by Gitta Sereny
“I know about him dying,” Mary answered, “because I helped to look for him when he was missing. I was with Pat Howe and Norma.”
“Where were you in the afternoon?” Mr. Dobson asked.
“Playing. I played with Norma.”
“Did you go down to the railway near the concrete blocks that day?”
“No, I never went there. I never go there. I have only been there once a long time ago. I went down to the car park with Pat and Norma when we were looking for Brian.”
“Did you see Brian that day?”
“Yes, about half-past twelve. He was playing with his brother in Whitehouse Road.”
“I have reason to believe that about 3:45 P.M. that day you went to the concrete blocks with Norma and you saw Brian Howe between the blocks.”
“I never,” she said.
“Where did you go with your dog?” Detective-Inspector Laggan asked.
“I went to the park.”
“Who were you with?”
“I was by myself.”
“Are you sure you were by yourself?”
“No, I remember, I was with Norma.”
“Did you see anyone you know in the park?”
“No, there was just a man and a woman with a pram.”
“When did you come back?”
“About half-past four. I sat on Maxine’s step.”
“What were you wearing that day?”
“This black dress [she indicated the one she had on] and my white blouse.”
“I have reason to believe you were wearing your gray dress that day,” said Detective-Inspector Laggan.
“No, I wasn’t,” Mary answered. “I haven’t worn it for weeks.”
“Did you play with Brian very much?”
“I never played with him. He’s only little. I sometimes brought him from the Nursery. That was before the school holidays.”
“I have reason to believe that when you were near the blocks with Norma a man shouted at some children who were nearby and you both ran away from where Brian was lying in the grass. This man will probably know you.”
“He would have to have good eyesight,” she replied.
“Why would he need good eyesight?” Chief-Inspector Dobson asked quickly.
“Because he was . . .”—she paused for a few seconds—“clever to see me,” she continued, “when I wasn’t there. I am going home,” she said then and got up.
“You can’t go home yet,” Chief-Inspector Dobson said.
“I’ll phone for some solicitors,” she said, “they’ll get me out. This is being brainwashed.”
“I have reason to believe that, when you were in the blocks with Norma, you showed her something which you said you had done something to Brian with,” Chief-Inspector Dobson continued. “Then you hid it.”
“I never,” she said.
“Norma showed me where this thing was. I now have it,” the Chief-Inspector told her.
“What was it?” Mary said. “I’ll kill her.”
“Do you wish to make a written statement saying where you were that day?” Mr. Dobson asked.
“I am making no statements,” Mary answered. “I have made lots of statements. It’s always me you come for. Norma’s a liar, she always tries to get me into trouble.”
“The whole interview,” Mr. Dobson recalled later, “had gone very slowly. My first impression of her was that she was a ‘kook’—she was very defensive, fidgeting, she kept jumping up saying she was going, she wasn’t staying there. She sat silent for intervals and questions had to be repeated to her. At one stage I received a telephone call and she said, ‘Is this place bugged?’ And in the end she had admitted nothing. I had her there half the night—three hours—and she just stuck to her story; she didn’t know a thing. Of course, it could have been true. It could have been Norma doing it all. At that time we had not yet made the connection with the sandpit incident, nor with Martin Brown. At 3:30 A.M. we sent Mary back home.”
That morning, 5 August, at eleven A.M., Mr. Dobson took Norma Bell once more to the place where Brian had been found and asked her again to lie down in the position in which she had seen Brian. “We had to make sure—it’s always a matter of asking the same things over and over. But she lay down in exactly the same position—no change.”
Norma had lunch in the policewoman’s office, and at 1:45 P.M. Mr. Dobson saw her again at the West End police station. “Before we could ask her anything, she said, ‘I want to tell you what I missed out of my statement last night. What I told you is true, every bit, but I was there three times.’” Mr. Dobson cautioned her again and asked her whether she wanted to make a written statement about this.
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t want anybody here, not my dad, just you.”
“Detective-Constable Thompson will have to be here.”
“All right,” she answered, “he’s one of your men.”
