Authors: Gitta Sereny
“I hadn’t run away before,” Mary said.
“But Norma had, and she said it was easy. She said, ” We’ll go to South Shields. I’ve been there before,” and she told me about a man there who liked her and we stole money from home for the bus. I was really excited at the thought of running away, we both were. Norma came by and before going I peed on the floor [this is one of the classic symptoms of aggression in children] and I laughed and laughed and Norma laughed too …”
Did you wipe it up? I asked her.
“Oh no,” she said.
“I left it right there. If I could have opened my bowels, I’m sure I would have done that, too.”
And then she digressed to talk about her bed in Whitehouse Road.
“I
didn’t have any sheets or blankets, just bits and pieces like an old coat on top of me. There was just a mattress which had a dip in the middle where the urine collected and I was always up very early and my bed was always wet and when my mother was there she would rub my face in it and I had to haul the mattress out onto the window [sill] so that everyone could see, because she said I was just doing it to spite her. ” They had taken the bus to South Shields, she then said, about an hour away, and Norma took them straight away to the house she obviously knew well.
“I know Norma’s parents thought later I led her astray,” Mary said when I put it to her, ‘but it was she who took me to South Shields. She’d run away there before and wound up at the house of this man who sexually abused her. “
Norma told you this?
“Yes. She told me the house had a lot of rooms and a nice kitchen and we could cook if we wanted to … The man would let us do anything we wanted. She told me he’d done things to her and that she had liked it.”
How old was the man? I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“To an eleven-year-old anybody is old. I said I just wanted to make toffee cakes and he said OK, but we should have a bath first. So we got into the bathtub and when I got out he tried to put butter on me, you know, down below, and I said I didn’t want to and I pushed him off onto Norma and he did it to her..;
He did what?
“He penetrated her.”
How did you know the man was doing that?
“I watched, and later Norma said again that she liked it.”
Did the man live alone in the house?
“We didn’t see anybody else, and at about five o’clock in the morning he got us up and took us in a car to some backstreets and left us there. That’s where the police picked us up.”
Had they told the police about the man?
“God no, we were in enough trouble as it was.”
It was after this running away that they confirmed their ‘pact’, she said.
“We were taken back to Newcastle in a police car and the police got Norma’s father and my mother to pick us up at the station. I got beaten for it by my mother and I’m sure Norma was in trouble, too, but in a funny way we were proud of ourselves. You see, my dad was always in trouble with the police, and now I’d been taken to the police station as well. After that we said we were criminals together and we promised each other that everything we did from then on we would do together …”
But had they actually said they would kill someone together?
She looked at me helplessly.
“How can one explain this now? No, I don’t think so, not in that way, but yes, we probably said words like that … You know how people not just children, adults too say ” I’ll kill her” or ” I could kill them”. But when you ask me like that I don’t know what to say. I think now we were fantasizing, dreadfully,
grotesquely. I remember asking my dad what the worst thing was that someone could do and he answered, “Kill a policeman.” And after that, yes, we kept talking about killing . someone . “
A child?
“No, it wasn’t … No, no, it wasn’t … It was just … to do the worst thing that could be done …”
And obviously, you couldn’t kill a policeman. But why did you want to do the worst thing that could be done?
“I don’t know. We talked all the time about running away, being on the run to somewhere in the wilds of Scotland, living with horses. It was It was…” She was stammering.
“Don’t you understand … ?” Her voice was beginning to sound strained.
“It was fantasy. But I think we didn’t know it was fantasy and we built it up and up until it now seems we never talked about anything except doing terrible things and being taken away. But we agreed we wouldn’t ever … Not our brothers and sisters or cousins …”
So in fact by then ‘killing’ and ‘children’ were on your minds?
She shook her head.
“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t … real … like that.”
What she remembers very vividly (and given the lack of communication between different Newcastle authorities, Mr. Lyons almost certainly didn’t know about this) was the other significant event in her life, towards the end of June or the beginning of July, which she associates with the running-away episodes. Although she cannot remember dates, and mixes up the times of some of her most momentous experiences, she thinks it was just about after the second running away, on 14 June, when they had two days on the road to Scotland before they were caught, that she was sent again to a convalescent home for enure tic children in Rothbury, about fifty miles north of Newcastle. She had been a bedwetter, she thinks, since she was four years old, and had been there several times.
