The Case Of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered

by Gitta Sereny

  Billy said, “We had arguments like, but no fights.” Even more unlikely, he claims, “We always tried not to argue in front of the kids.” In fact, nothing was hidden from the Bell children. Even if they had wanted to protect them, living as they did on top of each other in Elswick Road and later, it would have been impossible to keep anything secret from them.

  The boy, at two and a half was still very young. But Mary, almost four, with an awareness, everyone says now, well beyond her years, was unlikely to have remained unaffected by the tensions in those closest to her. It was about this time that Mary had her fourth and worst accident.

  Newcastle General Hospital has the records. “Mary Flora Bell,” the register states, “28 Elswick Road, Newcastle/Tyne, 6/3/61 to 9/3/61: under care of Consultant, Dr. Cooper.”

  On this occasion the police, who often help by delivering urgent messages when there is no telephone, came to Cath’s house and told her that her niece was in hospital in Newcastle. It was no doubt Betty who sent for her: she always called the family for help when in trouble.

  Cath left almost at once for Newcastle, but she had to dress, make arrangements for her own household and travel for more than an hour to get there. By the time she arrived, Mary’s stomach had been pumped out and she had regained consciousness. Betty was standing in front of the ward. “Don’t believe her,” she implored, sobbing. “She says I gave her those pills.”

  This time apparently Mary had swallowed a number of “iron” pills her mother was taking. And it appears that when they got the four-year-old awake she immediately said to the doctor, “Me mam gave me the smarties,” and kept on saying this on and off for twenty-four hours.

  (Mary’s best friend at this time was a girl of five who lived near her. Cath met this little girl in the street a few days later and she said, “May’s mam gave her the smarties in the backyard.” About five weeks later, this child was killed by a bus when out in the street with Mary.)

  Mary certainly has a vivid memory of the “iron pill” incident and everything connected with it and was to mention it periodically and pointedly over the years. Even during the month of the sandpit incident and the death of Martin Brown, she was heard to mention suddenly to her mother, for no apparent reason, “Mam, do you remember them smarties you gave me to eat that made me sick?”

  After this incident in 1961 there were bitter words between Betty and various members of her family who were now terrified for Mary’s safety. “Once is an accident, even twice it just might be,” one of the sisters said to Betty, “but three—and now even four—times is impossible.” Shortly afterward, Mrs. McC. and her daughters received letters from Betty saying she never wanted to see them again. They did not see her for more than a year. But in a way the family’s concern had the desired effect. For, although by no means the end of her troubles, this was to be the last of Mary’s accidents at home.

  In September 1961 she started school, first at a kindergarten at Westgate Hill and then the Cambridge Street Infant School where she was to stay for three years.

  The headmistress and her form teachers remember her clearly—astonishingly so, considering the many hundreds of children who go through the school. The teacher remembers the first time she met Mary on a visit she paid to the school before she began to teach there. She went into the classroom where Mary (now five) was a pupil. Mary was hiding under the desk. “She was always doing this. Sometimes it wasn’t really hiding; she’d go and lie under the desk on her back, stiff as a rod, and refuse to move.”

  “That’s Mary Bell,” she was told by the mistress then in charge of the class. “You’ll be getting to know her soon enough.” But both of these women, warm-hearted and dedicated to their profession, spoke of Mary with fondness, as a child who had interested and amused them (a reaction Mary has always provoked in people and still does).

  “She was almost always naughty,” they said. “But I could almost always tell in advance the days when she was going to be specially naughty,” said the teacher, “because those days she would arrive at school in a ‘bouncy’ sort of way. The days when she was going to be good she would arrive in a ‘rather withdrawn and quiet way.’”

  “If a child behaves today the way Mary did then,” the headmistress said, and sadly shook her head, “I automatically send them to the Child Guidance Clinic. And there are other children here who behave like this. But when Mary was here one did not immediately think of psychiatrists and Child Guidance. I only wish we had known more then. . . .”

  The teacher told of an occasion when Mary put her hands around a smaller child’s neck and pressed. “Don’t do that, you mustn’t do that,” she had said to Mary. “That’s naughty.”

  “Why?” Mary asked. “Can it kill him?”

  Both teachers say that she was very lonely and that other children disliked her, including the boys, “even though she was so pretty.” She was always “kicking,” “hitting,” and “pinching” everybody (“nipping” as they call it in the North). “Once I found her crying in the playground,” the teacher remembered. “I asked her what was the matter. ‘Nobody wants to play with me,’ she said. I told her, ‘You mustn’t do such nasty things to them. Well, come and walk around with me.’ And she took my hand and walked around the yard with me. She often did after that.”

  “She couldn’t differentiate between truth and lies,” both said. “She told tall stories all the time. She had a great deal of imagination but she wouldn’t work. One didn’t get the feeling then that she was all that bright—certainly not academically. But she was very cunning, crafty. She could always get out of things. You could never get the better of her; she always kept us going.”

