From today's "News of the World":

THE mother of murdered toddler James Bulger today reveals the chilling moment she came face to face with one of the monsters who butchered her son 11 years ago.

Denise Fergus tracked down Robert Thompson after she was given information that led her to the child killer—now living under a top-secret new identity.

And when she finally found the beast after terrifying weeks of relentlessly searching the streets, her blood froze.

"I recognised his podgy face and evil eyes in an instant," devastated Denise, 37, told the News of the World. "It was such a shock to see him in front of me.

"This was the person who murdered my little James. The person I last saw as a smiling 11-year-old in the dock all those years ago.

"I wanted the right to know what he looks like. To know where he is. I wanted to rush up to him and scream, ‘Why did you kill my child!'. Yet I was turned to stone—paralysed with hatred.

"But now I have found him at last. And I will find the other one next. They can change their addresses as much as they like—but they can't change their faces. There is no hiding place for them."

Like the rest of the nation, Denise has been prevented by law from knowing where Thompson and his fellow murderer Jon Venables, both 21, live under their secret personas. They were caged in 1993 after deliberately luring two-year-old James away from his mum at a Merseyside shopping centre. In a murder that stunned Britain, Thompson and Venables, then both 10, dragged the weeping toddler across the city to a railway line where they tortured and battered him to death.

Ever since the pair were released in 2001 after serving just eight years in detention, Denise has campaigned for the right to know where they live.

"They know where I am—why shouldn't I know where they are?" demanded the mum last night at the home she shares with second husband Stuart, 29, and children Michael, 10, Thomas, 6, and Leon, 5.

"Ever since those bastards were released I have received mail from people saying where they might be.

"People have come to the door offering information they think might help me."

But the trails were always cold—until early August when a letter that would dramatically change Denise's life landed on her doormat.

"It was neatly handwritten and started, ‘With you being James's mother, I thought you should know this...' It was quite brief but some of the things in it made me look at it harder than the others I get.

"The writer said he or she was in frequent contact with Thompson, didn't know where he lived but knew his movements during the day, giving me specific information about the area where I would find him.

"It was signed, ‘a well-wisher'. The writer asked that I destroy the letter once I'd read it. I respected that wish and burnt it."

And so Denise's painstaking search began. She spent hours driving the streets described by the mystery writer before returning emotionally drained to her home in Kirkby, Merseyside.

"Sometimes I was with friends, other times family. I'd sit in the car for hours on end waiting for him, smoking endless cigarettes. Sometimes I'd get out and go on foot," said Denise.

"The area I was looking is a really nice place, some of the houses were quite large semis, others a bit smaller. All the times I couldn't find him, I never felt deflated or empty because I just knew I wouldn't give up looking. This was going to go on for as long as it took.

"Friends and family never tried to stop me. They all supported me 100 per cent because they knew it was something I'd wanted to do from the day those two were released."

Denise knew she would have no problem recognising Thompson.

"I don't need pictures to remind me of his or Venables' faces. They are embedded in my brain," she said.

"I will never forget what they look like. I was staring right at them every second we were in that courtroom. I was so close to them I could have bloody well touched them.

"I can remember them giggling and laughing. They must have been able to feel my glare looking right at them both—looking right in their eyes. I knew if ever I saw them again I would recognise them."

Then one day in September, that time came—and Denise's patience and determination paid off.

"I remember the day I saw Thompson quite clearly," said Denise. "It was a nice day, the sun was shining. I was with a friend in the car. We'd been driving the main roads of the area in the usual sequence I used every day I went looking."

In a grim echo of her baby's death, they were parked near a railway line when it happened. "He was walking on the opposite side of the road. I was in the passenger side and he came alongside me," said Denise.

"I knew it was him by his facial features and most of all his evil eyes. His hair was dark and quite short. There were people round him, I don't know how many because in that situation you don't stop to count. I wondered if they were bodyguards.

