Ungeklärte Details im Mordfall des zweijährigen James Bulger
05.05.2011 um 20:48
Es sind echte Fotos von Jon Venables im Netz aufgetaucht - von einer Seite die mittlerweile down ist. Die Fotos sind von kurz vor der Verhaftung im Februar 2010. Auch weitere Details sind
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New details
The ban relating to Venables was partially lifted on Friday at the Old Bailey after he was jailed for the offences under the 1978 Protection of Children Act. The judge revealed that Venables had been living in Cheshire at the time of the offences, and that the case was dealt with by Cheshire police and Cheshire probation service.
It was also revealed that Cheshire police had produced a “threat assessment” to try to establish what could happen to Venables were his new identity revealed. That assessment concluded that Venables would face the highest possible risk of being attacked if his name was either published in the media or known elsewhere in society.
Police had even trained him in counter-surveillance after he was told he would have to “live and hold a lie” for the rest of his life. Venables worked full-time in a job with anti-social hours, earning close to the minimum wage, the court heard.
Then in 2007, he started drinking heavily and taking drugs, including cocaine and the recently-banned substance mephedrone.
On 20 September 2008, he was held on suspicion of affray over a street fight with a man who claimed Venables had attacked his girlfriend. Both men were charged with a public order offence, but this was later dropped.
Venables was formally warned by the Probation Service for breaking a “good behaviour” clause in his licence. Three months later, police cautioned him for possessing cocaine, and a requirement was added to his licence ordering him to address his alcohol and drug problems, the court was told.
It was not until February that it emerged Venables had been recalled to prison for breaching the conditions of his release. The Ministry of Justice refused to reveal any details, but the then Justice Secretary Jack Straw did say the recall was prompted by “extremely serious allegations”.
Venables was later charged with three offences.
The first involved downloading 57 indecent pictures of children on to his computer between February 2009 and February 2010. The second involved distributing three indecent photographs of children in February 2010, while a third involved distributing 42 images in February 2008. He pleaded guilty to these charges.
Some of the images involved children as young as two years old and some showed the rape of young girls. The Old Bailey also heard that in 2008 Venables had posed as a mother offering to sell her daughter for sex during three online chats.
It was on 12 February 1993 that two-year-old James Bulger was snatched from the New Strand Centre in Bootle, on Merseyside, while his mother Denise was shopping.
The moment was caught on CCTV and became the defining image of a horrific case. In the picture, it is Venables who is holding James’s hand.
‘Unparalleled evil’
Two days later, after a huge police search, James’s battered body was found on a railway line more than two miles away. A few days later, Venables and Thompson were arrested and charged – the youngest people to be accused of murder in the 20th Century.
They were tried as adults and made to stand in the dock away from their parents, while the judges and barristers wore full gowns and wigs. Some seven years later, the Court of Human Rights would rule that they should never have been tried in an adult court.
During the trial, the full horror of James’ death emerged. He had been tortured – beaten with bricks and an iron bar. He had so many injuries it was hard to determine which had been fatal.
In court, Venables was the more emotional of the two defendants, crying openly and leaning against the shoulder of his social worker.
Both boys were said to have had difficult home lives and both had been playing truant from school on the day of the killing.
They were convicted after a 17-day trial and only then were their names and faces revealed. Summing up, the judge, Mr Justice Morland, told them they had committed a crime of “unparalleled evil and barbarity”.
But he also laid blame with their parents, calling for a public debate about “the home background, upbringing, family circumstances, parental behaviour and relationships” of children who commit “grave crimes”.
The detention
Thompson was held at the Barton Moss secure unit in Manchester, which housed 14 young offenders and was divided into three wings, including one for girls. Venables was detained in Vardy House, a small eight-bedded unit at Red Bank secure unit in St. Helens on Merseyside — the same facility where, 25 years prior,Mary Bell had been held for half of her 12-year sentence. These locations were not publicly known until after the boys’ release.
