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James Bulger’s mum writes to PM to stop killer Jon Venables from being released
Venables was jailed for possessing thousands of indecent images of children in 2017
The mother of James Bulger has written to the prime minister as Jon Venables’ parole hearing looms.
Venables was just ten years old when he and Robert Thompson, also ten, abducted and murdered two-year-old James. They had lured the toddler away from his mother in a shopping centre in Bootle, Liverpool in 1993, before torturing him and leaving his body on train tracks 2.5 miles away.
Venables and Thompson were sentenced to indefinite detention for the murder, and were both released on lifelong licence aged eighteen in 2001.
Thompson has stayed out of trouble, however, Venables has reoffended on a number of occasions, with him currently serving time behind bars after being found with a number of indecent images of children.
In 2017, Venables pleaded guilty to downloading nearly 2,000 images from the dark web over the course of several months, as well as to owning a ‘sickening’ paedophile manual.
He was jailed for three years and four months, and was turned down for parole in 2020 after serving his minimum forty months.
But now, Venables has been referred to the parole board for a second time to consider whether he is safe for release, with the hearing expected early next year.
With this news, James’ mother Denise Fergus has written to Liz Truss urging her to honour a Tory pledge to toughen parole laws to keep dangerous offenders like Venables inside.
The pledge was made by former Justice Secretary Dominic Raab, though Truss sacked him when she won the Conservative leadership race, resulting in the Bill of Rights reform being shelved.
Denise said, as per The Mirror: “We need the Prime Minister or her new Justice Secretary to step in immediately to make sure my son’s killer stays firmly behind bars where he belongs. We are calling on them to, please, intervene now.”
She said her representatives had sent five emails in the past five weeks to the Ministry of Justice asking for an update on previous discussions with Raab, but have heard nothing.