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

by Gitta Sereny

  Where Neil, however, looked gentle, soft and devastated, Susan seemed angry; she had what I was certain was a nervous habit—of fixing her make-up time and again. Whenever anyone spoke to them, or they got up to go outside or downstairs to see their boy, she appeared to lead; Neil followed. Oddly, for it somehow didn’t fit the picture, when, as happened repeatedly every day, Jon turned around to look for or at his parents, his father often met and held his glance; his mother looked away or through him.

  On the surface, the police were quite positive about the Venables, who had been very helpful to them during the incredibly difficult interrogations. But they did not feel like this at all about Anne Thompson, who had not only been absent during the first week-and-a-half of the trial but had refused to attend many of the interrogations in February.

  The fact that, as the Thompson family solicitor, Dominic Lloyd, told me, she had broken down after being present at the first interrogations, did not appear to impress the otherwise immensely humane police. “Can you imagine,” said Detective Sergeant Phil Roberts, one of two officers who interrogated Robert Thompson, “a mother who lets her child go through this without her?” (“I saw her collapse,” Dominic Lloyd said. “He didn’t.”)

  Until I met Shirl Marshall, Dominic Lloyd and the boys’ barristers, I had only heard Anne Thompson described as a “slut”, a “shrew” and a “slag”. This was not the way they felt, and it was not the impression she conveyed to me when I saw her.

  Forty years old last December, Anne is a big woman, dark-haired with a pale complexion: I found her unexpectedly attractive. She sat, always next to a psychiatric social worker who had been assigned to her some time before the trial and continued to work with her afterwards, two rows behind the Venables and out of reach of Robert’s eyes if he had tried to look at her, which he didn’t. Nor did she move, or stretch to look at him. She sat very quietly throughout the proceedings. From time to time—and there was good reason—she cried, and when she did she sat totally still, tears pouring unchecked down her cheeks. In the end she would fumble blindly for a handkerchief, wipe her face (which would emerge looking curiously young and naked), and then clench her hands and soaking handkerchief in her lap, her knuckles white with tension.

  Anne Thompson had expressed a wish to meet me quite early on, even before the trial ended. She had seen my book about the Mary Bell case and told Dominic Lloyd that, with the knowledge I had gained, I could perhaps help her. She was, however, extremely upset for weeks after the trial, and it was mid-January when we finally met and spent a day together.

  Sue and Neil Venables agreed to meet me shortly after that, when—just as in Newcastle 25 years ago—someone who knew them became convinced that the wrong approach to the trial needed to be publicized, and that both parents’ stories were essential if this was to be understood and the boys were to be helped.

  The attractive couple who came up to my room at the Adelphi in Liverpool had very little in common with the man and woman I remembered. I had of course expected them to have regained some equanimity: no one can continually manifest pain, even when they feel it. But Susan and Neil seemed almost like different people.

  Sue was as attractive as I remembered her, only more rested and strangely gay. She is 37 but looked years younger. She wore tight-fitting black trousers—she is very slim—a black and gold blouse, black suede bootees, a short white belted raincoat and a Spanish hat; she would not have been out of place having tea at the Savoy.

  Neil, in a dark suit, shirt and tie and beautifully polished shoes, was handsome, appeared to have filled out and grown several inches, and also looked much younger than his 41 years. Both of them readily told me about their childhoods. “I was spoilt when I was young,” Neil said. “We had a very happy childhood, me and my younger sister. My father worked on the docks, nobody drank, nobody beat anybody. I did OK in school, and at 15 I left and got a job as a panel-beater for two garages.”

  The money hadn’t been “brilliant”, so his mother, who worked at Jacobs’ biscuit factory, got him a job there driving a fork-lift truck. “It was an 8-to-5 job: I didn’t mind it, did I?” He constantly repeated his statements in the form of questions to Sue. He laughed. “Once I was out of bed, I didn’t mind, did I? But until that point, no, I wasn’t that keen on it.”

