A two-year-old named Tommy Lark vanished from a butcher's counter in Halverton's Coppergate Arcade in forty seconds, turned up two days later on a railway embankment two and a half miles away, and a hundred uniforms across the city couldn't put a name to the two figures in the closed-circuit film.

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THE REAL CASE BEHIND THIS STORY: On February 12, 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was led out of the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, England, while his mother paid for groceries at a butcher shop. He was walked two and a half miles on foot through Liverpool to a railway embankment in Walton, where his abductors beat him to death and laid his body across the tracks. He was found two days later. Roughly thirty-eight people had seen the three children together along the route; none intervened. Six days after the abduction, a woman recognized one of the boys from enhanced CCTV stills broadcast on national television and called Marsh Lane police station with two names — Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old, both flagged on a truancy list that investigators had set aside on the assumption that the perpetrators were teenagers. The pair were arrested the same day and convicted at Preston Crown Court on November 24, 1993, making them the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. Both were released on life licence with new identities at age eighteen in June 2001 under a court order granting them lifelong anonymity. Robert Thompson has not reoffended. Jon Venables has been recalled to prison twice on child-pornography charges and remains in custody, with his most recent parole hearing held in February 2026.

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Originally aired: May 18, 2026