Authors: Gitta Sereny
“A propensity of this kind,” he said, ‘could be valuable as a means of identification when there was no motive besides pleasure and excitement, or possibly the feeling of superiority and a child showing herself cleverer than the police. “
In his comparatively brief description of the death of Brian Howe
* See the facsimile in Appendix 1.
which followed, he said that in statements taken by the police, each of the two girls had told lie after lie. But while both denied they had anything to do with the death of Martin Brown, they had both admitted to being there when Brian was killed, though each said the other had committed the act. Fibres exactly matching those from a grey woollen dress worn by Mary had been found on the clothing of both Martin Brown and Brian Howe. (Mr. Lyons neglected to mention at this point that fibres matching Norma’s brown dress had been found on Brian’s shoes. ) Mary, however, he said, had tried to involve a totally innocent small boy in the killing of little Brian.
We know now, of course, much more about what Mary did and cannot go into great detail about Norma. Certainly, one cannot fault Mr. Lyons’ facts, which were supplied to him by an exceptional police team, and there is no argument whatsoever about Mary’s guilt. But the effect of evidence, as we shall see, depends not only on what is said, and the tone in which information is conveyed, but also on what, either deliberately or by default, is not said: and it was impossible not to see how the prosecutor’s interpretation of the facts in this case, and the use he made of them, inevitably had to affect the court, the jury, the public, and the lives of all concerned.
A trial does not happen in a void: it is necessary to consider the circumstances that bring it about, the circumstances under which it is conducted, and the circumstances it creates for future lives. As I have said, the first question that should have been asked here is how could children get to this point of disturbance without anyone in their families or among those in charge of them being aware. The second is by what yardstick was guilt apportioned. And the third, which should apply to all cases involving serious crimes committed by children, is how guilt is interpreted firstly by the court, then by the various authorities to whom the child’s case, or punishment, is delegated, and finally, by the public.
Mr. Lyons had listed seven incidents which pointed to the involvement of one or both girls in Martin Brown’s death. I would later discover that there had been other, equally serious incidents that the prosecution either hadn’t known about or hadn’t mentioned. In order to gain some understanding of how the fantasizing minds of Mary and Norma developed in the three months of May, June and July, here is a list of thirteen dates from’ll May, two weeks before Martin Brown’s death, to 31 July, the day Brian Howe died, when both girls or, on three of these occasions, Mary alone either behaved conspicuously or actually offended against the law’ll May, 12 May, 25 May (the day of Martin Brown’s murder), 26 May, 27 May, 29 May, 31 May, 1 June, 8 June, 14-16 June, 17 June, approximately 27 July, and one further significant event in either June or July of which there is no record, the date of which Mary cannot recall. On five of these twelve days, both girls (and on a sixth Mary on her own) came to the attention of authorities.
In the early afternoon of Saturday’ll May, two weeks before the murder of Martin Brown, police were called to the Delaval Arms pub in Scotswood where a three-year-old boy, Mary’s cousin John Best, had been brought in by two girls, Mary Bell and Norma Bell, with a minor head wound. Sobbing bitterly, he said he had been ‘pushed down’ a nearby embankment but adamantly refused to say who had pushed him. As it had been Mary and Norma who had found him, they were questioned the following morning.
Their statements were virtually identical. They had been playing in the street late Saturday morning when they met little John and took him to Davy’s shop to buy him some sweets. They then told him to go home. After collecting wood in some of the condemned houses nearby and taking it home to their mothers, they went to play in the car park next to the Delaval Arms. When they heard a child shouting “May!
Norma! ” (they both said) they ran to the nearby embankment and saw that John, lying at the bottom, was ‘bleeding from the head’. They shouted to a passer-by, ‘but he wouldn’t help’, so they jumped down and with some difficulty got him out. Then another man who came by carried little John to the pub and an ambulance was called.
‘. I have never seen John playing down there before and I have never taken him down there,” Norma ended her statement.
Mary said: “I don’t know how John got down behind the sheds. I have never taken him there to play before.”
Even though the police were aware that little John had said he had been ‘pushed’, it never occurred to the three officers who questioned the girls to wonder why the boy had so specifically called out “May!
