Why did Jamie Bulger die?

For the past three months Gitta Sereny has thought of little else but the case of the Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger, who was murdered a year ago tomorrow.

'If you have, as I do, an innate belief in the goodness of human beings (especially children), it is only if you see the very worst that can happen that you can discover a) why it happened, and b) how bad can be turned back into good.'

Sereny, who in 1968 wrote about another child murderer in The Case of Mary Bell, is the only journalist who has interviewed not only the police officers, lawyers and teachers involved in the Bulger case, but also the parents of both the boy-murderers. Part two of her account will be published in the Independent on Sunday this weekend. Part one was published last week.

This week, Sereny interviews Anne Thompson, the mother of Robert, who was regarded as the more dominant of the two boys. Demonised by the tabloids during the trial, Mrs Thompson describes a childhood in the shadow of a violent father and her subsequent life of deprivation.

In talking to the boys' parents, Sereny is not attempting to excuse, but to answer the question: why did they do it? At the end of the proceedings last November, neither the jury, the boys, their parents, nor Mr and Mrs Bulger were any closer to the answer to this. The reason we are none the wiser, Sereny believes, lies in two particular weaknesses at the centre of our criminal justice system.

The first is that in Britain, in contrast to every other Western nation, children charged with a capital crime are tried as adults, by a judge and a jury. And at no point between being charged and coming to trial are they allowed psychiatric help, for fear that this might taint their evidence.

The strictness of a formal public trial places a far greater emphasis on the principle that justice must be seen to be done than on the importance of understanding, helping - and ultimately rehabilitating - these children. 'We are not talking about two murderers and a baby,' Sereny says, 'we are talking about three children. Two of them are children who badly need our help.'

The second weakness lies in how evidence about the case was omitted from the proceedings. There were good reasons for doing this. Some of the evidence - that which dealt with the sexual aspects of the murder - was particularly upsetting. And lawyers on both sides agreed that as it was not fundamental to the murder charges, it should not be made public. This spared the Bulger family yet more heartache, but the disadvantage, Sereny believes, is that it also deprived the public of knowledge that would have added to its

understanding.

What distinguishes Sereny's writing is its plain kindness. She uses none of the psycho-jargon that imbues most other writing about victims and pain, language that always serves to dull rather than enhance the anguish. Moreover, 40 years' experience gives her a rare wisdom.

Born in Vienna, of Austrian and Hungarian parents, Sereny found herself in France when the Second World War broke out, and turned from drama studies to working with children abandoned during the conflict.

Since that time, Sereny's interest in the victims and perpetrators of that war has not waned. She wrote Into That Darkness, the 'as- told-to' autobiography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka death camp, and her biography of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, will be published by Knopf next year.

For Sereny, who has always specialised in investigations, it is not just digging up the facts that is important, but bringing the insight that adds to our understanding or acts as an agent of change.

'It depends on making relationships with people. Stangl became a monster, but he wouldn't have been as a child. Speer was never a monster, but he was a very immoral man.

'One has to find out in order to learn, doesn't one? These children, if people think of them only in terms of evil, then there is nothing to be done. Evil is immutable. Society can only help if we can try and understand.'

Part two of Gitta Sereny's report will be published in the Independent on Sunday this weekend

(Photograph omitted)