The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (14 page)

Reporter.
Yeah, when, er, what, er, when did you first see the body?

Stee.
About, like, and then we ’eard dogs barking away the compounds …

Pitts.
In the police station.

Stee
.… so we went down, and we walked past it and never noticed it in the beginning, right, then we went down to have a look at the dogs, came back up, like that, and I jus’ seen it there, just in a like a coat, like an ’orse, with the organs all coming out.

Osty.
All the organs coming out, like big fat worms.

Stee.
So like and then I said, ’ere, look at that, doesn’t that look like a baby.

They all laugh, except the reporter, and Stee falls away, cracking up.

Stee.
Can we start it again?

Reporter.
Yeah, we’ll start it again. Just tell me how you came to discover the body.

Stee.
Right, we were walking along the railway and, er, like, we, erm
(laughing)
,
and he dropped something, and he said, oiyo, come back ’ere, I’ve lost me money. This was by the bridge, so we walked back, I said, and he was throwing all the bricks and all of that off the railway, like that, and someone went, you’re never gonna find this, and I went, here are, there it is, like that, and then, er.…

Pitts.
He says, I find everything, me, and then he walked up and then he found the baby.

Stee.
Like we had a look at the dogs and then found the baby.

Pitts.
Yeah, we walked past him, right past him we walked. They were about there, and we walked round past him.

Reporter.
So you walked past the child at first?

Pitts.
Yeah, we would’ve walked past it, only he says come and have a look at the dogs in the compound, there might be big dogs and that.

Reporter.
What did the body look like?

Stee.
Terrible. We couldn’t see the face. We couldn’t see the face.

Pitts.
Wrapped up in a little, like a coat.

Reporter.
OK, start again, tell me what the body was like when you found it.

Pitts.
Wrapped up in a coat, with all housebricks all round it and bars on it.

Stee.
And all organs hanging out from the waist.

Pitts.
Like just there, not pouring out, just all in a big, big like hill.

Stee.
And then he turned round, no, and then he went, it’s a cat. It’s a cat wrapped up. Then we seen its legs.

Pitts.
No, we said, no, it was you that said, well I said, it’s a dead cat, and you went no it’s not it’s sausages.

Reporter.
Tell me, sensibly now, tell me what did you think it was when you first saw it.

Stee.
A baby. I did. Honestly. Didn’t I say.…

Osty.
Socks and shoes.

Stee.
Shoes, yeah. ’Cos I said, it’s a baby, ’cos I seen the legs.

Pitts.
Then you see doll’s legs, and they all ran, and I said no, it’s not, and I walked back over and it had no pants on or nuttin’, and all dirt round its feet, so then I jus’ went, it’s a baby.

Stee.
And then we all ran towards the bridge, got down and went to Walton Lane.

Reporter.
What did you do once you’d found it? Who did you tell?

Stee.
The police. The police. Walton Lane, ’cos it was only the back.

Osty.
Next to it.

Reporter.
So tell me sensibly, were you surprised that you found something like this on the railway line?

Stee.
Yeah, very, like, ’cos you don’t really find dead bodies on the railway, do you. When we seen it we jus’ ran to the police station.

The reporter pauses for a moment or two. Children begin to gather round, encircling the boys, in front of the camera. They creep into the view of the camera in twos and threes. Eventually there are nearly 20 of them, all gathered around Osty, Pitts and Stee, jostling, pushing and laughing. One girl, in a red sweatshirt, has her headphones on, attached to a Walkman. In the fields beyond, a man is walking a dog.

Reporter.
So what did, er, what did you think when you found it? (
Pitts
looks
around
him.
)

Reporter.
Don’t worry about the people behind you. Be sensible. It’s not funny.

Stee.
He thought it was a dead cat wrapped up.

Pitts.
Doll’s legs.

Reporter.
Tell me, this one on the right here, tell me, what did you think when you first saw the body?

Osty.
Don’t know. All of us jus’ seen it and ran away.

Reporter.
Were you surprised that you found it?

Osty.
No.

Reporter.
So tell me, just once again, and as sensibly as you can, forgetting everyone around you, tell right from the beginning what happened, tell me really from the beginning what happened.

Stee.
We were walking along the railway … from the beginning?
The
reporter
nods.

Stee.
We were walking along the railway from our mates, then he dropped his money, and I found it. Then I said, erm, come on, let’s have a look for it, ’cos he was on the floor already, throwing the bricks and that up, and I said there it is, like that, picked it up, and I says, I find everything. Walked a bit further on and we ’eard dogs barking, didn’t we?

Osty.
So we went in and had a look.

Stee.
Went in and had a look at the dogs and that.

Pitts.
Just as we came out, as we went in we must have run through the middle of the body and the legs and everything, ’cos we all ran in to see the dogs, and as we came out, walkin,’ you could jus’ see it there on the floor, right there as you looked.
(To
the
children
around
him
) Go away.

Reporter.
Sensibly as you can, when did you first see the body?

Stee.
When I jus’ came out from the dogs. Looking at the dogs, that, I just seen it then.

Pitts.
Like, you jus’, as you’re walking like that, there’s a drop off a little wall. We looked down it, and jus’ there.