Norma! ” (as any small child will beg for help from those who hurt him). And as the child’s young mother thought he had fallen while playing in a forbidden place they not surprisingly perhaps logged it as an accident. They had, after all, more serious cases to worry about in Scotswood. Nonetheless, when I later checked the date of this ‘accident’ with the police, I found that it and the girls’ names had been quite properly recorded. The prosecutor, however, did not mention this first recorded incident in the chain of events involving both girls.
He did, however, mention the ‘sand-pit incident’, as it became known later, which occurred the next day, 12 May, and was reported to the police at 9. 30 p. m. that Sunday night by the mother of seven-year-old Pauline Watson one of the three little girls Mary was accused of attacking. Pauline told two policewomen the next morning that they had been playing in the sand-pit when ‘two big girls came in. The smallest one of the two girls told me to get out of the sand pit I said no. She put her hands around my neck and squeezed hard. The bigger girl was behind the hut, playing. The girl took her hands off my neck and she did the same to Susan . The girl who squeezed my neck had short dark hair. I don’t know this girl and had not seen her before. ” But older girls who had been playing round the sand pit identified Norma and Mary as the ‘two big girls’ and Mary as the one who had caused trouble. So on Monday afternoon, 13 May, Norma and Mary once again gave virtually identical statements to two WPCs who came to see them, except that this time each of the girls, in almost the same words, accused the other, a pattern that would become very familiar in the coming months.
The only deviation was that Norma, after telling how Mary had attacked the little girls, ended her statement on what I found a convincingly childlike note: she said that after squeezing Pauline’s and Cindy’s necks, Mary had done the same to Susan Cornish.
“Susan had some rock,” she continued, ‘and Mary took this off her. I said to Mary, “There’ll be trouble,” and then Mary asked me if I wanted some rock. I said, “Yes” , and had a little piece from her. I then ran off and left Mary. I’m not friends with her now. ” (Twenty-eight years later Mary, though with some corrections, would essentially confirm the little girls’ story, though she would quite strenuously avoid using the word ‘throat’: ” Cindy had thrown sand at me,” she told me, ‘and she and the two others were going to hit me, so I put my hands around their ears, or hair or something…” ) This case, too, I would find in police records. A Sergeant Lindgren wrote that he had seen the three little girls on Sunday but that ‘they had no marks or injuries to substantiate the complaints,” and that the parents, informed that they could take out a private summons for common assault, had declined. Sergeant Lindgren added: ” In view of the home circumstances of the two older girls, the [Social Services] Childrens Department has been notified’ and ‘the girls bell have been warned as to their future conduct. “
I would discover later that Newcastle Social Services had been aware of the two Bell families all along: Norma’s because, with eleven children, there was a fairly constant need for material help; Mary’s because of her father’s repeated troubles with the police and her mother’s frequent absences. And a social worker tried to explain to me why there was no record of any social workers visiting the families following the police notification after the sand-pit incident.
“Children are always squabbling around here,” she said.
“And you saw that the police didn’t actually find any damage on the little girls.
We have to be very careful not to intrude too much on families. It is easily resented and then we can do nothing with them. We need their trust. ” The children of both Bell families, she said, appeared to be properly fed and clothed and were attending school, so they were not considered at risk. Social workers, as we can see, are on the whole strongly protective of their clients’ privacy. One can appreciate why, but in practice it puts children at risk, for it means that unless parents are conspicuously negligent or abusive, the priority for social workers has been for many years to keep families together, at almost any cost.
On 25 May, the day three schoolboys found Martin Brown dead inside number 85 St. Margaret’s Road at about 3. 30 p. m. ” one of them, Walter Long, feeling sick minutes later and getting some air at a window, saw two dark-haired girls (the smaller of whom, Mary Bell, he knew) climb through a basement window into the condemned house next door from which, by climbing up a flight of stairs that still remained, it was possible to get through a broken wall into the boarded-up ground floor of number 85. He would testify at the trial that he told the girls to go away when they came up the stairs, and that Mary replied (in her usual show-off way): ” It’s all right. The police know I’m here. ” Only a few minutes later, as Mr. Lyons had told the court, these same two girls were knocking at Mrs. Finlay’s house to tell her that her nephew had had an accident.
