The grainy image of the surveillance camera was stored in the collective memory of Britain: a small child holding another’s hand in a shopping center near Liverpool.
The seemingly harmless images, which were reported in the news in the days after the disappearance of James Bulger, 2 years old, hid the truth of what had happened hours after he appeared in the security cameras. On February 12, 1993, the boy had gone with his mother to the store to buy pork chops for dinner. While paying at the counter, Denise Fergus let go of her son’s hand to look better for the change stored in some corner of her bag. A split-second decision that she would never forget. When she looked again, her son James was gone.
The search for the child developed frantically throughout the United Kingdom, evolving from the search of a missing child in a shopping center to a search for a kid kidnapped in Liverpool and, finally, to search for the two children who were seen in the surveillance images walking James out of the establishment, and they were soon suspected of torturing the child to death.
After they had left the mall, they took him for a long walk, according to The Washington Post in 1993. The two children zigzagged through the streets of the city and traveled a little over 3 kilometers, carrying little James near Leeds and the Liverpool channel.
While they were doing it, they invented stories for all the passers-by who asked them why two 10-year-old boys were carrying a 2-year-old boy while he was crying and staggering because of the blows to his head. However, nobody stopped them. They reached a railway embankment. There, out of the public view, they threw paint into the child’s eyes, stoned him with bricks and beat him to death with an iron pipe. His corpse left on the tracks.
Fergus never wanted to know the details. She also did not want to attend the three-week trial that was held for the 10-year-old children, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who became the youngest convicted murderers in Britain in nearly 250 years. She avoided the media, after the crime had quickly become one of the most chilling in the history of England. But some things never went away. The images of the surveillance camera or its dramatic representations appeared in several places that Fergus hated to find: in a video game about crime, in a police program from Australian television and, more recently, in a short film nominated for the Oscars: “Detainment“
On Tuesday, after the announcement that the film had been chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a finalist in the category of Best Live Action Short Film, Mrs. Fergus made her discomfort known internationally.
The 30-minute film, produced and written by the Irishman Vincent Lambe, focuses on the police interrogations of Venables and Thompson, and is also based on the actual transcripts from the interviews. But for Fergus and James’ father, Ralph Bulger, the film is deeply disturbing, made worse by the fact that both say they were not consulted or informed about the film before its release.
In a statement widley amplified on Tuesday through Twitter, Fergus drew attention to a request on Change.org, urging to please consider removing the film from the Oscar nomination and that the movie not be shown in theaters. Since early Wednesday, more than 97,000 people have signed it.
“I can not express how disgusted and upset I am at this so called film that has been made and now nominated for an Oscar,” Fergus said on Twitter. “It’s one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James family, but another to have a child re-enact the final hours of James’s life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my have to relive this all over again!”
This is all I want to say at present. pic.twitter.com/GbyshtVoa9
— Denise Fergus (@Denise_fergus) January 22, 2019
In an interview with The Mirror newspaper, Ralph Bulger said he had accepted the fact that articles about his son’s murder were never going to be missing, “but making such a comprehensive film with James’s killers is devastating.”
Lambe apologized on January 6 for not consulting the situation with the parents after it had been revealed that “Detainment” was on the Oscar list, provoking the anger of the Bulger family and their supporters. Lambe offered to donate any benefit from the film to the James Bulger Memorial Trust set up by Fergus, saying: “I have great sympathy for the Bulger family and I am very sorry for any discomfort the movie may have caused them.”
But he also denied that sympathizing with the killers was his intention. Previously, he had told the Awards Circuit in a question and answer session that he “did not intend to make excuses. But it humanizes them.” He said he became interested in the case long after it happened, after reading the records and delving into the murderers’ background, Lambe was 12 years old when they condemned Thompson and Venables, he mentioned in the interview, and Before I started to investigate, everything I had heard about the case concluded that the two children had done it because they were bad.
#Detainment featured in The Sunday Independent – 13/01/2019 pic.twitter.com/uE0OQx9Moc
— Vincent Lambe (@vincentlambe1) January 20, 2019
The United Kingdom had struggled to attribute any other motive to the atrocious crime. In fact, no cause was ever revealed, fueling the unbridled fears that existed among the parents, who thought that if they neglected their children for a moment, they could become victims of a senseless murder. The judge who presided over the case suggested at the end of the trial that “violent films” could be part of the explanation, refusing to “pass judgment on his education,” the Guardian reported at the time.
That’s exactly what Lambe wanted to explore, according to what he said in one of his last interviews. He noticed that Thompson, whose father had left when he was young, was often beaten by older siblings. The Post reported in 1993 that Venables’ parents were divorced and that he was reportedly a “slow learner.”
“While it is a painfully difficult case to understand, I think we have a responsibility to try to understand why it happened,” said Lambe, who added that “the film has been criticized for humanizing murderers, but if we can not accept that they are human beings, we will never begin to understand what could have led them to commit such a horrible crime.” Thompson and Venables were released from prison under various conditions in 2001 and from there they received new identities. Venables was arrested twice, in 2010 and 2017, for possession of child pornography, The Independent reported .
Since the death of her son, Fergus, who has said she could never forgive Thompson and Venables, has been protective of James’ memory. In 2007, when she learned that a computer game based on the television series “Law & Order” used the grainy surveillance images of James’ kidnapping as a visual clue, her outrage caused it to be removed from the shelves in the UK in 2009.
The petition she and her supporters created to oppose the Oscar nomination for “Detainment,” she said during an interview last Tuesday, “has been ignored by the Academy, as have my feelings.” The Academy has not commented on it.
