by Ralph Bulger
I often sat with Mum and cried like a baby myself as she held me in her arms and hugged me. I told her that I wanted to hold James and make everything OK again. I can remember grabbing his pillow, his toys or his clothes and holding them tight to my face because I could still smell James on them. It was an intense period of grieving that no words can properly describe. I couldn’t reach Denise and she couldn’t reach me. I didn’t know a human being could hurt so much and, when I look back, I have no idea how we survived it.
We had regular updates from Mandy and Jim and they did their very best for us in the most terrible of circumstances. All I kept repeating to them like a broken record was the same question.
‘Have you got them yet? Have you got the bastards that killed my baby?’
We didn’t watch the news or read the papers. It was all too much for us to bear. And so the days ticked by. I wish I could say I remembered more about those early few days, but the truth is one hour just rolled into another with the same miserable suffering. It is a blur to a large extent, but I will never forget the pain.
The police, of course, were busy as ever with their investigation. They did an outstanding job and worked around the clock to find the culprits for James’s murder. They were still frantically hunting for the two boys seen in the CCTV video images and about sixty young kids were interviewed as they worked through class registers of all the kids who had failed to turn up at school that day. But still they had no positive lead. On the Tuesday evening after James had been killed, a boy of twelve was arrested in the area of Kirkdale, which is very close to Liverpool city centre. Police wanted to question him about James’s murder and it sparked a near-riot in the area. Television crews and reporters got wind of the arrest of a boy named as Jonathan Green and began arriving at his home, where he lived with his mum, dad and grandmother. Their presence alerted local people and soon a huge crowd began gathering in the street outside his house. They started stoning the property, smashing windows and shouting abuse, and police were forced to call for back-up to disperse the mob that had formed. Gossip was rife, and as rumours spread that the police had nicked a kid for James’s murder, another angry crowd started gathering at Marsh Lane Police Station.
It was mayhem because the mood across the city was so angry at what had happened to James. Denise and I were also receiving calls that night from people telling us about the arrest of a kid who was thought to have been behind the murder. We didn’t know what to think and so we called the police station and spoke to Geoff MacDonald, who reassured us that this was just one of a number of arrests and that no charges had been made. Later that same night, Jim Green came out in person to see us because he didn’t want us to get our hopes up that the killer had been caught. As it turned out, Jonathan Green had nothing to do with the murder whatsoever and he was released without being charged, but the damage had already been done.
Gangs continued to harass Jonathan Green and his family and eventually they had to be moved away to a secret location. It was a classic example of mob rule getting out of hand, and some people were baying for blood. I could not forget that complete strangers had turned out in their hundreds to look for James when he was missing, and I will always be grateful for that help. As a family we had received so much support from the people of my city and I understood that Merseyside now felt shocked and angry — I was angry too — but I didn’t want vigilantism in my son’s name. I didn’t want innocent people to be hurt. On top of that, I didn’t want this sort of stuff to be getting in the way of the police investigation to find James’s real killers. I wanted the police to be able to do their jobs properly without local feelings boiling over into chaos.
In homes across Liverpool, anxious parents questioned their young sons about the murder of baby James. Some asked outright if their child had anything to do with the crime, including the mother of a young boy called Robert Thompson.
‘Is that you on that video, son?’ Ann Thompson demanded.
‘Nah, it’s got nothing to do with me,’ he replied.
As if to prove his point, Robert went to a makeshift memorial that had been growing near the railway in Walton, close to where he lived, where local mourners had been leaving flowers, teddies, cards and messages of sympathy. He later took some flowers to lay at the site, where news crews were filming everything that was going on, including those who turned up to pay their respects to James.
When he got home he said to his mother, ‘Why would I take flowers to the baby if I had killed him?’
At another home nearby, after the security camera footage hit the news, Jon Venables told his mum, Susan, ‘If I’d seen them kids hurting the baby, I’d have kicked their heads in’
When his mum later told him that James had been found dead, he said, ‘That must be awful for his mum.’
Jon’s father, meanwhile, asked his son about the blue paint that was splattered on his mustard-coloured coat. He said that his friend Robert Thompson had thrown it at him.
I later learned that on the Wednesday evening an anonymous woman walked through the doors of Marsh Lane Police Station and said she had some information about James Bulger. She was a friend of the Venables family and knew that the son, a boy called Jon Venables, had skipped school with a friend called Robert Thompson on the Friday that James went missing. He had returned home with blue paint on his jacket. She also said she thought she recognized his outline from the CCTV video. The woman’s identity has never been revealed, but her visit to the police station set off a vital chain of events.
Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts was in charge of a group of officers who were assigned to talk to Robert Thompson and arrest him for questioning. Another group of detectives would arrest Jon Venables. The police set out early on the morning of Thursday, 18 February, and DS Roberts has recalled his experience for several television documentaries. He described how, when the information came in, no one on the team could believe Robert or Jon could be guilty. How could two ten-year-old boys do such terrible things? Nevertheless, the information had to be followed up.