Details of the boys’ lives were recorded twice daily on running sheets and signed by the member of staff who had written them. The records were stored at the units and copied to officials in Whitehall. The boys were taught to lie about their real names and to conceal the crime they had committed which resulted in them being in the units. Venables’ parents regularly visited their son at Red Bank, just as Thompson’s mother did — every three days — at Barton Moss.
The boys received education and rehabilitation; despite initial problems, Venables was said to have eventually made good progress at Red Bank, resulting in him being kept there for the full eight years, despite the facility only being a short-stay remand unit.Thompson was said, by a social worker who observed him for his eight years at Barton Moss, to be well-behaved and intelligent, and to have coped well with his situation, adjusting to life in the secure unit quickly, but never showing any remorse or interest in his crime. By the age of 14, Thompson was taken on outings to the theatre, the Lake District, and shopping centres, where he could spend some of the £60-per-month allowance he received. At the age of 16, he acquired a girlfriend, a fellow inmate who served time in the unit for one year. Venables was taken on trips to Wales, swimming in Wigan, and once to watch a Manchester United football match at Old Trafford. Both boys, however, were reported to suffer posttraumatic stress disorder, and Venables in particular told of experiencing nightmares and flashbacks to the murder
Venables’ relationships and other misdemeanours
In the aftermath of his imprisonment in 2010, allegations were reported in the media of Venables’ sexual encounters with a female member of staff at the secure unit he was detained in while serving his original murder sentence. In April 2011, these allegations were outlined in a Sunday Times Magazine article written by David James Smith, who had been following the Bulger case since the 1993 trial, and again later in a BBC documentary entitled Jon Venables: What Went Wrong?. Shortly before his 2001 release and when aged 17, Venables was alleged to have had sex with a woman who worked at the Red Bank secure unit where he was held. The female staff member was accused of sexual misconduct and suspended; she never returned to work at Red Bank.A spokesman for St Helens Borough Council denied that the incident had been covered up, saying: “All allegations were thoroughly investigated by an independent team on the orders of the Home Office and chaired by Arthur de Frischling, a retired prison governor.”
Venables began living independently in March 2002. Some time thereafter, he began a relationship with a woman who had a five-year-old child. It is not known whether Venables had already begun downloading child pornography at the time of dating the woman, though he denies having ever met the child. In 2005, when Venables was in his mid-20s, his probation officer met another girlfriend of his, who was aged 17. After a number of “young girlfriends” it was presumed that Venables was having a delayed adolescence.
After a period of apparently reduced supervision, Venables began excessively drinking, taking drugs, downloading child pornography, as well as visiting Merseyside (a breach of a fundamental condition of his licence). In 2008 a new probation officer noted that he spent “a great deal of leisure time” playing video games and on the Internet. In September that year, Venables was arrested on suspicion of affray after a fight outside a nightclub; he claimed he was acting in self-defence and the charges were later dropped after he agreed to go on an alcohol-awareness course. Three months later he was found to be in possession of cocaine; he was subjected to a curfew.
On two separate occasions, Venables revealed to a friend his true identity. It was on 22 February 2010 that Venables phoned his probation officer to report his fear that his identity had been compromised. Upon arriving at his flat, the officer found Venables attempting to remove or destroy the hard drive of his computer. This led to the confiscation of the computer and discovery of the child abuse images
May 2011
CHILD killer Jon Venables has lost two stone after becoming hooked on fitness training, the News of the World can reveal.
Vile Venables – convicted with pal Robert Thompson of the 1993 murder of toddler James Bulger – saw his weight balloon to 18 stone after he was recalled to jail last April when he was caught with kiddie porn on his computer.
He gorged on chocolate, sweets and crisps – then whined that being fat left him “feeling depressed”.
Concerned prison chiefs put him on a strict diet and paid for him to have personal training sessions for an hour a day, four times a week.
But Venables, 28, became obsessed with getting fit – and now spends three hours a day in the prison gym on the running and rowing machines and the cross trainer.
A source said: “Due to his size he can only jog for about 15 minutes before he has to stop and catch his breath. But he has lost a lot of weight.” Venables’ health kick comes ahead of a fresh bid for freedom.
He is due to face a parole board in the next few weeks – but sources say he is unlikely to be released.
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