Authors: Gitta Sereny
“She felt nothing,” the nursing sister who had sat in on her statement told me later.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. She said all those awful things they had done, but she didn’t feel a thing. I thought she was a very intelligent child. But she didn’t seem like a child at all.
I have a boy of eleven, but he couldn’t use words the way she used them. All that evening I repeated to myself what I’d heard. And even so, I couldn’t believe it. “
Both Mary and Norma were charged on the evening of 7 August with the murder of Brian Howe. Mary answered: “That’s all right with me.” Norma said, “I never. I’ll pay you back for this,” and she cried.
“I was upstairs at my Aunt Audrey’s when they came for me,” Mary told me thinking back to 7 August 1968. “My mother was in Glasgow. My dad wasn’t there either. He had to go to the police in Durham about something he’d done, I can’t remember what, and my Auntie Audrey’d gone with him. So Uncle Peter was baby-sitting all of us, their kids and our lot. There was such a kerfuffle you know, policewomen, policemen and all of them so big…
” She suddenly laughed.
“P. had seen them arrive and he’d been in some mischief, I don’t know what, and he thought they’d come for him and he ran off. He was quick’.” she said with pride.
Had she been surprised when the police came?
“Not really. They had been several times their house-to-house, you know and I knew Norma had seen them even more than I had, they sort of went from one to the other and back. Then they told me Norma and Brian and I had been seen together and I told them I don’t know what lies. But then they went back to her and she turned around and said, ” It wasn’t me, it was May. ” She said Norma cried when, talking over the fence, she told Mary what she had said.
“I knew it was … different for her,” Mary said.
“I think her family had been talking to her, and in order to get out of it, they wanted…”
The truth? I asked.
“Yes, yes, but … um, they wanted her to be the first to say something, or to admit that, you know, she had anything to do with it.”
And what about you? Did your parents talk to you about it?
“My mother wasn’t there. She was away.”
And what about your dad? Did he ask you whether you had anything to do with it? Do you think he knew?
“He did, sort of,” she said, slowly.
“It was late at night and Brian had been found and my dad called me and we were sitting on the doorstep, and … um … he turned around and looked at me and said, ” They’ve found him, he’s dead. ” And he just looked at me and I just… put my head down.”
Did she feel now that he knew or guessed something?
“I think the fact that I didn’t ask where they’d found him … I don’t know what he thought. I only remember us sitting there and there was a lot of noise from over down the Tin Lizzie, and a lot of lights, and my dad saying nothing, just looking at me …”
Her Uncle Peter had gone with her to the police station.
“I was sitting on one of those swivel chairs they had and I was fooling around on it, you know, and Uncle Peter came up to me and slapped me across the face and he told me I was in big trouble, and I was to keep my mouth shut, to admit to nothing.”
I asked her whether it had felt to her then as if her uncle expected her to be guilty. She shook her head.
“I don’t remember now what I felt, but of course I knew I’d done wrong and I would have expected to be slapped and whatever. I knew my mother wouldn’t even have asked any questions, she would just have nearly beaten me to death. But thinking of it from the perspective of today, much more than believing me guilty of such a terrible thing, he may have thought that I would blabber something or other to the police that I’d made up, to show off, you know. My mother always told everybody that I fantasized and that one couldn’t believe anything I said. It was years and years, a lifetime really for me, before I understood why she did that, and that it was to protect herself. So the reason he slapped me was probably less for what I had really done which he couldn’t really know, could he? than because what I might say was going to get my dad, his brother-in-law, into trouble. He wanted his family to have no association with this.”
She remembered that slap when she talked to me, but she didn’t remember that first trip to the police station in the middle of the night, two days earlier, when her Aunt Audrey had sat in the back of the car with her arm around her, talking to her quietly, urging her to tell the truth.
Earlier she had told me repeatedly that both she and Norma wanted to be caught. Well, I said, now you were.
“Well, that wasn’t the way we had imagined it,” she said.
Was there any sort of agreement to take responsibility together? I asked.
“There was no … um … we hadn’t got that far really … We never thought … we thought we would be on the run, in Scotland, like big-time criminals, you know.”
