Image of innocence that was revealed as a foretaste of brutal murder that horrified nation

IT WAS a grainy CCTV image that appeared to show an innocent scene of a toddler walking hand-in-hand with a child.

• Picture: PA

But what the fuzzy pictures revealed turned out to be every parent's worst nightmare.

As James Bulger was led through the Strand shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, on 12 February 1993, there was nothing to hint at the dreadful murder he would later suffer.

Moments earlier he had been seen on cameras walking with his mother, Denise Bulger, now known as Denise Fergus.

Although occasionally dropping a few steps back, he followed his mother into a shop. A short time later he was seen leaving alone, with his mother in pursuit soon after. It soon became apparent that James was missing.

The next day, his parents, Denise and Ralph, made an emotional appeal for help, as police released CCTV images that would shock the nation.

They revealed the terrible reality that James had been abducted – by a child.

Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, then aged 10, had led the boy out of the shopping centre. Shocking details of James' torture would later emerge during the court case.

The two boys, who were truanting from school, walked James around the streets of Liverpool for more than two miles, stopping occasionally to kick and punch him.

After taking him to a nearby railway line, they left his body on the tracks in the hope it would be destroyed by a train.

The toddler had been splattered with paint and his battered head lay surrounded by a pile of bricks. His body was found two days later – 200 yards from a police station and more than two miles from the Strand shopping centre.

Days later, Venables and Thompson were arrested. They were the youngest to be charged with murder in the 20th century.

In November that year, they were convicted following a 17-day trial and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, the normal substitute sentence for life imprisonment when the offender is a juvenile.