Mary attempted many other murders besides the two which resulted in death. “One day in the summer of 1968, while she was eleven, she went a step further and pushed a three-year-old boy off the roof of an air-raid shelter. The child was severely injured. The next day, she squeezed the throats of three six-year-old girls, one after another, until they went purple. The police gave her a telling off. … Soon after, she tried to strangle the 11-year-old sister of her best friend, Norma. The child’s father prised her fingers loose and slapped her.” [Colin Wilson, “Mary Bell must not disappear, Daily Mail (London), April 15, 2003]
“I like hurting people.”
“Brian Howe had no mother, so he won’t be missed.”
“If I was a judge and I had an eleven-year-old who’d done this, I’d give
her eighteen months. Murder isn’t that bad, we all die sometime anyway.”
Norma stated that Mary told her: “I squeezed his neck and
pushed up his lungs that’s how you kill them. Keep your nose dry and don’t tell
anybody.”
“Oh, I know he’s dead, I wanted to see him in his coffin,”
Mary said to the mother of the child she murdered.
***
From Wikipedia: Mary Flora Bell (born 26 May 1957) is a British woman who
was convicted in December 1968 of the manslaughter of two boys, Martin Brown
(aged four) and Brian Howe (aged three). Bell was 10 years old when she killed
Brown and 11 when she killed Howe, making her one of Britain’s most notorious
child killers.
~ Early life ~
Bell’s mother
Betty (née McCrickett) was a prostitute who was often absent from the family
home, travelling to Glasgow to work. Mary (nicknamed May) was her first child,
born when Betty was 17 years old. It is not known who Mary’s biological father
was; for most of her life she believed it to be Billy Bell, a habitual criminal
later arrested for armed robbery who had married Betty some time after Mary was
born. Independent accounts from family members strongly suggest that Betty had
more than once attempted to kill Mary and make her death look accidental during
the first few years of her life. Mary herself says she was subjected to
repeated sexual abuse, her mother forcing her from the age of four to engage in
sex acts with men.
~ Murders ~
On 25 May 1968,
the day before her 11th birthday, Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin
Brown in a derelict house. She was believed to have committed this crime alone.
Between that time and a second killing, she and a friend, Norma Joyce Bell (no
relation), aged 13, broke into and vandalised a nursery in Scotswood, leaving
notes that claimed responsibility for the killing. The police dismissed this
incident as a prank.
On 31 July 1968,
the pair took part in the death, again by strangling, of three-year-old Brian
Howe, on wasteland in the same Scotswood area. Police reports concluded that
Mary Bell had later returned to his body to carve an “N” into his stomach with
a razor; this was then changed using the same razor but with a different hand
to an “M”. Mary Bell also used a pair of scissors to cut off some of Howe’s
hair, scratch his legs, and mutilate his penis. As the girls were so young and
their testimonies contradicted each other, the precise details of what happened
have never been entirely clear.
An open verdict
had originally been recorded for Brown’s death as there was no evidence of foul
play — although Bell had strangled him, her grip was not hard enough to leave
any marks. Eventually, his death was linked with Howe’s killing and in August 1968
the two girls were charged with two counts of manslaughter.
~ Conviction ~
On 17 December
1968, at Newcastle Assizes, Norma Bell was acquitted but Mary Bell was
convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, the jury
taking their lead from her diagnosis by court-appointed psychiatrists who
described her as displaying “classic symptoms of psychopathy.” The judge, Mr.
Justice Cusack, described her as dangerous and said she posed a “very grave
risk to other children”. She was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s
pleasure, effectively an indefinite sentence of imprisonment. She was initially
sent to Red Bank secure unit in St. Helens, Lancashire — the same facility that
would house Jon Venables, one of James Bulger’s child killers, 25 years later.
After her
conviction, Bell was the focus of a great deal of attention from the British
press and also from the German Stern magazine. Her mother repeatedly
sold stories about her to the press and often gave reporters writings she claimed
to be Mary’s. Bell herself made headlines when, in September 1977, she briefly
absconded from Moore Court open prison, where she had been held since her
transfer from a young offenders institution to an adult prison a year earlier.
Her penalty for this was a loss of prison privileges for 28 days.
For a time, Bell
also lived in a girls’ remand home at Cumberlow Lodge in South Norwood (in a
house built by Victorian inventor William Stanley).
~ Life after prison ~
In 1980, Bell,
aged 23, was released from Askham Grange open prison, having served 12 years,
and was granted anonymity (including a new name) allowing her to start a new
life. Four years later she had a daughter, born on 25 May 1984; Bell’s daughter
did not know of her mother’s past until Bell’s location was discovered by
reporters and she and her mother had to leave their house with bed sheets over
their heads.
Bell’s daughter’s
anonymity was originally protected only until she reached the age of 18.
However, on 21 May 2003, Bell won a High Court battle to have her own anonymity
and that of her daughter extended for life. Any court order permanently
protecting the identity of a convict is consequently sometimes known as a “Mary
Bell order”.
In 2009, it was
reported that Bell had become a grandmother.
~ Depictions in media ~
Bell is the
subject of two books by Gitta Sereny: The Case of Mary Bell (1972), an
account of the killings and trial, and Cries Unheard: the Story of Mary Bell
(1998), an in-depth biography based on interviews with Bell and relatives,
friends and professionals who knew her during and after her imprisonment. This
second book was the first to detail Bell’s account of sexual abuse by her
mother, a prostitute who specialised as a dominatrix, and her mother’s clients.
The publication
of Cries Unheard was controversial because Bell received payment for her
participation. The payment was criticised by the tabloid press, and Tony
Blair’s government attempted to find a legal means to prevent its publication
on the grounds that a criminal should not profit from his or her crimes, but
the attempt was unsuccessful.
Bell’s brief
prison escape was the basis for a Screen Two teleplay on the BBC, Will
You Love Me Tomorrow (1987), starring Joanne Whalley as the tough yet oddly
innocent escapee who has come of age behind bars and goes looking for love in a
seaside resort town.
Bell’s case (as
well as the murder of James Bulger) was used as the basis for a 1999 episode of
Law & Order entitled “Killerz”. Hallee Hirsh played the Mary Bell
analogue. The story was reprised in a 2010 episode of Law & Order: UK
entitled “Broken” and a 2011 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims
Unit called “Lost Traveller”.
Bell’s case was
also used as the basis for an episode of the short-lived 2005 series The
Inside entitled “Everything Nice”. Jennette McCurdy played the Mary Bell
analogue. The “Young Blood” episode of Deadly Women on the Investigation
Discovery channel also depicted the Bell case.
Bell was also the
basis for several songs written by extreme metal band Macabre on their 1993
album Sinister Slaughter, and is also the subject of the Perfume Genius
song “Look Out, Look Out”. The seminal industrial artist Monte Cazazza wrote a
song entitled “Mary Bell” evoking the murderer and her crime.
Bell’s case was
the basis for a short story titled “Blue Eyes” by Jay Caselberg that aired on
Pseudopod on September 2nd, 2011.
***
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