THE SAVAGERY OF CHILDREN
Britain: A judge convicts two boys, both 11, of murdering a 2-year-old.
Their motive is a mystery.
One boy still sucks his thumb and enjoys Bugs Bunny videos. The other carries a teddy bear named Coach. Last week their trial for the murder of 2-year-old James Bulger reached its conclusion in a courtroom in northwest England. Thompson and the bear-toting Jon Venables, guilty of one of the most shocking crimes in British history. The boys, both 10 at the time, has abducted Bulger from a shopping center in a bleak neighbourhood on the outskirts of Liverpool last February. First they tried to push him into a nearby canal. Then they dragged him two and a half miles to a railway embankment near Thomson’s home. They pelted the child with stones and bricks. They kicked him in the head. They bludgeoned him with a 22-pound iron bar. Trying to disguise their crime as an accident, they finally laid his dead body on the rail where it was sliced in two by a passing train.
‘Little bastards’: The defendants – known during the trial only as “Boy A” and “Boy B” – declined to take the stand. Neither offered any public explanation of the crime. The damning evidence came from hours of taped police interviews, in which each child tried to incriminate the other. The jury bought no excuses. Neither this Justice Michael Morland, describing the deed as “unparalleled evil and barbarity”. He sentenced both Thompson and Venables to serve terms of indefinite detention “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”. That vague sentence is the only one British law allows for such young defendants. But both are likely to remain locked up into their adulthoods. As the sentence was read, James Bulger’s uncle cried out from the public gallery: “ How do you feel now, you little bastards?”
Outside the courtroom, most of Britain felt awful. In the days after the verdict, politicians, commentators and churchmen engaged in an inconclusive, round of public theorizing about what made the boys do it. One intriguing theory revolved around a violent American movie called “Child’s Play 3” – rented by Venables’s father less than a month before the crime. In the film, an evil, child-size doll named Chucky comes to life and wreaks havoc. The good guys ultimately mutilate Chucky and smash his head in after a chase on a fairground ghost train. Judge Morland said last week that “violent video films may in part be explanation” for the murder. But the police say there’s no evidence either child ever watched “Child’s” Play 3. “That didn’t keep Rupert Murdoch’s from launching a nationwide campaign to burn every copy in Britain. And it didn’t stop the rival Daily Mirror from gleefully noting that Murdoch’s satellite channel. Sky TV had recently shown the film twice. Others clung to more mundane notions – notably the one endorsed by police, that the defendants were simply “freaks of nature”. Either way, Thompson and Venables – both truants from broken homes in a rough neighbourhood – became the youngest Britons convicted of murder since 1748. the minimum age of criminal responsibility in England is 10, four to five years younger than in most European countries. But public sympathy was minimal: the crime was blood-curdling, the boys were destined for secure but comfortable juvenile units, and Thompson showed a disturbing lack of remorse. (Friends of Thompson say he is suffering from posttraumatic stress. Venables’s lawyer reported his client had broken down in his cell after the verdict and cried: “Will you please tell them I’m sorry!”) At the shopping center where the child was seized, local residents were unsure there was anything at all to be learned from the trial. “It’s a sign of the times”, said disgusted merchant Ted Webster, not far from the spot where Santa Claus was making his seasonal appearance. “Those kids were just looking for bloody murder”. Even they, perhaps, don’t really know why.
Daniel Pedersen with William Underhill in Liverpool
/Newsweek, December 6, 1993/