Authors: Gitta Sereny
the rest was part of a terrible fantasy which had become real. But no one looked, no one asked, and no one therefore was in a position to associate one event with another. If the girls’ behaviour had been recognized early on, perhaps someone would have realized that serious trouble was brewing in the two girls’ minds and the most devastating thought of all perhaps both little boys would have lived. But even if, in the months leading up to the trial, when some of the social workers realized the deficiency in their knowledge as we know they did efforts had been made to gain some understanding of the dynamics of these families’ lives and to discover what Mary’s childhood had been, the resulting picture would have proved how wrong adult assumptions can be, and perhaps could have led to different decisions being made.
A few minutes after Mary’s three-hour examination-in-chief was concluded, the defence called the two psychiatrists who had examined Mary upon their request. Under British law as it stands, accused children can only be seen by psychiatrists for the defence in order to show that the child is ‘incapable of criminal intent’, and for the prosecution to rebut that presumption Dr. Robert Orton had seen Mary twice, in August and November. In his opinion, he said, she was a ‘psychopathic personality’, which he defined as having ‘a persistent disorder or disability of the mind . the primary symptoms [being]: 1), a lack of feeling quality to other humans; 2), a liability to act on impulse and without forethought . ; 3), . aggression; 4), a lack of shame or remorse for what has been done; 5), an inability to profit by or use experience which includes the lack of response to punishment; and 6), . the presence of viciousness or wish to do damage to things or persons. “
From the moment Betty Bell had started visiting Mary, before the trial and shortly afterwards, she had told her, “Never, never talk to psychiatrists.” Betty herself was no stranger to psychiatrists; she had been in and out of hospital for years with nervous breakdowns, real and imagined illnesses, and on at least one occasion had been sectioned at her older sister’s request. Her fear of psychiatrists appears to have been above all what Mary might have been brought to disclose.
“There was just one time she and my dad came together,” Mary told me.
“And she said that I must just say I wouldn’t talk to pyschiatrists:
these doctors could put things in my head and send me to outer space “into a twilight zone” she said. My dad told her not to say something so stupid, but it terrified me. ” Up to this point she had mainly rejected all questions about her family and childhood, but after this she virtually refused to co-operate at all.
Dr. David Westbury had visited Mary four times, but could only talk to her twice in October and early November when she was, he said, ‘sulky and only partly co-operative. ” Though he expressed himself less radically than Dr. Orton, Dr. Westbury concurred that Mary showed ‘no evidence of mental illness or severe subnormality,
* Large sections of the testimony of these two psychiatrists, and three others who saw Mary later, are reprinted verbatim in The Case of Mary Bell.
or subnormality of intelligence’, but had a ‘serious disorder of personality . [which] required medical treatment’. He added that Mary’s abnormality of mind arose from a condition of retarded development of mind ‘caused partly by genetic factors [i. e. ” the inheritance of disease] and partly by environmental factors’. Replying to questions from Norma’s counsel Mr. Smith, he agreed that Mary was ‘violent’ and ‘very dangerous’. (Three years later, in 1971, reassessing Mary on behalf of the Home Office, he would write an entirely positive opinion of her and recommend that she should be considered for release by 1975.)
By the time the court recessed after all the testimony had been heard, neither the public nor the media had any doubts: they had all heard the judge impress upon the jury at the very start that it was not only what the accused said that counted, but their demeanour while they said it. All of them had seen Norma’s despair and been witness to her family’s affection and faith in her. And all of them had watched that blank face of the smaller girl and finally found her to be exactly as the prosecutor, Mr. Lyons, was to describe her the next day: ‘. a most abnormal child: aggressive, vicious, cruel, incapable of remorse a dominating personality with a somewhat unusual intelligence and a degree of fiendish cunning that is almost terrifying. ” She had had, he said, ‘an evil and compelling influence over Norma, almost like that of the fictional Svengali…” By this time there wasn’t anyone who could have doubted that Mary had killed Martin Brown and that Norma was innocent of that crime. I too thought that this was the case, and indeed it was.
