Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (13 page)

Aware of the level of hatred, the two children became increasingly anxious. They were sent to secure units, where they had nightmares and Jon soiled himself twice. They were afraid to play outside – and Robert apparently comfort ate – so they each gained over two stone, a third of their original weight. They were
terrified
of never having any friends, of going to prison. Robert continued to say that Jon was guilty of all the violence – and Jon was too upset to talk about it.

Their childishness showed through their attempts to be grown up. Jon said that he’d like to be a Sylvester Stallone type figure such as Rocky – then added that he’d also like to be Sonic The Hedgehog. Robert, who had sometimes spent all day in the local video shop watching cartoons, admitted that he liked to collect trolls.

Nine months after the murder, Jon and Robert (now aged eleven) were tried at Preston in an adult court. Jon’s lawyer later admitted to being petrified when entering the packed courtroom and said it must have been terrifying for the two boys.

Jon cried frequently and often looked back at his parents, but they kept their heads bowed. Robert looked defiant – but he would later tell his mother that he felt like crying but didn’t want everyone to think
that he was a baby. The press misinterpreted this and described him as diabolical, a fiend. Ann was occasionally in court, heavily tranquillised.

Numerous witnesses testified to seeing the two boys with the increasingly tired and occasionally sobbing toddler. Another witness had seen James laughing. It doesn’t seem that the original plan was to kill him as they had taken him into the local pet shop and had
spoken
to the assistant there. They had also spoken to two other boys they knew, saying that James was Jon’s little brother and that they were taking him home.

Forensic evidence was introduced that proved James’s blood was on Jon’s shoes and that Robert’s shoeprint appeared on the toddler’s face, suggesting a glancing blow rather than a deep, bruising one. The toddler’s lower lip was badly damaged, probably by the batteries. Death had been due to heavy blows to the skull.

There was little doubt that Robert and Jon were the killers so the trial centred around whether they knew it was wrong to take a child from its his mother, injure him and leave him on the railway line. Psychiatrists testified that the boys were of average intelligence and were fit to plead.

The children’s interviews were played over the speakers, their voices high and unbroken. Robert looked upset when he heard Jon say that he, Robert, was girlish. (Robert, who spent much of his time in the secure unit knitting gloves for his baby brother, was happiest
spending
time in the playground with the girls.)

Attending the trial, author Blake Morrison noted
that the court was only interested in the children’s intelligence, not in the mental disturbance both obviously had.

Robert had put a flower on James’s tribute site – and one court observer later said that this ‘wasn’t the
normal
action of a ten-year-old.’ But Robert wasn’t a
normal
ten-year-old. He’d been neglected, kicked, punched, tied up, tortured and possibly sexually molested. How much normality could the rational world expect?

After six hours of deliberations the jury came back with unanimous Guilty verdicts for both boys. Jon cried and Robert looked confused. Moments later, out of sight of the many spectators, he would
hyperventilate
. The judge told them that in his judgement their conduct was ‘both cunning and very wicked’ and that they would be ‘securely detained for very, very many years.’

After the eleven-year-olds had been taken from the court, the judge said that violent videos might have played a part. This came as a surprise to those who’d noted the background of violent parenting, violent
siblings
and violent school bullies. He wished everyone a peaceful Christmas and thanked Mr and Mrs Venables and Mrs Thompson for trying to get Jon and Robert to tell the truth.

In search of a scapegoat, the tabloids picked up on the judge’s comment about violent videos and had a field
day with stories of evil horror films and ‘born bad’ boys.

But other authors – each of whom wrote a book about the case – brought more understanding to the discussion. Mark Thomas quoted a report on reducing delinquency which said ‘poor parental supervision, harsh, neglectful or erratic discipline, parental discord and having a parent with a criminal record’ were the childhood factors ‘consistently and significantly linked to later teenage offending.’

David Jackson wrote that the ‘suggestion that the killing was a freak happening… erodes our personal responsibility for understanding and challenging the individual and social forces that have produced such a numbing event.’

