by Gitta Sereny
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Preface to the Pimlico Edition
Prologue
PART ONE: Summer 1968
1. Scotswood
2. Martin Brown: 25 May 1968: Four Years and Two Months Old
3. Brian Howe: 31 July 1968: Three Years and Four Months Old
4. Remand: “I Hope Me Mum Won’t Have to Pay a Fine”
PART TWO: The Trial: A Guilty Mind
PART THREE: The Past: “Take the Thing Away from Me”
PART FOUR: The Present: “The Guilty One Is You Not Me”
Postscript
Author’s Note
Appendix: Mary Bell—Documents
Appendix: The Murder of James Bulger
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Book
In December 1968 two girls – Mary Bell, eleven, and Norma Bell, thirteen (neighbours, but not related) – stood before a criminal court in Newcastle, accused of strangling, within a six-week period, Martin Brown, four years old, and Brian Howe, three. Norma was acquitted. Mary Bell, the younger but infinitely more sophisticated and cooler of the two, was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because of ‘diminished responsibility’ and was sentenced to ‘detention’ for life. Step by step, the extraordinary murders, the events surrounding them, the alternately bizzare and nonchalant behaviour of the two girls, their brazen offers to help the distraught families of the dead boys, the police work that led to their apprehension, and the trial itself are grippingly re-created in this rare-study of the wanton murder of child by child. What emerges with equal force is the inability of society to anticipate such events and to take adequate steps once disaster has struck.
About the Author
Gitta Sereny is of Hungarian-Austrian extraction and is trilingual in English, French and German. During the Second World War she became a social worker, caring for war damaged children in France. She gave hundreds of lectures in schools and colleges in America and, when the war ended, she worked as a Child Welfare Officer in UNRRA displaced persons’ camps in Germany. In 1949 she married the American Vogue photographer Don Honeyman and settled in London, where they brought up a son and a daughter and where she began her career as a journalist.
Her journalistic work is of great variety but has focused particularly on the Third Reich and troubled children. She has written mainly for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times, The Times, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday Review. She has also contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines throughout the world.
Her other books are The Medallion, a novel; The Invisible Children, on child prostitution; Into that Darkness, on Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp; and, forthcoming, a biographical re-evaluation of Albert Speer. Gitta Sereny died in June 2012.
“. . . As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence also, more alive to tenderness.”
To Don
The Case of Mary Bell
A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered
Gitta Sereny
With a New Preface and Appendix by the Author
PREFACE TO THE PIMLICO EDITION
When I first saw Mary Bell, on 5 December 1968, the opening day of her trial at the Newcastle upon Tyne Assizes, I was there to report for the Daily Telegraph Magazine. I had recently undertaken to write a book on cruelty to children, and this strange case of the alleged murder by two girls, one thirteen, the other eleven, of two small boys, one four and one three, seemed a possible extreme example of cruelty by child to child.
But as I sat through the nine days of the trial, my purpose changed. In Court and in the press, Mary Bell was called a “fiend” and a “Svengali”. The Court would decide that she—and basically she alone—had committed the murders, and when the other child was acquitted, the whole country seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The older girl being found innocent created an equation acceptable and even welcome to society: fate, or some terrible wrath of God, had produced a freak: one monstrous child, a “bad seed”, the uniqueness of whose evil could be seen as confirming the probity and virtue of society at large.
My difficulty, almost from the first day, was that I could not believe it. I had, very quickly, met the families of the little boys who had been killed and their pain was atrocious to see. And, of course, I knew that one or both of the girls had killed four-year-old Martin and three-year-old Brian. But somehow I could not associate the concept of evil with Mary Bell. In the context of the events, the suffering of the small boys’ parents, and the anger, not to say panic, in the media, there was one, to me overriding, impression I knew I would not be able to express in the articles I was commissioned to write. But it was precisely this impression that would change my original plan and would bring me to write this book. This feeling, much easier to describe today when, twenty-six years later, we have lived through the violent Jamie Bulger murder, was that the murder of the two little boys in Newcastle was not at all an illustration of cruelty by child to child.
There was a strange absence of violence in those murders which—and this is what one could not say at the time—were carried out, it seemed to me, almost with tenderness. This inversion, even perversion of emotion, I know, is as frightening as anger, and in these circumstances perhaps even more puzzling. But somehow I could not reconcile it with evil: to me, this strange, intelligent and isolated child just seemed horribly hurt.
Twenty-six years later, in Preston, at the “Bulger trial”, as it became known all over the world, we would find striking parallels but equally significant disparities.
Here too, two ten-year-old boys had accused each other of kidnapping and torture, but both denied having initiated the killing. The vast difference, however, was that in this case the victim was a child only just out of babyhood, entirely unknown to either of the boys, and was killed, not as a dreadful “game”, not out of some aberrant sense of curiosity, but with a ferocity really beyond human understanding. Not surprisingly, perhaps, in the absence of any explanation whatsoever, the vox populi, yet again, decried the two child perpetrators as “evil”.
