Mary Flora Bell
Mary was born on 26th May 1957 to Betty, a seventeen-year-old single mother. She was a beautiful baby with a sweet smile and large violet-blue eyes. But Betty shrieked ‘Take the thing away from me’ when a nurse tried to put the baby girl into her arms. Betty had been hidden away in a convent for the duration of her pregnancy as she came from a Catholic family and in those days illegitimacy was frowned upon.
No one knew who Mary’s father was and Betty – who was deeply religious – just said that he was the Devil. Whatever Mary’s true paternity, Betty reluctantly took her home to the house she shared with her widowed mother and younger sister in Gateshead, England. Thankfully her relatives loved Mary from the start.
Betty returned to her factory job leaving her mother to care for the child. Seven months later she met a handsome young man named Billy Bell. They married within weeks of meeting (by which time she was pregnant again) and Billy moved in with Betty and her mum. Billy was very proud of his new bride who had won many local beauty competitions and who loved to dance.
Betty continued to look upon her firstborn with unconcealed loathing. She gave the one-year-old some of her own mother’s tranquillisers and Mary almost died. Luckily Betty’s relatives found the baby and rushed her to hospital where she had her stomach pumped out. Everyone knew that a one-year-old could not have reached the secure hiding place where Betty’s mother kept her tranquillisers but no one wanted to believe that Betty was to blame…
That autumn Betty gave birth to a son, Mary’s first half-brother. At this stage the rest of the family moved back to their original home town of Glasgow in Scotland, leaving Betty and Billy in Newcastle, England, with their little brood.
Billy soon found that he alone had to take care of the two children. Betty would do the cleaning but she didn’t cook and wouldn’t get up to feed the babies during the night. When her little boy was six months old she left him and Mary with her husband for a few weeks and no one knew where she’d gone. On other occasions she took Mary with her to stay with an assortment of friends and relatives. Robbed of the routine that young children so desperately need, Mary often looked pale and tense.
She had received so little attention from her mother that she’d had to deny her own need for hugs and now wouldn’t let her relatives hug her. (Gwendolyn Graham, profiled in this author’s book Women Who Kill, had a similarly neglectful mother and also could not respond to physical affection when it was finally offered.)
Mary’s mother now gave her away to a female acquaintance and the woman cut Mary’s hair because it was full of lice. The frightened toddler had no idea what was happening. Unfortunately the woman soon returned the child and Betty explained this rejection by telling Mary that she was a bad child. The following year, it’s apparent that Betty gave both Mary and her little brother pills that could have resulted in their deaths. Luckily a relative saw the children eating the tablets – though she didn’t see Betty handing them over – and she made both children sick.
A few months later Betty took Mary to visit her grandmother in Glasgow. Betty was holding Mary near the window when she suddenly ‘fell’ out. Her uncle managed to grab the three-year-old by an ankle, seriously straining the ligaments in his back. The following week Betty left Mary with a stranger that she’d met at an adoption agency but her relatives reclaimed her within hours. The woman, who clearly meant well, had already bought the confused little girl some new clothes.
One of Billy’s relatives suggested that she and her husband adopt Mary as they were so worried about her being ill-treated and given away to strangers, but for some reason Betty refused to consider this. Instead, she took the sad-faced little girl back to Newcastle.
Shortly afterwards Mary had yet another ‘accident’ in which she swallowed some of her mother’s iron tablets and spent three days in hospital, iron tablets being poisonous to a small child. By now she was almost four and was able to tell the doctors that her mother had given her ‘the sweets.’ A neighbourhood child who had been playing with Mary when the pills were handed over verified this.
Mary’s relatives made it clear that no child could have this many near-death accidents in four years – but Betty’s response was to sever contact with them. Sadly, they didn’t go to the authorities and Mary’s life now took an even more dangerous path.
For some time Betty had been seeing other men and she now began to turn this into her profession. She became a prostitute and often went to Glasgow to pursue this work but at other times, when Billy was away, she had clients come to the house. Billy – who loved Mary and her brother and was always good to them – was away more and more often, sometimes serving time in jail for petty theft.
