by Ralph Bulger
This was the first time that child killers had been granted lifelong anonymity, and I had been right to fear it would set a precedent. In 2003 Dame Elizabeth would be called on again to rule on a second similar case — that of Mary Bell.
In December 1968, Bell was convicted of the manslaughter of two boys, four-year-old Martin Brown and three-year- old Brian Howe. She was ten when she killed Martin and eleven when she took Brians life. She was released in 1980, aged twenty-three, after serving twelve years’ detention, including time in an adult prison. She was granted anonymity but it was not for life. Four years after being released from jail she had a daughter, who was unaware of her mum’s past as she grew up. When a reporter discovered Bell had a daughter, the courts granted anonymity to the child until she reached the age of eighteen. Two years after Thompson and Venables were granted secrecy for life, Bell applied to the court to be given the same lifelong anonymity, which was granted. June Richardson, whose son Martin was one of Bell’s victims and who had earlier attended the protest for James in Liverpool, called for conditions to be attached to the anonymity so that at the very least Bell could not make money from her crimes by selling her story.
It was hard to take everything in, especially as Robin had worked so hard on our case for us and it had got us nowhere. I remember going round to see Jimmy and sitting at his kitchen table. I was spouting venom until I was blue in the face. I could hardly get my words out I was so mad. I was letting off steam and Jimmy felt the same way as me.
‘What kind of bloody message are we sending out when we protect these bastards who have done such evil things?’
I vented at my brother. ‘What can stop other monsters like Myra Hindley and Peter Sutcliffe from using this ruling if they are freed to live in our midst without anyone being allowed to say who they are? How fucking dare they do this in my sons name.
‘Are they gonna protect all killers from now on? Are all the bad people gonna be given new names and secret lives when they do something wrong? Its just sick, really sick. It is totally warped and corrupt that the public will be the ones who are at risk from evil people because they don’t know who they are potentially living next door to.
‘They have not been punished yet but are gonna be set free anyway to live among normal people who have no idea who they are. They have been given everything to make life easy and privileged for them — everything short of a pat on the back and a gold star for savagely murdering an innocent baby. What next, a sodding knighthood?
‘I hate the world we live in, Jim, I hate it! These bastards in their ivory towers are saying that if you brutally kill a two-year-old baby, you’ll be looked after in every way. This has to be some kind of sick joke.
‘We are the only ones being punished for this terrible crime. These evil cretins have had better lives as a result of killing my baby than they ever would have if they had stayed at home.’
I sat with my head in my hands after letting rip and then I started to cry. I was crying in frustration at the injustice of the way my country was treating us. I felt violated. I felt James’s memory had been desecrated and spat on and that his name had been used and abused for the benefit of the boys who had murdered him. How dare they? The treatment we received at the hands of our legal and political system was almost as bad as losing James. I felt like a snarling animal in a cage that was being prodded with sticks by the upper classes. We didn’t matter because we were ordinary, working-class folk who just wanted to get on with our lives.
I couldn’t even say goodbye to my boy at his funeral because he had been so badly mutilated. The judges may have forgotten that. But I never can.
When my tears dried up, Jimmy, who had remained silent, said gently, ‘We are never going away, Ralph. We are going to be a pain in the arse of each and every one in this system that doesn’t seem to give a monkey’s about James. Don’t you worry about that, Ralph.’
As ever, my big brother was right.
14
Justice for James Denied
Without question, we all knew what was coming next. After serving our legal challenge on Lord Woolf and Jack Straw, we were told that a decision would be made within a few weeks. We didn’t have to wait long for the inevitable answer.
On Friday, 16 February 2001, three High Court judges sat to deliver their verdicts. I couldn’t face going to court myself because I felt sure that our challenge would be thrown out and I didn’t want to face any further humiliation. I’d had a bellyful of courts and judges with too much power. Jimmy, as ever, stepped up to the mark for me and travelled to London for the hearing with Robin. Jimmy recalls:
None of us wanted to be there really, because we had been shot down and ridiculed so many times over the years that it had become exhausting. We were all drained by the events of the last few months, and although we retained some hope that our legal fight would continue, we also felt pretty certain that we would be chased out of court unceremoniously.
When we arrived at the High Court in the Strand, we were met by Lyn Costello, her husband Roger and several other supporters from MAMAA, who had turned out to protest at the release of Thompson and Venables. It was a sight for sore eyes. Just like us, they had never given up the fight, and as we stayed chatting on the pavement, along that busy London street, taxi drivers and motorists drove by and honked their horns in support of our campaign. It was like there were two different worlds. One for the millions of normal people like me and Ralph and Lyn and Roger, and the other world that seemed to be inhabited by the few — a lofty elite who appeared to be out of touch with the rest of us.
As I stepped into court, I took a huge, deep breath as once more I steeled myself for rejection. And it wasn’t long before I got it. The proceedings were led by Lord Justice Rose, who was sitting with two fellow judges, Mr Justice Sullivan and Mr Justice Penry-Davey. It was not a long hearing as the three senior judges outright rejected our accusations that the Lord Chief Justice had set a minimum sentence for James’s killers that was so low in comparison to the enormity of the crime that it threatened to undermine confidence in the criminal justice system. They continued to say that Ralph did not have any legal standing to challenge the tariff, refusing him permission to apply for a judicial review.
