VERY DIFFERENT MONSTERS

Born into a feral family, Robert Thompson was seen as the dominant partner in James Bulger’s murder. Now he’s got a steady job and hasn’t been in trouble since . . . . . . Jon Venables was from a respectable background and said to be in Thompson’s thrall

The defendant in Court 11 of the Old Bailey spoke only to answer the charges against him: three of downloading child pornography and one of possessing a paedophile manual. ‘how do you plead?’ the judge asked him. ‘Guilty,’ he replied . ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’ ‘Guilty.’

We did not see his face. he was speaking via a video-link resembling a television, mounted above the well of the courtroom, but the screen was wrapped in brown parcel paper; all that was visible was the shadow of a head occasionally moving, very slightly, back and forth. Most commonly, it is victims of sexual abuse who give evidence in this way. Or, in exceptional circumstances, individuals like Jon Venables.

Jon Venables is a name that is intrinsically associated with that of Robert Thompson and grainy CCTV footage capturing frame by haunting frame the moment they abducted two-year-old James Bulger from a shopping mall on Merseyside in 1993. The toddler was found two days later on a railway embankment in Walton with horrific injuries inflicted with an iron bar and bricks; his body was left across a track, where it was cut in two by a train to make it look like an accident. Their crime was called an act of ‘unparalleled barbarity,’ a description as true today as it was then.

At the time, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were both ten. ‘Whose idea was it to kill him?’ Venables was asked in his police interview. ‘It was Robert’s idea,’ he told detectives.

Venables was more photogenic than his friend. he appeared the ‘sweeter’ of the two. he was led, and Robert Thompson was the leader, in other words, is how the narrative played out in the media; Thompson was the boy, after all, who ‘started throwing the bricks at him’ [James].

Yet, it was Venables, not Thompson, who came before the Old Bailey this week. It was Venables, not Thompson, who has now been caught accessing child pornography for the second time since his release on licence in 2001 from an eight-year jail sentence for the kidnap and torture of James Bulger. And it is Venables, not Thompson who, the court heard, poses ‘a high risk of serious harm to children.’

Among the disturbing material found on his laptop, hidden behind the headboard of his bed in his flat, was a document with detailed instructions on how to ‘ have sex with little girls . . . safely.’ The content is supposed to have been based on the experience of the author with his own two daughters.

Venables was jailed for 40 months for these offences.

The case has led to calls from the family of James Bulger for Venables to be stripped of his lifelong anonymity. he and Thompson — now both 35 — were given new identities when they were freed all those years ago, at a cost of millions of pounds to the taxpayer.

JAMES’s parents, who are no longer together, were in the Old Bailey for Venables’s latest court appearance. how unbearably painful it must have been for them to hear, albeit briefly, his voice and to learn that he continues to be a danger to society on the eve of the 25th anniversary of their son’s murder on Monday.

A documentary about the tragedy, The Bulger Killers: Was Justice Done?, shown on Channel 4 a few days ago, attracted criticism for appearing to have sympathy for Venables and Thompson.

should they simply have thrown away the key, as some suggested in the aftermath of the film, and condemned the boy murderers to life in prison at ten years of age?

While Venables has persistently re-offended, Thompson appears to have been successfully rehabilitated and led a trouble-free life.

‘I believe personally that we will be unlikely ever to hear from him again,’ the solicitor who represented Thompson (and is still in contact with him) told the programme.

either way, recent events have once again turned the spotlight on one of the darkest episodes in British criminal history — and the two boys who became the youngest children in the 20th century to be tried and convicted for murder. The law prevents us revealing any details that could lead to their identification. Their whereabouts are known only to the Probation service and the police.

Robert Thompson has had a number of jobs since his release; at one time he was working in a shop, then a public venue. Jon Venables was once employed as a nightclub bouncer; he was living in the West Midlands, a detail which emerged at the Old Bailey this week.

Their lives as adults may have turned out very differently, but they had a shared past in Liverpool; two boys, born ten days apart in August 1982; two boys who formed a friendship at school which began by stealing sweets and toys together, then throwing stones at old ladies’ windows, swearing at shopkeepers, and chillingly, stoning birds and torturing cats, a pattern of delinquency that eventually escalated to murder.

Officers who worked on the Bulger investigation could find no other plausible motive than Venables and Thompson were born wicked.

Doesn’t the fact, though, that Thompson, the so-called ring leader, has managed — against all expectations — to steer clear of controversy for all these years suggest another explanation? That the answer to the evil they committed may be partly explained by their backgrounds, both harrowing stories of abuse, alcoholism and violence . . .

JON VENABLES: ‘The more innocent one’

MANY commentators regarded Venables’s parents, neil and susan, a working-class couple from Liverpool, respectable compared with the Thompsons. But both had been treated for depression and were living apart at the time of the trial.

Jon’s behaviour deteriorated after his father neil, a one-time fork-lift driver, left the marital home in scarsdale Road, norris Green, when Jon, the middle of three children, was three years old. If he didn’t get his way with other children when he was a little older, he would get the family rottweiler to bark at them.

