The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (45 page)

Once out of The Strand with James the boys quickly sought the seclusion of the neighbouring canal tow-path and it is not difficult to imagine their surprise, excitement even, at having ‘got away with it’, and their uncertainty over what to do next. We don’t know how serious was the intent when they talked about pushing James into the canal, and then there was a sudden escalation, the first act of violence. One of them – each says it was the other – picked James up and dropped him head-first onto the concrete path.

It might have ended here, when Bobby and Jon then ran off, but they went back, perhaps to have a look at James, and found him coming along towards them. They pulled the hood of his anorak up to cover the head injury and set off to … well, to where? It was not as if they went straight to the railway line or even followed a direct route. They dawdled and meandered and it is hardly in keeping with Bobby’s supposed cunning that they made their way to Walton, which both boys knew and where both, especially Bobby, were known; their final destination, the railway line, was just a few hundred yards from Bobby’s home.

Perhaps they were waiting for the cover of darkness before carrying out their attack on James or, perhaps, they didn’t really know what to do or where to go. A proper, artfully conceived plan would not have involved so much casual idling, messing around and wandering in and out of shops, nor offered so many opportunities to be caught in their encounters with adults. It might be stretching credulity to suggest that the boys wanted to be stopped and discovered but they certainly did not go to enormous lengths to avoid it. Of course, they lied when confronted, as children commonly do when caught out doing something wrong. Again, it is worth pointing out that Jon seems to have taken the lead in the significant exchanges.

James’s fate may still not have been decided when the boys stood at the end of the entry on Walton Lane – and James was seen alive for the last time. The police station is directly opposite, across the road, and the boys were observed apparently trying to push James into the road. Just possibly, they were trying to send him off to the police station. Equally, on this busy dual-carriageway, they may have been trying to get him run over. Either way, their lingering presence here and the act of pushing James off the pavement do not suggest they had already decided to drag the child on to the railway line and attack him.

Violence had been a part of James’s ordeal since his injury at the canal. Bobby had been seen to kick him. Jon admitted in interview that he had
punched James while they were on the reservoir and tore the hood from his anorak when they were walking down the entry between City Road and Walton Lane.

By degrees, James’s presence in their company and in their power had become a part – almost a ‘normal’ part – of Bobby and Jon’s experience that afternoon. They had taken a boy and not been caught, they had been violent and not been stopped. James could do nothing. He was powerless. The boys, by now, could do anything with him.

The attack on the railway line began with a casual flick of a tin of paint and escalated quickly into a very violent assault. We do not know exactly what happened or what part each boy played in the attack. My belief, which I will explain, is that Jon was responsible for the worst of the assault, though Bobby was no by-stander. I imagine a great deal of nervous and exciting tension between them. Laughter, fear, aggression, anger, viciousness. The attack, once it had begun, was unstoppable.

They probably did not need to egg each other on. The experience of the afternoon and their presence together at that moment was enough. One of the boys, quite possibly both, wanted – I would even say ‘needed’ – to sexually assault James and this became a feature of the attack. Finally, they moved the body across the tracks and covered it with bricks. It was an obvious, but feeble, attempt to disguise the killing.

Within the hour both boys were back in their mothers’ arms, Jon being verbally and physically attacked by Susan Venables for his disobedience at playing truant, Bobby sending Ann Thompson into a rage at Susan Venables by complaining that she had hit him. Both parents were oblivious to their sons’ recent murder of a two year old boy. Both boys were immediately back in their more familiar role as victims rather than victimisers.

*

Nothing will ever persuade me that Bobby and Jon were born to kill James Bulger. The idea that there are people who do evil simply because they are evil has its ancient root in bigotry and intolerance. It’s the kind of attitude that got ‘witches’ burnt and it remains a convenient, comforting means of explaining away and distancing ourselves from an event – such as the killing of a child by children.

By definition, children have been granted a special place in the history of evil and original sin. They have natural tendencies towards wickedness and need to be beaten into line. Don’t do as I do, do as I tell you. I suspect that an authoritarian, repressive, affectionless approach to parenting has been responsible for producing generations of damaged children and, in its darker corners, has allowed terrible excesses of physical and sexual abuse. In turn, damaged children grow up to be parents and inflict further damage.

It used to be thought that infants and children had short memories and would not remember as adults what had happened to them at the beginning of their lives. This may be true at a conscious level but it is also apparent that they have powerful feelings. Babies, in their innocence, have primary needs and responses. They want food, love and security to thrive. A baby that is not fed when it is hungry cries and becomes agitated. If the hunger continues to be unsatisfied it becomes anxious, enraged and humiliated because it is being neglected and is powerless to do anything about it. A parent, or carer, who shouts and hits the baby to try and stop the ‘fit’ will make the baby feel even more resentful. The baby will eventually be fed, and the traumatic feelings, which of course the baby can’t identify, will be suppressed and stored up in the unconscious because they are too painful to live with, and get in the way of the overwhelming need to love and be loved.

The potential traumas of babies and children are many and varied, from the unsatisfied needs of hunger to the extremes of physical and sexual assault. Each person will experience a trauma differently – but the worse the trauma the more extreme the later reaction to it is likely to be, up to and including killing yourself or somebody else.

This is not an exact science, but then neither is the theory of innate evil. What did the British media call Bobby and Jon? Devils, demons, monsters … it sounds like superstitious nonsense.

There have been few empirical attempts to prove a link between childhood trauma and subsequent violent offending and some inconclusive studies to establish the causes of delinquency. In Britain the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a so-called longitudinal examination of a group of urban, working-class boys has suggested that delinquents are more likely to emerge from large families where discipline is strict or inconsistent and the parents passive or rejecting. Intriguingly, the study also indicated that while the loss of a parent was important, it was only so in cases where there had been parental conflict. In other words, broken homes without parental conflict were not a significant predictor of delinquency and unbroken homes with parental conflict were more likely to lead to delinquency.

