Beyond belief... Sadly, revisited.

by Sue Russell
WCI Guest Contributor

Do you think British taxpayers should have to pay nearly $400,000 to hide the identity of someone who, as a child, committed one of the most horrendous crimes in modern British history? Do you support the government giving this notorious baby-killer another chance? And just how long do you think he should be protected?

In February 1993, British toddler Jamie Bulger (left) was abducted during a Friday trip to a Merseyside shopping mall after briefly straying from his mother. By the next day, police were scrutinizing fuzzy mall surveillance camera footage in utter disbelief. Two-year-old Jamie, in his blue anorak, was being led away not by a hardened pedophile but by two youths. Holding one’s hand, Jamie cheerfully toddled off, away from his mother forever.

His abductors, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, betrayed his innocent trust in the most ghastly way imaginable. Truants and practiced shoplifters, they dipped in and out of shops and walked two miles with Jamie. At a local canal, they dropped him on his head, leaving him bruised and crying. Further on, at some isolated railway tracks, they unleashed unimaginable violence, beating Jamie with bricks and an iron bar. They also removed his sneakers, socks, trousers and underpants. Forensics experts suspected sexual assault based on suspicious injuries.

Before leaving Jamie for dead, they covered his bleeding head with bricks, then lay his body across the tracks, knowing a train would come. Back home, Jon and Robert were just kids in hot water for playing hooky.

Jon Venables was labeled the “follower,” yet two years earlier, he had pinned a boy with a ruler against his throat until two teachers pulled him off.

Sunday brought a gruesome discovery. Jamie’s upper body was on the tracks; his naked lower half lay nearby. His little face bore a shoe print (later linked to Robert’s shoe.) Jamie survived the initial attack, police say, but mercifully died on the tracks before the train hit him.

Later, Robert Thompson took a single rose and joined mourners at the crime scene.

Police descended on the boys’ homes following a tip. They questioned them but never really suspected them. Jamie’s killers, they assumed, must be 13 or 14 years old at minimum. But there was blood on their shoes, and soon the dreadful truth was inescapable.

Jon Venables (at the time of the murder, booking photo below left) and Robert Thompson, both 10 years old, became the youngest people charged with murder in England and Wales in the 20th century.

They’d talked about pushing the infant into the water, but obviously one or both wanted something more sadistic and personal. We still don’t know why they did it, but Jon was bullied, reportedly cut himself with scissors, and envied the attention given his two special needs siblings.

The killing’s sexual element couldn’t be denied, but Jon and Robert were little kids. However, that November, they were tried as adults. In Britain, 10 is the age of criminal responsibility. Sentenced to at least eight years, their release would hinge upon rehabilitation and no longer being a danger to society.

In June 2001, they were freed with new identities, new birth certificates, new secret residences and, spy-like, new back stories, witness protection program-type scenarios usually reserved for mobsters.

Many Britons were out for blood; Jon and Robert had to be protected. They were, essentially, on lifetime probation and could be yanked back into custody immediately if ever they broke its rules.

Thompson stayed under the radar, but in 2008, Jon Venables was in a drunken scuffle and caught carrying a little cocaine. Reportedly, probation  officers knew Jon had a drug and drinking problem, and they let him be.

Then Venables adopted a disturbing online persona: “Dawn,” a pedophile mother willing to pimp out her young daughter. As Dawn, Jon lured pedophiles into sending him hardcore child pornography. He was busted when, fearing his secret identity had been blown and ready to flee, he gave police his computer for safekeeping. He’d tried removing the hard drive, which aroused suspicions.

Police found shocking images; videos of an eight-year-old girl being raped, and pictures of children as young as two being raped by an adult. Jon Venables’ viewing choices are a frightening window into his perverted fantasies.

Rehabilitation was the dream, but in no universe has he been rehabilitated. And so we face a painful truth. Fresh starts can’t always change the toxic mental brew that leads children to kill. They couldn’t erase Venables’ deep-seated problems or recast his warped sexuality. As children, Jon and Robert were anomalies, treated with kid gloves by the system. But Venables’ monstrous act was 17 years ago. He is no longer 10. He’s a man of 27.

Jon’s defenders say living a lie proved too much psychologically. He couldn’t have a girlfriend and feared being alone forever. But most men without girlfriends don’t covet or collect child pornography. He has shown us what excites him, and it is hugely dangerous.

Venables told police he saw downloading the images as “breaking the last taboo.” No. That was the torture murder of Jamie Bulger.

