Authors: Gitta Sereny
“I liked school, you know, but I stayed off a lot. Now I think that, perhaps without understanding it, I did that out of some confused sense of solidarity with my dad you know, ” teachers are enemies too”. So perhaps I thought if I played at despising them, I’d be admired for it.
“It was confusing, because actually if my mother found out, either that I’d missed school or been rude there, never mind how rude she was about the teachers or the school system, I’d get beaten for it. But it didn’t matter. I went right on or right back to ” daring” people.”
And was Norma that sort of ‘dare me’ child too?
“Not in the same way, no, not at all. Her family was actually very straight, you know, poor of course, but honest. But she was a fighter.
She picked fights coloured kids I don’t know where she got it from but she didn’t like them. “
After that Mary talked for a long time how passionately she and her partner feel against bigotry, and how her child could never feel intolerant of, or superior to, anyone because of the colour of their skin or their religion.
“Children are what you make them to be,” she said finally.
“Anyway, she was in lots of fights,” she said, returning to Norma.
“Now I think it was only to get attention like me, though not like me. I as I know now needed attention from some adult to … to get me away from my family. With her I think it was probably the opposite. She just wanted her family to notice her. It must have been hard in that family, with so many children, to be an older and as they later said a slower child. Perhaps you got forgotten. But she really loved her brother who was handicapped, and when children made fun of him, you know, as children do, she’d stand in front of him, her fists balled, and shout, ” Put your dukes up! ” and she’d look savage.”
Did they fight her then?
She laughed dismissively.
“No, of course not. She’d scare them off and I admired that. And then, I was terribly impressed because she was a runner …”
A runner?
“She’d run away from home several times …”
But why had she run away? Did she speak of being unhappy at home?
“Yes, she kept saying she hated home, she wanted to be away from them.
Much later I wondered whether they ever noticed when she ran away . Now that I think of it, she was also often . I don’t know . just sad. I think we were both, in our own way, very sad little girls. “
“The first time I saw Norma since the remand was the first day of the trial,” Mary said.
“They said we weren’t to speak to each other, but of course we did. And she was different… She just seemed a completely different person to the girl I knew. I became very quickly aware that she was being … oh, given a lot of sympathy. I saw her as playing on this and on being simple and everything. She may have been educationally subnormal as they said, but simple, that’s a load of rubbish. I thought then that she was conniving, but looking back I don’t really think that any more. I think she did what she was told to do, by her family, by the lawyers”
Did she think her own behaviour in court was dictated by her lawyers and her family?
“Well, I never really had anything to do with my barrister. Mr. Bryson [her solicitor] told me right away that anything I wanted to say to the barrister had to be through him. I remember thinking how could my barrister talk about me when he didn’t know me? And then, when I heard them say things in court which weren’t true, I wanted to tell Mr. Bryson, but he told me off for whispering to him. He also told me off for smiling at Norma and for laughing a couple of times when they said something I thought was funny. He said what I had to do was sit quietly and listen.”
What had she thought was funny?
“It was when somebody I don’t know who called me a ” monstrosity of nature” or something like that. I thought those were really funny words, nothing to do with me. You know, it made me think of a TV programme I’d seen. Lost in Space. A lot of the time, anyway, I thought all of it had nothing to do with me, fit was] as if I wasn’t there, you know, or there but standing outside looking in.”
Had her parents or others in her family talked to her about what was happening and told her how to behave?
“Never,” she said at once.
“Nobody ever mentioned the reason for the trial, except my dad once, when he came to see me during a break, and suddenly hugged me and whispered, ” You’ll be all right. I know you’ll be all right. ” (Billy believed for years that Mary was innocent and so somebody in her family told me when it became obvious that she would be convicted, conceived a cock-eyed plan with some of his chums to kidnap and hide her.) ” My mother never said anything, though she brought me dresses. She made the dress I wore on the day of my crossexamination, or at least she said she’d made it. “
Her mother did come every day to the trial, I reminded her.
