We have been inundated with requests today to play a Whitney Houston song as a tribute and to show our respects following her untimely death yesterday at the age of 48. While we have a great deal of sympathy for her and her family, it is indeed tempered by the fact that it will probably turn out to be caused by the drugs she took. Today is also the 19^th anniversary of the death of James Bulger who, if he were still alive, would be looking forward to his 22^nd birthday next month. He is someone who we feel is more deserving of our sympathy today.

Don’t misunderstand us, Whitney Houston’s passing is a sad demonstration of how someone can have it all and yet throw it away. How many more celebrities will discover, when it is too late, that they are not immortal? Whitney’s whole career was overshadowed by substance abuse.

It has been rumoured and even reported on TMZ that Ms Houston had been partying heavily on both Thursday and Friday nights. According to them she was singing while out partying in Hollywood on Thursday and was witnessed drinking and chatting loudly with friends in her hotel bar on Friday night. As she told ABC in a 2002 interview; “The biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.”

While we all agree she was a great talent, it was her own decision to squander that talent.

The person who really has our sympathy today is James Bulger. He was 2 years old when he disappeared from the Strand Shopping Centre while out shopping with his mother. His mutilated body was found on a railway line in Walton, two days later. He was just an innocent child probably looking forward to his third birthday on the day he was taken. He had no say in any of the actions that resulted in his life being taken.

His murder didn’t just horrify Britain but the whole world must have taken a sharp intake of breath that day. The passing years will not have diminished the pain for his parents and neither has it diminished the anger felt by the people of Merseyside towards his killers. I remember reading an interview a few years ago with the solicitor who had represented one of the killers and he said he read in the police reports that James Bulger’s body had been found with a leaf stuck to the bottom of his bare foot and just that one detail broke his heart. Reading between the lines, he was the one hired to defend the killer’s actions and yet even her was repulsed by them.

No doubt at some point in the future, memorials will be built to the memory of Whitney Houston but James Bulger has none of that. At the place where he was murdered there is nothing to mark the spot where the little boy’s life was ended with such brute force. The steep grassy embankment approaching the railway line is strewn with broken vodka bottles and has been screened off by a high metal fence. A derelict pub stands on one side of track making it a desolate place to end a life. It is a bleak memorial to such a young life – no monument, no plague, no flowers.

Fortunately, Liverpool has a long memory and the people carry those memories close to their hearts. Somewhere amongst all those memories James Bulger still lives!