Murder Of James Bulger
James Patrick Bulger (16 March 1990 – 12 February 1993) was a boy from Kirkby, England, who was murdered on 12 February 1993, when aged two. He was abducted, tortured and murdered by two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson (born 23 August 1982) and Jon Venables (born 13 August 1982). Bulger disappeared from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, near Liverpool, while accompanying his mother. His mutilated body was found on a railway line two-and-a-half miles (4 km) away in Walton, two days after his murder. Thompson and Venables were charged on 20 February 1993 with Bulger's abduction and murder.
The pair were found guilty on 24 November 1993, making them the youngest convicted murderers in modern English history. They were sentenced to custody until they reached adulthood, initially until the age of 18, and were released on a lifelong licence in June 2001. In 2010 Venables was returned to prison for violating the terms of his licence of release.
The case has prompted widespread debate on the issue of how to handle young offenders when they are sentenced or released from custody.
Read more about Murder Of James Bulger: The Murder, Subsequent Events, Depictions of The Case in The Media
Famous quotes containing the words murder of, murder and/or james:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)
“As I sat before the fire on my fir-twig seat, without walls above or around me, I remembered how far on every hand that wilderness stretched, before you came to cleared or cultivated fields, and wondered if any bear or moose was watching the light of my fire; for Nature looked sternly upon me on account of the murder of the moose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business.”
—William James (1842–1910)