Even after all these years, the CCTV still that captured James Bulger’s last walk stays fixed in public memory. For anyone who does not know the case, it seems ordinary: two boys guiding a toddler through New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, England, on February 12, 1993.
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the older boys in the frame, looked to some people like siblings or relatives of the child. They were not. They had taken two year old James Bulger, and they were leading him away to kill him.
Only hours after that image was recorded, Venables and Thompson, both 10, had violently assaulted James Bulger and ended his life.
Between the moment the CCTV caught them and the moment James was killed on a railway embankment a few miles away, dozens of people saw the three of them moving through the Merseyside area.
Many later said the toddler appeared upset. Some said they watched the older boys strike or kick him. Yet most people did nothing, and even those who questioned the boys at points along the way allowed them to continue until the child was murdered.
Before anything else, Venables and Thompson had to take James from his mother in a crowded shopping centre. They had arrived at the New Strand that afternoon after skipping school.
Inside the mall, the two boys drifted from shop to shop, stealing small items and then throwing what they took down escalators, apparently for entertainment.
At some point, for reasons that remain uncertain even decades later, they decided to take a child. Investigators later could not pin down which boy first proposed it, and after arrest each blamed the other.
James Bulger was not the first child they targeted that day. Another child came close to being abducted first.
In the TJ Hughes department store, a woman noticed two boys trying to draw her children away. Within moments, her three year old daughter and two year old son were out of sight.
She found her daughter quickly, but her son was gone. When she demanded to know where he had gone, her daughter said, “Gone outside with the boy.”
The mother shouted for her son and ran out, where she saw Venables and Thompson trying to coax him along. When Venables noticed her, the boys told the child to return to his mother, and then they disappeared.
Chance spared that boy, and James Bulger became the child they took instead.
After that failed attempt, Venables and Thompson lingered near a snack kiosk, looking to steal sweets, when they spotted James near the entrance to a butcher’s shop. His mother, Denise, was briefly distracted, and they persuaded him to come with them. Venables held his hand.
Shoppers later recalled noticing the three of them moving through the centre. At times James ran slightly ahead, and the boys called him back with phrases like “Come on, baby.”
A security camera recorded them leaving the shopping centre at 3:42 PM.
By then Denise was frantic. She believed James had been close beside her while she ordered at the butcher counter, but when she looked down he was gone.
She contacted mall security and described her son and his clothes. At first, announcements were made over the public address system. By about 4:15 PM, with James still missing, the police were notified.
After they left the centre, James began crying for his mother. The older boys did not respond and kept walking toward a quieter area near a canal.
Near the canal, they dropped him, injuring his head, and left him on the ground crying. A woman passing by saw the child but did not intervene.
The boys then called him again, and he followed them. By this time his forehead was bruised and bleeding, so they pulled the hood of his anorak up to cover the injury.
Even so, other people still noticed the wound, and one person later recalled seeing a tear on his face. Still, nobody stepped in.
Venables and Thompson continued across Liverpool, passing shops, buildings, and car parks as they wandered.
They walked along one of the city’s busiest streets. Some witnesses later remembered James appearing calm or even smiling at points, while others recalled him resisting and crying for his mother. One person said they saw Thompson kick him in the ribs when he refused to go along.
And still, nothing changed. People watched and did not act.
Soon after, a woman saw Thompson hit and shake the toddler. Instead of reporting it, she shut her curtains and tried to block it out.
There was, briefly, a chance for James Bulger to be saved. As it got later, an elderly woman saw the child crying and noticed his injuries. She approached and asked what was happening. The boys told her, “We just found him at the bottom of the hill.”
She accepted their explanation and told them to take the toddler to Walton Lane Police Station nearby. She called after them again as they walked away, but they did not turn around.
She remained uneasy, yet another woman nearby said she had heard the child laughing earlier, and they assumed it was fine. That night, one of them saw reports that James was missing and called police, later expressing regret for not acting.
Not long after that, another woman tried to intervene and said she would take the child to the police station herself. But when she asked a nearby woman to watch her daughter, the woman refused, saying her dog disliked children, and the opportunity vanished again.
Venables, Thompson, and James went into two different shops, speaking with shopkeepers who were suspicious of the older boys but still let them leave.
After that, they ran into two older boys they knew. Those boys asked who the toddler was, and Venables said the child was Thompson’s brother and that they were taking him home.
Eventually they reached the railway line. For a moment they seemed to hesitate and turned away, as if reconsidering. Then they headed back toward the embankment, where the assault and murder took place sometime between 5:45 and 6:30 PM.
