was sitting there, nodding) found them. “And you [to his mother] took me to the police station and he [the duty officer there] said if you do it again, you’ll go in a home. And then you took me home and then I went to bed.”
This story—little bits of truth mixed with large chunks of past experience and imagination—had taken almost an hour. Its whole purpose was to keep him away from the Strand, where Robert, much more defiant, and much more sure of his ability to outwit the police, in his account admitted arriving within minutes.
The second day, 19 February, was decisive. Both children were interrogated three times: Jon from 11.06 to 11.50; 12.23 to 12.56; and 15.57 to 16.30. Robert from 11.35 to 12.28; 14.14 to 14.57; and 15.00 to 15.11.
Throughout that morning—in Robert’s case also the early afternoon—both boys desperately denied anything but the most marginal contact with James. In each 300-page transcript of each boy’s interrogations, their denials, almost eerily voiced virtually in the same words, stretch over 100 pages.
Robert: “I never took James on to the hill.” “I never went on the hill.” “I never had hold of his hand” (on four different occasions). “I never had no paint.” “I never touched the baby” (again in four different interrogations). “I never killed him.”
Jon cried more often. His need for his mother’s approval was paramount, and it was always her he addressed whenever he mentioned the baby: “We never got a kid, Mum.” “We never.” “I’m telling you, please.” “I never got him.” “Never a kid.” “Mum, I never.” “I never took him by the hand, I never even touched the baby.” “I never touched a baby.” “I never took the baby, Mum . . .”
That afternoon, Detective Sergeant Roberts had been asking Robert Thompson about the things they had “robbed” during their tour of the shops in the Strand that Friday, such as the tin of blue paint which Robert said Jon had “thrown in James’s eye.”
“Did he or you take anything else?” asked Phil Roberts.
“No.”
“Did either of you take some batteries?”
“No.”
“. . . You went all red in the face there.”
“What?”
“I noticed you went a little bit red in the face. What about these batteries?”
“I never took anything.”
“When somebody gets embarrassed about something, they go red in the face. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, but I never took no batteries.” (Cries wildly.)
“Well son . . .”
(Almost a screech) “I never took no batteries.”
“Who took the batteries, then?”
“I don’t know” (sobbing) “. . . Yeah, well Jon might have took them . . . Why do we want batteries? It wasn’t me . . . He might have stuck them in his pocket . . . I never. It weren’t me . . .”
And that afternoon, questioned again about the batteries, Robbie said again Jon might have taken them. “For his game gear, cos that’s what he plays on most . . .”
“What are the batteries like he uses for those?”
“Pencil.”
“The little thin ones, are they?”
“Not the . . . little thin ones.”
“No?”
“They are about that thick” (he indicates with his hands).
“Are they the round ones—you know, are they shaped round?”
“Yeah, round.”
“How would you put it—with a little . . . nut . . . at the top?”
“A lump at the top . . . And no lump in the bottom . . .”
After six more pages in the transcript, Robert, with enormous determination and skill, led the police officers away from the dreaded batteries by initiating a discussion about what one would think would be the worst thing for him to talk about—blood.
During the 33 minutes of Jon’s second interrogation that day, he had become increasingly distressed, bursting into tears every few moments and beseeching his mother with that repeated “I never touched him” to believe him. And Susan Venables tried desperately to help him: “Calm down first,” she said.
“No, I can’t, I never touched him . . . we just went home and I . . . I left Robert on his own until he came back to Walton Village.”
“Tell me the truth now, please Jon,” his mother urged.
“I never killed him, Mum. Mum, we took him and we left him at the canal, that’s all [he now admitted for the first time taking James] . . . I never killed him, Mum.”
“I believe you,” Sue assured him.
“You think I done it,” he cried. “I’m telling youse . . .” He starts almost to hyperventilate. “Don’t,” she tries to quiet him, “we don’t, Jon. Come on.”
