by Gitta Sereny
And yet, was that the reason? Was this case any more horrific than the interminably dissected and described child murders by Brady and Hindley on the Yorkshire Moors in 1965? Was it more terrible than the slaughter of the Clutter family in a small town in the Middle West of America? Was it really worse than the murderous rampage of the drug addict Manson clan, written up for months in all its details?
What was it that made the murders of these two small boys more unbearable than any of these others? What was it people did not want to know or face? Why was it that a traditionally compassionate public, a punctiliously fair court, an exceptionally enlightened city administration, and a press renowned all over the world for its sense of civic responsibility asked few questions and did not demand an inquiry or protest against outmoded legal proceedings? Why did they not reject the theories of evil birth and insist on being informed not that but why an eleven-year-old child, who had grown up in an ordinary English working-class street, in a city with all the facilities of a modern society, in a good school with well-trained teachers, and who, not at all a neglected or unloved child, was a member of a large united family, should have an irresistible compulsion to kill?
What was it, above all, that prevented Mary’s many relatives from seeking advice and help when for so many years both were so manifestly needed? Could it have been foreseen? Could it have been prevented?
Mrs. McC., Mary’s grandmother, her aunts Cath, Isa, Audrey, and Margaret; her uncles, Philip and Jack, are all intelligent, hard-working people who love Mary deeply. All of them could have helped. Each one could have told what combination of circumstances finally drove this girl to commit murder. “It’s all of us,” Mary’s aunt Audrey said afterwards. “We are all to blame, aren’t we?” Long before these tragic events, in an agonizing conflict of loyalties, hoping against hope that time alone could be the healer, they had made their unhappy choice of silence.
Cath remembered how “Sometime before all that trouble with May,” her sister Betty had sat in her gaily wall-papered kitchen, a sunlit room in a pleasant, small house in a village north of Newcastle not far from the sea. On her lap was a book she carries with her wherever she goes. It was—they said—always within reach at home, in her handbag on her many wanderings, under her pillow wherever she slept. Her father won it at a raffle and gave it to her when she was small. It is the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, with pull-out pictures.
Betty (“she tells tales, one doesn’t know what to believe”) had just been telling Cath that she’d been to see “the doctors” at Newcastle General Hospital and that they’d told her she was very sick and had “only two years to live.” She opened the book and pointed to a sealed and addressed envelope between the pages. “That letter is for you,” she said, “if I die.”
“What is it then?” Cath asked.
“It’ll tell the whole story,” was all Betty said.
The story started long ago, and Betty Bell, whom so many people have loved and protected and whom no one realized that she needed help when she was small, is the most important person in her daughter Mary’s life, and always was.
Betty McC. was born in Gateshead in 1939, a beautiful child and her father’s favorite. The other children in the family—all exceptionally good-looking—were Cath, the eldest, Philip, the only boy, and tender, graceful Isa, the youngest by six years. (A boy, Benjamin, born in 1940, died in infancy.)
The McC.s, living in Glasgow, were a happy family. The father, Philip, was a miner who never missed a day’s work until he fell ill with T.B. in 1943. The mother, Mrs. McC., has a flashing sense of humor, is a meticulous housekeeper, and like many Scottish women gave great care to her children’s education. Well-taught and well-brought up, all of them have turned out highly articulate, with a poetic turn of mind.
The family were Roman Catholics but, although they went to Mass and the children attended Sunday school, they were not fanatical about their Church and, as about the rest of their daily lives, there was a sense of humor in the way they approached religion which later enabled some of the children, without pangs of guilt and conscience, to marry happily outside the Church.
“Our Dad was a very good man,” says Isa. “He was a very religious man. He never swore. He’d never stand for any man to say a swear word in front of my mother.”