At school, he threw tantrums and exhibited increasingly disturbing behaviour. ‘he would sit back and hold his desk and rock backwards and forwards, moaning and making strange noises,’ said one of his teachers. On one occasion, he was found hanging upside down like a bat from his peg in the cloakroom.

his mother susan was not always around to look after him. A regular visitor to local pubs, she was in the habit of leaving her children unsupervised at home. On one occasion, police were called after the children (aged seven, five and three) had been left alone for three hours.

Jon spent a few days a week with his father, whom friends insisted was a devoted parent. But it emerged that he regularly rented violent or pornographic videos, although Mrs Venables denied that their son ever watched them.

The murder brought Jon’s parents back together. They became familiar faces at Vardy house, a small eightbed section of the Red Bank secure unit in st helens on Merseyside, where their son had been detained.

every detail of his detention was logged and forwarded to the home Office; one episode did escape scrutiny, however. shortly before his release, when he was 17, Venables was the subject of a BBC documentary which revealed he’d had sex with a female member of staff.

The woman accused of sexual

misconduct was suspended and never returned. Still, Venables’s release went ahead in 2001 and he was given a new name.

Despite the stringent restrictions surrounding his identity, details of his life in the outside world leaked into the public domain.

By 2002, Venables was living independently and had reportedly begun a relationship with a single mother, who had a five-yearold child.

(A common theme, it should be pointed out here, is that among the indecent material recently found on his laptop was adult women having sex with young boys ‘where the photographs’, according to the prosecution, ‘purport to show mothers having sex with their children.’)

By 2005, now aged 23, Venables had been involved with a string of younger girlfriends.

It was around this time that he was hired by a firm which provided door staff at clubs. Venables was arrested, in 2008, for affray following a brawl outside a nightspot. Police accepted he was acting in self- defence, but he was given a formal warning by the Probation Service, for breaching the good behaviour term of his licence. Three months later, he was cautioned for possession of cocaine.

When his probation officer visited his home in Cheshire, where Venables was living, he found him trying to remove and destroy the hard drive of his computer with a knife and a tin opener. On it were images of children as young as two being raped by adults.

So, in 2010 Venables found himself back behind bars, serving a two-year sentence, for downloading and distributing child pornography. Venables is thought to have remained close to his mother, who is said to have changed her name.

ROBERT THOMPSON: ‘The ring leader’

THOMPSON grew up in a bay windowed terrace in Walton Village; he was the fifth of seven brothers. His mother Ann married Robert Thompson Snr when she was 18. Who could possibly have imagined the reality of life behind the front door of their home?

This was laid bare in a case conference held at the NSPCC in Liverpool after James Bulger died.

Present were social workers, solicitors, nurses, youth project leaders, child protection officers, and education welfare officers, and the boys’ headteacher. The number of professionals in attendance — 16 in all for just one family — gives you some idea of what kind of household they were dealing with.

The file is horrifying and reads like a real-life version of Lord Of the Flies. The boys, it said, grew up in fear of each other and their aggressive, alcoholic father, who beat their mother and punished them with sticks and belts.

When he abandoned them for another woman in 1998, the brothers turned on each other. The eldest boy picked on a younger sibling, that sibling picked on the next in line, and so the violence percolated down to Robert.

One of the brothers asked to be taken into care after being tarred and feathered. He was found by a neighbour chained up and locked in the garden shed.

Yet Robert Thompson had shown early promise at school and was regarded as a bright pupil with potential to be a high achiever. But in the two years before the killing he was barely in class.

‘ What happened to James [Bulger] devastated the neighbourhood and brings back horrible memories,’ said a neighbour.

It was all too easy, under the circumstances, to portray Thompson as the prime mover in the events which unfolded in that shopping mall in Bootle a quarter of a century ago.

Unlike Venables, Thompson did not remain on Merseyside after the trial. He was placed at Barton Moss secure unit in Salford, Greater Manchester. Staff would recall how obnoxious he was in his early days. But, away from the horrors of home life, it was an environment in which he made progress.

He passed a string of GCSEs and showed real creativity in art and design. In a report, the head of education at Barton Moss said the unit was proud of Thompson.

His mother, who had descended into alcohol abuse following the break-up of her marriage, visited her son throughout his detention at Barton Moss.

ANN Thompson was effectively in hiding after the trial, fearing revenge attacks, and frequently changed her name and address. At one point she and her family were living in a hotel near Barton Moss, then a flat attached to a residential care home for the elderly.

Unlike Venables, little has been heard of her son since his release. He has, as stated, had a number of jobs including shop work.

Soon after he was freed he is thought to have had an intimate relationship with at least one woman. A few years ago, a story also emerged in a Sunday newspaper that Thompson had fathered a child by a woman who did not know of his past.

The ‘revelation’ was dismissed by ‘sources close to Thompson’ who told this newspaper he was, in fact, in a steady homosexual relationship. At the time, he was living at a secret location in the North-West.

‘I’ve never had justice for James,’ said his mother Denise Fergus, 50, ahead of the 25th anniversary of her son’s murder. ‘I never said: “Lock them up and throw away the key”. I thought doing a proper sentence in a proper prison would be justice. But that never happened . . . I did say that if they weren’t punished properly, then they would go on to re-offend.’

How chillingly ironic, though, that it is Jon Venables, not Robert Thompson, who is now back behind bars.