by Ralph Bulger
Seats had been reserved for family members in the front row of the public gallery in the courtroom, and as I walked into court, I sensed all eyes were on me. It was horrible and I couldn’t wait to sit down. Jimmy and Ray sat either side of me and I felt myself getting really hot with stress. My nervousness made my jaw clench tight and my palms were wet with sweat. It seemed like an eternity before the judge came into court. We all rose in silence as he took his seat, and as soon as he sat down he ordered that the two defendants be brought up from the holding room downstairs. The trial was about to begin.
I could not believe my eyes as Thompson and Venables walked up the steps into the courtroom. Standing just ten feet away from me in the dock were two short, chubby- faced kids in their school blazers and ties. I was stunned beyond belief. They were both so tiny. I felt like someone had just knocked me sideways.
‘This cannot be happening,’ I silently screamed inside.
I will never forget that moment when I saw them both for the first time. I had steeled myself to deal with the occasion, but the shock was overwhelming, momentarily taking my breath away as I stared intently at the boys who sat before me. Where were the demonic forces that had carried out such unparalleled acts of atrocity? Had I really expected to see horns growing from their heads and blood-drenched fangs dripping from their mouths? I was totally unable to grapple with the idea these boys could be capable of such gruesome and wicked acts.
The scene before me had run through my mind on a thousand different occasions as I imagined how I might react. I had wondered if I might scream at them or make a lunge towards them or dissolve in a fit of grief. Now the moment had arrived, instead I sat rooted to the spot, oblivious to anyone else in the room. I felt my hands clench tight and I could almost hear my heart smashing frantically against the walls of my chest amid the stunned hush of the room.
The fact they were in the dock in their school uniforms really struck home. They were so short that special provision had been made to raise the platform they would sit on to make sure they could see over the brass rails surrounding the dock. My head was completely scrambled and I felt like I was going to pass out. I desperately needed some air and I felt the knot in my tummy rising into blind fury. I couldn’t lash out, but I wanted to jump from my seat and smash them to pieces. I didn’t see innocent children before me. I saw two disciples of the Devil wrapped in children’s bodies.
A hand gripped my arm. It was Jimmy, who was holding on to me for dear life, as if he sensed what I wanted to do. I didn’t hear anything that was being said in the court and it was as if the events before me were playing out in slow motion. At that moment, when Jimmy gripped me, I think I had almost taken leave of my senses.
And then it hit me like a tidal wave. Hatred. It was a pure, undiluted hatred that coursed through my veins as if it had replaced every last drop of blood in my body. I still wanted them dead and I am ashamed to say it. How could I hate two boys who hadn’t even reached their teenage years yet? Before James’s death I would not have believed it was possible for me to feel this way. But from that day to this, I have never doubted that, regardless of their tender age and stature, I was staring into the faces of evil: the faces of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson who abducted, repeatedly tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered my beautiful two-year-old son.
It was hard to look at the two boys, let alone assess how I felt, but at the same time I couldn’t avert my stare. My heart was beating so fast, I thought that everyone in the courtroom would be able to hear it. Boom, boom, boom. That was all I could hear.
The boys remained standing for the first few moments before the judge addressed them and asked them to confirm their names. Both just nodded in reply.
Thompson and Venables then sat and began fidgeting and shuffling in their seats. I wanted them to look at me so I could see into their eyes but they continued to mess around in the dock. Eventually, one by one, their eyes met mine. I don’t suppose for one moment they knew who I was, or how much they had destroyed my life. I was just another face in the crowd to them.
I remember locking eyes with Robert Thompson first. He just seemed to stare ahead in my direction as if he didn’t have a bother in the world. I felt a coldness to him that I will never forget. If he was feeling anything inside, he did not seem to show it. His expression seemed blank. He looked neither scared nor upset and I began to see what he was really like inside. Jon Venables was no different, just a more twitchy child whose eyes seemed as cold as rock when I looked at him. I peered into their eyes searching desperately for signs of sorrow, remorse, fear or regret — anything that would show me that they too were made of flesh and blood with human emotions, but to me their stares were spine-chillingly vacant.
As the two boys sat in that dock, I felt certain they were not thinking about the little baby whose life they had destroyed so unnecessarily. Had they ever thought about James? The pain and cruelty they had inflicted on him? Looking at them, I don’t believe that James had ever crossed their minds. They might have been worried about what was going to happen to them as they sat in that courtroom, but they seemed monumentally oblivious to the human suffering they had caused on a catastrophic scale.
