.

MARY BELL

 

 

 

by Katherine Smith

 

 

 

© Copyright 2020 Katherine Smith

 

 

 

Contents

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

REFERENCES

 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is, I hope, a sensitive and balanced account of the Mary Bell case and her life in the decades that followed the infamous events of 1968. The sources used for the research of this book are listed after the conclusion of the final chapter.

INTRODUCTION

The case of Mary Bell shocked the nation in 1968. In the city of Newcastle, an eleven year-old girl was responsible for the death of two young boys who were not much more than toddlers. The method of death was strangulation (squeezing of the neck) and both tragic incidents took place on derelict land where massive slum housing clearances were under way. The girl responsible for the murders was Mary Flora Bell - a darkly angelic looking child who never seemed to show any sign of emotion. Mary Bell is still alive today and now a grandmother (it is nothing short of remarkable to think that the 'demon child'of Scotswood, as the media dubbed her, is now a grandmother living a quiet life somewhere) but she will always be frozen in time as that eleven year-girl with the bob haircut and piercing eyes. This was a desperately tragic and awful true crime case made all the more sad and harrowing because it involved children.

One of the many chilling things about this case is that the death of the first child, Martin Brown, was initially judged by the authorities to have been an accident. Martin was judged to have slipped and hit his head playing in one of the derelict houses of Scotswood in Newcastle. Because his death came at the hands of a little girl there was no obvious physical evidence of assault or foul play. The actual reason for his death was too shocking and too strange to even be a consideration for the authorities at first. Had it not been for the death of Brian Howe soon afterwards (in suspiciously similar circumstances) the death of Martin Brown might never have been investigated any further. Martin's mother would never have known that Mary Bell, who she knew and spoke to often, had killed her son.

At the heart of this awful, tragic, and grim drama was Mary Bell. Mary was intelligent, cunning, damaged, disturbed, and seemingly out of control. She was already notorious in the area and known to the police for numerous unprovoked attacks on other children. No action was ever taken against this child nor her family though - save for standard police warnings to stay out of trouble in the future. The social services in 1968, by comparison to social services today, were woefully inadequate. One would like to think that a case like that of Mary Bell today would see much prompter intervention and professional help for the family before any tragedy could occur. However, no one could possibly have foreseen that Mary Bell was capable of killing anyone. This was beyond any reasonable comprehension.

The case of Mary Bell was exceptionally difficult and complex for the police, legal authorities, and reform and prison services to prosecute and process. How does one extract any justice against an eleven year-old girl charged with double manslaughter? The system had no rules or guidelines in place for such an unlikely eventuality. Was the child to be tried in an adult court? At what age should she be sent to prison if convicted? How long should that sentence be? Can she be rehabilitated and reformed? Can she be released one day? As we shall see in the chapters which follow, these were not easy questions to answer. Mary Bell became a fascinating case study in the process and methods of reform and rehabilitation. We will examine in the book what happened to Mary Bell when she was locked up and how she changed in those years.

Mary Bell, by any standards, had an awful childhood. Her mother Betty Bell was an alcoholic prostitute who tried to give Mary away on several occasions. Betty Bell could be violent and was subject to unpredictable mood swings. There were beatings in addition to verbal assaults on Mary Bell and her siblings. All of this clearly took its toll on Mary Bell in particular. Mary Bell also endured several drug overdoses as a child thanks to the pills her mother would both give her and absently leave around the house.

Decades after the terrible events of 1968, Mary Bell would claim that she had been sexually abused as a child by the men that her mother brought back to the house as a prostitute. Mary Bell would blame her mother for the creation of the 'demon child' she had been in 1968. We will examine the credibility of Mary Bell's claims in the book and also to what extent they explain (if at all) anything that she did. Many people endure very difficult childhoods without turning into Mary Bell. What was it about Mary's childhood that made her snap? Why was she so cold and detached from life at such a tender age?

We will also examine Mary Bell's childhood friendship with Norma Bell (who was no relation) in the book. Mary Bell predictably blamed Norma for the deaths of the two boys and the two girls were eventually put on trial side by side. It was a bizarre spectacle. Two little girls in an adult court on a charge of manslaughter. The trial of Mary and Norma was remarkably strange and the comparison between the two girls was fascinating. Norma was confused and emotional while Mary was confident and calm. The jury essentially had to decide at the trial which was the 'evil' and dominating one of these two girls. That was not a decision which took long at all. The contrast between the two girls was plain to see. Norma was human and vulnerable while Mary seemed cold and dispassionate. Norma was instrumental in the downfall of Mary Bell and we shall examine the close and strange bond between these two children.