They had stolen blue paint at the shopping centre and threw it into James’s left eye. They then attacked him with kicks and blows, struck him with bricks and stones, and forced batteries into his mouth.
They later hit him in the head with an iron bar weighing about 22 pounds, causing multiple skull fractures. In total he suffered 42 injuries to his face, head, and body. Investigators later said the injuries were so extensive they could not determine which specific blow was fatal.
Afterward, the boys laid his body across the railway tracks to make it appear he had been killed by a train, then left before a train arrived and cut the body in two.
The following day, police searched the canal area because a witness had reported seeing James there earlier. Other searches were carried out elsewhere, without success.
With few leads, police initially considered James’s parents as possible suspects. But when officers reviewed the shopping centre CCTV, they were stunned to see that two children appeared to be leading him out.
When police released the CCTV images publicly, the case became national news and the search intensified. James’s father, Ralph, later said that seeing his son with two boys made him feel relief, believing that James would be safe because he was with other children.
Two days after James disappeared, the search ended when four children found his body on the railway line, about 200 yards from the nearest police station.
Items used in the attack were found scattered nearby, including the iron bar, stones, and bricks, along with the tin of blue paint.
Knowing the suspects were likely children and having some physical evidence, police checked local school absence lists for the day James vanished. Many children were flagged, and some parents even reported their own children.
An anonymous call ultimately pointed police to Venables and Thompson. The caller said both boys had missed school that Friday and added that Venables had been seen with blue paint on his jacket sleeve.
Police went to the boys’ homes and found blood on Thompson’s shoes and blue paint on Venables’ jacket.
Even with that, Venables and Thompson were not immediately treated as the main suspects. Investigators were focused on other children with known histories of violence, and many officers believed the boys in the blurry CCTV looked older, around 13 or 14, rather than 10.
In separate interviews, the two boys began blaming each other. Over several days of questioning, Venables eventually admitted involvement.
He said, “I did kill him,” and asked whether someone would tell James’s mother he was sorry.
Thompson was harder to question. Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts later said Thompson denied everything, but undermined himself by giving a detailed description of what James had been wearing. The press later called him “the boy who did not cry,” describing him as strangely unmoved.
Both boys were charged, and nine months later they went to trial. Outside court, crowds shouted for vengeance and screamed phrases like “Kill the bastards” and “A life for a life.”
Public outrage grew further as observers and reporters focused on Thompson’s detached behavior in court, especially compared to Venables’s emotional outbursts. Many assumed Thompson had led the crime, though psychiatrists and officials never settled on a single motive or a clear account of who initiated what.
Writer Blake Morrison, who covered the trial in As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood, argued that Venables also had a history of losing control and doing disturbing things, and that he could just as plausibly have been the instigator.
Court appointed psychiatrists said the boys understood right from wrong and were not diagnosed as sociopaths, but they still could not identify a definitive motive for the killing, something experts have struggled to do ever since.
Regardless of motive, Venables and Thompson were found guilty, becoming the youngest people convicted of that crime in Britain in roughly 250 years. They sat in a modified adult court dock so they could see over its edge as the verdict was delivered.
They were sentenced to be detained “at Her Majesty’s pleasure,” the standard indefinite sentence for juveniles convicted of murder or manslaughter, with a minimum term set by the court. In their case, the minimum was eight years, meaning review would come when they were 18.
After the minimum term, authorities would reassess risk and decide whether release was appropriate. Reports from custody said both boys behaved quietly and did not show further violent or unusual behavior while detained.
So in 2001, after eight years, they were released.
On release, they were given new identities and lifelong anonymity because of the intense public anger and the fear they would be tracked down and harmed.
There have been no widely reported successful revenge attacks. Denise Bulger reportedly located Thompson in 2004 but later said she was overwhelmed by hatred and did not confront him.
Thompson is believed to have rebuilt a quiet life, but Venables’s later history has drawn repeated attention.
In 2010, Venables was jailed for downloading images involving the sexual abuse of young boys. He later became eligible for parole in 2013, and Ralph Bulger told the parole board he could not forgive and believed Venables should not be released.
Ralph described a constant physical dread, saying it could feel like a heart attack, like a tight knot in his chest that had been there since the day his son died.
Venables was released anyway. In November 2017, he was imprisoned again after more child abuse images and a so called pedophile manual describing sexual abuse were found on his computer.
He received a sentence of three years and four months, far shorter than the time he had served for the murder of James Bulger decades earlier.
Venables made headlines again in September 2023 when he was granted a parole hearing scheduled for November. James Bulger’s family publicly responded once more, saying he should spend the rest of his life in prison for the crime committed in 1993.
