Rights and wrongs: a tale of two killings

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 23 March 2010

In 1994 in Norway a little girl was killed by two boys. The similarity with the James Bulger murder in Britain is clear. So why was there no outcry? Erwin James and Ian MacDougall report.

On the afternoon of October 15, 1994, three young children, a girl aged five, and two six-year-old boys, were playing on a football field covered in snow.

Their parents were neighbours who did not know each other, but the children had played together before. The three had been making snow castles, until the fun stopped. Nobody knows why. A childish disagreement? A tantrum?

Whatever it was it triggered a reaction in the boys that devastated a family and the community. At some point while playing, the boys turned on the little girl, punching and kicking her and beating her with stones before stripping off her clothes. Then they ran away, leaving her to die in the snow.