I was sick to the pit of my stomach, but I had calmed down enough to know I would not try to lunge at the boys or jump over the dock. Where would that have got me? James deserved so much more dignity than that. He died without dignity and I was determined that I would not shame my son with behaviour that belonged to his killers. Still, I was very glad that I was sandwiched between close family members. All of us felt the same way about these child killers, but they were there looking out for me, for which I will be eternally grateful. I don’t think I came close to crying that day because I was so angry. I felt so ill, but I wasn’t going to show an ounce of emotion to these little bastards who had taken so much pleasure in killing my son.
As the court proceedings started, my heartbeat began to slow and I managed to get a grip on my emotions. One by one, potential jurors were called into the room to swear their oaths before the court. It was quite a lengthy process and it gave me a chance to settle down a bit. The formal proceedings were important, but my mind was elsewhere. Although I tried to listen as intently as I could to what was going on around me, I still couldn’t stop looking at the two boys in the dock, and images of how they had tortured James kept flashing through my mind. My brain was in chaos and I didn’t know the name of the judge, or the prosecuting and defence barristers; all I knew was that my son was dead because of these two monsters. Through archive material of the proceedings, I learned a lot of these details as the months and years ticked by.
The judge in the case was the Honourable Mr Justice Morland. When all the jurors were accepted and settled in their seats, the three charges against Thompson and Venables were read out for their benefit: the attempted abduction of a child, Diane Powers son, the abduction of James and the murder of James. Thompson and Venables had already pleaded not guilty to all three at an earlier hearing. Mr Richard Henriques QC was prosecuting for the Crown, and here is how he opened the trial.
‘James Bulger was two years and eleven months old when he died. He was the only child of Ralph and Denise Bulger and they live in Kirkby. They always called him James and we will refer to him as James throughout this trial. He died on Friday, 12 February this year. In short, these two defendants abducted James from his mother in a shopping precinct in Bootle. They walked him some two and a half miles across Liverpool to Walton, a very long and distressing walk for a two-year-old toddler. James was then taken up to a railway line and subjected to a prolonged and violent attack. Bricks, stones and a piece of metal appear to have been thrown at James on that railway line. He sustained many fractures of the skull. Death resulted from multiple blunt force injuries to the head. There were several lacerated wounds. At some point James’s lower clothing was removed. His body was placed across a railway line and some time later his body was run over by a train, which cut his body in two
. The pathologist concludes that death occurred prior to the impact of the train. The prosecution alleges that the two defendants acting together took James from the precinct and together were responsible for causing his death.
‘Both defendants are now eleven years of age. On Friday, 12 February, they were both ten years and six months old, both born in August 1982. Notwithstanding their ages, it is alleged that they both intended either to kill James or at least to cause him really serious injury and they both knew that their behaviour was really seriously wrong. Not only is it alleged that they both abducted and murdered James, but that they attempted, prior to abducting James, to abduct another two-year-old boy. He was in the same shopping precinct three hours earlier. That attempt failed because the boy’s mother saw one of the defendants beckoning to him to follow him. She called to him, thus preventing the abduction.
‘It was between 5.30 p.m. and 6.45 p.m. that James was stoned and beaten to death before being placed across a railway line.’
It was a shocking opening to the trial and there was silence in the courtroom as he spoke. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I listened to the gruesome description of how James met his death. Hearing the words spoken aloud in public made it even worse because you could see from the looks on the faces in that room that no one could believe what they were hearing.
Mr Henriques told the court that bloodstains found on Jon’s shoes were consistent with a DNA sample of James’s blood, as was the blood found on Robert’s shoe. He also added that there was a close match between marks on James’s face and the imprint of the shoes worn by Robert that day. He didn’t need to spell it out that Robert had kicked and stamped on James’s face.
After hearing the prosecution outline, court ended for the day with Mr Henriques telling the jurors that the next day he would describe to them details of the police interviews with the two boys, after they had been arrested.
I couldn’t wait to get out of that room. I felt like I was suffocating.
When we got back to Denise, I found it so hard to talk about all the things I had heard that day, and so her brother Ray briefed her as simply as possible, leaving out the gory details of how they had battered James to death.
I barely slept a wink that night. I couldn’t erase the faces of the two little kids who had devastated so many lives. The difference now was that I had seen the vacant and cold expressions in their eyes and I realized that is what James would have seen before he died. I think I knew at that moment that I was never going to feel normal again, that my life was going to be a long and painful journey.
I felt drained and exhausted and I didn’t want to go back to court the following day. I didn’t want to see their faces ever again, but I knew I had to keep going for James. It would be wrong if I didn’t show up.
The police had spent a lot of time with our family trying to explain the most important aspects of the case. They said that they were not just relying on the evidence of Thompson and Venables admitting to abducting and attacking James, but on the accounts of thirty-seven witnesses who had been traced during the investigation. All of them put James with the boys. He had been forced to walk nearly three miles that day over a period of one and a quarter hours. All of those witnesses could provide a different snapshot of the events as they unfolded.
