by Gitta Sereny
By the following spring, five months later, she was quiet and withdrawn. She had seen her psychiatrist once, the same who had testified about her in court. Her parents, concerned and gentle as ever, stated emphatically that the whole nightmarish business was all over for her: that they never talked to her about it; that she never thought about it; that they were very aware how bad it was for her to be reminded of it; that she was now once again a perfectly ordinary child, close to her family. “She doesn’t want to go out,” Mrs. Bell assured me, “she doesn’t even want to go to the films. She says, ‘I want to stay with Mam; I don’t want to go to the cinema; I only want to stay at home.’” She loved looking after the babies in the family, they said, was anxious to help with the housework and was infinitely considerate. “I have these terrible varicose veins,” her mother said, “and in the evening Norma comes and lifts up my leg and puts it up on a chair for me. She’s that good. . . .”
In spite of her acquittal she did have some problems at school. “Just the other day when she came from school, a boy stepped out in front of her and shouted, ‘Murderer.’ When she got home—I had had her coat cleaned just the day before and there it was full of mud. I didn’t ask how she got it, whether they pushed her, or she fell when she ran away, and she never said. She doesn’t complain. She tells me these things, but she doesn’t say anything else.”
All of the children except the oldest boy had been sent out of the room while we talked. When Norma, shy but friendly, came back, Mrs. Bell told her to show us her “letters.” She brought over a big old handbag bulging with fan mail, most of it in response to an article that appeared in the German magazine Der Stern, with photographs of the family and some remarkably evocative poems she had written, one of them about Vietnam, which she recited to us—it was an extraordinary effort for a girl diagnosed as retarded by five years. The fan letters, most of them in German, were primarily outpourings of sick minds. “You are a beautiful girl, petite chérie, Norma darling,” one of them said—this particular correspondent wrote four poems to her, all of them highly suggestive. One boy, “Franzl,” “son of a doctor from Düsseldorf,” wrote her an admiring letter in English. “He came to stay with us,” the Bell family said. “Slept on the settee down here in the sitting room. He and Norma got on very well, chatted for hours, and went for walks. The other kids liked him too. He was very nice, was Franzl.”
The story in Der Stern had brought Norma a kind of fame, and her mother seemed proud of it: “So many people writing to her,” she said, “and she’s even been invited to come and stay abroad.”
The letters were worn thin from being handled, from being read and re-read.
“When she’s home—after school and at weekends,” said a neighbor across the street, “she stands for hours at her bedroom window, stands and looks out into the street.”
For Mary’s relatives, her Scottish grandmother and her aunts and uncles, disaster continued.
During Mary’s trial they had learned that Isa’s baby was in hospital with leukemia. “We kept going to the telephone to learn about her. The baby so ill in Glasgow, Mary on trial for these terrible things in Newcastle—the baby died in February; we feel as if we are being punished for something, but we don’t know for what.”
It is difficult to identify oneself with a family so pursued by catastrophe; it is difficult to imagine how one would act and behave in their place. As for Betty Bell, one can only guess at what went on in her beleaguered mind. During the months of Mary’s remand, and the days of the trial, she was constantly writing notes, letters, poems, and prayers to her dead father. “Nobody knows how I miss you Dad, how I need you, how I love you . . .” She fluctuated between wild extremes of gaiety and depression.
“We were always dying for her to get rid of that horrible wig,” Cath said. “I offered to wash it for her in the spin drier—I so hoped it would get torn. But it came out beautiful. She set it—she had the boy (their youngest) sitting here in the middle of the room with it on, and put the curls into it with it on his head. . . . It was that funny but . . .” she stopped.
One cannot—and does not even wish to—doubt that both Betty and Billy Bell were frantically unhappy about what had happened to Mary. And yet, there was the other side of the coin.
