by Gitta Sereny
“Do you remember,” asked Mr. Smith, “when Mr. Dobson went to the blocks with you . . . and you were able to show him where the razor blade was?”
“That’s ’cos Mary hid it there ’cos she said she got it out of the scullery.”
“She said what?” This was completely new to Mr. Smith.
“She got it out of her scullery,” Norma repeated sullenly.
“Do you remember,” Mr. Smith continued, “that you told Mr. Dobson that May found the razor on the way down, on the path to the ‘Tin Lizzie’?”
“Yes, I told a lie.”
“Why did you tell that lie to Mr. Dobson?”
“I don’t know why. I was frightened.”
“Who were you frightened of?” She began to squirm. “What were you frightened of?” Mr. Smith insisted. “Norma, just think: why did you tell Mr. Dobson that May found the razor blade on the path when you tell the Court now that May had said she had got it from her scullery?”
“She did,” Norma said stubbornly. “I know I told Mr. Dobson a lie.”
Her capacity for thinking ahead being very limited, she had now decided that she wanted to rid herself of a lie: she didn’t know why, and it would never have occurred to her that admitting to a lie would bring about a barrage of further questions. Even if it had, it is doubtful that she could have visualized this consequence sufficiently to make a decision whether to face or avoid it. All through the trial her parents had said to her again and again, “Now you tell the truth about everything: tell them everything,” and, in her ineffectual and impulsive way that is what she was now trying to do. Norma was as worried about the razor blade as she had been about the scissors. What was happening in Norma’s mind was that the actual killing of these two boys was finally such an enormity to her that she could not face it at all. When she talked about it, it was, in a sense, as if she was describing fiction—something impossible, certainly something she herself had nothing to do with. Her worst moments on the witness stand were when she was questioned on matters where—because the actual evidence proved it—she had to admit that she had been involved, such as the “We Murder” notes. The fact that Brian had been cut with the razor blade and made “baldy” with the scissors was in a sense more real to her than his death. And, whether true or not, it was essential to her—not from the point of view of innocence or guilt—but to her as a person, to separate herself from anything that had been done with these two objects.
Mr. Smith was in a difficult position: for, while it was his duty to protect his client’s interest, at the same time, once she had publicly admitted to a lie on a vital point (never forgetting that Mary, in her police statements, had insisted that it was Norma who had “cut” Brian with the razor blade), he could do no less than investigate her retraction. He could have requested a recess to allow him to discuss it with her in private: electing instead to question her in court was a gamble, but at the same time it was a public affirmation of his faith in his client—and it paid off.
“Why [did you tell a lie]?” he asked her.
“I don’t know.”
“You say, ‘she found it on the path.’” He was now taking her back to her lie: again a gamble, for it could confuse her and, if it hadn’t been a lie, entangle her further. On the other hand, if it was a lie, as she said, he was forcing her to deny her original statement again, to admit again to the lie and thus eventually, he must have hoped, be brought to say why she told it.
“’Cos May wanted it found on the path. If we were caught, she wanted it found on the path.”
“‘May wanted it found on the path if we were caught’?” the Judge repeated, but neither this nor Norma’s subsequent information, equally the result of intricate childish reasoning, was ever clearly understood.
“How do you know she wanted it found on the path?” asked Mr. Smith.
“’Cos May and me were talking together.”
“What did Mary say?”
“This was a few days after Martin”—she caught herself—“Brian died,” she said quickly.
“After Brian died you and May were talking?”
“Yes.”
“What did Mary say about the razor blade?”
“She wanted—she didn’t want it to be a razor blade out of her house.” (One wondered, was Mary afraid of her parents or was she trying to protect them?)
“Well, whose idea was it to say that the razor had been found on the path?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Mary told me to.”
“Well now, at one stage you told Mr. Dobson that you had seen the razor blade on Brian’s belly.”
“That’s right, that’s a lie.”
“Was that true?”
“No, it’s a lie.”
“Did you know anything about the razor blade being used on Brian’s belly?”
“No.”
“Did you ever see . . .?”
Mr. Justice Cusack interrupted. “What made you say that, then, to Mr. Dobson,” he asked, “that you had seen the blade being pressed on his belly? What made you say that?”
“Mary wanted to.”
In her third statement to the police Norma had said, as she was saying now, that Mary had told her that she “had cut his belly.” (“And she pulled up his jumper and I saw a tiny red mark somewhere on his belly,” she had stated.) In her fourth and final statement she had changed her story. She said then that, on their second visit to the “Tin Lizzie,” Mary had found a razor blade on the path. When they got back to where Brian was, he was lying there on his back with his arm stretched out. She, Norma, had “lifted his head and shoulders up a bit and patted his back.” But his hand fell on one side and she laid him down again, she had continued. She said she had felt his pulse but “it wasn’t going up and down.” “Mary pressed the razor blade down on Brian’s belly a few times in the same place,” she had gone on. “She lifted his jersey and that’s when she did it. 1 didn’t see any blood.” (The fact that a cut inflicted after death does not bleed cannot be considered common knowledge.) “That was when she [Mary] hid the razor blade and said, ‘Don’t tell your Dad or I’ll get wrong,’” she had continued in her statement (page 43). The medical re-examination of Brian’s body immediately following this fourth statement disclosed the fine lines which had previously not been noticed.