From 1943, when Betty was four, their father could no longer work and had to live an invalid’s life. His wife, quietly competent, took over. She worked mostly in hospitals, in a variety of jobs ranging from doctor’s receptionist to cleaner. Money was scarce, but in a part of Glasgow where unemployment and extreme poverty were the norm they were not desperately poor. They were “respectable.” They were always clean, always warmly dressed, they always ate their fill. The children helped to look after each other, but it was their mother who did the cooking, and brushed, sewed, and polished at night and weekends. “I never made them do any housework,” she says now, “perhaps that was wrong.”
Betty was the light of her father’s life. “She was that religious, and good, and always with the saints’ pictures and rosaries all over the place,” says her mother. “We all thought she was going to be a nun.” But little Betty was not happy. Perhaps it was because of her father’s illness, or the fact that her mother went out to work, or because, when she was just five, her mother became pregnant and Betty suddenly realized there was going to be another baby. Whatever it was, something had begun to happen to her, for around that time she began to refuse to eat with the family. They would urge, persuade, beseech, and finally punish her—“Mam would tan her bottom”—but nothing helped. The only way she would eat was if her mother put food in a corner for her, behind a chair. Then, hidden away, she would squat there and eat.
This happened toward the end of the war, when child guidance clinics would not immediately spring to mind—not even for someone like Mrs. McC. who worked in hospitals. “I suppose,” she says, in a despairing voice, “the only way all this [now] could have been prevented—the only right thing would have been if Betty had been under a psychiatrist since she was small. But how could I know that it was wrong if a child didn’t want to eat with her family?”
She was so good otherwise—they thought she’d outgrow this silliness.
“I think our Dad always favored Betty,” says Isa. “Though he was always tender with both of us. I remember Betty sitting on one of his knees and me on the other.” But she also remembered that fairy-tale book. “I loved that book,” she said. “It was the only thing our Dad ever won in a raffle. I wanted it too, but Betty got it.” Their father loved Betty’s drawings. “She was so good at drawing,” says Isa without envy. “But she’d always hide her drawings while she was doing them,” she remembers. “They were always of religious things: she always drew nuns, and altars and graves and cemeteries.”
Betty outgrew the habit of eating on the floor in corners but then would eat only if her family pretended not to see her, or if she could pretend to steal the food. Again they comforted themselves. “It’s just her silly ways. Other kids don’t eat properly either. She’ll get over it as she did over the other business.”
It was not all sweetness when the children were naughty. “Of course, now it’s different,” Isa says to her mother, and smiles, “but when I was small I was that afeared of you.”
“Of me?” her mother asked, astonished, and it did seem extraordinary that any child should have been even momentarily afraid of this small woman whose stem exterior hides so much warmth and humor.
“If Mam promised us something,” Isa said, “we could be sure as houses we’d get it—presents or hidings. Remember, Mam, when Betty and I were naughty in the streets when we were all out shopping and you’d promise us a hiding when we got home?”
They’d get their spanking two or three hours later, at home. “I couldn’t very well give them a hiding in the street, could I?” Mrs. McC. said with spirit.
“Betty and I would stand in front of the mirror with our skirts up and look at ou
r bottoms and say, ‘Mine is redder’—’No, mine is.’ But we were never beaten,” Isa says later, “only spanked. I don’t think it did us any harm.” Isa is exceptionally sensitive and perceptive. “1 think Betty and Cath like to think they were beaten,” she said, thoughtfully, “but they weren’t really. Why, my mother never had the strength for it.”
“Betty was that fond of our father,” Isa said, “but she loved our mother too. She was always waiting for her when she was out, the kettle on the boil and her slippers ready.”
