The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case

by David James Smith

  PC Whitby is in his mid-thirties, and has two children of his own, a seven-year-old daughter and a boy the same age as Bobby and Jon. His own childhood, though not spent in Walton and perhaps more stable than many, was not so very dissimilar to that of the youngsters he now encounters.

  He knows that much of his job reflects the worst of the area — young people in trouble, or causing trouble. He knows it’s not all like that. He’ll be visiting a school during assembly and only recognise say two dozen faces out of a thousand, as he looks around. He’ll go into one classroom and they’ll all stand up respectfully as he enters. He’ll go into another, and they’ll chorus, ‘Fuck off, bizzy!’

  When he started as a JLO five years ago, he was full of crusading zeal. He was going to save the children and put the world to rights. At the moment, Brian can think of about ten kids he saw in those early days. Only one has stayed on the straight and narrow. The others have become probably the worst juveniles in Walton.

  He’s learned to pick out the ones that are going to be a problem. Others will hang their heads when confronted, and cry and seem genuinely remorseful. It’s the ones that stare you straight in the eye and deny everything that you’ve got to watch out for. They’ve got O Levels in lying before the/re ten. The/11 be going for the degree.

  It usually starts at home, when they’re seven or eight, stealing from mum’s purse, swearing. The parents’ll call the station and say we’ve tried everything, now can you have a go, have a word with him. One time, a little lad comes into the station with a note in an envelope. He hands it to Brian. ‘Dear ofcer, this little bastard of a son of mine has been robbing, can you speak to him, please.’ Good enough. So what you been doing? Stealing from me mam’s purse. Brian tells him the rights and wrongs, shows him round the cells … this is where naughty people go who steal… he doesn’t do that so much any more, employing the shock tactics, but anyway, he’s shown the lad round, and sat him on the desk to give him a final talking to. The lad says I wanted to buy me mum a mother’s day present, and I didn’t have enough money. It was two pound fifty, and I only had one pound fifty. That finished Brian. How can he tell the lad off now?

  Another day, and Brian’s on a home visit. He knocks on the door and a small boy answers. Brian’s feeling chirpy, so he says, hello sonny, you the man of the house? Fuck off, I’m only six. He goes inside and speaks to the father. He asks the father, do you know what your son just said to me? Brian recounts the doorstep exchange. Well, what do you fucking expect, says the father. Brian leaves, and finds a big nail under the wheel of his car.

  If they’re going to make a career of it, the next thing will be trouble at school. There’ll be a phone call from the head teacher. Brian will be called in to have a word. In his greener days, he used to go around with a more senior JLO, and they were at a school to see a boy, let’s call him Mickey, who’s been collecting for charity and pocketing the money. Mickey’s from a big family. They’re all built like bulldogs, and they’re all trouble. Brian’s got a bet on that Mickey’s going to murder someone.

  Anyway, they’re up at the school. Mickey’s mum’s there, the teacher, Brian, and his colleague, who’s shouting at Mickey. Suddenly, Mickey keels over, in a dead faint. His mother’s over him, get up you little bastard, she’s pulling at him, and Brian’s concerned, fending her off, trying to give the boy some air. He comes round, and starts crying. End of telling off.

  Two years later, Brian’s up at the school to see Mickey’s younger brother, who’s in trouble for something or other. Brian is giving him what for, when, suddenly, younger brother keels over, in a dead faint. It won’t work. Not this time it won’t. Brian gets the lad up and carries on, unmoved by his ploy.

  There are another two brothers that Brian has dealt with, off and on, over the years. They’re only in their early teens now, and often in some trouble or other. People think they’re just plain nasty. Cheeky bloody hard-faced kids, Brian calls them.

  They were smoking cannabis when they were seven or eight, mixing with older lads, coming on like mini-gangsters: Our mate’s doing a five stretch for a blagging… pulling the tarts… on the skag. The boys have been in and out of care, and used to go missing for days at a time, getting picked up somewhere in the city in the early hours of the morning. There was always some kind of trouble at home, and Brian has been there when one of the boys took a hammer and a snooker cue to his mother. Brian does not know what will become of them, but fears the worst. There’s a rumour going round at the moment that they’ve got a gun. This is information that will need to be checked out.

