Authors: Gitta Sereny
Brian Howe’s death, however, was a different matter: the jury had a so-called ‘bundle’ containing, among other things, all the girls’ police statements, which were frequently referred to during testimony.
Though Norma will have understood very little of the discussions between the learned men in wigs and the many directions the judge gave to the jury throughout the case, she knew they had the statements and therefore knew of the lies she had told, and that she was there both when Brian ‘was hurt’ and, time and again, when he was dead.
There were two things she could bear to speak of only as related to Mary, never to herself: the razor blade which, in her inability to think ahead, she had brought to the attention of the police and then led them to it; and the scissors, which in her final statement she admitted to having taken away from Brian’s brother Norman and carried on to the Tin Lizzie when she and Mary (or Mary and she both claimed it was the other’s initiative) took Brian there. The fact that Brian had been cut with the razor blade and made ‘baldy’ with the scissors was more real to her than his death. And, whether true or not, it was essential to her, not from the point of innocence or guilt, but to her as a person a little girl who could not hurt a child-to separate herself from anything that had been done with these two objects.
Her replies about Martin, however, were fairly straightforward, except when the questions put to her either dealt with what Mary had told her about his death, or when they appeared to force her mind into proximity with it. She had been watching her mother ironing for about five minutes, she told her counsel, Mr.
R.
P.
Smith, when Mary called her through a hole in the fence between their houses.
“Did she want something?” he asked.
“She wanted me to go down to Number-85.”
“Do you remember what she said?”
“There’s been an accident.”
“Did she say anything more about it at that time?” Norma did not reply and Mr. Smith did not press for an answer. (It was at this point in our conversations that Mary said, “I told Norma right away that I had killed Martin,” and Norma said, “You didn’t, you didn’t? Show me.” ) “Well, we went down,” Norma continued.
“She took us down 85 … There’s a hole in the toilet [she meant of 83 St. Margaret’s Road, next door]. We went through there … and up the steps. [The excellent shorthand writer carefully noted the children’s reactions and wrote here: ‘the witness became excited.” ]’ “Did Mary say anything more to you about the accident before you went through and out into the back and through the hole in the wall?”
“No, but she knew the name ‘cos she said Martin Black … ” It’s Martin Black who has had the accident. ” But I don’t know who she really meant… I don’t know Martin Black.”
The fact was that Norma knew little Martin (Brown) very well because she had frequently seen him when he dropped in on his aunt, Rita Finlay, whose little son John she often baby-sat. But oddly enough Mary, who didn’t particularly care for small children, didn’t know Martin well at all, and may not have known his surname.
Norma said she had only gone a little way up the steps of number 85.
“Did you ever get up to the room upstairs in Number 85?” Mr. Smith asked.
“I never went in. There was a crowd … they wanted to know whose little boy it was and Mary went up but I never went up. She went up into the room and she named the boy.”
“How do you know she went up, Norma?”
“I saw her going through the wall and she told me … [note: ‘the witness became excited and upset…” ]’ “Did you see Mary come out?”
“No.” But she obviously saw her shortly afterwards, for she said they went to Rita Finlay’s house: “May wanted to tell Rita that there had been an accident, ‘cos she said there’s been an accident and Martin and something about blood all over … [note: ‘witness became excited’].”
Time and again over the two days of her testimony, the judge interrupted proceedings to give Norma a rest, even when it meant that a question remained unanswered, or remained unchallenged if it had been answered but required clarification. This was the case first of all when she was questioned about the girls’ outrageous calling on Martin’s mother, June Brown, four days after her little boy was found dead.
“Norma, did you ever want to see little Martin Brown lying in his coffin?” asked Mr. Smith. [“The witness nodded head, ‘no’,” the stenographer wrote, confusingly, for she had in fact nodded, yes. ] “No. Were you there when May went to see Martin’s mother to ask if she could see Martin in his coffin? Were you there?”