  The teachers said that they’d had very little indication of Mary’s mother’s unsettled way of life. “I don’t think we ever thought anything but that she was at home,” the headmistress said. “Except once when she told me that Mary’s younger brother (not Mary) was the one she could entrust the babies to if she wasn’t there. And he was quite often absent.” They remembered then that the little boy acted strangely. “When he was away like that, he’d stay out of school for a week or more; and when he came back he was morose, withdrawn, and one had to start with him all over again. It was discouraging—we’d just be getting somewhere with him, getting him to open up and that, you know, and then he’d be taken out of school, kept out like that, and come back in this state of moroseness.”1

  But they said the Bell children were very well taken care of, “always clean and well dressed.” They thought that Betty Bell was exceptionally involved with her children, more than most mothers. “Mrs. Bell often came to pick them up from school,” they said. “She was aggressively protective of them. If any one of us said something about them, she’d say, ‘You are always picking on them.’

  “But we didn’t pick on Mary,” they say sadly. “Of course it’s true, she was so often naughty that perhaps she did get blamed for some things she didn’t do. This happens with children who—as Mary always did—draw attention to themselves to this extent.”

  “She seemed to have a need to be noticed—perhaps punished too. If she couldn’t get my attention any other way,” one of the teachers added, “she’d come and sit under my desk and pull the hairs on my legs, you know—anything to get a reaction; I remember letting her do it; I was so determined not to give in to her craving for attention.”

  Both these women and the teachers at Mary’s later school were more than anything else sorry and sad for her. “I often feel guilty,” said the headmistress, “I don’t know—perhaps I should have seen more, noticed more.”

  And yet, another teacher, although equally loyal to Mary and equally appalled at what eventually happened, told of the day in August 1968, when—before any names had been published—a friend who was the wife of a police officer told her that two little girls had been arrested for the murder of Brian Howe. “It really was perfectly extraordinary,” said the teacher, “because the moment I heard this, the name Mary Bell sho
t into my mind—although by this time I hadn’t seen or heard of Mary for more than three years. I thought about it for a while and then I phoned my friend back. I said, ‘Look, ask your husband whether one of them is called Mary Bell? If not, don’t say anything. 1 am just wondering. . . .’”

  If Elswick Road had been a big step down for them, the Bells’ next move, in early 1963, to 147 Westmoreland Road, meant that they had reached the bottom of the ladder. “Everything became so much worse six years ago,” said Isa in 1969. Westmoreland Road, also now in the process of redevelopment, was then one of the worst streets in Newcastle. Although there were a couple of small stores near the house where they lived, one of them dating back to 1887 when this had been a respectable neighborhood, Westmoreland Road by 1963 was a district of dilapidated, rat-ridden housing, used car lots, petrol stations, warehouses, and billboards adorned with crude graffiti. It was the sort of dark district which the police patrolled regularly, but always in cars, never on foot.

  Betty now had her third child, followed by a nervous breakdown and one of her stays in hospital. “Even before this,” Billy Bell was to say later, “she was in and out of hospitals with her nerves and stomach.”

  The pattern, already established in Elswick Road, continued and intensified; Billy moved in when Betty went away, and regularly departed when she returned. When she was there, the flat was filthy. After none of the family had seen Betty for more than a year, Cath, too worried about her to allow the friction to continue, went to see her. “I was prepared for anything,” she says. But all Betty said was, “Hello, stranger,” and that was that. Betty’s need for her family has always prevailed over her resentments, as indeed their anxiety about her has always outweighed their condemnation of her conduct.

  “But it was so dirty,” Cath says, “I used to bring a kettle and a cup when I went to tea.” This split reaction exists in all of Betty’s relatives except for her mother, who cannot bring herself to speak a word against her. Devoted to her, they have protected her with singular determination for years. On the other hand, most of them understandably feel that need to reassure themselves and their families by occasionally—and pointedly—disassociating themselves from the way she lives. But any critical remark any of them make is almost immediately—and frequently irrelevantly—followed by some sort of praise. “She is a much better baker than I am,” Cath had added immediately on that particular occasion.

  In Westmoreland Road the two rooms were separated by the scullery. Betty used the front room—the three children slept in the back. It would have been impossible for the children—especially Mary, as the eldest and most tuned in—to be unaware of her mother’s activities. “I ask myself sometimes whether I did her harm, whether I did something to Mary,” Betty, crying bitterly, was to say over and over later to a number of people, with reference to her life (and no doubt the degree of Mary’s knowledge or understanding of it) during that period.

  Outside her home, too, Mary’s life was not peaceful. The children of Westmoreland Road had no park or playground—they played in the streets. When Mary was almost six, a fourteen-year-old boy stabbed her in the back with a broken bottle. The splinters had to be removed, the wound stitched, and she was left with a bad scar. Was it an attack on her, or was it the result of a fight she had initiated? No one would tell, she least of all. It is certain that she often fought. Billy Bell said later that she was “never violent but a kid has to stand up for herself or they’ll walk all over her.”

  “May’s afraid of nothing,” said Cath, “except to be thought afraid. She never, never cries when hurt.”

  Mary later told Dr. Westbury that she never worried about anything and was never frightened. “I’ve got no feelings,” she said, “I’m like me dad. Can’t cry.”