"I felt completely numb. I couldn't move—almost like someone was sitting on my knee holding me down. I turned to the person I was with and said, ‘That's him there'. I was close enough to him, about 20ft or so, to know without any doubt it was him. I was staring at him and he was none the wiser."

Denise had been rehearsing the moment she would confront her child's killers for 11 tearful years. But as the moment came, she froze.

"I kept picturing myself running up to him and screaming in his face 'Why did you murder my son?!' There were all kinds of things I wanted to say—but I just couldn't," said Denise.

"Part of me wanted to jump out of the car and punch him but I was paralysed with the hatred I feel for him. In the end I just stared after him as he wandered down the street, turned a corner—and was gone.

"It was unreal. It felt like a lifetime but it was over in seconds. Afterwards I felt steel-cold and wondered why I had just sat there. Why hadn't I got out of the car? But in hindsight I think I did the right thing keeping calm.

"I have got what I wanted. I have seen what he looks like—so my interests now are to find the other one and that day will come soon as well.

"I want to see what Venables looks like. It gives me a sense of power knowing I can spot the bastards. I have no intention of doing anything —I just want to know what they look like and where they are. Forewarned is forearmed."

Denise revealed she once went looking for Venables after receiving information but her search proved fruitless. She thinks he has been moved to a different location.

"The only thing stopping me is that I haven't got enough information—but I am grateful to those who try to help me," said Denise. "People are keeping an eye out for me—and I am going to bide my time. When I see him I will try to do what I did with Thompson and keep calm."

In a long-running battle with the Home Office, distraught Denise has asked for pictures of the killers and a meeting with them.

"Jack Straw, (the then Home Secretary) the probation service, the social workers and the judges have all kept me in the dark. But the system does not really care about victims and their families," said Denise.

"They refused me point blank—so when I got the letter I decided to take action myself." Denise hit out at the lifetime injunction that bans publication of anything that might identify the killers.

"I think it is disgusting newspapers cannot report about them now," she said. "There are families out there with young kids who are probably playing close by them and they don't know who they are."

She admitted she once wondered whether she could forgive her son's killers if she ever met them.

"Before I saw Thompson, I did think that if I ever saw his face then maybe I could in some way forgive him, but now that I have I still can't," said Denise.

"I still have the hate inside me from the day they murdered my James. There will be no closure for me. And I am only telling what I am doing now because I want people to know that I haven't given up.

"I am still here, and I will always be here, fighting for justice for James."

From an Observer article by Euan Ferguson:

Don't call him Jamie. His name, to those who knew him, was James, always. The diminutive diminishes. It's James on the headstone, in Kirkdale Cemetery, and James on a little metal sign on the tree beside it: James's Special Place. It's not that special.

All the children's graves, in this chill corner of Liverpool, are near to trees, and toys hang in the branches. They're there to cheer the place up, which they will manage for, oh, half a day or so, until the winter dark comes again, and some more ice and rain and wind, and they end up having a paradoxically depressing effect. Last week, James's tree was as bedraggled as the rest: grimy little Tiggers and Kangas being swallowed by dirty moss, the cheap McDonald's labels on the back their last splashes of real colour; plastic squirrels and owls; a toy plane (for he liked planes, and taxis, and police cars), wearied and hammered by the elements for what could, now, have been more than a decade.

There are some vaguely recent daffodils, drooping badly. There is a festive plastic pine-tree gift, with a message, the letters runny behind the cellophane. 'To James, happy Christmas. All our love, as always, from Mum, Stuart and boys xxxx.' I step back with a mild start as my boots slip in the mud, realising that, in order to read it, I had thoughtlessly trodden on the wrong side of the stone. I had actually been trampling on James's grave. And I'm not the first.