David James Smith was equally aware that children of ten don’t think in the same way as adults do,
offering
a Rousseau quote which tells that ‘childhood is the sleep of reason.’ He also spoke honestly in a later
Despatches
television programme about how unhelpful it was to demonise these damaged boys. And Blake Morrison wrote that ‘between the ages of eight and fourteen, most of us do something terrible, performed in a childish, first-time daze.’

Other journalists came forward with their own
stories
of destructive acts they’d carried out in childhood. One could remember prodding a distressed toddler repeatedly into a lake, egged on by his equally bored friends.

Both boys came from the family backgrounds that make a child most likely to become extremely violent.
That is, they had abusive childhoods, had fathers who were absent in Robert’s case and passive in Jon’s case. Both had dominant mothers – and Jon’s mother was also over-protective. Both had seen violence in the home.

Both experienced a fear of abandonment – Jon in particular was shown to be terrified of his mother’s rejection. Both lived in environments that were
emotionally
chaotic. The final factor is that the mother may come to fear her children – and Ann Thompson had been hit by one of her older sons.

It’s likely that many factors came together on the day that the boys lured little James away from his mother. It seems that the original idea was Jon’s – he’d been so excited at school the day before that his teachers couldn’t get any work out of him. The theft of the batteries and the blue paint (the latter appearing in the Chucky film
Child’s
Play
) suggest he may have had some vague plan – based on childish logic – to have access to his very own Chucky-sized living doll.

Robert was initially less interested in keeping the toddler, and was ready to hand him over to a concerned passerby. But Jon told him to take the child’s hand, and he did. There was clearly a strong folie a deux element to the crime, for Jon admitted later that he did things with Robert that he was too scared to do on his own.

Having taken the toddler to an isolated location, it’s likely that Robert – who appears to have been sexually abused – examined him intimately then felt deeply ashamed of this act.

Author David Jackson would later speculate that the boys, forced to grow up too quickly in a violent macho culture, were ‘splitting off their fearful, baby parts and projecting them onto baby James.’ It’s likely that both boys were jealous of their siblings; Jon’s brother and sister were given extra attention because of their developmental problems. And Robert saw Ann, now sober, caring for her new baby in a way that he couldn’t remember being cared for, given that she’d been a battered wife then a single mother with a drink problem during his formative years.

The public continued to hate the boys, rather than simply hating their murderous actions. Perhaps reacting to this, the judiciary kept increasing their sentence. The trial judge had originally given both boys an eight year sentence but the then Lord Chief Justice increased this to ten years. Later still, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, increased this to fifteen years but this last increase was quashed by the English judiciary.

For the next eight years, Jon and Robert remained in separate secure units for juvenile offenders. After a year in such a facility, Robert was given a few hours of freedom by being taken on a long supervised walk. As he moved into his teens the staff would sometimes take him into town to buy clothes when he’d outgrown his old ones. These outings are formally known as ‘mobility’ and are a way of preparing the child to
re-enter
the outside world.

Jon was also taken on supervised outings, sometimes accompanied by his dad. There’s more information available about Robert’s post-trial years because the
Despatches
team, who produced an investigative report on the boys for Channel Four, were able to talk to a boy who had spent time in the same unit as Robert but they apparently couldn’t find a youth who’d spent time in the unit that housed Jon.

The boys both had regular sessions with psychiatrists to help them come to terms with what they’d done. Though Jon had admitted to the police that he’d killed James, it was another two years before he was able to admit his guilt again. Robert apparently remained in denial for much longer; it was five years before he took responsibility for his earlier actions and showed remorse. Even then, he was only able to talk about the
crime when his psychiatrist promised not to write most of it down.

The Lord Chief Justice said that the boys had made remarkable progress – and a visitor to the secure unit said that Robert was now an exceptional young man, very thoughtful and caring. He was also an academic success, having gained five GCSE’s and gone on to take A Levels. Jon had also made exceptional progress. His earlier writing had been semi-literate, but he’d now made great strides in English and Maths. A
psychiatrist
specialising in children said that ‘for the majority who are amenable to treatment, the outcome is good.’

