by Gitta Sereny
“Just look at Note 4, Exhibit 15. Just look at the front of it. Is that your writing?”
“I think so.”
“Yes. Now, does it say, ‘You are micey’? Does ‘micey’ mean stupid?”
“Yes.”
“And who is the ‘you’? Does it mean the police?”
Mary pointed at the lone “Y” on the note. (See here) That’s a ‘Y’ there,” she said.
“No,” Mr. Lyons said firmly. “It says, ‘you are micey.’ Did you mean that the police were stupid?”
“I don’t know. We just put it down. Everyone.”
“Well, look at the last line. Did you write, ‘you screws’?”
“I think so.”
“Well, who did you mean by the ‘screws’?”
“That’s what people call policemen.”
“Yes, and weren’t you saying, ‘you police are stupid’?”
“I suppose so.”
“Because we murder Martin George Brown.”
“Er—yes, it says that,” she said artlessly.
“That’s right, isn’t it,” Mr. Lyons pressed, but Mary was not to be caught in such an easy trap.
“Yes,” she went on, calmly reading from the photostated note she held in her hand, “‘And you better look out.’”
“You better look out there are murders about,” Mr. Lyons continued doggedly, “and there was another murder, wasn’t there, two months later?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you were showing the police how clever you were, weren’t you?”
“How?” she inquired.
“What?”
“How?” she repeated.
“Well, you knew that you knew something about Martin Brown’s death that the police didn’t know?”
She had maneuvered neatly. “I never knew nothing about it,” she said calmly. “The police knew more than me . . .”
Every day after the session ended, the girls’ families were allowed to see them for a few minutes in the small waiting room off the Court. During the first two or three days these were treated as social occasions, with laughter and chitchat on both sides. As time went on, the meetings became quieter, with an undertone of anxiety and nerves.
For Mary it was her father she was most eager to see. Once when the time came for her family to leave she said, “All of you go first and Dad go last because I love him best of all.” A little later, everybody having left, her mother came back and kissed her once more.
“Oh Mam,” she protested, “now you’ve spoilt it. Now Dad has to come and kiss me again so I can feel his lips on me till tomorrow.”
All of Mary’s family confirm that it was only at this period that she allowed herself to be kissed. Otherwise, as her Aunt Audrey had said, “She always turned her head away.”
If until the very end of the trial, and beyond it, there was doubt in the minds of people about how Martin Brown met his death, and if both Norma and Mary steadfastly denied having had the least part in his killing, there was no such doubt about Brian Howe.
Mr. Justice Cusack, in his final summing up, made this clear:
“. . . As to Brian Howe’s death, there is no dispute that he was killed by somebody. In that there is a difference between him and Martin Brown. . . . [But] each of the girls denies harming him and each says that it was the other one who attacked him. You will remember the evidence, not only about the marks on his throat, but how his body was marked in a way consistent with the use of a razor blade. How his body was punctured in a way consistent with the use of those scissors which you have seen. And how his hair had been cut and the cutting was left on the ground not far from him. You will also remember that there were compression marks on the lower third of his nose towards the tip, and points to where it is said his nose had been squeezed.”
Dr. Bernard Tomlinson testified that he was asked to consider the possibility of what the slits might represent or suggest. “If you stand on the left-hand side of the body the marks could have been considered as crude attempts to produce capital letters. It was possible to see an ‘M’ or an ‘N’ in these marks, and standing on the other side of the body one of the letters looked rather like a ‘W’.” There were three similar marks on the thigh.
Chief-Inspector Dobson later confirmed that to him the marks had looked like the letter “N” to which another line, completing the letter “M”, had been added by a different hand.
Forensic scientist Norman Lee had examined Brian’s clothes and found eleven gray wool fibers which had many similarities with those of a dress belonging to Mary Bell. A red fiber from Brian’s jumper was indistinguishable, he said, from one found on Mary’s dress, and two maroon fibers from a skirt belonging to Norma matched exactly those found on each of Brian’s shoes.
While both girls in their first statements to the police had denied any meeting with Brian on that day, or any knowledge of his whereabouts beyond having seen him playing in the streets, each of them, as they panicked, had abandoned a little more each day their attempt at keeping faith with each other and added a little bit of additional information in each statement. Norma had first brought in Mary’s name and finally accused her of the murder. Mary had tried first to involve a completely innocent little boy and, when that failed, had accused Norma.
The first four days of the trial they were kept together during adjournments and the midday meal. “They are chatting away like two little women,” said a police officer, shaking his head. “They are talking about clothes, films, pop stars.” He shook his head again. “It’s like a party, it’s incredible.” Their attitude toward each other in and outside court was as unreal, as childish, and—if one wished to acknowledge it—as sad as everything else about this trial. In some way their ability—perhaps an unconscious need—to disassociate the things they were accusing each other of having done in the past from their feelings and behavior toward each other in the present was incomprehensible to the adults who watched them.