“She was very excited,” Mr. Dobson said. “Falling over herself wanting to be helpful. Her face looked drawn now, she was twitchy, wriggling in her seat, again looking from one side of the room to the other even though there was no one there and nothing to look at.”
Norma gave Mr. Dobson what was to be her fourth statement:
I want you to write my statement down, I don’t want my dad here, but your men can come in. The statement I made yesterday was all true but I missed the first bit out. I want to tell you all the truth now. Last Wednesday about 1 o’clock I was playing with May and about 3 o’clock we saw Brian Howe playing with his brother. They were playing with two little lassies on bikes. They live on the corner of Crosshill Road and Whitehouse Road. They were beside the garden gate and his brother gave Brian a pair of scissors. We both went with Brian. May said we would take him. We went down Crosshill Road, and through the hole in the fence near Dixon’s shop. We went over the railway lines. I had taken the scissors off Brian in the street and I carried them. We climbed over the fence at the bottom of the bank, then over the fence at the other side. I climbed over first and May bunked the bairn over. May said, ‘Look at that big tank, we’ll all get in.’ The tank was further along from the blocks. There was a hole in the side of the tank. May got in first, I bunked Brian up to May, then I got in. It had a stinky smell so we all got out again. May then said, ‘The blocks Norma howay,’ and we went along to the blocks. Then May said to Brian, ‘Lift up your neck’. Just when she said that there were some boys playing around and Lassie, Brian Howe’s dog was barking. She had followed us down. May said to them, ‘Get away or I will set the dog on you’. The boys went away. May said to Brian again, ‘Lift up your neck’. She put her two hands on his neck, she said there was two lumps you had to squeeze right up. She said she meant to harm him. She got him down on the grass and she seemed to go all funny, you could tell there was something the matter with her. She kept on struggling with him and he was struggling and trying to get her hands away. She left go of him and I could hear him gasping. She squeezed his neck again and I said, ‘May, leave the baby alone,’ but she wouldn’t. She said to me, ‘My hands are getting thick, take over.’ Then I ran away. I went back the way we had come.
I went into Whitehouse Road where I played with Linda Routledge and the other kids I told you about. About twenty minutes after, May come up and asked me to go back down. I forgot to tell you that when I ran away and left Brian and May, I left the scissors on the grass. We went round by the car park. We didn’t take the dog that time. That was when I tripped over Brian’s head like I told you in the other statement. On the way down May found a razor blade on the path. I didn’t tell you before that when I lifted Brian’s head and shoulders up a bit and patted his back but his hand fell on one side and I layed him down again. I felt his pulse but it wasn’t going up and down. May pressed the razor blade down on Brian’s belly a few times in the same place. She lifted his jersey and that’s when she did it. I didn’t see any blood. That was when she hid the razor blade and said, ‘Don’t tell your dad or I’ll get wro
ng’. The scissors were in the corner near the blocks beside Brian’s feet where I left them. We went back to Whitehouse Road, May went away and I went into the house. About 5 o’clock I saw May outside. She had just had her tea. We took her dog down to the car park again and then went to see the bairn again. May said she would make him baldy and she cut a lump of hair off his head near the front, she put it on the grass above his head. She pressed the scissors onto his belly a few times but not hard. That was when the man shouted at them kids and she hadn’t time to cut any more hair off before we ran away. The hair she put on the grass was separated a bit. She put the scissors on the grass somewhere beside him on the side where his dirty hand was. We went onto Scotswood Road and back up to Whitehouse Road. I saw May again about a quarter to seven when we looked for Brian with Pat.
“Could you draw Brian and put in the place where Mary pressed the razor blade?” asked Chief-Inspector Dobson.
She drew a little body lying with legs spread, and arms outstretched. There is a line drawn across just above where the bellybutton would be and there are some marks (some bigger, some smaller) above it and several more below.
“The top marks are where she pressed the scissors and the bottom ones where she pressed the razor blade.”
