10-Year-Olds as Murderers: An Angry City Ponders the Horror : Britain: Death of child shocked the nation. But a look at the lives of the suspects suggests what happened in Liverpool could happen anywhere.

The dirty yellow moving van lumbered down Walton Village Road and nosed out into the flow of traffic on the main street, on its way to another street and town, its destination kept secret from those who stood here by this 50-yard bank of flowers, piled up for the little dead boy, Jamie Bulger. But they saw it going.

“Look! They’re moving ‘em out! You see! Right there! He’s one of the ones that did it!”

The woman in the yellow jacket had been advancing on the van as it groaned into the traffic, as though she might have thrown a rock had she been able to lay her hands on one. But she wasn’t finished.

“Come look,” she urged. “There’s flowers in the window. I bet he nicked them from here and put them in his own window. Just you look.”

Up the curving perspective of the road, lined by nearly identical two-story row houses with their little bay-windowed parlors, the house in question stood guarded by a policewoman. Through the curtains, indeed, a bouquet was visible, whether artificial or lifted from Jamie’s memorial or simply overlooked by the hurried movers, it was impossible to say.

Anyway, this sad house, made now so much sadder, was empty but for this yellow blur. Gone, too, of course, was the 10-year-old boy. One of the ones that did it.

There were two of them, actually, both 10, and Liverpool might well have lynched them, or stoned them to death, had it been given the chance, for their crime shocked the city and all of Britain.

From the look of his photograph in the newspapers, James Bulger--who was buried on Monday--was blond, blue-eyed, smiling, a cherubic-faced and happy 2 1/2-year-old. He was with his mother, Denise, 25, shopping on a late Friday afternoon in a spot teeming with mothers and children. While his mother’s back was turned, maybe a couple of minutes, two boys took Jamie. They held his hand and walked away with him.

They left the Strand Mall, Jamie toddling along between them. Walked nearly two miles along thoroughfares busy with homebound traffic. Stopped once on a corner by a flower shop to ask directions to a police station.

They took him to some railroad tracks cut between two steep embankments (not 100 yards from the police station they claimed to have been looking for) and there, after some time and evidently some horror, they killed him. They left his body on the tracks, where it was found the next day, after a train had passed over it.

In a nation where crimes against children seem to occur with inordinate frequency, or are perhaps amplified by the tabloid press, the boy’s disappearance and the frantic search for him were instant news, accompanied by suspicions of the usual pedophile killer.

But then came the release of security camera videotapes, which brought an even more abysmally sickening realization: the blurred images of the three children, walking hand-in-hand. Six days after the killing, police announced the arrest of two 10-year-old boys.

The news struck Britain as a blow to the solar plexus, coming at a time when even the Royal Family has hit a new level of dysfunction, when unemployment is on a relentless climb, when politicians on both sides of the House of Commons seem paralyzed like hares in the headlights of disaster, and daily reports of violent crime provide a metaphor for a society coming unglued.

When the two boys were formally charged with the murder recently in juvenile court, a crowd of 300 shouted “Kill them!” and threw rocks at the police vans that carried them away. Some said the whole episode gave a bad name to Liverpool, a place where nothing good has happened since the Beatles were discovered.

It is true that the Liverpool docks, once the mainstay of the economy, have shriveled in importance and that unemployment, at 15%, is five points above the national average.

But what happened here could have happened in any number of towns in the United Kingdom, where the numbers and the malaise are as bad or worse. And a look at the lives of the boys suggests that their circumstances were not all that unusual, that it could have happened anywhere at all.

The names of the two boys have been kept out of the press, but their identities are no secret on the streets of the Liverpool communities where they lived.

What follows comes from neighbors (for the police, as is normal in British crime cases, are saying nothing) and is, perforce, fragmentary and hardly gospel.

This is not his real name, but, for ease of reference, call him Stevie. He is one of seven children, all boys, ranging in age from 18 to about 9 months. They live with their mother. She is 38. She and her husband parted company some years ago--neighbors are unsure when. She lives on welfare but, in the past, has done work for a janitorial service.

The three eldest boys are all, as the English say, “in care,” meaning they are in institutions for youths in trouble, where they are educated and more or less confined.

The family has lived in the house about five years. Before that, all lived a few streets away, in a house that burned down, due to causes that some call suspicious.

Stevie had a skateboard. The woman across the street said she used to see him sitting on the front steps of the house, sucking his thumb. She said he seemed meek, perhaps “immature” for his age.

The man who lived next door saw them at closer range and knew all their names and ages. “The older one, I don’t know where he went,” he said. “I think he just got tired of it all and left. . . . Oh, they were a handful. The 16-year-old, he went to . . . a place for juveniles. It was nothing very serious, I don’t think. They were always stealing. They’d pinch the milk off our steps. We would see bicycles in the back yard, and we knew they’d been stolen someplace, because they didn’t have any money.”

Over the last couple of years, relations with the boys chilled, what with the pinching of the milk and other things. Once Stevie threw a cupful of feces out his upstairs window onto the side of his neighbor’s house. Then, too, the boys would set little fires in the back yard.

The mother spent some part of every day, more or less, in the pub up the hill, an observation confirmed there, although everyone agreed that, since the baby came, she didn’t go so much, or maybe at all. The pub owner remembers her, the kids and Stevie. “He was a cheeky little bastard,” he said. “He called my wife a ‘slag,’ ” street slang for “slut.”

Walton doesn’t have the look of some wretched inner-city slum. It is a lower-middle-class neighborhood, one of several that built up rapidly at the edges of the city in the early ‘60s, when the Liverpool docks were busy and unemployment was relatively low.

A woman up the street from Stevie’s house grew up here. She remembers a time when the front steps of every house were scrubbed daily “until the pavements shone white,” when everyone seemed to marry inside the neighborhood and everyone knew everyone else’s kids.

That doesn’t happen now, of course. Some people have moved out, new people have moved in. For-sale signs have been hanging for months on the fronts of many houses; some have been turned over to “council housing” for welfare residents. Not so many front steps are washed, nor so often. The pavements, in these straitened times, are not so well-repaired. Residents ensure that they never leave valuables in their cars at night.

But the streets, at night, seem safe enough from muggers. No addicts lurk in doorways. It is no horror here. The struggles to make the pennies stretch are private; most dramas that go on are enacted quietly behind closed doors.

The woman across the street remembers Stevie, on that Friday night, banging loudly on his front door and yelling to get in.

“Someone wouldn’t let him in,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

Across the street, city workmen are out with ladders, nailing up plywood sheets over the door Stevie pounded on, blanking out the windows from which he would have been able to see the growing heap of flowers for Bulger.

Plywood also covers the windows of the house, a few miles away, where the other boy lived. Neighbors here are closemouthed or absent. This boy--call him Billy--lived with his mother, a brother and a sister.

The neighborhood is similar, if newer. The same for-sale signs, the same mix of older residents and new arrivals, the same unemployment; a quiet street, mothers and children out at midday, empty of visible threat.

And that’s all, really.

The plywood nailed over the windows of one house would go unnoticed, if you were just driving down the street, if you didn’t live here and didn’t know what they say. But some people do drive down the street now, neighbors say.

They look for the plywood. They know what it means.

What they can’t seem to figure out is why.