Dispatches

By HELEN GIBSON, in Preston, England

The small, hushed crowd outside Preston Crown Court watched as the two white police vans drove away. "It's hard to believe they did it," remarked James Livesey, 69. "It could have been a prank that went wrong," said Colette Smalley, mother of an eight-month-old, "but maybe we want to believe that -- it's too horrific to think otherwise." The vans' two occupants, 11-year- old boys with tidy haircuts, had just left the ornate, oak-paneled Court 1, where the floor of the dock had been raised a foot to allow them to see over the brass rail. The boys are charged with abducting and brutally murdering two-year-old James Bulger last February in Liverpool, and with the attempted abduction of another toddler the same day. The ghastliness of the case and the youth of the defendants shocked the nation and particularly Liverpool, where mobs demonstrated against the boys. For the sake of fairness, the trial was moved 20 miles north to Preston (about 220 miles northwest of London).

Last week as the trial began, the prosecution in Regina v. A and B (Two Children) -- no other identification is allowed -- told of how Denise Bulger, 25, was buying meat at the butcher in a mall when she looked down to find that her high-spirited James had vanished from her side. Only a few minutes later, as she frantically searched for him, James was walking off with two boys, his hand trustingly in theirs. The scene, captured in a hazy film on mall security cameras, was shown in court to the nine men and three women on the jury. The prosecution claims that in an interview Boy B quoted Boy A as having said at the time, "Let's get him lost outside, so when he goes into the road he'll get knocked over." According to at least 27 witnesses, the two schoolboy truants dragged the now distraught child along 2 1/2 miles of streets to a railway siding. In the intervening two hours, five passersby stopped the threesome but were persuaded that the littlest boy was lost and being taken to the police station or was being looked after in some way.

Once by the railway line, James was kicked, stoned and beaten on the head with bricks and a metal rod until he died. The child's half-unclothed body was then placed across the freight track, said the prosecutor, where it was found two days later, cut in half. "James is only a small child," was the description his mother gave the police the day of his disappearance. "He has brown-blond hair, straight, which is ready for cutting ... he has a full set of baby teeth." But it was already too late.

Both boys deny the charges, although the prosecution has described how one confessed to the killing when he was arrested a week after it took place. In private, the prosecutor says, the defendants have blamed each other for the murder, each changing his story as further evidence was put to him.

The defendants, sitting beside two social workers, listen with pale and expressionless faces. Both come from broken homes, with parents reported to have alcohol problems. While Boy B's parents have both been in court, sometimes crying as the grisly murder was described, neither A's mother nor his father has attended the trial. Boy A has kept his composure for the most part, but his companion has sobbed and clutched at the social worker beside him. James' father, Ralph Bulger, listens intently, occasionally closing his eyes.