How James Bulger's mother is STILL battling to keep her son's killer locked up and why Jon Venables refuses to face the parole hearing that could see him freed any day, by DAVID JAMES SMITH

Published: 01:00, 20 July 2026 | Updated: 01:22, 20 July 2026 The two boys who abducted, tortured and murdered James Bulger a month before his third birthday in February 1993 will both turn 44 next month. It was a crime that sent shockwaves through society and triggered something close to moral panic as the country engaged in a prolonged bout of finger-pointing and soul-searching over the possible role of ‘video nasties’ in the formation of the killers’ psyches. And when the boys – aged ten at the time – made their initial court appearances, up to 500 demonstrators gathered outside the magistrates’ court where they were held. But in the 34 years since they took their victim on a meandering, two-mile journey through north Liverpool, before kicking and attacking him with stones, bricks and a metal bar, their paths have dramatically diverged. One of them, Robert Thompson, is living under an assumed name in an undisclosed location having never reoffended since being freed under licence, at the age of 18, in 2001. Jon Venables, on the other hand, will wake up on the morning of his birthday in a prison cell having been put back behind bars for the second time in 2017 for possession of child sexual abuse images. For more than a year now, Venables has been entitled to a parole hearing for which a date has still to be scheduled. The Parole Board does not give reasons for delays, but according to representatives of James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, she has been given the right to attend the hearing when it does finally take place. As someone who has been covering the case for more than three decades, it is this development that I believe explains why the hearing is yet to be held. Venables is, quite simply, unwilling to give evidence in front of the mother of his victim. James Bulger, the two-year-old toddler who was abducted, tortured, and murdered in Merseyside on February 12, 1993 After all, he refused to speak at his last parole hearing in 2023 because a lawyer for James’s father Ralph was permitted to listen in to the hearing remotely and would have heard every word Venables said. His non-participation may well have helped persuade the Parole Board’s panellists to decide that he was not safe to be released. His continued imprisonment suits Denise Fergus. The last thing she wants is for Venables to be given his liberty, even if it would involve intense monitoring and highly restrictive conditions. To this day, some people cannot bear to contemplate the enormity of Thompson and Venables’s crime. James Bulger was left with 42 separate injuries, including multiple skull fractures, and his body was placed on a railway track where it was later cut in two by a train. How could they commit such an unspeakable act? The Bulger case both repels and fascinates – because it can never quite be explained, because his murderers were two kids playing truant from primary school, and because the death of the angelic-looking child is a lasting tragedy not just for his family, but for all of us, who can never forget what happened. Now a new generation is learning what some children are capable of. As if that was not bad enough, Jon Venables, after spending eight years in a children’s secure unit for the murder, has spent 12 of the past 16 years in prison, caught and convicted, twice, of offences related to the hoarding of child sexual abuse images. His life – his case – represents a disastrous failure of our criminal justice system. Touted as a model of reform and rehabilitation at the time of his first parole review, in 2001, the reality, we would later discover, was very different. For all involved, the case in some ways seems frozen in time, but life has rolled on. Denise Fergus and her husband Ralph Bulger had a second son together before parting ways. Denise has since had two more boys with her second husband Stuart Fergus. Ralph, too, has remarried and had three further children, all daughters. Time has not stood still for Thompson and Venables either. I can disclose that both have been bereaved in recent years, Thompson’s estranged father has died and Venables has lost his mother. I won’t give any more details to avoid the risk of patchwork identification. James Bulger’s mother, Denise Fergus, has been given the right to attend the hearing when it does finally take place The growing dominance of social media in all our lives has haunted them, too. There are poignant photos of family holidays being enjoyed by Venables’s parents and siblings. There are tans and smiles and you would never know anyone was missing, or that the missing person is one of the most notorious figures in our criminal history. Others on social media have played with fire, posting images purporting to be of both Venables and Thompson. Some have been prosecuted and publicly shamed for their actions, others have been imprisoned for contempt of court. The lifelong restriction on identifying either boy or their whereabouts is not a whim to be disregarded. The order was imposed by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, then the president of the High Court Family Division, in 2000 after she was shown evidence that the boys could be hunted down and killed (as Ralph Bulger once said he would aim to do on their release). Even now, there are people on TikTok pretending to be the killers, or pretending they know who the killers are, or posting pictures purported to be of the killers. In this febrile atmosphere it is, perhaps, impressive that Robert Thompson has carved out a life for himself below the radar. He has kept homes, held down jobs and sustained relationships. It is a source of endless irony to me that it was Thompson who was widely assumed to be the thug, the ringleader of the gang of two. Jon Venables’s parents, who only ever gave one interview to the media, after the trial, said exactly that. They described Jon (to the BBC’s Winifred Robinson) as ‘quite a loving, caring little boy, always has been, thoughtful and considerate, fun to be with’. He had been ‘brought up right’, they said. They believed he had been ‘provoked’ by Thompson into committing the crime. ‘He is easily led,’ they said and, besides, their son had told them how Thompson had threatened to get his older brother to batter him if he did not join in with the abduction. Venables’s father repeatedly cried. He had lost his son as well, he said. He and his wife