There were further parallels between these two cases, almost three decades apart. The most important one (because of which my publishers and I have decided to add my report on the Bulger case—written in February 1994 for the Independent on Sunday Review—as an annexe to this book) is the total bewilderment which the court and jury in both these significant cases manifested when they were confronted with the children’s testimonies.
This “bewilderment” was and is symptomatic of the unfitness of that formal venue for the trial of children, even for murder. And the identical reactions of the court and public opinion in 1968 and 1993 also demonstrated how terribly little we have learned in a quarter of a century, how little progress we have made.
In 1968, I had become increasingly concerned each day of Mary Bell’s trial about the incomprehension and the partisanship of the Judge. In 1993, even though the Judge in the “Bulger case” was infinitely more knowledgeable and professional, and clearly aware of the deficiencies in the proceedings, his actions and decisions were inevitably determined by the system he served. For me, sitting through an almost exact replica of the 1968 trial, much of it had a distressing quality of déjà vu. And during the breaks and the sixteen evenings of the trial days, I found, yet again, that every lawyer, every court official, virtually every police officer and every member of the media I spoke with, had grave mi
sgivings about the case and, yes, the venue of the trial.
In Newcastle, Brian Roycroft, one of the finest social workers in the country, took over as Children’s Officer in the summer of 1968. Not long afterwards he became Director of Social Services and, thanks to him, I received enormous help from all who worked there.
In Liverpool, where the police and voluntary organizations readily responded to me, the local authority social workers and the teachers were, not surprisingly perhaps, officially gagged.
But even where officials consented to speak—in 1968 and in 1993—what they voiced were private opinions: officially, unlike capital cases involving children in other Western countries (or proceedings in the far more knowledgeable and enlightened Juvenile or Family Courts in Britain), no-one was allowed to seek the reasons for these tragedies.
“Due process” in British High Courts allows only the facts of the case to be presented: and according to these facts—which certainly established that eleven-year-old Mary Bell in 1968, and Robert Thompson and Jonathan Venables in 1993, had killed—there was no reason, and so these children, who had most certainly committed evil deeds, were stamped “evil” and tried, convicted and sentenced as adults.
So first in 1968 in this book about Mary Bell, and then again in 1994 in the articles about the boys who killed Jamie Bulger (which are reprinted at the end of this book), I decided to ask the questions a British Court is not in a position to ask, and to protest against a judicial system which is totally outdated.
How, first of all, can it be right to subject young children to the awesome formality of a jury trial? How can a jury be expected to understand the thought processes, the emotions or language of children? How can it be justifiable in the last half—now the last decade—of the twentieth century, to deny children, who have committed the ultimate crime and therefore presumably gone through an ultimate trauma, immediate access to some kind of therapy—this on the pretext that if they were allowed contact with psychiatrists for any other reason than to establish their capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, it could “contaminate the evidence”?
Indeed, unless we continue to subscribe to the antediluvian concept of evil birth, do we need psychiatrists to inform us that a child who kills does so because it has suffered profoundly disturbing experiences and is in fact a sick child?
Let me state swiftly here that I do not subscribe to the thesis that all criminals are sick and in need of hospitalization rather than imprisonment. I think there are greedy, dishonest and brutal people about, and when they commit crimes they must be punished. There are also mad people around—the Yorkshire Ripper and Ian Brady, to name only two—and even though it is only too possible that childhood experiences have caused or at least contributed to their abnormalities of mind, I have no hesitation in saying that they should be permanently restrained from contact with society.
It is possible that this could apply to a child; it is possible for children to be sufficiently hurt to be damaged for life. But an enlightened society cannot presuppose this. An enlightened society, it seems to me, has to believe in the essential guiltlessness of children. And if a child’s intrinsic goodness fails, then this enlightened society must surely ask the question why.
Why should a child want to kill another child it has no obvious grudge against, or does not even know? Where does the fantasy, which no doubt underlies this act, begin, and why? And what causes, forces or enables a child to take that fatal step from fantasy to enactment?
In the case of the two boys who killed James Bulger—and we will not know for a long time which of the two was the moving force in this awful act—we now know, which the Court did not, that both of them had for years gone through profoundly upsetting childhood experiences. Unhappily, they found each other at a dangerous critical time in both their lives and, supporting each other, together breached that fatal line which neither would probably ever have crossed on his own.
The parallel with the case of Mary Bell is evident, though there it was clear that her co-defendant, two years older and much loved by her family, was mentally fragile, and that clever little Mary, emotionally abused for years by a seriously disturbed mother, was the leader.
The mystery in both these cases is, how was it possible that relatives and neighbours, teachers and social workers had not recognized the danger, had not understood that these were children approaching a crisis point?