What Norma was now saying in Court was that all this had been a lie and that she had never seen Mary touch Brian’s body with a razor blade, that therefore she hadn’t been there when anything final was done to Brian; that, for some mysterious reason, it was Mary who wanted it to be known that she had cut his belly and told her so. In cross-examination to Harvey Robson, she affirmed again that she herself had been almost totally uninvolved.
“Did you do any cutting of it [Brian’s hair] at all?” Mr. Robson asked.
“I was frightened,” she said again, “I would not. I didn’t like to because I was frightened.”
“. . . When you went back the first time,” Mr. Robson asked a little later, “did you ask Mary to get a pen?”
“I never asked her at all, I never asked her.”
“Either the first or second time?”
“I never asked her at any time. I never.”
“. . . Did Mary say to you, after you had gone away—after, when you were going away on the first occasion, ‘Norma, I have got nothing to do with this’?”
“No, she never says nothing, because she was the leader. She was the leader of everything.”
Mary, the next day, told about going back to the “Tin Lizzie” the third time—the time Norma said Mary had used the scissors to cut off some of Brian’s hair to “make him baldy” and—though Norma had only mentioned this once, in her third statement to the police, but never in her examination-in-chief—“had put some purple flowers on top of the grass that was over Brian. . . .”
“. . . Er—Norma had asked me if I would come back and I just says ‘Yes’ because at that time she was going back to cover him with those, you know, those re
eds.” She thought she’d been in the garden at that time and then they had gone “the car park way.”
“And what did you do when you got back to the blocks?”
“Norma asked us if I would pick the reeds up with her and I did.”
“Pick the what up?” asked the Judge.
“The reeds, the—like reeds, big like stocks with little purply flowery things on them,” Mary liked explaining things to the Judge.
“And what did you do with those?”
“I was lifting them up and Norma dropped them on top of Brian and I dropped some.” Once again, this had sounded credible, for in a way this manner of “burying” little Brian would have been part of the “game.” But Mary, under cross-examination on the following day, also said—in a different way—that she had been uninvolved.
“I asked you before,” Mr. Lyons said to her, “why you did not tell the boys [five boys who, both girls said, had come toward the blocks when they were there with little Brian Howe before he was dead] what Norma was doing. And you said you were frightened.”
“Yes.”
“But you were not frightened to shout at the boys, were you?”
“No. . . .”
“. . . You shouted, ‘If you don’t go away I will set the dog on you.’”
“Yes.”
“Why did you want the boys to go away?”
“I don’t know. I was just frightened.”
“So that Norma could go on with what she was doing?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you shout, ‘Come over here’?”
“I don’t know. I was just frightened, that’s all. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“You were asked a little earlier,” said the Judge, “if you were sorry that Brian was killed. Were you?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Lyons continued, “You said that while Norma was killing Brian she made a screaming noise.”
“She did.”
“Did you think she was mad?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think she ought to be in a Home?”
“No, not really, she just—I hadn’t seen her like that before.”
“Did there come a time when you knew that Brian was dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think then that Norma was mad?”
“Well, I just thought she had gone out of her mind.”
“If a girl can go out of her mind and kill one little boy, she might do it to another little boy? . . . Did you realize that?”
“No.”
“Did you tell your mother about it?”
“No.” [Her mother, as we learned later, had not been there: she was on one of her regular trips to Glasgow.]
“Did you tell anybody?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was frightened.”
“Frightened of what?”
“I don’t know. I was just frightened. I couldn’t tell no one, not even if I tried I couldn’t.”
“You told the Court that you said to Norma, after Brian was dead, ‘I should tell the police, but I’m not going to.’ Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you say that to Norma?”
There followed one of the many instances where the court found it impossible to follow Mary’s child thought-processes. The only way in fact in which one could understand her reasoning on such occasions, was if, putting oneself in her shoes, lies and all, one started from her point of view.
“Because,” Mary answered, “I was not going to tell the police and Norma thought I was. ‘Oh, if I told the police that May done it,’ she said [to herself], ‘I will be on the better side of the police’—that is what she thought.”
“I don’t understand.” said Justice Cusack. “Will you say that again?”
“I was not going to tell the police,” Mary said, “but Norma says, ‘Oh’ she says, [or rather] she thinks to herself, ‘Oh, if I tell the police, I will be on the better side of them and May will get all the backwash’—that is what she thought.”
(Later in his summing up the Judge repeated that he had not really understood:
Well, Members of the Jury, it does not make a great deal of sense to me I admit, but apparently there was some deep complicated reason in Mary’s mind, according to herself, involving blame falling on one or other of them which prevented her from telling the police and made her say that she would not tell the police.)
