Authors: Gitta Sereny
“Whichever child had done this was very, very disturbed, and very dangerous at that point of disturbance.”
The next afternoon, Norma, who had been with the police all day, said she wanted to make another statement. She said it was to tell Mr. Dobson what she had missed out on the night before. She was cautioned again, and once more said she didn’t want her father there:
“I only want you.”
“Detective Constable Thompson will have to be here,” Mr. Dobson said.
“All right,” she answered.
“He is one of your men.”
“It should have been funny,” Mr. Dobson said to me later.
“Except, it wasn’t.” Had he felt that she was trying to get round him?
“With her head, no. Instinctively, perhaps,” he answered. Did he know why she didn’t want her father present? Did she seem afraid of him? Dobson said he wasn’t sure, but what was certain was that she had told and probably intended to continue to tell lies and didn’t want her father to hear them.
“I think specifically it was her father she was frightened of,” he said.
“But it was more complicated than that. She was very, very excited, and I’ve never been sure that it wasn’t this curious excitement she didn’t want her father to see.” Excited because she had done something?
“I didn’t know whether she had or hadn’t, but excited, above all, because she felt important.” Had his feeling been that Norma lied and Mary didn’t, or that both of them lied but one more than the other?
“I didn’t know. We couldn’t tell. Norma was much, much more childlike than Mary. Mary was lying, too, of course. But to tell the truth, she was a mystery to me. What preoccupied me a great deal was that there was, about both of them, a curious fantasy feeling I could never quite get a grip on. I always knew I should have, but of course there was the dead little boy and we couldn’t really be doing with thinking ” fantasy”. It wasn’t our job. And whichever way one looked at it, Mary’s conduct was exceptionally and disturbingly sophisticated for an eleven-year-old Scotswood child. We didn’t know then what to make of her, and, as you know, nobody ever did later, either.”
Norma had been very nervous that Monday, Mr. Dobson said, ‘twitchy, wriggling in her seat, looking around the room even though there was nobody there and nothing to look at. I don’t know what had gone on in her head, but she was falling over herself wanting to be helpful. “
Norma’s fourth and longest statement, though some of the details were wrong and her description certainly specifically accused Mary of killing Brian, was at the same time by no means a complete exculpation of herself. For in it she not only admits to being present when the act was committed, but makes no claim that she herself was either forced or frightened and admits that she voluntarily returned twice to the scene of the crime after the toddler was dead.
At about one o’clock that Wednesday she had been playing with May, she said, and about three o’clock they had seen Brian Howe playing with his brother and his brother had given Brian a pair of scissors.
“We both went with Brian. May said we would take him … We went over the railway lines. I had taken the scissors off Brian in the street and I carried them.” They went down the bank and over two fences “I climbed over first and May bunked the hairn over’ and walked alongside the concrete blocks until they came to an old tank.
“There was a hole in the side of the tank,” Norma said.
“May got in first, I bunked Brian up to May, then I got in. It had a stinky smell so we all got out again. May then said, ” The blocks Norma ho way and we went along to the blocks. Then May said to Brian, “Lift up your neck.”
It was at this point that some boys appeared and Brian Howe’s dog Lassie, which had followed them, started to bark, and Mary said,
“Get away or I will set the dog on you.” The boys went away. May said to Brian again, “Lift up your neck.” She put her two hands on his neck, she said there was two lumps you had to squeeze right up. She said she meant to harm him. She got him down on the grass and she seemed to go all funny, you could tell there was something the matter with her. She kept on struggling with him and he was struggling and trying to get her hands away. She left go of him and I could hear him gasping. She squeezed his neck again and I said, “May, leave the baby alone,” but she wouldn’t. She said to me, “My hands are getting thick, take over.” Then I ran away.
Norma had gone back to Whitehouse Road, she said, where she played for about twenty minutes until Mary appeared and asked her to come back down.
“I forgot to tell you,” Norma said, ‘that when I ran away and left Brian and May, I left the scissors on the grass. We went round by the car park. We didn’t take the dog that time. That was when I tripped over Brian’s head like I told you in the other statement. On the way down May found a razor blade on the path. “
This was untrue: the razor blade came from one of the girls’ homes, though as each of them accused the other, it was never quite clear whose.