Venables received a two-year sentence for downloading and distributing the pornography, but could be freed in a year. Reportedly he is letting slip who he really is, so authorities are discussing another new identity, at a reported cost of 250,000 pounds (US $398,323) to taxpayers.

One new identity and one fresh start is plenty. All coddling should have gone out the window the minute he re-offended. Brits now need to know who he is, and where he is, and the powers-that-be now must protect those he is most likely to prey upon. Jamie Bulger’s memory deserves that much.

Today downloading child porn; tomorrow acting out? Maybe. But who is willing to take a chance on Venables? Rehabilitation is difficult, if not impossible, for hard-core sex offenders. Their sick sexual fantasies can be managed with enough will and medication, perhaps, but not erased. Jon’s redemption would have been saying “no” instead of “yes” to his dark impulses. It didn’t happen. This baby killer’s rights should never again overshadow the rights of our children. Venables is a time bomb. No good will come of burying the truth a second time, no matter how ugly.

So, just how much money, time or effort do you think should be spent on giving Jon Venables a second new identity? Let us hear from you on this issue.

Sue Russell is a British-born journalist and the author of Lethal Intent, a biography of executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who admitted to killing seven men in Florida. Sue is at work on another crime book. Find her at her website; e-mail her at: sue@suerussellwrites.com; or follow her at http://www.twitter.com/@SRussellWrites.

Tweet

Don't Free the West Memphis Three

by Pat Brown

On October 23, 2009, nine-year-old Elizabeth Olten told her Mommy goodbye and skipped over to her little friend's house. She didn't come home. This young child, sugar and spice and everything nice, encountered the exact opposite late that afternoon. She went trustingly into the woods with her friend's older sister, fifteen-year-old Alyssa Bustamente (left), to explore, to play, to enjoy the special feeling of being given attention by an older girl. Only this teenager morphed into the nightmare her mother always told her wasn't real.

In the next moments, the last moments of Elizabeth's short life, she saw a monster come for her, cruel and nasty words spewing from her mouth. The monster hit her, shoved her to the ground, and there as the evil loomed over her, Elizabeth (below right) terrified, her eyes blurring with tears, wanted her Mommy. Mommy! Mommy! She felt hands clawing her throat, clamping down around her neck, and she couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe ... no ... no .... Mommy ... stop, Alyssa, stop ... no ... the fear screamed through her little body. The hands left her throat and as she gasped for air, she felt a pain shoot through her left wrist, and then her right. Through the tears coursing down her cheeks, she saw blood coming out of her arms, her blood, and the monster was laughing.

The monster with the knife came at her face, and she felt the burning, searing ripping of her throat ... and the knife came down again and the choking this time was from the blood filling up her airway .. and she knew ... she knew she wouldn't see her Mommy again ... she knew ... she knew the worst thing in the world had happened to her. She felt the dark rush over her, and she screamed silently in her head one last time.

Alyssa Bustamente confessed to killing the little girl. She wanted to know "what it would be like to kill someone." This is the same girl who thought it was funny to watch her little brothers shock themselves on an electric fence. She hated the world; she wrote that her hobbies were "cutting" and "killing people."

Now, let's back up to to an early May, 1993, evening in West Memphis, Arkansas, when three eight-year-old boys rode their bicycles into a wooded area known as Robin Hood Hills. They zigzagged through the terrain, daring each other to do a better trick, to jump a ditch, to beat each other to the far tree. They would have played on happily until one of them remembered it was time to go home -- if they hadn't encountered three other boys, teenagers, in their play space. At first, they thought it was cool; big guys, like older brothers, all dressed in rebel black, grins on their faces, yeah, swaggering, a bottle of whiskey in one of their hands, yeah, we are hanging with the men now, we are member of their club. The older boys joked with them, told them they had something neat to share with them. The little kids got off their bikes, let them fall to the ground, and eagerly went over to the trio. They were shown something, all right.

Each boy was grabbed, thrown to the ground. At first, confused, they thought maybe this was a game, like a wrestling game, until fists hit them in the face, repeatedly, and their clothes were pulled off. Shoelaces were stripped out of their shoes and used to hog-tie them. Pants dropped to the ground from the older boys' waists, and then the unimaginable happened, things that they had heard of, whispered and giggled about on the playground, repulsive things that were now happening to them. Pain, humiliation, terror rained down on the little boys, the brutality increasing by the minute until the knife came out and screams came from one of the boys as he was stabbed and mutilated. The other two lay in their agonizing contorted positions, frozen in horror as their watch their friend dying -- and then their heads were bashed in. They were still alive when they were dragged into the stream. Water filled their lungs and, if they were conscious at all at that moment, they would have felt themselves choking as they sunk into the their muddy, watery grave.