“I loved it,” she told me.
“A young couple ran it and they were really nice. I can’t remember their name. We did physical things all day long, all kinds of sports, and the place was so clean and pretty. It was such a contrast, so tidy and friendly you know, while our house in
Whitehouse Road was always dirty and angry and loud when my mother was there. So when they told me one evening I had to go home the next day, I said that I didn’t want to go back home and asked them to let me stay there. Couldn’t I just live with them? And they . they asked me questions I couldn’t answer. But then they went and told on me. And when they took me back to Newcastle, I got taken to some office, magistrates’ or some children’s service or what have you, and the woman there . I had to stand across from her, on the other side of a table She said did I really not want to go home? And I didn’t answer because my mother was standing behind me, and the woman said, “What is it? Do you want to be sent away?” and I could hear my mother breathing back of me so I took a jug of water that stood on the table and chucked the water in the lady’s face and my mother slapped my face and we went home.
“It was so stupid,” she said to me.
“You know, to ask me in front of my mother whether I really wanted to leave home.” The moment they got back to the house, “My mother grabbed me by the hair and shook me, and her midriff was bare, and she had a cheque red skirt on, and there was that female smell, period kind of smell, disgusting, and I was crying.
And I tore myself loose screaming, “I don’t want to be here!” And I ran outside and bounced up and down on the fence between Norma’s house and mine, showing off I suppose, and I was being “Puppet on a String” , which was number one in the charts at the time, and Norma’s mum came out and sang along with us and then she asked me to sing “Congratulations” , the Cliff Richard one, and then she said how well I sang and that perhaps I’d be a singer one day. It made me feel so much better. “
Had she ever wondered why Norma kept saying she hated home and wanted to be away from her parents when her mum was so nice?
“No, I was too small to think about that,” she said.
“I thought of me.”
When Mary went to the house of Brian Howe on or around 27 July, and told fourteen-year-old Pat the lie that Norma had killed Martin Brown, it was, one might say, her last cry for help. It was grotesquely tragic that it should have been to the sister of the little boy who was to die four days later.
As the trial progressed, Norma’s frequent tears and Mary’s controlled stillness created an almost tangible atmosphere of compassion towards one and animosity towards the other. The tone of newspaper reports, remarks in the lobbies during breaks, and indeed the reactions of the court, clearly showed that the smaller girl was increasingly seen as a dangerous and frightening freak whom no one could think what to do with.
From Friday afternoon, 6 December, to Tuesday afternoon, 10 December, the court heard the prosecution witnesses: Martin’s mother, June Brown, and his aunt, Rita Finlay; Brian’s sister, Pat Howe, and their friend, Irene Frazer; Roland Page, a handwriting expert; the two forensic pathologists, Dr. Bernard Knight (for Martin) and Dr. Bernard Tomlinson (for Brian); the forensic scientist Norman Lee; Mary’s teacher, Mr. Eric Foster; DCI Dobson and several officers of his team;
eight-year-old Pauline Watson un sworn who was questioned about the sand-pit incident; ten-year-old Susan Bell, Norma’s sister, who claimed that Mary had tried to throttle her too when she was angry;
and Norma’s parents, who confirmed the story.
“I gave her a clip on the shoulder,” Mr. Bell told me later, describing how he had separated Mary from Susan. And Mrs. Bell said she tried to stop Norma from seeing Mary: “But I couldn’t pry them apart.” Twelve-year-old David McCready, who was the thirty-ninth prosecution witness, gave his account of Mary’s fight with Norma in the nursery sand-pit two weeks after Martin’s death, which is when he said, yes, he’d laughed, because everybody knew what a show-off May Bell was.