The fact is—this being the essential unreality and anomaly of the trial—that “death,” “murder,” “killing” had a different connotation for Mary than it has for other people. Basically for her all of it had been a game (in the sense that an experiment can be a game to children)—a grisly game, but a game nonetheless.
For Norma, too, neither mentally nor emotionally capable of dealing with anything except on a momentary or immediate basis, the events, far too terrible to absorb in all their horror, had probably in retrospect assumed the depersonalized quality of a film.
For Mary too, though, it was not something she had done, for none of Mary’s actions were committed for the sake of doing but rather for the sake of feeling. Incapable of connecting her compulsive need to feel with the consequences of her actions, she simply could not conceive that every action has a consequence. It is perhaps as if a connecting link is missing in her brain and in her deepest self.
For both of these children, for different reasons, the only reality they felt as the trial progressed was fear. In the meantime, while this process took place, it was almost as if both of them—separately and together—existed on two planes, with two personalities toward each other.
In court, on innumerable occasions, their heads turned toward each other, their eyes locked, their faces suddenly bare of expression and curiously alike, they always seemed by some sort of silent and exclusive communion to reaffirm and strengthen their bond.
It was not something real, not something one could understand or interpret in so many words. What we witnessed were the intangibles in a relationship which may well have been as mysterious to them as it was to us.
The other aspect of it, much easier to accept, was exactly what one would have expected: they shook their heads incredulously or furiously at what one or the other said; they turned abruptly, glaring at each other when hearing themselves quoted as having accused the other of something outrageous; and they commented audibly—in Norma’s case with tears and desperate cries of “No, no,” in Mary’s case w
ith loud and furious remarks—about and against each other’s evidence.
Listening to them one after the other answer the same specific questions about the events leading up to and the murder of Brian Howe, with virtually identical descriptions of each other’s movements, facial expressions, actions and words, was an eerie experience.
The stage had of course been set: just as there remained no doubt as to who had squeezed the necks of the three little girls in the sandpit, so, almost even before the evidence began, there was hardly any doubt in anyone’s mind that it was Mary who had actually murdered Brian Howe. The trial therefore to some of us began to take on some of the distressing characteristics of a Grand Guignol, a spectacle which was at once irresistible and intolerable.
In the case of Martin Brown we may never know quite exactly what happened. The case of Brian Howe is different. Neither Norma nor Mary denied that they, together, took Brian for a walk on the afternoon of 31 July.
“. . . What happened when you saw Brian and Norman [Brian’s brother] in the street?” Harvey Robson asked Mary.
“Norma says, ‘Walk ahead of we,’” she answered. “And she says something about sweets, she had money or something. I says, ‘Norma, where have you got money from, you haven’t got none,’ and she says, ‘Nebby.’”
“What did you understand that to mean?”
“Keep your nose out. . . . We went down by Dixon’s shop,” she continued a little later, “and there is a fence there . . . and I think we got through the hole or we climbed over, I cannot remember, sir. . . . When we got to the railway fence I says to Norma, ‘Where are you going?’ and she says, ‘Oh, you know, that little tadpole pool’ . . . and I just thought she was going there. I says (to myself) oh, it’s all right there because there was a frog spawn and tadpoles in it, you know, and we went over. . . .”
It all sounded so normal.
Norma presented it only a little differently: “Norma, when you first on that afternoon went with Mary and Brian Howe,” she was asked by Mary’s counsel in cross-examination, “was something said about going to a tadpole pool, or a frog pool on the ‘Tin Lizzie’?” By this time the Judge had ordered that there should no longer be any contact between the two girls. He had directed that they were not to be in the same room at all, “and were to be kept separate from other people.”
“No,” said Norma, “that never got mentioned. . . . What happened,” she continued a little later, “was that May and Brian and me just went down Crosshill Road and no pool was mentioned. . . .” Mr. Robson, referring to Mary’s statements to the police, asked about the “sweets” with which Brian was tempted into accompanying the girls. As had happened before when questioning Norma, questions had to be repeated and clarified for her several times. “. . . Did you say this to Brian, that there was a lady coming on an 82 bus who would have some sweets with her?”
“No, I never said it,” said Norma. “It was Mary Bell, but she never says she was going to come on a bus. She says the lady and she never says bus—she says the lady is coming but she never mentioned bus.”
“With some sweets . . . was ‘sweets’ mentioned?”
“No, lollipops. . . .”
“Wasn’t it you who talked about the lady and the lollipops or sweets?”
“No, Mary says it.”
“And did Brian walk along with you and Mary?”
“Yes.”
“When you came to the railway, there were two fences to go through, were there not?”
“There were two. One beside Dixon’s shop, one fence at the top, and when you get down to the bottom, there is another fence.”
“Yes, and were you able to find holes to go through both fences?”
“Hole on the top one, but we climbed over. I lifted Brian over.”
“And did Mary help in lifting Brian?”
“May held his hand going down.”
Mary, the next day, talked about the next fence they got through, after being asked whether they had to go across a road to get to it.
“We had to go down the bank first, sir,” she said.
