Authors: Gitta Sereny
Mary had thrown Norma to the ground, David said, and was hitting and scratching her. And then he heard her scream, “I am a murderer!” She had then, he said in court, pointed in the direction of the house where little Martin had been found and called out to him, ‘. that house over there, that’s where I killed . Brown. ” David said he’d just laughed because Mary Bell was such a show-off. Everybody knew she was, he said.
What Mr. Lyons also didn’t tell the court under the judicial system as it stands it wouldn’t have been part of the evidence-was that the very next day, on Saturday 1 June, Mary and Norma ran away from home. They were picked up by the police in South Shields, about ten miles away, the following day and brought back. Two weeks later, on 14 June, they ran away again. This time they were on their way to Scotland and were on the loose for two days before being turned off a bus at Ainwick, forty miles north of Newcastle, because they were trying to travel with used tickets.
Mary would tell me a great deal about her absconding with Norma, but although she remembers being brought back both times in police cars (and remembers getting beatings from her mother), she has no memory of being questioned either by police or social workers about it.
“Social workers came to the house to see my mother but she threw them out, and they didn’t come back,” she told me.
“And if they had questioned us, what could we have said? That our dream was to live with horses in the wilds of Scotland? That we planned to eat carrots, dig a hole if it rained? That the only practicalities we’d thought of was to steal enough money to buy the first bus tickets and to take some matches to light fires? We were just two nutcases, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to them. I knew that then and I know it now.”
She also remembered “It wasn’t long after that, though it’s all a bit of a blur now, you know, like images going into each other’ telling that awful tale to Pat Howe about Norma killing Martin.
“I had had that awful fight with Norma. We were fighting and threatening each other all the time and this was just part of it.”
Pat and her friend Irene, of course, hadn’t believed a word of it:
everybody knew that Martin had died in an accident in the condemned houses two months earlier. All Scotswood had mourned with June and George Brown and hundreds of people had gone and demonstrated in the Newcastle streets to protest because the houses should have been pulled down long ago and were a danger to their kids. But Pat and Irene had warned Mary that Norma’s dad would find out she was telling such tales and she’d be in awful trouble.
“I went and apologized to Norma’s mother,” Mary told me. Did she know, I asked her, what made them take three-year-old Brian, Pat’s brother, just four days later and she shook her head.
But, unconsciously, the eleven-year-old girl knew more than the forty-year-old woman now remembers. What is important about the drawing Mary did only forty-eight hours after killing Martin, about the writings left at the nursery, about her shouts of “I am a murderer’, and about all the bizarre behaviour described by Mr. Lyons to the jury as that of a vicious and monstrous child, was not what she was trying to hide, but what she tried to disclose. Under a different system, a different kind of ‘court’ though just as certain of Mary’s guilt would have known what these disclosures meant. Informed about the child’s circumstances before coming to decisions about her life, they would have realized how unlikely it was that a girl as intelligent as Mary would have deliberately drawn attention to herself, as she did over and over after Martin’s murder, for any other purpose than the unconscious one of wanting to be stopped and helped.
By the end of that first day, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind where the prosecutor stood. Already he had planted the seeds in the jury’s mind which, two weeks later, would lead to a verdict of not guilty for Norma and guilty of manslaughter because of diminished responsibility for Mary. Norma, Mr. Lyons concluded his argument, would be shown to be an immature, backward girl who, but for the fact that she and Mary lived next door to each other, would never have been in the terrible position in which she was now placed. Mary, however as witnesses would testify, had this propensity for putting her hands on the throats of smaller children. Although two years and two months younger than Norma, she was the cleverer and more dominating personality. And it was Mary, he said, who in one of her statements had tried with cunning to involve a totally innocent small boy in the murder of Brian Howe. He then told the court how Mary had told the police long before anything had been published about the scissors which had been found next to Brian’s body, about eight-year-old “A’, who had often played with Brian, and that she had seen this little boy ‘cut a cat’s tail off’ with a pair of scissors ‘like silver-coloured and something wrong … like one leg … either broken or bent’.
