by Gitta Sereny
When Susan’s parents heard her scream they dashed out, they say, and saw Mary and Susan standing near the front door of the house, Mary with both hands around Susan’s neck.
“I chopped Mary’s hands away,” says Mr. Bell, “and gave her a clip on the shoulder. She said, ‘I’m going to tell my dad,’ and I said, ‘You do that.’ But I heard no more about it. After that I didn’t let Susan play with her no more.”
Woodlands Crescent is a small curved street at the end of Whitehouse Road. The Day Nursery, well staffed and equipped to take care of the children in a community where a large number of mothers go out to work, is in an old two-story house, with a gabled roof. The window frames and door are painted white, there are flowering hedges and small lawns in the front and a playground and sandpit in the back.
On the morning of Monday, 27 May, the teachers arriving at the Nursery found that it had been broken into over the weekend. Slates had been removed, it had been entered through the loft, and large amounts of school and cleaning materials were scattered and smeared round the room. Among the wreckage the police found four pieces of paper, with words scribbled on them in childish writing.
“I murder
so that
I may come
back,”
said Note one. Note two had the letters “BAS. . . .” at the top, and underneath,
“fuch of
we murder
watch out
Fanny
and Faggot”
Note three said:
“WE did
murder
Martain
brown
Fuckof
you Bastard”
Note four read:
“You are micey
y because
we murderd
Martain Go
Brown you better
Look out THERE
are Murders about
By FANNYAND
and auld Faggot
you srcews”
The young policeman who had come in answer to the Nursery teachers’ telephone call decided that the notes were a nasty prank. He took them back to the station, gave them to the Station-Sergeant, and they were filed away in a drawer. But the Nursery was a valuable property and had been broken into before, so it was decided to install a beeper alarm system in the loft.
That same morning, 27 May, Mr. F.’s class at the Delaval Road Junior School worked on their school “Newsbook” in which, every week, they were encouraged to record current events and interesting things they’d noticed.
Mary Bell drew a picture which showed the outstretched body of a child lying on the floor of a room under a window. Next to the body is a bottle and above it, written partly in capital letters, the word TABLEt. To the left, a man, a cap on his head and a tool over his right shoulder, walks toward the body. Above the drawing, on the left, the date: 27568. Underneath it says:
On saturday I was in the house. and my mam sent Me to ask Norma if she Would come up the top with me? we went up and we came down at Magrets Road and there were crowds of people beside an old house. I asked what was the matter. there has been a boy who Just lay down and Died.
When the teacher glanced through the forty books at the end of that day, Mary’s entry did not strike him. It was only when, many weeks later, he found her newsbook behind a radiator, that he realized that she was the only child who had written about Martin Brown’s death.
Four days after Martin had been found, Mary Bell knocked on the door of the Browns’ house. “There was another girl or maybe girls down the garden path,” June Brown says. “Mary smiled and asked to see Martin. I said, ‘No, pet, Martin is dead.’ She turned round and said, ‘Oh, I know he’s dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin,’ and she was still grinning. I was just speechless that such a young child should want to see a dead baby and I just slammed the door on her.”
On Friday, 31 May, the automatic alarm that had been installed at the Woodlands Crescent Nursery went off in the West End Police Station. The two policemen, who got there within minutes, found two girls in the Nursery Yard. They had broken in by removing slates and climbing through the roof. They were Mary Bell and Norma Bell.
The girls were questioned but positively denied ever having done it before. They were charged with “Breaking and Entering” but were released into their parents’ custody until the case could be heard in Juvenile Court, which, as the court calendar was very full, would be months later.
About a week after this, a twelve-year-old boy, who lived near the Nursery and knew both girls, joined them when they were playing near the Nursery sandpit, and saw Mary “tripping Norma up.” Norma fell, and Mary jumped on top of her and scratched her face and arm. “I am a murderer,” Mary screamed, which made him laugh. But he says he stopped laughing when Mary pulled Norma’s hair and kicked her in the eye. He says she then pointed in the direction of the house where little Martin had been found and said, “. . . that house over there, that’s where I killed . . . Brown,” and that made him laugh again, because Mary Bell was such a show-off and everybody knew it.