“A man phoned me one day,” said Sidney Foxcroft, Newcastle reporter for The People and The Sun, who wrote several perceptive pieces at the time of the trial. “He said he was a friend of the Bells and that they wanted to come and talk to me about something. I got a friend of mine to sit in on this meeting. You know, I could hardly believe it myself. They came along, Betty and Billy Bell and their pal, and they said they wanted to sell us the story of Mary’s life. Their kid was on trial for murder over there in Moot Hall and they sat here and said, ‘We tried to teach her right, but we couldn’t do a thing with her. . . .’ Well, it was my job to listen to them—but I’ve never been so sickened in my life. I rang through to the office in London afterwards and told them. They said they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”
But then, sometime during that period—it was not quite clear exactly when—Betty tried once again to kill herself; she had tried several times before (and repeatedly since). On that particular occasion, late one night, she climbed up on one of the Tyne bridges, deserted at that hour. “But there was a man came up in a car,” said one of her sisters, “he jumped out and pulled her back. He talked to her and asked whether she was a Catholic. When she said yes, he said he’d take her to a church; he thought she needed to talk it out with somebody trained to deal with terrible problems, and that’s one of the jobs of a priest, he said. He drove her to a Catholic church and took her in. He made quite sure the priest was there before he left her. He was a good man. The priest was there all right,” Betty’s sister said bitterly, “but when she began to talk to him—I suppose she was very upset and crying like she does—he said, ‘Are you a member of this parish?’ Well of course she wasn’t. So she said no, she wasn’t. So he told her to go away. He said for her to go to her own priest in her own parish. And she left. . . .”
“We were that worried,” said Cath, “about May, about Betty, about what was being said in court. When . . . you know, when the psychiatrists said that about ‘genetic influences,’ we tried and tried to remember what possible illnesses there had been in the family. My mam and I—she was staying with us—we sat up all night, with pencil and paper trying to retrace people and events.” Her mother would often just drop off to sleep in her chair. “And I’d go to sleep for two hours and then up again. We couldn’t find anything.”
In the morning they would meet Betty somewhere in town on the way to court, “so that we’d arrive together.” Betty was officially also staying with them (Billy, loyal as ever, claimed she stayed with him), but mostly she was somewhere else altogether. “My mother and I talked for days and nights about Betty’s way of life,” Cath said, “trying to understand why and how . . .”
Viewed in retrospect, how is it that some of Mary’s relatives, faced with the awful certainty of her guilt, did not immediately tell more about the circumstances of her tragic life to the people who might have helped her?
The truth of the matter is that in their hearts none of them could believe that the law—even in its most formal sense—could be anything but merciful to an eleven-year-old child. A psychiatrist was to write later in his report that he encountered “a conspiracy of silence.” It is doubtful whether what happened was at all deliberate. It was merely the result of an intolerable and really insurmountable conflict of loyalties.
Mrs. McC. has tried desperately to avoid saying anything that might be detrimental to Betty, even when her children, younger, more resilient, and perhaps at this point more aware of the implications, tried to persuade her. “All I want,” she said, “is that May be left alone. Nothing can help now. She is paying the penalty to society.”
Her children, however, like a great many other people who were involved, as time went on groped towar
d some means to help, to make amends. “I hope my mother talks to you,” said Betty’s only brother Philip, a quiet and thoughtful man. “It’s terribly hard for her—she’s caught between Betty and Mary. But I think she should. It would be better.”
“She hugged me when I left,” said Isa on another occasion when we met. “She said, ‘You are old enough. You must decide yourself what you want to say and do. How can I do anything? They can’t expect me to choose between Betty and May.’”
After the trial Betty disappeared. No one in her family knew where she was. Cath, tidying up some shelves a few months later, found Betty’s letters to her father and all her papers: wedding certificate, the children’s birth certificates, and various mementos.
“She must have put them there one day when I wasn’t looking,” Cath said. “In case they were needed any time.” There were rumors that she’d been seen in Glasgow and working in this or that pub in Whitley Bay. Even while their apprehensions grew about Mary, all of them wondered if Betty would ever come back.