This book will also examine the life of Mary Bell after her release from prison in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. Mary Bell's attempts to live a quiet life away from the spotlight were frequently challenged by media intrusion. Her photograph quickly found its way into the tabloid newspapers of the time after she was released. Mary Bell had to move house and flee more than once when her true identity was uncovered. In 1998, when Gitta Sereny updated her book about Mary Bell, the case of Mary Bell was suddenly headline news again when it came to light that Mary had been interviewed for the new book and received financial compensation for her time. This, as one might expect, was hugely controversial. Even the Prime Minister Tony Blair was questioned about this and asked his Home Secretary to try and block the book. By this stage of her life Mary Bell had a daughter of her own. Mary Bell's daughter had no idea of her mother's dark past until the great media storm of 1998.

In this book we will also remember the victims of this case and see how shabbily June Richardson, the mother of Martin Brown, was treated by the authorities after his death. The local authorities even denied June's request for some modest financial compensation so she she could pay for Martin to have a headstone - a decision that seems so heartless, insensitive, and mean it beggars belief. June Richardson spent the rest of her life tirelessly campaigning for the rights of mothers bereaved by murder and manslaughter cases.

We will reflect on how June Richardson coped in the decades after Martin's manslaughter in the book and also not forget Eileen Corrigan - the mother of Brian Howe, the other boy killed by Mary Bell. June Richardson wanted to forget about Mary Bell but that was never easy - especially when Mary escaped from an open prison in 1977 and became headline news again. The media rumpus of 1998 over Mary Bell's payment for Cries Unheard (Gitta Sereny's updated book about the Mary Bell case) was also, as we shall see, deeply painful for the surviving relatives of the two victims.

Ultimately though, this book is about a little girl who, to use her own words, fell into a dark abyss. We will follow Mary Bell from childhood right through to the present day

and see how the unfathomable and tragic actions of her youth cast a shadow that neither she nor Tyneside could ever hope to completely escape from. The case of Mary Bell, as it drifts further and further into the past, is like a nightmarish folk memory that refuses to ever completely fade. It is a strange and tragic story that will probably never lose its enduring and morbid fascination.

CHAPTER ONE

 

The suburb of Scotswood lies in the Western District of Newcastle upon Tyne - a city in the north east of England. The city developed around the Roman settlement Pons Aelius and was named after the mighty castle built in 1080 by Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror's eldest son. The town grew and expanded as an important centre for the wool trade in the 14th century. At one point in history Newcastle was one of the largest shipbuilding centres in the world. Tyneside yards built the first armour plated warships and were responsible for The Gluckauf - the world's first oil tanker. The name Scotswood is believed to derive from 1367 when Richard, son of John Scott, merged the west ward with Benwell. Benwell and Scotswood remains an electoral ward to this day.

 

Scotswood grew rapidly in the nineteenth century thanks to the not inconsiderable influence of local industrialist and engineer William Armstrong and the powerful Vickers and Armstrong military engineering group. Armstrong built a factory on the Scotswood Road and invented and manufactured high-pressure hydraulic machinery that was state of the art cutting edge technology at the time. He created remarkable hydraulic cranes and modernised the munitions for the British Army. Armstrong was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1843 and created a baron in 1887. Meanwhile, in Benwell, Joseph Swan established the world's first electric light bulb factory. One might say that Scotswood and Benwell was at the heart of the industrial revolution and new age that was dawning.

 

Benwell and Scotswood were also host to a number of coalmines. A great tragedy occurred in 1925 with the dreadful Montague Colliery Disaster. An inrush of water from the nearby Paradise Pit crashed through where 148 men and boys were working. In the chaos their lamps extinguished, plunging them into a terrifying darkness. When the miners reached the surface they realised that 38 of their comrades had been lost.

 

By the 1950s, Scotswood was longer the industrial hub it had been in the past but was yet to suffer the full effects of the mass de-industrialisation that would occur in the British economy during later decades when services gradually replaced the old industries. It was a staunchly working-class community of long terraced streets and down to earth 'Geordies' - as people from the Tyneside region are known. The writer Yvonne Young, who lived in Benwell, had memories of tough folk with big hearts. A place teeming with vibrant life.

