Authors: Gitta Sereny
“It is because I think somebody needs to find out and explain how terrible crimes such as Mary’s, the two ten-year-olds who killed James Bulger, and quite a number of other young children’s serious of fences come about,” she said. There could not be any question of excusing, or through understanding them, legitimizing such acts, she said.
“But in the public’s justified horror about these events and their ready acceptance of ” evil” as an explanation [for them],” she continued, ‘people tend to forget that these are, or were, children. They were children who,” she emphasized, ‘prior to what one might call their ” explosion” into such acts of violence, carried around a baggage of childhood experiences unknown to or ignored by any responsible adult.”
She said her experience had taught her that if such children were as young as Mary, and indeed as the two boys who killed James Bulger, the reason for such a baggage of childhood experiences “If one can use the word reason,” she said bitterly will have been entirely incomprehensible to the children themselves.
“Maybe we have progressed since 1968,” she said.
“Maybe, though I have my doubts, those two young boys [now serving life sentences, as did Mary] are being helped to understand what brought them to the point of killing little James. But as far as Mary is concerned, the childhood experiences she suffered prior to committing the crimes are still undigested, still neither really understood nor accepted.
She would have needed continuous psychiatric help throughout her detention. But basically, except for the human kindness shown to her as a child by the headmaster and staff of Red Bank, and a short stretch of once-a-week group therapy in prison a privilege she had to fight for she had no professional attention or guidance whatever for the twelve years of “growing up” “
Probation officers in Britain are not usually trained therapists; it is not their function.
“I happen to be very interested in it,” Pat Royston said, ‘and have developed this style of working with the help of further training. And because of this, I was able, two years after Mary’s release from prison, to help her begin the long process of untangling her confused emotions which then made it possible for her to create a family and thereby begin to have something of a life. “
There were four reasons, she said, why, after long soul-searching, she had accepted Mary’s decision to co-operate on a book. Two applied specifically to Mary, and two to the many other children in trouble.
“The first is that if Mary is ever to become a normally functioning human being, she must be helped to understand not what she did for she understands that already and feels a grinding guilt for it but what was done to her as a child. And this means that she must take issue and be helped to come to terms with what her mother was and did to her, and with her own feelings about this mother.” Secondly, she said, she also hoped, as Mary does, though with less optimism, that once her whole story is on record, the media will leave her alone and she can at last begin to lead a normal life.
Her third reason arose from her own concern at the grave deficiencies in the training of social workers, primary school teachers, and also probation officers, which resulted in the lack of awareness and care for seriously troubled children. Without any doubt, she said, this contributes to the catastrophic rise in serious crimes committed by children and, as we could see from Mary’s case, in which many cries for help were left unheeded, to the risk of tragic outcomes in such cases.
“Finally,” she said, ‘my fourth reason is my own distress, and that of most people of my service, with the way children and young adolescents who commit serious crimes are dealt with by the judicial system. I finally came to feel that, although very unconventional and normally neither welcome nor even acceptable to professionals like myself perhaps to have Mary, who is very articulate, take issue with herself so to speak in public, is a legitimate means of demonstrating, firstly, the degree to which society fails in the care of children, and, secondly, how we doubly fail in our dealings with the resultant tragedies. I came to the conclusion that, in this age of communication, it may finally be the only way to alert people to the crying need for changes in public attitudes and in the law. “
When Mary returned, with a mumbled “Sorry’apologies were never to come easily to her I tried to explain why I was, in a way, playing devil’s advocate against my own wish to do this book by questioning whether she should really go in for such a difficult undertaking. But it would still take considerable time to get across to her what a book like this would have to be; what she would have to give of herself to make it possible for me to produce it. And until we actually worked together, I warned, we couldn’t be sure that it could work and that we wouldn’t eventually have to abandon the attempt. I couldn’t know, I said, how she would respond to questioning; how honest she could bear, let alone want, to be with herself, or with me, about things which almost certainly were unbearable to speak about. I couldn’t even be sure, I said, that I was the right person to do this with her; that it was right for me to do it, which was the reason why, earlier on, I had suggested that it might be preferable for her to see a psychiatrist.
Throughout our time together over the next year she would fight this idea. Very soon after we began to talk she would tell me one of her early memories.
“I think I was six or seven,” she said.
“We, my mother and I, were going to see my dad’s parents, who lived on the other side of the Tyne Bridge. I remember it was dark, because there were lights on the bridge and on the cars. We were walking along the bridge. My mother was angry. I don’t remember why. She grabbed my arm and she pointed ahead at a sentry-box, you know, one of those concrete things, and she said, if I told anybody stories, that’s where I was going to be put.
“That’s what they do with children,” she said, “who don’t keep their mouths shut as they are told.” And she shook me. “
But that day it would not only have been impossible but wrong to bring up her childhood, which I had always been convinced was even worse than her family had admitted to me, and which had to be, not an excuse, but something which could lead to an explanation for her terrible acts in 1968. But this would need slow development. As for the acts themselves, it would, of course, be essential for her to confront what she had done. She had always denied to that day that she had killed Martin Brown, and had always understated, I believed, the extent of her responsibility in the death of Brian Howe. Before one could search with her for the reason why, it would be necessary for her to face up to the fact that she had committed these acts, whether someone else was present or not. All these were matters to be approached with great care, leaving the initiative of when and how to talk about them largely to her, and, if and when she was able to approach them, protecting her from the shock that was almost bound to follow such disclosures.
As I would often notice in the future, her attention had wandered soon after I began this long and difficult discussion, and her thoughts were so deeply elsewhere, she probably hadn’t heard half of what I said.
‘. Norma,” she said, as if answering a question.
