The little boys who became Britain's most notorious childhood killers: How Robert Thompson developed streak of cruelty and Jon Venables came from broken home before they kidnapped and murdered James Bulger in crime that shocked the nation

The savage murder of James Bulger in 1993 by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson was a crime that horrified the nation and left the two-year-old's family utterly broken.

In February 1993, the toddler was snatched from his mother at New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, Merseyside, after she took her eyes off him for a matter of seconds.

Thompson and Venables, then aged just ten, subjected James to a series of horrifying assaults before dropping a 22lb railway fishplate on his head.

They then dumped his body on a train line, where it was found two days later.

This week, Venables, now 41, had his bid to be released from prison rejected by the Parole Board. He was initially freed in 2001 but has since been returned behind bars twice for possessing indecent images of children.

Thompson, who was also released in 2001 and was at the time considered to be the ringleader in James's murder, was reported in 2006 to be living in a stable gay relationship in Canada with a man who was aware of his true identity. 

In November 1993, the Daily Mail revealed the full backgrounds of the young killers, and highlighted a home video showing them happily playing at their school, filmed less than a year before their crimes.

The scenes revealed nothing that would mark them out as future murderers.  

Broken Homes, Shattered Lives

THE EVIL AND THE INNOCENT: ALONE THEY MIGHT HAVE SURVIVED, BUT TOGETHER THEY BECAME SAVAGES - Daily Mail, November 25, 1993 

The home video was recorded to mark the 97th anniversary of St Mary's School in Walton and showed the pupils laughing happily at their party. 

Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, in collars and ties and sporting short neat haircuts, played easily with their classmates. Certainly, there was nothing to mark them out as future murderers. 

Yet within a year of this video being made, they were awaiting trial for a crime brutal beyond comprehension. 

Every parent will ask how any child could commit such merciless violence against another. 

There can be no conclusive answer, but in children so young, their upbringings must be vital. 

For Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, their lives were in disarray long before the murder.

After his father ran off, Robert developed a streak of cruelty 

Robert Thompson, detectives believe, was the originator of the plot to abduct a child. 

It was he who turned to Venables in the Strand Shopping Centre on seeing another child, saying: 'Let's get him lost outside so when he goes into the road he will get knocked over.' 

Throughout the case, he has been the more defiant and hard-faced of the pair, maintaining patent lies about James Bulger's abduction and killing. 

While Venables slumped in his courtroom seat, head hung low in shame, Thompson maintained an arrogant air which even his legal team found remarkable. 

While harrowing tapes of police interviews with the boys were played, he yawned, drummed on the edge of the dock, knotted his handkerchief and shined his ring. 

The fifth of Ann Marie Thompson's seven children, he comes from a home characterised by disruption and ill-discipline. 

Typical were the comments of neighbours all around them. 'A horrible family,' said one. 'A really nasty child, full of cheek,' said another. 

Thompson's arrest, and the subsequent departure of the family, were mourned by nobody. 

The defining moment in his life appears to have been the breakdown of the family. His father Robert apparently ran off with another woman in October 1988, following a caravan holiday in North Wales.

He had been a hard father, often beating his sons with a pole, according to neighbours, but his departure appears to have precipitated a total breakdown in the family. 

Six days after he left, a fire mysteriously destroyed the family home in Belmont Road, Anfield, a mile from Liverpool Football Club. 

Ann and the children were moved into a hostel for the homeless and then to Walton Village in Walton, Liverpool, where she became known as a heavy drinker. 

At the Top House pub in Walton, neighbours recalled fights with other women and, on one occasion, other men. 

One man who commented on her clothes was flattened with a single punch to the jaw, according to a family friend. 

The children, cowed by the temper of their recently departed father, were well behaved and decently dressed at first, but quickly became more unruly. 

A typical problem family, it was not long before they came to the attention of social workers. 

The second eldest, David, then 16, was the first to go into care, according to neighbours, because of stealing. 

Philip, then 14, was next, then Ian, 15, regarded as the brightest of the boys, followed him after requesting to go into care when he was beaten with a two-foot length of garden cane.

But neighbours said Ian had asked to go into care after seeing the tracksuits and expensive training shoes given to Philip. 

His departure sparked a change of attitude in Ann, who feared she would lose other children if she continued to physically punish them. 

The children sensed this and taunted her. Robert, in particular, would challenge Ann: 'You can't batter me cos I'll go to the busies (the police).' 

