4. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson (both 10 years old) had been stealing things all day at the shopping center — candy, a troll doll, some batteries, a can of blue paint, and other incidentals. Why did they decide to steal 2 year-old James Bulger? Was it a plot or a sudden, overwhelming compulsion? Once they had him, they didn’t know what to do with him. They could have easily discarded him, leaving him alone on the sidewalk by a shop where someone would discover the crying baby. But Jon and Robert, like children who would rather destroy their own possessions than give them to another, murdered the little boy. James’s parents would never see their baby alive again. The video cameras at the mall caught several images of James Bulger in the hands of his killers, frozen in time. He was to be taken on a long, aimless walk, cruelly tortured along the way. James was senselessly beaten to death by his ten-year-old captors, who callously abandoned him on the railroad tracks.
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