Authors: Gitta Sereny
“But I must admit, I sensed this from reports on her behaviour after the visits, rather than understanding it from my own observation,” he told me. As a result, however, he recommended stringent control on which members of her family should be allowed to see her.
“I suggested the mother should be excluded, at least for a period, but I was told one couldn’t forbid a mother to see her child.”
(This was the identical response I had received when, after discovering from her family some of the things Betty Bell had done to Mary, I
made this same suggestion to the relevant department at the Home Office. ) Dr. Jones had insisted at that point that he should be allowed to see Mary regularly and on her own, and permission had been granted. But when they talked, he admitted it had turned out to be useless. He couldn’t help her by seeing her for half an hour or an hour, once a week, in the environment of Red Bank. His subsequent suggestion, that she be brought instead to see him at the hospital two or three times a week, was rejected.
“I don’t think it was because of the bother of bringing her, or because of money,” he said.
“Just as the powers that be quite honestly thought, months earlier, that knowledge of her background was irrelevant for the unit’s staff, so they now, just as honestly, believed she didn’t need psychiatric attention. You can’t do part-time therapy with a child as disturbed as Mary in what, however organized and benign, is a lay environment,” he said.
“There are increasingly large numbers of children, quite as disturbed as Mary, everywhere in the world, even if they haven’t committed the ultimate crime. As long as we do not have longterm medically or therapeutically orientated educational units basically like Red Bank but staffed with specialized educators children such as Mary will not get what they must have. They are likely to remain a burden on society as long as they live, and they themselves will pay in unhappiness for these deficiencies in our system.”
In the course of my involvement with Mary’s case, which has lasted at various degrees of intensity for almost thirty years now, I have talked to many leading psychiatrists and social workers about her life specifically and about the treatment of damaged or unstable children in general. In 1995 I talked to Professor Guy Benoit, a leading French child psychiatrist, both about Mary Bell and about the boys who killed James Bulger. What he said echoes what the Oxford child psychiatrist Christopher Ounstead, director of the Park Hospital for Children, who guided me during my research for the first book, told me in 1969. In both these cases, Benoit said, insufficient connection was made between the crimes these children committed and their mental or emotional conditions.
“Sibling violence is comparatively frequent,” he said.
“But the kind of explosion that leads to a child committing a motiveless murder of a smaller and unknown child is very rare.” However, the condition of long-pent-up anger and suppressed emotional pressure which the child is suffering and which becomes so obvious to you, he said, in these cases [Dr. Benoit - I think wisely avoids the term ‘psychopathy’, replacing it with ‘intolerable pressure’] is not rare at all.
“My files, and I am sure those of any child psychiatrist working in this field, are full of children who border on this ” explosion” or ” breaking point” and, if not helped, must reach it, if not sooner then later. This ” explosion” will inevitably become increasingly violent, whether towards animals or humans, towards others or towards the child itself.” Child suicide, which has become so horrifyingly frequent and which more often than not follows a final cry for help in the form of repeated attempts at self-mutilation, is the ultimate manifestation of this explosion point.
In 1996, however, Mary only remembered the positive side of Red Bank.
Had she ever felt angry about the unit and about being there? I asked.
“Oh no, no, no. I was a tomboy, really, you know, and … well, maybe it was wrong for me to be virtually only with boys for years. I suppose it must have been. But I really liked being the only girl. I made some really, really good friends there, fast and firm friends I’ll never forget. And teachers I’ll never forget. A lot of them are never more than a thought away…”
If that is so, I said, why haven’t you tried to see any of them since your release?
She shrugged.
“They’d be too busy,” she said.
It hadn’t all been so rosy, I reminded her. I said I knew she’d had quite a bit of trouble, and that some of the staff neither liked her nor she them. Several teachers, though asking me not to name them, had spoken to me very frankly in 1970 for The Case of Mary Bell after I told them, as I told Dr. Jones, what I had found out in Newcastle about Mary’s childhood.