expressed their sorrow to the family of James Bulger, and the shame they felt at what had happened. The interview, like so much of the historical record of the case, looks now like an exercise in denial, a monumental failure of understanding. We were meant to think it was all a tragic mistake on the part of Venables, but that was not what happened. Jon Venables, aged ten in 1993, took the victim on a meandering, two-mile journey through north Liverpool, before kicking and attacking him with stones Venables’s belated admission that he has a sexual interest in children raises renewed concerns about the still unexplained suggestion of a sexual element in the killing of James Bulger. There was only scant evidence for such behaviour, and both boys reacted hysterically at the time to any suggestion it might have played a part in the killing. Sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure (the children’s equivalent of a life sentence), Venables was believed by those around him to have made amazing progress on the road to adulthood and reform. Those were the assessments of him at the time of his release in 2001. But in the succeeding years his life slowly unravelled, with arrests, drug use, breaches of his licence (such as visiting Merseyside) and a string of young girlfriends, attachments that were attributed to delayed adolescence. In 2010, he called his probation officer in a panic, saying he believed his real identity had been discovered and he was at risk. The police were called to take him into protective custody and arrived to find Venables trying to remove the hard drive from his computer. When they looked at the drive, they found images of child sexual abuse and evidence that he had posed online as ‘Dawn’, a woman with a child ‘she’ was offering up for abuse. He was sentenced to two years in prison. The behaviour went back to at least 2008 and had been missed by all those responsible for keeping him – and us – safe. The authorities did not appear to appreciate the deep impact that the trauma of his terrible crime and the crown court trial that followed had on Venables. At one stage he imagined a baby James growing inside him waiting to be reborn. He had been taught to lie from his earliest days as a ten-year-old in custody, to hide his identity because of his notoriety, and he had become good at it. The wonder is that anyone ever thought he was OK. As I discovered after he returned to prison in 2010, Venables had a sexual encounter with a woman on the staff of the secure unit in which he was held while still a child. The incident was known about at the time, but no one seems to have thought it might have done him harm. He clearly did not get the help and support he needed, even if he was hiding his true self from everyone around him. He was re-released, still on life licence, in 2013, by now an even greater national hate figure on social media. He had a new identity and was cautioned two years later for accessing the internet on his computer. Then, in 2017, he was recalled to prison again and his computer seized. He was found to have hoarded nearly 400 images of child sexual abuse. He also had what was described as a ‘paedophile manual’ disguised as a ‘Jazz Guide’. Among its 20 pages was said to be ‘graphic content’ purportedly based on the author’s own experiences with his two daughters. At his new trial, the prosecutor described it as a sickening document that fell far below any recognised standards of morality. Venables was said to have made ‘frank admissions’ that he was aroused by the images he had collected, which predominantly featured adult women having sex with young boys. This was, perhaps, an echo of both his online alter ego ‘Dawn’ (from his first bout of offending) and his own experiences at his secure unit – and who knows what else from his past. Venables said he needed help ‘to understand why he did this and ensure he didn’t do it again’. He admitted he preferred looking at the images to having sex with an adult partner. He was sentenced to 40 further months in prison. Ralph Bulger, through his solicitor Robin Makin, attempted to have Venables’s anonymity restrictions lifted. The application was rejected and people continued to be prosecuted for revealing his new identity online. One was the actress Tina Malone, who once starred in Channel 4’s Liverpool-based soap opera, Brookside. She was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and was ordered to pay £10,000 for contempt of court in 2018 after sharing a Facebook post containing a photograph of Venables and what was said to be his new name. To this day, some people cannot bear to contemplate the enormity of Thompson and Venables’s crime. Pictured: CCTV footage of the boys kidnapping James At his first parole review for his most recent convictions, in 2020, Venables said he was not seeking release. Requests were made for the next hearing to be held in public but that was rejected by the then chair of the Parole Board, Caroline Corby. Instead, in November 2023, permission was given for Robin Makin, on behalf of Ralph Bulger, to listen down the line to the hearing that was planned to be held at the prison where Venables was (and perhaps still is) being held. Yet the panellists arrived there only to discover that Venables was refusing to participate because of the Bulger lawyer’s presence. In their decision summary, the Parole Board noted that Venables had accepted he had a ‘long-term sexual interest in children’ and had completed a considerable amount of work in prison to address this area of risk. But the risk that his behaviour would progress into having contact with children was too great, so they determined he remain behind bars. Various licence conditions had been proposed to try to ensure that Venables was not committing further sexual offences against children. Apparently even polygraph testing had been suggested, but the panel said (without explanation) that he would not be eligible. Could he be trusted with a probation officer after all his past deceptions? ‘The panel noted there were concerns about how well Mr Venables would be able to work with his probation officer. It concluded that his engagement with his probation officer would be crucial to the success of his release plan.’ Clearly, the Parole Board contemplates that Venables could be released at some point in the future. When the next hearing will happen is unknown, but what is certain is that, whether Venables likes it or not, looking across the room at him will be Denise Fergus. David James Smith is the author of The Sleep Of Reason: The James Bulger Case.