Rita Finlay talked to me about that day some weeks after the trial.
“There was a knock on the door … and it was them two, Norma and Mary,” she said.
“And I said, ” What do yous want? ” and … that Mary she said, ” One of your hairns has had an accident. No, I think it’s your June’s. But there’s blood all over. ” When Mrs. Finlay, running all the way, arrived at the derelict house, Mary was there again and told her she could show her where the body was.
“I was going hysterical,” she said.
“I told her to get out of my way and followed a man up some stairs into a small bedroom where I saw Martin in the arms of another man. He looked asleep.”
And from that point on, if only it had been understood, the two girls’ behaviour became ever more indicative of profound disturbance. Mrs. Finlay also told me that the next day, Sunday 26 May (Mary’s eleventh birthday), ‘those two girls, Norma and Mary, came and asked to take four] John out. ” She knew the girls well, particularly Norma, who had baby-sat John often and whom she liked a lot.
“I thought it was very good of them,” she said, ‘. with me so upset. They came every day after that to play with him, or to take him to the shops. But then they kept asking me, “Do you miss Martin?” and “Do you cry for him?”
and “Does June miss him?” and they were always grinning. In the end I could stand it no more and told them to get out and not to come back. ” Mr. Lyons appeared unaware of this development.
June Brown, too, told me about this curious grinning. She said that Mary had knocked on her door four days after Martin had been found and, smiling, asked to see Martin. June remembered that there was another girl, or maybe several, standing giggling down the garden path.
“I said, ” No, pet. Martin’s dead. ” And she said, ” Oh, I know he’s dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin. ” And she was still grinning…”
It was, however, the dreadful notes the girls left when they broke into the Woodlands Crescent Nursery on that same Sunday, 26 May, that Mr. Lyons particularly emphasized. Several members of the jury had felt visibly unwell earlier when shown photographs of the dead boys and looked reluctant when they were handed photostats of the notes and specimens of the girls’ handwriting for comparison.
The police had found the notes among the wreckage of smeared paints and torn school and cleaning materials when they were called in on Monday morning (the same morning when, in school a few streets away, Mary made her drawing of a little body on the floor). There were four pieces of paper with words scribbled on them in childish writing. The letters looked as if they had been formed alternately by two different hands (as did the letter N, altered by another hand to M, on Brian Howe’s tummy, the pathologist said, two months later). One note said:
“I murder SO That I may come back’. The second, after the capital letters ” HAS’ at the top, read: ‘fuch of we murder watch out Fanny and FAggot’. The third note said: “WE did murder Martain brown, fuck of you BAstArd’. The fourth: ” YOU ArE micey y BecuaSe we murderd Martain GO Brown you BEttER Look out THErE arE MurdErs aBout By FANNY AND and auld Faggot you srcews’. (Mary would later say she was ‘auld Faggot’. *) But the young policemen who had come in answer to the nursery teacher’s telephone call decided that the mess and the notes were a nasty prank and the notes were filed away in the station sergeant’s
* See the facsimiles in Appendix 1.
drawer. The nursery, however, was a valuable property so it was decided to install a beeper alarm system in the loft. On 27 May Mary drew the picture of Martin in her school notebook, and on 29 May she asked to see Martin in his coffin.
What Mr. Lyons did not tell the court was that the new alarm went off in the afternoon of 31 May, and when the police got there they found Mary and Norma. Questioned at the station, they swore they’d never done it before and would never do it again, and as the police never took the “We murder’ notes seriously, and didn’t for a minute associate the two breakins, the girls were charged with breaking and entering and released into their parents’ custody until the case could be heard in Juvenile Court, which (they were told) would be months later.
The Woodlands Crescent Nursery sand-pit was evidently a social centre for Scotswood children. On 8 June, a week after the second breakin two weeks after Martin Brown was killed twelve-year- old David McCready witnessed a fight there between Norma and Mary. This, too, Mr. Lyons did not tell the jury, though they would hear about it later in the trial.