Don't call him Jamie, but the papers did. Little Jamie. Brave little Jamie. Justice for Jamie. Jamie's psycho killers go free. For more than 10 years now, 11 years next February, the media has appropriated the memory of James Bulger for its own ends. The usual suspects have split along the usual lines. Some - and my own hand goes up first here - have used the scenes of violence outside Bootle magistrates' court to excoriate the 'mob'; to bemoan the way that the mourning and the flowers were tinged with mawkishness, and opened Britain's emotional floodgates. The more vengeful elements have, of course, gone potso. They started off comparing James's killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, to Saddam Hussein; more recently, particularly after they were paroled, it has all but threatened to expose their new identities and let the lynch mob do its worst. 'While the News of the World will, reluctantly, obey the court order banning the media from publishing information about the schoolboy murderers' new identities... we WILL monitor this evil pair closely. We shall do all in our power to watch over them. That is the very least that a law-abiding society deserves.'

Even if the Bulger family had wanted to try to forget, it never had a chance; every twist in the legal wranglings prompted another call to elicit simplistic quotes such as the recent one from James' uncle, also James, that 'killing's too good for them', and the rest of us shake our heads again at Liverpool. Even politicians got in on it. Michael Howard extended the boys' sentences at the yelp of the tabloids. Tony Blair's speech at the time about 'hammer blows against the sleeping conscience of the country' went down particularly well; according to my Observer colleague Andrew Rawnsley, this episode as much as any other brought him first to public attention and was, in significant ways, the making of him. So we all got something out of it, something out of James. Except, of course, for Liverpool.

A.R. Tyms, the butcher's shop in which Denise Bulger had been buying lamb chops when she turned round to find James gone, is still there, still on the lower floor of the Strand shopping centre in Bootle. It's now more than 10 years since I first stood here, trying to imagine the very beginnings of something so unimaginably grim. The sandwich board is in the same place. Times have moved on in the tiniest of ways; the board now offers kangaroo rump steak, at £7.80 a pound. But the strip-lit surroundings are practically unchanged, every bit as cheap and cheerless as in 1993. Superpound, Pawn Stop, and something called Knightingales Britains Lowest Prices Closing Down. Outside, just past the canal where Thompson and Venables first dropped James on his head, the library offers a hint of hope with big rainbow signs advertising 'Internet Access'; smaller signs on the actual door announce more quietly that the library has closed down.

The walk on which they took James, some two and a half miles, seems even more astonishing this time round. It's a long way, and much of it uphill, across horrendous junctions. I walked it again on Wednesday night, and learnt the next morning that a 16-year-old girl was killed by a bus on the Stanley Road, about 10 minutes after I had walked by. At the top of the long slog up Breeze Hill, the reservoir where they were told to take James to the nearby police station by one woman - one of the so-called 'Liverpool 38' who saw James but did nothing, half a dozen of whom I'm told are still daily damaged by the knowledge - has now become the 'Breeze Hill Millennium Park'; but it's already a ****hole of potholes, ruts, puddles, failed trees and rusting buckets. It is cold, now, and dark, as it would have been when they passed this point on 12 February 1993. An ice-cream van, playing a wonkily off-key 'Greensleeves', slows to a wildly optimistic stop. There is ice on the pavement. Ten minutes later I'm in Cherry Lane, beside the railway where James was killed. Unlike 10 years ago, there's not one flower; there's a storage depot and some unfeasibly large gates. But there are still, here, plenty of memories.

Much has been made of the famous CCTV picture, the first stunning alert that it was children who had taken a child. It was other images, unseen, that lived with me down the years. An eyelash on a brick. The blue Humbrol paint poured into James's left eye. Marks from the metal tags of a bootlace left on his cheek. The terminology used to describe the bar that finally killed him: a '22lb railway fishplate'. And my own memory of standing there, back then, eyes streaming from the cold, trying to work out the obvious huge question of why.

'I don't think we'll ever know, now,' says Lawrence Lee, Venables's solicitor at the time. 'It's infuriating, actually.'

