Authors: Gitta Sereny
Very shortly after Pat’s first visit, Betty threw Mary out.
“She said it was because I stayed out late and worrying about me kept her awake,” Mary said.
“But firstly, I was twenty-five years old, and secondly, she didn’t stay awake, she was drunk every night. But maybe anyway none of this was the reason: perhaps it was because she met Pat and was afraid of what I might say to her. Anyway, it was OK with me.
I got myself a job as a receptionist at a hotel and moved in with Rob.
“
“I tried to see Betty repeatedly after that but only managed twice,” Pat said.
“Every other time she would either open the chained door and then slam it in my face, or else not answer the bell but look out from behind the curtain; I could see it flick. On the second occasion I actually managed to get across the threshold she immediately began to yell at me, blaming me for Mary not coming to see her and blaming her for all her ills. When I then tried to question her, about the bedwetting and other things, I was met with stony silence. Finally she opened the door for me, telling me to get out.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said.
“I’m not your client.” And the only other time
I got in she screeched at me like a banshee because I told her that I wanted Mary to see a psychiatrist. “
I asked Pat whether during that first visit Betty had mentioned Mary’s boyfriend, Rob.
“I don’t know whether she did on that occasion or the other time, but certainly she totally disapproved of him: his age, his fairly middleclass background, and even the work he’d chosen to do fin wholesale food]. As it later turned out, Rob was too young and immature for Mary. But of course that was neither here nor there: I came to understand when Mary really started to talk to me, that Betty would try to stop any relationship Mary might develop which could lead to her ” talking”. With Rob, she had made it her business to meet him, and not only told him ” who” Mary was, but lied to him, saying that Mary had been sterilized and couldn’t have children.”
“I was absolutely gob-smacked when Rob told me that,” Mary said.
“Not about the Mary Bell thing; I was used to her telling everybody and I would have told him myself, maybe I already had. He had a really nice younger sister who I became really friends with; I think I told her.
But the other thing? I know she’d been railing against him ever since I started going out with him, but to say that. Why would she do such a thing? “
Rob bought a nice house by the seaside and when Mary moved in with him gave her an engagement ring.
“It all went terribly wrong in the end,” she laughed with that little hoarse laugh I often heard when she was about to admit to something embarrassing or sad.
“I was probably too much for him to cope with,” she said.
“I’d given him credit for more maturity than he had. And why should he have had it? He was only a boy. But I thought he was an innately good person and at the end of the day I still think he was, despite everything that happened.”
“Mary told me of her wish to have a baby very soon after I began to work with her,” Pat said.
“It wasn’t because of what my mother told Rob,” Mary said.
“I mean it wasn’t that I wanted to become pregnant to prove my mother wrong. It had been in the back of my mind ever since the abortion.
That is not the kind of birth control that lies easy on the conscience.
“
The lives of released Schedule One offenders are subject to a host of regulations and precautions and the safely of an unborn child ranks high among them. Pat Royston told Mary that if she and Rob were planning on a baby, she should arrange for her to have a psychological evaluation: “I knew she would have problems with the social services about it and such a report might preempt their possible objections,” Pat told me.
“She agreed to that immediately, which was interesting, because I knew by then about her always having gone along with her mother’s mania against psychiatrists. Making this decision now showed her strength of feeling about having a child. What was strange, however, was that almost in the same breath as talking about having a baby, she began to talk of her feelings about Martin and Brian, whom she had not yet mentioned at all. It was as if her wish for a child was inseparable from her awareness of the loss she caused to two families of their children.
“She told me that she hadn’t admitted to herself for several years that she had killed. She said she wondered why the remorse had taken so long to come out. When she talked about it, it was clear that she had frozen all the emotions completely, with Betty who she kept bringing up always in the background saying, ” Don’t talk to anyone about anything that happened or you’ll be in trouble. “
“Mary told me it had only been at that significant eighteen-year point that she could think of the parents of the two boys and what it must have been like for them. And the moment she mentioned the parents she began to cry.
“It will never be over for them; it will never be over for me.” She has always brought Martin and Brian up, and always in connection with her own child not so much the details of what she did to the two little boys, she never told me those, but rather her sadness for the parents, and her despair about herself. “
Had Pat ever thought, I asked as I had considered when I first talked to Mary-that this remorse was put on for her benefit: that Mary might be manipulating her?
“I certainly asked myself this at the beginning. I knew, of course, that some people in Red Bank, and many more later in the prisons, talked a lot about her being so manipulative. And she no doubt was manipulative about all her relationships there. But the situation now was different and it was new for her. I was actually trying to work with her, in a therapeutic sense, and she was responding to it. I think when her mother finally agreed to see me and don’t forget, this was while Mary was still living with them it was at least partly because Betty realized I was getting closer to Mary and was panicked by this. I saw this very quickly. She really was terribly afraid of me. This was, after all, what she had tried to prevent all these years. It was her nightmare. And the evidence she gave me of hostility, anger and, yes, obvious fear of what I might discover, was striking.
“So my answer to your question is that after my various experiences of Betty, even though I knew none of the details I would learn later from Mary and then from you, I became certain that the acts Mary committed in 1968 could only be understood in the context of whatever acts her mother had committed in Mary’s early childhood. And associating this certainty with the despair I witnessed in Mary, yes, I was entirely sure that her remorse was real and true.”
On 28 April 1983 Pat took Mary up to London where she was seen by a psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Hyatt-Williams, and a consultant psychologist, Paul Upson.
“I felt I had nothing to hide from them,” Mary said.
“If there was something wrong with me when I was a child, there wasn’t now. I felt that if they could X-ray me inside, they could see that anything broken had been fixed.”
