Let Us Prey

Product Information

Jon venables would go on to reoffend and is still jail as we speak for child pornography offences for the second time yet he is still protected under yet another assumed name! This book was very informative. But this author clearly has a lot of sympathy for these two little monsters yeah I said monsters cause that’s what they are! I have read about this case from the moment it happened the authors pathetic explanation at the end of the book as to why these two tortured and murdered an innocent two year old boy is weak. Nothing much had ever happened in Maids Moreton before Ben Field arrived and began deceiving and killings its residents.

It is so hard to rate books based on facts, especially when those facts are based around an appalling death. In this case, the tragic little James Bulger who must have had a terrifying last few hours of his brief life. None of that was happening to Jon Venables and Bobby Thompson, the two truanting ten year olds. They were little kids, and they decided to murder a littler kid. Might it have been some kind of crazy adventure (let’s play kidnap) gone wrong? Doesn’t look like that – why not just abandon the kid next to the police station? The two year old didn’t know their names, he couldn’t have said who they were so they wouldn’t have got in trouble. So did they really mean to kill him? If so, where did that horror come from? That’s what we all wanted to know.I think Smith should have made more mention of the fact that there were two perpetrators, this is known to be a strong disinhibitor and I imagine that, for two children giving each other encouragement and normalising each step of this crime, this would have been a powerful factor. I think this area should have had more coverage. We have seen from the studies of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, for example in Christopher Browning’s brilliant Ordinary Men, how murder can be normalised, so guys can think that shooting a village full of men, women and children is an unpleasant but reasonable thing to do, given the circumstances. You know, a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. That was the pathology of a lot of German murderers during the Third Reich. It was group think. It was people abdicating responsibility upwards. Hitler, he knows what he’s doing. Everything is happening just like he said it would. We’re not psychopaths, we’re doing good work here, building a great future for our children.

She said she had known he was a risk because of his “wolfish” nature. She had hoped he would recognise in her the real thing. If you're newer to the case than I am, David James Smith will do a great job of bringing you up to speed on it. It covers most of the important facts in a fairly straightforward way. Smith's book starts out ok, but derails in that it gets bogged down in the details and there's a lot of repetition. I found myself skimming parts. The portraits of the police and inspectors that he draws up are in-congruent with the rest of the story and frankly dull. I would have rather heard more about the boys and James Bulger and his family. There are three types of true crime books – absolute classics like Homicide by David Simon or The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer; there is complete trash like Body Dump by Fred Rosen; and there are the decent thorough accounts like Defending Gary by Mark Prothero. This book is in the top half of division two. He wrote that he fantasised about hitting Peter with a hammer, which led to a darkly comic exchange in court.What i personally struggle with is how to view the post traumatic stress they developed as a result of murdering James. Because they did this awful thing, which gave them PTSD and this PTSD should be taken into account when judging them....isn't that walking in circles a little bit? He almost certainly gently suffocated Peter at the moment of his death in October 2015 after first priming him with drugs and alcohol. Incapable of ordinary human emotions such as empathy, he observed those qualities in others and copied them for himself. He was all a pretence. Fantasises about 'suffocating neighbours' in twisted diaries The horrific murder of James bulger is one of those events that stands out in human history and author is wrong when he states there is no such thing as evil people the darkness that exists in this world was strong the day these too no doubt budding psychopaths met each other. The inhumanity these two monsters showed to James bulger is the definition of evil and can’t be explained away by a subpar childhood.

Jon Venables leads James Bulger, aged 2 and 11 months, away. His friend Bobby Thompson is just in front of the two.) The most interesting part of this book was the way in which the author examines the demonization of Jon and Bobby by the media and their own community. David James Smith looks at the family dynamics of both boys as well as the social undercurrents of their community to try and explain why this crime was committed. Smith includes a chronological list of child murderers to disprove the notion that the murder of James Bulger was a singular event. Smith also discounts the idea that some children are 'born evil'. Instead, the author suggests, they are created through repeated cycles of abuse, humiliation and powerlessness. David Smith has clearly spent a lot of time on this case and he does an admirable job of delving beyond the trite 'demon,' 'monster,' 'beyond evil' trope that is thrown around by the gutter press. The Sleep Of Reason (I'm not sure what this title actually refers to) gives us the whole sad story about how, why (is there really a why??), when, etc of the abduction, torture and death of James by two 10 year old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.This book is narrated by Smith based on his own investigation into the murder of Farquhar, citing Field's own journals to show how he manipulated those around him and indulged in perverse fantasies that, although he later claimed with merely flights of fancy, contained very specific details about the acts he actually carried out. These journals provide a fascinating, if viscerally chilling, look into the mind of a killer, portraying Field as an extremely cruel and calculating individual. The chilling case of Ben Field, who killed an author and deceived lovers in a twisted campaign of lies, has been likened to a real-life Agatha Christie plot.