Lee, a brisk but thoughtful bloke, has gone over it time and time again, since he first took the call, by complete chance, on Thursday 18 February, after Thompson and Venables were first arrested. He can remember his conviction that his client had just been truanting, or 'sagging', and was just another red-herring arrest; he can also remember feeling physically sick the next day when Venables broke down, wailing, and it all began to come out. He can remember his own nightmares, for a year after the trial; nightmares of being run down by a ghost train.

'I think they could have spent a bit more time inside, and I think I'm speaking for Liverpool on that. But not that much more. The time had to come when they were released, and most people in this city, if you bother to talk to them, feel the same way. Once the decision was made you've got to believe that they can start to make a go of their lives; otherwise it's all been a waste of everything; of time, of money, of hope, of lives.

'It would all happen differently now. In the first place, one priority would be a psychiatric nurse for the two of them. Because it was just policemen and lawyers, they bottled up before they got to court. I never got the full story; I don't think any of the lawyers did. Venables... he was in some ways a likeable little boy. And, God, yes, if I met him now I'd sit down for three days, for a week, to try to find out why. If he knew, of course. Sometimes I doubt either of them will know why. And nor, of course, will we; the climate has been made such that they can never speak, never explain, never let anyone know who they are.'

Mark Thomas, a Liverpool Echo journalist who has written a book on the case, agrees. 'Other than the complete nutballs, there's a sensible attitude to it in Liverpool. In 1993 the percentage of people who simply couldn't come to terms with it, and were trying to find an escape route, was high. But the dust has settled. There will always be a small minority who want to lynch; but there will always, worldwide, be a small minority like that. It's not just Liverpool. And yes, it is annoying that the climate means we will never, can never, know why; for surely that is, still, the most important question.'

In the pubs around Bootle, and in towards the city centre, they shake their heads at the question. They've been asking it themselves for years. But here, in these grim warm havens, £1.60 a pint, I find myself growing gently surprised.

Not at the surroundings, or the circumstances. Despite the hype around investment in the city centre, travel one mile north of the Albert Dock and the poverty will still smack you. At the time of James's murder, unemployment in Liverpool was 15.2 per cent, 4.4 points above the national average. Today it's at 11.1 per cent, but that's still 5.8 per cent above the average. It's not even a surprise to learn, sadly, that of the four youngsters who found James on Valentine's Day 1993, all around the ages of the accused, no fewer than three of them have ended up in jail. (Police are refusing to comment on this, but it's understood the Echo, which has been working to find them for weeks, will run the story to coincide with the anniversary.)

It is a surprise to find an absence of bitterness. Feelings still run deep but there's no manic saloon-bar editorialising; they'll leave that to the manic saloon-bar newspapers. ?Most people I spoke to, as Lee had predicted, wanted the pair to stay in a bit longer - 'maybe into their early twenties, would have been about right' - but none wanted blood, or the key thrown away.

'It's not just the murder that damaged Liverpool,' according to Tom Lynch. 'Greensleeves' is still playing mournfully somewhere in the distance. 'And you have to remember that we were on our knees. We'd had Heysel, and Hillsborough. This was the last straw. But the mob stuff was wrong, and most souls know that. And, of course, it was just used as another stick to beat us with. We're a better city than that. For every one man who might be whipped up into taking the law into his own hands, there'd be 10 to stop him. You should all just stop making generalisations about this city. We've had it long enough, and we're fed up with it.

'I don't think I could say I would forgive those two. But perhaps I will, one day, perhaps we will. But I'll tell you something: forgiving's one thing. But we'll never understand.'