Betty’s own life careered increasingly downhill. She was often admitted to hospital suffering from her nerves. She complained of stomach problems and sometimes imagined that she had cancer. Her digestion had been poor since childhood, again doubtless as a result of stress. A desperately unhappy woman, she attempted suicide several times, sometimes by overdosing and once by preparing to jump off a bridge. Four-year-old Mary watched and listened to her mother’s constant stream of complaints and blamed herself as children do. Her mother contributed to this, telling her that she was no good.
Betty now began to specialise in sado-masochistic prostitution and brought a variety of whips into the home. Usually this speciality is as much about verbal and physical ritual as it is about pain so it tends to be at the higher end of the sex-for-money market. Most dominatrixes don’t engage in intercourse and many clients are forbidden to ejaculate. Instead, the specialist simply binds and whips the submissive client and indulges in clever word-play or enacts a script that the client has previously written.
Sophisticated specialists can earn large sums and can afford a flat to ply their trade in, keeping their activities well away from their children. But Betty clearly wasn’t in this upscale category. Her home was poorly furnished and she was earning so little that she told the authorities that Billy had permanently left her. This meant she got more social security money as a single mum.
Meanwhile, Betty brought some of her clients to the house where she whipped them for money. But for reasons that can only be guessed at, she now introduced four-year-old Mary to the sex for sale. She would hold her daughter’s head back whilst the client ejaculated into the little girl’s mouth. Mary would vomit and her mother would then tell her that she’d been a good girl and give her sweets.
It may be significant that Betty’s own mother had gone out to work when she was four – the age that Betty introduced her daughter to oral sex. Four-year-old Betty was left with her invalid father who may not have been able to protect her from paedophile activity. By five Betty was refusing to eat with the family and such sudden appetite loss can be one of the symptoms of child sexual abuse. Another sign is trying to be very good – and Betty was constantly drawing religious icons. A third sign is overreacting to criticism and Betty began to believe that she was her mother’s least favourite child.
So perhaps Betty felt compelled to abuse her daughter just as she’d been abused. Or maybe the alcoholism that would later cut short her life was already beginning to claim her and she wanted the additional money that paedophiles would pay in order to buy the whisky that she craved. Whatever Betty’s conscious or subconscious motivation, the pre-school Mary paid the price.
Mary would later show another sign of child sexual abuse, acting inappropriately by unzipping the trousers of a horrified family friend. And she’d exhibit many of the other symptoms, namely an inability to concentrate, depression, nightmares and several attempts at running away from home.
In the autumn of 1961, Mary went to school. Already she was a world removed from the other children. She’d lie on her back under the desk and refuse to come out. At other times she’d sit on the floor and pull hairs out of her teacher’s legs in a desperate effort to be noticed. Misunderstanding, the teacher refused to respond to her bad behaviour. But Mary strived to be noticed by a parent substitute, as being ignored by a parent is devastating for a child. When Betty was at home she’d hit Mary and shout at her and talk about what a sinful girl she was. At other times she’d half choke the child whilst her clients forced their penises into her mouth.
Mary began to copy this behaviour, as children often feel compelled to do. She put her hand around another child’s neck and asked her teacher if doing so would make him die. Again, the teacher didn’t realise the significance of this strange comment. Mary also kicked and nipped the other children until they all avoided her, then she cried because she was so alone.
Mary’s ordeal continued at home. Betty would hold Mary down on her stomach for her clients to abuse. At other times she would take her to the homes of old men and they’d masturbate over her. Afterwards her mother would be nice to her and would buy her chips.
By the start of 1963 the family had moved again to an even uglier neighbourhood. There Betty had a third child, a girl. The birth was soon followed by a nervous breakdown and when Betty got out of the hospital she was so depressed that she stopped cleaning the house. But two years later she had another baby girl; the people who can least nurture children often give birth to the most.
Mary’s mother now spent even less time with her than before – and when she did notice the child it was often to shout at her or to beat her. Mary was beaten for such crimes as having a bath and using all the hot water. She was also punished for wetting the bed, something Betty was convinced that Mary did on purpose. In truth, Mary tried to stay awake every night so that she wouldn’t lose control of her bladder again.
She remained odd and unpopular at school. Though her clothes were clean, she often had headlice. And her dog – though loving towards her – was the fiercest in the district and barked at everyone who went by.
Mary was so lonely that she used to give her brother coins if he would play with her. She sometimes acquired this money by getting into cars with men then saying that she’d tell her father that they’d touched her. Her mother’s actions had shown her that men paid for sex – and that adults of both sexes would pay a child for her silence.
