My Name Is Bulger

What Is the Series About?

My Name Is Bulger is a documentary series streaming on Disney+ that returns to one of the most shocking and emotionally charged criminal cases in British history: the 1993 abduction and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, in Liverpool, England. The series takes its provocative title from the central tension that has haunted British public life for nearly three decades — the question of identity, anonymity, justice, and whether the killers of a toddler can ever truly leave their crimes behind them. Through testimony, archive footage, and in-depth interviews, the series revisits not only the crime itself but the legal, ethical, and human questions that have kept the case alive in the national consciousness long after Thompson and Venables were released.

The Case

On 12 February 1993, James Bulger, aged two, was abducted from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, Merseyside, while his mother Denise momentarily looked away. CCTV footage captured two older boys leading James away by the hand — images that would become among the most recognised and haunting in British crime history. Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old, took James on a journey of approximately two and a half miles through the streets of Liverpool before subjecting him to a sustained and fatal assault on a railway line near Walton. James's body was discovered on 14 February 1993, and the post-mortem examination revealed the severity of the attack.

Thompson and Venables were arrested shortly after police released stills from the shopping centre CCTV footage. In November 1993, both boys were convicted of murder at Preston Crown Court and sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure — making them two of the youngest convicted murderers in modern English legal history. The trial itself was controversial, with debate about whether children of that age should have been tried in an adult Crown Court setting.

After serving approximately eight years in secure youth facilities, both were released on licence in June 2001 and granted lifelong anonymity orders — legally binding injunctions that prevented the media and public from naming them or disclosing their new identities. The decision prompted fierce national debate. James's mother, Denise Fergus, became one of the most prominent voices arguing that the anonymity orders were unjust and that the public had a right to know where the killers were living.

The case did not end with their release. Jon Venables was recalled to prison in 2010 after he was found to have downloaded child sexual abuse images. He was recalled again on subsequent occasions on related charges, each recall reigniting the debate about whether his rehabilitation had ever been genuine and whether the public was being adequately protected. Robert Thompson, by contrast, has not been publicly linked to further offending and has largely remained out of the public eye.

Production

My Name Is Bulger was produced for Disney+ and released in 2021, arriving as part of a broader wave of streaming documentary content revisiting landmark British criminal cases. The series draws on decades of archive material, including the original CCTV footage from Bootle Strand that first alerted police and the public to the identity of James's abductors, as well as news coverage and court reporting from the period. The production seeks to give voice to those most affected by the case, including members of James Bulger's family, who have consistently maintained a public presence and advocacy role in the years since his death.

Denise Fergus, James's mother, has remained a central figure in the public memory of the case and has spoken extensively over the years about her feelings regarding the anonymity orders, the justice system's handling of the killers, and her son's legacy. Any documentary series addressing the Bulger case must navigate the profound grief of a family that has lived with public attention and private loss simultaneously for almost thirty years.

The title of the series is itself a pointed statement: at a time when Thompson and Venables live under legally protected names, the title asserts that the name Bulger — James's name, his family's name — is the one that must not be forgotten.

Reception

The James Bulger case remains one of the most emotionally raw and socially divisive cases in British criminal history, and documentary treatments of it tend to attract both significant viewership and significant critical scrutiny. My Name Is Bulger, airing on Disney+ in 2021, drew attention from British audiences and press outlets who have followed the case continuously since 1993.

Critical response to the series reflected the broader tensions the case always provokes: questions about whether re-examining the case serves justice or prolongs the suffering of James's family, and whether the media's long fascination with Thompson and Venables has itself been a distorting force. The presence of Denise Fergus and other family members in documentary projects has generally been viewed sympathetically by audiences, who regard her continued advocacy as a legitimate and dignified response to an unbearable loss.

IMDb ratings and formal critical aggregation data for the series are not available at the time of publication and should be verified directly via the IMDb title page.

The Case Today

The James Bulger case continues to generate legal and public controversy in the United Kingdom. Jon Venables's repeated recalls to custody on child sexual abuse image offences have kept the case in the headlines and fuelled ongoing calls by Denise Fergus and her supporters for the anonymity order to be revoked, arguing that the public has a right to know Venables's current identity given his pattern of reoffending.

The legal framework protecting Thompson and Venables's identities remains in force as of the time of writing, and any breach of those injunctions by a media organisation or private individual carries the risk of contempt of court proceedings. This legal tension — between press freedom, public safety, and the rights of convicted individuals who were children at the time of their offence — continues to be debated by legal scholars, journalists, and campaigners.

James Bulger would have been in his early thirties today. His mother Denise Fergus has continued her public advocacy through the James Bulger Memorial Trust and other initiatives, ensuring that James's name and memory remain at the centre of any public discussion of the case that bears it. My Name Is Bulger, in its title and its content, explicitly aligns itself with that insistence: that whatever names Thompson and Venables may now carry, the name that matters is the one belonging to the child they killed.