The first blow landed at 7:42 a.m. on March 17, 2010, inside the segregation wing of HMP Frankland, a maximum-security fortress in County Durham where the air smells of bleach and despair, and the man throwing the punch was James Heap, then 28, a lifer doing twenty for armed robbery, a Liverpool lad with knuckles like gravel and a temper that had already cost him three teeth in yard scraps, and the man on the receiving end was Jon Venables, one half of the duo who abducted, tortured, and murdered two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 when they themselves were only ten, and as Heap’s fist connected with Venables’ cheekbone the crack echoed down the corridor like a starter pistol, guards shouting, alarms shrieking, batons drawn, but Heap kept swinging, roaring through blood-flecked spit, “That’s for Jamie, you sick bastard,” until four officers dragged him off and Venables curled fetal on the floor, nose streaming, whimpering the same five words he had whispered to Heap the night before, words that had ignited the rage: “He cried like a lamb.”
Fifteen years later, James Heap breaks his silence from a parole hostel in Merseyside, ankle tag blinking under the table, voice raw from years of chain-smoking roll-ups and nightmares that still wake him swinging at shadows, and he wants the world to know exactly how the child-killer lived behind bars, because the public imagines Venables rotting in a dungeon, but Heap says the truth is cushier than any council flat in Bootle, and the memory of those five words, “He cried like a lamb,” uttered with a half-smile while Venables polished his PlayStation controller, is what finally snapped the last thread of Heap’s restraint.
Heap was moved into the protected wing in February 2010 after a contract was put on his head by a Manchester gang, and there, in the velvet-gloved corner of the prison where Britain hides its most reviled, he found himself sharing air with Venables, then 27, living under the identity “Mark Dixon,” a pseudonym so flimsy that every con in the block knew who he was, and the setup was luxurious by any inmate standard, a private cell with en-suite shower, Sky TV, an Xbox 360 loaded with FIFA and Grand Theft Auto, a mini-fridge stocked with Coca-Cola and chocolate Hobnobs, art supplies because Venables fancied himself a painter of sunsets, and a weekly visit from a child psychologist who brought Lego therapy kits, all funded by the taxpayer at a cost that Heap claims topped £1.2 million a year, more than the annual salary of the detective who originally hunted him.
The two men were never meant to interact, but segregation wings are small worlds, and during association hour they ended up at adjacent tables in the common room, Heap nursing a mug of prison tea, Venables sketching cartoon dolphins on A3 paper, and at first the conversations were banal, football scores, complaints about the slop on the menu, but Venables had a way of steering talk toward the dark, asking Heap if he had ever “lost control” as a kid, if he remembered the first time he made someone cry, and Heap, sensing the game, played dumb, but Venables kept probing, eyes flicking to the CCTV camera as if daring it to blink, until one night in the TV room, with Coronation Street flickering unheard, he leaned over and murmured the sentence that would haunt Heap forever: “He cried like a lamb,” adding after a beat, “soft, then nothing,” and in that moment Heap saw not a man but the ten-year-old monster who lured James Bulger from the Strand shopping centre with promises of sweets, who led him by the hand to the railway line where they battered him with bricks and an iron bar, who placed batteries in his mouth and left him for the trains.
The next morning, when the cell doors clacked open for breakfast, Heap was waiting, and as Venables shuffled past in slippers embroidered with teddy bears, Heap launched, fist connecting with the soft part of the cheek, then the jaw, then the temple, each blow punctuated with a name, “Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” until the guards piled in and Heap was pinned face-down, tasting his own blood, shouting into the lino, “He gets Hobnobs and Lego while that baby’s in the ground,” and Venables, nose broken, lip split, was whisked to the medical wing where he received stitches, ice packs, and a new identity before the day was out.
Heap got six months added to his sentence and solitary confinement in the basement block known as the Dungeon, but he says the punishment was worth it, because for one brief moment the monster felt what James Bulger felt, fear, pain, helplessness, and in the long nights alone he replayed Venables’ life of comfort, the custom-made meals because he claimed allergies to prison gravy, the private gym sessions with a personal trainer to keep his “mental health weight” down, the encrypted phone calls to his mother who still sent him birthday cards addressed to “my special boy,” the art classes where he painted seascapes that guards hung in the staff room, all while the Bulger family received annual updates that amounted to “no change,” all while Denise Fergus, James’s mother, worked double shifts in a care home to pay the mortgage on a house that would never hear her son’s laughter.
Venables was moved within hours to a new facility under a new name, and Heap never saw him again, but the whispers followed, that Venables had bragged to another protected inmate about “finishing the job” if he ever got out, that he kept a locked diary filled with train timetables and crayon drawings of railway tracks, that he once asked a guard for a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD “for nostalgia,” and Heap says the system is rigged to coddle monsters, because every time Venables reoffends, and he has, twice, with child pornography, he is simply given a new face, a new postcode, a new childhood to hide behind, while James Bulger remains forever two, forever on the railway embankment, forever crying like a lamb.
Denise Fergus heard about the punch-up through a prison chaplain who owed her a favor, and she sent Heap a letter that he keeps in a tobacco tin under his mattress, four lines in blue biro: Thank you for giving him what the courts never did. James is proud. Keep fighting. Denise. Heap reads it every night before lights out, and when parole officers ask why he still wakes swinging, he tells them the truth, that the monster is out there living better than most, that the five words still echo, that one punch was never enough.
Jon Venables, now 43, lives somewhere in northern England under his third identity, reportedly engaged to a woman who believes he is a victim of mistaken identity, reportedly attending anger-management classes paid for by the state, reportedly drawing disability benefits for anxiety, and Heap says the public deserves to know that the boy who stole a toddler’s life has stolen comfort ever since, that the railway line where James died is now a footpath lined with wildflowers, but the path Venables walks is paved with privileges, and until someone burns that path to the ground, the lamb’s cry will never stop.
