sees as an effort on the part of the other two boys to shift blame upon him. He admits to using his foot on John Dresser, but he claims it was only to turn the baby over in order "to help him breathe right."
From this point forward, the excruciating details slowly come out: the blows to little John Dresser from the boys' feet, the use of copper tubing upon him like swords or whips, and ultimately the discarded concrete blocks. Parts of the story, however - the exact details of what happened with the banana and the hairbrush, for example - Michael refuses to speak about altogether, and this silence about those two pieces of evidence remains when the other two boys are questioned as well. But the postmortem examination of John Dresser's body, in addition to the level of the boys' continued distress when the subject of the hairbrush comes up, indicates the sexual component of the crime just as its terrible ferocity substantiates the deep well of anger each boy called upon in the final moments of the toddler's life.
Once a confession was obtained from the boys, the Crown Prosecutors took the highly unusual and equally controversial decision not to present the full details of John Dresser's antemortem injuries to the court during the subsequent trial. Their reasoning was twofold. First, they had not only the confessions but also the CCTV films, the eyewitness testimonies, and copious forensic evidence, all of which they believed established without doubt the guilt of Ian Barker, Michael Spargo, and Reggie Arnold. Second, they knew that Donna and Alan Dresser were going to be present for the trial, as was their right, and the CPS did not wish to exacerbate the parents' agony by revealing to them the extent of the brutality that had been inflicted upon their child prior to and after his death. Wasn't it enough, they reasoned, to learn one's child - so recently out of infanthood - had been abducted, dragged across town, stripped naked, whipped with copper tubing, stoned with broken concrete, and dumped into an abandoned Port-a-Loo?
Additionally, they had complete confessions from at least two of the boys (Ian Barker only going so far as admitting finally that he was in the Barriers that day and he saw John Dresser, before holding firm to, "Maybe I did something and maybe I didn't," for the rest of his interviews), and more than that seemed completely unnecessary for a conviction. It must be argued, however, that a third reason could well exist for the CPS's silence on the matter of John Dresser's internal injuries: Had these injuries become known, questions regarding the psychological state of his killers would have arisen, and these questions might have led the jury ineluctably towards manslaughter instead of murder because they would necessarily have been instructed to consider the 1957 Act of Parliament which declares that a person "shall not be convicted of murder if he was suffering from such abnormality of mind...as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts" at the time of the crime. Abnormality of mind are the key words here, and John's further injuries do much to suggest deep abnormality on the part of all three of his killers. But a verdict of manslaughter would have been unthinkable, considering the climate in which the boys were tried. While the venue for the trial had been changed, the crime had gone from being a national story to an international story. Shakespeare declares that "blood will have blood," and this situation was an example of that.
Some have argued that when the boys stole the hairbrush from the Items-for-a-Pound shop in the Barriers, they knew full well what they were going to do with it. But to me, this suggests both reasoning and planning far beyond that of which they were capable. I don't deny that perhaps my reluctance to believe in such a degree of premeditation is attached to a personal disinclination for considering the potential for pure iniquity to exist in the minds and hearts of ten-and eleven-year-old boys. Nor will I deny my preference for believing that the use of that hairbrush was the work of impulse. What I certainly will agree with is what the fact of that hairbrush illustrates about the boys: Those who abuse and violate have been abused and violated themselves, not once but repeatedly.
When the hairbrush was brought up in interviews, it was a subject that not one of the boys was willing to