About book The Sleep Of Reason: James Bulger Case (1995)
FOUR CHILDREN, TWO CRIMESTwo crimes have hypnotised the British public in the last 20 years above all others, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in May 2007 (this made actual headlines only this past week) and the murder of James Bulger in February 1993. It’s not hard to see why. They represent parents’ worst nightmare : that if you turn your back for a moment your children will be stolen away and murdered. We’re horribly well acquainted with the idea that adults may well want to abduct children or teenagers, so that is why the James Bulger case is the more alarming of the two, and the hardest to think about.A TWO HOUR WALKThe facts are very easily stated. One day a mother and her friend went shopping in a big mall in Bootle, Merseyside. She took her almost three year old along. He was toddling around the shops with her. She was buying meat for the Sunday roast and when she looked round, he was gone. He was there one minute, playing at the shop entrance, and gone the next. That was the last she saw of him. Two ten year old boys, truanting from school, had led him away from the shop, away from his mother, and away from the shopping mall. Here’s the famous CCTV image, discovered by the police some hours later. (Jon Venables leads James Bulger, aged 2 and 11 months, away. His friend Bobby Thompson is just in front of the two.)The boys took the kid on a rambling two and a half mile walk through the town lasting a couple of hours. They were seen by dozens of people, most of whom thought the little kid was their brother. When anyone asked, because the kid was crying a lot, they would say they were taking him home. They dragged him on to a railway embankment, opposite Walton Police Station, and there they threw bricks at him, stamped on him and dropped a metal bar on his head. He died from multiple skull fractures. The CCTV images were given saturation coverage and in a few days a woman thought one of the kids looked like her mother’s friend’s son, and she was right. The cops made two arrests:They were put on trial, found guilty, and became Britain’s youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century (the youngest for 300 years).We say “they” but when they were interviewed by the police, each blamed the other. Wasn’t me, it was him. He threw all the bricks. As to why they took a little kid away from his mother like that, the answer was I don’t know. We just did.MURDER CAN BE NORMALThe reason why this case is compelling is that it’s like an experiment in the aetiology of evil. We have seen from the studies of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, for example in Christopher Browning’s brilliant Ordinary Men , how murder can be normalised, so guys can think that shooting a village full of men, women and children is an unpleasant but reasonable thing to do, given the circumstances. You know, a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. That was the pathology of a lot of German murderers during the Third Reich. It was group think. It was people abdicating responsibility upwards. Hitler, he knows what he’s doing. Everything is happening just like he said it would. We’re not psychopaths, we’re doing good work here, building a great future for our children.Well, I don’t say it’s easy to accept that human beings have such a slender grasp on basic morality as that, but it kinda looks that way. You pump up the propaganda enough and you can get results like Rwanda and Stalin’s purges and Democratic Kampuchea. INTENTIONNone of that was happening to Jon Venables and Bobby Thompson, the two truanting ten year olds. They were little kids, and they decided to murder a littler kid. Might it have been some kind of crazy adventure (let’s play kidnap) gone wrong? Doesn’t look like that – why not just abandon the kid next to the police station? The two year old didn’t know their names, he couldn’t have said who they were so they wouldn’t have got in trouble. So did they really mean to kill him? If so, where did that horror come from? That’s what we all wanted to know. Towards the end of this book the author tries to fathom intent. Surely this is the heart of the matter. When they lured James away what was their intention? Smith says :It does not seem to have been much of a plan, and in this context, it is hard to accept that they knew they were going to kill a child. One of the two boys must have first introduced the idea that led to taking James… “Let’s get a kid…let’s get a kid lost…”. It probably did not go much further than that to begin with. … 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. Smith then describes the escalating violence against James and it’s at this point that the question of intention arises. It took two hours to get from the shopping mall to the railway tracks where they killed James. When did the idea of actual murder appear in their minds? Perhaps it never did. Perhaps they just enjoyed the cruelty they appeared to be allowed to inflict and it just got worse. And then it was what have we done? Shove him on the railway track and when a train hits him they’ll think that’s what killed him.These kids came from the underclass. Their families were chaotic, were from the ranks of the lowliest Scouser uneducated unemployed petty crime alcoholic ducking and diving black economy class. They were failing badly at school, they weren’t the brightest of kids, they were dreadfully rowdy and they had a mean bullying streak, and Jon Venables, he was strange, sometimes he’d throw things around and lay on the floor in class and refuse to get up. Smith includes what is almost a stand-alone impassioned essay at the end of this book saying that this is where to look for the motive, that evil is no longer a functioning concept. It may be that every murder is symbolic and these two kids from such miserable backgrounds were given this tragic opportunity to direct their anguish and hatred of their own situations, their own powerlessness, onto the two year old, one of the few creatures even more powerless than themselves. James becomes a scapegoat, and the scapegoat was killed. In this reading, we are complex, soft machines, and if you put violence and abuse in at one end, you get violence and abuse coming out at the other end. He acknowledges that his argument is always – well, many kids are brought up in families as bad or worse than these two, and they never killed a two year old. He then mutters darkly about how much we never found out about the boys’ families, and how two such boys who became friends created a folie a deux.I think it’s valuable to meditate on the moments when the situation turns from something ordinary to something murderous – the months before the Rwandan massacres, the balmy years before 1939, the two hour walk of Jon, Bobby and James. There are three types of true crime books – absolute classics like Homicide by David Simon or The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer; there is complete trash like Body Dump by Fred Rosen; and there are the decent thorough accounts like Defending Gary by Mark Prothero. This book is in the top half of division two.AFTERTHOUGHTCoincidentally, I'm reading about the boyhoods of some other scousers who grew up a few miles away from Thompson and Venables. One came from a family background you could describe as difficult, another from a family he himself later described as alcoholic; but those boys turned into The Beatles.SONG OF THE DAYhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3yCcX...
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