by Gitta Sereny
She signed the statement at 6:55 P.M.
I have read the above statement and I have been told that I can correct, alter or add anything I wish. This statement is true, I have made it of my own free will.
Mary Flora Bell
“Do you know it’s wrong to squeeze a little boy’s throat?” Chief-Inspector Dobson asked.
“Yes,” she replied, “it’s worse than Harry Roberts; he only did train jobs.”3
“She felt nothing,” said Sister H. “I’ve never seen anything like it. She said all those awful things they had done but she didn’t feel a thing. I felt she was a very intelligent child. But she didn’t seem like a child at all. Her vocabulary—I have a boy of eleven—he couldn’t use the kind of words she used. All that evening I repeated to myself what I’d heard. And even so, I couldn’t believe it . . .”
Sometime during those two hours Chief-Inspector Dobson had brought up Martin Brown. “It was in my mind from the beginning that there was some connection between Martin’s and Brian’s deaths,” he said. “That afternoon I just told her that I believed she and Norma had broken in the Nursery School and written the notes and she admitted it at once. But that was all I said about it that day: I was having my team re-interview all the people concerned: it was necessary to get far more details than were available so far if we were going to look at it as a possible murder; we had to start all over again and get the facts.”
At eight P.M. that night he charged Mary. “I am arresting you on a charge of murdering Brian Edward Howe on 31 July 1968,” he said, and she answered, “That’s all right with me.”
At 8:30 P.M. Norma was brought in. “Do you know it’s wrong to squeeze a little boy’s throat?” he asked and she said, “Yes.” When he told her he was arresting her on the charge of murdering Brian she replied angrily, “I never. I’ll pay you back for this.”
Ten minutes later he saw the two girls together. “Do you wish to say anything in answer to the charge? You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so. But whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. You are charged as follows: In the city and county of Newcastle upon Tyne on Wednesday, 31 July 1968, you did murder Brian Edward Howe contrary to common law.”
This time Mary said nothing but Norma said again, “I never, you know,” and cried.
* * *
1 Now Superintendent.
2 No paper carried such a report.
3 Harry Roberts was actually found guilty, on 12 December 1966, of murdering three policemen in Shepherds Bush, London.
CHAPTER FOUR
REMAND
“I Hope Me Mum Won’t Have to Pay a Fine”
THE CELLS AT the Newcastle West End police station, used only for overnight detentions, are along a narrow corridor on the ground floor at the very back of the building. There are six of them, about eight-foot square, each with a cot and small ceiling light. A door from the cells leads to the “washroom”—which has a sink and a gas ring for making hot drinks.
The two girls spent the first night after their arrest in two small rooms at the end of another little passageway that leads from this washroom to the main office. These rooms, specifically intended for juveniles who require care and observation, are considerably less isolated and lighter than the “cells,” because, if youngsters for any reason have to be kept there overnight, the doors to the brightly lit corridor are usually kept open, with a woman police officer sitting just outside.
Two policewomen, Pauline Z. and Lilian Y., were assigned to guard Mary and Norma that night. “We came on at ten,” Pauline recalls. “When we arrived they were chatting away—I think they were both lying on a cot in one of the rooms. They told us right away that they’d had fish and chips for supper. ‘Mr. Dobson bought them for us,’ Mary said—sort of proudly, you know. We took them along to wash their faces and hands—there wasn’t anything for them to change into for the night but we tried to settle them down as comfortably as possible. It wasn’t bad,” Pauline said. She is a humorous young woman with a direct and warm personality. “’Course, it was a hot night, and they were that wrought up—they couldn’t sleep. I sat with Mary, and Lil sat with Norma.” She shook her head. “But oh, it was a night. They kept shouting to each other through the doors. . . .”
“They made such a racket,” Policewoman Y. said. “We finally told them to shut up. At one moment I heard Mary shout, ‘I’ll kill my mother.’”