On 7 June, the Coroner’s inquest on Martin Brown left the cause of death open and Martin’s body was released for burial.
“There were so many flowers,” Rita Finlay said.
A few days later a crowd of Scotswood residents marched on the Civic Centre to protest against the deplorable housing conditions which allowed such accidents to happen.
Five or six weeks later, toward the later part of July, Mary Bell was visiting the Howes, neighbors at 64 Whitehouse Road. The family consisted of the father and five children from two marriages: four boys and a girl, fourteen-year-old Pat. The mother of the two youngest boys had left them eighteen months before, and Mr. Howe, who had suffered from ill health for many years, was in hospital at the time. Pat, slim, blond, and childlike, but responsible beyond her years, had left school and was keeping house and looking after her two small brothers, Norman, seven, and Brian, three. The oldest boy Albert, twenty-three, was at that time courting a pretty twenty-year-old, Irene, who was also there that day when Mary Bell came by. “Mary was showing us some pictures she had drawn,” Irene said, “and she said, ‘I know something about Norma that will get her put away straight away.’ We asked her what it was and she said we’d tell the police if she told.”
When they assured her that they would not, Mary said, “Norma put her hands on a boy’s throat. It was Martin Brown; she pressed and he just dropped.”
“When we asked her what she meant,” Irene said, “she showed us by putting her hands on her own throat. Then she left.”
No time was lost in letting Norma’s family know about the rumors Mary was spreading. “You’ll get wronged,” people told Mary. “You wait till Norma’s dad tells yours. Will you get it!” Later that day, Mary went and apologized to Norma Bell’s mother for what she had said.
CHAPTER THREE
BRIAN HOWE
31 July 1968: Three Years and Four Months Old
BRIAN HOWE HAD fine, curly, very light blond hair, a strong, small body, a pink-and-white complexion, and a face that, still with the contours of babyhood had a tentative and vulnerable quality. On Wednesday, 31 July 1968, he was three years and four months old. He hardly knew his mother because she had left them when he was only a year and a half, but he loved his father, his step-sister Pat, his brother Norman, and his black-and-white dog, Lassie. Rita Finlay’s three-year-old son John was his best friend, and he loved Rita too.
“Pat was always over here,” Rita Finlay said. “I used to go and wake her up on my way to taking John to the Nursery and then I’d take Brian too: I’d take them one day and she the next—then she’d wake me up. I loved little Brian,” said Rita, “different like from the way I loved Martin—but I loved him. That day I was taking my kids to the Nursery and I went to wake up Pat on my way and pick up Brian. I knocked at the Howes’ door but they didn’t answer. I said to myself, she must be having a lie-in. The woman at the Nur
sery asked where Brian was.”
At lunch time, though, Brian and John met up and they went out to play. Rita went looking for them about 1:30 P.M., she says. “I found them sitting on the ground watching the men pull down one of the old houses. I went mad. I screamed at the men and said didn’t they know better—a brick could fall down and kill them—how could they let them sit there? And then I hit the lads so hard, one after the other, my hands were stinging. I put John to bed and I gave Brian some biscuits and sent him home, and told him to tell Pat he’d been to the old buildings but she was not to hit him, because I’d already hit them. That’s the last I saw him.”
Between two and three that afternoon—it turned out later—Brian was noticed by a number of children, all of whom saw him playing in the street, with his brother—and two girls on bikes. Lassie was with him, they all said.
“Sometime that afternoon those two lasses—Norma and Mary—came,” said Rita, “and Norma asked, ‘Where’s my boyfriend?’ She meant our John. Yes, I am sure she really loved him: she was on about him more than about her own brothers and sisters—she had ten of them you know. I told them the lads had been to the old buildings and that I’d put John to bed. Norma said, ‘Put Jacqueline to bed,’ as if that had anything to do with it. And then they left. It was such a beautiful day out that day. I nearly got John up and let him go with them. If I had, maybe it would have been him they’d got rather than Brian. . . .”
