Unlike the Moors murders, the story of Mary Bell, eleven, who in
the company of her friend - not sister - Norma Bell, killed two
little boys of three and four at an interval of more than two
months, was muffled in the press. It was too unthinkable. And
actually Miss Sereny who covered the trial and followed it up for
three years never raises her voice above a quiet rebuke at the
world which neglected this child - her mother, teachers and the
society at large where until recently there have not existed the
right facilities in which to confine and perhaps rehabilitate her.
Mary Bell is a psychopath and her condition has never been properly
separated from her crime, reviewed here along with the extensive
Assizes trial in Newcastle where both girls blamed each other but
only Mary - intelligent, variable ("I couldn't hurt a fly" or "I
like hurting people") but above all manipulative - committed the
strangulations. And as she most rightly declared, "I've got no
feelings." With less wide-ranging social commentary than Pamela
Hansford Johnson's On Iniquity (1967) but equal regret, author
Sereny discusses the aftermath for each family involved and in
particular Mary's own terrible history - a mother as disturbed as
the child and the various prefatory "accidents" since Mary's
infancy. She has also informed it with caution (we cannot afford
sentimentality) as weft as compassion and cool reason. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In December 1968 two girls - Mary Bell, eleven, and Norma Bell, thirteen (neighbours, but not related) - stood before a criminal court in Newcastle, accused of strangling, within a six-week period, Martin Brown, four years old, and Brian Howe, three. Norma was acquitted. Mary Bell, the younger but infinitely more sophisticated and cooler of the two, was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because of 'diminished responsibility' and was sentenced to 'detention' for life. Step by step, the extraordinary murders, the events surrounding them, the alternately bizzare and nonchalant behaviour of the two girls, their brazen offers to help the distraught families of the dead boys, the police work that led to their apprehension, and the trial that itself are grippinly re-created in this rare-study of the wanton murder of child by child. What emerges with equal force is the inability of society to anticipate such events and to take adequate steps once disaster has struck.
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