When leaving Bootle to travel back to his office in Anfield, Alex Radnor-Boulton always drove straight along Merton Road.
As the electrical engineer for the Triad offices above the Strand, the journey had become a familiar one. It was the swiftest route back towards Walton and was the same stretch of road that two year-old James Bulger had been led along on February 12, 1993.
James was reported missing that same day. His dead body was found two days later on the rail line passing over Walton Lane, a police station just a few hundred yards away.
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Grainy CCTV images had captured James being led away by two youths at the Strand shopping centre, but it was not clear enough to see how old they were. An appeal went out to the whole community to help identify the killers.
In the days after, Alex drove a different route, driving away from the Strand along Park Street before heading along Hawthorne Road which meets the familiar Merton Road. “Intuition” and a “lightbulb moment” is how Alex describes the change in routine, attempting to follow a route the boys could have taken.
The change made him pass AMEX construction on the corner of Hawthorne Road, a business where he was another subcontractor. He noticed CCTV cameras facing towards the junction James had passed just days earlier.
After, he claims, alerting AMEX’s owner to go back through footage, the police were then handed pictures that proved to be a decisive breakthrough. The footage captured James and two boys and helped narrow down suspects.
The breakthrough came amid 11 days of horror, grief and disbelief. It was a breakthrough that eventually helped identify the killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, but also revealed the horror of their age - leaving Bootle and the wider city to carry the memory of two 10-year-old murders for the last 30 years.
“People in the area haven’t forgotten,” says Alex, now retired and in his 70s. “The community has never been able to come to terms with such a heinous crime.”
'It could have been us'
Today Bootle’s main high street is a very different place 30 years on. Some locals feel it was irrevocably changed on that frightening day in 1993, but the difference is also physical and one that has been accelerated in the last decade.
Big name brands have been scrubbed off the shopfronts around the Strand shopping centre - still legible enough to act as reminders of different times. Rows of units are more sparse than before, but a healthy footfall still remains.
“There’s something changing at the Strand,” proclaim billboards around the centre. The statement is hard to disagree with when looking back on pictures of its heyday. But some locals feel there will always be one consistent memory - one many would prefer to forget, as one trader tells the ECHO.
A.R Tyms, where James’ mother Denise was shopping when the two-year-old was lured away, is no longer there. The bottom floor of the Strand is now known as “charity row” to some traders, referencing the number of donation shops, interspersed with bookmakers and slots arcades.
The family connection to the butchers is instead carried on outside of The Strand, a street away from the Leeds Liverpool Canal. Stephen Webster, 39, notes how it was his uncle’s business where the dreadful incident began.
“It had a big impact,” says Stephen, the owner of a barbershop on Merton Grove, “it really affected the area.”
Only nine years old when the incident happened, Stephen recalls how his uncle’s business never quite recovered to the levels of before that day. “Parents would never let you go to the Strand,” he says, “they were always scared.”
He notes how the area “came together” in the aftermath, but temperatures throughout the community were high. Stephen remembers watching news clips of the killers arriving for hearings at Sefton Magistrates where large crowds had waited outside.
“Bootle was a very sombre place up until the trial,” Alex remembers, “but there was also an anger about the place. People weren’t having it.”
One local, who did not want to be named, says a “mob mentality” fed into the area amid the grief and shock. One shop worker in The Strand notes how, when in his 20s, he was among the groups outside of the courts.
“People wanted to kill them back then,” he says from behind the counter, “a lot of people still do.
“There were more women than men in those crowds around the van on that day,” he adds, alluding to the impact it had on other mothers in the city at the time. “It could have been us” is a familiar phrase that pops up when speaking to people about the emotions the incident evoked - even 30 years on.
The deep anguish and hollowness completely shattered Ali Maryangi’s understanding of a town he had moved to in 1991. The 67-year-old owned a taxi fleet which would be serviced at a garage near to the canal, a business he would eventually take on himself.
“It was a nice area at the time, filled with good people; the high street was very lively,” he recalls, but adds that the murder “fundamentally changed the area that day.
“To have happened on your doorstep, nobody could believe it,” he says, sitting in the office of the garage. While the area bears the weight of unthinkable memory, its people’s conscience has also been strained for multiple decades.
