Authors: Gitta Sereny
“I’m sorry,” she said, repeating it again and again, ‘re ally sorry but I had to be alone. “
But where were you? What did you do? I asked.
“I walked,” she said.
All night? I said, unbelievingly, and she nodded.
Later I found out she had had endless cups of tea and, in the manner of bag-ladies, rested in doorways until morning. Finally, not wanting to ring our bell too early, and also by then horribly reluctant about the whole project, she had sat in a nearby snack bar drinking one coffee after another while gearing up her courage to approach the residential street where we live.
That morning all I could do was run a bath for her and put her to bed, and when she woke up six hours later, give her a telephone to ring home. By the evening an indication I thought both of the nerves and the chaos within her she had covered every available clear space in my study, where she slept, with papers, toiletries, make-up and a litter of ill-assorted, obviously haphazardly packed, clothes.
But, far more indicative of her state of mind, all that she wanted to speak about that first evening and the next day was her child almost as if before saying anything about the past she wanted to establish for me her identity in the present. And what Mary is, above all other things to herself, is the mother of her child. It was to be several days
before I understood that there are two entirely distinct parts to her.
One is the attractive, warm and unconditionally loving young mother who with talent, imagination and intelligence is dedicating a large part of her mind and personality to creating something of an ideal child hood for her daughter. In this part of her life she is calm, organized, disciplined and happy. The other part the one I would inevitably become more familiar with (even though there wasn’t a day in those five months when the subject of her child wouldn’t arise) is chaotic, almost incapable of organization and discipline and, despite a lurking, roguish sense of humour, often very sad.
One of the things I would only discover many weeks after we began to talk is that she had developed a partial dependency on painkillers, which were first given to her in prison and are still prescribed to her for frequent migraines. When she had one of these attacks during the week she stayed with us and I remarked upon the obvious severity of the pain, she said that she was so frightened of it coming that she sometimes took the pills, which also had a calming, indeed soporific effect, before the attacks came, and took a larger dose than was prescribed. It was later that I realized and, clearly hoping for help, she admitted to me that the slurred speech I had occasionally noticed was due to her taking such a preemptive dose of this medicine. She would tell me then more about the number of drugs that had been prescribed to her in prison: one of the positive consequences of our discussing this problem was that she admitted it to her doctor and is being helped to reduce her intake of this medication.
The months we talked, the length of time extended by her quite frequent failure to appear I once spent two weeks expecting her in vain at 9. 15 every morning were dominated by the necessity, which would become almost immediately obvious, not only to give her an incredible amount of time to get to the point of many of her recollections, but also to recheck the authenticity of many of her memories by repeating many of my questions weeks or months later. Over the months, however, I was to become entirely convinced of her essential truthfulness and the reality of her pain.
“How did I become such a child?” These are the words that stayed in my mind during the sleepless night that followed that first meeting in November 1995. And they would remain with me as we worked together when, day after day, she brought up the ever-present spectre of her mother, Betty, who having almost succeeded many times in killing and certainly in emotionally and psychologically severely damaging her daughter, only nominally freed her when she died in January 1995.
part one the trial december 1968 the court december 1968
The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is ten years old (eight in Scotland). Children between ten and thirteen, however, until the passage of the Law and Disorder Act in 1998, were presumed in law to be doll incapax, incapable of criminal intent, and this presumption must be rebutted by the prosecution before a child could be convicted. This means that the prosecution had to prove that the child had not only carried out the alleged acts, but knew at the time that what he or she was doing was seriously wrong. The 1998 act has abolished even this safeguard, and anyone who is ten or over is considered to have the same moral awareness of right and wrong as his or her elders. The trial of Regina v. Mary Flora Bell and Norma Joyce Bell would uniquely highlight the problems of doli incapax, and of trying young children in adult courts, but there was never any doubt that it would take place.
