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[–]lornamd-116 years ago
I have read about the case in the newspaper and books. Psychiatrists who examined the boys found they suffered from post-traumatic stress which does suggest some remorse on their part.
Although Jon Venables was found fit to stand trial there was a history of mental illness in his family if that is relevant to his crime I do not know. I do know that Robert Thompson was violently abused by his older brother and he in turn took that out on his younger brother. I believe that this pattern of child cruelty desensitized him to violence and made picking on the weak and vulnerable seem normal to him. According to what I have read Thompson was the more dominant of the
two and he probably put peer pressure on Venables to take part. Since Venables came from an abusive home and was bullied by other kids for having a squint eye he may also have been desensitized to violence and probably enjoyed having power for once rather than being the victim. They have both said the original plan was to take James to have a toy but James fought back and wanted to go back to his mother which led to the violence and eventual murder. Once again I'll stress I am only trying to explain their behavior not excuse. There is no excuse.
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[–]prettyh13 years ago
mhearn wrote:
How do you know of all this trauma Thompson and especially Venables suffered. I live in the USA so I did not know about that. As far as I am concerned they were Brady and Hindleys in training. I have read extensively about B and H and your comments are right on the mark. Ian Brady wrote a book about serial killing; I actually tried to read it, but found it so twisted even I could not stomach it.
I'm actually reading Brady's book right now (I'm in the healthcare field, hoping eventually to put my psych/soc degree to use in the forensic intake program at a psychiatric facility, so I tend to read a lot of crime-related stuff), and it's...interesting. In a twisted way. Odd to think of him as a 70-something-year-old man starving himself in prison, still.
You might want to try reading a book called "The Lost Boy" by Duncan Staff (reviews are here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/980939.The_Lost_Boy), which is more about Hindley than Brady, and focuses on the struggle that Keith Bennett's mother has gone through having never had her son's body found on the Moors. It's not as deranged a read as "The Gates Of Janus."
As for Thompson and Venables, I recently read a book about that case as well (see? I told you I read a lot of them! It's for field education purposes only, I swear it!) which might shed some light on what was behind their particular pathologies. It's called "As If," written by Blake Morrison, an English journalist for the New Yorker who sat in on the trial and had access to psych reports and such. (Reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/812759.As_If.) I'll warn you, though, that some of it is tough to stomach. The odd thing is that the author, who is very well-written and certainly well-researched, gives a definite sympathetic slant toward the boys (not at the expense of James Bulger or his parents, mind, as he reserves his greatest sorrows for them...rightly so), but in the end I was still totally unable to feel any sympathy whatsoever for them, regardless of what they'd been through or the fact that they were a mere 10 years old when they killed James. Usually I can at least manage some empathy of sorts, but...no. Having said that, though, when I saw the film based loosely on the life of one of the killers ("Boy A" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1078188/), I nearly cried myself into dehydration, and it was over the killer more than the victim. Odd, indeed.
Ian Brady as as a child had the capacity to pull off something like the Bulger killing; it is amazing he didn't. And while Myra Hindley may not have turned out the way she did had she not crossed paths with Brady, she certainly was a piece of work!!!!!!
There's a not-dissimilar case to that of Hindley and Brady here (in Canada, my homeland), perpatrated by Karla hom*olka and Paul Bernardo. A lot of people bought into the idea that Karla was warped by Paul, and she got off VERY easy by comparison, but later evidence (videotapes, no less) have made a lot of people wonder if she was the one who escalated Paul to murder. If you're interested in the power dynamic in couples who kill, you might want to read up on that one as well. (I'm an endless fount of information on this stuff; can you tell?? )
~ http://prettyh.blogspot.com/ ~
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