Noting the canal, where James was taken by Venables and Thompson, is only yards away from his business, he wrestles with the idea of being in such close proximity to the horror that had unfolded - unaware of what was really taking place, much like the 38 people who did in fact cross paths with James as he was walked two and half miles to Walton.
“[Maybe] I could have seen,” he considers, a thought so many have likely pored over for years on end, noting how the details of the murder “stick with you for the rest of your life.”
'No excuses'
Bootle MP Peter Dowd, then a local councillor who went on to be leader of the Sefton council in the years after, says the event “still remains in people’s minds”, but reaction 30 years on should be “articulated through the perspective of [James’] family.”
Peter is inside The Strand on the day we visit as part of a promotional event ahead of the Eurovision song contest, set to be staged a few miles up the road in May. But even as the area looks to the future, for some The Strand will always carry echoes of the past.
“It was a terrible shock for the community - everybody knows the Strand as a friendly and community based place,” says Peter. Councillors and politicians are accustomed to visibly supporting their communities when shocking events unfold, but there was no precedent for what happened in Bootle in 1993.
“We were trying to reassure people,” says Peter of the frontline response at the time, “the local authority wanted to reassure people that our community is a safe community.”
He adds: “It could have been any shopping centre where it happened. This was not a Bootle problem, it was not a Liverpool or Merseyside problem. It was two individuals responsible.”
Peter says “no excuses” were ever made about the social and economic challenges of the time as Bootle and wider Liverpool looked to claw its way out of periods of recession. No seeds of justification could ever be reasoned with.
“Taking a little baby and killing him on the railway,” ponders Geraldine Scully, closing up a sandwich shop on Bootle’s high street, “it was horrific, absolutely horrific to kill a little kid like that.” The 83-year-old was 53 at the time and remembers police in and out of the shop and also swarming the estate where she lived on Breeze Hill - part of the route James was taken on.
“Walking around The Strand in the days after, everyone was breaking their hearts crying,” Geraldine remembers, “you don't ever forget it, how could a young kid do that to a baby?”
'Stunned silence'
The Jawbone Tavern, over 200 years old and a survivor of The Blitz, also found its quiet corner of Litherland Road equally upturned by the events 30 years ago. Landlord Harry Sandle, now 70, remembers the unfolding investigation well.
“There were reporters in here all of the time, police coming in and out speaking to people,” he says, sitting in the corner of his pub, adding: “At the time it was horrendous. Everyone was stunned by it. People felt helpless. There was just a stunned silence."
In terms of legacy, he felt the area was branded with “the stigma of child killers.” He says it was completely “unfair”, something that stuck in the eyes of some people outside of the city.
But this ‘stunned silence’ he recalls has remained for many, with Harry noting the murder is often a subject people would prefer to not talk about. The feeling is mutual inside Bootle Library.
Rikki Simpson, 41, senior library officer, explains how the library has a reading group every Friday focusing on true crime stories. The Bulger case is unlikely to be discussed this week or next.
"Many of the group find they cannot talk about it," says Rikki, who was 11 when the incident happened, “it still upsets and haunts people.” But the shared grief does in turn provide a foundation for recovery - the same kind James’ mum has strived for in her campaigning for tougher laws and work with his charity.
“People stuck together,” says Rikki, “if you hurt one of us, you hurt all of us, was the reaction. It was [a Merseyside issue]."
Rikki notes how people who weren’t born when it happened will know the ins and outs of the horrific incident. She suggests that memory is one that people pass on and carry, whether the want to or not.
“It should still be a prevalent story - it keeps people aware of what happened,” adds Harry, noting how the memory cannot rest, if anything, to ensure James is always remembered.
Thirty years on there is now a clear feeling that Bootle is looking forward, despite the incident always being there at the back of its mind. Three decades on the challenge for Bootle is more all encompassing.
Some of its key office spaces have been left empty, more jobs and opportunities now coalesce around Liverpool city centre, taking money and investment with them.
All this while Bootle continues to be overlooked for critical funding to regenerate the town. Plans to overhaul The Strand, pulling it firmly into the future, are underway with hopes of one day constructing a permanent canal-side market and events attraction. But once again idea was not backed by the Conservative Government’s Levelling Up fund.
The sombre irony of The Strand as the town’s heartbeat, lifeblood and future isn’t lost on Stephen Webster, whose barbers would be just a street away from the proposed new canal-side development.
“When the Strand can finally be regenerated,” he says, “maybe the memory will go away.”
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