It was very likely after leaving Rita Finlay’s that Mary and Norma came upon Brian playing with the two little girls on the corner of Whitehouse Road and Crosshill Road. And it was him they took for a walk.
At about 3:20 P.M. Pat Howe came back home after spending several hours with friends in another part of the city. She asked Irene, who was still staying with them, where Brian was and was told that he was out playing. About four o’clock, Albert told Pat to go and look for him in the streets.
One of the first people she asked was Maxine Savage, who lived at 66 Whitehouse Road, next to Norma Bell’s house. She talked to her on her backsteps—where Maxine was sitting with Mary Bell—but Maxine hadn’t seen Brian.
“Are you going to look for your Brian?” Mary asked. “Yes,” Pat answered, “Are you coming to help?” Mary Bell was always ready to do anything at a moment’s notice. “Yes,” she said. Just a few seconds later Norma Bell came up. She said she’d come too, of course. Pat also asked several boys who were about on their bikes to look for Brian and they all went off in different directions. “Howay,” Mary said, “let’s go down Davy’s way first. . . .”
Davy’s was a shop at the far end of St Margaret’s Road, one of the places where the children congregated quite often. But he wasn’t anywhere on the way there, or near the shop, and they started down the hill, across the railway toward the Vickers Armstrong car park—another major attraction for the children of Scotswood, who had no playgrounds. But he wasn’t at the car park either, and they went back up on the railway bridge from where they could see all over the “Tin Lizzie”—the 400 or 500 yards of waste ground full of old building materials, oil drums, and “tanks” just on the other side of the tracks, which the children used as an adventure playground. “He might be playing behind the blocks [they were huge concrete boulders],” Mary Bell said, “or between them.” But Norma said firmly, “Oh no, he never goes there.”
Pat didn’t think so either—not alone he wouldn’t anyway, and from where they were standing there wasn’t anybody to be seen. “We’ll have another look around for him up top,” Pat said, “and if we don’t find him by seven o’clock, we’ll go to the police.” Norma ran off saying she was going to play with Linda Routledge. Pat and Mary went the other way to Hodkin Park. There they met Pat’s boyfriend and they all came back together. Later Pat came past Linda’s house at 59 Whitehouse Road, saying she was going to phone the police. “You coming with us?” she asked Norma, who was still there playing with Linda. But Norma said, “No.”
From up the road came the sound of Mary’s dad, Billy Bell, calling her in for supper—it was 7:30 P.M.
They found Brian at 11:10 that night. He was lying on the ground, between two concrete blocks on the “Tin Lizzie.” His left arm was stretched out from his body, and his hand was black with dirt. Lying on the grass nearby was a pair of scissors with one blade broken and the other bent back. His body was covered with a carpet of long grass and purple weeds—which grew all over the “Tin Lizzie.” There were scratch marks on his nose, traces of bloodstained froth at his mouth, his lips were blue, and there were pressure marks and scratches on both sides of his neck. He was dead.
“We’d all been out looking for him for hours,” said Rita Finlay, “June and me and—oh, hundreds of people it seemed like. We’d look one way and then another and then come back and have a cup of tea and a sandwich—spam or cornbeef or whatever—and then go out again. By the time they found him we were back home though—it was dark. We could hear the sirens going with all the police cars rushing down there. People called to each other out of their doors, asking what was happening. I don’t know who knew first—it went from street to street and house to house.”
Mary Bell—a light sleeper at the best of times—came downstairs at 11:30 and joined her dad, who was standing outside the front door watching the commotion in the street. “What’s going on then?” she asked.
“They’ve found Brian Howe,” he said, “over on the ‘Tin Lizzie.’”