Chris Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore (all above left) would never ride their bicycles again.

Jessie Misskelley, 17, (right) confessed to the crime in detail. Three times. He had a temper and got in fights. He had a record for shoplifting and vandalism. He was a bit slow and a follower.

Jason Baldwin, 16, had a record for vandalism and shoplifting. He was Damien's best friend.

Damien Echols, 18, had a history of psychological problems for which he had been institutionalized. He is reported to have stomped a dog to death, attacked patients in the mental hospital sucking blood out of their wounds, starting fires at school, threatened to kill his teachers and parents, claimed he was a supernatural being, said he liked to drink blood because it gave him special power, and read Anton LeVay's Satanic Bible. Damien exhibits psychopathic behaviors. He bragged about committing the crime

Circumstantial evidence supported the involvement of the teens in the crime.

The three had no alibis.

Then who did it?

The defense needed a new suspect and a new motive. They brought in criminal profiler Brent Turvey. He provide one. His analysis concluded that the boys were killed at dawn, not dusk (giving the three teens alibis), that they were abducted, killed elsewhere, and the bodies driven back to that location (eliminating teens without trucks), and that there were bite marks that did not match the West Memphis Three (nor anyone else for that matter, because those blurry autopsy photos were not teeth impressions). The focus of the attack was to punish little victim Chris Byers (locking in his father, Mark Byers, as the killer). Recognizing the attack on the three boys required more than one person, Turvey allows the killer to have a more passive helper, his wife Melissa. She would be responsible for the "bite marks" on Steve Branch's face, the result of a female style of Battered Child Syndrome.

Okay. So let me get this straight. It is not believable that a violent psychopath like Damien Echols (left) got together with his deviant buddies and decided to follow some young kids into the woods and get a sick thrill out of attacking and torturing them, but THIS scenario makes sense?

The Byers leave their other son at home (and tell him to tell the cops he was with them when they went looking for his brother). They go out to find Chris and when they see him with his friends, they are already mad that he disobeyed them and didn't come home on time. They decide to lure all the boys away to some hideout and strip them naked and tie them up with their shoelaces. Then they leave them there while they go help search the park with the other parents. Sometime in between helping search the woods, Mark Byers and his wife sneak back the hideout, beat the crap out of the kids, and stab them as well. While Mark Byers is busy hacking off his son’s genitals, Mom is too busy biting up the Branch kid to be all that concerned. After Chris is dead, they jump in the truck with his body and his bleeding, dying little friends. They rush to the park to dump the bodies, hoping no one happens upon them while they are doing it, go home to their other son, meet with the concerned parents, talk with the police, go out on the search all night, and keep up this pretense for the duration of the trial.

This scenario lasted for years, with the Free the West Memphis Three side standing firm that Byers was the killer and had his teeth pulled in 1997 so he couldn't be matched to any tooth impression evidence. I am not sure when this theory went downhill, but maybe they were counting on those "teeth" to match something.

Now, they needed a new suspect. In 2007, one hair was found entwined in one of the knots and it was stated that it was "not inconsistent with" the hair of Terry Hobbs, victim Stevie Branch's stepfather. Another hair found nearby was supposedly "not inconsistent" with that of his good friend, David Jacoby, who he hung out with Since hair could have ended up there through secondary transfer and the one that was "not inconsistent" with David Jacoby was found two weeks later by a searcher (the hair was consistent with 7% of the population), it's not any evidence that can convict. But this hair and the new theory that Hobbs and his buddy killed the boys is what the defense hopes will get an appeal.

I hope they don't get it. The deaths of these three boys were not the result of domestic child abuse gone out of control. I have never seen a case where a parent becomes angry, decides to assault and kill the child AND take out a couple of friends as well, especially stripping them, hogtying them. Then leaving them close by where the bodies can be found along with any evidence? Unless the stepdads, one or the other did not have vehicles, those bodies should have been dumped some thirty miles away in a ravine or in three shallow graves.

Here is what I believe happened:

The crimes were committed by more than one person.

The offenders lived nearby the crime scene.

The boys were targeted because they were easy to access and control.

The boys were probably followed and conned or lured into the woods.