  Brian has been preoccupied lately with the fate of a 12–year-old whom he and social services have been trying to get into secure accommodation, as much for the boy’s own protection as for anything else. The boy just can’t stop robbing, and the locals are sick of it. When he stole and killed a racing pigeon, allegedly worth £2000, people were coming into the station saying, if you don’t sort him out, we will. We’ll kill him.

  The boy looks like an angel, and is so plausible he can talk his way out of anything. He’s forever turning up, miles from home, in some trouble or other. The other day it was St Helen’s. He’d had fifty pounds out of a till, and was in the police station. The station sergeant is on the phone to Brian, telling him he seems such a nice lad. Says he’s keen on bird-watching. The sergeant gets a bit funny when Brian starts laughing. A week or two before that, the boy is caught in the back of a shop in another centre. A police woman is called. He cries and cries. He’s lost, he can’t find his mum, he’s frightened. The policewoman takes his name and date of birth, and let’s him go. Then it transpires that four other nearby shops have been robbed. The policewoman calls Walton. The name the boy gave is false, but the date of birth is all too familiar to Brian.

  No one’s counting, but the boy has come to police attention more than 80 times. Many of these will be reports that he’s absconded from care homes. None are crimes of violence, and not all are far from Walton Lane Police Station: a policeman is walking into the station one day, and sees the boy wheeling a motor bike out of the yard. It turns out he’s just stolen it from round the back of the station, where it had been stored as recovered stolen goods.

  Sometimes, Brian can’t help admiring the wit and resourcefulness of the youngsters, and the scams they pull. He used to work the director’s gate at Anfield on match days. You’d get boys coming along, saying they were from JimllFixIt, and Jim was fixing it for them to get into the match. Boys trying to slither in under the turnstiles, standing outside wailing that they’d lost their ticket and waiting for some kind soul to come along and get them in, boys that Brian knew lived up the road saying they’d travelled from Speke without a ticket, ‘blagging’ one from somebody, and then trying to sell it on at an exorbitant price. ’Ere matey, got a spare ticket? No. Well, lend us fifty pence for some ciggies. Like they’re seriously intending to pay you back next time they see you.

  They mind the parked cars of visiting fans, even of the police officers in uniform, who can’t get into the station car park, and have to leave their cars nearby. Brian knows you have to pay. If you said sod off you cheeky little beggars, your tyres’d be flat when you got back. Or they’d’ve scratched fuck off pigs into the paintwork.

  It’s a bit of a game, all this, but Brian believes there’s a new mood creeping in. More youngsters showing less respect. The other night a boy of about 15 came up to him and pointed at Brian’s chest. What’s that on your tunic? Brian looked down, and the boy’s hand flicked up, knocking off Brian’s helmet. Hah, got yer officer. What can you do? You can’t give ’em a clip round the earhole.

  There’s another boy causing a few problems on the street, and Brian’s having a word with him. The boy says he goes to one of the local schools which just happens to be the school where Brian is on the board of governors. He tells the boy. The boy says what do you want, a medal? The boy turns to his mates. Give this fella a Blue Peter badge, he’s our school guv’nor.
r />   It might only be a minority that’s bad, but the minority’s getting bigger all the time.

  Brian doesn’t think the new directive on cautioning is helping very much. Trying to keep kids out of court, penny pinching. There isn’t the same flexibility any more. In the old days you could have a word with the boss. Look boss, this kid is stepping out of line a bit, but he’s got a good mum, and the offences are very petty, let’s try and do something for him. Now it all goes up to the juvenile panel; it’s just a paper exercise, and there isn’t the scope there was before to work with the kids.

  The youngsters have noticed the change too. They’ve twigged that there’s a new leniency, that they can get away with things like knocking a bobby’s hat off, and worse.

  Take, for instance, a teenage girl, arrested the other day for criminal damage. She smashed a door in after a row with somebody. She’d done exactly the same thing a few days earlier. She’s already got two cautions for shoplifting, and seems to be under the impression that she’s entitled to three before she gets prosecuted. Her attitude can only be described as cavalier.