Lord Justice Rose said, ‘Despite valiant efforts, it seems to me there is no arguable grounds for challenging the decisions of either the Lord Chief Justice or the Secretary of State. ’
And there it was. Another door slammed in our faces and the end of the road for us to try to keep James’s killers off the streets. I knew Ralph would not be surprised. We had been expecting the knockback, but I was still dreading telling him.
Jimmy phoned as soon as the hearing was over and told me the bad news.
‘The bastards have knocked us back, Ralph. They have refused permission to challenge the tariff. I’m sorry, kid,’ he told me.
‘Its nothing that we didn’t expect, Jim. But we had to do it anyway for James. Tell Robin thanks for everything he has tried to do. We will just keep fighting another way.’
I was devastated by the news but, as Jimmy rightly pointed out, not in the least bit surprised. We well and truly knew the score by now.
I really felt for Robin too. He had worked for almost two years to get this back to court, and in just a few short minutes, his attempts had been dashed. There was nothing more he could have done and I will always be grateful to him. When Lord Woolf had reduced the tariff back in October, he said that neither of the boys had shown any aggression or propensity for violence during their detention. We had tried hard to show in our legal challenge that there was evidence that Robert Thompson had been involved in at least two known incidents of violence in his secure unit, which had been reported in the press. The hearing denied that one of the reports, published in the Sunday People, was true. The Sunday People had gathered evidence of a vicious fight between Robert Thompson and another inmate called John Howells, but the High Court branded official papers that recorded the fight as f
akes. These were documents that had originally been leaked to the Sunday People, which said the fight took place at 3 p.m. According to officials, Howells was in court at that time and the fight did not appear in any official logs. However, the Sunday People said they were confident the documents were written by someone ‘with intimate knowledge of the running of that secure unit’ and that they had not been asked for money in return for the papers and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to carry out such an elaborate forgery.
The paper then reported that two separate taped conversations between Howells and his lawyer confirmed that Howells had told his lawyer of a punch-up with Thompson. There was also an incident with another boy who claimed that Thompson used an electrical flex to try to strangle him. Our QC had a statement from this boy who also complained that Thompson had made himself out to be the victim to the authorities when this was not the case. The barrister acting for the Government didn’t deny the attack had taken place but said the event had been thoroughly investigated and the boy had not only exaggerated a minor incident, but in fact he had seriously provoked Thompson.
So despite what we believed was damning evidence to show that Thompson clearly still showed signs of being violent, our case was dismissed. But I couldn’t help but believe that the courts didn’t want to accept our case because it would show that their grand scheme of rehabilitation and release had failed.
After the court hearing, Dee Warner, speaking on behalf of MAMAA, issued a public statement. She said, ‘The law in this country has been taken from the people. The law belongs to one man who is out of touch and that is Lord Woolf. He doesn’t live in the same streets as our children do.’
There was one journalist who did grow up on the same streets as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, and just two days after we lost our High Court challenge she wrote a brilliant article, published in the Sunday People, that I think is worth revisiting. So much has been written about the case, but this provided an unbiased, compelling argument to keep the killers locked up. Senior BBC presenter Winifred Robinson grew up on the estate where Venebles lived. From a deeply personal viewpoint, she argued convincingly that it was too early for the murderers to go free. Here is an abridged version of what she had to say:
The myth that has grown up since the trial is that these two boys came from the worst possible homes and that the cruelty and neglect of adults drove them to do what they did. I spent six months investigating their backgrounds for a BBC documentary. I found nothing in their home lives to explain what they did. Thompson had the worst start in life. His father left his mother for another woman and never bothered to see his children again. Afterwards his mother turned to drink and Robert, the fifth of seven boys, was left to fend for himself. The older children bullied the younger ones.
It was a violent household and one brother asked to be put into care when he was threatened with a knife. But friends of Ann Thompson who lived across the road told me she loved her boys. She even took Roberts shoes away to try to stop him roaming off at night. She had stopped drinking in the two years before James was murdered because she had met a new man and had another baby. And in the seven years since the trial, she has not deserted Robert. She is a regular visitor at the secure unit where he is held.
And anyway, it wasn’t Robert Thompson who was known for violence. Jon Venables had made a nuisance of himself at school, hurting other children. His parents, Neil and Susan, were separated but they both looked after the children. They decided to move their son to a school near his dad’s flat in Walton to give him a fresh start. It was there he met Thompson and started skipping school.
Venables lived with his mother on the Norris Green estate. I know it well. I grew up there. My sister lives there still and I visit her often. Like most council estates, it has problem tenants. But most people are decent. It is not and never has been a rough estate. When I called, the Venables’ house was deserted, but a neighbour told me Susan and Neil were good parents. Susan had suffered from depression; so have thousands of mothers whose children don’t hurt anyone. The neighbour didn’t like Jon Venables, though, remembering him as a boy who hit and poked other children on the sly. When he was late home his mother reported him missing to the police and both his parents scoured the streets for him, proof that they cared. After he was arrested they were at his side during the police interviews. He only confessed when his mother said she’d always love and care for him no matter what he had done.
