Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 3, 1993 TAG: 9311030102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PRESTON, ENGLAND LENGTH: Medium
Prosecutor Richard Henriques also told the court that the two boys on trial for the murder of James Bulger, 2, had a "fluent capacity to tell lies" and tried to blame each other.
The defendants, now 11 and referred to in court as "Child A" and "Child B," knew what they were doing was terribly wrong, he said.
Both boys have pleaded innocent to murdering James, whose body was found cut in two near the rail line after he was abducted from a shopping mall in Liverpool in February. But Henriques, on the second day of the trial, said one of them confessed during police questioning.
The two pudgy dark-haired boys, 10 years old at the time of James' death, are the youngest children to be charged in Britain with first-degree murder.
Britons were outraged by the murder and shocked at the age of the suspects. Witnesses who saw two boys drag James to the rail line said the older children told them the dirty, crying toddler either was their brother or a lost child they were taking to police.
Child B fidgeted and cried as Henriques spelled out more details from the police account of James' horrifying last hours.
His divorced parents sobbed as they sat side-by-side on a wooden bench. His father hunched almost double as the prosecutor described how the boy finally confessed after swearing innocence to his mother.
Henriques said Child B, during questioning by police in front of his mother and a legal adviser, at first denied ever seeing James.
His mother said, "Is that the God's honest truth, son?" He replied, "I am telling you we never. We never."
The boy nervously pressed his fingertips together and wiped his face with wads of soggy tissues as Henriques quoted him as confessing later:
"We started throwing bricks at him. A big steel bar knocked him out. . . . [He] fell over and kept getting back up again."
Child A, whose parents have not appeared in court, sat calmly beside a social worker Tuesday during the reading of the confession. But when a young mother later accused the two boys of also attempting to abduct her 2-year-old son hours before James was taken, he sucked his thumb.
Both he and Child B had lawyers and a parent or social worker at every police interrogation.
Newspapers splashed the trial across front pages Tuesday with headlines such as "The Full Horror" and "James - The Last Terrible Moments."
National television stations led bulletins with the unfolding testimony.
But all that Britons see are artists' renderings of the backs of the boys' heads, hair neatly combed and sitting between social workers on a dais that has been raised so they can see the proceedings.
Trials may not be televised in Britain, and the boys may not be identified because of their age.
In Preston, a couple of dozen people hung around outside the courthouse as two separate police vans, windows covered, arrived with the defendants.
by CNB