  Neil’s parents were both dead: his mother died in 1977, when she was 51, after a complicated bypass operation; his father 14 years later in 1991. He wasn’t working now, he said. He’d lost his job when he was 30—in 1983—and hadn’t worked since.

  Was it his health that had stopped him working? I asked. Although looking infinitely better than during the trial, he is still very thin. “No,” he said, “I’m perfectly healthy,” and Sue laughed fondly. “Mr. Perfect,” she teased him, “that’s you. He wrote after 300 jobs,” she added quickly. “I even tried for a £2-an-hour job sweeping streets,” he said. “But then I said, no, I wouldn’t get out of bed for that . . .”

  “You were OK,” she said. “You worked when you could, didn’t you? Well . . .” she threw in, disconcertingly, “I made more money than he did,” and she laughed again, a somehow unconvincing laugh.

  To all appearances she was always shoring him up, but after a while I began to wonder: was she supporting him because he was weak, or was he submitting to her to allow her to appear strong?

  Susan Venables was born in 1957. Her one brother is three years older. They were quite well-off, she said; her father was a building contractor and they lived “in a big house three storeys high”.

  Her father was also a musician: he played the guitar. “After a while he started a band and then he did building and the band.”

  Sue loved school, especially the last years. “Dad always worked, mum was a part-time barmaid. Dad got the band together when I was 12 or 13, and when he was off on gigs and mum was working, I’d stay with schoolfriends. I loved it. I still have some of my schoolmates now; one of them got in touch with me through the Daily Star when it all happened, just to say hello and that she didn’t believe a word of it.”

  At 15, she started work at Littlewoods Pools as an inspector and copy typist and stayed there until she was 22. They had married in 1975 when Sue was 18 and Neil 22. “We had four years on our own; that’s not bad,” she said. In 1979 they had their first son, Paul; Jonathan came in 1982 and their daughter, Sandra, in 1983. Paul was born with a cleft lip which was operated on when he was 11 months. “He was a terribly unhappy baby and little boy till he was four or so,” Sue said. “He was just so frustrated: he couldn’t speak, couldn’t express himself at all, though he seemed to know inside what he wanted to get across. Anyway, it was just dreadful; he never stopped crying . . . it drove me berserk.”

  I asked what she did about it.

  “Oh, I just put him in his room and closed the door on him, left him to scream. There just wasn’t anything to do. I was never out of hospital with him.”

  What had she done with baby Jon when she had to take Paul to hospital? Did she take him along?

  She reacted as if she suspected a trick question: “Never,” she said quickly. “I never took him along. We don’t think Jon suffered from all that. He was a new-born baby.

  “I just loved Jon,” Sue continued. “I loved him to death. He was the best, the sweetest baby—he was great . . . pleasant, smiling of a morning, wasn’t he?” Neil nodded.

  “He never gave me a moment’s trouble. He just sat there in his push-chair or carry-cot and smiled and gurgled. He walked at 11 months, spoke well at 15, was potty-trained at two years. He was just brilliant.”

  To complete the family picture then, a year later, in 1983, they had Sandra: “Now I had my daughter.

  “I remember Jon at 15 months, with Sandra in her little cradle, they’d sit watching the children’s programmes on the telly while I was working in the kitchen. They were like little peas in the pod: he’d always look at her, look after her, say ‘Baby’, and touch her and if she cried, he called me—‘Baby cry’.
”

  It would actually be almost two years before they realized that Sandra, too, had some problems. “We didn’t suspect that at all. Contrary to Paul, she had been a happy baby—I just got to notice—probably because Jon had been so advanced—that she was lazy, though of course, she was much better than Paul . . .”

  “Much better,” Neil echoed. “And she talked. And she was happy—you know, she was lovely, she still is . . .”

