Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (12 page)

Jon was born on 13th August 1982 to Neil and Susan Venables. The couple already had a three-year-old son who’d had an operation for a cleft palate and who would later be diagnosed with learning difficulties.

The family lived in Liverpool, an area of high
unemployment
, so Neil often couldn’t find the work he was trained for, driving forklift trucks. Neil and Susan both had a history of serious depression and Susan’s own childhood had been very strict.

When Jon was one year old, his parents gave him a
sister. All five of them lived in a nice terraced house with a little front lawn. But Susan felt lonely and
isolated
at home on her own during the day and her eldest child’s constant screaming drove her mad.

The couple had an increasingly unhappy marriage and they divorced when Jon was three. At this stage Susan went back to her mother for three years, then she moved in with Neil. Later she got a council house of her own but she still spent much of her time at Neil’s home. He, in turn, lived with his father, before getting his own place and finally moving back to his father’s house after his father died. Unsurprisingly, all of these changes caused the three children stress.

Susan found it particularly hard to cope – and social service reports would later allude to ‘two traumatic incidents.’ Reporting on these, author Blake Morrison says that they seem to have been suicide attempts.

By now, Jon’s older brother was attending a school for children with special needs. His younger sister was diagnosed with the same learning disorder and, in time, she also would attend the same school.

At five, Jon went to an ordinary school – but he was teased by the other children who wrongly called his siblings retarded. He started to ask if he could attend a special school too.

By the time Jon was six his older brother was
becoming
frustrated by the number of things he couldn’t do and was having tantrums. Social workers arranged for him to go to foster carers for one weekend each month to give his mother a break. Susan kept a nice home and Jon was well fed and clothed, but she was very controlling towards him. She hit the children, especially at night when they didn’t want to go to sleep. Jon found it particularly hard to sleep and had lots of cuddly animals to ‘guard’ him in bed. He often felt tired, bit his nails and had bad dreams. But he did what he could to please his mother, reading quietly in a corner when at home or attending church where he joined the choir.

The Venables worked out a joint custody
arrangement
so that Susan had the children from Monday to Wednesday and Neil had them from Thursday to Sunday. When one parent couldn’t cope, they’d send the children to the other’s house.

By the time Jon was ten, he was so disturbed that his concerned teacher kept a journal of his behaviour. The child would rock back and forwards in his chair, bang his head against the wall and cut himself with scissors. He threw things at other schoolboys and stuck pencils in the neighbourhood children. Finally he tried to choke another boy with a ruler – and it took two adults to set the victim free.

Jon was suspended and in autumn 1991 was moved to a new Church Of England school where he met Robert Thompson. The boys very quickly became friends. Jon hadn’t played truant before – but Robert soon
convinced
him of how much fun it was and Jon’s
attendance
deteriorated significantly.

Jon continued to bully younger children and many of them feared him because of his quick temper. He also remained self-destructive, throwing himself about the playground and often disrupting the class. An experienced teacher noted that the child was clearly desperate for attention – after all, most of the attention at home was going to his siblings as they had special needs. The teachers could see that he wasn’t a bad boy, that his antics were a desperate plea for help.

But there were happier times, when the family settled down to watch videos together. And Neil rented
adult-certificated
videos to watch by himself after the children had gone to bed. Jon sometimes got up early and watched the video so it’s possible he saw at least part of an adult film that Neil rented called
Child’s
Play
3
. The story revolves around a toddler-sized doll called Chucky which is possessed by the soul of a serial killer. It’s basic shock-horror, the strapline being ‘Don’t fuck with the Chuck.’

Chucky eventually dies – with blue paint on his face – on the train ride in a funfair. To most children it would just have been a scary story, but to a boy as disturbed as Jon, it might have meant more…

On 12th February 1993, the two boys slipped out of school and eventually made their way to The Strand, a large indoor shopping centre. There, they stole a little pot of blue modelling paint and a packet of batteries.

Jon started to entice away a two-year-old boy but his mother called him back. He tried and failed to attract another little boy’s attention. Then they saw a third toddler, James Bulger, hurrying from a butcher’s shop whilst his mother queued inside.

Jon beckoned to James, who happily followed him and took his hand. The trio were filmed by the security cameras. James was a month short of his third
birthday
, a happy and trusting child.

Jon and Robert now took the toddler on a two and a half mile journey during which he understandably became increasingly tired and distressed, asking for his mum. But the ten-year-olds, probably egging each other on, felt no empathy for him. (In their own lives, they hadn’t been shown much empathy.) They let him fall on his head, leaving a bad graze, and they both swung him by his arms.

Numerous people saw the three of them but just assumed it was two brothers taking their younger
sibling home. One woman offered to take the toddler to the police station at which Robert looked ready to run away – but Jon told Robert to take James’s hand again and said that they would take him to the police by themselves.

At last Jon and Robert reached an isolated part of the railway. The exact sequence of events will probably never be known, but at one stage they stripped the
toddler
below the waist. Jon admitted to taking James’s shoes off but said that Robert had taken off his trousers and underpants. He said that the child was
unconscious
at this time.

Jon would later say that Robert touched the
toddler’s
private parts. It’s very likely that Robert had been sexually abused himself – and children who have been molested often feel compelled to repeat the abuse. What’s certain is that the toddler’s foreskin was retracted and his lower clothes had been removed.

This possible sexual exploration was preceded or
succeeded
by escalating violence. They threw the blue modelling paint and at least one of the batteries at the toddler, who continued to cry.