Ann's best friend at the time said: 'If she made a mistake, it was over discipline. I'd tell her to give them a battering — I'd even volunteer to do it — but she was scared stiff of the social services. 

'Robbie and the others knew it. They knew there were no consequences for bad behaviour. 

'It was a mistake because on the rare occasion she hit Robbie, it stopped him playing up straight away.' 

She tried to keep Robert indoors by hiding his shoes but he would steal out in her slippers and borrow friends' shoes. 

He had good reason to fear reproach from adults because he was a badly behaved child from a very early age.

He was marked out among neighbours as a cruel child, seemingly unable to play with other children without reducing them to tears. Tackled by other parents, he would say: 'That's the way my brothers play with me.' 

He and his brothers made the lives of near neighbours a misery. A neighbour said: 'Robbie was always lighting fires in the back garden, burning batteries and aerosol cans with other kids. 

'I'd try to tell him off and he'd say: "I can do what the .... I like in my back garden." 

'All the Thompsons could turn on you very quick. I had given them money for sweets, food, even bottles of drink but they were never really grateful.' 

There were chilling portents of the treatment of James Bulger in his behaviour towards other children. 

A friend took sympathy because he always seemed to be alone and invited him to play with her son, James. 

Playing in her backyard, he looked up one day and said, poignantly, 'I wish you were my mum.' 

Her generosity was repaid by Thompson going missing with James and her baby daughter for hours at a time. 

'It scares me silly when I think of what happened to little James,' she said. She noted how her own son's behaviour deteriorated. 

When she grounded him, Thompson told him how to sneak out of a back window.

She rescued a cat from Thompson when she found him about to tie it to a railway line. 

He bragged about how he had drowned pups born to the family mongrel. 

She banned her son from seeing him when she noticed sores on Thompson's mouth which she attributed to solvent abuse. 

'I chased Robbie away from the house and he said he'd break my windows and steal the pet rabbit. And he meant it. 

'There was something very sadistic about him well before this case. I told Ann he was out of hand but she didn't like it. 

'She thought people were picking on her kids so she stuck up for them, even if they were wrong.'

The impression of sadism was supported by Thompson's friend Michael Gee, who often played truant with him. 

He revealed they would go out and shoot pigeons with an air gun. 

'Robert would lay some bread down, shoot them and then stamp on them when they were wriggling about,' said Michael. 

'I liked him at first but if I didn't want to steal something, he would batter me. I was frightened of him.' 

Ironically, Thompson had shown early promise at school. One report said he had the potential to be very bright and a high achiever. 

But as his behaviour deteriorated, truancy reached chronic proportions. In the two years before the killing, a total of 250 half days were missed. 

Council officials insist they followed standard procedures, involving home visits, letters to his mother and reports to the local authority, but none of them worked.

Ann tried taking him to school herself but he would avoid her by running out of the house before she was awake. 

Dejected, she told one friend: 'They can all go into care. I'm fed up with the lot of them.' 

She was also preoccupied with the impending birth of her seventh baby, a son by her new boyfriend Bobby Gill. 

Displaying baby Ben after birth, she told a friend: 'I don't care about the other boys. This one is going to be different, better.' 

In the autumn term, the truancy continued: 49 half days in the autumn term and 37 out of 60 in the first half of the spring term. 

With Ann concentrating on the new baby, Robert spent even more time away from school and out of the house. 

Whenever he was told off, Jon would hurl himself at the walls

Jon Venables, perhaps inevitably, is the classic product of a broken home. 

He was born in 1982, the third child of Neil and Susan Venables, whose marriage was already on the rocks when he arrived. 

At odds over Mrs Venables's friendship with a number of men, they divorced when Jon was just three, an event which assumed pivotal importance in his life. 

Mrs Venables took the children and moved to Norris Green, two miles from the old family home in Walton. 

On the surface, the pleasant terrace home in tree-lined Scarsdale Road should have been a better place to raise children. 

But friends noticed what they called an atmosphere of neglect in the absence of a father figure.

Jon's older brother Mark was sent to a special school, where his learning difficulties could be tackled, and was soon joined by their sister Michelle, leaving Jon as the only child receiving a mainstream education. 

His behaviour quickly deteriorated. 

He would steal from local sweet shops, treating his mother's attempts at discipline with contempt. 

If she grounded him, he would run from the front door, kicking it for good measure on his way out. 

Friends recall one occasion when his mother chased him up a tree and fell to the ground in agony. 

Poor behaviour manifested itself in battles with neighbouring children during games of football, basketball and kicking rounders, a variation on the traditional game involving a football instead of a bat and ball. 

