Bryony Gordon
Why us feminists are to blame for everything
Laurence Lee still dreads the recurring nightmare that stalked him following the James Bulger trial.
The setting was always the same
– an evocation of the freight railway line in Walton, Liverpool, where the two-year-old’s badly beaten body was dumped by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, splattered with blue paint and covered in bricks. For years after the trial, as he fell asleep each night, Lee – the defence lawyer for Venables who, like his co-defendant, was just 10 years old – imagined himself on a speeding ghost train that tipped him on to the tracks and ran him over.
“They didn’t have PTSD in those days, but if they had I would have been a victim,” Lee recalls. “I had awful nightmares for ages afterwards. Even now I can’t listen to the details.”
The murder of James Bulger, which took place 25 years ago this month, united a nation in shock. The CCTV picture of James being led away from Liverpool’s Strand shopping centre, hand in hand with his abductor, Venables, endures as one of the most chilling images of modern times.
How two young boys could commit such a heinous act remains unexplained. The trial of the country’s youngest murderers for 250 years also continues to provoke a lingering sense of unease: anger that the killers did not spend longer behind bars, tempered with shame at the way the legal process developed into a witch hunt.
Lee appears in a new documentary on Monday night reflecting on the trial, and asking whether justice was ever properly served – either for the Bulger family, or the two 10-year-olds tried in an adult court. He describes them being treated like “circus animals” at Preston Crown Court, where they stood on a platform specially raised 18 inches off the floor, enabling them to peer over the dock.
After three weeks in court they were convicted of murder and received sentences with a minimum tariff of eight years. A subsequent campaign led by Denise Fergus, Bulger’s mother, persuaded the then home secretary, Michael Howard, to increase the tariff to 15 years, but this was overturned in the House of Lords. Later, the European courts ruled the trial had been unfair and deemed Howard’s intervention a breach of human rights.
In 2001 both boys were released, with new identities. While Thompson, who is widely believed to have been the ring leader, has stayed out of prison, Venables has been convicted twice more for possession of child pornography and is currently in jail.
“I don’t think Venables can cope with outdoor life,” Lee says. “I’m not showing sympathy towards him but the effect on his life after release is untold.”
It was through what he calls “the phonecall of fate” that he became drawn into the orbit of the case.
A then 39-year-old solicitor who mainly dealt in minor fraud and drugs cases, he was of course aware of Bulger’s disappearance – and the subsequent discovery of his body two days later – but because it was a Bootle murder, while he was based in a different part of Liverpool, he had dismissed any likelihood of being involved and had made promises to his family to that effect.
But on an otherwise routine day in court the following week, he received a phone call from a Sergeant Bond of Lower Lane police station asking whether he could represent a recently arrested boy. Lee enquired whether it was simply another of the young truants who were being rounded up by the police. The sergeant replied: “I think it may be a bit more than that.”
The cells, Lee recalls, had been emptied of other prisoners and he remembers encountering Venables sitting with his mother, Susan, on a wooden bench. “He was this tiny little boy and very polite. To look at him you wouldn’t think he was capable.”
When interviews commenced
‘To look at him, you wouldn’t think he was capable’
Venables was plied with Coca-cola and given pens and toys to play with. At first he denied even being near the Strand shopping centre, saying he had gone to collect the school gerbils he was looking after, and bumped into Thompson, who suggested they “go robbing” elsewhere.
“He was the most convincing little liar,” Lee recalls.
At the same time, Robert Thompson was being interviewed at Walton Hill police station. Phil Roberts, a detective sergeant in the serious crime squad, had arrested the youngster at home, where he discovered Thompson had even been to lay flowers at the scene.
Det Sgt Roberts had been on the case since the day after Bulger’s disappearance and had been in the police station reviewing CCTV footage when Bulger’s mother, Denise, was told he was dead. “We heard this awful scream from the bottom of her gut,” he says.
“It was chilling.”
Over a series of short interviews, Roberts recalls becoming increasingly convinced that the boys were the murderers. Whenever he knew Thompson was lying he spotted his legs – too short to touch the floor – rocking from side to side. Later in court he noticed Venables cowering in his presence.
“[Thompson] knew what he had done and to me he was the leader,” Roberts says. “I thought he was just pure evil.”
That night, as the police compared notes from the different interviews, the lies began to unravel. As Lee left the station to go home, he says officers checked under his car to see if a bomb had been planted there. It was a sign of the hatred he was to soon encounter.