 

Life in Scotswood in the fifties and sixties was hard but colourful. One might encounter rat catchers or even boxing matches going on in back gardens - obstreperous spectators taking bets on the outcome as these amateur pugilists imagined themselves Randy Turpin or Tommy Farr. Residents were loath to leave clothes on washing lines or coal buckets in the garden (lest they should be taken) but it was, to borrow a cliché, a time when you could still leave your front door unlocked. It was a time when society still retained some innocence. The word 'paedophile' had yet to enter the general lexicon. There were no 24 hour news channels reporting local murder and misery and tabloid newspapers were an altogether different and tamer beast in comparison to what they would eventually become. As for child killers, that is say children who killed, this was a concept that most people had never even contemplated. Children were innocent. They were not capable of the sort of evil one associated with the most notorious, wicked, and serious crimes. Evil was the preserve of adults.

 

Mary Flora Bell was born on the 26th of May 1957 in Newcastle. Mary was the first child of Elizabeth 'Betty' Bell (née McCrickett). There would be four children in all, giving Mary two younger sisters and a younger brother. Mary was rarely - if ever - called Mary by friends and family. They all knew her as 'May'. Mary Bell's family lived on Whitehouse Road - a rough part of a rough area and around two miles west from the centre of Newcastle. Betty Bell was seventeen when Mary was born - not that much more than a child herself. She would not prove to be the most responsible or stable of mothers. Quite the reverse.

 

Mary's father Billy Bell was a petty criminal (who eventually graduated to more serious crimes) and fond of drink. He was a big burly looking man with a mop of curly hair and red sideburns. Betty married Billy after Mary was born. Mary was brought up to assume this man was her father but Billy Bell was almost certainly not her real biological father. Mary was always told to refer to Billy as her uncle so that Betty could claim government welfare payments. A police detective would later say that the Bell house didn't feel like a home. It was a cold and spartan place with none of the personal touches or bric-a-brac one would expect of a family environment. A very bleak house. Mary and one of her siblings later slept in a back room room downstairs which used to be a coal bunker. A rag and bone man named Harry Bury, who was Billy Bell's friend, often slept in one of the upstairs rooms. Mary Bell also had a vague memory of a pregnant woman named Frizzy sleeping in the house. It was a cramped and basic sort of life.

 

Mary was not an especially welcome new addition to the young life of Betty Bell. This is putting it mildly to say the least. Betty is said to have desperately wanted to get rid of this child. She almost allowed Mary to fall out of a third floor window through neglect and is said to have once undertaken a vague attempt to drown Mary in the bath. Betty was notorious for giving Mary overdoses of sleeping pills. Betty was an exceptionally troubled woman and always awash with tranquillisers and various pills for medical conditions. Betty, frequently addled through drink and medication, would absently leave her battery of pills around the house and the children would sometimes pick them up and eat them, thinking they were sweets. It was estimated that Mary was taken to hospital four times because of pills she had been given or found in the house. Betty tried to give Mary away several times but the child was always brought back by extended family members. It was not a very happy start in life for young Mary Bell. One might say it was the worst start imaginable.

 

Betty Bell was said to be very religious as a child. Her family always thought she was going to become a nun. Betty suffered no abuse nor any great trauma as a child. Her background was alarmingly normal. It is said though that something changed when her father died. Betty began to drift away from her family and become more eccentric after this. The loss had deeply affected her. Betty's sister Isa called Betty 'demented' in a later interview. In 1960, Betty took Mary to an adoption agency and tried to give Mary away to a woman who was moving to Australia. The woman got as far as buying clothes for Mary before Isa learned of this proposed adoption and put a stop to it. It is said that Mary's other aunt Cathy once offered to adopt Mary after two of the children had an overdose eating Betty's pills but Betty refused to give Mary away this time.

 

It is speculated that the overdoses Mary was subject to may have left her with some form of brain damage that was never diagnosed. Mary was clearly an odd child from a very young age. She never cried or showed much sign of emotion. Perhaps the key incident in Mary's early life came when she was five years-old and witnessed another child be killed by a bus. Mary seemed to suffer from a form of PTSD after this incident. She found it difficult to bond with other children or make friends. Mary's first kindergarten teacher said she was a nightmare. Mary would pinch, hit, and throttle the other children and she was constantly making up tall stories.

 

The Scotswood and Benwell area was rife with prostitution in the 50s and 60s. For some, going on the 'game' was the only way to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. When Mary Bell was four years-old, her mother Betty became a prostitute. Betty was born in Gateshead but had family in Glasgow - a city she would often travel to for meetings with her punters. Betty would make the 150 mile trip to Glasgow on a regular basis and vanish for days at a time. Betty had her own 'stand' (a spot where she picked up clients) in Glasgow and spent almost as much time in the city as she did at home.