Jon's favourite trick was a kick in the shins followed quickly by a punch to the rib cage. 

If he didn't get his way, he would burst into tears before getting the family Rottweiler, Blackie, to bark at other terrified youngsters. 

Complaints to his mother were invariably met with abuse, according to neighbours. 

One said: 'Mrs Venables was not with us at all. Jon would throw stones and give you unbelievable cheek. 

If I told him off, he would put his hands over his eyes as if he could shut me out. His mother couldn't be told her kids were in the wrong ever — she was just so aggressive.' 

Another neighbour used to take the children in when they arrived home from school to find no one in. 

'They would be out in the street all hours, so I would take them in and give them lemonade,' said Sarah Ogden. 

'I have to say we didn't come to an arrangement over this — mum simply wasn't there, and I stepped in to help.' 

Neighbours noted a procession of men friends for Mrs Venables. 

She was a regular visitor to local pubs, drinking lager, and vodka and tonic. 

At a New Year's Eve party, Jon developed a severe headache after staying up late, but his mother ignored suggestions to take him home. 

Another mother at the party, Susan McCrossan, recalled: 'He got worse and had to lie down. She was pouring drink into herself like there was no tomorrow.' 

At Broad Square primary school Jon became known for causing disturbances and trying to duck the blame. 

When told off he would go berserk, hurling himself against desks, tables and walls. 

One teacher said: 'He was the strangest child I have ever had in my class. He demanded attention all the time and if he did not get it he would throw the most outrageous tantrums. 

'He would literally throw himself around the room, banging off the walls and furniture.' 

He was thrown out of the school in June 1991 after trying to garrotte another child with a ruler. 

So intense was his assault that it took two teachers to haul him off, and staff later told police they were unsure how far Jon would have gone. 

Mrs Venables considered enrolling Jon at the same special school as Mark and Michelle, but her request was refused. 

Instead, it was decided he should go to St Mary's Church of England School in Walton. 

To help him settle in, Jon was invited to spend occasional nights and weekends with his father nearby. It was to prove a fateful decision. 

The house was just a few hundred yards from the home of Robert Thompson, who also attended St Mary's. The pair became firm friends. 

At first, school staff noted an improvement in Jon's behaviour, attributed to the presence of a male teacher, one of the few male figures in his life. 

Neighbours, well used to the poor reputation of Thompson, his brothers and sisters, tried to warn Mr Venables that their friendship would come to no good. 

'You want to stop your lad playing, with that Thompson kid,' one friend recalled telling him as they looked out of a window at the duo in the street below. 

But the friendship grew when both were kept back a year because of poor performance. 

It was a humiliation which exacerbated their hatred of school and led to more and more truancy. 

Venables was marked absent for 50 half-days in the autumn term last year. 

Mr Venables had now moved into the more comfortable home of his own father, who had just died, and Jon moved in with him full time. 

Friends insist Mr Venables, an out of work handyman now aged 40, was a devoted father, buying Jon a computer games system, CD player and video recorder. 

At Christmas, all three children received new bicycles. But if he was kind, he was also perhaps unwise in his choice of entertainment. 

He insists he did not allow Jon to watch horror videos, but the Daily Mail has seen evidence that Jon may have had access to the most graphic of films. 

Jon lent a home-made tape to one of his best friends, seven-year-old Paul, featuring horror films Alien Nation and Witchboard. 

The tape's label reveals the films had been recorded over the notorious video nasty, I Spit On Your Grave — and it is marked 'uncut version'. 

Paul's mother, Karen, noted that Jon was developing a cruel streak, particularly towards animals. 

She was horrified when her Paul showed her how Jon had taught him a way to snare and kill wild birds using a length of string and breadcrumbs as a lure. 

Jon's parents, however, seemed more concerned about the effect of his friendship with Thompson.

Mr Venables had cut Jon's truancies dramatically by collecting him every afternoon from school, and they had decided to move him to a new school in the summer of this year. 

But on Friday, February 12, he played truant again, and James Bulger died. 

When Mrs Venables found her son in the local video shop, she beat him and took him to Walton Lane police station for a dressing down. 

But she was so oblivious of his real activities that when detectives came to arrest him, she assumed it was to deliver a further truancy reprimand. 

Two days earlier, her lack of knowledge had been betrayed when she told a friend: 'I don't understand the parents who are shielding the kids that killed James Bulger. What they are doing is terrible.'