  And then she swerved back to Paul. “I tried him in an ordinary nursery when he was three, then asked for a psychologist to assess him. She did a brain scan—normal. So then she suggested special education, and after he went to Meadowbanks with the small classes, one-to-one attention, a lot of help and special tuition, and he calmed down; got much better . . . He’s 15 now; gets his own bus.

  “Sandra could probably have coped in ordinary school—she was assessed and went there from five to seven; but then the class went bigger and bigger; she couldn’t keep up nor get the attention she needed and she was always struggling and got so upset. So we got her moved to Meadowbanks, too, and she was happy as a lark there. She’s 10 now . . . reads at seven.

  “I sometimes said about Paul, ‘I hate him, he’s overruling my life . . .’ The doctor said ‘That’s just in your mind: you really love him . . .’

  “Of course, I never stopped asking myself,” Sue said, “did I do anything to harm them when I was pregnant? Well, I had been ill at the beginning of my pregnancy with Paul and was put on antibiotics; but later the doctors assured me they had been very mild.”

  There appears to be no clear explanation of the origin of the two children’s retardation, or, if there was, the parents were not told. Susan’s early handling of her screaming baby was not necessarily wrong. In principle experts have long found that it is often safer to leave crying babies who are not physically at risk, not wet, hungry or otherwise physically uncomfortable, on their own for a while in a warm and familiar place, rather than expose them to the danger of one’s own frustration.

  But listening to this account, it becomes obvious that Jonathan, born in 1982, must have spent his first years in an atmosphere of tremendous maternal tension.

  However loved these children were—and one doesn’t for a minute doubt Susan Venables’s love—forcing this middle child, Jon, for a long time, perhaps unconsciously, to compensate his mother for her two problem children, put an enormous weight of responsibility on this child virtually from the time he was born.

  By 1984, the pressures became too much for Susan herself. “I’d had five years of it by then. He . . .”—she nodded in Neil’s silent direction, but with a smile—“he was OK: he was out working all day . . . Well,” she added quickly, with one of those endearing bursts of self-correction she sometimes showed, “Not that all right then: he’d no sooner come in the door and I’d gab away about all the awful things that happened—whether it was my continued failing with Paul’s potty-training and of course by then Sandra’s too . . . or whether it was just . . . oh, everything . . . just the inside of the house where, 27 years old, I was all day with three kids—oh, it just went on and on and I felt completely trapped . . .” “Well,” Neil said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I worked, and the house and the children were her job. I didn’t want all that every night. I just told her to get on with it.”

  It was at first hard to imagine Neil taking the quiet and almost humorously firm position he depicts here, but later I would change my mind. When Sue readily admits “I nagged the moment he came in . . .” the situation must have been much more traumatic than that, above all for young Jon.

  On the face of it, Susan and Neil present themselves as an exceptionally well-behaved, now well-adjusted couple; but it isn’t hard to visualize the chaos of their marriage, with the three small children listening to Susan’s despair and Neil’s recriminations.

  Did you ever hit her? I asked him. He shook his head, and Sue came in at once with another of her disarming funnies. “I’d be more likely to have hit him,” she said and they looked at each other tenderly. “But I didn’t, did I?” SHE ASKED HIM. “Not really?”.

  “No,” he agreed: “Not really.”

  “I felt closed in,” she went on, “and took it out on Neil. I’m a chatty sort of person; I need my girlfriends, an occasional game of darts, a meal out. Neil doesn’t.”

  “I expected my wife to be at home, looking after me and the kids,” Neil said again with unexpected firmness. “I said ‘That’s your job—like my mother’s. Get on with it . . .’”

  “We were very young when we married,” Sue said, as if summing up. “When the kids came I felt I was a prisoner in my own house. I needed other people. We had a lot of rows through 1983. My dad had died of cancer so my mum was alone. So I decided to move to my mum’s, with the kids. Neil had been made redundant. So we sold the house.”

  “I got myself a bedsit,” Neil inserted.

