by Gitta Sereny
In the autumn of that year Mary entered Delaval Road Junior School. The headmistress and Mary’s teacher at this school were again warm and concerned people. “Mary was charming,” the headmistress said, several times, obviously at a loss what to say about a child they had seen daily for three years and in whom they had failed to observe the pressures which finally drove her to kill. “I always felt there was a lot of depth in Mary,” said Mr. F., who taught Mary for three years. But if he felt anything suspicious about these hidden depths, he didn’t think it prudent to touch or to expose them. “There are other [troubled] children like this in the school,” both teachers said. “It is better just not to poke too deeply into their lives and circumstances.” “We really thought there wasn’t any father in this family,” the headmistress said. Mary’s teacher said he had known “there was a father because Mary once wrote about him—some story of an excursion or an outing where the father had taken them somewhere.”
But there was a good reason why the school did not know much about Billy Bell. For when the Bells—Billy too—moved to Whitehouse Road (“They had a real home there,” Audrey said, “the only real home they ever had.”) the children were instructed to call their father “uncle” whenever anyone else was within hearing, and Betty Bell notified the council that her husband had abandoned her and proceeded to claim the relevant social security benefits.
Billy said later, with disarming frankness, “Nobody wants to work.” He is young, fit, and strong and could earn between £25 and £30 a week. But, “as long as I have my pint,” he said, “I don’t need money.” After Mary’s trial and conviction, when Betty Bell disappeared altogether, he set up house with the three remaining children and an old friend, Harry Bury, in a house the council gave him in another part of town. Obviously then feeling morally justified in not working he said, “I can’t work—somebody has to mind the kids now that Betty’s walked out—she’s left us.” He got £10 a week from social security. “What about clothes and shoes for the children?” he was asked. “There are grants,” he answered, logically enough.
Harry Bury, a sixty-year-old rag and bone man, toothless, quiet, and kind, has known the Bell children since they were born. He has often lived with Billy when he took care of them alone and they call him “uncle.” He is known to have given Mary many generous presents. A fragile-looking man who suffers from stomach trouble, Mr. Bury begins to cry as soon as the conversation turns to Mary. “She was the best friend anyone ever had,” he said, and one had to remind oneself that he was talking about a little girl.
“Do you write to her?”
“Sometimes, not often.” He speaks very slowly with pauses between sentences. “It’s different you see,” he said with dignity. “I am not a relative . . . I’d always be saying the same . . . same words like, you know. When Billy goes to see her, he takes messages from me and . . . I don’t need to say anything . . . it isn’t necessary—May knows, I am here . . . I’m . . .”
“Her friend?”
“Yes.”
“How do you think it happened—whatever it is that happened to her?”
“When she was very small,” he said quickly, “that was when it started like . . .”
Billy certainly is very attached to his children and always has been. There was always ample evidence of Mary’s affection for him—and his for her. But if she was able to develop some sort of feminine child-father-cum-pal relationship with Billy (and if this endures to the present), there was nothing like this between Mary and Betty.
“She and her mother had no relationship like we have with our children,” Audrey said. “Rather perhaps like two sisters. But they never said anything to each other.” (A psychiatrist who observed them together later said, in almost the same words someone had used earlier describing Mary with Norma, “They chat away about clothes, TV, pop stars and, you know—nothing—like two teenagers on the telephone.”)
Even so, Mary’s relationship with her mother did have its normal moments as another of Mary’s entries in her school notebook proved:
On Saturday I had to stop in bed all day I was bad and I got up and tried to sneak downstairs but the dog came running up the stairs and it barked and my mum came up to see what was the matter and I shut the door and ran back to bed but mum heard me and brought me downstairs with some blankets to lie on the sete.
Animals—her Alsatian most of all—were always important to Mary. “She had her room full of animals,” Billy Bell said (everybody always spoke of Mary in the past tense, after the trial), “budgies, kitten.”
“She brought animals home from school for the holidays,” Audrey said, “she loved plants too.”
“She talked a lot about some horses on an uncle’s farm,” one of the policewomen said later, “especially about one she loved and said she owned, ‘a beautiful black stallion.’ I thought to myself, ‘What a little liar she is.’” One of the psychiatrists who examined Mary also remarked on her “fantasy life” and mentioned how she “stated with conviction that she owned a beautiful black stallion.”
Cath later explained about that stallion. “One day during her remand, Mary was so miserable and homesick—she kept talking about her dog, a ferocious Alsatian nobody could touch but who’d do anything for her, and about the horses on her uncle’s farm . . . she obviously missed it all so much, it broke my heart. And suddenly I heard myself saying, ‘You know, your uncle’s given you that great big stallion. He’s yours now,’ and she was that happy. But later I said to myself, ‘What came over me to tell a lie like that?’”
Billy Bell said that “I’ve given the dog away now, he was a wild one, he was May’s dog. No, I haven’t told her. I won’t. She loves him. He slept in the passage. She could do anything with him.”
