My Son, James Bulger: ‘I Don’t Have the Energy for Anger Any More’ – Denise Fergus’s Battle Cry 32 Years Later as Killers Walk Free

In the quiet suburb of Kirkby, where the scars of a nation’s deepest wound refuse to fade, Denise Fergus sits in her modest living room, gazing at a large portrait of a cherubic two-year-old boy with tousled hair and an impish grin. It’s James – her James – forever frozen in time, a ghost who haunts not with malice, but with the unrelenting ache of what was stolen. Thirty-two years have passed since February 12, 1993, when toddler James Bulger was lured away from a Bootle shopping centre by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and subjected to a brutality that shattered the illusion of childhood innocence. Tortured, battered with bricks and iron bars, and left on railway tracks to be severed by a freight train, James’s murder wasn’t just a crime; it was a rupture in the collective psyche, a grim reminder that evil can wear the face of schoolboys.

Today, at 51, Denise Fergus – once a 25-year-old mother juggling benefits and nappies in a working-class Liverpool enclave – speaks with a voice tempered by decades of grief, advocacy, and quiet fury. “I don’t have the energy for anger any more,” she tells me, her eyes welling but her jaw set. “It’s not that the hate’s gone; it’s just… exhausted. But I’ll fight till my last breath for James, for every family left in the shadows.” Her words, delivered over tea in her home, echo the raw candor of her 2018 memoir, I Let Him Go, but now carry the weight of fresh betrayal. Just weeks ago, on September 15, 2025, the Parole Board quietly confirmed that Venables – the more volatile of the killers, who has twice been recalled to prison for child sex offenses – had been deemed “no longer a risk” and released under a new identity, his third since 2001. Thompson, the supposed instigator, remains free, living a low-profile life in Canada under perpetual protection. For Denise, it’s the final twist of the knife: “They walk free, while my boy lies in a grave. Where’s the justice in that?”

The story begins in the grey drizzle of a Merseyside afternoon. Denise, then Denise Bulger, had taken James and his older brother to the New Strand Shopping Centre to buy an ice cream and escape the chill. For mere seconds – “that split second,” she calls it – she turned to rummage in her purse at a butcher’s counter. CCTV footage later captured the horror in grainy black-and-white: Venables and Thompson, truanting from school, spotting James and beckoning him with a deceptive charm. Over the next 90 minutes, they paraded him through Bootle’s streets like a trophy – past 38 oblivious witnesses who mistook the trio for brothers – before dragging him to an isolated canal under a railway bridge. What followed was an orgy of savagery: kicks to the head, batteries hurled like missiles, a 22-pound iron bar crashing down 17 times on his skull. James’s final moments, inferred from the autopsy, were a symphony of terror – poisoned with blue paint in his eyes, his body arranged on the tracks as if to disguise the murder as an accident. “If I’d taken the right turn that day,” Denise reflects, her voice cracking, “I’d have seen them leading him away. Four minutes – that’s all it took to lose him forever.”

The discovery of James’s mutilated body two days later ignited national revulsion. Flowers piled high at the Walton Lane railway, vigils swelled in cathedrals, and Prime Minister John Major commissioned a rare House of Commons debate on “moral decline.” The killers were caught swiftly – a tip-off from a missing-person poster – but the trial at Preston Crown Court in November 1993 was a farce of adult justice imposed on children. Tried as adults in a packed courtroom, the boys, now 11, were shielded by screens but forced to endure a three-week spectacle that the European Court of Human Rights later deemed “severely intimidating” and unfair. Guilty verdicts rang out like gunshots: “Guilty of murder.” Denise, heavily pregnant with her second son Michael, couldn’t attend, shielded by doctors fearing miscarriage. “I thought justice was done,” she says now, bitterly. “But eight years? That’s what they got – detention until 2001, then new lives, new names, taxpayer-funded security. I got a lifetime sentence.”

Released at 18, Venables and Thompson vanished into anonymity, protected by a worldwide injunction against identification. Thompson, the “ringleader,” reportedly thrives in Canada, married with a family, his past a sealed vault. Venables, however, has spiraled: Jailed in 2010 and 2017 for possessing indecent images of children, he was recalled yet again in 2023 for breaching parole terms. Each revelation has reopened Denise’s wounds. “One laid flowers at the tracks, knowing he’d killed my baby,” she revealed in her book, a chilling detail unearthed years later. Stalkers have plagued her – a woman jailed in 2016 for tormenting her online as “James’s ghost,” a man imprisoned for following her home. Yet Denise channeled her pain into purpose. Remarried to Stuart Fergus in 2000, she bore three more sons – Harvey, Elliot, and Bobby – who grew up with James’s portrait as their “big brother.” “James is never far from our minds,” she insists. “I brought the lads up knowing him, even though they never met him. We talk about his cheeky laugh, his love for Postman Pat.”

Her advocacy ignited in 1999, when she and James’s father, Ralph Bulger, sued the government at the European Court, demanding victims’ voices in sentencing. Though unsuccessful, it birthed the James Bulger Memorial Trust in 2012, aiding crime victims and bullied children. Denise lobbied Parliament for harsher youth penalties, testified before inquiries, and even confronted Tony Blair in 1999, her plea for lifelong incarceration falling on deaf ears. “They gave the killers ‘the best of everything’ – therapy, education, freedom,” she seethed in a 2010 Guardian interview. “Sorry will never be enough.” By 2018, marking 25 years, her ITV documentary James Bulger: A Mother’s Story laid bare the “never-ending grief,” earning praise for its unflinching humanity. “He still gets talked about every day,” she told Trevor McDonald, setting an extra place at Christmas dinner.

But 2025 has tested her resolve like never before. Venables’s latest release, announced sans fanfare amid a backlog of parole cases, prompted a petition surge: 250,000 signatures demanding transparency. Denise, now a grandmother, launched a blistering campaign – #JusticeForJames2025 – vowing to “shake the system.” She’s penned op-eds for The Times, demanding the injunction’s lift if reoffending recurs, and rallied MPs for a Victims’ Rights Bill overhaul. “The pain continues,” she says, echoing her 2018 words. “Internet laws don’t protect enough; families like mine struggle in silence.” Her trust has expanded, offering counseling hotlines and legal aid, funded by book proceeds and donations. Stuart, her rock, still blacks out graphic news clippings. “Peace? Yes,” she smiles faintly, completing his thought from years ago. “But not without accountability.”

As winter looms over Liverpool’s cobbled streets, Denise stands at James’s grave, blue teddy in hand – the emblem of his trust. Thirty-two years on, the boy who loved slides and songs endures not as a statistic, but as a catalyst. “They took his life,” she whispers, “but not his legacy.” In a world quick to forget, Denise Fergus ensures James Bulger’s story screams: For every silent family, there must be a battle cry. Will the system finally listen? Or will the killers’ shadows eclipse the light she fights to keep burning?