The Thompson family lived a few hundred yards away from the railway at Walton. When Ann Thompson opened the door to the police and DS Roberts explained why they were there, she looked ‘petrified’. Inside the house, DS Roberts saw Robert’s younger brother Simon and told him that he wanted to speak about James Bulger. Simon told him Robert knew about the murder and had taken some flowers to leave at the scene.
Then Robert came downstairs, neatly dressed in his school uniform. DS Roberts was struck by how small and young the boy looked and thought again that he couldn’t be responsible for killing a baby. He sat Robert on the sofa and crouched down in front of him so he could make eye contact, then he explained that the police had been told Robert might be involved in James’s murder. At that point, Robert panicked and started to cry, although he didn’t shed any tears. He shuffled his feet and DS Roberts could tell that the boy was frightened.
As Robert was led away with his mother, police search units began scouring the house, collecting his clothes for examination. Officers immediately noticed there was blood on his shoes.
Jon Venables was also visited at his home in Norris Green in Liverpool, which is about three miles from where Robert lived in Walton. He too was taken away for questioning. His mother, Susan, was unsurprised when the police turned up, but put their visit down to his bunking off school. They asked for his mustard-coloured coat, which showed the outline of a small handprint in paint on the sleeve where James had tried to grab hold of it.
Jon Venables also burst into tears and officers said he looked genuinely petrified.
‘I don’t want to go to prison, Mum. I didn’t kill the baby,’ he cried. ‘It’s that Robert Thompson, he always gets me into trouble.’
Both boys were taken to separate police stations to be questioned, but as Jon was driven away, he kept asking about Robert and told police that he thought they should speak to him.
As Phil Roberts was about to start inte
rviewing Robert he knew what was at stake. He prepared himself well.
‘The age and the size of Robert was shocking,’ he said. ‘I just couldn’t believe he was old enough to have done something so terrible. It was so unusual to have suspects this young, which made the importance of what I was about to do all the more significant. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake and I also knew that I couldn’t be aggressive, despite the horrific nature of the murder of baby James.
‘I planned to take it nice and easy, and I knew that I had to sit off my own feelings and do a professional job.
‘It was crucial that I established whether he knew the difference between right and wrong and the difference between telling lies and the truth.’
Denise and I were informed throughout that police were formally interviewing two ten-year-olds about James’s murder and, like everyone else, we just couldn’t believe what we were hearing.
‘How can ten-year-old boys do something so evil towards a little baby like James?’ I asked. ‘There has to be some mistake. They must have the wrong people, which means James’s killers are still out there.’
I would find myself talking to James all the time. I kept asking if he was all right and I kept repeating to him how sorry I was not to have saved him. I told him how much I loved him and that I missed him.
And I got drunk. Very, very drunk. There is no rule book for grief, and I was just trying to get through each minute of every hour the best I could. I have no doubt that grief alters the brain and feels like a temporary insanity. And I started to fall apart.
I can remember sitting with Jimmy one day as he tried to support me through it.
‘I don’t know how to do this on my own,’ I said. ‘Please help me.’
‘I’m here for whatever you need,’ he replied gently.
My emotions would run away with me sometimes and I would sit and imagine all sorts of things. In particular, I kept thinking about all the times I had spent with James, and I could constantly hear his voice and his happy, infectious giggle. Other times my emotions would just vanish and I would feel cold and distant as I tried to switch off from the horror story that had become my life. I wanted to help Denise more, but it felt as if she had withdrawn completely, numb and paralysed by the shock of what had happened.
I obviously wasn’t present during the long hours of police interviews, but in his book, Every Mother’s Nightmare, Liverpool journalist Mark Thomas, who covered the case from start to finish, gives a full account of what happened when Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were quizzed about killing my son. He has kindly allowed me to reproduce his account of what took place, for which I am very grateful. The rest of this chapter is an abridged version of what he wrote:
The little boy looked frightened. He looked tiny next to the burly figure of DS Phil Roberts sitting alongside him at the table in the interview room at Walton Lane Police Station. Roberts mother Ann sat at his left-hand side, a portly, unkempt woman who was almost as scared as her son. A solicitor, Jason Lee, sat at the end of the table next to her, while DC Bob Jacobs sat at the other end, to Phils right.
It was three minutes before six o’clock on the evening of Thursday, 18 February, when Phil began his questioning, recording the precise time on the tape machine and stating who was present for the legal record.
Phil knew that his first job was to try to put Robert at his ease. It would not be easy, but if anyone could bring it off, it was Phil Roberts. He had been on a special course to learn the techniques of interviewing distressed children, but he was also a born detective, a Serious Crime Squad man with the kinds of instincts and experience that you cant teach on a course.
The first thing was to establish eye contact. Phil sat hunched forward, crouching in his chair to keep his head on a level with Roberts. It was an uncomfortable posture for such a big man, but one he would maintain throughout the interviews to help Robert feel more secure. Phil spoke softly and slowly, making his sentences short, his questions simple.
