Authors: Gitta Sereny
I knew our work together would take many months; they would have to move, possibly repeatedly, to be safe, and for the duration of our work to enable them to move when necessary would have to live in rented accommodation. Mary’s then eleven-year-old child would have to be looked after, her partner would therefore not be able to work. And, quite aside from these essential financial considerations, as the book could not exist without her I felt she was entirely entitled to a share in the author’s rewards. Legally we were in the clear, for while a Proceeds of Crime Act in Britain makes it illegal for criminals to profit from their crimes (by writing or collaborating in writings about
their crimes) this applies only for of fences committed introduction TO THE paperback /xix within six years prior to publication. Not only was this book about her whole life and the consequences of her childhood rather than the acts of her crimes, but also thirty years had gone by since those terrible two days and surely no one so I thought, wrongly as it turned out could think of that eleven-year-old child as a criminal in the accepted sense of the term, that is an adult child killer such as, for example, the two notorious British female murderers of our time, Myra Hindley and Rosemary West, who had participated in the torture and murder of a number of children and adolescents.
I always knew, as did my publishers, that the question of Mary receiving money would be a matter of concern, above all to the families of the dead boys who, because of the rules imposed on us, could not be warned about the book’s publication more than a day or two ahead of the public as otherwise, without any doubt, the information we would give them would have been made public. The only condition the Official Solicitor imposed, in order to assure the anonymity of the child being maintained for as long as possible, was that the subject of the book would be kept totally secret until very shortly before publication days rather than weeks. Even though we knew this was right, we were very worried about it and, although nothing could have been done that would really have helped the families, we had arrangements in place to warn them of the impending publication as soon as we could and as gently as we could. This condition also meant that for almost two and a half years no one except the principals for Mary, her partner, lawyers, agent and probation officers; for myself, my family, one legal counsellor, my agents and eventually three psychiatrists, two of them abroad; and the four top executives of Macmillan knew what I was writing.
Since those terrible months in 1968 when, nine weeks apart, the two little boys died, Mary has not hurt a human being. Released in 1980 as rehabilitated after twelve years of detention, seven of them since the age of sixteen in a maximum security women’s prison, she has lived an unexceptionable life ever since. And although for many years now in a state of devastating and, as she feels it, inexpiable remorse, she has
managed to sustain a long and stable relationship XX / introduction TO THE paperback with a caring man and bring up an exceptionally well-balanced and happy child.
But all these positive aspects counted for nothing with the populist British media who have been engaged for years in a bitter circulation war. Both the Observer, on 19 April 1998, and, a week later, the Guardian, published articles with journalistically legitimate if unaccredited and somewhat sensationally presented information. The Observer disclosed the so far unknown book’s subject and the Guardian named (incorrectly) a sum of money Mary Bell had allegedly been paid.
Most unusually, neither of these papers had sought confirmation from either publisher or author. An unfortunate immediate comment by the Prime Minister, visibly caught unawares by a TV reporter and of course without knowing that he was commenting on something that had been done by an eleven-year-old thirty years before (that he couldn’t think it could be right for ‘people’ who had committed serious crimes to receive money for a story about their crimes), was reported in headlines as was, a day later, an equally off the cuff first reaction (unfortunately later intensified by continuous tabloid pressure) by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw (see Appendix 3 for Mr. Straw’s report to the House of Commons in July 1998 on the results of an inquiry he had instigated.
This began a competition of tabloid vilification of Mary Bell with daily screaming headlines about the “Childkiller’ and ” Evil Monster’ who was being paid ‘for her collaboration’ on the ‘story of her crimes’. After The Times advanced the beginning of serialization, and the publisher the publication of the thus far unprinted book, most quality papers, saving at least a bit of the honour of British journalism, printed many articles in defence and praise. Nonetheless, for the first week the vicious attacks on Mary Bell and the acrimonious debate about my methods and motives carried the day. By the end of the first week, with my house now under siege by the media, faxes and telephone calls began to come in from family and friends in America, Sweden, Austria and the UK saying they were receiving calls from London asking what they knew about Mary Bell, and what their connection was
with me: this is how we found out that our telephone introduction TO THE paperback /XXi bills had been illegally obtained, i. e. bought by the tabloids, no doubt in an effort to discover Mary’s whereabouts. And on 29 April, ten days into the scandal, they found her. At 10. 30 p. m. that night, dozens of reporters and photographers surrounded the small house Mary and her family had only moved into a week earlier and knocked on doors along the street, asking the people, none of whom had even met their new neighbours, whether they knew that a killer had moved in next to them. Four hours later, with the media mob still in place and raging, police and probation officers, covering Mary and the child with blankets, removed them from their home and drove them to a place of safety.
“What was it all about, Mum?” the thirteen-year- old asked in the car, and the probation officer said that now she had to tell her.
So, crying and near collapse, Mary did.
“I knew there was a secret,” the child said.
“But, Mum, why didn’t you tell me? You were just a kid, younger than I am now.” And they hugged each other.
Over the years, since the child’s birth in 1984 when, as is customary for children born to prisoners released on license, the baby was made a ward of court, the Official Solicitor issued unprecedentediy strong injunctions against the media’s always threatened disclosures about Mary Bell’s life. Already, as of 1987, when a tabloid was about to divulge her family’s location, the court ruled that nothing could be published by any media that could interfere with their anonymity and privacy. Following the furore in the spring (of 1998), the court issued a further injunction, unique in British legal history, forbidding anyone to approach, or from any distance photograph or film the family, their friends, their neighbours, their carers or the child’s school, and Mary and the child have been given mobile alarm units which can bring the police to their side within minutes.