“In all relations with adults,” one of them said, ‘it is Mary who decides events. She even persuades them into believing that they feel no differently about her than they do about the other children. “
Another teacher explained to me that the children chose their own counsellors. By mid-1970, he said, Mary had had four.
“In the case of most boys, if they request a change of counsellor, the staff just shrug it off. But every time Mary has asked to change, people have become worried, introspective about it. They feel it is a reflection on themselves. They feel guilty. They feel they have failed.” There was also the problem, he said, with teachers failing to maintain their detachment towards Mary. Two members of staff, he said, had left, solely because they felt themselves becoming too involved with her.
“The third still sometimes broods on why Mary didn’t stay with him.
And the fourth who has also now left became convinced that Mary was innocent of killing those little boys. “
It was this particularly intelligent teacher who first explained to me how exhausting many of the staff found dealing with Mary. His remarks were prophetic. It wasn’t just what I found when I worked with her so many years later, but two of her probation officers, who between them have had charge of her for seventeen years, would both tell me how draining they found her.
“There is in her,” this teacher said, ‘an extraordinary inner intensity a neediness one can neither really understand nor handle. And most of us feel we fail with her because, not understanding what it is she so desperately needs, we can’t give it to her. That’s where the sense of failure comes in. “
Carole G. told me of an occasion when she experienced that sense of failure.
“It was only a few months after I came to Red Bank. I was playing ball with a group of kids. May among them, and a big boy called Ross kicked the ball to me, shouting, ” Here you go, Carole! “
and May absolutely flipped.
“She is not Carole to you’” she screamed at him.
“Miss Jeffries, Miss Jeffries to you!”
“Well, I managed to calm her down that day, but two days later I was giving guitar lessons in an upstairs sitting-room when this boy Ross started it again, and May flew across the room and started hitting him for all she was worth, calling him every name under the sun. The guitar went not quite around his neck, but something like that and she was gone, completely gone. When, with another boy helping me, I finally managed to pull her off Ross, she was trembling all over and her body was almost stiff with tension. I took her down to the duty officer then and he sent me home, I was so upset.
“Of course, it wasn’t unique the lads often had physical outbursts but usually, the way the place was set up, there would be several staff around and it was quickly contained. In this case I was alone with them and it upset me terribly, firstly that she had got so angry obviously because of … well, in defence, she thought, of me. And secondly that I hadn’t prevented it or stopped it quicker. The boy Ross was black and blue all over the next day.”
Was Mary sorry afterwards?
“She was very apologetic the next day to me, not to the boy, and not because she fought him, I think, but because she swore at him. Mr. Dixon really didn’t allow swearing. I was really upset. I walked home and shook like a leaf for an hour. I cried and cried. She … she really did get one too involved with her. I think and this applies to almost everybody there if we had had proper training for dealing with such needy children, it would have protected us not entirely, but at least better from our emotional responses.”
The only person who somehow managed with her, Ben said, using almost exactly the same words another teacher had used twenty-five years earlier, was Mr. Dixon: “He had a kind of genius for dealing with young people, not because he was better trained because he really wasn’t but simply because of what he was as a human being.”
When Ben and Carole were with her, I asked, had they often, or ever, thought of her as a child who had murdered?
They both thought about this for a long time and then Ben said:
“Well, no. You dealt with the here and now. We did know she was a danger, perhaps to herself, perhaps in moments of stress to others, because, particularly in the early days, we’d seen it happen. But in terms of day-to-day, we didn’t really think of her as a child murderess, no. Not only because nobody ever talked or was supposed to talk about it, but also because we knew that she had never disclosed had never said that she had done that, and actually there was always that element of doubt. There were quite a number of staff in the end, including, I have to say, Jim Dixon, who thought she was innocent, that there had been a misjudgement. I know now, of course, that that wasn’t good for her. She lived in denial and we supported that instead of helping her to understand herself and then to come to terms with it.”
