The mother of James Bulger has spoken of the regret she feels 25 years after her toddler’s abduction and murder.
James (2) was abducted by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson from the Bootle Strand shopping Centre in Liverpool in 1993. Venables and Thompson, both 10 at the time, were jailed for life for the torture and murder of James Bulger.
They were released in 2001 with new identities on licence, which meant that they could be jailed immediately again if they breached any of the conditions.
James’ mother Denise Fergus has spoken of the guilt of letting him out of her sight for a split second while she paid for pork chops at the butchers.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Fergus says that her biggest regret is taking the wrong turn once she left the butchers. If she had turned right instead of left, she would have seen James being led away.
“There aren’t the words to describe how I still feel now, every day. I was the one who let go of his hand; I was the one there meant to protect him.
“But do you know what my biggest regret is? That I didn’t turn right instead of left – if I had taken the right turn and gone around the corner, I would have seen James being led away, just four short minutes after he had left my side, trustingly holding hands with the boys who were about to murder him.”
Denise says that she felt hopeful when she saw on the CCTV that James was led away by two children instead of an adult.
“He was a sharer and he was trusting. You only have to look at the CCTV footage of him being led away to see that.”
“Whenever I look back on the day that James was taken, I am haunted by so many ‘what ifs’ – what if I had taken a buggy to the shopping centre?… What if I hadn’t gone shopping at all?
“The only time I let go of his hand was to pay for the chops I had bought, and he was standing right beside me. When I looked down, James was gone.
“Outside the shop doorway I had a 50:50 chance of picking the correct way and no clue at all, so I turned left frantically to start looking, another seemingly small decision that was to have the most earth-shattering consequences.”
She says that she went straight to the security information centre where they immediately made an announcement that a child had gone missing. She asked if they could shut the shopping centre doors incase he wandered out, however that wasn’t possible.
“Two hundred and 40 seconds was all it took for them to lure James away from me and get him out of that shopping centre.”
Just this week, Venables (now 35) has been charged over the possession of “indecent pictures of children.”
He was previously jailed for two years in 2010 for downloading and distributing child pornography. He was released in 2013 with another new identity.
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