“I didn’t tell you before,” Norma added, ‘that when I lifted Brian’s head and shoulders up a bit and patted his back but his hand fell on one side and I laid him down again, I felt his pulse but it wasn’t going up and down. May pressed the razor blade down on Brian’s belly a few times in the same place. She lifted his jersey and that’s when she did it. I didn’t see any blood. That was when she hid the razor blade and said, “Don’t tell your dad or I’ll get wrong.”
It was as a consequence of this statement of Norma’s, who could not have known that there is no bleeding after death, that the child’s body was re-examined and the pathologist found on his tummy the faint outlines of the letter N, to which a fourth vertical line had been added, the pathologist thought in another hand, changing the letter to an M. Norma said she had left the scissors ‘in the corner near the blocks beside Brian’s feet’, and that they had then both gone back to their homes. About five o’clock she saw Mary again after her tea and they took the dog and went down to the car park ‘to see the hairn again.
May said she would make him baldy,” Norma explained, ‘and she cut a lump of hair off his head near the front, she put it on the grass above his head. She pressed the scissors onto his belly a few times but not hard.” It was at this point that the man who had seen them had shouted, and Mary, said Norma, ‘hadn’t time to cut any more hair off before we ran away. The hair she put on the grass was separated a bit. She put the scissors on the grass somewhere beside him on the side where his dirty hand was. ” Then they had gone back up to Whitehouse Road.
“I saw May again about a quarter to seven when we looked for Brian with Pat.”
An hour later, Mr. Dobson confronted Norma with eight pairs of scissors and asked her if she recognized the ones Brian had on Wednesday when they took him to the blocks. She immediately picked up the correct ones, threw them on the desk, and said: “That’s them.”
“I saw her again several times the next day, 6 August,” he told me.
“I
asked the same questions over and over. She never back-tracked an inch. Either she was a masterful liar or she was speaking the truth.
“
The day of Brian Howe’s funeral, on the morning of 7 August, came in the middle of the investigation.
“It was a brilliant hot summer day.
There were masses of flowers,” Mr. Dobson said.
“There were at least two hundred people there. A lot of them who had nothing to do with the Howe family cried. It was very sad.”
He said Mary was standing close to the house when the coffin was brought out and he was watching her.
“It was when I saw her there that I knew I did not dare risk another day. She stood there, laughing.
Laughing and rubbing her hands. I thought, “My God, I’ve got to bring her in, she’ll do another one.” A woman police sergeant was sent to get Mary at 4. 30 p. m.
(“Oh my God,” Mary said to me when I read it to her.
“That sounds so awful, so hard, so callous.” She cried.
“It’s true,” she then said, “I do tend to laugh when I’m nervous, even now. But I couldn’t have … you know … laughed the way he said. Could I?” )
Mary was very apprehensive when she was brought to Mr. Dobson’s office that afternoon on 7 August.
“She was pale and tense,” he said.
“She gave me the impression she knew the time of reckoning had come.” He had asked her first about her dress on 31 July and she said she had the grey one on part of the day but changed into her black one in the afternoon.
“I want to tell you the truth, but I’ll get wrong,” she added.
Did she mean because it wasn’t true that she had changed her dress? he asked.
“No,” she said.
“I mean about when I was there when Brian died.” She dictated her statement immediately after the nursing sister Mr. Dobson had requested to sit with her arrived from the nearby Newcastle General Hospital.
Brian was in his front street and me and Norma were walking along towards him. We walked past him and Norma says, ‘are you coming to the shop Brian’ and I says, “Norma, you’ve got no money, how can you go to the shop. Where are you getting it from?” She says, ‘nebby’ [keep your nose clean]. Little Brian followed and Norma says, ‘walk up in front’.
I wanted Brian to go home, but Norma kept coughing so Brian wouldn’t hear us. We went down Crosshill Road with Brian still in front of us.
There was this coloured boy and Norma tried to start a fight with him.
She said, “Darkie, whitewash, it’s time you got washed.” The big brother came out and hit her. She shouted: “Howay, put your dukes up.”
The lad walked away and looked at her as though she was daft. We went beside Dixon’s shop and climbed over the railings, I mean through a hole and over the railway. Then I said, “Norma, where are you going?”
and Norma said, “Do you know that little pool where the tadpoles are?”
