Mary Bell: Newcastle’s youngest serial killer
It’s hard enough to fathom why adults are capable of murder, then you consider the haunting tale of Mary Bell and have to consider something even more shocking and confusing. That sometimes, it’s children who are capable of it.
We’re not even talking about someone who is still technically a child on account of being a teenager. We’re talking about someone who took the lives of two much younger kids while she was at the tender age of ten. Somehow, there’s a way this becomes even more bizarre and horrible. These events happened in 1968, and in the six decades since, we have absolutely no idea why exactly she did it. It’s not that the murder of toddlers by a pre-teen would become somehow more palatable if we could understand it, but at the very least, one wants to understand it.
Mary Flora Bell was born to Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Bell and William ‘Billy’ Bell on May 26th, 1957, in Corbridge, Northumberland. From the very beginning, Bell was dealt a rough hand in life. I mean that literally, too. The story goes that the moment Bell was handed to her mother in the hospital minutes after giving birth, Elizabeth began screaming, “Take the thing away from me!” It didn’t get any easier when they got home, as the Bell’s home life was rotten to the core.
Elizabeth was a well-known local prostitute, and Billy was a habitual criminal. It is possible (if not exactly probable) for parents to provide happy, safe lives for their children in situations like that, yet it wasn’t the case here. While alone with her mother, Bell would often suffer “terrible accidents” at home. Since they would only ever happen when she was alone with her mother, we know exactly what was going on here. Especially after Elizabeth tried to sell her daughter into adoption to a mentally unstable woman unable to have kids.
Elizabeth’s sister went across Newcastle by herself to retrieve Bell and bring her home, but honestly? Bell was probably better off there. Because later in life, Bell revealed the most horrific detail of her home life. As previously mentioned, Bell’s mother was a prostitute. Her hatred for her own daughter grew so intense that, according to Gitta Sereny’s book Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell, she began allowing her clients to use Bell in their sessions.
One almost hopes this is sensationalism to sell books. The alternative is too horrible to consider.
So, why did Mary Bell do what she did?
Understandably, Bell grew into a violent child. Rarely volatile, she seemed unnervingly in control of herself, choosing to hurt and, in some cases, outright maim her classmates at Delaval Road Junior School – police were notified of her actions, but due to her age, little else could be done other than give a warning, then, in May 1968, Martin Brown, a four-year-old neighbour of hers, was found dead in a derelict house in Bell’s neighbourhood.
The postmortem on Brown’s body couldn’t find a sign of violence on him, leading most to believe he’d ingested some tablets he’d found. His nursery was then broken into and vandalised by people claiming to have murdered him, but this was considered to be a tasteless, childish prank. It wasn’t until July 31st, when three-year-old Brian Howe was found dead, clearly of strangulation, that people genuinely believed that a murderer was in their vicinity. Howe had last been seen playing with Mary Bell and her friend, Norma Bell (no relation).
In investigating the case of Howe, it became clear that Bell was responsible. Fragments of her dress were found on Howe’s body, which were also found on Brown’s -Norma and Mary’s cover stories did not hold up to examination, and eventually, they confessed: Mary had been the ringleader, she had gotten these two poor boys isolated, then told them they had a sore throat… She began massaging their throat, then strangled them both.
The girls were arrested. Bell was analysed by four psychiatrists who all concluded that she suffered from a psychopathic personality disorder, and thus, when the case came to trial, Bell was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility – she served 11 and a half years in custody before being released in 1980 at the age of 23 and granted anonymity, but her identity has been leaked to the press several times in the decades since.