James’ loss was great, but in the short time he was on this Earth his life left an imprint on the hearts of all who loved him.

Barry George was convicted and later acquitted of the infamous 1999 shooting of the television presenter on the doorstep of her London home.

At the court hearing, it emerged that Venables had posed in online chat rooms as 35-year-old Dawn "Dawnie" Smith, a married woman from Liverpool who boasted about abusing her 8-year-old daughter, in the hope of obtaining further child sexual abuse material. Awaiting trial, they were held in the secure units where they would eventually be sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure.

Beyond a story of horrific child murder, I Let Him Go shares precious memories of a cheeky little boy who filled his family’s hearts with abounding joy.This belief is shared by Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby who’s in charge of the investigation. James’s 27-year-old brother Michael and half-brothers Thomas, 22, and Leon, 21, describe in the Channel 5 film how Fergus often told them stories about their oldest brother, and kept an empty chair at the dinner table at Christmas. They represent parents’ worst nightmare : that if you turn your back for a moment your children will be stolen away and murdered. The European Court case led to the new Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, reviewing the minimum sentence. The boys went on a 2 + 1⁄ 2-mile (4-kilometre) walk across Liverpool; they were seen by around 38 people, but most bystanders did nothing to intervene.

The same light-blue paint-marks were also found on Child A and Child B’s clothing including their jackets, trousers and shoes. The terms of their release included the following: they were not allowed to contact each other or Bulger's family; they were prohibited from visiting the Merseyside region; [66] curfews may be imposed on them, and they must report to probation officers.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice commented: "Such a change of identity is extremely rare, and granted only when the police assess that there is clear and credible evidence of a sustained threat to the offender's life on release into the community. The editors of The Sun handed a petition bearing nearly 280,000 signatures to Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, in a bid to increase the time spent by both boys in custody. The level of anger that someone could commit such a brutal and savage murder has incensed the Liverpool community. They made all that on their own and if you decide to randomly kidnap and brutally murder another human being, you have no one but yourself to blame when that ends up ruining your life, no matter your age. In August 2009, Australia's Seven Network used real footage of the abduction to promote its crime drama City Homicide.

For the first time in the programme’s history an appeal is to be launched in the same week the murder has been committed.

The way she felt the need to repeat "I only let his hand go for a second" broke my heart, as if anyone could have predicted it would end up like this. Early press reports and police statements had referred to Bulger being seen with "two youths" (suggesting that the killers were teenagers), the ages of the boys being difficult to ascertain from the images captured by CCTV. However, being a true crime fan/reader, I think I probably should have read an account about the crime itself prior to reading this, just to get some background information.