She returned three months later, for a few days. She saw her mother and her sisters, all of whom, as always, succumbed to her need for their love and support. She saw Billy and the three children who were living with him, and she and Billy went to see Mary. After that she vanished again, this time for almost a year.
Mary had been sent for a period of observation to Cumberlow Lodge, a (strictly short-term) Remand Home for girls in London, which serves as a classifying center for the metropolis and adjacent counties. A model institution of its kind, it has an exceptionally large staff, the best medical facilities, and—essential for Mary—“special provisions for high-degree security.”
Mary spent over two months there, during which, by far the youngest girl there, she needed a great deal of special care and attention. Interestingly enough—an encouraging note in a sad tale—she provoked in the other girls “nothing but compassion.”
She was seen by several psychiatrists. Those who were later put in charge of her said bitterly and incorrectly, with the possessiveness Mary always brings out in those charged with her care, “At Cumberlow Lodge she was seen by countless psychiatrists—every student in London was unleashed on her . . .” Actually she was examined above all by Professor Trevor Gibbens, one of the leading child psychiatrists in Britain, who concurred with all those who had seen her previously, that she needed and could benefit from medical treatment.
The Home Office, uncomfortably exposed to a wave of public concern and criticism, not so much over Mary’s fate as over the danger she represented to others, was now confronted with the great problem of what to do with her.
There are a number of mental hospitals in Britain, some with excellent provisions for children and young people. There are also a number of first-rate homes for maladjusted children (more and better provisions than exist in any other country in Europe and possibly the world). The trouble was that none of them have security provisions adequate to contain children as dangerous as Mary, nor do the Approved Schools for Girls, although one or two of them have good arrangements for psychiatric treatment.
“Secure” hospital provisions, on the other hand, which do exist within the penal system, are only for those over fifteen, and tend to be restrictive rather than therapeutic.
“There was conference after conference about her,” said someone who attended many of the Home Office meetings at the time. “Nobody could think what to do.”
The authorities were faced with a barrage of newspaper comments and questions in Parliament emphasizing that—with the hysteria created by the outcome of the trial—the public would object to her presence wherever she was sent. It was a difficult atmosphere in which to make a decision that required courage and imagination, as well as an unemotional, level-headed approach.
It was clear that what was needed was something new to meet all the requirements: security, social environment (companionship, educational and recreational facilities, the potential for building relationships), and psychiatric treatment.
The ideal solution (valiantly supported by a few lone voices at the time) would have been to accept the challenge and accelerate a long-standing project for the creation of a “secure” psychiatric unit for severely disturbed younger children. But such a course presented—quite legitimate—practical difficulties of organization, staffing, and above all cost, and furthermore was resisted by some almost as a point of principle on the basis that Mary was a unique case whose special needs could not justify such an effort or expense.2
The belief that Mary was a unique case was certainly shared by the press and public. Fostered first by the universal revulsion against her crime, it was reinforced by the almost complete lack of background information of her life and the “extreme stress” which presumably led to these crimes, and exacerbated by the extravagant epithets—”monster,” “fiend,” “Svengali”—which were so readily applied to her.
The basic misunderstanding about Mary—which appears to persist today—was that insufficient mental separation was made between her condition and her crime.
Her crime—the “motive-less” murder of two small boys—is, if not unique, certainly very rare. Children who kill—and there are a surprising number of them, although usually much younger or somewhat older than eleven—are more often than not driven by “normal” (if excessive) emotions such as jealousy or fear. Murder without motive, other than perhaps a desire to feel something, is the epitome of psychopathy—Mary’s condition as diagnosed. Although, again, very few psychopathic children commit murder, the condition itself is not rare. According to London University sociologist Professor Terence Morris, there were in the late 1960s about 200 psychopathic children within the child-care system of England and Wales alone. Many of these are unsuitably cared for in adult wards of mental institutions, in Children’s Homes or even worse, for lack of other possibilities, are prematurely returned to their homes, in many cases the very root of their troubles. In many others the condition is not even diagnosed.