“Yes, down the bank, and then across the road?”
“Yes, sir. But there was—er—a big hole, a big square hole in the fence over there, Mr. Dobson could fit in,” she was off on one of her embellishments, and everybody’s mind (as no doubt intended) immediately veered off onto visualizing the tall Chief-Inspector Dobson getting through a hole in the fence: “So we never touched Brian getting through there,” she added—as if it mattered now. And she continued her elaboration. “We went towards, like, a big round tank what had been used for the Army or something. You would think it had been used for the Army. It was like a big bomb and had a round hole in it and little dots round that hole.”
“Up to that time, had anything been said about sweets?”
Mary forgot what she had said herself only a few minutes before—a very rare lapse for her. “Er—no sir,” she said, “it was when we got in the tank sweets were mentioned.”
“Very well.”
“I cannot remember who got in first.”
“But all three got in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how did Brian get in?”
“Well, one of us passed him through to the other one. I cannot remember who got in first but . . .”
“Then go on, will you, about what happened in the tank?”
“Brian started to cry and Norma says, ‘Have you got a sore throat, son?’ and he went ‘Aye’ or ‘No’ or something and . . .”
“Yes?”
“I cannot remember if she touched his throat with two hands or one hand, and then she says, ‘Oh, this isn’t where the lady comes with the sweets.’”
“Had any mention been made of a lady beforehand?”
“I am not sure, sir, but, and then—and then she says, in the tank she says, ‘This isn’t where the lady comes with the sweets,’ she says, ‘she comes over them big slabs, the concrete blocks,’ she says. ‘She comes on the No. 82 bus,’ sir, or a 28.”
Norma, during all this, had violently shaken her head and begun to cry. She had been cross-examined about this the previous day.
“When you got over the railway line,” Harvey Robson had asked her, “you were near this tank were you, quite a short way away? Now when Brian got into the tank, was there somebody in already, you or Mary?”
“Mary first.”
“Mary first, and then Brian had to be hauled in?”
“Yes.”
“Did you actually lift him or was he able to scramble in with your help?”
“He needed help to get in.”
“And Mary was helping him as he got down inside?”
“I am not sure. I have forgotten.”
“And you had with you, had you, Lassie? That is Brian’s dog?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of dog is that? Is it a smallish dog?”
“I am not sure,” she said in a tired voice. “I have not seen it for a long time.”
“You don’t remember anything at all about the color of it?”
“Black and white.”
“Black and white. Now in the tank, did you take hold of Brian by the neck, or near his neck?”
“I never touched him inside the tank.”
“Did Mary say to you, ‘What are you doing?’”
“No, she never says nothing.”
“And did you say ‘nebby’ or something like that?”
“I never says nothing because Brian never got touched in the tank not even by Mary,” Norma said, and added one of those bits of information one felt could only be genuine, because it was she who said it first, “Because it was too stinky.”
“We all got out,” Mary recounted the next day, “and then when we got over to the concrete blocks . . .”
“Wait. When you got out of the tank, how did Brian get out?”
“Well, one of us passed him out to the other one. I cannot remember any . . . anything like that, who pas
sed him to who, sir.”
“Did you, all three of you, go to the concrete blocks?”
“Yes, sir. I thought at that time, I thought she was looking for a jar for the tadpoles,” she was off again. “I never mentioned that to Mr. Bryson but I thought she was looking for a jar for the tadpoles.”
“Yes.”
“And when she . . .”
Harvey Robson interrupted. “Just go slowly. What happened when you got to the concrete blocks?”
“She told him to lie down. She says, ‘You have got to lie down for the lady to come with the sweets,’ and then I again . . .”
“Wait, yes?”
“Then again I asked her what she was talking about. I asked her what she was talking about and she just replied ‘nebby’ again.”
Mr. Justice Cusack broke in. “Mr. Harvey Robson,” he said, “do you think you could go very slowly at this stage? I don’t only want to make notes, I want to be able to look up as well.”
“My Lord, yes. Now, quite slowly, May, what happened after that? Don’t rush on but just stop in sentences, do you see?”
The next minutes were among the most remarkable of the trial: Mary, watching the Judge and closely and carefully adjusting her rate of speech to the speed at which he was able to take notes, gave her evidence with a precision rarely achieved in court by even the most experienced witnesses. “Norma Bell,” she dictated slowly, “told him to put his neck up and put his neck down . . .”
“Now stop there,” said Harvey Robson. “Was he still standing up then or was he on the ground?”
“He was on the ground, sir.”
“Yes?”
“And she—I cannot remember if she squeezed his neck with two hands or one hand, sir.”
“Yes?”
“And there was some boys coming along and she got up and she sat on the square slab, the big one, and Brian was sitting down or something and the dog was there.”
“Yes, which dog was that?”
“Lassie. And I was frightened. I never—and I was just in a kind of a trance, and I says, ‘if you don’t get away I will set the dog on you.’”
“To the boys?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, and did the boys go away?”
