When Kids Kill: A Tale of Two Ten-Year Old Murderers.

On the 12th February 1993, these two boys led a two-year-old toddler named James Bulger away from his mum, who’d momentarily taken her eyes off him, and out of the shopping centre where they were. The boys had been skipping school that day, and before they kidnapped Bulger, had been thieving from shops and purposefully looking for a target.

The two boys walked around with him for a while before bringing him to a railway line near a disused station, where they began torturing him. They dropped him on his head, stamped on him, kicked him and thew bricks at him. Threw paint into his eye. Dropped a 10kg iron bar on him. They hit him so many times—42—that the pathologist couldn’t even determine which was the fatal blow. Then in a final act of cold-blooded depravity, lay his dead body on the railway line, in the hope that a train would run over his body and make it look like an accident. It did, and his body was severed in two.

What made this case even more disturbing is that they were under psychological scrutiny for years, but none were able to understand why they did what they did. They weren’t obviously disturbed and seemed (at the time) to be developing pretty normally whilst behind bars. They got an education and were allowed unlimited visits from the parents, and Thompson was said to have quite a high IQ. A lot of people pointed the finger straight to the mothers (apparently the fathers get an automatic pass), but that just doesn’t cut it. For one thing, it was Venables that had a track record of violence, despite coming from a pretty stable home. Thompson on the other hand didn’t, and he came from a shambolic home life, feral even. For another, the idea that coming from a bad home makes you a violent murderer at the tender age of ten without a shred of empathy, one who actively seeks targets, just doesn’t stack up. If even half of kids in bad homes ended up like that, we’d have a worldwide epidemic on our hands. Besides, having it hard should on average make you more empathetic, not less, because you can understand and sympathise with others’ plight. There’s a wiring issue in all of this, there has to be.

Adult revelations would seem to support that idea too. Following his release and into adulthood, Venables started drinking heavily and taking drugs, and a slew of teenage girlfriends when he was aged circa 23 lead people to suspect he was suffering a delayed adolescence. During this time, he also started downloading child pornography on the internet. He also was arrested for fighting outside a nightclub and later caught in possession of cocaine. Then in 2010, aged 26, he was arrested and charges of possession of child pornography. It was revealed that he had posed a single mother online, one who boasted about abusing an eight year old girl, in order to gain more child pornography. On the hard drive of his computer, police found videos of children as young as two being raped by adults, and penetrative sex of 7-8 year olds. He pleaded guilty in court and was sentenced to two years in prison. Years after his release in 2017, he was once again thrown back in prison for more child porn charges.

Robert Thompson's adulthood has been less turbulent, with no mention of any further criminal activity since his release in 2001. Reportedly, he is currently in a gay relationship with a man who knows his true identity.

Truly, it is chilling to think that some children possess such deep depravity and destructive impulses. Thompson and Venables after all are not alone; they belong to a small clique of child murderers, like the fix and six year old boys who beat and killed five year old Silje Redergård in 1994.