Authors: Gitta Sereny
But there was another point that puzzled me: how had the psychiatrists reached the conclusion that Mary was suffering from a ‘psychopathic personality disorder’? What was it? What had caused it?
“Does it mean she is mentally ill?” I had asked Dr. Westbury after he had testified, and he had shaken his head.
“It’s not a mental disease,” he’d said.
“It’s a condition.”
“Is it curable?” I had asked, and again he had shaken his head.
“It is treatable,” he said.
I was, I admit, momentarily reassured. The trial had seemed disastrous, but in the end, I told myself, they would do the right thing. Rather than punish this unhappy child, who was not mentally ill but had somehow become subject to a condition of profound disturbance and as a consequence caused such awful suffering to the families of her victims, they would send her to a hospital where she could be treated and cared for. Dr. Westbury told me that he had already been making enquiries as to where Mary, or both children if they were both convicted, could be sent.
That night of 16 December, Mary knew that the next day the jury would decide her fate.
“What would be the worst that could happen to me?” she asked WPC Pauline J. “Would they hang me?” Pauline had felt sick, she told me.
“I wasn’t supposed to talk to her about the case but… you couldn’t not answer a question like that, could you? I said no, they didn’t hang little girls. A bit later she asked me again, would they send her to prison for thirty years like Harry Roberts? I said that they didn’t send little girls to prison, either.
But then she started talking of going home as if, you know, they just had to let her go home, so I told her they’d send her somewhere where she’d be . looked after . It was better to tell her, prepare her sort of, you know. “
It was quite clear: Mary, an avid watcher of Westerns, had seen men being chased, caught and hanged. And she knew about “Harry Roberts’ who got ‘thirty years’ he was a sort of hero in her family. But for her there was no connection between these images in her mind of pursuit, murder and violent death, and what she had done. As she told Pauline, they just had to let her go home. Why not? What had she done that was so bad?
It was 2. 15 p. m. the next day when the jury came back with their verdict. The judge had warned he would tolerate no outbursts or demonstrations in the court, and there was silence as the Clerk of the Assize, Mr. Peter Robinson, asked for the decision.
“Do you find Norma Bell guilty or not guilty of the murder of Martin Brown?”
“Not guilty.”
“Do you find her guilty or not guilty of the murder of Brian Howe?”
“Not guilty.”
The only sound was Norma’s momentary clapping of her hands, which ceased just as suddenly as, with the same gentle motion we had seen so often, Norma’s mother turned the beaming child back towards the court.
The row of faces of Mary’s family: her mother; her grandmother, Mrs. McC. ; Billy; the three aunts, Cath, Isa and Audrey, and some of the uncles, were all stiffly facing the front as the Clerk then read on:
“Do you find Mary Flora Bell guilty or not guilty of the murder of Martin Brown?”
“Guilty of manslaughter because of diminished responsibility,” the Foreman replied. And again, moments later, about Brian Howe, “Guilty of manslaughter because of diminished responsibility.”
Betty’s immediate screaming sob was so expected it hardly moved one;
Billy, as he had done time and again during the trial, leaned forwards covering his face with his hands; Mrs. McC. sat stiff, unmoving. Mary, who had listened with that strange immobility we had noticed before, only reacted I saw it plainly as she looked at her family, from face to face: then she began to cry and Mr. Bryson put his arm around her.
Ten minutes later, the judge pronounced sentence on Mary.
The child need not stand and I shall address myself to the matters without specifically addressing myself to her.
On the verdict of the Jury in this case, Mary Bell has been found guilty on two counts of manslaughter. The verdict is one of manslaughter because the jury found that at the material time she had diminished responsibility. Otherwise their verdict would have been one of murder. In the result it means that this child, now aged only eleven, has in fact been found to have killed two other children.
My difficulty is to know what order should now be made by the court.
Having regard to the medical evidence put before me, I should have been willing to make . a hospital order, so that she could have been taken to a mental institution to receive the appropriate treatment . accompanied . by a restriction order . which would have meant that she could not have been released from a hospital without. special. authority.
Unhappily, I am not able to make such an order because one of the requirements of the Mental Health Act is that I must be satisfied, firstly, that there is a hospital to which she could go;
secondly, that she could be admitted to that institution within twenty-eight days.
Evidence has been given to me by Dr. Westbury . that it has been impossible to find any institution to which she can be admitted for treatment under the Mental Health Act . The responsible Government Department requires time to consider what they wish to do . I make no criticism of that Department. But it is a most unhappy thing that, with all the resources of this country, whether it be the Ministry of Social Security, or the Home Office, it appears that no hospital is available which is suitable for the accommodation of this girl and to which she could be admitted.
All the requirements, apart from the one I have mentioned, of the Mental Health Act have been satisfied, and I am merely precluded from doing what I would otherwise do by the fact that no such hospital is available. No evidence has been put before me which would enable me, therefore, to make an order of the kind I would wish to make.
I must, therefore, turn to other matters.
If this had been the case of an adult, having regard to the evidence put before me, which I fully accept, that this is a child who is dangerous, I should have felt obliged to impose a life sentence for the reason that, not only did the gravity of the of fences warrant it, but that there was evidence of mental disease or abnormality which made it impossible to determine the date when the person concerned could be safely released.
It is an appalling thing that, in a child as young as this, one has to determine such matters, but I am entirely satisfied that, anxious as I am to do everything for her benefit, my primary duty is to protect other people for the reasons that I have indicated.
I take the view that there is a very grave risk to other children if. she is not closely watched and every conceivable step taken to see that she does not do again what it has been found that she did do.
In the case of a child of this age no question of imprisonment arises, but I have the power to order a sentence of detention, and it seems to me that no other method of dealing with her, in the circumstances, is suitable.