When it came to Brian Howe, there was never any doubt that one or both girls had killed him, but on the evidence alone it could have been either one of them or both. They had been questioned about it for hours. Fibres from both children’s clothes were found on Brian, though in Norma’s case only on his shoes. Both of them, questioned first by the police and then at the trial, blamed every piece of evidence on the other: the use of the scissors and the razor blade, the cuts on
Brian’s body, the pressure marks on his nose and neck. The only thing both girls accepted having had a hand in was the carpet of wild flowers that covered him. Except for the fact that Mary’s lies, a number of them based on the evidence she was hearing, were more cleverly composed and thus of course more blatant, the only thing the court could be certain of was that both girls were on the Tin Lizzie with Brian that afternoon, once while he was still alive, and twice more when he was dead.
Of all the official people in that court, Mary probably only had one ally, her young solicitor David Bryson, who was a modest man and desolated afterwards because he felt that he had failed her. (“I think he’s thick,” Mary told one of the policewomen.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But she was wrong. ) Her analysis of him almost thirty years later is nearer the truth:
“He was young,” she told me now, ‘probably too young for such a case.
“
I think that is correct, but it was because he was young that he felt compassion for her.
“I simply couldn’t see her as the monster, the ” evil seed” she was described as,” he told me.
“She was a sick child.
I didn’t know what was the matter with her but I knew that what was happening in that court was wrong. ” Mr. Harvey Robson, he said, had been convinced from the start (as it turned out, rightly) that she would be found guilty.
“That’s why he went for diminished responsibility he said.
“He thought it would give her a better chance.” In principle, it would have, but as it turned out, it made no difference.
The next day, on Friday 13 December, Mr. Smith concluded his defence of Norma, saying that she had been ‘an innocent bystander’ who had told childish lies to get herself out of trouble. Mary’s lies, on the other hand, trying to get an innocent little boy into trouble, he said, had been ‘wicked; one was tempted to describe her as evil . [But],” he continued, ‘it is not part of my duty to blackguard Mary … Although this is a ghastly case, and … some of the evidence may have made you ill, it is possible to feel sorry for Mary … Her illness psychopathic personality is said to be the result of genetic and environmental factors. It’s not her fault she grew up this way; it’s not her fault she was born …”
“She never slept the nights of that weekend,” WPC Valerie M. told me.
“Four of us guarded her those three shifts and she asked every one of us: ” What’s a psychopath? ” What could one tell her?”
Another of the policewomen had pondered deeply about it all by the time we talked in 1970. “I took courses in criminology in college and read quite a bit about psychopathy and serial murderers,” she said.
“I
was astonished when the psychiatrists called her a psychopath, which is a condition extremely hard to treat, not to speak of curing it. I know I have read that some people have tried to apply the term to children, but I felt it was nonsense, gobbledegook, and should surely never be used by psychiatrists about a child they barely knew, had barely examined. I was disgusted by it,” she said, and asked me not to name her.
By comparison to the others, Mr. Harvey Robson’s final speech to the jury was not long.
“What was there to say?” David Bryson said sadly a few months later. Mr. Harvey Robson sounded resigned to the inevitable, but oddly enough his conclusion contained the one grain of wisdom everyone had studiously ignored.
“It is … very easy to revile a little girl,” he said, ‘to liken her to Svengali without pausing even for a moment to ponder how the whole sorry situation has come about.
Although you may think that this last is the most disturbing thought of all, I believe that in the course of your deliberations you, as a jury of this city, will be able to discover some measure of pity. “
The judge’s summing up was to last four hours, and although his legal arguments were perfectly correct, few people present could have followed their logic, or indeed detected logic in them. He made very clear, however, what he expected the jury to do about each chHd.
