by Ralph Bulger
I sometimes sat him on my shoulders and he used to try to pull my ears off in fun. I would be covered in bruises because he was so boisterous, and on one occasion he accidentally snapped the gristle at the top of one of my ears. It’s an injury that has never healed. But its odd to think that when I now touch that damaged ear it can evoke such tender memories of my little boy.
I used to tell him all the time how much I loved him, and he would reply, ‘I love you too, Daddy.’ Or ‘Ralph’, depending on how the mood took him!
The night before he vanished from our lives for ever, I put him to bed as normal after another exhausting day. It was one of the jobs I loved as a parent because even when James closed his eyes, he looked content and happy. Denise and I would always take it in turns to put him to bed. That evening when he was finally sleepy, I tucked him under his duvet and kissed him on the forehead before watching him fall asleep. He was holding my hand as he often did, and I waited until his fingers relaxed, slipping away from mine, before I dared to move away.
‘Goodnight, my beautiful son,’ I gently whispered in his ear.
2
The Day Everything Changed
Friday, 12 February 1993 was a bitterly cold day and, as ever, James was sitting on his special chair in his ‘jim-jams’ eating his breakfast in front of the fire. Fie was as lively as could be, even though he had just got out of bed. He was like that every day, full of beans, until it was time for him to go to sleep at night. To be honest, I can’t say that the details of that morning stood out to me more than any other. But I do know that as soon as James was up and about, it meant that everyone else had to be full of energy too, because he was such a live wire. James always had cereal for his breakfast and I started my day with a cup of coffee and some toast. When I think back, it is almost unreal just how ordinary the day was and how happy and untroubled we all were as a family. And yet in a few short hours nothing would ever be the same again. No, we didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a warm and clean home, Denise and I had each other, and together we had the most amazing little boy. It is easy to take your blessings for granted until they are stolen from you.
I had agreed to go out that morning to help Denise’s brother Paul fit some wardrobes at his new home, which was only a short distance from where we lived. Denise asked if I would take James with me because she was heading up to her mum’s to see family, and it would give her a break and the chance to catch up on her own chores. Denise usually went and did some shopping on a Friday, but as far as I can remember she hadn’t planned to go out of Kirkby when we parted that morning. I was normally happy to have James around me, but on this occasion I was concerned that he might get hurt if we weren’t keeping an eye on him at all times. The doors to the wardrobes were heavy and there would be lots of electric tools and nails lying around that might pose a danger to an incredibly nosy child like James. I couldn’t bear the thought of him being injured because I wasn’t able to keep an eye on him properly. Both Denise and I were very protective of James, and we were both constantly checking on him because he had the potential to get into mischief in the blink of an eye.
Not taking James with me that morning is the biggest single regret of my life. It was the worst decision I have ever made, and to think that I made it trying to protect James is the most bitter irony of all.
Denise and I agreed that she would take James with her. He was dressed warmly, bundled into his long blue hooded anorak. We all left the flat together and walked to Denise’s mum Eileen’s house. I said goodbye to them both from there. The last I saw of James was as he waved to me from the front door. My last words to him were a simple, ‘Ta-ra.’
When I arrived at Paul’s house, I didn’t have a care in the world. We set to work for the day fitting the wardrobes and it wasn’t until late in the afternoon that I finished and called in to see my mum. I didn’t stop long, and after having a chat with her I walked back to Eileen’s house to meet Denise and James. I can’t remember exactly what time it was, but it was already dark and approaching teatime. I had no idea until that point that my son had gone missing. We were not yet in an age where everyone had a mobile phone and people were ringing or texting each other every few minutes.
I remember that when I walked through the door I immediately sensed a strange atmosphere. I couldn’t see Denise or James and I wondered if they had already gone back to our flat.
‘What’s up, Eileen?’ I asked. I knew from her face that something was wrong.
‘Ralph, the police have been on and your James is missing. I don’t know much more than that, but there’s a message on the answerphone for you to get to the station. I’ve been out shopping myself, so I don’t know what time this all happened, but I’ve been ringing round as many people as I can and no one seems to know anything. You need to get to Marsh Lane Police Station.’
‘What do you mean? How can he be missing, for God’s sake?’
I felt sick to my stomach. It hit me so hard, as if someone had just punched the living daylights out of me. It was just coming up to six o’clock, and I looked out of the window only to see how dark and cold it was.
‘Where’s my baby boy, Eileen? I need to find him,’ I choked.
I ran out of the house as fast as I could to rally relatives to start a search for James. The first person I went to was Denise’s brother, Ray Matthews, who was at home with his wife Delia eating their tea when I arrived.
‘James has gone missing. They can’t find him anywhere. We need to get to the police station and find out what’s happened to him. I need to get out there and find him but I don’t know what’s gone on. I haven’t even spoken to Denise. Have you heard from her?’
‘How has he gone missing? What do you mean?’