Norma finished at 3:30 P.M. “We left her with the policewomen in their office. Dr. Tomlinson and I re-examined Brian’s body,” Mr. Dobson says. “We now saw five faint but clearly outlined marks, slightly brown at the edges [on Brian’s belly] which had not been visible at the post mortem examination on 1 August. We discussed this at great length. It was the first time in either the pathologist’s or my own experience that we had found incisions which were made so freshly after death that they were invisible until decomposition set in. I don’t know whether this was the first time anywhere—probably not. But it must be very rare indeed.”
The marks—obviously razor cuts—were later to be described as appearing to form a letter, or letters: three of them looked like the letter “N,” but in conjunction with the fourth one there also seemed to be an attempt to transform it into the letter “M.” (An interesting possible parallel to this emerged later when a handwriting analysis of the “We Murder” notes concluded that the girls had each written consecutive letters of some words or had alternately written the words of the notes. See here.)
At 4:30 P.M. that afternoon, Norma was again taken to the “Tin Lizzie” and asked to point out the tanks and the two points where she claimed to have crossed the railway with Mary and Brian. At 4:45, at West End police station (only minutes away by car) Mr. Dobson confronted Norma with eight pairs of scissors. “Can you tell me if any of these are the ones Brian had last Wednesday when you took him to the blocks?” he asked.
Norma immediately picked up the scissors which had been found. “She threw them on the desk and said, ‘That’s them.’”
“I saw her again several times on 6 August,” said Mr. Dobson, “both at the Children’s Remand Home and at West End police station. I asked the same questions over and over. She never backtracked an inch. Either she was a masterful liar or she was speaking the truth.”
Brian Howe was buried on 7 August, a brilliant, hot summer day.
“There were at least two hundred people,” Mr. Dobson says. “Masses of flowers. A lot of people cried who had nothing to do with Brian’s immediate family. It was very sad.
“Mary Bell was standing in front of the Howes’ house when the coffin was brought out. I was, of course, watching her. And it was when I saw her there that I knew I did not dare risk another day. She stood there, laughing. Laughing and rubbing her hands. I thought, My God, I’ve got to bring her in, she’ll do another one.”
Mary’s mother Elizabeth Bell, called Betty, was still away on one of her regular trips—people said—to Glasgow. Billy Bell had been summoned that afternoon by the Durham police to answer some questions on a minor charge that was pending against him. It turned out that his sister Audrey, loyal as ever, had gone with him.
“I sent a woman police sergeant at 4:30 P.M. to get Mary,” Mr. Dobson says. “We had expected that Billy Bell’s sister would be there to look after the other children. When the policewoman realized that she had gone along to Durham, she brought all the children in. We settled the other three in another office with some toys and tea and a policewoman to look after them until their aunt came to get them later that night.”
Chief-Inspector Dobson saw Mary in his office as before. “She was very apprehensive,” he said. “She was pale and tense. She gave me the impression that she knew the time of reckoning had come.” He cautioned her again and asked her first to tell him which dress she had worn on Wednesday, 31 July.
“I had my gray one on part of the day, but I changed into my black one sometime in the afternoon,” she said. “I want to tell you the truth but I’ll get wrong,” she added a moment later.
“Do you mean that it is not true that you changed your dress?”
“No,” she said, “I mean about when I was there when Brian died.”
Mr. Dobson stopped her at this point and telephoned the Newcastle General Hospital—just a few blocks away—to ask that a Nursing Sister be sent over to sit with Mary while she would make what Mr. Dobson was certain would turn out to be the decisive statement. As a rule (in Britain) minors under sixteen years are not questioned about a crime unless a parent or an independent person of the same sex is present.
Sister H. said she was “a bit shaken when they said what it was for, but you know, I didn’t have to do anything: I just sat there.”
Chief-Inspector Dobson asked Mary whether she wanted to make a written statement, and she said, “Yes.”
I, Mary Flora Bell wish to make a statement. I want someone to write down what I have to say. I have been told that I need not say anything unless I wish to do so, but that whatever I say may be given in evidence.