Mr. Lyons’ last words that first day of the trial would somehow establish Mary, not as a disturbed or sick child, but as an evil being, irrespective of age a monster. Magnifying Mary’s rather pathetic, childish effort to get herself and Norma out of trouble by putting it all on an innocent eight-year-old boy, it took on a significance out of all proportion to the real tragedy, the death of the two small boys, and became a reprehensible deed against which everything else had to be measured.
“This gives you some indication of the sort of girl she is,” he said, finishing his presentation.
And late that night, in the locked little top-floor flat at the Fernwood reception centre where Mary was kept isolated under police guard for the nine days and two weekends of the trial, she asked WPC Barbara F. the meaning of the word ‘immature’. Each of the policewomen had their own feelings and reactions to Mary, and WPC F. told me frankly that she hadn’t liked her, and felt ‘creepy’ about her.
“But of course, if she asked about something, I tried to answer.”
“Would that mean if I was the more intelligent I’d get all the blame?”
Mary asked.
“I just shrugged,” the young policewoman said.
“What could you say?”
Mary had talked again and again about ‘a pact’ she and Norma had made and she tried many times to explain it to me, but, apparently never sure herself just how and when it came about, never quite succeeded.
However, while the timing changed again and again, the fact that it was ‘an agreement to do everything together’ remained constant.
This ‘pact’ or ‘agreement’ had two aspects, both of which appeared and reappeared throughout Mary’s many attempts to recall the events which reached a first tragic peak with the killing of Martin Brown. The first was, as stated, to do everything together; the. second element remained constant too: there was never any ‘plan’ to kill a child, only increasingly terrible fantasies which these two unhappy children shared.
“You see, what we did, more and more as time went on, was to ” dare” each other,” Mary said.
“I was ” Miss Dare Me” and Norma … well… she’d dare me to do things and I did and then I dared her to do it too and of course she would; she wasn’t going to be chicken. She’d say, ” I dare you to walk on the pipes over the Tyne Bridge,” and I’d do it.
And then she’d do it too, never mind if we might have fallen down into the Tyne. We’d do more and more dangerously naughty things . we kept hoping we’d be arrested and sent away. It was all I wanted and fall] she said she wanted too . “
That first date in May, when the two girls came to the attention of the police after pushing little John down the embankment, was already part of this increasing drive to do “bad” things.
“We were going to get into the factory [the Vickers Armstrong plant] down by the Delaval Arms,” Mary said. What were they going to do there? I asked, and she shrugged, “I haven’t got a clue, but certainly mischief. He was pestering us and he wouldn’t leave us alone, so I pushed him and said go away and he fell down a bit of an incline where there was like a little workman’s hut type of thing …”
Was he hurt?
“No … he got up and came back and I says … I says … [wrong grammar or repeating words is invariably a sign of stress in Mary, who now usually speaks middleclass English] ” Go away,” and he was a stocky little thing, and I said, ” I’ll push you again, I’ll push you off there. ” He sat down, the little bugger, so I grabbed him by the leg and hurled him over the edge; he could practically touch the bottom, you know. I just dropped him. I says, ” Now go away and stay away. ” I didn’t want to hurt him; it was like. Bugger off, you nuisance …”
What did she remember about the sand-pit incident? I asked. Did you touch these three little girls as was said in the trial?
“There were loads of us children there,” she said.
“And Cindy Hepple threw sand at me. But I didn’t put my hands around her throat like they said. I put my hands around her ears or her hair or something like that … I don’t even remember the other two they said, but two big girls came they were about fourteen and throttled me. Somebody had her hands around my throat and I passed out or felt like it and they threw me into a bed of nettles. It was because I had hit Cindy, they said, but you know, that was the way it was, no matter how old anyone was, that was the way we used to be. Those older girls, they were massive as far as I was concerned, but I remember … I got so angry I just … jumped up and I pulled them down and bashed their heads off the floor. And then I just felt unstoppable [but] then other big girls came and I got kicked all over … I was battered all over, had black eyes and was blue all over, but that wasn’t ever reported”
Had Norma come and helped her?