The closest I can come to understanding, on the night I leave, looking back through my notes, is the word frenzy. Remember the circumstances. Thompson, with evidence of family abuse, and a loathed younger brother whom he had taken to the canal, and threatened, two weeks earlier. Venables, the weaker but slyer, in some kind of scared thrall to his streetwise fellow-truant. Depressed families, and therefore depressed children. Boredom. A terrible dare - to 'lose some kid' - but one that still could have ended less horrendously; the time they spent walking up and down roads, in and out of shops, telling poor lies, suggests they almost wanted someone to take James away from them, near the end. Tired, cold, and with a screaming child in the dark, they knew they were in grave trouble, and the most terrifying decision came not at the beginning, to take James, but at the end, to take him onto the railway line. Frenzy fed itself; frenzy, and denial, and a howl of something else, something inchoate, which we cannot now know. We won't, it seems, ever be able to speak to them. Even if Liverpool itself believes, to varying degrees, in the concept of rehabilitation, our tabloids and, therefore, our politicians, don't.

The ragged chanting - Leever-pail, Leever-pail - dies as Crystal Palace score again. I'm in the centre, and fans are streaming in, chill and disgruntled, to the First National Wine Bar. The game is not even being shown in the pubs around Anfield; Sky is broadcasting Millwall v Southampton. They've come here because they know it's the one place they can see their team. The commentary, and the adverts, are in Danish. They are about to lose to First Division Palace, and no one has thought to show them their own team, all they have left, in their own language. Why, again. Why do we continue to think so little, so seldom, and so wrongly, of this bright-eyed suicide of a place?

Thank you for sharing these two articles with us, Lotta. The piece from the Observer I found very moving indeed.

I read his mothers account regarding seeing one of the killers. It has always been obvious that the law is only concerned about the law, people and victims do not count. Nor do the guilty count, they are just objects that have broken the law, I dont think the state cares about anyone or anything other than itself. If you get badly beaten up for £10 by some rogue in the street or you haven't payed your TV licence, the latter is perceived as the greater crime.

There is plenty wrong with the law and plenty to criticise about the state but don't lets get silly about it.

Beating someone up in the street and stealing from them is the offence of robbery. It is classed as one of the most serious criminal offences. The maximum sentence is life imprisonment and a robber case is so serious that can only be dealt with at the Crown Court.

For having an unlicenced TV the maximum penalty is fine and minor cases of this type can only be dealt with at the local magistrates court.

To say that the state regards not paying your TV licence fee as a more serious offence than street robbery is simply bonkers.

In the majority of cases, justice is administered with great wisdom by our learned judges.

In others, however, the man on the Clapham omnibus (or should that be the Northern Line these days?) is left bewildered by the sheer injustice of our justice system.

Regardless of the reality, there is an almost universal perception that a pensioner of previously exemplary character who can't pay his council tax is more likely to be imprisoned than is a burglar with a record as long as your arm.

Tony Martin should not have been imprisoned for shooting and killing a burglar. Had he shot the villain as he ran towards him brandishing a chainsaw, that would have been acceptable to the law. Tony's mistake was to shoot the burglar in the back as he ran away from him. The law saw that as unacceptable and gave him a long prison sentence. The public for the most part saw it as highly commendable and would have given him a knighthood.

I think the Tony Martin case is a classic example of the public's getting it right and the law's getting it wrong.

I'm not (generally speaking) a supporter of capital punishment but the two young Scousers that battered James Bulger to death should have been hanged - and I say that after having in my infinite mercy reprieved them from burning at the stake.

what has jamie bulger got to do with this site . let the poor child rest in peace

This is MY forum and people can write about anything they like, unless I decide to censor it.

LottaNonsense - The Bulger Dressmaking Psychologist.
Was she the famous psychologist who seemed to have a vendetta against the Bulgers becuase they were given special treatment, and went around the media purporting what strange boys they are, because one of them was into sewing and making girls' dresses as part of his rehabilliation into society.

I think it is the psycholigist's who are to blame for all their mumbo-jumbo that pervaded the schools and police psychologists and the criminal justice system.

She is like other vindictive female psychologists I have come across: a vindictive intellectual snob who cannot stop lobbying her peculiar ideas onto a forum that is a complete and utter antathem to her.