 

Several years later, when Mary was under arrest, Betty would fail to turn up at one of the initial court hearings to extend Mary's detention. Social workers in Newcastle were so appalled and angered by this they set out to look for Betty in their own spare time. They eventually found her in Glasgow, plying her trade as a prostitute at her stand. Her daughter's court appearance was something Betty had apparently chosen to ignore. This true story served as the perfect capsule biography of Betty Bell. She was a strange and aloof sort of woman. There was always something slightly unpredictable and unfathomable about Betty Bell.

 

Betty Bell had black hair but for reasons best known to herself she usually wore a long tatty blonde wig that didn't look terribly convincing. Betty Bell didn't appear to like being herself very much. She always seemed to be trying to play a character. As Billy Bell (who was later arrested for an armed robbery) was also absent from the home on a regular basis, the children were frequently left to their own devices. Relatives (who were kind and decent and came out of the Mary Bell story well) were charged with keeping an eye on them but it wasn't quite the same as having loving parents who were always there.

 

There are no stories of Billy Bell being mean or abusive to Mary. When she was on trial, Billy Bell seemed to be the person that Mary was happiest to see during the breaks in court. Mary was never one to display physical affection with family members but she would hug Billy Bell during court intervals. Mary clearly loved Billy Bell. One wonders if Billy Bell couldn't have done more to save Mary. He just wasn't around enough. "Everything was all right when my dad was there," said Mary Bell years later. "But he wasn’t, often." While Billy at least left Mary with some fond memories to carry into her traumatic (and eventually notorious) life, it's safe to say that Betty Bell on the other hand was not mother of the year material. Betty Bell was an alcoholic and took drugs (both prescribed and recreational) in the house. She was hardly fit to care for young children - even when she was actually around.

 

Mary Bell's mother suffered from depression and unpredictable mood swings. It was never a comfortable experience to be in Betty's company. Betty was highly erratic and one never knew what mood she was going to be in from one minute to the next. The young Mary Bell was forever on edge as she anticipated which version of her mother she would meet that day. Sometimes her mother could be nice and then at other times she was a living nightmare.

 

Betty had a temper that she could barely control. According to Mary Bell, her mother once beat her with a dog chain so badly that the police were called (although no action was taken in the end). Mary was not the only victim of her mother's violent mood swings. Her brothers and sisters and even big burly Billy Bell also bore the brunt of her temper. Betty had classic symptoms of bipolar disorder. Her mood could go from one extreme to another in a moment and she was easily annoyed. At other times she would have fleeting bursts of optimism and recklessly spend money she didn't have.

 

One of the popular theories frequently floated in the story of Mary Bell is that Betty had a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP). In medical terms, this is defined as a disorder in which the caretaker of a child either makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms to make it appear as though the child is injured or ill. The term by proxy means through a substitute. Though MSP is primarily a mental illness, it is also considered a form of child abuse. Many people with MSP exaggerate or lie about a child's symptoms to get attention. They may also create symptoms by poisoning food, withholding food, or causing an infection. Some people may even have a child undergo painful or risky tests and procedures to try to gain sympathy from their family members or community. It seemed that Betty Bell liked attention and sympathy. Betty even made up a story once that Mary had been hit by a van.

 

Betty Bell is always tagged as the pivotal character in the formation of the child that Mary Bell became. It was - many have argued - her treatment of Mary that created a monster. Mary would even argue this herself - although it took many decades before she broke her silence. Mary Bell's mother would not just go out on the streets or to Glasgow to meet clients in her work as a prostitute. She would also bring men to the house in Whitehouse Road. Betty's particular speciality was sado-masochism. "I always hid the whips from the kids," she famously said to social workers. One can only imagine their reaction to this. Betty seemed to think that hiding a few whips in the cupboard somehow made bringing strange men back to the house (where her children lived) for sado-masochism sessions perfectly fine.

 

As the house on Whitehouse Road was tiny, Mary was often not only fully aware but also personal witness to some of the sessions Betty had with her clients. These included whippings and beatings. It is unavoidably speculated that the sado-masochism sessions had an effect on Mary - and not just by a form of osmosis either. Mary Bell later claimed her mother had sometimes included her in the sessions. That was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the shocking claims Mary would make against Betty Bell. Many decades later, Mary would say that, when she was a child, Betty would even allow the clients to sexually abuse her. Mary Bell claimed she was once sodomised by a client on Betty's bed when she was four years-old. One 'punter' even, according to Mary, tried to strangle her. Mary also alleged that she was whipped by her mother for the enjoyment of a client.