“Well, my gran came, and my aunts, so she wouldn’t have dared not come. But… it was a performance for her, a show. My dad, my aunts, my uncles too, I think now they were desperate for me and probably about me, too. She was desperate about herself, and after a few days she started hurting me when she came to see me whenever nobody was looking.”
Hurting you how?
“Nipping and pinching me, on my arms and the skin of my back. I knew all the time, all the days of the remand and the trial, that when I got home part of me thought they’d have to let me go home she would beat me to death.”
the investigation august to november 1968
In both these key cases in Britain since World War II the case of Mary Bell, as it became known, and the murder of “Jamie’ Bulger (whose picture, holding the hand of one of his child abductors, caught by a shopping mall security camera, dominated TV screens and front pages in Britain for weeks in 1993) there was no doubt from the start that children had been involved in the killings. I have in front of me as I write a copy of the report Detective Chief Inspector James Dobson wrote out on 15 August 1968 and which, after agreement from the DPP, would form the basis of the evidence for the trial.
It is strange to read it now, so many years later, for its official phrasing makes it sound nothing like the deeply human man I came to know. Tall, with bright-blue eyes and an incisive mind, his trenchant manner was a necessary cover, he soon told me, for a ‘soppy’ heart where children were concerned. Of all the people involved in the investigation, James Dobson was the only one who suspected quite soon that there was more to this case than an ‘evil child’, a ‘freak of nature’, as the press called her.
“Let us say I sensed there was something terribly wrong,” he told me soon after the trial when (like so many of the police officers I would speak to twenty-five years later in Liverpool and Preston during the Bulger trial) I felt great depression and discouragement in him.
“But my function was to determine who had perpetrated the crime and how it was committed. In our system, it is not the business of the police to find out why crimes are committed. But as we have seen here, sadly, when the perpetrators are children, it doesn’t appear that it is anyone’s business.”
He had been asleep at home when his phone rang at one o’clock in the morning of Thursday, 1 August 1968, to tell him that three-year-old Brian Howe had been found dead, believed stabbed. He’d pulled on trousers and a sweater over his pyjamas, shoes over his bare feet, and ‘belted over’ to Scotswood.
“I’d parked up on the road,” he said, ‘and as I walked down to the Tin Lizzie, I suddenly thought of Martin Brown. I’d had nothing to do with that case and I had no idea what I would find on the Tin Lizzie. But I had stopped the car just across from the house where Martin had been found and somehow he stayed in the back of my mind throughout the next days. “
By the time he reached the Tin Lizzie, arc-lights had been put up.
“The whole area was brightly lit. There were a lot of people around,” he recalled, ‘but somehow it was very quiet. ” It was, he felt, a first indication of the shock that would soon pervade Scotswood, Newcastle, and the whole country.
“Murder is always special, whoever the victim;
but there is something very different for us, something very personal, when it’s a child,” he said.
“What I heard most was the clanking of the railway. It’s very loud at night. Our chaps,” he repeated, ‘were quiet. “
The first assumption, immediately after the body had been found, was that a pervert was on the loose. But after examining little Brian’s body in situ, the pathologist, Mr. Bernard Tomlinson, had concluded that he had been strangled, not stabbed, and had probably died between 3. 30 and 4. 30 the previous afternoon. The pale pressure marks on his neck and nose and the lightness of the stab wounds there were six tiny puncture wounds on his thighs and legs and a small area of skin loss in the middle of the scrotum-were all much more tentative than such injuries would be had they been caused by an adult, and clearly indicated the actions of a child or children.
“There was no anger, none one could see, none one could feel,” said Mr. Dobson.
“There was a terrible playfulness about it, a terrible gentleness if you like, and somehow the playfulness of it made it more, rather than less, terrifying. It was incomprehensible. How could it have happened? And why?”
A hundred CID officers had been called in and were assembled into teams.
“I told them we’d be working around the clock until we solved it,” said Mr. Dobson.