However, what Mary was trying to tell us was that if it had really been Norma who had killed Brian and Mary had seen her do it, Mary’s reaction out of loyalty to her friend, would have been not to tell the police. What she was saying to us—always on the assumption that we were accepting her presentation of the situation, rather than Norma’s—was:
“I was not going to tell the police, and I wouldn’t have told if she hadn’t.” This is basically all she meant to say. She was quite consistent in her story so far and it was finally merely a matter of semantics.
One must remember that, according to Mary’s code of honor, where criminals and anyone opposing authority is someone to be lauded, people who were, as she was to say later, “in it together” owed each other loyalty.
She wasn’t the only person running foul of the police to have the illusion that if she and Norma stuck to the story they had no doubt originally concocted together, they would win. After all, she had ‘won’ for two months after the killing of Martin Brown.
Mr. Lyons continued his cross-examination of Mary. “Well, did you tell the police when you were going home that Norma was acting kind of funny?”
“Yes.” (She hadn’t.)
“Do you mean as if she was out of her mind?” he said.
“Yes,” she said again.
“What was she doing?”
“Making fingers.” (Norma, when upset or excited was in the habit of making “faces.” But it is Mary who, during the trial and according to the policewomen also in her sleep, constantly “spread” and “stretched” her fingers.)
“This was what she was doing?” Mr. Lyons asked, and Mary demonstrated with her face—making a grimace—and her fingers, spreading them out wide.
“Going like that,” she said, “making funny fingers and that.”
“Did you never tell anybody?”
“No,” she said, “only the police when she thought she would be on the better side, that is when I told them.”
“And then there came a time, the same day, when you say that Norma asked you to get a pen?”
“Yes.”
This business of Norma asking her to get a pen had sounded quite credible all along. If one accepted that, to Norma, Brian’s being dead was quite unreal, and that she had unconsciously elected to treat it as a game (as Mary did for different reasons), it was quite within the realm of possibilities—indeed in the context of her mentality not only possible but very probable—that Norma would write something on his tummy, really without meaning any harm.
“What was that for?” Mr. Lyons asked.
“I don’t know,” Mary answered, “she just asked us to get a pen.”
“Well, did she say what she wanted the pen for?”
“To write a note on him.”
“To write a note on what part of him?”
“His stomach. But I would not get one . . .”
“. . . Do you mean a note, like the one that you had both written in the Nursery?”
“I don’t know what kind of note, sir.”
“Was that note a joint idea?”
“No, I asked her what for and she just says to write a note on him.”
“Why did you go back with Norma to the body of little Brian?” Mr. Lyons continued.
“She asked us and I just—I just went with her. I don’t know what happened. I just went.”
“Weren’t you frightened that she might kill you?”
“No.”
“Why not? She was mad. . . .”
“She would no
t dare,” Mary said quite correctly—her self-esteem did not permit her to allow that Norma could possibly do her any harm.
“And she had killed a little boy?” Mr. Lyons went on.
“She would not dare,” Mary repeated.
“Why would she not dare to kill you?”
“Because I would turn round and punch her one.”
There was just one point—strongly in Norma’s favor—which both girls agreed on. Mr. Smith, at the end of Norma’s evidence-in-chief, asked her about the charade she and Mary had played when they went with Brian’s sister Pat to look for him:
“. . . you went looking for Brian with Pat Howe?” he asked.
“And Mary Bell,” Norma said.
“And Mary Bell, yes. You heard Pat Howe say—I forget which day it was—but she said that the three of you went down to the railway bridge and looked over the ‘Tin Lizzie.’ Do you remember that?”
“We never went in.”
“I know you never went in, but do you remember going to the railway bridge and looking over the ‘Tin Lizzie’?”
“Yes.”
“Did Mary Bell say anything about where you should look? Where you should go? You nodded your head. Do you mean she did say something?”
Norma nodded.
“. . . Yes, what did she say?”
“She says to Pat, ‘He might be playing behind the blocks or he might be in between them. . . .’”
“. . . Do you know why Mary Bell said that?”
“Because she wanted Pat Howe to have a shock.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she says she wanted Pat Howe to go there because she wanted Pat to see him because Pat liked Brian. . . .”
“. . . How do you know Mary wanted Pat to have a shock?”
“Because she told me and I spoke back to her.”
“What was the last phrase?” asked the Judge.
“Because she told me and I spoke back,” Mr. Smith repeated. “What did you say when you spoke back?”
“I said, he will not be there.”
This was the one place where, essentially, Mary’s evidence tallied with Norma’s: “How did you come to go to the ‘Tin Lizzie,’ toward the ‘Tin Lizzie’ with Pat?” Harvey Robson asked Mary.
“Norma was there with us,” she answered, “and I says he might be over the ‘Tin Lizzie’ and Norma says, ‘Oh, no, he never goes over there’ and she convinced Pat that he was not over there.”