“She could be that funny,” her mother said. “Remember that time,” she asked Isa, “when she broke a cup over your brother’s head just because I said as a joke, ‘Break a cup over his head’?” Even now, they are a family who laugh a great deal. The grandmother is very much a part of each married child’s family circle. There can be no doubt that they were just as gay and just as close fifteen and twenty years ago, certainly until the day Philip McC. died, finally it seems, of a heart condition, not T.B. “It was in 1953,” Isa said. She was then seven, Betty going on fourteen. “They sent him home from hospital and said they could do nothing more for him.” As long as he believed he could survive he fought it with equanimity. “It was so very strange,” Isa said softly. “I’d never heard him say a bad word, ever. But in the last six weeks of his life he suddenly became quite different and said the most dreadful things. I remember the day he died; it was a Sunday morning. We heard a sort of croak from his room and when we went in he lay there dead. We were all terribly upset but Betty was demented. That afternoon there was a Sunday School treat and we had to go. We didn’t want to, but they wanted us out of the way, so we had to. We walked two and two, Betty and me holding hands last of the crocodile, both of us crying. Then Betty sat down on the grass verge and said ‘I’m not going,’ and I said, ‘If you aren’t I am not either.’ But then the Sunday School teacher came and made us go.
“The next day, Monday, my dad was lying on the bed in his room, Betty locked herself in the wardrobe and wouldn’t come out. I think it took my mother an hour and a half to get her out.
“Afterwards, for a long time,” Isa said, “she started going around with her shoulders pulled in and her head down, her eyes to the floor; our mum couldn’t do anything about getting her to straighten up.”
Isa remembers a day about a year later, when Betty was still fourteen. “She had been punished at school for doing something wrong; they said she wasn’t allowed on the school bus. She had no money for the fare—so she had to walk the six miles home. To get home, she had to cross a field, or a golf course where, only a little while before that, three women had been killed. It so happened the doctor was at our house, I can’t remember why—perhaps for me, or my mother. But anyway, Betty arrived in a state of collapse. It was awful. Her face was white, she was shaking all over with fear. She had picked up a stick; she was holding it in her hand; her fingers were so tight around it, the doctor had to almost break them open to get the stick away from her. He gave her pills to calm her down and we put her to bed.”
“She changed,” her older sister Cath said, “she’d become wild. My mother would wait up for her nights, give her a hiding when she was due home at nine and come in at two—what else could she do?”
Once the pattern—the instinct to maintain respectability at all cost, to hide family troubles from outside—is established, what is there to do for a woman trying to bring up four children on her own?
“Very soon after our dad died, Betty began to steal,” Isa said. “On one occasion she stole a purse from our aunt. Our uncle came to the house. . . . He took her to the bathroom and gave her a real hiding to make her own up. She did. And she gave the purse back.”
By now Betty had begun to work, first of all in shops, later in a pickle factory.
“She stole in the shop too. But you know . . .” Isa sounds surprised even now, “she’d give all the things she stole away to other people. Slippers, bags, all that sort of thing. She never gave any to our mother because she was afraid of her, but she gave all kinds of things to our aunt, who finally got frightened and brought the lot back to our mum. Mum took the things back to the shop and Betty got the sack.”
“We didn’t know what it was,” Cath said. “We were that worried. You know, Betty has always thought our mother doesn’t like her. But it wasn’t true. I sometimes thought our mum loved her more than any of us. She was that beautiful and that spoiled.”
Betty’s mother held her arms in front of her, in the gesture of an embrace. “I always wanted to surround Betty, to keep her safe.” Mrs. McC. loves deeply but not demonstratively. The safety the family provided—perhaps the kind of safety it was—was not enough for Betty. She needed more.
When she was not quite fifteen, she fell in love with a boy, “Jimmy or Johnny.” And soon she thought she was pregnant. She wrote a letter about it to somebody and her mother saw the letter. A classic situation which no doubt had the usual consequence of deep hurt, bitter recriminations, anger, and fear. But, even so, this was by no means an unenlightened or intolerant family. Betty was about to have her fifteenth birthday and anger was to be forgotten for that day.
Cath recalls the day before the birthday. “We were going out to get her a present, Mum and I. Betty carried on something terrible. But she was always jealous, always having tantrums, so we just went. . . . ‘That’s right,’ Betty shouted, ‘Go on out with your favorite, I don’t care.’”