Everyone accepted there was little doubt that the boys had carried out the crime, but a successful conviction hinged on whether the defendants knew and understood that taking James away, torturing and killing him, was wrong. The prosecution needed to prove to the jury that Thompson and Venables knew the difference between right and wrong and could tell truth from lies. If that could be proved, it would show that they both knew what they were doing and deliberately intended to injure and kill James. I knew they did before I even reached the court.
The jury was made up of nine men and three women and I put my trust in them that they would come to the right verdict. When we arrived at court the following day, it was with a heavy heart that I forced myself to go back inside. Mr Henriques began to take the jury through some of the police transcripts of the interviews with Thompson and Venables. It was horrific.
The court heard how the two boys continually blamed each other for the attacks on James. Jurors looked shocked when they heard how Thompson had said that Jon threw a brick in James’s face and that he fell on the floor, his face bleeding profusely. Thompson continued with blaming Venables, insisting that he had smashed James in the face with a stick and battered him with an iron bar. Venables, they were told, said that Thompson picked James up and slammed him to the ground, leaving him with injuries to his head. And so the evidence went on, with everyone in the room listening in stunned silence.
When Mr Henriques was finished, he spoke to the jurors about the importance of establishing that the boys knew that what they were doing was wrong, just as the police had explained to us. Then they were handed a bundle of photographs depicting scenes from that day. He talked them through each picture and then warned them as they came to the most horrific ones.
‘Members of the jury,’ he said, ‘the remaining photographs are unpleasant to look at and I invite you to steel yourselves. I should warn you now that you are going to see pictures of the scene after James’s body was found.’
It was almost too much for me to bear. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes, trying to block out what these poor jurors were being forced to witness. All I could see and hear in my mind was James screaming for help, blood pouring down his face. I wanted to throw up but sat motionless in my seat.
The graphic pictures the jurors were shown demonstrated the savage injuries to James’s head and body. I don’t know if those twelve men and women will ever have been able to get those visions out of their heads.
Thompson and Venables squirmed and fidgeted throughout but still I saw no shame, no sorrow or remorse. The evidence continued on, outlining minute by minute what had occurred on 12 February. I was glad when the day was over as it was really beginning to take its toll on me.
The following day I went with Denise to hospital for a check-up on the pregnancy. The doctor said that she and the baby were doing great. It was welcome news to know that our baby was safe and well, especially after the stress of the previous two days. As Kirsty had been stillborn, the fear for our unborn child was always in the back of our minds. And James had now been taken from us as well, so the life of this unborn child was unbelievably important to us. It also brought so many mixed emotions. Here I was, soon to be a father again, and yet I was hearing the most unthinkable details of what had happened to my son only a few months before. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a fucked-up world that we lived in. I wanted this baby so much, but I was also petrified of bringing another child into a society that could be so cruel and heartless. I held Denise’s hand as we left the hospital that day, and we both allowed ourselves to smile a little at the good news we had received. We had to hold on to something positive because everything else was so grim.
‘We’ll get through this,’ I told Denise. ‘At least we have each other and our new baby.’
‘I know,’ she replied softly.
The CCTV videotape of James being led away from the shopping centre was played to the jury that day when I was absent from court. I was glad I didn’t have to sit and watch that again. I thought back to the first time I had seen it shortly after James went missing. I remember feeling so relieved that he was with two young boys because I believed with all my heart that he would be OK and would be brought home to us.
When I returned to court the following day, I saw many of the witnesses who had seen James that day describe in detail what had happened. Some of them looked destroyed and shaken, but to this day I have never blamed them for not stepping in to help my son. They were not bad people. They didn’t know that two kids were about to brutalize and murder a little boy. They also have to live with knowing they didn’t intervene and I am sure that is a heavy burden to bear. When I
had first seen the CCTV footage of the boys with James, it didn’t cross my mind that they were going to cause him any harm, and he was my son. So how on earth could total strangers have guessed any other way? Every one of them should have a clear conscience.
The final straw for me came that morning as the emotional and tearful witnesses took the stand, one by one. I kept looking at Thompson and Venables in the dock, watching to see if they would react in any way to what they were hearing, but they weren’t even listening. And then it happened. As one woman broke down in tears giving her evidence, I saw these two boys giggling and laughing to each other, heads bowed down, oblivious to the distress of everyone around them. They were smirking and sharing a private joke between them and I felt something snap inside of me.
When the court broke for lunch, I said to Jimmy and Ray, ‘I can’t take this any more. I cannot sit and watch those evil monsters smirking and laughing as I listen to how they butchered my baby to death. I’ll end up doing something stupid if I go back in there and I never want to see their faces again. It’s too much for me. I didn’t think it was possible for children to be so cruel and calculating.’