“I am not sure she said that,” said Pauline. “It may have been ‘I’ll kick my mother.’”
“They were going to be charged in Court the next morning. They were charged twice, you see—first in the ordinary Magistrates’ Court that next morning, Thursday, and then the Wednesday afterwards in Juvenile Court because Juvenile Court only sits once a week. Mary didn’t talk much to me about the case that night. She wore broken shoes, and she was more concerned about that than anything else. ‘I told Mum I needed new shoes,’ she said. ‘I sent her a message. I just hope she’ll get new ones to me. What will people think if they see me like this?’ I kept on hoping she’d go to sleep. At one moment I said, ‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’ and I sort of chatted to her quietly for a bit and after a while she said that she was frightened she’d wet her bed. ‘I usually do,’ she said. I told her not to worry about it but she did—she kept going to the bathroom. She didn’t wet her bed. But she didn’t really sleep either.
“Later on that night,” Pauline went on, “I was sitting in the chair at the foot of her bunk and she was lying on it—she suddenly started singing. Do you know The Northumberland Mining Song?1 Cilia Black sings it. She knew every word of it, she had it absolutely right. She has a very good voice.” Again Pauline shook her head. “I can’t explain, but to hear that kid sing like that in those cells, that night . . .”
Oh, you are a mucky kid
dirty as a dustbin lid
when he hears the things you did
you’ll get a belt from your Da
You look so scruffy lying there
strawberry jam tats in your hair
’tho in the world you haven’t a care
and I have got so many
Oh you have your father’s face
you’re growing up a real hard case
but there’s not a one can take your place
so go to sleep, for mammy.
“That’s what she sang and she hardly slept at all.”
Mary’s mother was not in Court for her appearance the next morning but the children were not unsupported: Billy Bell, his sister, and Mary’s grandmother from Glasgow came. And so did Norma’s parents. The children were seen about ten minutes before the normal Court convened, and, as the magistrates sat as a Juvenile Court, the papers would report only that two juveniles had been remanded in custody for the murder of Brian Howe and the room was empty except for those directly involved.
“It took about three minutes,” Mr. Dobson said. “The magistrates granted the application for legal aid and then both girls were taken to Remand Homes: Mary to Seaham and Norma to Carlisle. The decision where to send them was mainly based on where there was space, and, of course, where there were adequate security provisions.”
The police as well as the Children’s authorities were stunned. “I’d give my eyeteeth if it hadn’t been children murdered and children concerned in it,” Mr. Dobson was to say shortly afterwards.
“One could hardly take it in, and it became more unreal, more unbelievable every day,” said Brian Roycroft, Children’s Officer2 for Newcastle. A young man of exceptional ability and initiative, he had only taken over his job in June and had hardly had the time to get the reins into his hands or familiarize himself with individual family situations.
Newcastle Welfare authorities were familiar with the circumstances of Norma Bell’s family. Not because any of them had ever been in trouble with the law—they hadn’t. But because they were a family of eleven children who, with several serious illnesses and accidents in rap
id succession, had had more than their share of troubles and were receiving help from various departments.
Brian Roycroft was to discover however that there was very little in the files about Mary Bell’s family. This absence of information and Mary’s parents’ distrust and resentment of “Authority,” their reluctance to cooperate in the subsequent inquiries into her background by police, social workers, and psychiatrists, were to be one of the main stumbling blocks in the efforts to find explanations for Mary’s actions and, later, ways to help her.
On 14 August the girls appeared in Juvenile Court and were remanded again. Again Norma’s parents and Mary’s relatives were in Court: Mary’s mother, too, had been found in Glasgow and was persuaded to attend.
When it was over, Norma was taken back to Carlisle and Mary went to Milton House, Croydon, near London.