“Yes,” Norma whispered.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
This admission of Norma that she was present at the call on June Brown would be discounted. The assumption that it was yet another appalling initiative of Mary’s fitted more comfortably into the pattern that by now ruled the trial.
There is no doubt that to the court and jury the most bewildering aspect of the two girls’ conduct that weekend of 25 May were the notes they wrote, first in the scullery of Mary’s home and then in the nursery after breaking into it. It was the prosecution’s contention that these notes amounted to a confession that the two girls had killed Martin Brown. The defence for both girls held that however vulgar and unpleasant the wording, they belonged to childish fantasy.
As it turns out, both sides were wrong.
The two girls admitted, as handwriting expert Roland Page had concluded, that the notes had been written by both of them. Norma, although she volunteered the information that she had written ‘a first letter’, which Mary had ‘put inside her shoe’ she didn’t say what the letter had been about and why Mary put it in her shoe, and she wasn’t questioned further about it said that the notes had been Mary’s idea. Mary said and maintains to this day that it was ‘a joint idea’.
Still questioned by Mr. Smith, Norma said that she and Mary had been at Mary’s house, first with Mary’s recorder and then ‘drawing’.
“And then when you had finished playing drawing, what did you do next?”
“Wrote some notes.”
“What with?”
“A red Biro pen.”
“Whose was it?”
“Mary Bell’s.”
“I want you to look, Norma, please, at four notes, exhibits twelve to fifteen. You have got the notes there, Norma, have you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see the one which reads, ” I murder so that I may come back”?
Exhibit 12? “
“Yes, I wrote that one.”
“You just hold it up. The original is written in red. Why did you write that, Norma?”
“Just for me and Mary.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Mary, ‘cos she wanted to get some papers to write some notes but she wrote a few and put something … [‘the witness became inaudible and excited’]’ ” Would you say that again, Norma? “
“May wanted some notes to be written … to put in her shoe …”
After a long discussion about another note, exhibit 15, which Norma said Mary had written and also put ‘in her shoe’, Mr. Smith asked again whose idea it had been to write these notes.
‘. Mary’s, ‘cos she first got scrap paper and I was writing a different letter on it and I wrote that and she put that in her shoe.
I don’t know why. I didn’t know what she was going to do . ” It went on for hours and ended in Norma’s total confusion when she first claimed they had done nothing else in the nursery (they had in fact totally trashed it) and that the police caught them in the yard (this was in fact a week later).
Norma’s parents, too, could have had no idea about the fantasies these two girls developed between them and, as was obvious from her reluctance to have her father present while she made her statements to the police, Norma was deeply afraid of his discovering what Mr. Dobson had described as her ‘curious excitement’. We cannot know whether for Norma, who had perhaps craved for years to be noticed, this ‘excitement’ was simply about the attention suddenly focused on her, or whether it was a response to something deeper within her recent experience. Her behaviour, after the deaths of both Martin Brown and Brian Howe, would point to the latter. But judging from the report Dr. Ian Frazer, chief of psychiatry at Prudhoe Monkton Hospital, gave to the court about Norma, this behaviour had changed quite radically during the months of remand in the sympathetic care and calm of the hospital where (the crime itself probably not being discussed as that would have been totally illegal) she was helped, at least for that healing period, to put the crime out of her mind.
Dr. Frazer was the only medical expert called by prosecution or defence to testify about Norma and, very unusually, the judge would quote his report word for word in his summation. In Dr. Frazer’s medical evidence, which he gave to the court as the psychiatrist who had studied her case ever since she had come into his care on 28 August 1968 (three weeks after her arrest and three months and a week before the trial), he said that her behaviour was good and that she gave no trouble. When she had first arrived, he said, she had found it difficult to show her feelings, but as she got used to the surroundings, she expressed them fairly well. She had not tried to run away and got on well with the other children and the staff. She had not shown any physical aggression. She had attended lessons and did her work well. When intelligence tests were applied to her they indicated that although she was actually thirteen years old she had the mental age of a child between eight and nine. Her comprehension and reasoning powers were limited. She could cope with concrete thought much better than with anything abstract or involved, by which he meant that she could give a physical description of things but had great difficulty with abstract terms necessary to describe feelings, motives and reasoning.
