Catherine wrote:
> I have no doubt that the boys who killed Jamie must
> have been extremely abused themselves, otherwise they
> would not have been able to commit such a horrible
> crime - and this wasn't a crime of passion, it was
> premeditated and they had plenty of time to back out
> of it, so we're not even talking about ordinary
> children going too far. As far as I'm aware, none of
> this was gone into in the media (at least not here)
> and I expect this was because of the age of the
> children involved - although we were told their names
> and their ages, so *not* to talk about the fact that
> they were abused makes no sense at all to me unless,
> as you say, this was because "society" is shocked when
> this kind of thing happens and would prefer to see
> this type of criminal as monsters. And monsters they
> are, but most likely were not born - unless we're
> talking about some type of brain damage, kind of
> unlikely given there were two boys from two different
> families. And their parents were likely abused and so
> on; and likely these two boys had tortured animals
> before moving onto a human child.
I have followed the Jamie Bulger case in some depth, if only to try and
understand what would compel two 11-year-olds to torture and kill a toddler.
I've found an extremely good write-up of the entire case, including the
backgrounds of each of the boys (one of them had a pretty disturbing
history) at this site:
http://www.crimelibrary.com/classics3/bulger/
The Crime Library site has fascinating articles on all manner of crimes
throughout history, eg. John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Nilsen, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey
Dahmer, etc. It's not really for the squeamish - they've included crime
photos in a lot of the articles, even photographs of Jack the Ripper's
murder victims! But the stories are very well-researched, and if you have
an interest in this sort of thing then I can highly recommend the site.
They also have a "daily update" section, which has links to recent events.
Hell - not disturbed herself, just fascinated in the psychology behind these
people, and now realising she should have followed her "dream" of becoming a
forensic pathologist, instead of a boring systems analyst, despite the 13
years of study required!
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