It’s a crime no one believed kids could commit: a toddler, lured from a busy mall by two 10-year-olds, is savagely beaten to death and left on a railroad track to be sliced in half by a train.
Now, the schoolboy thrill-killers responsible for the 1993 slaying in Liverpool may be released within days with new identities – spurring outrage from every corner of the globe.
The British government is expected to announce that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who turn 19 in August, will be moved to a halfway house after serving only eight years for the murder of 2-year-old James Patrick “Jamie” Bulger.
Secret parole-board hearings were held yesterday for Venables, who could be released if the board decides he’s no longer depraved.
Thompson is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow.
By next week, the two could have a fresh start, thanks to a High Court ruling that would protect their identities for life and allow them 24-hour police protection.
The police detail would cost British taxpayers $750 million.
Jamie’s parents, Ralph Bulger and Denise Fergus, said they are outraged the boy’s killers might get a new lease on life.
“Denise would like to see the government try to explain and justify exactly what they’ll do with these two if they are released,” a spokeswoman for the Bulger family’s support group told the Daily Mail of London.
Jamie was a month short of his third birthday when he was abducted while his mother was buying meat at a butcher shop on Feb. 12, 1993.
Haunting security-camera footage showed James trustingly being led away, hand-in-hand with an older boy.
In the following hours, Jamie was dragged nearly three miles across Liverpool to a secluded railroad track, where the boys beat him with bricks, a tire iron, their fists and feet, and poured paint in his eyes.
Eight years later, the British Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, requested the killers’ release, suggesting they’d likely degenerate in the “corrosive atmosphere” of an adult prison.
The boys are said to be terrified they’ll be killed if they are set free.
Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, president of the British Family Division, said they must be protected because there was a “possibility of death from vengeful members of the public or from the Bulger family.”
Ralph Bulger has already threatened to “hunt down” his son’s killers.