By now her family life had become even more bizarre as Billy and Betty rarely spent a night in the house together. Instead, he stayed with friends but when Betty went away on prostitution trips to Glasgow, he’d move back in to look after Mary, her half-brother and the other two little girls. But sometimes Betty went away while Billy was in prison so the children had to be looked after by one of his relatives.
As soon as Betty moved back, Billy would leave again. Increasingly worn down by his wife’s instability he gave up work permanently and lived off the money from small burglaries and handouts from the state. Mary still thought that he was her biological dad but called him her uncle when there were strangers around so that Betty could keep claiming extra social security as a single mum. Mary managed to keep this lie going so successfully that her teachers thought she didn’t have a father figure in the house.
The confusing and frightening days merged into sleepless nights, but when she was nine years old her life improved because a new family moved in next door to her. They also had the surname Bell though they weren’t related. Mary soon befriended one of the children, a girl two years older than herself called Norma Bell.
Norma had five brothers and five sisters and a father who couldn’t work because of ill health. One of her brothers was handicapped and others had suffered serious illness. As a result, Norma didn’t get much attention and had run away several times. She admitted to Mary that sometimes she wanted to kill her younger siblings as they took up so much of her kind but overworked mother’s time.
That same year, Betty beat Mary and her brother so hard with a dog chain that the police were called. But, as usual, other adults saw the family as sacrosanct and no one did anything.
On 11th May 1968 Mary and Norma said that they’d found a three-year-old boy bleeding from his head. The dazed child had been pushed by an unseen attacker. The next day Mary squeezed the necks of two six-year-old girls and asked one ‘If you choke someone, do they die?’ In both instances the police interviewed Mary and Norma but none of the victims were seriously harmed and no charges were brought.
Less than a fortnight later, Mary killed for the first time. It was 25th May, the day before her eleventh birthday and she found four-year-old Martin Brown playing in the street. She took him into a boarded up house and strangled him. The act involved so little pressure that it didn’t leave any marks on the child’s neck. Shortly afterwards he was found by workmen who Mary saw trying to revive him. She hurried to Martin’s relatives and told them that there had been an accident but when they reached the house they found the child dead.
There were tablets scattered beside his body, so the pathologist suspected poisoning but the post mortem revealed that the child had a small haemorrhage in the brain. The medics believed he might have had a convulsion, so questioned the family as to whether Martin ever had fits. He hadn’t. In the end, his death was ruled as accidental and the CID weren’t involved.
The next day – a Sunday – Mary tried to strangle one of Norma’s sisters but the girl’s father intervened and hit Mary.
That same day, Norma and Mary broke into the local nursery and co-authored some notes, one of which said ‘we did murder Martain brown.’ (sic)
On the Monday, Mary made a drawing of Martin surrounded by pills with a workman walking towards the body. The wording underneath included the words ‘a boy who just lay down and died.’ Later that week she asked Martin’s distraught mother if she could see him in his coffin. She was clearly desperate to draw attention to herself. A week after that she started screaming ‘I am a murderer’ but none of the other children took her seriously.
Norma who had run away before suggested that Mary go on the run with her this time. During the first week of June 1968 they did so but were soon brought back in a police car. Poor Mary was beaten for this by her mother. No one asked why girls of eleven and thirteen would want to run away. By mid-June they had absconded again and were picked up by the police and, again, Mary was punished. By now the sexual abuse had stopped but Betty was clearly terrified that Mary would tell someone about it. The physical and emotional abuse that she had suffered all her life continued. She still wet the bed most nights and her mother would rub her nose in her own urine and make her put her mattress by the window for the neighbours to see.
After the running away escapades, the days returned to their usual hell. Eleven-year-old Mary played outside for hours with Norma and with her Alsatian but she had to go home for meals and never knew when she’d find her mother in a violent mood. She frequently read her Bible, just as her mother wanted her to do. Betty went away again to prostitute herself in Glasgow and Billy moved back in to look after Mary and her brother and sisters in the poorly furnished house.