“She was just in the background there. [Norma would tell the court that she was playing ‘behind a shed’ and the small girls confirmed this.] My father said something like, you know, ” It’s always the same, someone else loads the gun and fires a bullet but you are the bullet that comes out. You are the idiot that comes out. ” You see that’s why Norma … It’s another thing that requires a certain amount of intelligence, doesn’t it, to stay in the background? And that was her way of coping and who can blame her? I don’t. Not her.”
In several of her versions of the death of Martin Brown, Mary claims she told Norma that she had killed Martin the moment she went to get her at her house that Saturday afternoon, where Norma had been watching her mother ironing (and Norma confirmed this at the trial).
And she quotes Norma saying, “You didn’t, you didn’t? Show me.” But when they went back to St. Margaret’s Road after the murder, Mary and Norma both said at the trial that Norma never came with her ‘all the way up’ to the first-floor bedroom where John Hall, the electrician, was holding the little boy in his arms after trying to give him the kiss of life.
“She turned around before we got there,” Mary told me, ‘and ran down. And later she kept saying . for weeks she did . “You didn’t really do it. It was an accident. He had an accident, everybody says so.” And I kept having to tell her that, yes, I did, and that although we had agreed to do everything together, she hadn’t been there, she was a traitor, she hadn’t helped. ” Nonetheless it is clear from all the testimonies during the trial, and confirmed by Mary’s memories now, that both girls were feverishly excited by what Mary had done. The fact that it took her several months and four different versions of the terrible fifteen or twenty minutes during which she killed Martin before what she said made any sense at all might tempt one into dismissing it all as lies: certainly I knew that her first three versions were in part, though never altogether, escapes from an unbearable reality into gentler fantasies. What was true, however, from the very start, was that she never claimed once that Norma was either present or aware in advance that she was really going to kill a child.
Why had she gone to Martin’s house four days after he died? I asked her. When she had been asked that question at the trial, she said that she and Norma were daring each other; that neither of them wanted to be ‘chicken’. Her answer to me, weeks after she had begun to try to recall her own state of mind during those days, was more searching “To see if he was yet alive.”
Her inability, when she killed Martin, to understand the permanence of death, permeates every one of her attempts to account, to me as well as to herself, for what she did.
“I didn’t understand the concept of death [being] for ever … It was unreal, incomprehensible. I had nothing against Martin or him against me. I didn’t mean to kill him for ever. I just thought I’d get taken away … I strangled him, but I thought of, you know, ” Play dead”.”
Was it a game? I asked.
“No, I didn’t think it was a game … I just thought, ” I’m not really hurting you . ” I told him to put his hands on my throat and I put my hands on his … Obviously, I must have been messed up inside, but I never associated it with the afterwards … I think to me it was:
“You’ll come round in time for tea.” (And during another attempt to talk about Martin’s death, she talked as she thought she must have spoken in her mind that awful afternoon.
“I must have done, I must have known, I must have [thought] that he’ll come round, it’s all right, you’ll come round, you know. You go to sleep and you’ll come round, come round, come round in time for tea…” all of this interspersed with hacking sobs. )
The first breakin at the nursery was obviously a signal point in both girls’ disturbance. Mary’s recollection of it now, however, shows how deliberate the action of writing was and how aware she was of the dangers.
“I was doing it with my right hand,” she said, ‘because they were able to tell, you know, if one was lefthanded [Mary is lefthanded]. I’d never seen Norma’s writing before, really. I hadn’t seen work that she’d done. She was two years older than me and in a different class. In the note where it says “There are murders about,” she put “murder” and I says, “No, it’s ‘murders’ [i.e.” murderers]”, so she added the ” s” and that’s when she said, ” You should kill one of your little ones,” and I said, ” No, I won’t, why don’t you kill one of yours, there’s so many of you it wouldn’t even be noticed. “
Running away on those two occasions in June was another stage in the development of their relationship, and according to Mary and the description of the place they went to appears to prove it at least the first of these two trips was made not on Mary’s but on Norma’s initiative.