JAMES BULGER TRAGEDY, 25 YEARS ON

The mother of the murdered toddler recounts her horror in a new book.

Many of the events of Feb. 12, 1993 remain “buried deep” for Denise Fergus, but one memory in particular stands out. After she and her husband, Ralph Bulger, had a cup of tea with her brothers at the home of her mum that winter’s day, her future sister-inlaw Nicola Bailey asked Denise if she and her son, James, nearly 3, wanted to join her and her daughter, Vanessa, for grocery shopping at the nearby Strand Shopping Centre. Denise agreed and began to load her things into Bailey’s car. “What I will remember until my dying day is walking over to James’s [stroller], putting my hand around the right handle ready to collapse it to put it in Nicola’s boot, and thinking to myself, ‘No need to bother with that, Denise—we will only be nipping in and out, you can just hold his hand,’ ” Denise writes in her memoir, I Let Him Go.

It’s a decision that will forever haunt the English mum. Not bound to a pram, James Bulger wandered away from his mother’s side at the shops, lured by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. While Denise frantically searched for her son, the boys took James on a 4km walk through Liverpool, during which time they tortured and tormented him,

eventually bringing him to an isolated railway line where the toddler succumbed to their relentless abuse. Before the boys fled the scene, they arranged James’s body on the railway tracks in the hope a train would hit him and make his death appear accidental. Found guilty of murder, the boys were detained “at her Majesty’s pleasure,” with a minimum term of eight years.

In this exclusive extract from her new book, Denise, who divorced Ralph in 1995 and is now married to electrician Stuart Fergus, with whom she has two boys, describes the moment she realised her son was gone, her “biggest regret” of turning left instead of right as she began to look for him—and the horror that followed. The shopping centre was packed full of people getting food for the weekend and rushing about. James couldn’t believe his luck that for once he was in among the crowd. I held on to his hand but inevitably he would run a yard or so in front of me, always where I could see him. If he strayed too far I rushed ahead and brought him back to my side, holding on firmly to his hand. I remember saying to him, “Stop running away! You’re getting naughty now and I’m not happy.” And that seemed to calm him down a bit.

Lively as he was, James never liked to think he had upset you or made you cross, and he held on to my hand a bit more after that. In reality, having another toddler there didn’t help. Vanessa was a tiny bit older and the two of them together were giddy at being out and about.

It was clear that both children had reached their limit, so we decided to make a quick and final stop to buy some meat for tea at A.R. Tyms, the butchers we used a lot as the meat was great quality but not too expensive. There has been so much written about what happened next and so many opinions given, but I want to make one thing clear: I absolutely did not leave my baby outside the butchers on his own—i would never have done that. He was with me and holding my hand as we went inside. The only time I let go of his hand was to pay for the chops I had bought, and he was standing right beside me. I picked out the meat I wanted and took my bag from my shoulder, got my purse out, opened it to count the right money and, when I looked down, James was gone.

I paid at the counter nearest the door while Nicola was being served by another butcher in the corner, just in front of the chiller cabinet. As soon as I realised James wasn’t standing by my thigh, I spun round and shouted, “Where is James?” Nicola looked back and said, “I don’t know.”

I could see Vanessa, but not James—if they weren’t getting into mischief together, where was he? I shouted, “He was just right there!”

Nicola tried to calm me down by reassuring me it would be OK and he would be playing just outside the door. I looked immediately outside the shop doorway and all I could think was, “Which way, which way?” I had a 50:50 chance of picking the correct way and no clue at all, so I turned left frantically to start looking, another seemingly small decision that was to have the most earth-shattering consequences. I stepped outside the shop and couldn’t see anyone who looked like James. The crowds were beginning to thin out a bit at that time so it was easier to get a clearer view, but whichever way I looked I couldn’t see my little James.

I took another left turn and went towards the ground-floor security information centre, which felt like the most logical thing to do in the midst of

“Where is James? He was just right there!” —Denise Fergus

a nightmare that made absolutely no sense at all. Perhaps someone had taken him there, or he might even have been clever enough to get himself there once he realised he couldn’t see me. I kept telling myself that James was bright; he understood things and there was a chance that he might find someone friendly to help him. I remember losing sight of Nicola immediately—i just got caught up in a swell of deep fear that saw me running around frantically trying to find any trace of James, and she carried on manically searching, too.

God knows what they must have thought of me as I approached the information desk, sweating, panicked and screaming that my baby was lost. I tried to calm down a bit to describe what he was wearing, what he looked like, his name and address, and they immediately started putting it out over the tannoy [speaker system]. It was only five minutes after he’d gone, so I was desperate to keep looking for him before we lost too much time. I remember telling them to shut all the shopping centre doors in case he wandered out as surely it would be easier to find him if we could somehow keep him inside.

Obviously that wasn’t possible but I was clutching at straws. My only thought was finding James as quickly as possible. I lost count of the number of people I stopped to ask if they had seen James—it felt like thousands. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what shops I went into—the whole thing was a blur—but I remember just after the announcement went out over the tannoy, I was searching under clothing rails and an assistant came towards me and asked if she could help. I told her I was looking for my little boy and she looked at me with a big smile and said, “Oh yeah, I know. Don’t worry love. They have found him. He’s on the second floor in such-and-such a shop.”

My heart leapt—thank God he was safe. I raced up the escalator two steps at a time, ran into the shop and shouted, “Have you got my little boy? Have you got him?” The woman behind the till looked at me, “No, we haven’t, but I think they’ve got him two shops down.’

So I ran down there only to be told they didn’t have him either, and so began a wild goose chase of well-meaning people and a shopping centre that didn’t seem immediately to grasp the severity of what was happening.

The only accurate word to describe me at this point is hysterical. My eyes were darting around everywhere and soon they started throbbing from the strain of jerking my head

in every direction to see if I could spot his mop of hair or a flash of his jacket. I just kept screaming James’s name, running around in circles and almost falling over other shoppers in my desperation.

Everywhere I looked I prayed that I would see my boy’s face peeking out from under a fitting-room curtain or see him running towards me as he spotted me through the crowd. The scene was right there in my head: he would hurtle towards me with his arms wide open for a cuddle—he would be crying because he’d scared himself and he would want his mummy. I would scoop him up and my initial anger would fade because I would just be so relieved to have him back.

Finally, at 4.22 PM, 40 minutes after James went missing, PC Mandy Waller received a message over her patrol car radio that a child had gone missing. But that’s when the nightmare really began. As the police began their own search of the shopping centre, James was already on the journey towards his death, having been spirited out of the shopping centre 35 minutes earlier—just four minutes after he left my side and after the alarm had been raised.

As Mandy herself went on to say years later, “We were just looking for a missing

boy when in fact it was an abduction.”

“I prayed that I would see my boy’s face” —Denise Fergus