  “After I left I was much better,” Sue said. “Neil was much better, too, we were more relaxed. Neil came up on weekends, took the children out.”

  “Sometimes Paul or Jon stayed overnight,” Neil said. “In the morning I’d go and get the others and we’d go places together.”

  “I explained to the kids that we each had our place,” Sue said, “that their dad loved them and would see them. Jon appeared to have no reaction—very bubbly, happy. Neil was always there. I went to see him with them. We were always friends . . . we slept together, we went on holiday together. I was at my mum’s about three years. We got divorced during that time. After that I got a place of my own. But he was always my best friend.”

  Why did you bother to get divorced? I asked her. She giggled. “It just sort of happened. I never picked up the papers; they’re still in court.”

  But then, perhaps you never were really divorced?

  “Oh yes, we were; I got the decree nisi; the lawyer told me. I just didn’t pick up the papers.”

  Neil grinned. “I had a good time, went to a club . . . oops, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you that.”

  They went on sleeping together. “We didn’t the first 12 months,” Sue rectifies.

  “I did meet another girl,” Neil said.

  “But I told her there was no chance I could marry anyone else and have children with anybody else. Nobody but Susan . . .”

  Sue said, “The kids were happy, we were happy . . . my mum helped me to up the Income Support—he had dole.”

  “I had these friends,” Neil said, “older with grown-up children. They were like a mother and father to me . . .”

  “But we tell each other everything,” Sue said. “Always did, always will. When I was working, I rang him up every day from work.”

  “We were working towards a reconciliation,” was what Susan Venables later told the police, social workers and the media.

  I have no doubt that this is how Sue and Neil interpreted—to themselves—their ten-year make-believe separation: their marital relations stopped only briefly; they had separate flats, but shared both; the children, theoretically alternating between them, in fact wandered to and fro with them; and they all went on holidays together.

  It seems at first mature and even sophisticated. But what it sounded like when Sue and Neil, who, although nice, are neither of these two things, ebulliently related their married-unmarried life to me, was two people rather desperately role-playing a kind of fantasy life. How would this curious confusion, added to his siblings’ problems—his mother’s principal preoccupation, to his cost—have affected Jon, especially once he started school and saw how other children lived?

  “When Jon was at Broad Square Infants,” she said, “he was OK. The bad things started when he was seven and went to Junior School. We had moved to a bigger house, a new area for us. Neighbours down the road who had four or five kids in the family called Paul names . . .

  “Jon was very unhappy when he came home to tell me. I told him ‘Words can’t hurt you—ignore them.’ But perhaps being in a new stree
t and another part of the school was too much for him?”

  In 1989, a social worker was introduced to the Venables family to help arrange respite fostering for nine-year-old Paul who was troubling his mother with sudden bouts of tantrums. This is a weekend away once a month in a foster-home to give the mother a rest.

  As the social worker would later state to the police, this measure worked well for Paul. But he soon realized that their real problem was Jon, “along with difficult relations between all the children in the family, and other youngsters in the road where they lived . . .”

  As time continued, he stated, “more and more of my attention when visiting the family was focused on [seven-year-old] Jon who was becoming an unhappy young man and as a result was creating disruption both at home and in his school. This was in spite of his mother’s best efforts to read what was happening to him and try to provide some answers . . .”

  “When Jon moved to the school at Walton,” Neil said, “he stayed with me for three days, then Sue came to stay for the other four days.” (So Jon was, in effect, living with his father.)

  The Venables insist that the rumours which circulated among the media during the case, that they had these two establishments in order to double their income from the state, were wrong. “It was not for money reasons,” Sue said.

  “Neil had his dole . . . I had the Income Support: it didn’t make any difference in money. And the proof is, when we got back together, we declared it and now we have Income Support together as a family and that’s just about £5 less. So it wasn’t money.”

  “We were lucky,” Neil put in. “Sue’s mother always helped—she saved some money, so we were able to have family holidays.”