“I came home from school,” Isa says—she was nine then; she knew her mother and Cath had gone out shopping to buy Betty a birthday surprise. “My mother had told Betty to give me my tea when I got in from school. I remember Betty pouring the tea, and, instead of pouring it into the cup, she poured it into the saucer, very slowly, and she had a piece of paper there which she pressed into my hand, and it said on it that she had taken fifty phenobarbitones—my mum was taking them for her nerves. She hadn’t taken fifty but fifteen, but she had written in a funny way fifty, perhaps her hand had slipped . . .” Isa ran for help.
“When we got back,” said Cath, “an ambulance rushed past us. We didn’t know Betty was in it. She’d taken an overdose. She was very bad . . .”
Shortly after this Cath married Jack S., a miner, and the young couple moved south to a small mining town in Northumberland, an hour north of Newcastle. Perhaps Mrs. McC., deeply attached to each of her children, found it difficult to envisage being so far away from her eldest daughter who had been her chief moral support since her husband’s death, or perhaps she thought a complete change of environment would help Betty—always the main worry of her life. Anyway, the family followed Cath.
They moved 250 miles south of Glasgow, to Gateshead, then an industrial overspill area on the periphery of Newcastle upon Tyne (now developed into the largest town between Newcastle and London), and found a flat at 23 Redheughbridge Road, just across Redheugh Bridge. one of the five bridges that spans the River Tyne. To the young McC.s the move must have been quite exciting. Looking left out of the front windows of their new home, they would have seen the bridge with its unceasing traffic, the railway lines next to it, the river and boats underneath. And in the distance the factory chimneys of Newcastle, many of which continued to belch smoke and flames at night when the red of the fires and the gold of the city lights were reflected in the water of the Tyne. Their immediate surroundings were anything but colorful. Across from No. 23 were the warehouses of Tait and Kelly Ltd, Builders and Contractors, Repairs to Property. To the right, on a corner building at the intersection with Redheugh Road, was a large advertisement for the News of the World, and beyond, straight up a steep hill, the continuation of Redheughbridge Road, the little red brick houses all exactly the same as the one their flat was in: with flimsy curtains, peeling paint, and broken hinges.
“But the flat was nice,” Cath says, “my mother kept it nice.”
Betty went to work as a machinist in a rope factory. “She was that ‘individual,’” Isa says, her voice now too reflectin
g the love and admiration she always felt for Betty. “She could never wear a dress just as she bought it. She always added a bow or something.”
“She was beautiful,” her mother said again. “She won all the beauty competitions, she might have gone into the nationals.” Photographs of Betty at that time show a spectacularly good-looking girl, with a luxuriant head of long shiny black hair, a small delicate face, huge blue eyes, a small waist, and long slim legs—very much the way Isa looks now.
“There’s no telling where she might have got to,” Isa says sadly.
In the familiar environment of Glasgow, surrounded by relatives and friends they had known for a lifetime, there had been some attempt to control Betty’s life. In Gateshead it became almost impossible. Perhaps, had they at last sought professional advice on any level, Betty’s life might have developed differently. The victories in the local beauty contests could conceivably have led on to a different, richer, and, who knows, more ordered life. But it did not happen that way. The change from one city, one street, one job to another made no difference and could not cure the trouble, or break the already established pattern: Betty’s continuous and restless search for new faces and new places. . . .
On 26 May 1957 at Dilston Hall Hospital, Corbridge, Gateshead, seventeen-year-old Betty McC. had a baby. “Take the ‘thing’ away from me,” Betty reportedly cried, jerking her body away when the baby was put into her arms minutes after it was born.
“We couldn’t believe it. We just couldn’t believe it,” says Isa sadly.
The beginning of life for Mary Flora Bell.
But post-natal depression is a familiar phenomenon. For someone in need of love, a baby of her own is often a stabilizing influence. And irrespective of their dismay at Betty’s initial reaction, this was no doubt what her family hoped and prayed for: it could not fail to happen, they thought, not when the baby was so pretty, so bouncy, and so bright.