Current right-wing political opinion in Britain cites the ‘collapse of the nuclear family as a primary cause of the rise in juvenile crime, perhaps because it deflects attention from the more obvious problem of a widening gap between rich and poor and the growing number of people living in poverty.

Certainly, families are vulnerable to the stresses and strains of low income and poor housing. The bigger the family the more extreme the hardship. The harder it gets the more likely parents are to take it out on their children. Not all parents of low income families and not just poor parents of low income families will abuse their offspring. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the pressure of poverty in the family takes an extra toll on its children.

Liverpool’s past is characterised by extremes of poverty. I was struck by the symbolically brutal scene (at the beginning of Chapter 23) of a group of adults laughing at the spectacle of children with their hands bound, fighting in the mud to catch a cock between their teeth. I though of the ‘ragged street urchins’ of the Victorian age, neglected and unloved. I wondered if it was more than mere coincidence that three of the past cases of killings by children, documented at the beginning of the book, had occurred on Merseyside.

As a character in a recent American novel says, ‘It’s the cycle of shit’ (
Clockers
by Richard Price).

*

Imagine the terrible moment when Jon admits to his parents, ‘I did kill him’. Not ‘We did…’, not ‘Bobby did…’, but ‘I did…’. Susan and Neil must by now suspect what is coming. Jon’s burden, as is evident from his distress, is unbearable. The catharsis comes when Susan and Neil tell him, as they have been advised to do, that they will always love him. It is the trigger for the enormous emotional release of Jon’s guilt.

Is it possible that the potency of those words – the expression of ‘love’ – was not just a result of Jon’s need to hear them then, when the desire to confess had become overwhelming? Is it also possible that he had not heard them very often in the past and had doubted, or at least not always been sure of, his parents’ love?

We don’t know everything, or even very much, about Jon’s childhood, but what we do know indicates that it was characterised by instability.

His parents first separated when he was four and were later divorced. Jon went with his mother and his brother and sister to stay at his grandmother’s home. Then he moved with his mother into their own home for a short period, before they all moved back in with Neil. The parents separated again, Jon again going with his mother. Sometimes his father would come to stay, then he didn’t see them very much at all for a while. Then they all began living together again for part of the week. We know that Jon’s mother would sometimes send Jon to stay with his father when she couldn’t cope. We know from the NSPCC case conference that Neil looked after Jon then sent him back to Susan because he couldn’t cope.

Jon was ‘upset and difficult’ following the initial separation, and his increasingly disturbed behaviour is a clue to the feelings of confusion, insecurity and rejection aroused in him by this continuing upheaval and uncertainty. The violence and aggression he displayed at school and at home also suggest a build-up of frustration, resentment and anger.

We can only guess at the domestic conflict behind Neil and Susan’s volatile
relationship, but it must have been aggravated by Neil’s unemployment and the special needs, first, of brother Mark and later, of sister Michelle. Being a child witness to such conflict would be distressing enough. Being a victim of it, in the stress-provoked way that Susan seems to have shouted at Jon and smacked him, could only have reinforced the impotent, powerless frustration of Jon’s position.

Susan, who does not give much away, describes her upbringing as strict and disciplined. This almost certainly means the use of harsh physical punishment and, if we are looking for the root of her depressive illness, it may lie in her own childhood experience and feelings of inadequacy as an adult parent and partner.

Neil describes a happy, spoilt upbringing, despite the loss of his mother at an early age. He too has had problems with depression as an adult and there is a sense of his passive incapacity as a parent: his inability to cope with Jon, his belief that Jon being bullied is ‘just part of growing-up’. Even though he was living less than ten minutes’ drive from Susan there was a period – a critical period in Jon’s worsening behaviour – when he ‘wasn’t seeing much’ of his family.

There are three small indicators of Jon’s hostile attitude towards his father. Two occur during the police interviews after Jon’s confession, when Neil has stepped in to replace Susan. Neil evidently takes a sip of water from a cup on the table. ‘That’s mine’, says Jon. The interviewing officer tells Jon to let his dad take a drink from the cup: ‘I think he might just need one’. Later, when Jon is being questioned about the possibility of a sexual assault on James, he turns to hit his father. Jon says it’s because ‘me dad thinks I know and I don’t’. He says he wants his mum. The third and final incident was back at Jon’s secure unit after the first day of the trial when he shouted at his father.

Neil, with his own vulnerability and passivity, is perhaps unconsciously passing on those qualities to Jon: an inconsistent and fragile father figure who is adding to his son’s feelings of powerless frustration.

After instability, another theme that emerges from what we know of Jon’s background is a tragic tendency to denial and suppression of reality. The instinct, even before the killing, to make everything seem all right, or at least, not as bad as it appears, is so strong that it is tempting to speculate that there is something lurking in a dark corner that is too big and too difficult to confront.

In their meeting with the consultant psychiatrist, Dr Susan Bailey, Neil and Susan said they had dealt with their separation by telling Jon that they could not get on together but were still friends. They said that Neil had continued to see all the children. The implication was that everything was all right, when we know that it wasn’t.

At the time, and in her talk with Dr Bailey, Susan seems to have been keen to find an external explanation for Jon’s behavioural problems. Jon was
simply an overactive boy who was bullied. He did not show any antagonism towards his siblings or jealousy of their special needs attention.

We know that Jon was not placated by his parents’ explanation of their separation and that he was ‘upset and difficult’, began having temper tantrums and showed some anti-social behaviour in school. This was around the time that the police were called to Susan’s home because the children had been left alone for three hours.