by Ralph Bulger
‘Go home, Denise, and I’ll get out and find our baby. I’ll let you know the moment we hear anything,’ I promised her.
‘I’m not going anywhere until I find James. I’ll stay out here all night if I have to. We’ve got to find him, Ralph.’
‘I don’t think you’re in a fit state to go wandering around. I promise I won’t give up till we find him, but just go back to your ma’s and I’ll ring to let you know what’s happening.’ ‘I’m coming with you, and nothing you say is gonna change my mind.’
Denise was a strong woman and a terrific mother, but I have never seen her so devastated. We had already lost Kirsty, our first daughter, and now our only other child was missing. It was hard for me to look at the pain etched all over her face, and although I hugged her, I knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better until James was back with us. I made many different pacts with God that night.
‘Please, God, please bring James back to us and I swear I will do anything in return,’ I prayed in my head.
The truth was, I would have laid down my life for my child at that moment if only he could be returned home safely. I think at that stage, my greatest fear was that he had suffered some kind of accident and that he had been injured somehow and couldn’t get any help. That seemed to make the most sense during those early hours of the search, because no one was coming forward to say they had seen him. He was so little and vulnerable, I was certain that if anyone had come across him wandering the streets alone on a dark night, they would have gone to his rescue and brought him to the nearest police station, but there was nothing. And so I had to hold on to the hope that he would be found safely at some point. It was just that the waiting was agony.
The feeling of helplessness is possibly the very worst thing of all. It’s as if you have been thrown out of a plane without a parachute and are free-falling to earth. You have absolutely no control over what is happening. To any parent, I can only say this: imagine that it was your two-year-old child who was missing. You know your son or daughter is out there somewhere, but you have no way of finding them. There is no greater torture for a mum or dad. All I wanted to do was put my arms around my baby and cuddle him for dear life. It was my job to protect my family and I had failed. There is nothing more precious than your own child and the love you have for him. I felt desperate inside.
‘Let’s go and find James,’ I urged Denise.
‘What if we can’t find him, Ralph,’ she replied.
‘We will find him. We have to find him. He can’t stay missing for ever. We will have him home tonight, tucked up safe and sound in his bed without a care in the world.’
3
The Search
The police search was well underway by the time Denise and I left the station around 8 p.m. There were patrol cars everywhere, not just in Bootle, but in the surrounding areas as well. They were using loudspeakers to appeal to the public, asking if anyone had seen a little boy, letting everyone know he was lost and missing from home. By now it had turned into a massive hunt for James. The police helicopter was scouring the skies above, shining its torch across the area. More than one hundred officers had been called out to join the hunt and the Operational Support Division (OSD), which backs up major incident teams, was being assembled to widen the search.
Mandy Waller had been assigned to continue looking after Denise and me, as she had struck up a good rapport with Denise especially. She would be our point of contact for information as the search continued. Mandy was a lovely woman. She was strong, confident and capable, but she was also gentle, kind and compassionate. We both trusted her from the beginning and that trust was not misplaced.
Denise’s brother Ray took Denise back to the now-closed mall to have another look, and when they arrived a security guard spotted them and let them in. Together with a plain-clothes detective and guards, the pair retraced Denises steps from earlier that afternoon in the hope they might get lucky. The guards told Denise it was unlikely that James was trapped inside a closed shop because any movement from him would almost certainly have triggered highly sensitive alarms, but they were taking no chances and they continued their search anyway. Keyholders to the stores were being scrambled to make sure that nothing was left to chance.
Close relatives from both sides, as well as extended family and friends, had rushed out in force to help the search once they were alerted that James was missing. It would be impossible to name everyone who was there that night; as the evening wore on, there must have been hundreds of people from Kirkby who made their way to Bootle to offer their help in trying to find our little boy. It was quite overwhelming, the show of solidarity we received from our community, but it didn’t surprise me one bit. That was the way it was where we came from. Friends and family spread out as far and as wide as possible. It was like a needle in a haystack, of course, but there were many carloads of people driving around just in the hope that someone would see something that would lead us to James. Others set out on foot to start combing every square inch of the area. I know Jimmy was there because he immediately tried to take some of the burden off my shoulders and suggested to everyone which places they should cover. His work as a taxi driver had given him a brilliant knowledge of the area. I can also remember him giving me a hug and comforting me.
‘Don’t worry, kid, we’ll find him,’ he said. ‘We won’t stop searching till we do.’
It was Jimmy’s turn to try to reassure me, just as I had with Denise, but we needed to cling to that hope and carry on believing that we would find James safe and well. As far as Jimmy was concerned, I was the baby of the family and, as my older brother, he was now trying to look after me.
Jimmy recalls:
It was the coldest of nights and yet that seemed to be the farthest thing from anyone’s mind as we started trawling the area. There were so many members of the public from Kirkby and from Bootle just turning up in droves and asking if they could help. I remember thinking that with this number of people, and the police operation in full swing, we were sure to have a lucky break somewhere.