The following day the boys confessed, and on Saturday evening were charged with murder. Venables – like Thompson – had parents who were separated (although in his case still lived together). At first, Lee says, he was supported by his mother, but “after the admission of guilt she really cracked and couldn’t take any more”. Instead, his father Neil, who according to Lee had struggled with his own mental health issues, was drafted in.
“It was very harrowing for both of them,” he says. “I felt more like a social worker than lawyer.”
On the Sunday, Lee recalls visiting Bootle police station to look at the post-mortem report, which he had to copy out by hand. “I just burst into tears,” he says. “It was horrendous.”
An angry crowd had gathered outside Bootle Youth Court for the first public hearing on Monday morning. When Lee arrived at 6.30am there were already people clambering over the bonnet of his car, and later “a baying mob chanting ‘Let them go.’” The prison van, which was pelted with bricks, was, according to Lee, actually a decoy. “Just as well,” he says. “If they had broken in and got them there would have been no need for a trial.”
Venables was sent on remand to Red Bank secure unit at Newton-le-willows for serious young offenders. Each week Lee would travel over to meet him. At first, they drank tea and chatted about football: Venables would pledge allegiance to a different team each week and even bought Lee an Everton tie for his birthday. On one occasion Tottenham Hotspur came to train at the remand home’s expansive grounds where Venables, Lee says, secured an autograph from then manager Ossie Ardiles.
As the months passed, his weight ballooned and he would brag to Lee that his “celebrity” status meant he would always be double marked when he played football. Other sinister facts also began to emerge – supposedly in primary school Venables would hang like a bat in the classroom cupboard.
“He was just a bizarre child, but that didn’t mean he would commit murder,” Lee says. “I don’t believe you can be inherently evil.”
According to Lee, he “completely clammed up” whenever the murder was discussed, and in order to obtain instructions for the trial, they had to ask questions while Venables was playing Tetris to distract him.
“He was petrified of ever getting out and what people would do to him,” he says. “He did not want to escape.” His parents continued to visit, but never at the same time as Lee. “They didn’t cut him off at all,” he says. “No matter what happened, he was still their son.”
The trial commenced on Nov 1 – the old courtroom, decorated with stone gargoyles and portraits of 19th-century judges, was packed to the rafters. The 64-year-old Lee says he has never experienced an atmosphere like it.
The attempted defence by his barrister, Brian Walsh QC, that Venables – known throughout as Child B – had played a minor part in the crime was dismissed by the jury. Lee still has his case notes from the trial and flicks through them as we speak. Under the date Nov 24 he has written: “5.15pm guilty”.
Det Sgt Roberts was in the court room as the guilty verdict was read out. Venables, he recalls, began to cry, but Thompson simply stared at him. “He was giving me one of those looks to say: ‘You put me here.’”
Even from the prosecution side, Roberts admits he felt uncomfortable with the manner in which the trial was conducted. “I just thought that there must be a different way to deal with this,” he says.
After the trial, judge Mr Justice Moorland permitted the identity of the killers to be revealed, insisting a public debate about the parenting and family background of Thompson and Venables was required to understand their “grave crimes”.
Lee remains critical of the decision today. “I was furious he was named – not for Venables, but his siblings and mum and dad,” he says. “He was from a nice family. His parents were really respectable people. She went to bits afterwards.”
Whatever the perceived failings of the criminal justice process, Lee insists it was right to attempt to rehabilitate the murderers, rather than condemn them to life behind bars. “To be incarcerated from 10 until 18 is the whole of your youth,” he says. “Coming out must have been horrendously difficult. They may be at liberty, but never free.”
Lee calls the psychiatric provision available at the time “a shambles” and believes this fear of ever getting released is perhaps why Venables continues to reoffend. As well as child pornography, he has also committed drug offences and breached the terms of his parole by returning to Merseyside, where it is claimed he attended an Everton match.
Around 18 months after their convictions, Lee and Venables parted ways for good. He hoped it would help his client move on. Why does he think Venables has been unable to escape his past, while Thompson seemingly has?
“You can never predict how a 10-year-old will blossom,” he says.
Still, he insists he has never felt sorry for Jon Venables. The only person he has ever felt compassion for is Denise: “My heart has always gone out to that woman.”
Lee lost his younger brother, Michael, to natural causes at the age of 26 and says he witnessed at first hand the devastating effect losing a child had on his mother.
“I’ve never spoken to Denise and I would like to think she realises I did my job,” he says. “Even war criminals are entitled to representation. Somebody had to do it.”
The Bulger Killers: Was Justice Done?
is on Channel 4 on Monday at 9pm
‘He was just a bizarre child, but that didn’t mean he would commit murder’