Signed: Mary F. Bell
Brian was in his front street and me and Norma were walking along towards him. We walked past him and Norma says, ‘are you coming to the shop Brian’ and I says, ‘Norma, you’ve got no money, how can you go to the shop. Where are you getting it from?’ She says, ‘nebby’ (Keep your nose clean). Little Brian followed and Norma says, ‘walk up in front’. I wanted Brian to go home, but Norma kept coughing so Brian wouldn’t hear us. We went down Crosshill Road with Brian still in front of us. There was this coloured boy and Norma tried to start a fight with him. She said, ‘Darkie, whitewash, it’s time you got washed.’ The big brother came out and hit her. She shouted, ‘Howay, put your dukes up.’ The lad walked away and looked at her as though she was daft. We went beside Dixon’s shop and climbed over the railings, I mean through a hole and over the railway. Then I said. ‘Norma, where are you going?’ and Norma said, ‘Do you know that little pool where the tadpoles are?’ When we got there, there was a big, long tank with a big, round hole with little holes round it. Norma says to Brian, ‘Are you coming in here because there’s a lady coming on the Number 82 and she’s got boxes of sweets and that.’ We all got inside, then Brian started to cry and Norma asked him if he had a sore throat. She started to squeeze his throat and he started to cry. She said, ‘This isn’t where the lady comes, it’s over there, by them big blocks.’ We went over to the blocks and she says, ‘Ar—you’ll have to lie down’ and he lay down beside the blocks where he was found. Norma says, ‘Put your neck up’ and he did. Then she got hold of his neck and said ‘Put it down’. She started to feel up and down his neck. She squeezed it hard, you could tell it was hard because her finger tips were going white. Brian was struggling, and I was pulling her shoulders but she went mad. I was pulling her chin up but she screamed at me. By this time she had banged Brian’s head on some wood or corner of wood and Brian was lying senseless. His face was all white and bluey and his eyes were open. His lips were purplish and had all like slaver on, it turned into something like fluff. Norma covered him up and I said, ‘Norma, I’ve got nothing to do with this, I should tell on
you, but I’ll not.’ Little Lassie was there and it was crying and she said, ‘Don’t you start or I’ll do the same to you.’ It still cried and she went to get hold of its throat but it growled at her. She said, ‘now, now, don’t be hasty.’ We went home and I took little Lassie home an all. Norma was acting kind of funny and making twitchy faces and spreading her fingers out. She said, ‘This is the first but it’ll not be the last.’ I was frightened then. I carried Lassie and put her down over the railway and we went up Crosswood Road way. Norma went into the house and she got a pair of scissors and she put them down her pants. She says, ‘go and get a pen’. I said ‘No, what for.’ She says, ‘To write a note on his stomach’, and I wouldn’t get the pen. She had a Gillette razor blade. It had Gillette on. We went back to the blocks and Norma cut his hair. She tried to cut his leg and his ear with the blade. She tried to show me it was sharp, she took the top of her dress where it was raggie and cut it, it made a slit. A man come down the railway bank with a little girl with long, blonde hair, he had a red checked shirt on and blue denim jeans. I walked away. She hid the razor blade under a big, square concrete block. She left the scissors beside him. She got out before me over the grass on to Scotswood Road. I couldn’t run on the grass cos I just had my black slippers on. When we got along a bit she says, ‘May, you shouldn’t have done it cos you’ll get into trouble’, and I hadn’t done nothing I haven’t got the guts. I couldn’t kill a bird by the neck or throat or anything, it’s horrible that. We went up the steps and went home, I was nearly crying. I said, if Pat finds out she’ll kill you, never mind killing Brian cos Pat’s more like a tomboy. She’s always climbing in the old buildings and that. Later on I was helping to look for Brian and I was trying to let on to Pat that I knew where he was on the blocks, but Norma said, ‘he’ll not be over there, he never goes there,’ and she convinced Pat he wasn’t there. I got shouted in about half past seven and I stayed in. I got woke up about half past eleven and we stood at the door as Brian had been found. The other day Norma wanted to get put in a home. She says will you run away with us and I said no. She said if you get put in a home and you feed the little ones and murder them then run away again.