Authors: Gitta Sereny
still representing it, however, as an accident. In 1975, at eighteen, during a brief period of group therapy in Styal Prison, she had her only positive contact with a psychiatrist and invented a first fantasy of how Martin might have died as a result of an innocent game. She told the group that she had picked Martin up by ‘his ears, and he slipped. It was an accident’ (this same evasion she still used when talking to me about the sand-pit incident). In 1983, three years after her release, talking to her probation officer Pat Royston, the story changed: she and Norma, she said, had strangled both boys. In 1985, in the draft of her ‘life story’, she wrote yet another obviously false and simplistic description of killing Martin ‘in anger’. (When I challenged her on this, she said she had thought if she described it as ‘an ordinary murder’, people would ‘find it easier to cope with’. ) After that, she said, she never spoke of it except to her current partner of (now) thirteen years, until our talks in 1996, when she almost immediately admitted to having killed Martin on her own. But as I have said, it would take months, and several different versions, all related with enormous difficulty, until the last one in which she finally convinced me she was telling the nearest she would probably ever get to truth. Even then, however, she would never be able to tell me why she thought she had done it.
“Mary,” the judge said at 10. 30 a. m. on 12 December.
“I want to ask you some questions.” Unusually pale, wearing the yellow dress she had told WPC F. the night before her mother had made for her, she stood very straight facing him.
“Have you been taught about God?”
“Yes, sir,” Mary answered in her singsong Geordie accent which put the ‘sir’ two tones higher than the ‘yes’. She would never forget to add this respectful ‘sir’ during the hours of testimony that followed unless it was to show anger, or even contempt for the questioner.
“Do you go to Church at all?”
“Sometimes, sir, to the Mission.”
“Sometimes to the Mission. Do you know what the Bible is?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if you take the Bible and promise before God to tell the truth, what do you think that means?”
“You must tell the truth, sir.”
“You must tell the truth. Very well, she may be sworn.”
As I write this now, I have no difficulty recalling the atmosphere in court that day. Unlike any of the other sessions, it had a sense of breathless expectation to it, a kind of hunger, with the undercurrent of morbid curiosity that in particularly lurid murder trials makes voyeurs of the spectators. I don’t know whether others had the same reaction, but I remember a sharp feeling of unease. I hadn’t felt this listening to Norma’s whispers and watching her sob. It was the younger child’s straight back, the blankness in her face, and that awful self-control which could so readily be interpreted as an incapacity to feel, that aroused in me a curious resistance to being part of it, a reluctance to watch, almost an embarrassment at being there.
In recalling my distress at the proceedings, particularly the instinctive partiality of all those present in favour of the unhappy, childlike Norma, and their almost passionate rejection of the apparently unfeeling, self-possessed Mary, I’m anxious not to mislead anyone now. Like everyone at the time I was quite sure that Mary had killed, and that, whatever part the older child might have played, Mary had to have been the dominating figure in this unhappy alliance.
Where I differed (leaving aside here my opinions about Norma’s role) was that although I was deeply aware that what had happened to the little boys and their families was monstrous, I did not for a moment see this eleven-year-old child as a monster, and I was appalled that others did. This was not because I knew more about her background than they did I didn’t until much later but because I had, in the aftermath of World War II, worked with many children who had been traumatized by their experiences in the camps or working as forced labourers in Germany. The majority were between the ages of four and twelve. Some were silent to the point of being catatonic. Others were hyperactive, talking not only all day, but through the night in their sleep. Some wanted to be held, others trembled at the least touch and pulled away. But one thing almost all of them had in common on arrival, and for many weeks afterwards, was an absolute rejection of anything that smacked of moral concepts. The words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ had no meaning for them; their faces went stiff, their eyes blank at any attempt to explain the necessity, for their own safety, of a few rules. There was a minimum of imposed discipline, but at the slightest indication by any adult of disapproval or impatience, many of them exploded, forcing us to watch them acting (for acting it was) wilder, ‘badder’, more knowing in every way then they essentially were.
