Jon Venables denied parole 25 years after James Bulger murder
Jon Venables, one of James Bulger's killers, has been refused parole. His father Ralph said he felt "huge relief" at the decision.
Venables parole bid refused as Bulger family marks 25 years
Ralph Bulger said he could "breathe easier" after Jon Venables, 44, was refused parole following a three-day hearing, theguardian.com reports. Ralph, 60, and his ex-wife Denise Fergus, 59, were not permitted to attend the hearing, but described the outcome as a "huge relief".
James Bulger was killed one month short of his third birthday in February 1993. He was abducted from Liverpool's Strand shopping centre by two 10-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, tortured, and left on a railway track to be struck by a train. The CCTV image of the blond toddler walking hand in hand with one of his killers remains among the most disturbing footage ever broadcast in Britain.
The trial, held at Preston Crown Court in November 1993, drew enormous public attention. Thompson and Venables were convicted and sentenced to a minimum of eight years — the youngest murderers in British legal history at that time. Three days after James's body was discovered, then prime minister John Major addressed the case publicly, stating that "society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less."
Fergus, who did not attend the trial — she was heavily pregnant with her second son, Michael, and was warned the stress could cause a miscarriage — has spent the years since fighting the legal system she believes failed her and her son. She successfully campaigned for a sentence review; home secretary Michael Howard increased the minimum term to 15 years, though he was later overruled. Thompson and Venables were ultimately released from secure children's homes in 2001 after serving eight years.
Since their release, Fergus has continued to oppose their right to anonymity and to challenge the public funds spent on providing them with new identities.
Now 50, Fergus has written a memoir, I Let Him Go, which she describes as part personal account and part indictment of a legal system that she believes has repeatedly let her down. She says there is another motive for writing it: to restore her son's identity beyond the circumstances of his death.
"He was very bubbly," she told the Guardian. "He loved dancing to Michael Jackson videos and making people laugh. My happiest memory of him is him running towards me with his hair bouncing everywhere. He didn't walk anywhere. He'd run into your arms with a big smile on his face."
A large portrait of James hangs on the living room wall of the family home. Her three younger sons regard him as their elder brother and speak about him regularly. "James is never far from our minds," she said. "I brought the lads up knowing him, even though they never met him."
The book's title refers to the moment James went missing. Fergus had nearly always taken him out in a buggy, but on that day she let go of his hand for a moment in a butcher's shop to retrieve her purse. That brief lapse was long enough for Thompson and Venables to take him. For years afterward, she says, she returned obsessively to the same questions — why she had not brought the buggy, why she released his hand, why she turned in a particular direction when she went to look for him.
In the book she writes: "When you've lost a child, you go through stages. You blame yourself. You blame others. But at the end of it there are only two people to blame in this, and that's the two who took him. But it did take me a long time to realise that and get my head around it. It wasn't me that killed James."
Asked whether the title suggested she still blamed herself, Fergus replied: "Well, I do, because I was the last to see James alive." She paused, then quietly corrected herself: "One of the last."
She says she is haunted by the idea that James was calling for her in his final moments and she was not there. For many years, she experienced panic attacks whenever she tried to think about those last minutes.
Astonishingly, Fergus says she still does not know the full details of what happened that day. Her husband Stuart, the father of her two youngest children, goes through any press coverage with a thick black marker to remove details she does not wish to read.
Fergus grew up in Kirkby, Liverpool, the second youngest of 13 children. She left school at 16 without formal qualifications, worked in an ice-cream factory, and had always believed motherhood would be her central role in life. She met Ralph Bulger at 18 and they moved into a bedsit near their family homes. Before James was born, she suffered the loss of a full-term stillborn daughter, Kirsty — a bereavement she describes as devastating.
The parole decision in Venables's case brings no closure, she has said, but it means her son's killer remains behind bars for now.
Source: The Sun