Free BORN TO BE KILLERS (True Crime) by Ray Black Page B

more sensitive and naive than his friend.
    On the morning of Friday, February 12, Jon Venables left his Merseyside home for school. He had a note in his bag from his mother asking if he could take the class gerbils home so he could look after them during the school holidays. On his route to school he passed his friend Robert Thompson, who was hanging around with his younger brother. Both Jon and Robert disliked school intensely and felt like outcasts in the classroom. They had both been kept behind a grade, which only seemed to make the matter worse, probably due to the fact that they felt ashamed and different from their fellow classmates. As a result of this they became expert at being truants.
    The pair of boys decided to spend the morning at the Bootle Strand shopping centre, with the sole intention of stealing. Sales assistants watched the pair carefully, as their school uniforms were a sure sign they were bunking off school, which usually meant they were looking for trouble. They lurked around the counters and waited until the salesperson turned away before stuffing anything they could into their pockets. They stole numerous items including batteries, enamel paint, pens and pencils, a Troll Doll, some fruit and sweets, make-up and other small trinkets. They usually threw away most of what they stole, for the stealing was the fun part.
    After a couple of hours the boys became bored with their ‘shopping’ spree. They sat down and discussed what would make their outing more exciting and came upon the idea of stealing a ‘little person’. They considered that would be much more fun.
    It was a little after 3.00 p.m., about the time they would normally leave school, when Venables and Thompson strolled nonchalantly through the shopping centre, looking for a small, unsupervised child. Perhaps in their poor, sick minds, they felt by doing this it would prove that they were no longer babies themselves.
    While in the T J Hughes department store, a woman noticed that her three-year-old daughter and two-year-old son were playing with a couple of older boys. The boys, Jon and Robert, were kneeling down opening and closing purses, which held the younger children’s attention. She called them back but it wasn’t long before they strayed off again to join the older boys. When the woman had finished paying for her purchases, she found her daughter and asked her where her young brother had gone. ‘Gone outside with the boys,’ her daughter answered. In a state of panic, the woman rushed out of the shop calling her child’s name. She saw Jon and Robert encouraging her son to follow them, but when Jon saw the woman following them, they froze and sent the small boy back to his mother. Jon and Robert quickly disappeared from sight and pondered on what to do next.
     
    THE ABDUCTION
     
    A little while later they found exactly what they were looking for, a small boy – James Bulger – playing alone with some cigarette butts in an ashtray outside a butcher’s shop in the centre. Baby James had only just wandered away from his mother’s side minutes before Jon and Robert approached him. Denise Bulger was normally a very vigilant mother, she had lost her first child during pregnancy and she didn’t want anything to happen to her precious son. But James was tired and had started to get fractious, and rather than have him squirming and whining in her arms, she felt it would be quite safe to leave him by the door of the butcher’s shop for a moment on his own.
    Denise chatted quite happily to some people in the queue and momentarily her concentration was off her little boy. In fact it wasn’t until she had completed her purchase that Denise Bulger noticed her son had gone missing. She called out for him in the shop and asked all the strangers around her if they had seen a two-year-old with blond hair wearing a blue anorak. Denise became frantic and headed straight for the security office, who announced the disappearance of James