“Months later,” Carole said, ‘she suddenly said to me: “Don’t you worry about being in the room on your own with me?” It quite shook me the inference being, of course, who she was and I said at once, “Of course not.” And it didn’t. But I have to say, the day of that outburst in the music room, the thought did cross my mind” My God, there it is…” Of course, I was wrong. That wasn’t it at all. There was tension between her and this boy anyway, but this outburst was primarily because of her possessiveness of me; had I been more experienced or better trained, I would probably never have allowed it to arise. I understand all that now but then all our reactions were instinctive rather than imposed and immediate rather than sustained. “
“She was just May to us,” Ben said, ‘a little girl I knew was growing up, who was a right little beggar, pushing the boundaries all the time. But did we think of her as a child who had murdered? No, in the sense of your question, no, we didn’t. “
Mary seemed unconcerned at my knowing about her difficulties at Red Bank. She shrugged.
“It’s true, I was a little horror at times. I fought and was abusive, you know, used bad language, and yes, there were the odd one or two staff who disliked me. Mr. Dixon would say it was all down to jealousy and my manipulation of people, how I played one off against the other. You know, it took time for me to … to calm down. I had to grow up, you see, and if I did … well, more or less,” she laughed deprecatingly, ‘it was at least partly because nobody treated me as if I was a freak. I was always talked to, things were explained to me, even after I’d been atrocious . “
For the first ten months of Mary’s time at Red Bank, Billy Bell was her regular visitor.
“And once he brought his mother, my Granny
Bell,” Mary said.
“He used to get there practically at dawn. Mr. Dixon would come into my room at six in the morning and say: ” You have a visitor,” and I’d jump out of bed and there would be my dad.”
But why did he come so early?
“I don’t know; I never asked him. I was just so glad to see him. He and Mr. Dixon got on really well; they had great respect for each other. They weren’t so different you know, except one was educated and the other wasn’t.”
Well, Mr. Dixon’s life-principle was surely discipline and order, wasn’t it? I asked. In what way did you find him and your father similar?
“I think it was my father’s as well,” she said.
“My dad had his own values, funny though that may sound. I remember once as a youngster having a fight. I came in and he asked me who had started it and said if it was me, I’d damned well better not come in crying. He said if I went out looking for trouble and bullying people it was the wrong thing to do, and I wasn’t to go round telling the world that my dad would show them, would beat up on everybody. Of course, if it wasn’t me who had started the fight, that was a different matter. You see what I mean? Mr. Dixon could have said all that.”
What did she and her father do when he came to see her?
“I wasn’t allowed to be alone with visitors. Mr. Dixon was usually there, or else we sat in the sitting-rooms where there was always a supervisor, you know, and just chatted. He could never stay long anyway. I think he came so early because he took a night train, but then he had to get back the same day, so it was never more than a couple of hours.”
All Billy would say to me at the time about Mary at Red Bank was that she liked the school: “She has a nice room,” he said and claimed (wrongly) that it was ‘that place in London [Cumberlow Lodge]’ Mary had liked best.
“That’s where she had the most freedom, like,” he said.
But from the end of 1969 his visits stopped for quite a while. On 10 December he and the woman with whom he was living at the time were tried at the Moot Hall in Newcastle for robbery with force. Mr.
Lyons, QC, who had prosecuted in the case against Mary a year before, sitting as a commissioner of Assizes, sentenced the woman, who was eight years younger than Billy Bell, to thirty months but gave Billy the comparatively light sentence of fifteen months in prison.
“I am reducing the sentence I would normally have passed,” he said, ‘because of the tragedy surrounding this man’s family life. ” Billy eventually served nine months of his sentence. His sister Audrey took the three children, Mary’s ten-year-old brother P. and the two little girls, aged seven and three, whom their mother, after one short visit in early 1969, had never asked to see again.
But at the end of that year, on Saturday 20 December, ten days after Billy was sent to prison, Brian Roycroft, the Children’s Officer at Newcastle Social Services (later their director), happened to drop into his office and came upon Betty Bell sitting on a bench in the corridor.