The resemblance between these seriously damaged children and their rejection of conventional morality in 1945, and Mary in that English courtroom in 1968, totally at sea with the moral concepts she was asked to swear an oath to, was quite striking for me. From day one, with her so obvious lies and fantasies, her puzzling but indicative movements with her hands and fingers, her strange intelligence, her stillness and isolation, she appeared to me nothing so much as a horribly confused child to whom something dreadful had at some time been done.
She was first questioned about Martin Brown’s death, as Norma had been. Both girls had admitted to having seen him in the street the day before his death, but neither had admitted to any guilt surrounding his death, or blamed the other. Mary initially told the police quite truthfully that she had never played with him. Four months later in court, however, in one of several demonstrations of exceptional mental agility, which had the effect of confusing not just the public but the barristers and the judge as well, she carefully adapted her reply to the evidence she had heard.
After a forensic expert testified that fibres found on Martin’s clothes matched those taken from the dress she had worn that day, she affirmed that, no, she had never played with Martin, but added, emphasizing the difference between the two acts, that while she hadn’t played with him, she had ‘given him a swing before dinner’ shortly before 1 p. m. on the day he was found dead. (“I made it up,” she told me now, ‘after the police told me they had found the fibres. “) Asked about her ringing the Browns’ doorbell four days after he died, Mary answered honestly enough.
“I asked his mother if I could see Martin,” she said, questioned by her counsel, Harvey Robson. The and Norma were daring each other . “
“You were daring each other?” Mr. Robson repeated.
“What did you want to see Martin for?”
“I don’t know, sir, because we … er … were daring each other and one of us did not want to be chicken or something.”
It was yet another example of the different reactions the two girls elicited from the court not because of what they said (though in their eagerness to accuse each other their replies were frequently diametrically opposed) but how they said it. Norma, answering unwillingly and with distress, constantly provoked sympathy and compassion. Mary, speaking succinctly with aplomb, often embedding her answers in a mass of extraneous information designed with extraordinary dexterity to give her time for reflection, both confused -and irritated-the court.
“I want to ask you, first of all, about the notes,” Mr. Harvey Robson said to Mary.
“Do you understand what I am referring to?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you remember how the notes came to be written?”
“Well, we wrote it was a joint idea.”
“Yes, where were you?”
“In our house. We only wrote er - er … two in our house, I think.”
“How did it begin? Norma, I think, has said something about you were playing a recorder?”
“Oh well…”
“Is that right?” Unwittingly, Mr. Robson had opened the door to one of her frequent diversions.
“Yes,” she began, “I can play a recorder. I was playing a recorder. I was playing, ” Go To Sleep, Little Brother Peter”; I was playing that or ” Three Blind Mice”. I was playing one of those tunes and I just put it back in the box because too much playing it makes the inside go rusty or something … We went into the back scullery I think no, I had a cat upstairs which was a stray cat and it was a black one and me and Norma were trying to think of a name for it, and we were thinking of names for it and it was a black cat…”
“Did you go upstairs?” Mr. Robson tried in vain to get her onto the subject of the notes the paper Norma had said Mary got from her bedroom.
“Yes.”
“Into what room?”
“My bedroom.”
“And what did you do in your bedroom?”
“We were thinking of a name for the cat.”
“Yes?”
“But the dog, it was coming up and sniffing under the door because it could smell the cat.”
“And how did you come to make the notes?”
“Well, the doll’s pram was at the side of my bed and Norma went over to it and looked under. It has … has got I think it is a red hood, I’m not sure what colour hood, but it has got like a thing to cover it and it has got the two studs at one end, and Norma went in because she saw, she was looking at the doll … and she saw there was a red Biro pen and she got it out, and she was doing some drawings and it was a joint idea to write the notes, so we both wrote them, but we never wrote them in the bedroom, we wrote them in the scullery.”
“Do you remember how many notes altogether you wrote in the bedroom?”
asked Harvey Robson, quite obviously lost.
