Child-on-child killing that shocked the world

IT was a grainy CCTV image that appeared to show an innocent scene of a toddler walking hand-in-hand with a child.

But what the fuzzy pictures in fact revealed turned out to be every parent’s worst nightmare.

As James Bulger was led through the Strand shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, on February 12 1993, there was nothing to hint at the dreadful murder he would later suffer.

Moments earlier he had been seen on cameras walking with his mother Denise Bulger, now known as Denise Fergus.

Although occasionally dropping a few steps back, he followed his mother into a shop. A short time later he was seen leaving alone, with his mother in pursuit soon after.

But instead of finding her son wandering nearby, it soon became apparent that James was missing.

The next day, his parents, Denise and Ralph, made an emotional appeal for help, as detectives released CCTV images that would shock the world.

They revealed the terrible reality that James had been abducted – by a child.

For reasons that are still unknown, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, then aged 10, had led the boy out of the shopping centre.

Shocking details of James’s torture would later emerge in the court case.

The two boys, who were playing truant from school, walked James around the streets of Liverpool for more than two miles, stopping occasionally to kick and punch him.

They told adults who intervened that he was their brother.

After taking him to a nearby railway line, they left his body on the tracks in the hope it would be destroyed by a train.

The toddler had been splattered with blue paint and his battered head lay surrounded by a pile of bricks.

His body was found two days later by children playing on a freight railway line – 200 yards from Walton Lane police station, Liverpool, and more than two miles from the Strand shopping centre.

Days later Venables and Thompson were arrested in connection with the murder of James, and later charged. They were the youngest to be charged with murder in the 20th century.

In November that year, they were convicted following a 17-day trial and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the normal substitute sentence for life imprisonment when the offender is a juvenile.

Trial judge Mr Justice Morland told the pair they had committed a crime of “unparalleled evil and barbarity”.

As shadow home secretary in 1993, future Prime Minister Tony Blair described the murder as “a hammer blow against the sleeping conscience of the nation”.

In November 2004, it emerged that Ms Fergus had managed to track down Thompson following his release but was “paralysed with hatred” and unable to confront him.