It has now been 30 years since James Bulger was coaxed away from his mother, Denise Fergus, at a shopping center in Bootle, Merseyside, by two ten-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. The CCTV images of him being led away from his mother, taken more than two miles away to a railway line where he was violently murdered, are etched into the nation’s mind. The murder shook Britain. Yet, the country isn’t alone in experiencing such horror, as a similar incident occurred in Norway a little over a year later.
Silje Redergard was five years old when she was playing with two six-year-old boys in a snowy field in October 1994. They had all been making snow castles together when suddenly, for reasons that remain unknown, the two boys turned on her.
They started punching and kicking her, lobbing stones at her, and ripping off her clothes. The pair then ran off, leaving her to die in the snow near her home in the Norwegian suburb of Trondheim.
While there are stark similarities between Silje and James’ respective killings, the boys were younger than Thompson and Venables and had been playing with Silje rather than maliciously taking her away. There was another key difference: forgiveness. The Norwegians did not react in the same way as the British public, with the newspapers’ headlines condemning the “Freaks of Nature”.
Even Beathe Redergard, Silje’s mother, told the Dagbladet newspaper that year: “I forgive those who killed my daughter. It is not possible to hate small children. They can’t understand the consequences of what they have done.”
But James’ younger brother told the Sunday Express in an exclusive interview that he will never forgive his brother’s murderers, adding that they robbed him of his childhood.
In 2010, Beathe told the Guardian that she had visited a woman who had tried to resuscitate Silje to say thank you. As she sat talking to the woman with the lady’s son on her lap, she was told that it was this little boy before her who had killed her daughter.
She said: “I looked at the boy and asked him ‘what did you do?’ He said ‘I jumped on her because I thought she was sleeping.’ Then he said he took off her clothes because he thought she was sleeping. When we found out he had done it, we left. It was too difficult. I wanted to throttle him and be done with it. When I realized that I almost wanted to kill him, we left.”
The names of the two boys were never released to the press. Additionally, the age of criminal responsibility in Norway is 15, whereas in England and Wales, it is ten years old.
READ MORE: ‘Venables murdered my brother Jamie Bulger – he should never go free’
Mugshots of Thompson and Venables were widely published, as well as their names. The public was horrified by what they saw and heard.
As a result, the Sun newspaper launched a petition, which reached 270,000 signatures, demanding that James’ killers receive life sentences. Then Prime Minister John Major said with regard to youth offending we needed to “condemn a little more, understand a little less”.
James momentarily let go of his mother’s hand in the butcher’s shop and was led away by the two boys, who were bunking off school together. A little over a minute later they were out of the shopping center and on their way to the railway line where they had a den.
They were seen by almost 40 people, most of whom assumed their innocence due to their age, or that they were brothers. But at the railway line, the two classmates attacked James — who was dressed in a Noddy t-shirt — bludgeoning him with an iron bar before leaving him to die.
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The pair are the youngest people to have ever stood trial for murder in the UK with the judge describing their crime as an “act of unparalleled evil and barbarity”.
A great deal of controversy has surrounded the release of the two men, who are both now 40. Although it was Thompson who was painted as the ringleader at the trial in 1993, it was Venables who has reoffended since his release in 2000.
A decade later, he was recalled to jail for possessing child abuse images. Then in 2017, he admitted to owning a paedophile manual that explained “how to have sex with little girls” as well as more than 1,000 child abuse images. In 2019, it was revealed that he was allowed to keep his anonymity in order to protect him from “serious violence”.
Thompson was released from a young offenders’ institution under license in 2001. Then, five years later, it was reported that he was in a relationship with a man who knows his true identity and is based in the North West of England.