“I want to go home. I’ve already told youse what I know. Ooh . . . you’re going to put me in jail . . . I never Mum,” he wails until his “I never, I never” no longer sounds like words but one long cry.
“I know you wouldn’t hurt a baby,” his mother said.
“This was where we broke it off,” David Tanner told me. It was early evening and we had been talking for an hour, sitting in his small office at the police station in St. Helen’s. Even though it was six weeks after the end of the trial, it had been extremely difficult to get any of the police officers who had been closely involved with the boys to talk to me. Superintendent Kirby had finally persuaded a few of them to help me. “Go easy,” he had warned me. “Some are still very upset.”
David Tanner had been all right for that first hour while we discussed Liverpool, unemployment, violence, the decision he had made before this happened to ask to be assigned where he was now, where it was quieter, and nearer home.
He is a powerful-looking man, but quiet, with warm eyes. The moment we began to talk about those days in February a year ago, they filled with tears. He tried to joke, “Just a reflex”, he said, and added that his wife would tell me there was a softy inside that big man. I didn’t think so. There was a very human being inside that man.
He and Detective Sergeant Michelle Bennett had stood outside the door of the interrogation room and listened in over the downstream monitoring. Michelle Bennett, herself a mother of young children, had been assigned to look after Susan Venables. “She is very, very good,” David Tanner said. “But she found it very arduous.”
To comfort Susan Venables? I asked.
“No,” he said, “to like her.”
As they listened to the increasing tension in Jon’s voice, they knew they had to do something. “By the end of that second session,” Tanner said, “it was clear to us that the boy had a desperate need to confess, and the mother’s reassurances were stopping him.”
They had taken Susan Venables to another room and explained to her that she wasn’t doing Jon any good by helping him suppress what he was trying to get out. The police by this time knew that James’s blood had been found on both boys’ shoes and other things. “It was particularly difficult,” David said, “because we couldn’t tell her about this evidence.
“We told her that what she and her husband had to do was to sit down with Jon and assure him that they loved him, and would continue to love him whatever happened. I think she trusted me,” he said. “It took almost an hour, but then it dawned on her that what we were saying was right. She went to find Neil and explained it all to him and he finally agreed.”
It was decided the parents would talk to Jon in the juvenile detention room where he had meanwhile been given lunch.
As they went in, Susan turned around and told Tanner that she wanted him to come in with them. “I hadn’t expected it,” he said.
The experience, it was clear, had been extraordinarily upsetting. Tanner’s lips kept trembling as he described it to me. “There wasn’t much of anything in that room,” he said. “Just a mattress on the floor and a bench at the far side of it. That’s where they sat down, with Jon between them. I sat down on the mattress, at the other end. They both put their arms around him and kissed and cuddled him. It wasn’t very long at all,” he said, “he ended up sort of curled up on Sue’s lap and he was crying and crying and they said over and over that they loved him and would always love him and then, really very quickly, he said: ‘I did kill him.’ It was so quick and he was crying so hard, we thought perhaps he hoped we wouldn’t hear but of course I did and Michelle and Mark Dale who were standing outside the door did too and it had an enormous impact on us . . .”
The parents came out then—Michelle took Susan to freshen up while David Tanner took Neil to the interview room. “I told him that Sue had done enough for a bit and that it was time for him to take over. I said ‘It’s time for you to be a man’. He went back to Jon then and a little later he came out and he looked white. ‘Do you know what they did?’ he said, sounding stunned. ‘My God, he just told me.’
“It really was all quite . . . quite terrible,” Tanner said, and we both sat quietly for a while. “We really couldn’t make do with Susan,” he finally said. “We couldn’t understand how she was . . . well . . . constantly repairing her make-up—it seemed so extraordinary.” A nervous reaction? I suggested. “Well, it didn’t feel like that to us.”
Neil’s weakness, too, he said, had made them feel uncomfortable. “But they were honest, you know, in wanting Jon to tell the truth . . .”