“It was a ridiculous performance: I took her to Croydon; me and Cathy V.,” said Policewoman Lynn W., a comfortable and cheerful-looking girl. “Here we were, at the railway station with this kid everybody was on about, how dangerous she was and how the whole country would be up in arms if she got away and all that, and then there was all this hargie-bargie about getting a private compartment on the train: there wasn’t the money for it—£25. You wouldn’t believe it, would you? If it hadn’t been that we knew the stationmaster, who got us one anyway, I don’t really know what we would have done. We got settled, you know, pulled down the curtains and all that so nobody could see in. Mary—she’d been zooming to and fro between the window and her seat and suddenly she said, ‘I hope me mum won’t have to pay a fine.’ I thought that was a funny thing to say for a kid who was supposed to have killed two little boys. But she meant it, you know, that’s what she was worrying about.
“Cathy went to get some eats, you know, orange drinks and sandwiches and all. (Cathy didn’t like May—I think May knew.) She was cheeky you know—at first I didn’t like her either. Anyway, after Cathy went, she suddenly sat still in her seat. I looked at her and I suddenly thought, why, she’s nothing but a little kid, and she suddenly looked all pale and tired and I put my arm around her. You know, she’d been all excited, and nobody would have thought she had a thing on her mind, but then she leaned against me, you know, she went all limp, soft you know, and I . . . well, as I said, I hadn’t liked her at first but, I don’t know how to explain it, I forgot all that, and she had lice crawling all over her head and down her collar and shoulders, and I knew they’d get on me. . . .” She laughed. “I did catch one, too . . . and I just held her and she started to talk about having to go back into Court the next week. You know, they have to go on remand every week until the trial. ‘Me mum will be there,’ she said. ‘I hope me mum won’t be too upset.’ ‘She was upset this morning,’ I said, ‘she was crying.’ ‘I know she was, but she didn’t mean it. I think she doesn’t like me. I’m sure she doesn’t. She hates me.’ ‘She’s your own mum,’ I said, ‘she must love you.’ ‘If she loves me, why did she leave?’ she said then.
“I didn’t know what she meant, so I didn’t say anything. She asked me what I did before becoming a policewoman, and I said I was a nurse. She asked me where I worked and I said in the children’s ward at Newcastle General Hospital. ‘You did?’ she said. ‘I’ve been in the hospital a couple of times, but it was long ago.’ I asked her what she’d been in for, but she wouldn’t say. She clammed up then. I never knew why. I’ve thought about her a lot,” Lynn added. “She was a canny kid. I didn’t like her at first,” again she sounded puzzled about her own reaction, “but later . . . I think I could have become very fond of her. She did that to one: one thought about her. But,” she added slowly, “I think that if I had become more involved with her, I would have been hurt.”
A report from Croydon says that “Mary’s head was thick with lice when she arrived . . . she has hundreds of flits.” Her first night there she couldn’t go to sleep and was crying. She said she felt she was being strangled.
During that week at Croydon, on 16 August, Mary had a first interview with Dr. Robert Orton, specialist in psychological medicine at Newcastle Royal Victoria Infirmary. Although not specifically a child psychiatrist, Dr. Orton has had considerable experience with severely disturbed children. “Throughout the interview,” he said later, “she was chirpy, bright, and a bit cheeky.”
“Cheeky” was the word most people applied to her. “She called me by my first name,” said Policewoman Constance U., who a few days later brought Mary back from Croydon. “I told her off and no mistake—cheeky.” Policewoman U. made no bones about disliking Mary, and Mary later told someone she didn’t like her either. (“She always knew who liked her and who didn’t,” said Lynn W. “It was uncanny.”)
Dr. Orton was immediately aware of the complete lack in Mary of one dimension of feeling: “I asked her of course to tell me about the events of 31 July. ‘I never done anything,’ she said. ‘It was Norma. I tried to pull her off but she screamed and I didn’t want to hurt her. I says to Norma I should tell the police, but I’m not.’ When I asked her what she thought might happen to her,” Dr. Orton continued, “she replied, ‘I might get put in an Approved School. I have been disgusted with myself,’ and added immediately, ‘I have been put away twice, that is enough.”