Judicial procedure in any country is bound by its own firmly established rules, but however and wherever a trial finally takes place, it is preceded by a police investigation and the arrest of a suspect who, except in cases of murder, is either granted bail or held on remand. In Britain the decision as to whether a case goes to trial has traditionally been made by the Director of Public Prosecutions, the government’s chief legal executive (who, since 1985, presides over the Crown Prosecution Service). Cases of murder, however, almost invariably end up before a judge and jury, and, until 1972, this meant
that cases outside London would be heard at a session of the Assizes the courts to which High Court judges made their ‘circuits’ several 32 / the trial times a year, travelling across the country in closed-off railway carriages, and living in virtual seclusion in judges’ residences in all the major cities where they dispensed justice.
The purpose of any criminal trial, whether conducted under the accusatorial system (as in the UK and USA, where the prosecution must prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt) or by the inquisitorial Napoleonic Code (as in most European countries, where the judge plays a much more active role), is to establish guilt or innocence. In theory, facts alone determine this end, although judges can affect the outcome both by their questions and their interpolations, which more often than not indicate their own position and without doubt influence juries. Equally, the judge’s summing up will weigh heavily on any juror’s mind and, as this case would so classically prove, judges, too, are only human and can be swayed by appearances and are subject to emotion.
The circumstances in which a trial is conducted, however, can be predetermined, and in Newcastle in 1968 provision had been made for frequent breaks in the proceedings and for the children’s relative comfort. The police officers and court staff on duty had received special instructions to keep the atmosphere quiet and treat both the children and their families gently. Nonetheless, a jury trial for murder is a fearful matter, deliberately grave in its procedure and awesome in its effect.
The Newcastle Assizes were held in the Moot Hall, an early nineteenth-century stone building on the south side of the city where, until a new building was recently constructed, all court proceedings were conducted. The public gallery in the centre of the court, and the two side galleries, reserved on this occasion for the press, were only full on four days of the nine-day trial: day one, when the prosecutor, Rudolph Lyons, QC, presented his case; day six, for Mary’s examination-in-chief; day eight, for the judge’s summary to the jury, and day nine for the verdict. On those four days the next day’s schedule was posted in the press room at the end of each day’s proceedings there were reporters from all the main papers and many foreign ones, and there were queues from early morning for the public seats. On the other days, however, much of the public gallery was almost empty and most of the reporters stayed away.
This obvious resistance to the case, in Newcastle and in the country as a whole, indicative of the difference in public attitudes between the sixties and the nineties, was to be reflected in the conduct of the trial and the atmosphere in the court throughout it. The court the judge and the lawyers and the psychiatrists, a number of whom attended in specially assigned seats from which they could observe the children, were of course intrigued, but the members of the public (who, twenty-five years later, would queue at dawn on every one of the seventeen days of the so-called “Bulger trial’) and the national press backed away from the case: in 1968 troubled children were not yet in vogue, and ‘evil’ was best ignored lest it might infect. Although the trial’s progress was briefly reported on news programmes, and commentaries appeared in the quality papers after the verdict, the BBC, in consideration of young viewers, prohibited any mention of it during the six o’clock news, and, more surprisingly still, the Sunday tabloids, all of which, a quarter of a century later, would dwell for weeks on the Bulger case and pay large sums to members of the Bulger family for their stories, rejected it altogether. The Sun at one point during the trial specifically refused the story of Mary Bell’s life as offered for sale by her parents Major trials were usually assigned to Court One, the largest in the
* Sidney Foxcroft was Newcastle reporter for the People and the Sun.
“A man phoned me one day,” he told me.
“He said he was a friend of the Bells and they wanted to come and talk to me about something. I got a friend of mine to sit in on this meeting. You know, I could hardly believe it myself. They came along, Betty and Billy Bell and their pal, and they said they wanted to sell us the story of Mary’s life.
Their kid was on trial for murder over there in Moot Hall and they sat here and said, “We tried to teach her right but we couldn’t do a thing with her…” Well, it was my job to listen to them, but I’ve never been so sickened in my life. I rang through to the office in London afterwards and told them. They said they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. “
Moot Hall, but in this case the trial had been transferred to Court Two, a comparatively small room panelled in dark oak. It was considered less forbidding and had an adjacent waiting-room and lavatory which would make it easier to take care of the two children.