When I saw Ralph, he just looked awful. Drained of colour and petrified. He is my baby brother and I knew I had to step up to the mark and do what I could to help him through this. We agreed that teams of people would spread out from the Strand and that we would keep returning to the police station every so often to see if there was any news.
There cannot have been a single place we didn’t check that night. There were police and members of the public in playing fields, schools, housing estates, industrial sites and car parks. We checked in bins, telephone boxes, skips — anywhere a small child may have tried to take refuge from the cold or somewhere that James might have found himself trapped. Some of the places were so eerie in the black of night, and there were some really rough and seedy areas we had to search. We checked back alleys used by the homeless and drug addicts, picking our way through empty beer cans and discarded and bloodied heroin needles. Id seen them all as a taxi driver but they were not the sort of places you would want to find a two-year-old baby.
The search continued with no joy. As every hour ticked by our nerves grew more frazzled, but we had to keep going. Tiredness didn’t come into it. It was like everyone was on autopilot, focusing on one thing only — the need to find baby James.
The next time I saw Ralph, I just tried to keep his spirits up. ‘Don’t worry, Ralph. We wont stop until we find him.’
But the panic was well and truly set in his eyes by this stage. I could see it in everyone’s faces, and I hoped it didn’t show on mine as he looked at me with complete despair.
The local and national media had now been told that there was a manhunt for a missing boy and news bulletins were being carried by regional television and radio stations by 10 p.m. The police told us that a woman had reported seeing a young child crying earlier in the day on the banks of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, which runs alongside the shopping precinct. That night the search team got down there with their torches to see if
they could find anything in the dirty water. Reeds were pushed aside and rubbish bags were ripped apart on the route, but still there was nothing. The liaison officers at the station told Ralph that an underwater search team would begin dredging the canal at first light. They wouldn’t have stood a chance of seeing anything in the dead of night. It was not a good moment. The focus of the search was drifting towards the canal as, at that point, it was the only known sighting of a young child, but it was just unthinkable that his body might be found there the following day. I tried to push the notion from my mind and carry on with the search.
Jimmy was a big help to me that evening. He was my backbone — the person who was there for me, while I was trying to be there for Denise. During the evening, Denise and I returned to the precinct several times with the police, shuttling between the mall and the station. Every time we spoke with the detectives, I said a silent prayer to God that they would have something positive to tell us. I would let myself feel a moment of hope, then see from their faces there was no good news. I searched so many places that night. Sometimes Denise was with me and other times she would remain with Mandy at the station or go off with her brothers to continue looking.
At one point the police took Denise and me back to the precinct to see some of the images being extracted from the security cameras. They asked us to look at a very fuzzy frame of a little boy running from the door of a butcher’s shop. My heart sank when I saw it.
‘That’s him,’ I said without hesitation. There was no mistaking my son’s little body, however grainy the images were.
Denise was exactly the same. She recognized our James immediately and screamed out, ‘That’s James, that’s our baby.’
I wasn’t sure if the sighting was a good thing or a bad thing. In one way I thought it was a positive breakthrough because we were now seeing our son leaving the butcher’s shop, and I was praying that further images and information would show us where he went. If that was the case, surely it would lead us to our son? Our early hopes of finding James had quickly faded as the evening became more intense. Was this the tiny chink of light that would bring James back to us?
But in the next breath, it was so painful to see this tiny little figure all alone, and I was terrified of what we might see next. I was almost too afraid of what was around the corner. Then we were shown another frame taken seconds later, which showed Denise leaving the butchers in a panic and beginning her search for James on the downstairs floor of the mall.
This must have been quite late in the evening, at a guess I would say about 10 or 11 p.m., because we had been in and out of the mall many times and I had been off searching elsewhere as well. By now we had still only identified this one image of James outside the butcher’s shop just moments after he had slipped away from Denises side. A police team was continuing to go through more of the images from the CCTV camera shots taken from the mall earlier that afternoon. Detectives told us there were sixteen cameras recording, which they hoped would provide a much clearer idea of where James had gone after he ran from the butcher’s counter. The frame-by-frame account of that afternoon was crucial in building up a picture of what had occurred.
Late in the evening, the police persuaded us that we should go home to get some rest. They reassured us that the search would continue through the night and that we should come back at first light. We were driven home to Eileen’s house, and when we got there Denise and I just sat in silence, both lost in our own thoughts. I began pacing up and down, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes. It was no good. I was not going to be able to rest and Denise felt the same. There was no way we were staying at home while James was still out there somewhere. At around 1 a.m. two of Denises brothers, Ray and Gary, returned home to check on us and to update us. They stayed a few minutes and Denise and I returned to Bootle with them to continue looking.