The judge would later point out to the jury that several of these testimonies, taken individually, were questionable. Pauline was considered too young to be sworn. Susan was Norma’s sister and her parents, of course, were Norma’s parents, and therefore interested parties. But, the judge suggested, if the jury accepted the evidence as presented, that is, as capable of corroborating Pauline Watson’s testimony about the sand-pit incident, then Norma’s own testimony in this matter, though to be treated with care, was (if accepted by them) capable of corroborating Pauline Watson’s. The judge said:
“She [Norma] was actually there, she says, and in substance, though not in detail, gives the same account as Pauline. If, having given due weight to my warnings, [you think that] it did occur, well then it is something which is relied upon by the prosecution and by those defending Norma as indicating the identity of the killer of the two little boys because, they say, here was a little girl in the neighbourhood with access to those two little boys, and she was doing to other children the very thing which caused the death of those boys.”
More than at any other time it was when the accused children were on the witness stand that one became desperately concerned about the failings of a judicial system where children are tried in adult courts. Juries, unfamiliar with traumatized children, are required to evaluate their tortuous thought processes and muddled words, and the current system neither requires nor provides mechanisms for communicating or teaching such understanding to them. The court was totally unaware of the fantasies that fed and ruled Norma’s and Mary’s lives together, and at times when the truth, as we shall see, accidentally emerged, the court would invariably ignore, reject, or flee from it.
Norma was called for her examination-in-chief at the beginning of the afternoon session on 10 December, the fourth day of the trial. It would take a day and a half and be followed, on the morning of 12 December, by Mary’s. Mr. Justice Cusack always made a point of addressing the children, whether the accused girls or child witnesses, in a special and personal way. Rather than speaking more slowly or raising his voice, he would move in his big red chair until his whole body was turned towards them, thereby forcing their concentration upon him. However, there was a clear difference in his demeanour towards each of the two girls, and when speaking to Norma it would have been impossible for anyone in the court not to notice his gentleness and protectiveness toward her.
“Norma,” he said very quietly. Very pale and already crying, she was standing in the witness-box with a policewoman next to her (to whom a touchingly childish gesture not lost on the public after being handed a clean handkerchief each time she cried, she would always return it, balled up and wet, after blowing her nose). “I want to say something to you before you start telling us what you have to say.
When you went to school, were you taught about God? “
“School and Church,” she whispered.
“You were taught about God. Do you know what the Bible is?”
“Yes.”
“And if you take the Bible and say that you will promise before God to tell the truth, what does that mean?”
“I must tell the truth.”
“Yes, you must tell the truth. She may be sworn …”
For children, it is not the formality of the oath that decides whether they will lie or tell the truth, but, a far more elusive quality, the degree to which they feel bad about telling a lie. And this degree is first of all determined by whether the environment in which they grow up is a truthful environment. In the case of Norma and Mary, Norma’s parents, though under permanent economic stress and perhaps like anyone else ill-equipped to deal with the psychological and social needs of eleven children, basically provided for them (as the police officers taking statements from Norma would notice) a ‘truth-orientated’ environment. Mary’s, as she would so clearly describe to me twenty-eight years later, was the opposite. Whatever the environment,
though, children will lie if they have done some 5
thing they know or sense was wrong and are scared of the consequences.
Norma’s capacity for thinking ahead was limited. But she knew three things: one, that her parents were absolutely convinced Mary alone was responsible; two, that as a consequence of this certainty, they wanted her to ‘tell the truth’. (“We told her from the start,” Norma’s mother explained to me a few months after the trial, “Tell the truth about everything: tell them everything.” ) But three, she knew that, whatever she had done, they were her safe haven. (“The difference between Norma and I,” Mary said to me, ‘was that she could always return home and be safe, while I never knew what I was walking into. “) By the time Mr. Justice Cusack called on her, there had been almost four days during which, with increasing horror, Norma had been forced to return to those months between May and August when she and Mary had so tragically been friends. During the therapeutic months in hospital, away from the anxiety of her parents, her involvement in the terrible events of the summer had quite simply become an impossibility. But now, when she could not avoid hearing with at least some part of her mind the endless repetitions of the events which resulted in the deaths of the two boys, her own involvement became such an enormity that she could not face it at all. Her worst moments during her examination-in-chief were when she was confronted with matters in which, because the factual evidence proved it, she had to admit that she had been involved, such as the ” We Murder’ notes, and the excited visits to Martin’s relatives.