“We took preliminary statements during the night from family and neighbours, and we produced thousands of mimeographed questionnaires to distribute the next morning. We started in Scotswood at 8 a.m. and except for snatches of sleep we didn’t stop for eight days.”
During the first twenty-four hours, a thousand homes in Scotswood were visited and 1,200 children between the ages of three and fifteen, and their parents, were given the questionnaires to fill out. There would be many inconsistencies in the replies and about twelve children were asked for additional statements, among them Norma Bell and Mary Bell. (The two girls’ statements are given verbatim in The Case of Mary Bell).
The differences between the two girls’ families were remarked on from the first day of the investigation, when Detective Constable Kerr arrived at Norma’s house to ask for clarification to part of the questionnaire. There were ten questions on the sheet and in Norma’s case, her answer to question 8 - “Do you know anyone who played with Brian? If so: name and address.” was unclear.
“This was a family where at least seven of the eleven children fell into the age three-to-fifteen category,” Detective Constable Kerr would tell me later.
“Of course they were overcrowded. But they gave me the impression of a close family. I talked to the mother and several of the children; they were nice polite kids, and clean, too, which I thought was an achievement when there were so many.
“I did think Norma was peculiar,” he added.
“I mean, I was enquiring into something pretty awful and little Brian was a child they had all known well, but there she was continually smiling as if it was all a huge joke. Her mother and I thought that was odd, too, under the circumstances was quite sharp with her: ” Didn’t you hear what he asked? Answer the question! “
Norma eventually gave DC Kerr the first of several statements she would make over the next few days (and which would eventually form part of the evidence the jury would be able to see in court).
Examined in retrospect, for a child who was considered educationally subnormal and was scheduled in the coming term to attend a special secondary school, it turned out to be a remarkably intelligent mixture of truth and invention.
The Howe family moved into our street about one year ago and little Brian Howe started to play with my brothers John Henry and Hugh Bell. I have never seen any of them playing near the railway lines, behind the Delaval Arms public house. I have only been down there about 2 or 3 times, and the last time was months ago.
The last time I saw Brian Howe was about 12. 45 p. m. ” Wednesday, 31 July 1968, when he was playing with his brother and two little girls on the corner of Whitehouse Road and Crossbill Road … Between 1 p.m.
and 5 p. m. that day I played in my street with Gillian and Linda Routledge, 59 Whitehouse Road. We were making porn-poms. ” [Next to this last sentence appears the police remark ‘verified’.]
At this point the police had made no connection between Norma and Mary. When DC Kerr went next door, to 70 Whitehouse Road, it was only to clarify Mary’s replies to question 6 - “When did you last see Brian?” and question 9 - “Were you playing behind the Delaval Arms public house near to the railway lines between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.” Wednesday 31 July? “
“It was a very different atmosphere in there,” DC Kerr told me.
“No feeling of a home whatever, just a shell: very peculiar, no sound, beat-up furniture and very little of it, and airless, stuffy, dark, you know, on a brilliant summer afternoon. The only life one felt was the barking of a big dog, a ferocious-looking Alsatian.
“Mary was the most evasive child I’d ever come across,” he said.
“And her father was very odd. I asked him: ” You be her father? ” And he said, ” No, I’m her uncle. “
“Where are her parents?” I asked. And he answered: “She’s only got a mother and she’s away on business.”
(Much later I learned that when the Bells had moved to Whitehouse Road a year and a half before, Betty Bell had notified the council that her husband had abandoned her. She proceeded to claim the relevant social security benefits and the children were instructed to call their father ‘uncle’ when any stranger was within hearing. ) “All the questions I asked Mary,” DC Kerr continued, ‘she was continually looking at [Billy Bell] for guidance. ” He finally wrote to Mary’s dictation, her statement shorter but parallel to Norma’s:
I last saw Brian Howe in Whitehouse Road about 12. 30 p. m. ” Wednesday 31 July … when he was playing with his brother. I did not go near the Railway Lines or the waste ground near there at all on Wednesday I have been down there before, but it was at least two months ago.