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

by Gitta Sereny

  “What right have we,” said a Children’s Department official to me once in a meeting I was invited to attend at the Home Office, “to separate a mother from her child?”

  When are we going to learn that no relationship can hold darker dangers than the one between mother and child gone wrong? When are we going to have the courage to discard the tired principle of the absolute sacredness of family and parental ties? When are we going to allow parents to be free of children they for some reason cannot love, and help children to be free of the catastrophic handicap of parents who cannot love them? When indeed will we be mature enough to accept, for ourselves and our children, that there is no obligation to love, there is no guilt in not loving, and that the only valid basis for relationships between parents and children, sisters and brothers, husbands and wives, women and men, women and women, men and men—between any human beings—is love freely given from both sides.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Except for the principals, names of all children who were more than marginally affected by the events described in this book have been deleted, equally those of Mary Bell’s family except for her parents.

  By agreement with the Chief Constable of Northumberland the surnames of all policewomen who were concerned with Mary Bell have been deleted.

  The account of the trial is taken verbatim from the transcript, with dots indicating deletions.

  APPENDIX

  MARY BELL–DOCUMENTS

  Photo of Mary Bell, age eleven

  “We Murder” notes (See here, and here)

  Page from Mary Bell’s school “Newsbook” (See here)

  Letter from Mary Bell to her mother, Spring 1970 (See here)

  APPENDIX

  THE MURDER OF JAMES BULGER

  [Note: The names of all children, except those of James Bulger, Robert Thompson and Jonathan Venables, have been changed.]

  Liverpool, a year after the murder of little Jamie Bulger, had forgotten nothing. The fact that Denise and Ralph Bulger had a new baby; that Jonathan Venables and Robert Thompson, the two ten-year-olds who killed James, were locked away in secure units; that their families—Neil and Susan Venables and their other two children; Anne Thompson and her six boys—had been given new names and “relocated” to the anonymity of distant council estates, meant nothing.

  The particularly endearing face of that little blond toddler, and the fluttering video images of three apparently playful children, which in February 1993 were on every front page and TV screen in Britain and the world, appeared to have been engraved in the minds and hearts of this hugely emotional English city.

  The days I spent there will remain among the saddest I have lived. But though Jamie continues to be mourned by thousands, I think the sadness one finds in almost everyone one speaks to there is less now for his terrible death than for the total inexplicability of it, which the trial in November 1993 did nothing to dispel. The most important thing I was reminded of in Liverpool a year after the murder was that in order for human beings to come to terms with such a tragedy, they need to understand why it happened.

  Where do we begin to look for understanding? What was it in these children’s lives that gave them the need to abduct and batter to death the unknown “Baby James”, as Liverpudlians, unfailingly tender, refer to the not-yet three-year-old who died?

  Certainly nothing was done to answer this question during the eight months preceding the trial, or, of course, since. One hundred and twenty police officers worked with exceptional commitment on the investigation; there is no doubt that every member of the two boys’ families, every friend, every neighbour, was questioned. But except for their teachers’ statements about their conduct at school, some information about the two families’ circumstances, and, in connection with these, various bits of gossip which allowed speculation but not knowledge, nothing emerged which might have provided some insight into these two children’s minds and inner lives. Many of the police officers I spoke to were deeply interested in the children’s backgrounds, but it was not their job to go into them. As far as the law is concerned, the primary function of the police is to prepare the evidence for the prosecution.

  What is astonishing is that in cases of children accused of serious crime in this country, the law forbids any therapeutic involvement by psychiatrists before the trial. So, although three psychiatrists did enter the picture in the months preceding the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in November, their job was only to establish, first, that the two boys were capable of distinguishing right from serious wrong and, secondly, that they were mentally responsible for their acts at the time they committed them.

  Any psychiatric attention other than this before a trial is held to “adulterate” the evidence.

  This, then, is the first question we need to ask: how effective is our judicial system in relation to children who kill? Britain is the only country in Western Europe where children may be considered criminally responsible as of the age of ten (eight in Scotland) and where, for cases of capital crime, they are tried by judge and jury, as adults.

  In every other Western country (excepting a few archaically inclined states in the USA), children are brought before Juvenile or Family Courts after social and psychiatric investigations which can take years. During this process, depending on the severity of their acts, and on their social situation, they may remain at home under supervision, in care in a children’s home, or in special psychiatric children’s centres considerably more medically and therapeutically oriented than our “Special Units”. Their cases are finally decided, usually in camera, by boards of specially trained judges and magistrates.

