Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Denise Fergus, Echo Publishing, $29.99
From the mother of two-year-old James Bulger, here’s a distressing account of a crime that shocked the world.
Heart-breaking though it is, this story is truthfully inspirational. It’s a crime that haunts, but Denise has an arresting story to tell about her young son, whose murder by two 10-year-old boys shocked the world.
Denise’s life changed forever on 12 February 1993. She let go of her son’s hand to take out her purse while running errands at New Strand Shopping Centre.
Denise never saw her son again. James was killed one month short of his third birthday.
It’s now more than 25 years, but it’s an unflinching account of that awful day. There are many ‘what if’ questions in her mind. This is a mother’s tale of finding a way through the crippling despair to remember the happiness and wonderful memories that James had brought to his family.
Above all, Denise doesn’t want her son to be remembered as a murdered child. With this poignantly written book, she does just that.
It’s part- memoir and part- harsh criticism of the legal system she says had let her down. Another reason for her writing this is to bring her son back to life. She is tired of James being remembered simply as the ‘little boy who was murdered’. She wants us to know him as the livewire he was: “He was very bubbly. He loved dancing to Michael Jackson videos and making people laugh.”
The death of James reverberated around the world and his killers became the youngest-ever convicted murderers in UK legal history. Denise took up a complicated legal battle for James, and it was her astonishing strength and determination that ultimately helped to change the way the law treats victims of crime in the UK.