I therefore have to turn to what length of detention should be imposed. I say at once that, if an un determinate period is imposed, as in the case of a life sentence of imprisonment, that does not mean that the person concerned is kept in custody indefinitely, or for the rest of their natural lives. It means that the position can be considered from time to time and, if it becomes safe to release that person, that person can be released.
For that reason the sentence of the court concurrently in respect of these two matters upon Mary Bell is a sentence of detention and the detention will be for life.
The child Mary Bell may be taken out of court.
It is very rare in Britain, because it is essentially illegal, that a juror comments on a trial for which he has sat on the jury. But on 13 May 1995, a year and a half after the trial of the two ten-year-old boys who had killed James Bulger in February 1993, Vincent Moss, a retired university lecturer and a juror on that case, sharply condemned the use of jury trials for children on a BBC Radio programme, Tales of the Jury. The case had remained in the news because of a controversy that arose soon after the two boys were found guilty of murder and sentenced to detention at LIMP. The judge, Mr. Justice Morland, had suggested a minimum sentence of eight years for ‘retribution and deterrence’ (after this their case would be reconsidered) which the Lord Chief Justice two days later increased to ten years.
A campaign by James Bulger’s parents, strongly supported by the Sun newspaper, resulted in 250,000 signatures calling for the two young murderers to be jailed for life. The Home Secretary at the time, Mr. Michael Howard, then announced in July 1994 that, in consideration of ‘the special circumstances and the need to maintain confidence in the justice system’, he would impose a ‘tariff i. e. ” a minimum sentence, of fifteen years. This meant that the two ten-year-olds eleven by the time of the trial would spend four years in a special unit, three years in a secure youth facility (i.e.” a maximum security prison for juveniles up to twenty-one) and, as of age eighteen, a further eight years in adult prison, until their first possible parole at the age of twenty-six. The boys’ lawyers initiated an appeal to the
Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg on the basis that the trial process involved breaches of various articles of the European Convention on Human Rights relating to a fair trial and the involvement of a politician in the sentencing procedure.
On 6 March 1998, the Commission ruled the application admissable. A year later they published their opinion that although the trial had not involved inhuman or degrading treatment it had been unfair. By this time, Mr. Howard’s decision had been judicially reviewed in the English High Court and ultimately, on appeal to the House of Lords, was found to be flawed. Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and if, as expected, the European Court pronounces against British procedure as it stands, radical changes will have to be made.
Juror Vincent Moss, however, discussed what he clearly considered an even more pivotal point than the length of sentence: did these ten year-olds know right from wrong, and could they be considered responsible for their actions? In his opinion they could not be considered responsible in the same sense as a mentally competent adult. The extent to which the boys were morally aware and understood the concept of morality was, he said, very questionable. He felt that a jury’s possibilities in an adult trial their choice being only between guilty or not guilty, murder or manslaughter was far too restrictive for such a case.
“We should have gone back into court,” he said, ‘and we should have said, “Yes, we do have a verdict: these boys are in urgent need of social and psychiatric help.”
“These two children,” he said, ‘had sat there for a month (in fact seventeen days], bored, uncomprehending and appallingly distressed when, at full volume, the court heard recordings as they cried and screamed for their mothers. ” He confessed that he had been horrified at the judge’s description of the boys as ‘vicious and hardened criminals’. He and his fellow jurors, he said, had no genuine freedom to decide on the boys’ guilt or innocence and had not even been offered the option of a verdict of guilty with diminished responsibility.
“We were there simply to rubber-stamp a verdict,” he said.
While considering what an intelligent juror felt in 1993, and before hearing more of how a child felt during and after a jury trial in adult court in 1968, it is perhaps worth considering a Times leader written a hundred years before, on 10 August 1861, about an almost identical trial in an adult court of two eight-year-old boys who, on’ll April 1861, in Stockport, Cheshire, beat to death a child they also did not know, two-and-a-half-year-old George Burgess.
Children of that age [wrote The Times] cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults . Why should it have been absurd and monstrous that these two children should have been treated like murderers? As far as it went, their conscience was as sound and as genuine a conscience as that of a grown man:
it told them that what they were doing was wrong . [But] conscience, like other natural faculties, admits of degrees: it is weak, and has not arrived at its proper growth in children; though it has a real existence and a voice within them, it does not speak with that force and seriousness which justifies us in treating the child as a legally responsible being.
What was the principal feeling she recalled about the trial? I asked Mary.
“Unreality,” she said.
“You see, they talked all the time about the dead little boys. But it was this that was unreal to me. Of course I knew I had done something wrong, but, you know, nobody ever talked to me … me … about the little boys in ways I could … respond to.”
Did the fact of their being dead mean anything to you?
“No, nothing, because I hadn’t intended … Well how can I say this now?” she said right away.
“But … I didn’t know I had intended for them to be dead dead for ever. Dead for me then wasn’t for ever.”
This is hard to understand, or even to believe. Most of us who have been parents of eleven-year-old children think they know what death is. But perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps they only know when the person who dies is someone who has been close to them and they sense the finality of it, not as a result of knowledge or understanding, but in reaction to the pain they see in others they love around them. It is a persuasive and a tempting thought, for it is no doubt the gentlest and most healing way to learn about death.
It would also go some way to explaining why Mary might not have had a concept of the finality of death. No human being she loved had died by the time she was eleven. And unable even now, returning in her memory to that time, to understand herself and thereby to explain, she reaches for childlike illustrations.
“You know, my dog, my Alsatian, he had died, two or three times I think, but I can’t really remember because each time my dad brought me the same … well, to me the same dog the next day. I know that doesn’t explain anything to anybody else, but it’s one of the things I’ve found for myself.