Jon Venables was 10 years old in February 1993 when he and Robert Thompson, who was also 10, lured a small boy, James Bulger, from his mother and killed him during a prolonged and savage assault on a railway line in Liverpool. The murder occupies an unsettling corner of our national psyche. Is this what children are capable of? Nobody who is old enough to remember that crime will ever forget it.
Venables was 18 when he was freed from Red Bank secure unit in St Helens, Merseyside, in 2001, and 27 when he was recalled to prison early last year after being caught with child pornography on his computer. His new identity had been compromised at his place of work, and the police came in a hurry to take him into protective custody.
Everyone around him was said to have been shocked to discover that Venables was a paedophile. Nobody, apparently, had seen that coming. It is the great and enduring mystery of the Bulger case: why, among all the experts who had met him and worked with him during his years of detention, was there a consensus that Venables was rehabilitated?
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Jon Venables, one of Britain’s most notorious murderers, is now back in jail on child pornography charges. David James Smith, the writer who has followed his life from boy to man, tells the full story of his chaotic ‘rehabilitation’ — and how he uncovered the sex scandal surrounding Venables’ care.
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