How James Bulger Was Killed By Jon Venables And Robert Thompson - By Daniel Rennie

The full story of how James Bulger killers Robert Thompson and Jon Venables led their two-year-
old victim past dozens of witnesses on a grim path to his chilling death.
More than 25 years later, the surveillance image above remains etched in the minds of the millions
familiar with the James Bulger case. To those who aren’t familiar, the scene looks harmless enough:
Two boys leading a toddler, one holding his hand as they make their way through a normal
shopping mall in Bootle, England.
The older boys (Jon Venables and Robert Thompson) seem like they could be the brothers of the
toddler (James Bulger), as some bystanders thought in the mall that day. But they weren’t. Instead,
they were the toddler’s abductors and, soon, his killers.
Within hours of that surveillance image being captured on the afternoon of Feb. 12, 1993, 10-year-
olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had tortured two-year-old James Bulger to death.
And in the time between when that image was captured and when James Bulger was killed in a
railway embankment a few miles away, the three boys had been seen walking around the area by
dozens of people.
Many of these witnesses later admitted that Bulger looked distressed. Some even saw the older boys
punch and kick the two-year-old. But most did nothing and those that stopped and questioned the
James Bulger killers soon enough let them go on their way to ultimately murder the toddler.
Before James Bulger’s Abduction
First, of course, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson had to snatch Bulger away from his mother in
the midst of a busy shopping mall. The boys ended up at the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle
(near Liverpool) on the afternoon of Feb. 12 after having skipped school that day.
At the mall, the soon-to-be James Bulger killers wandered from shop to shop, stealing anything they
could get their hands on, then toss their stolen booty down escalators — just for the fun of it.
At some point, for reasons that still remain unclear more than two decades later, Venables and
Thompson decided to steal someone’s child. Who suggested it is unclear; later, after they were
arrested, each blamed the other.
James Bulger was not the first child that the pair tried to abduct. In fact, that first child nearly
became the victim.
Inside a TJ Hughes department store, a woman noticed that two boys were trying to get her kids’
attention. Moments later, her three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son were missing.
The mother quickly found her daughter, but there was no sign of her son. Frantically she asked her
daughter where he was. “Gone outside with the boy,” she said.
The woman began calling for her son and ran outside, where she found Venables and Thompson
beckoning the boy to follow them. When Venables saw the mother, they told the boy to go back to
her and they vanished.
Mere luck had saved the boy — and sealed James Bulger’s terrible fate.
Leading James Bulger To His Death
Soon after the aborted abduction, Venables and Thompson were loitering around a snack kiosk
hoping to steal candy when they noticed James Bulger by the door of a nearby butcher’s shop. With
Bulger’s mother, Denise, momentarily distracted, they got the toddler to come with them. Venables
took him by the hand.
Several shoppers later remembered noticing the trio as they walked through the mall. Sometimes
Bulger ran ahead, leaving Venables and Thompson to beckon him back with calls of “Come on,
baby.”
They were caught by a surveillance camera leaving the mall at 3:42 p.m.

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By this time, Denise was panicking. She had thought that her son was by her side as she was placing
her order at the butcher shop. But when she looked down, he was gone.
She quickly found mall security personnel and described her son and what he was wearing. At first,
they announced the boy’s name over the mall’s loudspeakers. By 4:15 p.m., however, there was no
sign of James Bulger and he was reported missing to the local police station.
The Witnesses Who Did Nothing
Meanwhile, after Venables, Thompson, and Bulger had left the mall, the toddler began crying out
for his mother. The older boys ignored him and continued down to a secluded area near a canal.
At the canal, they dropped Bulger on his head and left him on the ground crying. A woman passing
by noticed Bulger but did nothing.
Venables and Thompson then called for Bulger to come. And still he followed. By now, however,
his forehead was bruised and cut, causing Venables and Thompson to pull the hood of the toddler’s
anorak over his head to try and hide the injury.
Nevertheless, additional passersby could still see the partially-covered forehead injury, and one
person even saw a tear on Bulger’s cheek. But no one did anything.
The older boys then meandered around Liverpool past shops, buildings, and parking lots. They
walked down one of Liverpool’s busiest streets. Some witnesses later remembered seeing Bulger
laughing while others remembered seeing him resisting and even screaming for his mother. One
person even saw Thompson kick Bulger in the ribs for resisting. Still, no one did anything.