Phil began with establishing if Robert knew the difference between telling the truth and telling lies. He kept the tone light, trying to gain the boy’s confidence. At one point Phil actually had him laughing as he broke the ice.
‘What football team do you support?’ Phil asked him.
‘Everton.’
‘Everton. Right, if I said Everton won 10-nil last Saturday, what would you say that was?’
‘A lie.’
‘OK, and if I said there was five of us in this room, what would say that was?’
‘True.’
After ten minutes, the detective sensed that Robert was relaxed and the time had come to move on to the facts of the case.
Now Robert’s legs began to move, swinging listlessly back and forth under his chair. It was a small body language clue that Phil learned to spot whenever he believed Robert was not telling the truth. Robert readily admitted to ‘sagging’ school that Friday and going to the Strand with Jon Venables, and he claimed he had seen ‘little James’ holding his mother’s hand in the precinct. He confirmed he had heard about the James Bulger case, revealing that he had taken flowers to the scene on Wednesday.
The detective then asked, ‘Now, is it right or is it wrong that James should have been killed?’
‘Wrong.’
‘It’s wrong, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
Exactly five minutes after the start of Robert Thompson’s first interview, detectives at Lower Lane Police Station began questioning Jon Venables. DC Mark Dale, the arresting officer, led the questioning, backed up by DC George Scott.
Mark Dale sat at the opposite end of the table from Jon. The others in the room sat nearby and included Jon’s mother, their lawyer Laurence Lee and George Scott. The detectives began just like Phil, trying to put Jon at ease. He confirmed that Robert Thompson was his ‘mate’.
‘I don’t go near him at school sometimes ’cos he causes trouble at school. He just wants me to stay out late and say we can do good things and I say to him what is there to do in the dark?’
Mark asked, ‘And what does he say?’
‘He just says come on the railway with me and that. . . you know, by the police station.’ Jon claimed that Robert slept on the railway sometimes and lit fires, but he insisted he had never been on the railway with Robert. He said Robert was not a good friend because he got him into trouble and added, ‘He’s much of a girl. He sucks dummies — and sucks his thumb.’
He then described some of the mischief they got up to when they ‘sagged’ school, climbing into back gardens and getting people to chase them. ‘We rob bouncy balls and throw them at windows and one day this fat man came running out getting his mop and throwing it at us.’
‘You have a riot, don’t you?’ asked Mark.
‘Yeah.’
He said that on the Friday of James’s death Robert had tried to get him to go ‘pinching’. ‘He just steals. He just goes, “I’ll have that and that,” and just stuffs it in his coat.’ Robert would then give him things outside.
The detectives got Jon a can of Coke and a Mars bar from a vending machine before they started their second interview that night.
George recalled, ‘We questioned Jon about where he had been on the Friday James Bulger was abducted. He led us on a wild goose chase. He told us he went everywhere, all over Walton and even as far as Scotland Road, but denied he ever went to the Strand.’
Asked about the paint on his coat, he claimed Robert had thrown it over him.
Back at Walton Lane, Phil Roberts and Bob Jacobs were deliberately keeping their questioning sessions short. It was a break the adults valued as much as the child.
Phil said, ‘I was totally focused while I was interviewing Robert. The thought of what happened to James Bulger never entered my mind at all. I was there to do the job — to find out what the hell went on.’
Robert told detectives that his hobby was skipping school. They put it to him that boys wearing clothes similar to his and Jon�
�s had been seen with James on the security video, and Robert said, ‘I never touched him.’
Asked again about the video, Robert said, ‘Yeah, but that may not have been me and Jon that killed him. But I know it wasn’t me that killed him, or Jon.’
He admitted stealing from shops in the precinct but insisted again, ‘I never took the baby.’
Asked what did happen, Robert repeated, ‘No, but I never touched him.’
Phil said, ‘Well, we’re going to find out what happened to him.’
Robert started to cry then and insisted, ‘I never touched him.’
Then Robert admitted that James had been walking round the Strand on his own and added, ‘He [Jon] grabbed the baby’s hand and just walked round the Strand and then he let him go loose. When we were by the church he let him go-
Phil’s heart jumped. ‘You don’t lose concentration but you lose the focus for a moment,’ he recalled. ‘The fact he had escorted him out of the Strand was a big step. He blamed everything on Jon.’
Robert said James had been asking for his mother, actually mimicking the toddler’s voice as he called for his mum. Later, Robert insisted, ‘I told him to take him back.’ He started to cry again and added, ‘I’m going to get all the blame.’
Robert’s crying was not winning the detectives over to his side.
‘When he admitted things he would cry at the same time, but there were no actual tears,’ recalled Phil. ‘It was part of his act. I really thought he was evil, looking at him. He was astute and very streetwise. He wasn’t educationally intelligent but he was shrewd.’
At the end of another interview, Robert asked, ‘Will I be able to go home tonight?’