At one point I remember trudging across a wet, dark field, feeling so desperate and alone. I thought about my baby James, scared and crying in the dark, and I just sank to my knees and cried. I raised my eyes towards the horrible black sky and prayed with my hands clenched close together. ‘Please, God, let us have him back. Please don’t let any harm come to him.’
‘What have we done to deserve this?’ I shouted out loud. ‘Are you punishing us for something? Just take me instead of James if you have to.’
As tears streamed down my face, I didn’t even feel the cold or the drizzling rain that had soaked through to my bones. There was only one thing that mattered.
Jimmy was still out searching with the rest of the family. We all refused to give up until we found James. We didn’t get any sleep at all that night, but as dawn broke on Saturday morning the search was to take on a startling new twist. We were unaware at that point that highly trained technicians and police officers from the OSD had been working through the night on a series of images taken from the CCTV. The next day, 13 February, Denise and I automatically set off for the station to continue our search and to see if the police had any further news. We were told the police had found images showing that James had left the shopping mall with two young boys, probably in their early teens. There was every chance they had taken him as a prank or as a bit of mischief, as if he was their younger brother. The police were now going to concentrate on finding the boys to establish if James was still with them or, if not, where they would be able to find him.
I looked at Denise and smiled with relief.
‘Hes gonna be all right, Denise,’ I said. ‘He’s with two young kids — he’s gonna be all right.’
For the first time, I felt that God had answered my prayers. As soon as I heard that, I thought everything was going to be OK. It all made sense as to why we couldn’t find James, because he had gone off to play with other kids. The previous night some very dark and nasty thoughts had crossed my mind. My biggest fear was that James had been stolen by a nonce, a pervert paedophile, and that he had been abused and killed. It was not something I could say out loud to anyone, and I kept telling myself I had to keep on hoping, but in the dead of night when you can’t sleep and your son is missing, you can’t stop such terrible fears preying on your imagination. I also worried that James had got lost and hurt himself, and was now unable to get help. There are so many things that you think, but this really was the last thing I would have imagined.
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, God,’ I said over and over in my head.
We were asked if we would take part in a press conference that was being held at 11 a.m. and we agreed. Even though we still didn’t know where he was, at least there was a chance that he would turn up and come home with us again. Denise was hopeful, but she was still so strung out by the events of the last thirty-six hours that she hardly had the strength to register a lot of what was going on. Neither of us was comfortable doing the press conference, but we knew it was important to get as much information out to the public as possible, as it may bring in further details that would lead to James. Both of us would have done anything at that point, but Denises nerves and stress got the better of her when she eventually faced the cameras.
The police station was a hive of activity that morning and loads of our family had arrived at the station too, to offer moral support. The press conference was packed and I could feel myself tensing as we sat down in the full media spotlight. There were TV cameras and flashbulbs going off everywhere and I was getting hot and sweaty. Denise was in a bad state. She was exhausted and wrecked from lack of sleep and worry. She managed to describe how she was buying meat with James and then the next minute he had gone, but she was close to breaking down.
‘If anyone has got my baby, please just bring him back,’ she sobbed.
Denise was now crying her heart out and it was horrendous. She had to leave the room and I tried my best to pick up where she had left off. It had been a mistake to ask her to deal with the press so soon after James went missing. Her emotions were there for everyone to see, as any mother’s would be in the same circumstanc
es. I was little better, and felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Neither Denise nor I would have imagined this in our worst nightmares, but it was very clear to me that we needed the press to keep putting the message out there because I was convinced someone would know where James was.
‘It could happen to anyone,’ I said. ‘She just turned away and the next thing he was gone. James is a bubbly kid who gets on with anyone. He will chat away to anyone, but we have taught him his name and address so if anyone asks him he will tell them.’
I answered a few questions as best I could, but I couldn’t wait to get out of that room. The police continued on with their briefing to the media as they broke the news about the images of the two boys seen leading James away from the mall. Copies of the video images were given out, and by Saturday lunchtime the headline television news on BBC and ITV reported that detectives searching for a missing toddler on Merseyside now believed he had been abducted. It was horrible to hear those words because they felt so threatening and dangerous. But it was far better to think he was with kids than the more sinister alternative of him being led away by a strange man — that his disappearance was just a result of high jinks, and that mischief, not murder, was the motive. I remained convinced that if James was with other children then he was going to turn up safe and well.
The TV reports were accompanied by the grainy images of James holding the hand of a boy as he was led away from the shopping mall. Ironically, they were passing a Mothercare shop at the time the images were taken.
Those blurred and sketchy pictures, which were screened around the world, have become some of the most eerie and terrifying film footage ever seen, a silent witness to a savage and unthinkable crime. Now, knowing what was to later become of my little boy, I desperately want to reach into the TV screen and pluck him back from danger. But at the time, as we watched my happy-go-lucky son trotting from the mall that afternoon, holding the hand of a ten-year-old boy, no one had any idea he was being led to his brutal murder.