In the course of laying out the evidence, he very properly reminded them that even if Norma had said that when Brian was being conducted along to the Tin Lizzie she did not know why or for what purpose, ‘she does admit, and it is an important factor in the case, that at that time she did think that Mary had killed Martin Brown because [she said] Mary told her she had. “
“If, as Norma claimed, two boys died at the hands of Mary,” said Mr. Justice Cusack, ‘then Mary having told Norma about killing Martin meant that Norma had done nothing to protect Brian Howe. “
For a few moments it had sounded as if the jury would be directed to let facts rather than emotions rule their decisions.
“If any unlawful killing occurs and two people participate in it,” the judge continued, ‘it does not matter whose hand actually does the deed. If one person commits the act which causes the death, and the other is present and knows what is intended and what is happening, and is either helping or ready to help, that person is equally guilty. “
Shortly afterwards, however, it became clear what he intended: “If, however, the person is there as a mere spectator and not there to help and not giving any help, that person cannot be held responsible. It may be wrong … but it is not a criminal offence.”
This was difficult to understand: for while we had all heard Norma state that she had ‘never touched Brian’, we also heard her admit that she had lifted Brian’s ‘head and shoulders up a bit and patted his back but his hand fell on one side and I laid him down again’. We had heard her say that she had ‘felt his pulse but it wasn’t going up and down’; and we had heard the experts tell the court reminding us of the alternate writing of the Nursery notes that the little cuts on the toddler’s stomach were ‘in the shape of an N with a vertical stroke added in another hand making it an M’. (“How can she then be described as a ” mere spectator”,” I noted at the time. ) But the judge went even further: “Secondly, and much more importantly, if you find that one girl did kill, or participate in the killing, but that at the time she may have been so under the domination of the other girl that she had no will or mind of her own,
then she would not be acting “voluntarily” and you ought not to convict her. “
This made it crystal clear: even if Norma had not only been there, but had actually, however marginally, participated in the killing (possibly just by the encouragement of her presence), the fact that Mary was manifestly the leader meant that Norma was innocent of the killing.
The judge then told them it was evident that his instructions referred only to Mary which was as good as telling the jury to acquit the other child and that there was an alternative to murder open to them on each charge, which was manslaughter, and, moreover, there was manslaughter with ‘diminished responsibility’.
After explaining again the meaning of the term, he reminded them that they had heard two doctors testify that Mary was suffering from a ‘psychopathic personality disorder, such as substantially impaired her mental responsibility for her acts or omissions’ but which was susceptible to medical treatment and came within the statutory definition of diminished responsibility.
“Murder,” he concluded, ‘re quires an intent to kill or to do serious bodily injury knowing that death may result. Manslaughter does not require that intent at all. It is sufficient if there is a voluntary, unlawful and dangerous act which results in death . The degree of understanding required to make a child of this age responsible in law is sometimes referred to as having “a guilty mind” but. the mere fact that a child commits an act which in an adult would be a criminal offence is not evidence in itself that that child had a guilty mind. You have to look outside the act itself to see if that child had an understanding of right and wrong, an appreciation of what is good and what is bad, so as to make that child responsible in the eyes of the law. “
In his summation, the judge had made his feelings very clear. In the corridors that afternoon, those who had attended all of the trial had no doubts: we all knew, I think, that the following day Mary would be found guilty of manslaughter with diminished responsibility, and most of those I spoke with thought and hoped that Norma would be acquitted. I, too, was certain that whatever else had happened before and during the actual killings, Mary had been the leading figure in this tragedy. Nevertheless I was disturbed by the legal point the judge had made: ‘if the person is there as a mere spectator and not there to help and not giving any help, that person cannot be held responsible. “
I thought it not only possible but probable that, whatever Norma’s mental capacities were, she had demonstrated during her testimony that she had, in fact, a moral sense, as did her parents, and that she would end up extremely disturbed by her part in these children’s deaths however passive that part might have been. I thought therefore that her total acquittal which appeared almost certain would not only be wrong towards Mary but, in the final analysis, damaging to Norma, too.