But on Wednesday 31st July, this usual routine was to change. That day both Norma and Mary took a four-year-old boy called Brian Howe to an area of wasteground. There, Mary squeezed his neck until her hands tired and Norma began to laugh hysterically (Norma would later claim that she ran away at this point, having told Mary to stop strangling the struggling child.) Brian was still alive so after a brief respite Mary squeezed his neck again until he stopped moving. Then she covered his face and body with grasses and tiny purple flowers.
Mary went home but later both she and Norma returned to the corpse and Mary cut off a lock of Brian’s hair. She also lifted his jersey and used a razor blade and broken scissors to make tiny cuts on his stomach. It’s possible that she’d seen her mother do this to her clients as scarification (the cutting of the flesh for erotic purposes) is a known sado-masochistic act.
Norma may also have used the razor briefly for handwriting experts would testify that a capital N scored on the little corpse had been changed by one stroke of a different hand to make it into a capital M.
Possibly remembering the penises that had abused her until three years before, Mary made a tiny cut on the dead boy’s scrotum. Hearing someone approach, she hid the scissors near the body and both girls ran away.
A search party found his body shortly before midnight. His neck was scratched, his nose was marked and there were small wounds on his legs and scrotum. Death was due to strangulation but so little force had been used that the pathologist was sure the killer was a child.
Police questioned dozens of local children and soon found inconsistencies in both Mary Bell and Norma Bell’s statements. Mary tried to blame another boy, mentioning that she’d seen him with broken scissors. It was the breakthrough – only the killer knew about the broken scissors left by the body as they hadn’t been alluded to in the press.
Eventually Norma told the police that she’d tell the truth if her father left the room. She then said that she’d tripped over Brian’s body and saw that he was dead. She added that Mary told her she’d squeezed the child’s neck and had enjoyed it. She added that Mary had showed her the tiny cuts on his stomach caused by a razor. Norma then took the police to the murder site and showed them the razor which was hidden under a concrete slab.
The police now got Mary out of bed and took her to the police station. She continued to deny everything and said that she was being brainwashed, and that she wanted a solicitor. The eleven-year-old child was behaving like an adult – but then she’d had an adult’s share of life experience.
The police let her go home that night but saw her laughing strangely at Brian’s funeral procession on 7th August. Afraid that she might kill again, they arrested her. At the police station her uncle Peter slapped her across the face and told her to keep her mouth shut. It’s unclear exactly what the child was supposed to keep quiet about.
Mary would later say that she was terrified that her mother would beat her to death for bringing the police into their lives. Her parents had always hated the police and Billy was a known lawbreaker. She knew that her family was poor and was terrified that her mother would have to pay a fine.
Dining her initial interrogation she had seemed clever and self-assured and old beyond her years. But now, in the cells at the police station, her minders saw a very different side to her. She was so frightened of wetting the bed that she went to the toilet constantly and hardly slept at all.
Mary told a policewoman that her mother hated her. The woman replied conventionally that her mother must love her at which Mary asked ‘why did she leave me, then?’ The policewoman had no idea that Betty regularly took off for weeks at a time leaving Mary with whoever was available. Yet again, no one looked into this neglected and abused little girl’s life.
Mary and Norma’s trial opened on the 5th December 1968 at the Assizes in Newcastle upon Tyne. Mary looked intelligent and alert whereas Norma appeared frightened and kept glancing at her parents for reassurance. It was to set the pattern for the entire nine day trial. As a result, the public – and doubtless the jury – quickly formed the opinion that Mary was the coldhearted ringleader who had led the educationally-challenged Norma astray. In truth, Mary was suffering from her usual insomnia and was having night terrors when she did get to sleep.
But no one was very interested in the background of either child, though Gitta Sereny – in her book The Case Of Mary Bell – became increasingly aware that ‘Mary’s mother was… the principle source of all her troubles.’ Betty Bell attended the trial with her own mother who sat between her and her estranged husband Billy. Billy looked distressed but remained silent whereas Betty frequently broke into histrionic sobs and seemed determined to have centre stage.
Norma said that she’d watched Mary squeeze Brian’s throat until he went purple. Then she, Norma, had run away and made pom poms with other girls. Later the two girls returned to the corpse and Mary cut a little chunk off Brian’s hair. Mary disputed this, saying that Norma had done the hair cutting and had also cut Brian’s knee with the razor blade.