But big-time criminals are on the run, I said, because they know they’ve done wrong. Did they never realize that the police were clever and that they would find themselves arrested?
“Yes, we did, but… how shall I put it? That was what we wanted. It was all part of it. But we weren’t thinking logically … rationally,” she said.
“And even while we wanted to be caught, to get away from where we were”
From your families?
“Yes. But we also had contingencies of how we would get away. Our horses would come with a rope and the horse would pull down the jail. That’s how we imagined it, for hours, days, weeks”
Of course, the ‘jail’ in their childish imagination was the sort of thing they had both seen in the innumerable Westerns they watched on TV and had nothing to do with the reality of juvenile cells in the West End police station two small rooms at the end of a little passageway that led from the washroom to the main office. Lighter than the ordinary detention cells, they were used, with the doors open and a police officer (in this case a WPC) sitting in the corridor within sight, if minors had to be kept overnight.
WPCs Pauline J. and Lilian H. were the policewomen on duty there that first night and when I talked to them a year later they, like all the other officers I would speak to, were still full of what they had seen-and felt.
“When we started our shift at ten,” Pauline said, ‘they were lying together on a cot in one of the rooms chatting away. First thing they told us was that they’d had fish and chips for supper: “Mr. Dobson bought them for us,” Mary said, sort of proudly you know. “
(“Yes, I remember two police ladies,” Mary said.
“But chatting? We were arguing. I was terribly frightened I would wet the bed.” ) “It was such a hot night,” Pauline went on, ‘and they were that wrought up they couldn’t sleep. We had them in different cells after a while. I sat with Mary and Lil sat with Norma. At one moment Mary shouted, “I’ll kill my mother!” I’m not sure she said that,” she added after a second, pondering her own memory.
“It may have been, ” I’ll kick my mother. “
(“I can’t remember saying that,” Mary said.
“I wouldn’t even say, ” I’ll kick my mother,” not in front of a policewoman.” ) “She was more concerned about her torn shoes than anything else,” Pauline went on. ‘“I told my mum I needed new ones,” she said.
“What will people think if they see me like this?” I tried to calm her, you know, talked to her quietly, and after a while she said that she was frightened she’d wet the bed.
“I usually do,” she said. “
(“That’s what I remember most,” Mary said.
“I thought of it all the time. I always thought of it later, too, wherever they took me.” ) “I told her not to worry about it,” Pauline said, ‘but she did. She kept going to the bathroom. She didn’t wet the bed, but she didn’t sleep, either. “
When had Mary first seen her mother after her arrest? I asked her.
“Auntie Isa was the first I saw,” she said.
“She came that first morning. She put her arms around me and she smelled of fresh air. I
didn’t see my mother till I think a week later or whatever. That’s when she shouted at me as I told you, “What had I done to her this time?” and all that. “
Another officer, WPC Lynn D. ” took Mary to the Croydon assessment centre after that second remand hearing on 14 August.
“She was cheeky, you know. It was easy to dislike her with what they thought she’d done and all. But on the train to Croydon she suddenly went very still and I looked at her and thought, why, she’s nothing but a little kid. She suddenly looked all pale and tired and I put my arm around her, even though her head was full of nits, and she went all limp … soft, you know.
“I hope me mum won’t have to pay a fine,” she said. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s what she said, that’s what she was worried about. And then she talked about having to go into court again next week they had to appear every week until the trial and she said, “Me mum will be there. I hope me mum won’t be too upset.”
“I said, her mum was upset that morning, she was crying,” said WPC
D.
“
“I know she was,” she said, “but she didn’t mean it. I think she doesn’t like me, I’m sure she doesn’t. She hates me.”
“I said, ” She’s your own mum, she must love you. “
“If she loves me, why did she leave?” she said then, and I didn’t know what she meant. “
It is questionable whether Mary herself, at this point of confusion and despair, knew what she was trying to say, though someone trained in the minds of children would have realized how much she was revealing and might have helped her, even then, to reveal more. We can see that even at this terrifying stage of half-awareness that she had done something dreadful and that dreadful things were about to happen to her, she cried out for help, and she would continue to do so in many of her remarks to the carers and policewomen who guarded her during the four months of remand and nine days of the trial. But nobody heard; nobody was equipped to understand.