Dr. Hyatt-Williams saw her in his consulting-rooms at home and, understandably enough, conflict arose at once.
“Do you know what the first thing was he said?” Mary asked.
“He said, ” What big hands you have. What do you feel when you look at your hands? ” I mean, can you imagine a doctor saying such a thing?”
He was trying to provoke you, I said. And he obviously succeeded.
“I cried. And then he said that I was upset because his remark reminded me of using these hands to kill the children.”
Having very limited time to evaluate your emotions, I said, getting you to manifest them was exactly what he aimed for.
“Perhaps. But all I was aware of feeling was anger that he should have said something so personal, and so unkind about my hands. And then he said, didn’t I think it was strange that I had chosen to fall in love with a man who was exactly the age Martin would have been?”
Do you remember what you answered?
“Well, no,” she said.
“I mean, that had just never occurred to me. I just liked Rob you know, and although I was aware he was younger than I after all my mother never stopped telling me I didn’t feel older. I felt pretty young.
“Then he told me that I had been ” in denial”, and I knew what that meant I’d read about it and I thought he was wrong, that I was doing something different, even though I didn’t know what it was called.”
It’s a pity you didn’t discuss your feelings with him, I said. That is precisely how a good psychiatrist would want to help you.
“I don’t think he wanted that,” she said.
“He just wanted … I suppose, as you said, he was just seeing me this once to write a report, so he just said things-provocative things-to see how I’d react. Like he said that if I became aware at fourteen of what I had done, it was because I was in puberty, had my periods and all that but it wasn’t just that, was it, either? I mean, a lot of things happened to me at that time, didn’t they, and it was those things that made me think. It’s all just cliches how they put things, isn’t it?
“I was shown the reports later. He said something like that my ” murderous manifestations” would never ” explode” but only ” implode”, whatever that was meant to mean, and then he went on there, too, about Rob being seven years younger and that it meant I was looking for ” atonement” or whatever. More important, though, he said I was a danger to no one, so I was grateful for that. And the other chap the psychologist he was a lot easier to be with and it was quite interesting, he flashed a lot of cards in front of me and I had to say what I thought of them or felt about them. Anyway, he also wrote I was
OK.
“
Although it took the two experts six months to write their reports, both did eventually say that it was entirely safe for Mary to have a chad.
“Rob had asked me after I came back from London whether I still wanted to have a baby and we decided to have a real think about it,” she said, ‘what it would mean, and how we were doing financially and how his family would feel about it. His father was dead and his mother had just remarried but she was OK with me. “
Did his mother know your real identity?
“She did. Everybody seemed to know. I was never quite sure how my mother, pub talk. Much later, when things went so wrong, it was Rob himself who told people, but that early on, it was really all right.
He was happy, working hard. We had this nice house. He had these wonderful paternal grandparents who were so glad he was settling down and that I was so sensible they said and his sister was pleased, too, at the idea of a baby, so it was good, really good. “
The two reports came through in October 1983. “I told Rob. We threw my pills down the toilet.” She giggled.
“I knew two weeks later that I was pregnant and told Pat.”
“I had to treat Mary like any Schedule One offender,” Pat said.
Schedule One offenders are only rarely allowed to keep their children and additionally in Mary’s case, there was the problem of her high profile. We had to ensure that the information about her pregnancy and all the decisions which would be made remained secure. This is why, when I called a case conference in January 1984, the heads of departments health, police, social services, legal and probation all attended. “
At the conference, the authorities had been given all the information that was on hand about Mary’s life. Her mother was described as mentally unbalanced; Billy Bell as irresponsible with many criminal convictions. About Mary herself, it was said that she was emotionally and physically battered as a baby, that the battering continued through to 1968, by which time Betty and Billy were living apart and divorce was pending. There were old psychiatric reports from Drs Westbury, Rowbotham and Cuthbert, which spoke of bedwetting, including daytime incontinence, but of otherwise ‘normal development’ (Cuthbert), and the new reports, which declared her safe for motherhood.
“It was agreed nothing would go on a computer,” Pat said.
“All reports then and afterwards would go through me and remain in my office. The question on the table was basically who should have care and control over the child once it was born, the parents or the social services. But underneath this there was another danger: that Mary could be considered unfit to keep her child.
“My own feeling was, and had been for months,” Pat said, ‘that while the child should and would no doubt, be made a ward of court, and everybody in fact agreed on that, Mary must not only be allowed to keep her child, but that the parents Mary and Rob should have care and control. Health and legals supported my point of view; the police were on middle ground until instructed by the social services, who finally came around to agreeing that Mary could keep the child. “
Two or three days after the baby’s birth, the first of three ex. forte hearings was held at the High Court Family Division. ‘[Mary’s solicitor] represented the parents and I gave evidence,” said Pat.
“We had tried to keep as much of the details away from Mary as we could.”
At this first hearing, the child was made a ward of court and an interim order was issued giving care and control to the parents until the full hearing, several weeks away. But at the second hearing, ten days later, the social services contested this order, and the judge asked Pat Royston into his chambers to find out more about Mary’s previous psychiatric evaluation. A week later, at the full hearing, the social services applied for care and control with a view to moving Mary, Rob and the child into a family centre for observation this would have meant up to six months in a residential unit, with several other families, miles away from where they lived, and under close supervision from morning to night.
“There was no justification for that, none at all, and it could have been destructive for their relationship,” Pat said.
“Mary’s solicitor and I fought this proposal all day, and by the end of the hearing the court awarded care and control to the parents with a supervision order for the child.” ^
“The last weeks before the baby was born I felt oh, just warm within myself,” Mary said.