“‘What do you mean by that?’ I asked. ‘I was a week in Seaham in the Remand Home,’ she said, ‘and then two days in Croydon, I’ve had enough punishment.’”
On 21 August the girls were remanded for the third time. “I had Mary in that day,” Mr. Dobson recalls. “Our investigation of the death of Martin Brown was completed. And I put it to her that I believed either she or Norma had killed Martin. She denied it. Meanwhile I had also learned more about the mysterious accident to John G. in May. I had it on very good authority that Mary and Norma had taken John for a walk that day and Mary had thrown a sand shoe up the old bank on top of the air raid shelter. Then—so my information went—she told John to run up and get it, that’s how she got him up there. And then she is supposed to have tripped him up and he fell the seven feet down onto the concrete footpath. That’s what I’d been told. I put it to her that she had pushed little Johnny G. down from the air raid shelter. But she denied that too.”
In that connection it is interesting to compare Norma’s statement to the police on 12 May (as quoted here) and a “news” story slightly different in important details which she wrote in her “Newsbook” at school one day later:
On Saturday my friend Mary Bell and I decided to go for a walk to the carpark and we were playing on the grass for 15 minutes [she wrote]. Then Mary said, ‘Would you like to go down to Vickers Armstrongs?’ So I went. It is only behind the carpark. Then I said, ‘Have you ever been inside the dark passage?’ May said ‘yes, I always go inside.’ I said to her ‘Come and we will go inside again’, so then we went in. On the floor was a little boy and his head was split wide open. I picked him up and it was little John G. I stood John up and then he fell down and his head began to bleed more. He was screaming. Then I tried to speak to him but he could not. I helped John out of the dark passage and I had to push him up to get on to the hill he was sick all over; I said to May are you going to help because he is your own Cousin, so she helped him on to the grass. . . .
(John G. is Mary’s cousin. In all fairness to Mary it should be said that John’s mother, who subsequently attended the final day of Mary’s trial, waved good-bye to her and showed considerable sorrow and affection—not the attitude of someone who thought Mary had injured her child.)
Anthony Smith, a highly experienced solicitor who had previously acted very successfully for Norma Bell’s family in an accident claim involving one of their sons, had instructed R. P. (Roddy) Smith,3 one of the youngest and brightest Q.C.s4 in the country, to act as Norma’s counsel. On 26 August they applied to Judge in Chambers (in London) for bail and stated that the purpose of bail would be that Norma would enter a mental hospital for observation. Bail was granted with this condition, and Norma consequentl
y spent the three and a half months of her remand living as a patient in the care of doctors and nurses in the children’s wing of the Prudhoe Monkton Mental Hospital five miles from Newcastle. The superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Ian Frazer, was to be the only psychiatrist to examine her and the only medical expert to be called to testify about her at the trial.
Mary’s solicitor was a young man, David Bryson, who had originally been retained to represent her in the matter of the breaking in at the Woodland Crescent Nursery. He was a man of integrity and humility who became deeply and agonizingly involved with this case and, throughout the months of preparation, the weeks of trial, and the following year, gave unsparingly of his time and of himself.
Counsel instructed to represent Mary was J. Harvey Robson, a particularly kind and courteous man who in the 1950s served as Attorney General in the Southern Cameroons and has had a long and distinguished career as a barrister in northeast England. Perhaps more than any of the other principals Mr. Robson, in his handling of the case, was to project gentleness and sympathy for all concerned. Nothing he or anyone else could have done could have changed the eventual legal outcome for Mary.
Mary was sent to Seaham Remand Home where she spent the next three and a half months with other girls who were in trouble with the law (and among whom she figured as a star). She was therefore—if not factually, certainly psychologically—immediately in a quasi-punitive situation. The Remand Homes were at that time run not by the Children’s Department but by the Prison Department.