Ray automatically assumed I meant that something had happened to my brother Jimmy, and then it dawned on him that I meant my son. I still knew so little. The police had told Eileen that James had gone missing during a shopping trip earlier in the afternoon, but not where they had been.
‘I don’t even know where he went missing, Ray. I just know they can’t find him and I need to speak to the police and Denise as soon as possible. Denise is at the police station. Can you take me there?’
Without hesitation, Ray grabbed his car keys and we both raced to the front door together. Marsh Lane Police Station is in Bootle, which is a dockside Liverpool town nearly eight miles from Kirkby. Ray was driving as fast as he could and my head was racing.
The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. I was beside myself with worry and all I wanted to do was open the car door and throw up because I felt so sick at the thought of my lovely son being out there all alone. Ray kept trying to reassure me that all would be well and that James had probably wandered off to make mischief as he always did. I hoped with all my heart he was right, and that by the time I arrived at the police station I would be greeted by my sons gorgeous face, grinning from ear to ear.
It’s not until something like this happens that you realize how physical your emotions can be. Every parent in the land must surely know what it feels like to lose sight of your precious child, even for a few seconds. I felt violently ill from head to toe and was in a blind panic over the thought of James being in danger. It seemed like an eternity before we arrived at Marsh Lane, but when we did I jumped from the passenger seat of the car and legged it into the police station.
‘My name’s Ralph Bulger and my son has gone missing,’ I blurted out to the first officer I saw. ‘Please tell me you have found him . . . please,’ I begged.
‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no news about your son yet,’ the duty officer replied. ‘Come through and I’ll find someone who can speak to you and bring you up to speed.’
It was obvious that everyone in the police station was on high alert and was aware that a child was missing. I was desperate to speak to Denise, because I needed to know what had happened. I also knew that I had to get out into the cold night and search for my son. Every minute I stayed at the pol
ice station was another minute not spent looking for the most precious little boy in my life.
I was led into an interview room where two policemen said they would need me to give a statement and as much information as possible to help them in their search for James. My fear and frustration spilled over.
‘For fuck’s sake, what am I doing in here answering questions when I should be out there finding my James?’
‘I’m sorry, Ralph,’ one of the officers replied calmly. ‘It’s vital we get as much information as we can to assist us in our search. I understand how you must be feeling but we are going to do everything we can to get James back to you. We just need you to tell us as much as you can.’
I realized that the police were doing their jobs, but there was no doubt about it, they were taking statements from me and Denise to establish if we may have been behind James’s disappearance. They couldn’t rule us out until they had spoken to us in detail. It took a long time as they tried to piece together where I had been and if I could have been with James at any time that afternoon. They asked me about Denise and where she had been that day, but I couldn’t answer many of their questions because I hadn’t spoken to her. I know this would be standard practice in a police investigation of this nature, to rule out immediate family and friends, but I found the line of questioning very harsh and unsettling. Perhaps I was just sensitive to their questions because I was desperate to get out and look for my son. In any case, I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t going to be let out of the police station until I had completed my statement. I hadn’t even seen Denise at this point, as she was being held elsewhere, answering more questions.
I felt bad about my initial outburst, but I was lashing out because I was so terrified about the safety of my son, and it was never meant as a criticism of the police. Even after I had made my statement, I still couldn’t get out and join the search. Instead, the police drove me back to our flat in Kirkby because they desperately needed some up-to-date photos of James. I understood why this was important, but as a parent, as James’s father, the delay was agony.
Finally, after what must have been about three hours, the police took me to see Denise in another interview room. She looked up at me and her face just crumpled. She was in bits as she got up to hug me.
‘What the hell happened?’ I asked as I put my arms around her.
Denise filled me in on the details as best she could, but she kept breaking down in tears and it was hard for her to get the words out. She was in the interview room with her brother Paul’s fiancee, Nicola Bailey, and it turned out that the pair of them had gone shopping earlier that day in the Strand in Bootle, a large, popular indoor mall. Denise had taken James with her and Nicola was also minding a little girl for the afternoon, the three-year-old daughter of Denise’s brother John. It was the first I knew that Denise had gone to Bootle, as her shopping trip had been arranged on the spur of the moment when Nicola had also turned up at Eileen’s earlier that day. Nicola was heading to the Strand and had asked Denise if she wanted to go along with her.
Nicola drove the four of them to the retail centre where they arrived just before 2 p.m. As ever, James was thrilled to be riding in a car, which was always one of his favourite pastimes. Since he had been very young he had loved cars, bikes, planes, trains — he’d always been mad about anything that moved.
It was a typical Friday afternoon in the shopping mall, ram packed with people spending their wages on food for the weekend or clothes for a night out on the town. It was also bitterly cold outside, and so that brought even more people into the mall because it was warm and sheltered from the wintry weather. Usually Denise would never take James out without his pushchair, but as the girls didn’t plan to stay long at the Strand, she decided to leave it behind. She told me that James was overexcited, being his normal bubbly self, but because he was not in his pushchair, he kept trying to break free from her hand to go off exploring the shops. I had always worried when we took him to the Strand because I knew how busy it was in there and how easy it would have been for James to get lost if he went off on his own.