At the time of the trial, I was the only journalist to meet Susan and Neil Venables face to face. They struck me as honest and I believe them when they told me that Jon had had more love and care than a lot of other children. They denied reports that he had been brainwashed by a horror movie his father had rented, Child’s Play 3, saying he had never seen it.
It is a combination of what we are born with and how we are raised that makes us what we are. I concluded that Thompson and Venables were both by nature warped. Together they probably did something far graver than either of them would have done alone. But who can say for sure?
Now they are on the brink of being freed, were told psychiatrists, merely by speaking to them, have sorted all their problems out. I find this hard to believe when psychiatrists are so plainly powerless to help in so many other cases. In fact, when it comes to the most heartless killers, like the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe or the Moors Murderer Ian Brady, many doctors write them off as personality-disordered people who cannot be treated, let alone cured.
If psychiatrists have all the answers now, they should out of basic decency share their knowledge with James’s parents. They have nightmares to this day as they struggle to comprehend what happened on that lonely railway line. Neither Venables nor Thompson told the truth. They blamed each other. Police had to rely on forensic evidence to prove they both took an active part. There were bloodstains on Venables’ coat. Thompson had kicked the baby so hard that he left the print of his boots on James’s face.
They said nothing about which one of them sexually abused James or what exactly was done. The toddler had been stripped from the waist down, his foreskin had been pulled back and torn, there was clotted blood in his anus from a tear. Sex offenders remain a danger for life. So which of these two killers will go on the sex offenders’ register and how can they be tracked or monitored with assumed names?
When he set the tariff at eight years, Lord Woolf said Thompson and Venables must be spared the corrosive influence of young offender institutions. He didn’t explain why these places are all right for everyone else except these two. It seems to be an argument for making special arrangements for them, rather than setting them free.
Mary Bell who was eleven when convicted in 1968 of the manslaughter, on the grounds of diminished responsibility, of two boys aged four and three, was detained for twelve years. She served her time in a secure home for boys, a women’s prison and finally an open prison. The Bulgers do not want their son’s killers to be treated with the cruelty they meted out to James. But they feel strongly that eight years is not long enough to reflect the evil of the crime or to act as a deterrent to others.
In ruling that James’s father Ralph has no legal right to question the decision of Lord Woolf, the most senior judge in England and Wales, the system has robbed victims of their voice — a very dangerous precedent.
How can any of us have faith in the courts to deliver justice when the voices of the innocent can be so cruelly ignored?
What Winifred Robinson said in her article summed up so many of my own thoughts, and she had first-hand knowledge of these boys and their families. She believed they bore the traits of psychopaths, that they were warped and that there was clear evidence of sexual abuse. As she rightly pointed out, you cannot cure a sex offender — they remain a danger for life — and so why was I being denied the right to question this tariff when it was clearly not safe for these boys to be back on the streets?
As I’ve already written, we have never found out why they acted so wickedly,
but my belief has always been that it was a sexually motivated crime and that after they had nastily molested James, they had to kill him.
And if the psychiatrists had so successfully sorted out these boys’ heads, then why were we being denied the right to know why they killed James? My own real worry was that it was because the doctors didn’t know. But surely it is wrong to even consider releasing dangerous criminals if you are not one hundred per cent certain they will not reoffend. Could those in the legal system or on the Parole Board put their hand on their heart, look me in the eye and tell me they were certain Thompson and Venables were no longer a threat? If they couldn’t, they would be taking a huge gamble with the life and safety of every child — and not one I would ever have been prepared to take.
As for the judges and politicians who crushed my bid to keep Thompson and Venables locked up, I made my feelings very clear. They all had my son’s blood on their hands.
But even though we had lost the ruling, I felt we had gained a moral victory. We had stood up to the might of the law and for what we believed was right. We had overwhelming support from so many people, ordinary decent folk who believed we were doing the right thing.
When Jimmy arrived home from London, we were asked to submit a victim impact statement to the Parole Board before they made their final decision on whether to release the boys. Could we persuade the members of the panel to see sense? Or had they already decided to toe the line and do what the judges had wanted all along? It was one last stab at trying to convince someone that these savages should not be roaming our streets again.
Robin helped us to prepare our victim statements in thorough detail. While it wasn’t easy, Jimmy and I both knew the importance of these reports because they were being prepared specifically to show the board the continuing effects that James’s murder had on us. We knew we were messed up but we had no grand names for it and didn’t always know how to describe ourselves. Robin organized for us to see Dr Mike Berry, a clinical psychologist, at his office in Liverpool. His report showed that I had been deeply psychologically damaged by the murder of my son. This was something I already knew, but for the first time it was given a name: post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a big awakening to me to know that the symptoms I suffered came from a very real medical condition when I had always put them down to prolonged grief. But even so, I didn’t see how identifying this was going to make it go away.