It had no dock and thus allowed them to be seated in a row between their legal advisers in front and with their families behind them, which made them feel and seem less isolated, and it had excellent acoustics, which would permit them to be heard even when as frequently happened they whispered. (This was in sharp contrast to Preston Crown Court in 1993, where the dock was raised on a specially constructed platform, without which the two accused boys would have been invisible to judge and jury. The result was that the height of their seats, in line with the judge but above everyone else, totally isolated them from the only people who mattered to them, their families, who were seated in the body of the court underneath and behind them and whom they could not see. ) Despite the careful provisions made for the two girls, neither of them had been prepared for the solemnity of the court proceedings. For nine days two mutually incomprehensible languages would be spoken in that ancient chamber. One was the language of adults, and formal language at that; the other was the language of two highly disturbed children the working of whose minds was a mystery to virtually everybody present. (“Nobody told us anything,” Mary would tell me later.
“Not about people coming in to watch, either.” ) Nor had they expected the crowds who attended the opening day of the trial, and both girls Norma reacting just an instant after Mary laughed with excitement when three knocks preceded the usher’s “Be upstanding in court!” (“We didn’t talk … hardly at all during the trial even when we could have,” Mary said.
“But, yes, I remember: we laughed. I can’t think why and what about, but whenever we looked at each other, we laughed.” And twenty-five years later, in Preston, I noticed the two boys doing exactly the same almost every time their eyes met. ) I was sitting in the gallery above but just across from the two girls and noted how the difference between them Norma’s terror against
Mary’s irreality -showed up almost immediately. As the judge in his red coat entered in slow and measured steps, the bewigged barristers and court officials bowed deeply, and the many police officers spread throughout the court stood stiffly to attention, Mary could hardly contain her pleasure at the spectacle. Norma, however, her whole body expressing bewilderment, turned round to her parents, her face reflecting the mixture of nervous smile and incipient tears that would become as familiar to the spectators as her mother’s shake of her head and gentle movement of her hand which propelled the child back to face the court.
Norma, too, was a pretty girl, her hair also dark brown and as shiny as Mary’s. Every day’ both of them wore immaculately clean and ironed cotton dresses, white socks and polished shoes. Taller and physically more developed, Norma had a round face that looked perpetually puzzled and large soft brown eyes. One felt worried about Norma almost all the time, sorry for her often visible distress and concerned for her obviously caring parents and numerous relatives who, sitting behind her, attended every session, stroking and petting the desperate child on the many times she burst into tears. Her ten brothers and sisters, ranging in age from her handicapped sixteen-year-old brother down to a baby in arms, waited outside the court every day of the trial, waving to her enthusiastically whenever the door opened. And at every recess they rushed in and down the steps to what Mary, years later, would describe to me as ‘the dungeon’, the arched vault in the basement of the court building where, until the fifth day, when the judge ordered the girls to be kept in separate rooms, the two groups huddled at opposite corners of the huge chamber during breaks in the proceedings. There was love and determined gaiety around Norma from the beginning to the end of the trial. And nobody in court could have thought for a single moment that anyone in her family believed that little girl capable of murder.
Mary, much smaller, with her heart-shaped face and those remarkable bright-blue eyes, was not alone either, though the members of her extended family who attended appeared unable to hide their anxiety and distress. Her grandmother Mrs. McC. ” Betty’s thin, fine boned mother, was there every day, with a white, tired face, straight backed and silent. And her aunts, Betty’s sisters Cath and Isa, and Billy’s sister, Audrey, came, and so did Audrey’s husband, Peter, and Cath’s husband, Jack; all of them respectable and quiet, avoiding contact with anyone around and, during the breaks, directing (what one Newcastle policewoman described to me as) ‘forced-like cheer’ and ‘desperate affection’ towards Mary.