Jon and Robert had a childish view of how easy it
was to silence a Chucky-sized child. Robert said ‘Stay down, you divvie’ and both boys were clearly shocked when the toddler kept getting up.

They threw stones and bricks and hit him with a heavy metal bar, fracturing his skull in several places. They kicked him and stamped on him. Blake Morrison said that the violence probably lasted for five minutes. They also put some of the batteries in his mouth in what was possibly a naive attempt to bring him back to life. Leastways, his mouth was damaged and Jon later told his father that they’d put the batteries there.

The children placed the body over the freight line, presumably to make the injuries look like a train accident. Blood was coming out of the unconscious toddler’s mouth and they didn’t like to look at it, so they put bricks over his face. Shortly after this, James died. Cause of death was fractures to the skull. Later a freight train cut the little corpse in half, the driver thinking that he’d run over a large doll.

After killing the toddler, Robert and Jon went on to the local video shop. They were filthy, and Jon had some of the modelling paint on his jacket, but they acted normally. At ten years old they couldn’t fully comprehend the enormity of what they’d done. They’d been on the railway from approximately 5.30pm to 6.45pm and Susan had been looking for them for much of this time.

She saw the boys entering the video shop and she hurried after them, grabbed Jon by his hair and started hitting him. She grabbed Robert by the wrist – and
witnesses
said she had him on the floor – and dragged him out of the shop, at which point he started to cry so she let him go. Susan then dragged Jon to the nearby police station for a telling off. The policeman shouted at Jon and he cried some more.

Susan took Jon home and started hitting him again. He fell on the floor but she kept hitting him. His father shouted at him too. Then Susan sent him straight to bed saying that he couldn’t have his evening meal.

Meanwhile, Robert went home and told his mother that Jon’s mother had hit him in the face – so Ann went to the police station to complain about this alleged assault, saying that Susan was an alcoholic. The policeman couldn’t see any mark on Robert’s face so the two Thompsons went home. But it meant that, within hours of James’s death, both juvenile killers were briefly in the police station in a distressed and dishevelled state.

At this stage the toddler was only reported as
missing
and it was hoped that he’d be found alive. The police were searching the centre’s shops in case he’d fallen asleep in one of them and were also looking for a known paedophile who’d been in The Strand
shopping
centre that day. They had no reason to suspect two sad-faced, frightened little boys.

The footage taken in the Strand was soon shown on television and a friend of the Venables phoned in to say that it looked like Jon. The abductors were known to have stolen blue paint – and the phone caller said that Jon had had blue paint on his jacket. He was arrested at his mother’s house. When Susan saw the police she thought they’d come to give him an additional telling off for playing truant. The police already knew that Jon had truanted with Robert so Robert was arrested too.

The boys were taken to different police stations and interviewed separately. At first both boys denied being in the shopping centre but by Robert’s second interview he admitted to being there but said that Jon had taken the child.

For his first four interviews, Jon continued to deny going to The Strand. Then the police told him,
truthfully
, that Robert had admitted they were there. He became hysterical – and journalists who heard the tapes have said they never want to hear a child in such distress again.

Jon was visibly distressed during much of the twelve hours of interviews that spanned three days. Robert cried less often, but his body language showed that he was also very anxious. Robert had been teased for years for ‘acting girlish’ and for sucking his thumb, so he was now trying to act tough.

Having admitted taking the toddler (whom they called ‘the baby’) they said that they’d left him by the canal. But eventually Jon sobbed ‘I did kill him.’ Robert
continued to protest his innocence but his shoe print was found on James’s face so it’s clear that he kicked the child.

Jon said that it had been his idea to take the toddler – but that it had been Robert’s idea to kill him. Jon said that he had only thrown stones at James, not bricks like Robert had, but he admitted to stamping on him. Robert said that Jon had hit the child with a metal plate and had kicked him – and James’s blood was indeed found on Jon’s shoes.

At other times it was clear that the gravity of the
situation
hadn’t registered with the ten-year-olds. They were happy when offered a bar of chocolate or a Chinese takeaway and often asked if they could go home. Their lawyers said that they were more like eight-year-olds than ten-year-olds. Robert was more worried about his mother than about himself, wondering if she could have a glass of water and a headache powder and asking if she could see a nurse.

The police were convinced there was a sexual motive to the crime – and the fact that James had been stripped below the waist does tend to confirm this. Both children found it very difficult to talk about sex.

Yet they were clearly preoccupied with it. When questioned about ‘dirty marks’ (meaning marks made by mud), Robert said ‘Oh, you mean sex marks.’ He
said that Jon would lie and say that he, Robert, touched the toddler’s private parts.

Jon also showed increased anxiety when being asked about a possible sexual assault. He suddenly launched himself at his father and started punching him, screaming ‘You think I know, Dad, but I don’t.’

When news of the children’s arrest reached the locals, many of them gathered outside the various houses where they believed the culprits or their families were and threatened to hang them. Completely innocent children were implicated by rumour and had to flee their homes.

When the case went to court, men and women launched themselves at the van shouting ‘Hang the bastards.’ A man would later call a phone in radio
programme
with the suggestion that the judiciary should have hanged these disturbed ten-year-olds.

Commenting on the situation years later on a television programme, a spokesperson for Consequences (which helps victims’ families) said ‘this lynch mob mentality didn’t really care who they took their anger out on’ and added ‘Britain was disgraced in that time.’ It’s certainly ironic that a crowd, ostensibly horrified by a violent murder, were willing to carry out two violent murders. And other members of the public with the same mindset attacked women in the street after mistaking them for the mothers of the boys.