JAMES BULGER 30 YEARS ON - THE CRIME THAT SHOCKED WORLD

THREE DECADES ON, THE MURDERED TODDLER'S MOTHER CONTINUES HER CRUSADE FOR CHANGE

-  Michael Crooks

“It had been decided that eight years was all my baby’s life was worth,” said Denise. “It was a disgrace.”

On February 12, 1993, mother-of-one Denise Bulger was inside a butcher's store in a shopping centre in Liverpool, northern England, when she let go of her toddler's O hand to pay for some chops. By the time she finished, her 2-year-old boy, James Bulger, was no longer by her side. After a quick scan of the area in the Strand Shopping Centre, the desperate mum informed security her child was missing, then continued a frantic search of her own throughout the centre.

"Everywhere I looked I prayed that I would see my boy's face peeking out from under a fitting-room curtain or see him running towards me as he spotted me through the crowd," Denise wrote in her 2018 memoir, I Let Him Go.

But by then, James was already on a journey away from the shopping centre, abducted by two 10-year-old boys in a murder case that left a family devastated, and a nation in shock and disbelief. Thirty years ago, in a sickening crime that sparked scenes of vengeful fury in England, schoolboys Robert Thompson and Jon Venables took James on a 4km walk to his brutal death.