For David James Smith to add insult to injury by attempting to elicit sympathy for such pedophile murderers should be deeply offensive to any decent-minded person. The two year old didn’t know their names, he couldn’t have said who they were so they wouldn’t have got in trouble. Some time thereafter, he began a relationship with a woman who had a five-year-old child; it is not known whether Venables had already begun downloading child abuse images at the time of dating the woman, although he denies having ever met the child. I was glad that the boys got an undetermined sentence , but don't like the fact that they were given name changes and able to live in anonymity.

Smith includes a chronological list of child murderers to disprove the notion that the murder of James Bulger was a singular event.

It seems that Smith's assumptions in his final chapter (which he repeatedly stated couldn't be proven) might not have been very far from the truth. Ralph Bulger and Denise Fergus are merely afterthoughts in this account, while the mothers and fathers of the killers are given in-depth biographies. It does not seem to have been much of a plan, and in this context, it is hard to accept that they knew they were going to kill a child. It seems to be meant for a British reader, as it is full of British slang, references to local places (without any descriptions) and references to acronyms (without any explanation). In March 2012, a 26-year-old man from Chorley, Lancashire, was arrested after allegedly setting up a Facebook group with the title "What happened to Jamie Bulger was f**king hilarious.

Chief Inspector Tracie O'Gara of Lancashire Constabulary stated: "An individual who was targeted four-and-a-half years ago was not Jon Venables, and now he has left the area. His mutilated body was found on a railway line two and a half miles (four kilometres) away in Walton, Liverpool, two days after his abduction. A child psychiatrist, Eileen Vizard, who interviewed Thompson before the trial, was asked in court whether he would know the difference between right and wrong, that it was wrong to take a young child away from his mother, and that it was wrong to cause injury to a child. Two crimes have hypnotised the British public in the last 20 years above all others, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in May 2007 (this made actual headlines only this past week) and the murder of James Bulger in February 1993.

On 4 July 2013, it was reported that the Parole Board for England and Wales had approved the release of Venables. Bulger's family, along with many others, complained, and the game was subsequently withdrawn by its UK distributor, GSP.

Its not that I'm naive to the abhorrent crimes of human beings at all - it was just simply awful to take in, it puts a heartbreaking image in your mind of a helpless 2 year old boy crying for his mum whilst reading.Reading about child abuse is something that always bothers me, so I was worried if I should get this or not, but deciding that I wanted to know more about the case that I find interesting, I decided to check it out of the library. Police suspected that the boys had sexually assaulted Bulger, as his shoes, socks, trousers, and underpants had been removed.