  It’s as if you’ve got to get two or three cautions under your belt to be taken seriously out there. Everyone looks up to the baddie, and wants to be like them. A few cautions will see you on your way. Go on, smash that window, all youse’ll get’s a caution.

  Nowadays, Brian goes on home visits after an offence has been committed and they’re saying, if I admit it, will I get off with a caution? Does that mean I won’t have to go to court?

  He’s gone round to see a 15–year-old about an offence. The youth answers the door and Brian explains why he’s there. What the fuck’s it got to do with you, the youth replies. Brian says he’ll be helping to decide what happens. I’ve already admitted it, says the youth, I’m going to get a caution. He’s standing on the doorstep, verbally abusing Brian, when the father comes out, telling his son not to be rude to the officer. The boy tells his hither to mind his own fucking business, and punches him. They’re all in the house now, Brian restraining the struggling youth, mother and father dancing round them, saying go on officer, give him a good hiding.

  Brian doesn’t know what it’s all about. They say it’s the Sixties and the do-gooders, but if you ask him what the difference is between his own son and some of the boys in trouble, he’d say it was care and affection, and teaching them right from wrong. At an early age, Brian would slap his boy’s hand if he was naughty. He loves the bones of his children, but he will smack them, and he thinks they do learn from that. Then he sits with his son of an evening, gives him time. They’ll go through schoolwork, always have a cuddle. That’s what’s missing for so many of them. You see families and you think, if you can buy them all these material things, why can’t you give them love. Brian sees these kids and, sometimes, he just wants to put his arms around them and give them a great big hug. There’s one lad, in a group Brian goes bowling with occasionally. This lad’ll be acting all tough with his mates, but Brian’U say, come here, put his arm round him, and the lad’ll do it. You can see that he wants to.

  That’s the main problem. Lack of love and affection. Mothers with four or five kids who say I can’t keep an eye on all of them twenty-four hours a day. They just don’t seem to have the time or the patience. Brian visits the local youth clubs, and there’s a little girl in one of them, about two years old, and she’s always running round him. Sometimes she’s a bit annoying, to be honest, but she’s a sweet thing, and one time, she was more annoying than usual, and the mother told her off, told her to leave Brian alone, and she came back, again being a bit naughty, and the mother just drew her hand back and hit the girl across the face, knocking her head sideways, practically into the door. Hey, hey, said Brian. He was really shocked. You can’t go doing that.

  He often gives talks at youth clubs and schools, on the effects of drugs and alcohol. There’s been some concern lately, that younger children are being used by older children as couriers for the sale of drugs. Mostly cannabis and LSD, being sold in schools as well. Brian’s sure the police don’t know the half of what goes on.

  When he speaks to the youngsters about drugs in his talks they’ll all say dreadful, we think drugs are dreadful. And what do you think about cannabis? Nothing wrong with that, they’ll say. What about drink? Great. What about LSD? Well, we’re a bit wary of that, but we might try it. Drugs to them is crack and heroin, and the rest don’t count.

  These talks are usually reserved for children of secondary school age. The primary school kids get the Stranger Danger lectures. What do strangers look like, he’ll ask the class? They’re ten foot tall, with big beards and pointed ears, comes the answer.

  ■

  Jon was born on 13 August 1982, at the Mill Road Hospital in Everton. His parents, Neil and Susan Venables, who were then aged 29 and 25, were living in an end-terrace house on York Street in Walton, off Rice Lane, a few hundred yards north of St Mary’s.

  Susan would say her own upbringing had been strict and disciplined. She had one brother, and the family were fans of country and western music. Some of them played in a group. Neil would say that he and his sister had a good time in childhood, and they were spoilt, although their mother died quite early.

  When Jon was born, Neil was working as a fork-lift truck driver at the Jacob’s Biscuit factory in Aintree, and they already had one son, Mark, born three years earlier in May 1979. Their third child, Michelle, was born 15 months after Jon, in November 1983.

  The couple had been married since August 1975, and had previously lived in Roderick Road, a turning off Walton Village, moving to York Street for the extra space after Mark came along.