  The British legal system, by comparison, seems both hypocritical and anachronistic. The two principles on which it bases its need to try children with the full formality of the law have, in the last few decades, changed so radically, that they have, essentially, lost their meaning. The first is that if a child is capable of understanding the difference between right and wrong, then it knows that it is “wrong” to lie, to steal, and to kill. This may have been valid for generations whose moral precepts rested securely on family, church and country. But many if not most of today’s children—as we can see from the latest figures collected since the Bulger case—get their secondary moral grounding largely from the TV screen, with its confusing sense of values and constant emphasis on violence. (Their primary grounding, in my opinion, is the instinct for good all children are born with.) Whatever children might overhear or witness in their own environment can rarely compensate them for this confusion. Whatever class of society they belong to, many forms of “wrong”—such as cheating and lying, about taxes, business or social security—have become a matter of survival. Under modern-day pressures family discord is almost the rule rather than exception.

  This does not, of course, mean that most children are without a sense of right and wrong, but that their moral priorities have been unbalanced. Instead of a universal acceptance of “right” contributing to the child’s sense of security, a general acceptance of “wrong” adds to its confusion. The second principle is that justice must be seen to be done: the child must have the same right as an adult defendant to the presentation of evidence, an advocate to plead his or her case and a jury to decide over guilt or innocence.

  But in our glasshouse existence, the meaning of this, too, has changed. I can hardly think of anything more harmful to child defendants, their families and the families of victims, than to have the crime and the suffering unroll in the greedy public arena the modern media can create. Of course, evidence must be presented and the child must be defended, but this can be done—and is in juvenile courts—in camera.

  As for the jury, anyone who watched those twelve men and women in Preston is unlikely to forget either their pain when they were forced to examine the photographs of the dead child or their bewilderment as they tried to resist normal feelings of sympathy for crying child defendants or make sense of their manipulations and lies under interrogations. Th
is jury knew just as well as the Judge, the lawyers, and the police that the brutal murder of a small child by two little boys could not be adequately explained, either with the forensic evidence of the crime, or with advocacy, however brilliantly presented, claiming that one boy was more guilty than another.

  Of course the formal requirements of the law could be satisfied: James had been killed; the two boys had killed him; the two boys were guilty; the two boys had to be punished.

  In the case of crimes committed by young children, can punishment be the only purpose of legal proceedings? Is it morally right that, at the end of eight months of investigation by 120 police officers and a 17-day trial involving some of the cleverest men at the Bar and three child psychiatrists, nobody knows what made these two boys commit this deed? What made them so ferocious and so cruel? I suggest that every member of that jury, that Court and the public could not have failed to ask themselves those questions during the trial. And the case should never have ended, or, more to the point, begun, without the answers being known.

  We do not live in a time when whipping and hanging is seen to be the punishment for “wicked” children. We know now about the relationship of violence in children to violence done to children. We know the cause-and-effect sequence of childhood trauma; we thus know that children who hurt others have almost invariably been hurt themselves. Many in the Court and beyond suspected that something terrible must have happened in these boys that finally drove them to this frenzy. But the legal system not only precluded the possibility of delving into their lives, it led to the suppression of evidence. The intention was kind: to do everything possible to avoid adding to the suffering of James Bulger’s parents. Thus an agreement was struck between prosecution and defence to the effect that, the forensic evidence entirely proving the case against the two defendants, certain injuries the child suffered would not be mentioned to the jury.

  Under the system as it stands, it was a reasonable decision: this evidence, which certainly would have led to prurience in the media, was not necessary to the case. The prosecution had all they needed to prove murder. The fact that it was necessary in order to indicate the two boys’ disturbance was, as we will see, not part of the case. The police, although perhaps more anxious than anyone else to protect the Bulgers’ feelings, did their duty: their careful interrogations of the two boys, almost all of which were played to the court on tape, repeatedly touched upon the suspected sexual element of the crime. James’s shoes and stockings, trousers and underpants had been taken off. And the pathologist’s report read out in court recorded that the child’s foreskin had been manipulated.

  That this information remained in the report was already beyond the agreement that had been reached. Detective Superintendent Albert Kirby, who led the investigation, knew about the agreement: “But I felt that the jury had a right to know at least that much,” he told me.

  Knowing only “that much”, however, was not enough. Even though nobody who listened to the interrogations could fail to notice both boys’ desperate discomfort when questioned both about handling Jamie’s private parts and about some batteries found near the toddler’s body, here the tapes and the official record stopped.

  Because this is the second murder of a small child by young children I have worked on at length, I have inevitably been driven to compare what happened in Liverpool and Preston in 1993, with the case of eleven-year-old Mary Bell, who killed two small boys in Newcastle in 1968. The horror people felt was the same, as was the fear of the unknown. The words which were used—“monster”, “evil fiend”—were the same in 1968 to describe Mary, as in 1993 to describe Jonathan and Robert. And the supposed reasons—though twenty-five years later perhaps expressed by more commentators in more pseudo-scientific terms—were equally facile.