“I don’t want to say anything against her … but…” She stopped and then started again.
“Poor Norma …”
There were many thoughts which remained unspoken between us that first day, but a number of points she felt relentlessly bitter about were to come up time and again over the next two years. The fact that the Newcastle court had declared Norma innocent and acquitted her is
probably Mary’s single most bitter memory of that December day in 1968 when the trial ended, even though she no longer feels any personal animosity against her childhood friend.
“I can remember quite clearly the feeling of knowing that would hap pen,” she said.
“I don’t know how I knew. It must have been from what they said About her? To her? I don’t know.” (I could have told her, though I didn’t that day, that, yes, it was entirely clear days before the trial ended that that court with that jury would never bring themselves to convict both girls and that Norma would go free. ) “How could they?” she would ask later time and again, and then often added, as on that first day, “Poor Norma …” And months into our talks she said, not once but several times: “Perhaps what happened to her was finally worse for her than what happened to me was for me.”
Mary’s greatest fear is of the media, and of the image they created of her in 1968 as a monster. To her mind this ‘myth’, as she always refers to it, has endured ever since, irrespective of the fact that since then there have been a number of ‘similarly dreadful’ (her words) and even higher-profile cases both in Britain and elsewhere.
This myth has kept her estranged from her aunts, uncles and siblings whom she loved, and from their, children, whom she longed to know. As for the public, who she feels, with some justification, have not forgotten her, the myth of her own unique and innate evil continues unabated, confirmed by Norma’s acquittal.
The third point of bitterness is that she was, and by extension still is and always will be she thinks, remembered as a liar and manipulator.
“But for God’s sake,” she said.
“I was a kid; what else could I do but lie?” The fourth, not unconnected to the above, is her resentment at being considered exceptionally intelligent. In her memory of the trial, every mention of her ‘intelligence’ is bracketed with the suggestion of manipulation.
“And that means that people think I can never be honest. But I am, I am…” she would say over and over, and she would cry.
Did I believe her tears, that day and later? Did I think when she left me late that afternoon that I would be able to trust her, that her motivations were as she described them, and that her story, whatever it turned out to be, would be true? I am not given to illusions. I thought her motivations were mixed and her descriptions of them disingenuous, but this was a result of insecurity and inexperience rather than manipulation. She didn’t know me, and she had never known anyone like me, or the world in which I live. And what she was proposing to do, even if. she didn’t yet understand the dimensions of it (and she didn’t), was a huge step outside the very specific boundaries of her life, and it demanded courage.
But yes, I thought she would try to manipulate me, as others, far more sophisticated than she, have tried. Equally I knew there would be lies how can there not be when human beings agree to lay open to another the worst within themselves? But I felt certain by the end of that day that any deliberate lies she might tell would be about small things in the present rather than important things in the past. For and this was decisive for me I believed her unhappiness about what she had done. I believed her sadness for the families whom she had robbed of their children, and I believed in her need to know herself.
However, even on that first day I knew that working with Mary would never be easy. I had told her at the end of it how I envisaged our time together: that although eventually I would arrange to work with her in places within close reach of her family, I believed the best thing would be if for the first week she would agree to come and stay with us in London where we could begin to work and get to know each other better.
I realized that, except for her supervision by the Probation Service, which was a condition of her release on licence, her past life had made her almost obsessively resistant to being tied down. I had warned her that from the moment publishing contracts were signed, we both of us would be bound by their conditions, both to the dates they specified
and the absolute discretion they would require of us. For I had known in advance Pat Royston had warned me, and Mary’s solicitor had confirmed it that the court responsible for Mary’s child’s welfare, even if they did not object to this project, would demand absolute secrecy in order to protect the child This need for secrecy was emphasized, even while we waited the six months it took lawyers, agents and publishers to reach agreement. Pat Royston received a request for an interview with Mary from one of her most persistent press pursuers, and twice there was evidence that a strange car was cruising the streets near where Mary lived and that questions were being asked of people in the neighbourhood. It was clear, as on numerous previous occasions, that she would have to move.
Although this was done, and a legal letter was sent to remind the editor of the paper concerned of the court order, it intensified our awareness of our obligation to the court.
This secrecy, not only about Mary’s whereabouts, but about the whole project, was to become a heavy load for both Mary and me. On her side, no one knew of our arrangement except her partner, Jim, two close relatives of his, Mary’s stepfather, George, four former teachers at Red Bank who agreed to talk with me, and her lawyers (the Official Solicitor was informed from the start and so also, it turned out later, was the ‘lifer unit’ of the Home Office). Pat Royston and another of her former probation officers, Samantha Connolly, worked with me throughout and essentially corroborated most of her story. For Mary the secrecy meant virtually total separation for almost three years from the few friends she had made.
On my side, in addition to my family and my editor, only one friend (a former social worker) who assisted me with some of the paperwork, and a barrister friend who advised me (an expert in crimes by and against children), knew from the start. Later I would consult a few others, psychiatrists in Britain and abroad, social workers and two
* Mary’s child will be a ward of court until eighteen. In 1985, because of the media’s continued pursuit of Mary, an injunction was issued forbidding any publicity that could lead to the identification of the child.
of my closest friends, both fellow writers, both abroad. All this forced me into a strange and quite disturbing isolation, even from my closest friends and colleagues.
The extent to which the prospect of the book and the conditions it laid down worried Mary would become apparent the very first time we arranged to work together. We had not known what time she would arrive in London, but she had telephoned from the station in the early evening and said that she had money on her and rather than wait to be picked up would take a taxi. That was the last we heard from her until she arrived the next morning at’ll a. m. in a state of collapse, carrying a bulging suitcase and four plastic bags stuffed with papers and photographs.