Soon after, a woman saw Thompson punch Bulger and shake him. But she pulled her curtains and
blocked out the scene.
But one bystander provided a glimmer of hope — however fleeting — for James Bulger. With
evening approaching, an elderly woman saw Bulger crying, noticed his injuries, and approached the
trio to enquire what was wrong. But the two ten-year-olds said, “We just found him at the bottom of
the hill.”
Apparently satisfied with their explanation, the woman simply told the two boys to take the toddler
down to the nearby Walton Lane Police Station. She called out to them once more as they walked
away but they did not look back. She was concerned, but another woman standing nearby said she’d
heard James laughing moments ago and so both assumed nothing was wrong. Later that night, one
of the women saw the news that Bulger was missing. She phoned the police and expressed regret
for not doing something.
Not long after the elderly woman sent the boys on their way, Bulger was almost rescued yet again.
A woman concerned for the toddler told Venables and Thompson that she would take the child to
the police station herself. But when she asked another woman nearby to look after her daughter
while she did so, that woman refused because her dog did not like children. And so Bulger slipped
away from safety once again.
Venables, Thompson, and Bulger then walked into two different stores where they interacted with
both shopkeepers who, though suspicious of the older boys, let them go. Then Venables and
Thompson came upon two older boys that they knew. These boys asked who the toddler was and
Venables replied that he was Thompson’s brother and that they were taking him home.
Then they arrived at the railway. The boys hesitated, perhaps reconsidering what they were about to
do, and did briefly turn away from the embankment. But then Jon Venables and Robert Thompson
turned back toward the privacy of the deserted railway. The brutal torture and murder of James
Bulger occurred sometime between 5:45 and 6:30 p.m.
The Murder Of James Bulger
Venables and Thompson had brought blue paint stolen from the shopping mall and splashed it in
Bulger’s left eye. They then kicked him, pummelled him with bricks and stones, and stuffed
batteries into his mouth.

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Finally, the boys hit Bulger over the head with a 22-pound iron bar, which resulted in 10 skull
fractures. All in all, Bulger sustained 42 injuries to his face, head, and body. He was so badly
battered, authorities later concluded, that there was no way to tell which injury represented the fatal
blow.
Eventually, Venables and Thompson placed Bulger’s dead body (a forensic pathologist later
concluded that he was dead at this point) across the train tracks, in hopes of making the whole thing
look like an accident, and abandoned the scene before a train came along and severed the toddler in
two.
The next day, police searched the canal where the boys had been earlier in the afternoon because an
eyewitness had reported seeing Bulger there. Other searches were conducted elsewhere, all leading
to nothing.
With little to go on, Bulger’s parents were suspects initially. But when the police eventually saw the
CCTV footage from the shopping mall, they could not believe their eyes. Despite the fuzzy footage,
it was two small boys that could be seen leading James Bulger (identified from the description of
his clothing provided by his mother) to the exit.
Once those CCTV images were released to the media, the story went nationwide and the search for
Bulger intensified. When Bulger’s father, Ralph, saw that it was just two boys with whom his son
had left the mall, he was relieved: “I looked at Denise and smiled with relief. ‘He’s gonna be all
right, Denise,’ I said. ‘He’s with two young kids – he’s gonna be all right.’”
The search ended two days after the disappearance when four children discovered Bulger’s body on
the railway track — just 200 yards from the nearest police station.
Catching The James Bulger Killers
All of the instruments used in the attack were found strewn around the area — the iron bar, stones,
and bricks all covered in the boy’s blood. The stolen tin of blue paint was found nearby.
With some evidence in hand and the knowledge that the James Bulger killers were likely two
children, the police checked nearby schools’ absentee lists for the day of the disappearance. This
caused various children to be identified as potential killers, with some parents even reporting their
own kids.
But it was ultimately an anonymous phone call to the police that implicated Jon Venables and
Robert Thompson as the James Bulger killers. The caller told the police that Venables and
Thompson were both absent from school on Friday and that they themselves had seen blue paint on
the sleeve of Venables’ jacket.