The psychiatrist who commented on Mary’s “fantasy” about the stallion also mentioned that she spun a yarn about “owning a police-dog.” It throws an interesting sidelight on how the best-trained specialists can jump to wrong conclusions if they are given insufficient information.
On 15 November 1967 Mary wrote in her “newsbook” under the title “On Saturday”:
On Saturday I was coming from the park with susan and the was loads of police cars. I went over. There had been a baby found dead in a polthene bag.
Underneath there is a competent drawing of a police car parked on grass. But would that have been particularly remarkable? Perhaps other children wrote about this too. They were, after all, supposed to write about interesting things that happened.
None of the people who lived close to Mary during the last two years—or months—before May 1968 noticed any significant changes in her even when, desperately wanting to help by remembering, they searched their memories. She was left-eyed, left-handed, and left-footed. This was only discovered when she was examined while she was on remand; even if those close to her had noticed it before, does it matter?
She was a bedwetter, but she always had been and had even on two occasions been sent for short periods to a convalescent home for eneuretic children—a place she loved and even ran away to later, with Norma. Equally, bedwetting is common enough and by no means necessarily indicative of serious trouble.
She did not sleep much, but she has never needed much sleep, nor do many perfectly normal children. She was “always reading the Bible” but who, without realizing what she was dwelling upon, could find fault with that?
And of course, there was that wall between her and others which Audrey had spoken of and had added, “Betty has that same wall.” That wall had almost always been there since she was a baby. And if it did get worse—perhaps it did—no one noticed. Mary had always been conspicuous: she had for years hit, kicked, scratched, and “nipped” other children, done everything to attract her teachers’ attention; lied so much that one of her aunts said “one always felt she was deceiving one.” Nobody paid attention to her. On the contrary, they were resolved to ignore her. So she went further, she killed pigeons by throttling them. “You stop that, May B
ell,” they said. She put her hands around the throat of a newborn baby lying in his pram. “May—leave him be,” somebody shouted. She allegedly pushed her little cousin off an old air-raid shelter seven feet onto a concrete floor—but no one reported her. And one day later she pressed the necks of three little girls in a playground: “The girls . . . have been warned as to their future conduct,” wrote the police who had statements about that event, as they had taken statements from the same two girls at the same addresses one day before.
So finally a small boy died: less than twenty-four hours later, having meanwhile put her hands around the throat of yet another child, this time one of her own age whose father “clipped” her for it, Mary announced in writing that they had killed. “I murdered,” she said. Still no one paid attention, so she began to shout it out in the playground, and in the street. She behaved morbidly and offensively to the dead child’s relatives. A week after having broken into the Nursery to leave the “We Murder” notes, she broke into it again, in the same way; she was caught, questioned by the police—and released.
A week later, on 2 June, Mary and Norma ran away—and again twelve days later on 14 June. Again they had come to official notice. Again not enough.
Six weeks after the death of the first little boy Mary went to the house of what was to be the next victim and (though she was accusing someone else) actually demonstrated how it was done.
The two girls to whom she had shown this shrugged their shoulders, just as, six weeks before, a boy had laughed when she had told him she’d murdered Martin. Policemen had not taken her behavior too seriously. Teachers had not wanted to probe; neighbors did not want to meddle, and loving relatives did not choose to see. Surely the classic “cry for help” can never have been more pronounced, and never more ignored; and that is why, on 31 July 1968, Brian Howe died.
* * *
1 This discouragement is very much a thing of the past. Mary’s brother, happily installed in an excellent small Children’s Home, is showing signs of being a very gifted child.
PART FOUR
THE PRESENT
“The Guilty One Is You Not Me”
AS I WAS writing this book, almost three years had passed since the events and the trial of 1968.
June and George Brown were still living at 140 St Margaret’s Road, the only family directly involved in the tragedy who have kept their original home. (Newcastle Council immediately offered new housing to all the families involved.) “It’s our home,” said June; “moving wouldn’t have changed anything.” In the sitting room there are two pictures of Martin on the mantelpiece. In one he is a baby, the other was apparently taken not long before he died. June is outgoing and tender to Linda, who at the time I saw them was three, a small, compact child with smooth, golden hair and a face startlingly like Martin’s. “Like two peas in the pod they are,” Mrs. Brown says. Linda is a happy child with bright eyes, glowing cheeks, and a chuckling voice; without being urged she recites poetry and sings nursery rhymes for the visitor.
“After it happened,” June Brown says, “I couldna believe it. All I did was cry. I couldna stand Linda; just look at her, to think I couldna stand her. The doctor told me it would be all right, that I was bound to feel like that for a while. I kept thinking I was seeing Martin, you know, in the streets. Every morning at six or so I was standing in front of the old houses and calling him. I was real crazy, you know. Every time I saw a small blond lad in a blue anorak, I’d run and shout, ‘Martin’—there were so many little lads in blue anoraks. I couldn’t stand seeing any other little lads. I said, ‘Rita’s got five—why couldn’t one of hers have been taken, or some of them neglected kids.’ . . . George, my husband, he cried after it happened—he misses him something terrible. But he’ll never talk about it now. He won’t have anybody talk about it in front of him. I think he just can’t bear to. Linda, she was real bad afterwards . . .” A photograph of the family at the time, taken by an Italian news photographer, shows George—whom both children resemble—sitting with a pale, closed face; June, looking ten, fifteen years older than now, gray-faced with deep shadows under her eyes, her figure bloated, sagging, and exhausted; and Linda, with a long, tiny face, her hair short and curly, her eyes huge, also with big shadows underneath.