  Billy Bell, a man sometimes bewildered by his own feelings, and events, can cry. Much later, in the course of several long conversations about his feelings for Mary and his life with Betty (now—four years later—a thing of the past for him), Billy Bell cried repeatedly and was near tears almost all the time. Not a man accustomed to talk about feelings, it takes him a long time to find the appropriate words. He spoke in single words—not sentences—with long pauses between words.

  “Did you used to eat together, you and Betty and the kids?”

  “She never ate with anybody,” Billy said, “she’d feed the kids, she’d bring me something. She never ate anything . . . never even finished a cup of tea . . .”

  “You used to dance together, you and Betty, didn’t you?”

  “We have danced for years.”

  “You love her, don’t you, Billy?”

  “Ay.”

  “If she came back tomorrow, would you take her back?”

  “Yes, I’d have her back.”

  “Did you know she was sick? For a long long time? Since she was a child?”

  “I suppose so,” once again a long pause. “During the trial,” he finally said, “we still . . . you know . . . together. But it wasn’t any good.” Another long pause. “But we had happy times,” he said then, softly.

  If they had happy times, they must have been well before Westmoreland Road. “Billy used to dress beautiful,” said his sister, “he was so careful of himself. And then something happened—about six years ago (1962–63), I don’t know what.” After that his clothes were untidy, his eyes bleary, his chin stubbly and he lived a seemingly aimless life between his home, the street, and his favorite pub of the moment. By no means a criminal, he has been at times on the edge of small crime. “But he isn’t really a hard lad,” said a perceptive police officer.

  “If you didn’t know you wouldn’t believe he is the same man,” is all Audrey could say.

  “I suppose Billy Bell has been telling you that he is a knight in shining armor,” his mother-in-law said later, bitterly, and referred to many occasions when Billy had “knocked Betty about.” “I feel arguments are all right,” she said, “but when a man starts knocking a woman about, then it’s time for her to leave, take her children and leave.”

  Betty’s mother does not blame the tragedy on anyone. (She said it was the slums they lived in, fate, God’s will.) Understandably, she has a great need to “explain away” the troubles in her family in “conventional” terms. From where she stands, paradoxically enough, the break-up of a family and even a degree of violence is “socially” acceptable if it can be explained by a husband’s instability, brutality, infidelity, and drink.

  “Billy did do the housework, Mam,” Isa had put in shyly. And everybody else affirmed that before this mysterious event in 1962 or 1963 which caused a complete personality change in Billy, he had been a regular worker, always a “natty dresser” who would rather not sit down than crease his trousers and that, if he liked his brown ale, so do all workingmen in this part of the world, and he had always drunk in moderation.

  Billy himself admits that he gets rough when he is drunk. “I get drunk as often as I can,” he says and laughs, “but only on weekends. I haven’t got the”—he rubs two fingers together in the familiar gesture signifying money—“to go to the pub more often. I wish I could go every night.”

  Whatever the reason for the change in Billy, the relationship between him and Betty—although complex, tortured, and increasingly venal in various ways—continued.

  In 1965 Betty even had another baby—the third girl—as beautiful as all her other children. “After that she first said the doctor suspected she had cancer,” one of her sisters said. Later, she said it was confirmed, and later still she said she had a hysterectomy. True? False? They don’t even know now. Nor does Billy. And her mother says she had vaguely heard about all this and knew that Betty had “an operation” but that Betty had never confided in her, never told her anything precise. What was known however is that she went as an outpatient “for treatments—regular like.”

  Somehow Betty and Billy had worked out some kind of “modus vivendi.” Their children until the events in 1968 were never “in care” and
, in a haphazard sort of way, the Bells were a family unit—which cannot fail to make us question, once again, the validity of the social work theory which claims that “any family is better than none” and that “keeping the family together at all costs” is the best guard against maladjustment and delinquency in children.

  The year 1966 was a new turning point in the Bells’ lives. They moved to 70 Whitehouse Road, where a few months later Thomas Bell and family were to become their neighbors at No. 68 and where Mary, then nine, and Norma, eleven, became friends.

  “When May was eight,” her grandmother said, “Betty came up [to Glasgow] and asked me to have her. She said, ‘We could get you a bigger flat and May could stop with you, run your messages and all that.’ But I said I couldn’t do it, I felt too old to take on a child.” She shook her head despairingly. “If only I’d said yes . . .”

  It may well have been during the same visit that Mary had a talk with Isa which Isa remembers particularly vividly. “I was pregnant with our little boy,” she said, “and Mary asked me about my big tummy. ‘That’s the baby in there,’ I answered, and her whole face looked astonished. ‘You mean it’s really in there?’ she asked, ‘under your dress? In your tummy?’ I took her hand and slipped it under my sweater and said, ‘Feel.’ She came and sat on my lap and for half an hour she just didn’t say anything, just kept her hand on my tummy and felt the baby move. Later, after he was born, she used to lean over him and say, ‘I felt you with my hand up your mam’s kilt when you were in her tummy.’ Does that sound like a cold, unloving child?” Isa asked.