James Bulger documentary: Jon Venables so haunted by toddler victim he detected 'baby smell' on everything he wore, C5 show claims

James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables was so haunted by his toddler victim he detected a “baby smell” on every item of clothing he wore to the 1993 murder trial, a new documentary will reveal.

On returning from court 10-year-old Venables would immediately strip off his clothes saying: “I can smell James like a baby smell”, according to the documentary James Bulger: The New Revelations.

Wednesday night’s documentary also reveals that during the trial Venables would often ask his parents: “Do you think baby James is there in the courtroom?”

His 10-year-old fellow murderer Robert Thompson is said to have asked police interrogators whether the two-year-old had been taken to hospital to “get him alive again”.

David James Smith, a journalist who covered the trial and wrote a book about the case, told the documentary makers: “Bearing in mind he [Thompson] was only 10, it makes you wonder what he really understood of what he’d done.

“I began increasingly to wonder what on earth they were doing there in the court, how could they play an effective part in the proceedings, and for whose benefit were they there?”

When they battered two-year-old James to death in February 1993, Thompson and Venables had been six months above the UK age of criminal responsibility, which is 10 years old.

They were tried in an adult court, sitting in a dock that had to be specially modified so that they could see over it.

In November 1993 the two boys were convicted of murder and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, the youth equivalent of an adult life sentence.

The judge, Mr Justice Morland, described their crime as an act of “unparalleled evil and barbarity” and deemed it in the public interest for them to be publicly identified in news reports.

Afterwards, a crowd of 200 watched two police vans leave Preston Crown Court, to cries of “kill them” and “hang them”.

Thompson and Venables were released on lifelong licence in 2001 at the age of 18.

Thompson is believed to have succeeded in making a new life for himself. Venables, however, is in prison after being convicted twice of child pornography offences.

He was jailed for two years in 2010 after admitting downloading and distributing indecent images of children, and released in 2013.

In February this year the now 35-year-old admitted downloading 1,170 indecent images of children, some of them showing “serious crimes inflicted on male toddlers” as well as an online “paedophile manual”.

His 40-month sentence was described by some as “a joke” and a petition was launched for Venables to be sentenced to life without parole.

The documentary, however, suggests that after the 1993 murder, Venables was so haunted by guilt he began to imagine a baby James Bulger growing inside him as if he could make things right again by giving birth and new life to his victim.

Airing claims that the trial only established the facts and there has never been a proper investigation into why the two boys murdered James, the documentary suggests Thompson and Venables may have been partly motivated by envy of a child who was loved.

The documentary reports that Venables’ siblings had special educational needs and the family’s social worker had noted the 10-year-old’s jealousy of the attention they got.

The documentary quotes the 18-year-old Thompson’s parole statement to suggest he had been subjected to violence during his childhood, and had from the age of eight spent most of his time on the streets with “friends whose main occupation was committing crime and causing trouble”.

An expert report would later describe Thompson as “an urban feral child and career delinquent”.

And when a new baby entered the family, the documentary suggests, Thompson may have been jealous of the love and attention it received.

Amanda Knowles, who managed the secure children’s home where Thompson served his sentence, told the programme makers: “I was very struck by the likeness between the youngest child in Robert’s family and Jamie.

“Similar age, similar looking child, blue eyes, blonde hair, beautiful.

“I thought about it at the time, and I’ve reflected on it since, whether there was some connection between a child who had perhaps experienced rejection through the arrival of another child in the family.”

The documentary also suggests Thompson and Venables may have resorted to killing James out of panic and not knowing what to do with him once they had abducted him from a shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside.

Ms Knowles said: “I always had a sense that, having done something that they knew to be wrong, taking this little boy away from his mum, the fear and anxiety of being in trouble became a sense of panic and a need to hide what they’d done.”

Arnon Bentovim, a psychiatrist who assessed Venables, told the programme: “Jamie would have been distressed so the whole thing mounts up.

“They’d be out of their depth and the response would be to anger, silencing, anything to shut him up.

“Instead of being able to put a brake on each other, they got increasingly angry, and their actions were increasingly destructive.”

Because of their differing demeanours at trial, with Thompson giving defiant stares while Venables wept, many assumed that Thompson had been the main instigator of the murder.

But in his parole statement Thompson, who now seems to have been successfully rehabilitated, said he had been the follower who had “gone along” with what Venables did in abducting a child.

“There was amongst my group of friends an unspoken rule that you didn’t stop or interfere with what anybody else was doing,” Thompson said in his parole statement. “You didn’t have to help or take an active part but you were in for whatever happened.

“We started to make our way home, and at some point I became aware that Jon Venables had a little boy with him.

“Looking back, I very much regret that I did nothing to stop it at this time and the sight of those photographs fills me with shame and revulsion.

“I am deeply ashamed of having played a part in this horrible murder.”

‘James Bulger: The New Revelations’ is on Channel 5 at 9pm on Wednesday