Jon repeated his confession into the tape shortly afterwards. That afternoon, and the next day, they tried to lead him further, but—even worse than Robert—there was one thing he simply could not get out. It took more than two hours not to say it; he told them everything in those hours: how it had been his idea in the Strand to walk towards James but “. . . Robert’s to kill him,” and then, bit by bit, he went over the whole walk and finally the railway yard and the bricks, and the metal bar, and the kicks, from both Robert and him, and the taking off of the trainers and socks—he did that—and his pants and his underpants—“Robert done that—and, and, and . . .”
“There was something else, wasn’t there?” Mark Dale eventually interrupted him. “You left it out, haven’t you, and you know it’s important, don’t you?” And it took another long detour, via yet more awful things he enumerated in his attempt to escape pronouncing what he just couldn’t seem to bear saying.
“We found batteries there, didn’t we,” Mark Dale finally said. And after countless more “I never, no batteries, never batteries,” and “Robert . . . not me,” he almost screamed, sobbing. “They’re his batteries . . .” and then, at last, they ended it.
In the final interview with Robert Thompson, the police expanded their questioning about the batteries into a long conversation that brought up various sexual aspects of the attack. Detective Sergeant Roberts told Robbie about some of the things Jon had said during his interviews—a tactic both police teams used to elicit more information from the boys.
“Can I just say to you what Jon has said . . .”
Robbie interrupts him: “Most probably that I’ve took everything off him and that I’ve been playing with him.”
Jacobs: “How do you know that?”
Robbie: “Cos I know he’s going to say that.”
Roberts: “Playing with what?”
Robbie: “His privates, that’s what you said before.”
Roberts: “What do you mean, privates?”
Robbie: “What I say.”
Roberts: “What, like his penis, that’s what you’re saying?”
Robbie: “Cos Jon’s not going to own up, is he? It wasn’t me.”
Robbie was now crying. He said that they were just going to accept everything Jon was saying, and blame everything on him.
“Well,” said Roberts. “You say you had hold of [James’s] body. At any stage . . . any time, have you put your hand into his mouth?”
Robbie: “No.”
Roberts: “Because what happened left a mark.”
Robbie: “In where?”
Roberts: “Where his mouth had been pulled down.”
Robbie: “On his lips?”
Roberts: “In his mouth.”
Robbie: “Or his tongue?”
Roberts: “In his mouth.”
Robbie: “On his lips?”
Jacobs: “You tell me.”
Finally, Jacobs asks him: “Have you put your hand in his mouth at all?”
Robbie: “No.”
Robbie: “I don’t know, it blows all around.”
Jacobs: “No it doesn’t blow all around. You get . . . dust, but it doesn’t make dirty marks.”
Robbie: “What do you mean dirty marks?”
Jacobs: “You know what dirty marks are, don’t you?”
Robbie: “Like sex marks.”
Jacobs: “Like what?”
Robbie: “Sex marks. Dirty.”
Until one or both of these boys one day tells his own story, we can try to fit together various pieces—the parents’ stories, the teacher’s descriptions, what witnesses saw—but we will never really know what went on inside those ten-year-old minds that dreadful Friday and the days which led up to it.
Superintendent Kirby, who thought of little else for almost a year, is convinced that they had long planned to murder a child that day. Two weeks before, Robert had bullied his little brother into truanting one afternoon and abandoned him crying by the Leeds–Liverpool canal which borders the Bootle Strand shopping centre. “That was the place where on 12 February they tried to make James lean over the water in order to push him in,” Mr. Kirby said. “I think leaving [the young brother] there was a rehearsal.”
Just before taking James, Robert and Jonathan had tried to lure away another little boy whose mother luckily found him in time.
Kirby is certain that they were determined to kill. He feels that four things support this view. First, when he considers the rehearsal for later events—Robert’s abandonment of Christopher in January. (Jon was not involved in this nasty caper, and Christopher, though very distressed, sensibly enough went across the street to the Bootle shopping centre and asked a security officer to help him; he called the school and Christopher’s class teacher was despatched to the centre manager’s office to collect him.)