**In this life, there is no justice
Fifteen years ago, the murder of toddler James Bulger by two young boys horrified Britain and inflicted deep wounds on their home city of Liverpool. In this moving interview, James’s mother Denise Fergus tells Elizabeth Day that the passing years have not diminished the pain over the loss of her son and her anger towards his killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables
Elizabeth Day
The Observer
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Denise Fergus still cannot bring herself to walk near the Walton railway line. The track is a constant reminder, a prosaic memorial of all that haunts her. She goes out of her way to avoid it, to circumvent this unremarkable part of Liverpool, even if it adds miles to her journey and makes her late home.
James Bulger
It has been 15 years since the murder of her son James Bulger on this stretch of track; 15 years since he was beaten to death by two killers who were themselves children. Time might have passed but, if anything, Denise’s memories have come more sharply into focus with each quiet anniversary. There is nothing exceptional in her annual remembrance, nothing that would intimate the barbaric nature of her son’s death nor that would hint to a passing onlooker at the anger that burns deep inside. On the day James was killed, 12 February, she took a wreath of flowers to his grave. The rest she kept in her thoughts.
‘It was a difficult day,’ she says. ‘Getting through February is always hard. James would have been 18 this year. The real sadness is that he would have been so loved.’ Instead, his death at the age of two became a part of legal history. When found guilty of the killing in 1993, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were the youngest convicted murderers in Britain for almost three centuries.
Most of us can remember the Bulger case. We remember the toddler’s disappearance - that blurry-edged CCTV footage of James being led out of a shopping centre by two older boys, his hands trustingly outstretched, his small legs whirring to keep up. We recall the sudden horror of his death, the discovery of his body 48 hours later on Valentine’s Day and the shocking realisation that the prime suspects were only 10. We remember the mounting sense of horror that children could be capable of such cruelty, later confirmed by the trial judge’s statement that theirs was an act of ‘unparalleled evil’. We remember that James was just two years old, too young, far too young, to have been dragged under by life’s dark undertow.
But, 15 years on, some of the detail is likely to elude us. The macabre precision of the post-mortem examination, for instance, that showed James had been beaten, kicked and bruised by his tormentors, that he had been thrashed with an iron bar and pelted with stones.
James being led away to his torture and death
That he had been forced to walk more than two miles, bloodied and crying, to a desolate stretch of railway line. That his face had been splattered with blue paint and the hood of his anorak had been ripped off. That when he was dead, the two boys laid him across the tracks and buried his head under a mound of bricks. That they stripped him of his trousers, shoes and socks. That a train ran James over with such force his legs were sliced from his torso and flung several metres from his upper body. (more…)