Reporter.
OK, thanks very much lads. Cheers. Can we just get a shot of you looking at your friend there? Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh, it’s serious. Look as if he’s talking. Don’t laugh. Fine. Good lads. And the same with you looking up at your mate there. Good lad.

The interview lasted for eight minutes, but only a couple of lines were broadcast.

*

Monday morning, eight o’clock, and all the officers who are taking a senior role in the Bulger inquiry are gathered in the officers’ dining room, upstairs at Marsh Lane, for a management briefing. The room has several tables pushed together to create a square, central table, around which the bosses are seated. It is not unlike a military Mess.

There will be two such briefings every day from now on, the second at eight o’clock each evening, followed by briefings for the whole inquiry team, at nine o’clock in the bar along the corridor.

Albert Kirby is now formally installed as the senior investigating officer, with Geoff MacDonald as his deputy. Albert will take sole responsibility for everything that happens. He carries the formatted Management Policy Book, in which he documents every, decision that is made, maintaining a complete record of the inquiry.

Geoff MacDonald has talked Albert Kirby and Jim Fitzsimmons through the post mortem, and Albert has decided to withhold the description of the injuries that James Bulger suffered from the Bulger family, from the press, the public, and the entire inquiry team, including most of the managers. The only detail that is officially released is that the body had been severed by a train.

Albert knows the family will have to be told eventually, but to do it now, he reasons, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them. Also, public feeling is already inflamed, and the disclosure of such horrendous information will only further incite emotion. The inquiry team has enough to handle already.

But the decision cannot prevent, and perhaps encourages, the rapid spread of rumour, which extrapolates from the known facts into lurid fantasy. The stories are always different, but none of them are true. Denise Bulger was out shoplifting when James was taken, and had to delay reporting James missing because she was getting rid of goods she had stolen. James was kept in a house and tortured before being left at the railway. He was abducted by boys for a paedophile ring. He was tied to a tree and beaten. He was strangled and set on fire. The genitals, the fingers, the head had been removed.

These tales will often begin, ‘Someone who knows a police officer told me.…’

The post mortem had shown that James had died from severe head injuries. There were multiple fractures of the skull, caused by a series of blows with heavy blunt objects. Death had occurred some time after the injuries were inflicted, but before the train had severed the body.

There were wounds all over the face and head; more than 20 separate bruises, scratches, abrasions and lacerations. A patterned bruise on the right
cheek suggested a blow from a shoe. The lower lip had been partly pulled away from the jaw, perhaps by a blow or a kick.

There were bruises, and some cuts, around the body, on the shoulders, chest, arms and legs. There was no conclusive evidence of any sexual assault, but there was a small area of haemorrhaging in the pelvis, near the rectum, and the foreskin appeared ‘abnormal’; it seemed to have been partly pulled back. There were linear abrasions across the buttocks, but these might have been caused by the body being dragged.

Brick dust and fragments were found on the body and in the clothing. There were no other injuries.

The managers in the dining room concentrated on the means which would lead to the identification of the two boys, and the gathering and examination of forensic evidence at the scene which would support a prosecution. There would be house to house inquiries, posters, the collection of last Friday’s truancy lists from local secondary schools, and a continual round of press conferences, fronted by Albert, to feed the media and maintain public interest. Someone, somewhere must recognise those boys.

To support the forensic efforts Albert decided that every suspect would be asked to give intimate samples. Blood, fingerprints, hair, nail-clipping and a photograph. Every suspect would be entered on HOLMES as a PDF. Personal Description File: surname, forenames, birthplace, birth date, age, sex, school, height, build, hair colour, hair type, eyes, complexion, facial hair, glasses, jewellery, accent, scars and marks.

This process of trawling, the painstaking method, was the reality of detective work. It always amused Jim Fitzsimmons watching that fella on the television, the one they’d been doing the wind-up on in the ads. John Thaw, yeah, Inspector Morse. He always sat there on his own and worked everything out. If only it was that easy. You couldn’t do it alone. You needed a system and the interaction of a team. And, these days, you needed a computer.

HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, had evolved out of the inquest into the large, major disasters of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation more than a decade ago. Human error and the inadequacies of old-fashioned policing had allowed Peter Sutcliffe to extend his series of killings long after he should have been identified as the Yorkshire Ripper.

A Home Office research unit had developed the HOLMES system as a programme which would allow all the information coming in to the incident room on a major inquiry to be stored and indexed on computers, with a complete facility for cross-referencing. In theory, no detail could be lost, ignored or its potential significance overlooked, as had happened with Sutcliffe.

The HOLMES procedure was that all information would go to receivers
for assessment, before being passed on to the indexers to be entered into the computer. If an action had been generated it would go to the allocators who assigned officers to the inquiry. The officers brought the result of the inquiry back to the receiver.

To Albert Kirby, after 26 years in the CID, there was nothing to beat HOLMES. As a management tool it was absolutely first class. Priceless. What it had saved in time and efficiency was tremendous. As the SIO he could never be expected to know everything that was happening at any one time. With the safeguards of HOLMES he could at least know that nothing would be missed.