Mother of James Bulger claims killer’s offending was covered up
THE mother of James Bulger has accused the criminal justice system of “collusion and cover-up” after it emerged one of her son’s killers was not prosecuted for breaching a ban on accessing the internet.
Jon Venables might still have been behind bars had the Crown Prosecution Service decided to prosecute him more than two years ago for breaching the terms of a Sexual Offences Preven- tion Order (SOPO) preventing him from going online.
Instead he was arrested in July last year on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children, including a paedophile manual downloaded from the internet on how to “have sex with little girls … safely”.
Venables, now 35, was yesterday sentenced at the Old Bailey to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to downloading explicitly indecent images. It emerged in court that in June 2015, the CPS had decided not to prosecute Venables for breaching his SOPO. It is further understood the Probation Service did not regard the offence as serious enough to warrant an immediate return to prison.
Instead he was cautioned, and remained on licence for an earlier offence of being in possession of indecent images of children and posing in a chat room as a woman offering up her eightyear-old daughter for sexual abuse.
Two-year-old James was tortured and murdered by the then 10-year-old Venables and Robert Thompson, also 10, after they abducted him from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, on Feb 12 1993. The two killers were released on licence in 2001, aged 18.
Denise Fergus, James’s mother, said yesterday: “We heard in court Venables breached his parole terms in 2015 by gaining access to the internet.
“However, we also heard this was covered up in that authorities dealt with him by way of a police caution rather than him being brought back to court for a breach of his parole.”
Speaking through Chris Johnson, of the Justice for James Campaign, Mrs Fergus called for a public inquiry, describing the earlier decision not to prosecute as “fundamentally wrong and part of a pattern of collusion between the authorities and Venables”.
Police arrested Venables during a
routine search of his West Midlands home in July last year, during which officers found his laptop hidden behind the headboard of his bed.
An examination of the computer found a total of 1,170 indecent images of children, with a third of them of the most serious nature, involving adults, including women, raping and abusing children aged six to 13.
Police also found a manual downloaded from the “dark web”, which purported to offer advice to paedophiles on how to have sex with children as young as two without leaving physical marks.
Louis Mably QC, prosecuting, described the manual as “a disgusting and sickening document which falls far below recognised standards of morality”.
Following his arrest, Venables, who was employed at the time, told officers: “This is my own fault … I’ve let people down again. I’ve had stupid urges, inquisitive. I’m not going to be seeing this for a lot of years, it won’t be a slap on the wrist for me.”
Sentencing Venables, Mr Justice Edis said possession of the manual marked a significant worsening of his offending behaviour and suggested his state of mind was moving towards the abuse of children in “the real world”.
Criticising the sentence, Mrs Fergus said: “Three years is a farce because this is reoffending and there is a pattern to this behaviour. He will be leaving court believing he got away with it.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Venables received a caution by the police for breaching his SOPO in 2015, but there was no evidence at that time of an increased risk to the public that would have justified recall.
“Police arrested Venables very quickly after they discovered his most recent offences, and the conviction he received is as a direct result of stringent monitoring by the police and probation service. He has constantly been subject to stricter licence conditions and more scrutiny than most lifers would be at the same stage of their sentence.”