When we got there, there was a big, long tank with a big, round hole with little holes round it. Norma says to Brian, “Are you coming in here because there’s a lady coming on the Number 82 and she’s got boxes of sweets and that.” We all got inside, then Brian started to cry and Norma asked him if he had a sore throat. She started to squeeze his throat and he started to cry. She said, “This isn’t where the lady comes, it’s over there, by them big blocks.” We went over to the blocks and she says, ‘at you’ll have to lie down’ and he lay down beside the blocks where he was found. Norma says, “Put your neck up’ and he did. Then she got hold of his neck and said ” Put it down’. She started to feel up and down his neck. She squeezed it hard, you could tell it was hard because her finger tips were going white. Brian was struggling, and I was pulling her shoulders but she went mad. I was pulling her chin up but she screamed at me. By this time she had banged Brian’s head on some wood or corner of wood and Brian was lying senseless. [The postmortem would prove this was untrue. ] His face was all white and bluey and his eyes were open. His lips were purplish and had all like slaver on, it turned into something like fluff. Norma covered him up and I said, “Norma, I’ve got nothing to do with this, I should tell on you, but I’ll not.” Little Lassie was there and it was crying and she said, “Don’t you start or I’ll do the same to you.” It still cried and she went to get hold of its throat but it growled at her. She said, ‘now, now, don’t be hasty. “
Then, Mary said, they went back home and took Brian’s dog Lassie with them.
Norma was acting kind of funny and making twitchy faces and spreading her fingers out. She said, “This is the first but it’ll not be the last.” I was frightened then. I carried Lassie and put her down over the railway and we went up Crosswood Road way. Norma went into the house and she got a pair of scissors and she put them down her pants.
She says, ‘go and get a pen’. I said “No, what for.” She says, “To write a note on his stomach’, and I wouldn’t get the pen. She had a Gillette razor blade. It had Gillette on. We went back to the blocks and Norma cut his hair. She tried to cut his leg and his ear with the blade. She tried to show me it was sharp, she took the top of her dress where it was raggie and cut it, it made a slit [examination of the dress, however, would later disprove this claim]. A man come down the railway bank with a little girl with long, blonde hair, he had a red checked shirt on and blue denim jeans. I walked away. She hid the razor blade under a big, square concrete block. She left the scissors beside him. She got out before me over the grass on to Scotswood Road. I couldn’t run on the grass cos I just had my black slippers on. When we got along a bit she says, ” May, you shouldn’t have done it cos you’ll get into trouble’, and I hadn’t done nothing I haven’t got the guts.
[This was so manifestly absurd that when she later repeated it at the trial, it would cause a ripple of nervous laughter in the court. ] I couldn’t kill a bird by the neck or throat or anything, it’s horrible that. We went up the steps and went home, I was nearly crying. I said, if Pat finds out she’ll kill you, never mind killing Brian, cos Pat’s more like a tomboy. She’s always climbing in the old buildings and that. Later on I was helping to look for Brian and I was trying to let on to Pat that I knew where he was on the blocks, but Nonna said, ‘he’ll not be over there, he never goes there,” and she convinced Pat he wasn’t there. I got shouted in about half past seven and I stayed in. I got woke up about half past eleven and we stood at the door as Brian had been found. The other day Norma wanted to get put in a home.
She says will you run away with us and I said no. She said if you get put in a home and you feed the little ones and murder them then run away again.
The court would not realize, when this was read out later, that this was a clear reference to a story in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, pages of which Mary’s mother Betty had glued into the ‘book’ she carried around at all times and which Mary read in secret.
“Do you know it’s wrong to squeeze a little boy’s throat?” Mr. Dobson asked her.
“Yes,” she replied.
“It’s worse than Harry Roberts. He only did train jobs.”
It was not only that she had mixed up Harry Roberts, who in fact killed three policemen in London in 1966, with the Great Train Robbery in 1963, which netted the criminals (most of whom were caught) several millions of pounds. What was more remarkable was that both these children appeared unaware of the nature or the gravity of the crime the finality of death. Norma, who had shown above all ‘excitement’ before and during her principal statement, was mainly concerned with the razor blade and scissors, and her desperate rejection of those items, or what had been done with them, would continue throughout the trial. But in Mary’s statement, too, the child’s killing and his death barely figure.