I found in many people I met in Newcastle, and then in Liverpool, an extraordinary collective sense of guilt and unease. In 1968–69, there was little compassion for Mary Bell, and in 1993–94 virtually none for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.
Nonetheless, in retrospect, there was in both these pivotal cases a public awareness that an undefined failure of—or deficiency in—society had contributed to these dreadful events.
All of Mary Bell’s family (as well as, later, the immediate families of the two Liverpool boys) were fully aware of what I was doing. All the information I have about Mary’s family life (and, later, that of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables) was given to me by relatives motivated only by a desire to help, and who showed great courage and honesty in doing so. Mary’s mother, who was the principal source of all her troubles, not unexpectedly rejected every opportunity to tell me her own story. And Mary’s maternal grandmother, in an impossible conflict of loyalties, understandably added only marginally to this account. (It is, I think, of considerable significance in a comparison of the two cases, in terms of their nature and the place and time in which they occurred, that while Mary Bell’s extended family stood firm in mutual support throughout and after these events, Jon Venables’s parents and Robert Thompson’s mother were deserted by practically all their relatives and most of their friends.)
In these pages I criticize the provisions which were eventually made for Mary Bell. The authorities involved have always known of my misgivings and it was therefore all the more to their credit that they co-operated with me on a number of occasions, including inviting me to conferences at the Home Office and enabling me repeatedly to visit the unit where Mary was held. It would be very wrong if my remarks here led to the impression, even at this late date, that there was ever even the slightest element of indifference in the official attitude toward Mary Bell. On the contrary, considering the number of children whose needs were just as pressing as hers, her case received throughout an extraordinary amount of attention and consideration.
Twenty-six years on, things have regressed rather than progressed. We live in an age where neither parents, schools, churches, nor for that matter police are willing or able to exercise authority. Parents are too busy or too depressed; teachers are over-extended and unsupported by parents; churches have become largely irrelevant to the young; and the British police—once upon a time a model for the whole world—are seen as a penalizing rather than as a supportive body. The life of human beings in this last decade of the century is not ruled by thought, or morality, but almost entirely by economics; by money despairingly earned and, ever more of it, desperately needed; by money controlled—given or refused—by what has become a much too powerful and entirely materialistic state, and by values which, largely dictated by money, are reflected in much we read, and see on the ever-present screen.
Within this atmosphere of having and needing, our children exist in a moral void. Shoplifting and car-thieving are considered a sport by children as young as seven; burglary is becoming a profession for young teenagers; violent child criminality, much of it drug-related, is ever increasing, and the only solution the government of the day has presently found is the creation of five secure training units which, staffed by private security firms appointed after competitive tendering, will attempt to re-educate, or “train” as they are calling it, about 200 “persistent young offenders” between 12 and 14 years old.
While I am not as horrified as some experts in penal reform at the idea of possibly quite tough educational and work-training centres for kids who have come to reject all structure
, the very idea of allowing semi- or non-experienced personnel anywhere near either the re-education or supervision of child offenders is highly questionable. Furthermore, changing the Criminal Justice Bill in order to allow the government to create punitive provisions for two hundred youngsters seems yet again a purely political gesture when what is needed are enlightened re-education facilities probably for several thousand rather than a few hundred.
In the final analysis, however, it is society itself, through the family framework on which its stability rests, that needs strengthening and safeguarding, in each instance from the moment a child is born. The offending child is a symbol of family—and more than that, of societal—breakdown.
Cases such as Mary Bell’s, and now the one of the boys who killed James Bulger, are the extreme; they are, one might say, the expression of ultimate anger, the final cry for help.
But, in the wake of the huge outcry following the murder of James Bulger, it is important to point out, once again, that these cases are so far very rare. Over the past two and a half centuries, there have been 27 recorded cases in Britain of children under fourteen killing other children, and four more who killed adults. This is no more than one such case per decade and the incidence in other Western European countries is about the same. But it is true that as family pressures continue to intensify and other cases of child violence proliferate, these extreme cases are likely to increase too. And it is shameful that Britain, which led the world in radical social reforms following World War II, today limps behind most Western nations in resources for children’s psychiatric and social services, and that the British judicial system, with regard to capital crime committed by children, has remained unchanged for centuries, almost as if we still lived in the age when children were whipped and hanged.
Twenty-five years ago, when I decided to undertake this book, I did so with considerable reluctance. I was profoundly conscious of the moral problems involved, not only in writing about someone who was still a child, but even more, in setting up a permanently available record of the unhappy circumstances of Mary Bell’s child-life which she herself—and, I already thought then, any children she might eventually have—would one day have to confront. But, the persistent incomprehension of Mary’s situation, demonstrated by the circumstances of her detention, persuaded me that nothing would help Mary then, and other children after her, except a public exposition of her case.