A renowned child psychiatrist in an English university town said, “I could find them twenty children [like this] just in this area, tomorrow.”
Intensive research into psychopathic children is being carried out in many cities in the United States, and also in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, France, Germany, Canada, and of course Britain. In one major project alone, at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, psychiatrist Laurette Bender examined 800 children who had been diagnosed as psychopathic.
What is a psychopath? Sociologists William and Joan McCord of Stanford University, California, supply a very clear description in their book The Psychopath3 which has become an essential textbook for any student of the subject:
The psychopath is asocial. His conduct often brings him into conflict with society. The psychopath is driven by primitive desires and an exaggerated craving for excitement. In his self-centered search for pleasure, he ignores restrictions of his culture. The psychopath is highly impulsive. He is a man for whom the moment is a segment of time detached from all others. His actions are unplanned and guided by his whims. The psychopath is aggressive. He has learned few socialized ways of coping with frustration. The psychopath feels little, if any guilt. He can commit the most appalling acts, yet view them without remorse. The psychopath has a warped capacity for love. His emotional relationships, when they exist, are meager, fleeting, and designed to satisfy his own desires. These last two traits, guiltlessness and lovelessness, conspicuously mark the psychopath as different from other men.
The McCords describe child psychopaths as follows:
The child psychopath has the embryonic personality traits of the adult psychopath. His tantrums and delinquencies betray his aggressiveness. His truancies reflect his impulsivity, his cruelties to animals and children reveal his asociality. The child psychopath has little, if any remorse for his diffuse, brutal, usually purposeless activities, and he seems unable to affiliate with other human beings.
Although the condition has been
described—in different terms—by psychiatrists for more than 150 years, we still do not know today what causes it. Some scientists believe in hereditary factors, others in neurological ones, others again are certain that environmental reasons are more likely to blame. Of these three, the hereditary approach has now been the most discredited, and the environmental offers the most hope. A feeling of rejection in childhood, although not the sole explanation and certainly not inevitably causing psychopathy, does appear to be a common factor in many psychopaths and research has tended to confirm that the greater the feeling of deprivation, the more psychopathic the child’s personality.
It is certainly on this concept of the unloved child that the Austrain psychoanalyst August Aichhorn conceived in 1907 his “milieu therapy” theory. To explore this technique he opened after World War I, in Oberhollabrunn, Austria, a home for delinquent boys, probably the most enlightened institution of its kind in the first half of the century. This became the model for a whole series of bold experiments, such as the Children’s Village at Ska in Sweden; Warrendale in Canada; and in the United States—the most ambitious programs—Hawthorne Cedar Knoll, Fritz Redl’s Pioneer House in Detroit, Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenic School in Chicago and Wiltwyck in New York: all schools concentrating on giving close therapy through affection to asocial children, a considerable number of them psychopaths.4 Even so, it is generally agreed that very little is really known or scientifically certain about so-called psychopathic children. Psychiatrists readily concede that it is a term applied fairly loosely to people with certain character deficiencies and showing certain behavior patterns. But the same characteristics and patterns have also been noticed in children with mental subnormalities or quite specific mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. “Psychopath” has in fact become almost a cliché—an emotive term used far too readily even by specialists, and far too often by the media. What we tend to forget—perhaps because we do not want to face it—is that psychiatry, far from being capable of performing miracles, is only at the dawn of knowledge. The fact that a few progressive experiments dealing with these problems exist in the United States (and Europe) should not be interpreted as indicating that the problem is solved—or even only marginally less acute there. On the contrary, America’s violent—or disturbed—society perhaps not unnaturally produces more violent—or disturbed—children than any other place in the world. And the few amongst them who, instead of being sent to mental hospitals or even prisons, end up being treated at the two milieu therapy centers which have survived America’s recession of the past few years, are very lucky indeed.5