Each decade in Britain appears to contain a symbolic, heinous murder – a crime so awful that it reflects a nation’s pathologies as well as its fears. In the 1990s, the death of James Bulger, a two-year-old who was abducted from a Merseyside shopping centre before being tortured and killed, led to the age of criminal responsibility being changed. The next decade began with the case of 10-year-old D
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