“No, we shan’t have any more kids,” said June. “I don’t think one can replace a kid that’s dead. And we’ve got Linda—she is everything to us. We don’t want anybody else now. It would be wrong.”1
Rita Finlay has moved, but not far away. Rita is less meticulous than her sister, but there was a bright fire with children’s clothes hanging from the mantelpiece to dry and a pot of tea appeared in minutes. The place was crowded with children—her own and others. They were no sooner shooed outside than they shot in again. “It’s cold outside, Mam,” one little boy protested.
“Out,” said Rita and he disappeared, quick as a flash, before retribution could reach him.
“Won’t they be cold?”
“They’re used to it,” Rita said and laughed—she always laughs and it probably makes the smacks she can hand out less painful. Rita talked for a long time about Martin—and then Brian. There had been no indication whatever during the trial that there was any connection between these two children. Nor had we known that Mary and Norma really knew them. “Oh, both of them—them two girls were always around here,” she said. “Martin,” she said, “I loved him like my own. I must have loved him nearly as much as June did.” June is there and nods, there is no jealousy. “I’ve got his clothes,” says Rita, “in the plastic bag they’d kept them in. One day I’ll wash them, but not yet. I can’t touch them like—not yet.”
“That Norma,” she suddenly says, “she came up to us some months after the trial and says, ‘Can I take your John for a walk?’ I didn’t even know what to say. I just stared at her and then I walked away.”
“We used to hate each other, Rita and I,” June says. “Well, not hate like, you know—we spoke. But we never really talked, you know, until Martin died and then Brian. Now we are that close; we are real sisters now—so close we are. . . .”
June and Rita are essentially strong and George and June Brown have a good marriage. Martin is sorely missed and lovingly remembered. But the memory of violence and death has given way to their natural ebullience and to the demands and compensations of life.
Not so for the Howes, who used to live next to Norma Bell’s family, and who moved to a tree-lined street where the houses look pleasant and well-cared for.
In 1971 Eric Howe lived there with his then sixteen-year-old married daughter Pat, her husband, and their one-year-old baby boy. Mr. Howe is a small, wide-chested stocky man who began to cry the moment Brian was mentioned.
“I miss him,” he said, “he was my life. He was only a bairn, but we used to talk like, you know, really talk. I think of nothing but him.”
Albert, the oldest boy, had meanwhile married and moved into a flat of his own. Norman, ten, was in hospital. “They say he is slow,” his father says, “but it isn’t so. He is very intelligent. When we are alone together we talk about Brian. He talks about him all the time. He’s sad, that’s what he is, not slow.”
Pat, who comes in with her baby, is pale and tense. She is profoundly uncomfortable the moment Brian is mentioned, and terribly bitter. When she undresses her baby she is so young it seems she could be undressing a dearly loved doll. She speaks of having very little money; her husband, she says, must get a better job. “How can we manage on £11 a week?” she asks, her young voice becoming querulous when she wants it to sound grown up and wifely. There is no money but she has bought her tiny baby toys: a beautiful doll, a shiny plastic car, both far too big and old for him.
“It’s destroyed us,” said the father, his eyes red, tears trickling down his cheeks. “All I can do is . . .” and he makes the gesture of lifting up and emptying a bottle. “Can’t you fight it if you know it’s bad for you?” He shakes his head. “It’s the only way I can stop the depres
sion. I can’t stand it. I think of nothing except him. We aren’t a family any longer. We were before. Pat will tell you. It’s true, isn’t it, Pat?”
Pat’s face was tight, she didn’t want to talk about the past. It was her private grief. “We aren’t a family any longer,” she agreed, “we talk, but we don’t say anything.” Both Pat and her father were perfectly aware of what was happening to them. But there seemed to be nothing they could do to control or limit their own despair. Brian, even though he’s never been there, was in that house and that room with them. And life itself, the fact of their being alive while he was dead, appeared to be a constant reminder of the horror and the injustice of their fate.
Norma Bell’s family have also moved now, although they tried for quite a while to stick it out in Whitehouse Road. For a family with eleven children it isn’t easy to find a decent council house and at the time of the trial they had only lived at No. 68 for two years.
Norma, acquitted at the Assizes, was put on three years’ probation when she appeared later in Juvenile Court on the long-standing charge of breaking and entering the Woodlands Crescent Nursery. The recommendation of the Juvenile Bench stipulated that she should be under regular psychiatric supervision. After a brief holiday with her sixteen-year-old brother, she returned to Whitehouse Road and her normal school.