A regional editor who covered the James Bulger murder as a reporter 20 years ago has revealed that the case still gives him sleepless nights.

Mark Thomas was working as the Press Association’s reporter on Merseyside when the notorious killing took place in February 1992.

Now editor of the Liverpool Post, Mark has penned a first-person piece for his paper and recorded a video interview for its website recalling what he termed “one of the darkest chapters in modern criminal history”

As well as filing the initial reports on James’s disappearance and the discovery of his body, Mark conducted the first ever media interviews with James’s parents and had one of the six press seats in the courtroom throughout the trial of his killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

Wrote Mark:  “When I did my routine police calls on the afternoon of Friday, February 12, 1993, I had no idea I was about to become a witness to one of the darkest chapters in modern criminal history.

“Not, of course, a witness in the sense that I stood and watched as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables battered the life out of helpless toddler James Bulger on that bleak Walton railway track.

“Heaven knows, that is a scene my fevered imagination has conjured up to disturb my slumbers enough times in the 20 years since. But no, of course I wasn’t a witness to the crime.

“But I found myself as close to the heart of the horror story that unfolded as anyone outside the immediate circles of relatives, police officers and lawyers whose lives were to become enmeshed so inextricably in this tragedy.”

Mark also recalled how a BBC 1 programme was interrupted for a news flash on the case he had just filed, adding:  “That’s when you know you are working on a big story.”

His piece together with the video interview can be seen in full here.