27 years on WHY THESE EVIL CHILD KIILLERS STILL HAUNT ME
He helped lock up the two baby-faced 10-year-olds who savagely killed toddler James Bulger in a crime that shocked the world
It’s 27 years since the little blue-eyed boy from Liverpool in the UK was snatched from a shopping centre and tortured, beaten and sexually assaulted, but the depraved crime still haunts prosecutor Sir Richard Henriques.
In his new book, From Crime To Crime: Harold Shipman To Operation Midland – 17 Cases That Shocked The World, the top British lawyer, 76, details why he has never recovered from his encounter with the real-life evil he experienced during the trial to convict Jon Venables and Robert Thompson of murder.
It was an act so evil committed by two children considered so depraved that they were jailed for life after being tried as adults and officially becoming Britain’s youngest murderers in 250 years – after turning 11 before they were convicted.
When Venables and Thompson committed their evil act, the world spent two days hoping and praying that
James, who would have celebrated his third birthday just a month later, would be found alive and well.
A picture taken from CCTV footage showing the toddler being taken by the hand by the boys and led out of the busy shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, became a defining image in a case that gripped the world.
SNATCHED
It later emerged that the two schoolboy killers snatched James while his mum was in a butcher’s shop and led the distressed toddler 4km away, passing 38 people, telling some who challenged them he was lost and they were taking him to the police station and others that he was their little brother.
The pair took James to a railway line, where they poured paint into his eyes, stoned him, clubbed him with bricks and dropped a heavy iron bar on him, before laying him across the railway line where his body was hit by a train, and cut in two – to make it look like an accident. James suffered 42 injuries.
“In my closing speech, I submitted that a child half the age of the defendants would know what they did was seriously wrong, and it was clear from their police interviews that each knew abducting and killing a child was seriously wrong,” Sir Richard says in his book.
“I submitted b itt d th that t a manslaughter charge would grossly understate the gravity of the crime. This was a murderous, prolonged attack on a small defenceless child. The jury retired and the same day came back with their verdict: guilty of murder.”
The judge called the murder an “act of unparalleled evil” and said that it was hard to comprehend how two normal boys of average intelligence could commit such a terrible crime and speculated that it may in part be blamed on exposure to violent films.
Venables and Thompson were released on licence in 2001 and granted lifelong anonymity and new identities. Thompson was never heard of again, but Venables, now 37, was put in jail for another two years in 2010 when he was found f to be in possession of child pornography.
Venables has also been the subject s of rumours he was to be relocated to Australia or New Zealand to protect his identity and allow a chance at a new life. The Australian and New Zealand governments have previously been forced to deny these claims after public outrage.
While the prosecutor acknowledges that both child killers were the unfortunate products of terrible home lives and negligence, he says these factors and their exposure to violent films did not mitigate their shocking crime.
‘The jury came back with their verdict: guilty of murder’