“Oh,” said Mary.
Detective Chief-Inspector1 James Dobson of the C.I.D. was asleep when his telephone rang at one A.M. (Some time had been lost trying to reach his chief, who was not at home but expected any minute.) “They said the boy Howe had been found under suspicious circumstances, believed stabbed.” James Dobson is tall, short-haired, wide-shouldered, with sharp blue eyes, a ready sense of humor, and a sympathetic mind carefully masked by his northern, trenchant manner. Like many others he was to become deeply involved and very troubled by the consequences of this case.
“I pulled on some trousers and a sweater over my pajamas,” he recalled, “and I rushed out. I remember it was a clear night. I got over to Scotswood at 1:10 A.M. I could see it from a long way off—they had arclights up by that time. I parked up on the road and as I walked down to the ‘Tin Lizzie’—the strange thing, looking back—I suddenly thought of Martin Brown. There wasn’t any reason: I’d had nothing to do with that case. But where I stopped was just across from where he’d been found. And it ran through my mind that there must be some connection.” The immediate area had been surrounded by uniformed policemen. “There were a lot of people around, but somehow it was very quiet. What I heard most was the clanking of the railway—it’s very loud at night.”
The bulk of the night was taken up with details. The pathologist’s examination established that Brian had been dead for several hours. “After that,” Mr. Dobson explained, “we took him to Newcastle General for further tests, and we sent for his stepbrother, Albert Howe, to identify him formally. Albert had been crying before he came in,” Mr. Dobson said, “and he burst into tears again when he saw the body. It was all very sad. We then took him across to West End Police—he made a statement and then we sent him home in a police car.”
The post mortem revealed three scratch marks on the right side of Brian’s neck and two on the left. There were also a series of compression marks on his nose, suggesting that someone had pinched his nose on both sides. In the midline of the scrotum there was a small area of superficial skin loss and a similar one on the tip of the boy’s right ring finger. There were six puncture wounds on his thighs and legs: two on the outside of his left thigh, three on the back, and one on the right calf. All these and the mark on his scrotum were superficial wounds which had only punctured the skin.
The pathologist, Dr. Bernard Tomlinson, concluded that the child had been strangled and that little force would have been required to kill a boy of three in this manner. He thought it was unlikely that the attacker was an adult b
ecause an adult usually used very much more pressure than was necessary. Equally, the curious playfulness (rather than brutality or viciousness) of the disfigurements pointed to a child or children. The scratch marks on Brian’s neck, he thought, were probably caused by his struggling against the person who was attacking him, and he put the time of death between 1:30 and 5:30 P.M., but most likely more exactly between 3:30 and 4:30 the previous afternoon. (Strangely, no such suspicious marks appeared on Martin Brown’s neck, considering, in view of his mother’s remarks to me later, that he, too, must have struggled. In view of the absence of such marks, Detective Chief-Inspector Dobson’s suddenly thinking of Martin Brown on his way to investigating the Brian Howe case is an all the more remarkable instance of the importance of police intuition.)
“There was no doubt, no doubt whatever that it had to be a child who’d killed him,” Chief-Inspector Dobson said. “But who? And why?”
The “Murder Room” at Newcastle’s West End Police, the headquarters for the investigation, was a hive of activity all night. “Murder cases are always special, whoever the victim, and where-ever it is,” Mr. Dobson said. “But there was something different about this, from the start. All of us felt a great sense of urgency, of anxiety, and of concern.”
Preliminary statements were taken, questionnaires carefully composed which would be used to collect statements from all neighborhood children of certain ages, and thousands of these forms were mimeographed. “We called in a hundred C.I.D. officers. The acting Chief Constable, Mr. Gale, said I could have anyone I needed. Those who had telephones were phoned—we sent cars for the others. When they were all assembled, I organized them into teams and told them we’d be working around the clock until we solved it. They started at eight in the morning and except for snatches of sleep now and then 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 mimeographed questionnaires to fill out.
