Laurence Lee still dreads the recurring nightmare that stalked him following the James Bulger trial.
The setting was always the same - an evocation of the freight railway line in Walton, Liverpool, where the two-year-old’s badly beaten body was dumped by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, splattered with blue paint and covered in bricks.
For years after the trial as he fell asleep each night Lee - the defence lawyer for Venables who, like his co-defendant, was aged just 10 - imagined himself on a speeding ghost train which tipped him on to the tracks and ran him over.
“They didn’t have PTSD in those days but if they had I would have been a victim,” Lee recalls. “I had awful nightmares for ages afterwards. Even now I can’t listen to the details.”
The murder of James Bulger, which occurred 25 years ago this month, united a nation in shock. The CCTV picture of James being led away from Liverpool’s...