“We never wrote notes at all in the bedroom,” she repeated patiently.
“We only wrote them in the scullery because you cannot do none in the bedroom because if you rest it on the bed the pen would go straight through it because the bed is soft, and there is like a sideboard thing and it has got a round thing which has a frilly thing on it.”
“You did not make any of the notes in the bedroom. How many notes did you make in the scullery?”
‘. Two. “
“And when you had made the notes, did you stay in or did you go somewhere?”
“We went er Norma says, ” Are you coming to the Nursery? ” I said, ” Yes, ho way then,” because we had broken into it before.” (Now it is Mary who confuses the two breakins, but everyone was so tired of the notes, nobody appeared to notice. ) Yes? “
“We had been in a week and all the week before that.”
Again, the discussion of the notes went on for mind-numbing hours. By the end of it, it seemed to me that the notes, though certainly part of the morbid game they were both playing, had clearly been part of a classic cry for help and that both children were very nearly telling the truth.
On the previous evening, after Norma’s examination-in-chief, Mary had shown to the policewoman guarding her how frightened she was becoming.
“They won’t be able to do anything to one of us without the other…”
she had said that night to WPC Pauline J. ” whom she particularly liked.
“After all, we were both …” she hesitated, ‘in it. It would be unfair to punish one without the other. ” And a little later that sleepless night she said: ” They are going to blame it all on me, because they’ll say Norma’s daft . “
And towards the end of her first morning of crossexamination, questioned once more by Norma’s counsel about the notes, Mary gave way to her anger about the court’s obvious partiality and her fear about what would happen to her. She answered with a part lie and, as I now know, a part truth which the only time it would happen during the trial gave some indication of the turmoil in the relationship between her and Norma and the increasing frenzy of their fantasies.
“What does a ” joint idea” mean?” Mr. Smith asked her.
“It was both of us.”
“Both of you what?”
“That wrote the notes.”
“Yes, but who decided the notes should be written?”
Her. “
“She did?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She says ” We will do it for a giggle. ” … I says it to Mr. Robson [she means Dobson] and all, it was both of us.”
“Did you ask why she thought this would be a giggle?”
“She wanted to get put away,” Mary said, sounding very angry now.
“Is this true, what you are telling the court?”
“Yes, because after that she asked me to run away with her …”
“Where to?”
“She just says, ” Run away with us. ” …”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. I have run away with her before.”
The judge now intervened.
“But did she say why she wanted to get put away?” he asked.
“Because she could kill the little ones, that’s why.”
“Because whatY the judge asked, startled.
“And run away from the police,” Mary continued, unasked, her voice now shrill with suppressed hysteria.
“She was going to go…”
Mr. Justice Cusack firmly shut his notebook and stood up, bringing everyone immediately to their feet with him.
“I think we will adjourn now until 2.15,” he said.
“I’ll kick her mouth in,” Mary shouted, but everyone had begun to talk as if to shut out her voice. For the first time she had tried to bring up the dreadful fantasies which bound her and Norma together but it was, of course, incomprehensible to this assembly of good and decent men and women who were neither qualified nor required to deal with the pathology of disturbed children.
“I think it’s all a dream,” she said that night to WPC Susan L. “It’s never happened. Do you think I’ll ever go home again? I wish I was going to sleep in my own bed. Do you think I’ll get thirty years? I think he is a horrible judge if he gives me thirty years. If I was a judge and I had an eleven-year-old who’d done this …”
“I realized she’d said ” done this”,” Susan told me later.
“But I didn’t report it. I felt I shouldn’t.”
“I’d give her … eighteen months. Murder isn’t that bad,” Mary went on.
“We all die sometime anyway,” and then, an apparent non sequitur, she said: “My mam gives me sweets every day…”
All of it meant something, the memory of daily sweets from her mother right after the mention of death and of murder, and above all her outburst in court about Norma, about planning to ‘run away from the police’, ‘running away from home’ and ‘killing the little ones’. It was all quite true: the running away from home was a fact;