The policewomen who guarded her told me they had to report every word she said, and I’m sure they did conscientiously. But this information was only required to provide the police and the lawyers with possible further evidence, not to enlighten them about the personality and problems of the accused child.
The whole problem of trying children in adult courts is that the entire judicial process is solely based on evidence. Motivation is marginal in British murder trials: it is neither the duty of the police as Mr. Dobson said nor that of the prosecution to seek an answer to the question why children commit crimes such as this. Under the system as it stands, there is no in-built mechanism which requires knowledge about and from a child as part of an inquiry into the crime he or she might have committed. There is no automatic investigation into the family background and circumstances of the child, which would be admissible as evidence in consideration of their case. Above all there is no sense that children are, in fact, any different from adults in their understanding of the proceedings and function of the court, and in their understanding of right and wrong. In fact, they are tried as small adults.
For adults who in theory can be expected to be equipped with the same sense of right and wrong as those sitting in judgement over them, this system is justifiable: they have to be held responsible in law for what they do, anything else would lead to chaos. But for children, for whom there is a wide separation between what they should know or are believed to know and what they do feel and understand, the evidence which proves their crimes, once obtained, should become almost irrelevant. The only thing that should count is human evidence the answer to the question: “Why?”
When the trial opened in Newcastle, the prosecutor, Rudolph Lyons, QC, took all of the first day and half the morning of the second to make his presentation. These two very young girls, he said, were charged with the murder, within the space of little more than two months, of two little boys, but though the similarities in the choice of victim and the method of killing tended to indicate that both boys were killed by the same person or persons, this did not absolve the jury from considering each charge separately.
Following Mr. Dobson’s hunch, the investigation of Martin Brown’s death had been reopened. Mr. Lyons spent more than two-thirds of his presentation on the murder of Martin Brown, basing the Crown’s case, as he explained, not on the original police findings in May, when the conclusion had been accidental death, but on those following Brian Howe’s murder in July. This second investigation, he said, had produced new testimony involving the two accused girls in events that both preceded and followed Martin’s death on 25 May, and he went onto describe the evidence which, he said, suggested that one or both of the girls was responsible for Martin’s murder.
First, he said, on the afternoon of Martin Brown’s death, these two girls, Norma Bell and Mary Bell, had appeared on the scene at 85 Whitehouse Road within minutes of the discovery of the body and before any other member of the public. Only minutes later, they had eagerly informed Martin’s aunt, Rita Finlay, of the child’s death. On the following day these same two girls had broken into a local nursery and left four vulgarly worded notes beginning “We murder …” with false signatures which the police had found the next day. And four days later, he said, Mary Bell (he emphasized) had rung the Browns’ doorbell and, smilingly, asked Martin’s shocked mother to let her see the little boy in his coffin. Then, in late July, Mary Bell had visited the house of Brian Howe, whose fourteen-year-old sister Pat she knew well, and told her and a friend that “Norma got hold of little Martin by the throat’. She had then showed these girls how Norma allegedly throttled Martin this before anyone suspected that Martin had died of anything but an accident.
In September, after Brian Howe’s death and the girls’ arrest, Mr. Lyons said, a teacher had found a drawing in one of Mary Bell’s old exercise books which until then had been mislaid. Under the heading “My Newsbook’ she had drawn the figure of a child in exactly the position Martin Brown’s body had been found, with the word ” Tablet’ next to the little figure and a workman wearing a cap and carrying some sort of tool. The significance of this, Mr. Lyons said, was that Mary Bell had made the drawing within two days of the child’s death as part of a school assignment to write a news story it was dated 27. 5. 68* before there had been any mention by the police or in the press that an empty pill bottle had been found near Martin’s body. But when questioned after the murder of Brian Howe, she said that the first time she had seen Martin Brown’s body was in a workman’s arms shortly after he was found. And furthermore, two weeks before Martin Brown’s death, on Sunday 12 May, Mary Bell coming to the local nursery sand-pit (once again he conveyed the impression that Mary had been on her own), had attacked and squeezed the throats of three little girls, four years younger than herself. The jury might feel, he said, that this indicated an abnormal propensity in one of these girls to squeeze the throats of young children.