James Patrick Bulger (1990 – 1993) was a two-year-old child from Kirkby, Merseyside, England, who was abducted, tortured and murdered. The perpetrators were two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Bulger disappeared from the New Strand Shopping Centre, while accompanying his mother. His mutilated body was found on a railway line in nearby Walton. Thompson and Venables were charged with the abduction and murder. It was later revealed by one of the boys that they were planning to find a child to abduct, lead it to the busy road alongside the mall, and push him into the path of oncoming traffic. The boys took Bulger on a 2.5-mile (4.0 km) walk across Liverpool, leading him to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal where he was dropped on his head and suffered injuries to his face. The boys joked about pushing Bulger into the canal. One of the boys threw blue Humbrol modelling paint into Bulger’s left eye. They kicked him and hit him with bricks, stones and a 22-pound (10.0 kg) iron bar, described in court as a railway fishplate. They placed batteries in his mouth and up his anus. Bulger suffered ten skull fractures as a result of the iron bar striking his head.
Before they left him, the boys laid Bulger across the railway tracks and weighed his head down with rubble, in the hope that a train would hit him and make his death appear to be an accident. After Bulger’s killers left the scene, his body was cut in half by a train. Bulger’s severed body was discovered two days later. A forensic pathologist testified that he had died before he was struck by the train. The boys were found guilty of murder on November 24, 1993 and spent 8 years in detention for this crime. They are free now with lifelong anonymity.