In December 1999, when the boys were seventeen, the European Court of Human Rights decreed that they’d been denied a fair trial, that – as eleven-year-olds – they shouldn’t have been tried in an adult court with a jury. This wasn’t altogether new thinking: at the time of the trial, many European newspapers had expressed shock that young boys were being tried in such a public way.

The European Court now said that, due to their exceptional youth and distress, the children hadn’t been in a position to instruct their lawyers and mount a fair defence.

There was also an awareness within the juvenile justice system that if the boys weren’t released at age
eighteen they would have to be transferred to adult prisons. There they’d return to a life of intimidation and violence, the life they’d known before.

Two disturbed little boys had apparently been
rehabilitated
to become caring teenagers. If they were imprisoned with hardened adults, they’d very likely become hardened again – and would be a danger to the public when eventually released.

Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, said that ‘because of their behaviour they are entitled to a reduction in the tariff’ and that, subject to a parole board decision, they would be freed early in 2001. They were
subsequently
released.

Sadly, large sectors of the British public remain
antagonistic
to these boys. The tabloid press has sometimes fuelled this, printing ‘new facts’ about the death that suggested the brutal crime was even more brutal. The
Despatches
team investigated these allegations and found them to be lies. An interviewee on the television programme
The
James
Bulger
Story
explained that ‘in tabloid press terms there is no such thing as rehabilitation,’ and that one bad act made you bad forever in tabloid land.

But occasionally there is a glimmer of understanding, an awareness that you can feel horror and disgust at little James’s death without having to forever hate the ten-year-olds that murdered him. A neighbour,
speaking on the
Despatches
programme, remembered a Robert who was far from the monster the media
portrayed
him as. She said that she’d like to see him again and added simply ‘I’d talk to Robert, I wouldn’t tell him to go away, cause there’s a reason for everything, isn’t there?’

And David Smith wrote in his introduction to
The
Sleep
Of
Reason
that ‘Many people… think kids pretend they’ve been beaten to get off the hook. A good slap never did them any harm. Anyone who has seen or experienced the effects of this kind of abuse, or spent time observing and listening to young offenders, will not be so dismissive.’

Gitta Sereny wrote honestly of the case saying that ‘Unhappiness in children is never innate, it is created by the adults they ‘belong to’: there are adults in all classes of society who are immature, confused,
inadequate
or sick, and, under given and unfortunate
circumstances
, their children will reflect, reproduce and often pay for the miseries of the adults they need and love.’

Rod was born on 28th March 1980 to seventeen-
year-old
Sondra and twenty-year-old Rick Ferrell in Kentucky. Within months the marriage had crumbled and they got divorced. Sondra found it difficult to fit into
normal
society as her Pentecostal fundamentalist parents hadn’t allowed her to go on dates, visit the cinema or attend dances when she was growing up. She
admitted
that her childhood had been an emotionally and mentally abusive hell so she wanted little Rod to see her as a friend rather than a cold controlling mum.

But despite his mother’s good intentions, Rod’s first few years were very uncertain ones. Sondra had felt alienated from the other children at school and had left as soon as possible. Still just a teenager herself, she was ill-equipped to support her infant son. Sometimes she’d find work in a burger joint for a few weeks, leaving Rod with her parents. On other occasions she worked as a dancer or lived off benefits.

The teenage mother began to smoke cannabis and drink alcohol in order to relax. She started dating. She continued to have difficulties with her parents and her father told her that she wasn’t fit to be a mum.

Rick, Rod’s dad, initially visited his son but Sondra kept interrupting their games and made the visits unpleasant. As a result, he saw less and less of the little boy. On the upside, Rod and his mum went to the
cinema
together and shared pizzas and had some fun
times. But her boyfriends and various jobs limited the amount of time she spent with her son.