Most of the trial consisted of such childish testimony. There were also psychiatric statements in which Norma was described as ‘a simple backward girl of subnormal intelligence.’ She was kept in a hospital during the trial whereas Mary was put into a remand home, probably indicative of the way both children were already being pigeonholed by the system and by the press. One court-appointed doctor said that Mary had psychopathic tendencies and that such tendencies were usually partly environmental. Unfortunately the importance of Mary’s environment wasn’t even touched upon. Her relatives could have testified to the times that her mother had tried to kill her and others could have told the courts of how Betty had worked as a prostitute in the presence of Mary and her brother. By now, Betty was also beating Mary’s younger half-brother with increasing severity so perhaps he could have told about the pain he and Mary had suffered at their mother’s hands.
Instead, the trial ended with the impression that Mary was simply a bad seed who had led a weaker girl astray. As such, the sentences weren’t a surprise for Norma was found not guilty and Mary found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. This applied to both the murders of Martin Brown and Brian Howe. In his summary the judge said that ‘quite young children can be wicked and sometimes even vicious.’ It was a view soon echoed by laypeople for this author can remember her own mother, a housewife who knew nothing about criminology, stating that ‘Mary Bell was a little bitch.’
During the trial, Betty and Billy Bell went to the tabloids and tried to sell the story of Mary’s life, but the newspapers refused.
Over the years various psychologists and group therapists tried to get Mary to talk about her childhood but she always answered ‘My mum said for me not to say anything to you.’ Betty had originally phoned Mary’s lawyer during the trial saying that Mary must never talk to a psychiatrist. After all, Betty knew that on some level Mary would remember being sexually abused from age four to eight whilst Betty held her down.
Now that Mary was in a reform school, Betty visited every few weeks to reinforce this warning and after her visits Mary was always unsettled. But visits from Billy always cheered her up.
Betty continued to have a strange attitude towards her oldest daughter. One day she got the young teenager to pose in her underwear for a series of photos, with Betty’s mother watching. Betty then sold the photos to the press.
For the next twelve years Mary lived in various remand homes and adult prisons. At first she remained disturbed and allegedly strangled two hamsters in the first remand home she was sent to (She’d also tried to strangle a kitten one night during her trial). But as the staff of the remand home continued to love and care for her, her behaviour markedly improved. She was considered manipulative as a teenager – but, in fairness, she was still being manipulated by her increasingly alcohol-driven mum.
Becoming aware that the hatred Betty felt for her wasn’t normal, Mary asked her mother again who her natural father was. ‘Was it your dad?’ she asked as she’d found love poems that Betty had written to him and feared she was the result of an incestuous union. But (according to Mary’s biographer, the respected Gitta Sereny) Betty’s father had died when she was fourteen and she didn’t get pregnant until she was sixteen so the dates don’t add up. Mary also asked a friend of the family but he simply said ‘It’s best that you don’t know.’
Mary was released from prison in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. She soon found herself a husband and in 1984 she gave birth to a daughter. But after she became ill her spouse became violent and she left the marriage, taking the child with her. For the first few years of her daughter’s life, the authorities watched very carefully, ready to intercede if Mary harmed the baby. But it became clear that she was a good and loving mother and that her daughter felt secure. And Mary herself soon formed another relationship, one which has lasted to the present day.
Unfortunately, Betty Bell did much to undermine Mary’s newfound security, continuing to sell stories to the tabloids. Betty remarried but eventually her second husband left her, saying that he’d suffered years of misery and couldn’t take any more. Mary asked him who her biological father was but he said it was best not to know. Betty still saw herself as a martyr, saying ‘Jesus was just nailed to the cross but I’m being hammered.’ She continued to emotionally hammer Mary on the few occasions that they spent time together and these emotional cruelties only ceased with Betty’s death in early January 1995.
Though Mary has never harmed anyone as an adult, she carries a deep sadness within her, a sadness that was apparent to psychologist Gitta Sereny. She suffers from frequent migraines and finds it difficult to concentrate on work or on any kind of project or educational course. And the love she feels for her own daughter has made her fully aware of the pain she caused to the families of her little victims, Martin Brown and Brian Howe.
She is continually hounded by the tabloids who refuse to believe that a battered child who killed can become a caring adult. As a result she has had to move house several times to protect her family. Yet, as crime writer Brian Masters has stated, her voice is ‘one of maturity and remorse.’