The boys were overpowered by larger assailants and the crime was committed at the scene, most likely in the water during the waning daylight hours.

The crime was planned but not in the sense that it would necessarily end with homicide. Like wilding, crimes involving groups of young teens often end extremely violently.
Nothing but a knife or two was brought with the offenders nor was anything but the weapons taken away. This shows lack of maturity or criminal experience.
The offenders did not attempt to get rid of the evidence. The water was a lucky break.

The crime was violent and was a show of power. Essentially, it was a thrill crime.

Now, who would be likely to live near the scene, not have a vehicle, have a posse big enough to handle three boys and be recognizable to the boys so they could lure them without them running away? Since the boys were dead by dusk (rigor mortis evidence and livor evidence and no evidence of the bindings being on a live body for any period of time), who was unaccounted for at that time? The crime was planned (even if just minutes before, when the boys were spotted going into the woods) but no materials were brought; a sign of a fairly inexperienced killer/killers or a sign of youth. The sexual aspects of the crime encompass power and control as do the actual murders. Who does this sound like to you? How about that cold-blooded psychopath who wanted to kill people and drink blood and be God, who knew the boys, lived near the boys and had his homeys with him?

Damien Echols is an evil, soulless creature. His two buddies aren't worth much either. They aren't being discriminated against because they wore black or were a bit weird. They are in prison because, like Alyssa Bustamente, sometimes teens kill.

Tweet

A Community Responds the Way it Should

by Pat Brown

It might seem impossible to see any silver lining in the horrific abduction and murder of little eight-year-old Sandra Cantu, but I am actually ecstatic over one issue related to this case: family, community, and police response.

For once, we don't see a muted, shrug-shoulders, "stuff happens" reaction from anyone. I have been in this business for over a decade and I have been forever frustrated with the general acceptance of heinous crimes as passing sad events that we just have to accept. The answer is "WE DON'T!"

In 1998, biologist Christine Mirzayan was raped and murdered on a path near Georgetown University where Mirzayan was returning after a barbecue with friends. At the time, only a paragraph about her murder made the newspapers and no one at the university or the community made much of a ruckus about this crime. If you Google her name now, you will see a few articles, but only because reporters were criticizing the Chandra Levy case and her name was brought up because it was another unsolved murder of an intern. Of course, she had no family in the area and she was somewhat blamed for walking in the dark. I guess those are good reasons to ignore the fact innocent women are getting killed and a serial killer is on the loose.

Fourteen-year-old Nia Owens had a similar fate in 1996 (you won't find a picture of her on the Internet). She was strangled and left in some bushes near her school. She got two or three small stories. Perhaps the lack of concern had something to do with her being African-American and making the mistake of playing around with phone dating. But there still remained a serial killer in town.

Just a few miles down the road in Greenbelt, Maryland in 1995, seventeen-year-old Julie Ferguson (no picture around of her either), a very popular girl at the local high school, was abducted and found on the side of the road with her throat cut. She got a few more stories because she was white, local, and very pretty. Still, I don't remember citizens swarming about in protest of such a horrible crime in our community. Unsolved, a killer remained at large.

But, finally, we see the appropriate response to Sandra Cantu's murder. The community is furious. They are keeping the pressure up to find her killer. They are calling for "the monster" to be caught. Law enforcement has worked around the clock putting all the manpower they can into the investigation. They have put up roadblocks and checked cars and gotten search warrant after search warrant in an attempt to prevent Sandra's killer from getting away with his crime.

Finally, the mother of Sandra appeared on the Today Show (sitting on the right), and, for once, instead of the viewers seeing a parent struggling to stay composed and speaking calmly, a national audience got to see the depth of devastation the family experiences when their loved one is brutally murdered. Maria Chavez could get no more than a few words out as she choked up and hyperventilated. Her grief was so overwhelming that she gave the best interview I have ever seen; she couldn't put on an act, and just sat there unable to speak. I cried watching her and I am sure other viewers did as well. Ms. Chavez made people aware, even if unintentionally, of just how much damage these monsters in our society are doing.

I would like to see every community, family member, and police force go berserk when such murders are committed. I would like every jury to lose all sympathy for these son-of-bitches and give them the full punishment the law will allow (preferably the death penalty). These creatures deserve no sympathy, no breaks, no life. The killer gave Sandra Cantu, a totally innocent child, the death penalty without any trial or lawyer. He gave the family life in prison. He deserves the same response from us.

Tweet