17 Disturbing Photos With Horrifying Backstories
7. James Bulger
James Bulger was a little boy from Kirkby, Merseyside, England who was abducted, tortured and murdered one month shy of his third birthday. While on a shopping trip with his mother Denise at the New Strand Shopping Centre, James disappeared while Denise was placing an order inside the butcher shop.
The abductors were a pair of 10-year old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who were playing hooky from school that day as they often did. According to one of the boys, the devilish duo had planned to snatch a child and push them into oncoming traffic. The mini-monsters were caught on CCTV observing several different children throughout the day, as well as stealing some sweets, batteries and blue paint, among other things.
The picture is from the CCTV footage with Thompson and Venables taking Bulger by the hand and leading him away from his mother and out of the mall. The scene appears innocent enough, two older brothers casually escorting their younger sibling through the crowded mall. But the truth is far more sinister.
The boys led little James on a 2.5 mile walk to his own death, up a steep bank at a railway line near the Walton & Anfield Railway Station. It was there that Bulgers tormentors tortured him, committing horrific acts Id prefer not to write about before finally killing him with a 22-pound iron bar. No child should ever have to suffer such atrocities, and the fact that they occurred at the hands of other children, who should have been playing with toys instead of murdering a toddler, is incomprehensible.