 

Only Mary Bell herself truly knows if these horrific and harrowing stories of being 'pimped' out by her mother as a child are really true. Mary Bell's brother and sisters apparently never noticed any of this in their time at the house. Mary said that Billy Bell would have killed these men if he knew of the abuse but he was never there when it happened and she never told him. The doubt in Mary Bell's claims came from the fact that Mary only spoke of this when Betty was dead. Mary never banished her mother from her life or outed her as a sexual abuser when Betty was alive. That was the strange thing about these disturbing stories of childhood sexual abuse. Mary remained close to her mother in her adult life. They even lived together for a time when Mary was released from prison as a young woman. It felt like an odd contradiction but then the relationship between Mary and Betty was complex and confusing at the best of times. It was fractious and difficult but, ultimately, Betty and Mary always seemed to need one another.

 

Mary Bell was also an unreliable narrator of her own life. Many of her claims contradicted other things she had. She was prone to getting dates and places muddled up. When she spoke of her crimes (which was rare), Mary Bell would give different versions of the same event to different people. It was difficult indeed to isolate fact from fiction or false memory when it came to Mary Bell. There is no doubt though that her childhood was tough and sexual abuse was a very real threat under the unusual and grim environment in which she lived.

 

Despite her often nightmarish family life, Mary Bell was a surprisingly bright and intelligent child. She was smart and streetwise and had an aptitude for writing and poetry. Even at a tender age, Mary Bell had a quick deadpan wit and inquisitive mind. Mary had also grown into a pretty girl. She had an oval face, a bob haircut with a long black fringe, and piercing blue eyes. Her ethereal blue eyes spooked and unsettled the other children at Delaval Road Junior School whenever she gazed at them. A frequent description of Mary at this time from those who encountered her was that she seemed completely unemotional. Mary seemed like a tabula rasa. When she stared at the other children they had a troubling sense that someone very cold and indifferent had fixed their steely gaze upon them.

 

It could be said that Mary seemed to have inherited some personality traits from her mother. Like Betty, Mary could be unpredictable. She also had a dark side. The children who encountered Mary Bell at school were all scared of her. She was a classic bully - only worse. Mary was a bully with a sadistic streak. Long before she became infamous and was taken away for her unconscionable and terrible crimes, it was already perfectly evident that there was something of the night about Mary Bell. The other children soon learned to be very wary whenever they saw the piercing blue eyes of Mary Bell target them. This was one child it was best to avoid if you were a little boy or girl in Scotswood.

 

Mary Bell was a child at a very different time from today. There were no CCTV cameras watching over the streets and towns nor armies of professional social workers staging family interventions and inspections. Mary was a child during a time when children were allowed to roam free at all hours in a fashion that they simply wouldn't be allowed to today. The world somehow seemed a less dangerous place in the 1960s. There were far fewer cars on the roads and no hysterical tabloid panics about anything in particular. There were no 24 hour news channels endlessly reporting murders, rapes, disasters, death, misery, or missing children.

 

There was no social media, no web to surf, no Playstations or X-Boxes, no mobile phones, no streaming platforms or DVDs. Children in the 1960s often had to live in their own imaginations and make their own entertainment. That often involved going outside unsupervised to play and explore for many hours at a time. In late 1960s Britain, parents sometimes had no idea where their children were. They were just out. In the woods, scrumping apples, or climbing trees. At a friend's house or playing football. It was ok though. They'd be home in time for tea. The children of Mary Bell's generation, for better or for worse, had a sense of freedom that simply doesn't exist today.

 

In the years when Mary Bell was a child there was also more of what might be termed community spirit. Today many people don't even know who lives next door to them. In the Scotswood of the late sixties this was not the case. Mary Bell knew who lived in nearly all of the houses in the immediate area. She would often go to many of these houses and was even engaged as a babysitter on occasion (a fact which seems darkly ironic in light of later events). Mary Bell would later use her extensive knowledge of the families around her in a most wicked and unforgivable fashion to play what can only be described a sick private game.

 

The Tyneside area was undergoing a massive social change in the 1960s. Urban slum housing had to be demolished to make way for more modern accommodation. This demolition was on a grand scale. Whole streets were being torn down brick by brick. There were streets in Newcastle that still looked like something out of the pre-war era and places like Scotswood were prime for urban regeneration. At the very least, some new houses were desperately needed.

 

So the area where Mary Bell roamed as a child became littered with derelict houses and cement strewn wasteland as this

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 01.12.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-6659-9

Alle Rechte vorbehalten