“Physically,” Dr. Frazer testified, “Norma was small for her age,” and that included her strength. This was a curious assertion, unwarranted, I felt at the time, either by fact or by his function, and the notes I made then express my surprise: “Is he telling us that she didn’t have the strength to hold a boy of three, or to press his neck?” I wrote.
Like everyone else in court, I had been observing the thirteen-year-old girl for hours every day and, like them, had been touched by the contrast between her physical sturdiness and her obvious emotional fragility. I had been repeatedly moved by her tenderness towards her young siblings who, when they ran up to her, she picked up and swung playfully, sometimes two at a time, holding them in a tight embrace, their feet off the ground.
Not surprisingly, however, Dr. Frazer also found Norma emotionally immature. She was, he said ‘an insecure little girl’ who did not have the capacity ‘to be a leader’, ‘to express herself readily’, or ‘to reason . Almost anybody of subnormal intelligence,” he said, ‘is more easily influenced than a person who is of normal, or above normal intelligence, and that is true in the case of Norma. She has more suggestibility. If someone … present with her showed influence, she will tend to be influenced by that person rather than by what she was told half an hour before by somebody else. And if you ask her the reason ” why? ” in relation to something, she has difficulty in finding words to express herself, although her powers of concentration are quite good for her intelligence.”
Crossexamined by Mr. Lyons, Dr. Frazer said that Norma’s capacity to know that some things are gravely wrong was limited.
“Is she capable of knowing it is wrong to kill?” he was asked.
“I think the probability is,” he said, ‘that she would not know that pressing on the throat hard would kill. I don’t think she has the capacity to appreciate that people are sometimes killed by strangulation. Under non-stressful conditions,” he concluded his evidence, ” Norma asked and replied to questions quickly and relevantly, but under stress, of course, the situation is different.
“
There is no doubt that in this friendly hospital environment, in the company of sick children, many of them younger than she, Norma presented exactly as Dr. Frazer described her. However, the fact that he was convinced Norma was blameless in the deaths of the little boys and incapable of harming children, as he told a number of colleagues whom I later spoke to, must have meant that Norma had not fully confided in him. If he had known of her fantasy life with Mary, it would have had to affect his judgement. He might still, and perhaps quite correctly, have considered her incapable of actually harming a child but he would have known of the frightening dreams the two girls shared and might have weighed his words which he would have known would greatly influence the jury-accordingly.
Mary’s state of mind was different from Norma’s, and yet in some ways the same: different, because she was immeasurably more disturbed, morally damaged, and alone than Norma; the same, because the acts she had committed were not real to her, not something she had done, but rather had she been able to express it this way something that had happened in her, or to her, she doesn’t even now know which. The essential contradiction of the trial was that ‘killing’ had a fantasy connotation for both these children, and neither of them, though of course familiar with the word, understood ‘death’ in the sense either of ‘for ever’ or of ‘loss’, though Norma, oddly enough, knew the symptoms of death and recognized it when she saw it. Mary, incapable of connecting her compulsive need to ‘act out’ with the consequences of her actions, simply could not conceive that every action has a consequence, and it would take her many years to recognize this.
The most important development in Mary’s mind during the months of remand and the weeks of the trial was that she began to dissociate herself from her own acts. In the beginning she did this deliberately, and consciously, with quite remarkable dexterity, as Chief Inspector Dobson would describe, noting her clever lies. Eventually, however, the psychological blocking mechanism which protects the mind from the unbearable took over and made this dissociation ‘re al’.
Mary would deny for twenty-seven years having taken an active part in the killing of Brian Howe and only acknowledged the details when she talked with me in 1996. About Martin Brown, she denied for the first six years of her detention having had any part whatsoever in his death, although at fourteen she jotted down bits of her life for a teacher whose approval she craved, and spoke there of his death,