  Early on there were problems with Mark. He had difficulty talking, and when Neil and Susan had him examined it turned out that he had been born with a cleft pallet. The frustration of trying to make himself understood caused Mark to have temper tantrums and when he went to one of the local infant schools it was soon apparent that there were behavioural troubles. At about the time of Jon’s birth, Mark was identified as having moderate learning difficulties. He was given speech therapy and began attending Meadow Bank Special School in Fazakerley.

  Neil and Susan separated in early 1986 and were later divorced. Neil had lost his job a couple of years earlier, and the strain of this while trying to cope with Mark and two other young children had been too much. Neil at first stayed on in York Street so that he could sell the house, and Susan and the children moved in with her mother. Neil still had a car in those days, and used to take the children out every Sunday.

  When York Street sold, Neil moved in with his father, at his father’s maisonette in Breeze Close, then rented his own flat nearby on Breeze Hill for a while, before moving into Kirkdale.

  Susan left her mother’s and went to live in Old Swan, and Jon started at the infants’ school in Broad Green. Susan’s new place turned out to be damp and none too pleasant, so she and the children moved back in with Neil, who drove Jon to and from school in Broad Green every day. Jon seemed happy at the school, though there were concerns that he was upset and difficult following his parents’ split, and he too began to have temper tantrums. He was referred for treatment of a squint in his eye — a problem which would remain untreated.

  When Susan’s name came up on the council’s housing list, she moved into a three-bedroomed house in Scarsdale Road on the Norris Green estate, which was one of the large, modern Liverpool developments of public housing.

  There was an incident, in January 1987, when the police were called to Susan’s home because the children had been left alone for three hours. Susan had found it difficult to cope with the separation from Neil, and had been treated for depression. Neil also had a history of depressive illness.

  Michelle and Jon began attending the Broad Square County Primary Junior School, which was close to Scarsdale Road, in September of 1989, following Jon’s seventh birthday. In his first year it was noted that he displayed some anti-social behaviour in class, whic
h was annoying but nothing too serious. Sometimes, he would go home complaining of being bullied by a gang of lads at school. In June 1990 he was referred to an educational psychologist, and seen by a trainee who reported that Jon seemed uninterested and unable to concentrate. He stared into space. He seemed unable to cope with the pressures on him.

  Neil was on the move again, going back to York Street to share with a mate, and he’d often spend a couple of nights at Scarsdale Road, occasionally baby-sitting if Susan wanted a night out.

  There was still concern over Mark, who continued to have sudden temper tantrums. This is not unusual among children with learning difficulties, but it led to the involvement of a social worker, who made arrangements for respite fostering. Mark began spending one weekend of every month with a foster family, and this helped to reduce the number of tantrums.

  In the following year, Michelle also began to show learning difficulties, and she joined Mark at Meadow Bank Special School. Jon moved up to Year 4 at Broad Square, in a class of 24 pupils, and in the first term there were no particular problems.

  It was after the Christmas holiday, in January 1991, that his class teacher, Kathryn Bolger, began to be concerned. Jon was acting very strangely. He would sit on his chair, holding his desk in his hands, and rock backwards and forwards, moaning and making strange noises. When the teacher moved him to sit near her at the front of the class he would fiddle with things on her desk and knock them to the floor. He would sometimes bang his head on the furniture, so hard that the teacher was sure it must be hurting him. Jon cried and said he was being picked on out of class. He occasionally ran out of school, and someone would be sent to his home to find him. He wouldn’t do anything he was asked, and his school books were empty of work. Jon was marked down as a low achiever; the teacher was sure he was capable of doing more.

  Jon’s behaviour began to be disruptive at home. He was abusive towards his mother, and the social worker, who had initially been supporting the family over Mark, now found his attention directed towards Jon. There seemed to be problems with other children in the street where Susan was living. Jokes about Jon’s brother and sister being backward, some bullying of Mark and Jon by older boys, and a lot of name calling: ‘shit, big ears, fucking prick, divvy’. The social worker believed that Jon was experiencing peer group pressure, and was also feeling excluded by, and jealous of, the attention being devoted to Mark and Michelle over their special needs. It also appeared that Jon copied Mark’s behaviour.