He was naturally nosy and friendly, and he would have been in seventh heaven looking around at all the shops and all the people there that day. Denise said they bought the kids sausage rolls and some sweets and then set off to get their grocery shopping for the weekend, calling in at Tesco and Marks & Spencer. She said the kids were getting restless and playing up a bit, running up and down the aisles and making a nuisance of themselves, as young children do. She was having trouble keeping hold of James as he kept trying to get loose from her grip and tear around the shops like a maniac. Both she and Nicola agreed it was time to get the kids back home, but they wanted to stop at a butcher’s on the way out.
They called into A. R. Tyms, where Denise usually bought her meat. She was buying chops for our tea that night.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Denise sobbed. ‘I swear I only let go of him for a second and he just vanished. I went into the butcher’s and got my purse out to pay, and when I looked down our James was gone. One minute he was there, the next he disappeared. I saw him by my side and then by the door and that was it. I ran out to find him, but I never saw him again. I’m so sorry, Ralph.’
She told me she just panicked and ran out of the shop. ‘Where’s James, where’s James?’ she yelled. ‘James, James, where are you?’
She said the rest was a bit of a blur and that she was running about everywhere, bumping into people and shouting his name out as loud as she could. She ran in and out of shops and checked the corridors and aisles of every place she could think he may have gone to. Her shouts for James became screams of panic, begging passers-by to let her know if they had seen her lost son. Nicola was searching different shops as the two girls tried their hardest to find him, but they both said it was as if he had disappeared into thin air.
A few minutes later Denise found the security office for the mall and reported James missing. They made several announcements over the public address system, appealing to anyone who had seen a lost little boy. After that Denise went back and forth to the security office, getting more and more desperate with every visit. She said it was mayhem and that she was just running around everywhere, crying and screaming for her son. She wanted them to shut the precinct doors to prevent James from leaving the mall, but the security officers kept reassuring her that he’d turn up.
‘I’m so sorry, Ralph,’ she sobbed, as I held her close to me. ‘I tried everything to find him but he just went. I want my little boy back, Ralph. Where has he gone? Please find him for us.’
‘Don’t worry, love, we will find him. I promise.’
It was all I could do to reassure her, but inside I had this huge knot in my stomach. The sick feeling of dread and frantic worry wouldn’t leave me. But I had to try to look after Denise as well as find James. It was now several hours since he had gone missing and all I could think was how my son was alone and cold and scared in the dark somewhere.
Denise told me that she and Nicola had carried on searching in the mall, and it was at 4.22 p.m. that the security office called the police, forty minutes after James had disappeared. Police Constable Mandy Waller arrived at the mall to meet Denise and Nicola.
Some time later, Mandy described to me how she had been the first police officer on the scene — she was on a routine patrol in her car when that initial call was made to say that a little boy had been lost.
According to Mandy, this was a regular thing and not in the slightest bit unusual. Routine police work often involves missing children who wander off, and in most cases parents and kids are happily reunited within about fifteen minutes. What had alarmed her, though, was that by the time she arrived at the mall, James had already been missing for a lot longer than that. She could see Denise was frantic with worry and together they started scouring the mall, retracing Denises every step earlier in the day and looking again at the places she had already searched for James.
The Strand con
tains more than one hundred shops, set over two floors. Together, the upper and lower malls have five entrances and exits as well as access through the main multi-storey car park. There was a lot of ground to cover, not just on the public forecourts, but in the stores themselves, which were due to close shortly after Mandy arrived. She tried to reassure Denise that it was most likely James had hidden himself under a counter or in a store cupboard as part of a mischievous game and then found himself lost.
The pair of them stopped as many people as they could, asking if anyone had seen a little boy, and then went outside to alert taxi drivers in the cab rank outside. Eventually the precinct closed as the last remaining shops shut at the end of business, but Denise still continued to scour the mall with Mandy. She said that she kept praying James had just been accidentally locked into one of the shops and that he would be found safe and warm. Maybe he had gone to sleep somewhere and was going to wake up oblivious to all the fuss? But both Denise and I knew it was highly unlikely given his reputation for being a ball of energy. What was so concerning was the speed with which he just vanished. How can a lively and loud child like James be there one moment and gone the next? It’s not as if he was a quiet lad who would go unnoticed, and yet everyone who was asked that day said they had not seen a small child lost.
Eventually Mandy took Denise and Nicola back to the station, where she gently told them the police would need to ask the pair some questions to learn as much about James and his disappearance as possible. Denise had not been in a fit state to say much, but she tried to pull herself together to help detectives in any way she could. She would have done anything to have her baby back by her side again.
By the time I met up with Denise in the interview room, she was falling apart again. While I wanted to take her home, as she was so upset, I was also desperate to get out and start looking for James.