Tabloids, by no means only in Britain but in America too, claim as a justification of their sensationalist treatment of serious issues that they are merely reflecting their readers’ opinions and feelings. But, as we can clearly see from this case, this is not true. The popular British media’s prediction was that Mary’s child’s life would be ruined by the manner in which she found out about her mother’s past, and that the very existence of Cries Unheard and the reaction of the public to
it XXii / introduction TO THE paperback and to Mary’s family would drive them into hiding, away from the place where they had chosen to live.
The truth is very different: the child, as we can see, was relieved that there was no longer any secret. Moreover, at thirteen she understood at once that the acts of a small child, however terrible they were, have to be seen and only seen in the context of childhood: she, after all, has known her mother as an adult for thirteen years and she knows the difference between that child and this adult.
As for the public, who can be momentarily misled by superstition, fear or indeed misinformation, in the final analysis, whatever their social or educational background, like to make up their own minds. Even more to the point however is the fact that human beings are essentially kind, a quality Mary and her family have benefited from this past year, both from the people entrusted with their care the police, the probation service and the child’s school and from the public. Not one angry word has been said to any of them, by anyone in the locality where they settled and where they have chosen to stay.
Offered the choice by the authorities of a new identity and a move to any place they liked in the United Kingdom, Mary didn’t hesitate for one moment.
“I’m not letting anybody drive us out,” she told me.
“It’s time for us to face reality and live with it.”
January 1999 introduction
Many, perhaps most of you, who first turn to this page will not know what happened in the lovely old northern city of Newcastle upon Tyne in the spring of 1968. You have forgotten, you were too young, perhaps not even born, or lived in other countries that had their own problems in the late sixties.
Briefly then, in the course of nine weeks two small boys, aged three and four, were found dead. Some months later, in December 1968, two children, both girls, were tried for their murder; Norma Bell, aged thirteen, was acquitted; Mary Bell (no relation) was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case caused uproar, the trial was widely publicized, and Mary Bell was demonized across the country as the ‘bad seed’, inherently evil.
I have already written one book about the tragedy that happened there that year. In The Case of Mary Bell, first published in 1972, I reported on the facts of the case as the police found them and as they were presented at the Newcastle Assizes in December 1968 in a nine day trial which I attended. In that book, too, I told as much as I found out over the subsequent two years from family, friends and teachers about the eleven-year-old who was found guilty in that trial and sentenced to detention for life at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.
Twenty-six years later. The Case of Mary Bell remains in print both in Britain and in several European countries, and is available in public and university libraries. For the purposes of this book it remains an essential grounding to the case, and for this new work I have borrowed from it some descriptions and original statements integral to the story. My account there already strongly reflected my misgivings about
a judicial system which exposed young children to xxiv/ introduction bewildering adult court proceedings and considered irrelevant their childhood and motivations for their crime. But it also indicated clearly my suspicion that there were elements of Mary Bell’s story which were either unknown or hidden from me. And in a preface to a new edition of The Case of Mary Bell, published by Pimlico* in 1995, I expressed the hope that one day Mary Bell and I could talk. By finding out not from others, but from her, what happened to and in her during her childhood, I felt we might achieve a step towards understanding what internal and external pressures can lead young children beyond a breaking-point to commit serious crime and murder. And by talking to her about her twelve years in detention and her life since her release, we might discover what effect imprisonment has on children growing into adulthood and how the way they are dealt with by society equips them for the future.
So I have been hoping for many years to write the book I am presenting to you here, in which Mary Bell, an exceptionally intelligent child at eleven, released from detention in 1980 when she was twenty-three, and now forty years old, speaks to us. She tells us what she did and what she felt, what was done to her and also for her, and what she became.
She describes the months leading up to the two killings, her friendship with her neighbour and co-accused, Norma Bell, and their fantasy life together which was to result in the tragic death of the two toddlers. She recalls the voices of all the learned men at her trial who, for what seemed to her like years, spoke in incomprehensible terms, and she recreates her horrifying certainty that they would send her to the gallows.
Mary Bell takes us through the twelve years of her detention, the first five (from eleven to sixteen) in a secure unit where for most of that time the only girl with twenty-odd boys she had no psychiatric care, but where she found in the headmaster, a former naval officer, the first honourable adult she could respect and love.
At sixteen, however, irrespective of her mentor’s pleadings, the system prevailed which demands that juveniles upon reaching sixteen must serve their
* And also in Germany and France.
introduction /XXV
punishment in prison, and she was removed from the emotional security and academic structure to which she had responded and sent to a maximum security women’s prison. Battling for seven years against being institutionalized, rebelling and using sex to manipulate this environment, she lost virtually everything she had gained in the previous five years, until, like most adolescents sent to adult penal institutions, she finally emerged into the conditional freedom of a “Schedule One’ released prisoner on licence, as an emotionally and sexually confused twenty-three-year-old in chaos.
She recounts then the years since her release from prison, back in the sway of her mother to whom she has always been tied in a mutual bond of love and hate. In 1984 she has a child, and with the support of her probation officer, Patricia Royston,* fights for the right to keep it.
For the first time in her life she feels total love and through the child gains a purpose and a framework for her life. But with her love for her child comes a terrible realization of what she has done, and a new and agonizing awareness of conscience which intensifies her inner chaos.
Finally, I return to her early childhood which, as we talked, slowly began to unravel from her mind, which had blocked the confrontation with it for so long. Here she speaks, with excruciating difficulty, about the sexual abuse she was subjected to as a small child upon her mother’s direction and in her presence; and in fits and starts over months searches her memory for the events in her life from the age of eight to the day before she turned eleven when she killed Martin Brown. She eventually talks haltingly and despairingly about those fifteen minutes on 25 May 1968, at the end of which the four-year- old child was dead, and about the following nine weeks leading up to the killing (I write about both acts only as far as seems necessary to me) of three-year-old Brian Howe.