  In 1968 in Newcastle, already in the grip of economic depression, it was the word “Scotswood” that conveyed the sense not only of the deprived area of the city where such crimes could happen, but the class which produced such killers. In 1993, in unemployment-ridden Liverpool, Scotswood was replaced by “Walton”, and somehow the contrast between the modern Bootle shopping centre with its electronic miracle of security videos and the violence of the act in a deserted railway yard made the horror worse.

  Yet the underlying suggestion—that this was a case of “them”, the children of the poor, drunk and inadequate, and therefore could never be “us”—was the same last year in Liverpool as 25 years ago in Newcastle, and just as wrong.

  Children who kill are not produced by a class, but unhappiness. Unhappiness in children is never innate, it is created by the adults they “belong to”: there are adults in all classes of society who are immature, confused, inadequate or sick, and, under given and unfortunate circumstances, their children will reflect, reproduce and often pay for the miseries of the adults they need and love. Children are not evil.

  In Preston Crown Court last November there was an invisible wall between Jonathan’s parents, Susan and Neil Venables, and Robert’s mother, Anne Thompson. Each parent was convinced that the other’s child had both initiated the crime and carried it out; to a degree, therefore, each parent was convinced that his or her own child was innocent.

  The two boys, as has been described often elsewhere, sat on a specially built platform, with two social workers between them. Although in all reports they were described as being of different size and build, Jonathan slim and tall, Robert smaller and roundish, they appeared to have caught up with each other in the intervening months: they were both rather heavy and flabby—both were said to have gained weight since their arrest, Jonathan over two stone. Under close restraint, neither had had any opportunity for exercise.

  But his new weight notwithstanding, Jonathan was a nice-looking boy with silky brown hair and a small childlike face: it was extremely difficult to associate that face with the acts we heard described. He behaved extraordinarily well during the long days of the sessions: except for occasionally turning around to glance at his parents, he moved little. We would hear in the course of the trial that a school psychologist had diagnosed him as hyperactive: he was certainly the stillest hyperactive child I have ever seen. A few times he, as well as Robert, played with some of the tissues their social workers held at the ready for them, creating patterns by folding them up and tearing little holes of different sizes and shapes. A couple of times I saw Jonathan open up his completed artwork and show it with a smile to the tall man beside him, who smiled back. The solid 6ft 2in man and the boy appeared close, conferred often, and the man’s eyes were almost always on his charge. Repeatedly, when Jonathan seemed particularly tense, or cried, his social worker briefly held or touched him. Robert, though too heavy and his face too wide, looked nice enough the first week. But after the weekend, his already short dark hair had been almost shaved off, giving him suddenly a disturbingly neutered look—and that of a convict. I asked whether perhaps his secure unit had been beset by headlice—it seemed the only explanation for this grotesque crop. But I was told, no, he had asked for this cut.

  Robert’s hands were much more restless than Jonathan’s. They were never still. The two boys appeared at times to compete in the Kleenex cut-outs both produced—they leaned forward repeatedly to look at each other’s paper-lace and once or twice appeared to smile. They also looked at each other, quick darting looks at high points of the evidence, but, with two or three exceptions, without visible emotion.

  While Jonathan’s feelings about things he heard were clearly expressed in his face, Robert’s was blank for most of those three weeks. His emotions were in his fingers—and in the movements of his mouth. His fingers were constantly moving, wadding-up the tissues, forming them as if with purpose into round or oblong shapes, or tearing them into bits. We were told he was in the habit of sucking his thumb and pushing his finger in his ear, but in court he did something different, stranger, with his hands, with great intensity.

  Several times in almost every session, he licked the tip of each fing
er, then wiped them on his trousers and licked them again; then he put two or three fingers in his mouth, filling it, closed his lips around them, held them still for a moment, and then pushed the fingers to and fro or turned them around in a circle. Or yet again, he licked a finger and then drew it slowly around his mouth.

  His social worker, a slim, tense-looking man, rarely looked at Robert (an interesting parallel to the reactions of policewoman Brenda M. to Mary Bell); their communication appeared limited to the five or ten times during each session when Robert, for an instant looking childlike, asked him the time. Although next to each other, there seemed always to be a small space between them which neither did anything to close. I was told the social worker was a nice man; but he didn’t touch the boy, even at the very end of the trial when Robert, hearing the sentence, his usually pink face chalk-white, cried.

  I had sat quite near Susan and Neil Venables throughout the trial. They were at the right, just behind and slightly underneath the platform where the boys sat. Shirl Marshall, the founder and director of Aftermath, an organization that cares for relatives of perpetrators, sat next to them. Two social workers sat directly behind them.

  Neil Venables, transparently thin, his face greyish-yellow, seemed smaller than his wife; most of the time throughout the three weeks he leaned forward, his head resting almost between his knees; much of the time he cried. Susan was remarkably pretty and, I thought, remarkably composed. We knew that the couple had lived apart for years and I thought it was touching that Susan, when Neil cried, leaned forward, her dark hair brushing against his face, and whispered to console him.