The police then visited both children’s homes and discovered blood on Thompson’s shoes and blue
paint on Venables’ jacket. Both boys were then arrested as the James Bulger killers.
Despite this evidence, however, Venables and Thompson weren’t initially the authorities’ prime
suspects. Police were focused on other children who already had violent records, and they remained
convinced that the two boys from the fuzzy CCTV footage looked 13 or 14, not 10.
But during separate police interviews, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson turned on each other.
Over the course of interviews lasting several days, Venables eventually confessed.
“I did kill him,” Venables said. “What about his mum, will you tell her I’m sorry?”
Thompson, on the other hand, was not such an easy interview. “He totally denied everything,” said
Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts. “…[B]ut, in the end, he shot himself in the foot by giving me a
detailed account of what James Bulger was wearing.” Nevertheless, throughout the whole process,
Thompson remained chillingly unfazed, earning him the nickname “the boy who did not cry” from
the press.
Venables and Thompson were both charged as the (but because they were minors, their identities
were withheld from the public). Nine months later, the trial began. Outside the courthouse, people
called for the blood of the James Bulger killers. “Kill the bastards,” people yelled. “A life for a
life.”
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Popular disgust only intensified when witnesses and the media noted Thompson’s cold, seemingly
remorseless behavior at trial (compared with Venables’ hysterical outbursts). Thus it was widely
assumed that Thompson was the instigator — even though psychiatrists and authorities have never
been able to reach a conclusion on the boys’ motives.
But Blake Morrison, the author of As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood, a book on the
trial, points out that “Venables had a temper and had been known to lose control and had done some
pretty weird things…[and it was] just as likely that he was the instigator.”
Moreover, court-appointed psychiatrists determined that the two boys knew right from wrong and
weren’t sociopaths, but were nevertheless able to uncover any concrete motives — something no
professional has been able to confidently determine even in the years since.
Motive aside, both Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were convicted of murder, making them the
youngest to be convicted of that crime in Britain in 250 years. As the jury foreman read the verdict,
Venables and Thompson were sitting in an adult court dock that had been altered so that the boys
could see over it.
Venables and Thompson were then sentenced to serve at Her Majesty’s pleasure, as is standard
protocol for juvenile offenders convicted of murder or manslaughter. This indefinite sentence has
no maximum but does have a minimum to be determined on a case-by-case basis. In this case, it
was just eight years, at which time the boys would be 18.
After that point, the James Bulger killers were to be assessed and, if they weren’t deemed to be a
danger to society, released. By all accounts, Venables and Thompson showed no violent or aberrant
behavior in prison, but instead served their time quietly and without incident.
So, when the eight years were up in 2001, both boys were released.
Jon Venables And Robert Thompson Since Their Release
Upon their release, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were given new identities and granted legal
anonymity for life due to the public fury that surrounded their trial and the danger of citizens
hunting down the infamous James Bulger killers in order to take vengeance.
To date, no significant attempts at vengeance have been made. James Bulger’s mother, Denise, was
able to locate Ralph Thompson in 2004 but was “paralyzed with hatred” and could not confront
him.
Today, while Thompson is believed to be assimilating back into society and living a quiet life, the
same cannot be said of Venables.
In 2010, he was imprisoned for downloading images depicting various kinds of sexual abuse being
inflicted upon male toddlers. He became eligible for parole in 2013, at which time Ralph Bulger
told the parole board that he couldn’t forgive his son’s killers and that Venables should not be
released.
“Sometimes you feel like you’re having a heart attack,” he said at the time. “It’s just a big knot in
your chest and that’s been there since day one.”
Nevertheless, Venables was released. But in Nov. 2017, Venables was again imprisoned when more
child abuse images and a pedophile manual that provided instructions on having sex with kids were
discovered on his computer.
Jon Venables was sentenced to three years and four months in prison, not far from half the amount
of time he served for joining Robert Thompson in torturing and killing James Bulger a quarter
century before.
After this look at the murder of James Bulger and what’s become of James Bulger killers Robert
Thompson and Jon Venables, see some other haunting death photos taken just before the victim met
their end. Then, read up on the most horrific child murderers. Finally, discover the story of Mary
Bell, the 11-year-old who killed toddlers and got off light.