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Bulger killers: Venables, Thompson

Novel inspiration + CCTV

The encouraging thing about these two recent references to Venables and Thompson isn't just that Anne Cassidy based her award-nominated novel on it (tho' I like that it's a story for teenagers, educating and placing the murderers' names before a new generation), nor that Deutsche Welle come out with this article on observation cameras.

It's that the Bulger case stays fresh in people's minds, either as inspiration (Cassidy's "Looking for JJ" and Denise Mina's book on the subject) or reminder that "Video surveillance was thrust to the fore of the public consciousness in Britain in 1993 when cameras in a Liverpool shopping center caught the moment when two 11-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, kidnapped two-year-old Jamie Bulger."

There was always a danger of the killing fading from the media's memory and the ferreting of the boys fall from journalistic fashion.

Plugs like these and the recent Court TV posting are signs of a tipping point - as are silly coincidences like there being a Thompson/Venables duo on some Oklahoma football team.