Mary Bell

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Mary Flora Bell (born May 26, 1957 in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne , England ) was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1968 at the age of eleven for the manslaughter of two young children . When she reached the age of 23, she was released on parole. Today she lives with her daughter and her partner on the south coast of England.

social environment

Mary's mother, Betty Bell, gave birth to their first daughter, Mary Flora Bell , in 1957 at the age of 17 , whom she was never able to love and adopt. Mary Bell grew up in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the so-called Scottswood Area, a run-down social housing area. Her mother, who she wanted to give away when she was born, worked here as a prostitute . She was married to a crook who wasn't Mary's father. More than once the mother tried to give her daughter away to tell her family that something had happened to Mary and that she had died. When Mary was three years old, her mother almost threw her out the third floor window, but her uncle saved her at the last second.

Mary Bell often suppressed her emotions as a child. She was extremely violent towards other children and even adults.

During her childhood she was frequently mentally and physically abused by her mother. She was hospitalized twice for poisoning, and it was suspected that her mother had deliberately given her pills to poison her. Mary's mother beat her almost every day and gave her twice as gifts to complete strangers on the street. From the age of five, she was forced to have oral sex with her mother's suitors or was abused for other sexual acts. It was also around this time that she witnessed her friend being run over by a bus.

In the kindergarten, which she attended since 1961, she remained a loner. Her kindergarten teachers later reported that she was extremely cheeky and kicked, punched and pinched the other children who teased her. She had an extreme need for profiling and was constantly making up stories. Here she also simulated another child's strangulation for the first time . She continued this behavior later in school, and she also attracted attention through vandalism and theft.

Murders

On May 25, 1968, ten-year-old Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown in an empty house. When he was found by three boys and there were construction workers rushing to help, Mary Bell and her thirteen-year-old friend Norma Bell (no relatives) came by to show her the body . The construction workers ordered her to disappear. The two went to Martin's aunt and told her that their nephew had been found dead.

Martin Brown was found lying on his back with blood and saliva smeared on his cheek and chin . Since the police found no further signs of violence, they believed it was an accident. The case was therefore not investigated by experts.

Later the two girls visited the aunt and harassed her emotionally. They asked her repeatedly, grinning maliciously: “Do you miss Martin? Did you cry for him? ”The aunt told the girls to leave and never come back. Four days after the murder, Mary Bell also visited the victim's mother, this time alone. She asked if she could see Martin. When the mother replied that Martin was dead, she said with a grin that she knew that, she wanted to see him in his coffin .

On the Sunday after the murder, on her eleventh birthday, Mary Bell tried to strangle her friend Norma Bell's little sister. However, the victim's father was able to prevent this. That same evening, the two girls broke into a school. They spilled cleaning material on the floor, destroyed school inventories and left notes scrawled on them that they had murdered Martin Brown and that more murders would follow. The notes were signed with "Fanny and Fagot" ( cunt and fagot ). The police saw this as a bad joke. Later confessions that she murdered Martin Brown were not believed by the notorious boastful storyteller Mary Bell.

In late July, Mary Bell went to the Howe family home and claimed that Norma Bell strangled Martin Brown. She was not believed. On July 31, 1968, she and Norma Bell strangled the youngest of the Howe family, three-year-old Brian Howe, in an abandoned block complex. They scratched the dead man's stomach with a razor blade, cut off some of his hair and partially skinned his genitals . They later tried to guide Brian's older sister, who was looking for him, to the crime scene , but it failed. Brian Howe was not found by the police until 11:10 p.m.

The police gave Mary Bell details of the location and tried to direct suspicion to a boy in the neighborhood who had an alibi . Even so, no one actually dared suspect 11-year-old Mary Bell of the crime until Norma Bell in front of the police accused her friend of murder.

Interrogation and trial

On August 6, one day before Brian Howe's funeral, the police brought 11-year-old Mary Bell to the police station at midnight for questioning, which was unsuccessful. When she showed up at Brian Howe's funeral the next day and was seen laughing mockingly and rubbing hands, she was summoned for questioning again. Now, although she admitted to witnessing the murder, she said she tried to prevent it and Norma Bell was the initiator of it all. Norma Bell was arrested and also charged .

At this point, the police began investigating Martin Brown, who was considered to have had an accident. It quickly became clear that Mary Bell was the possible perpetrator.

The prison guards and the forensic psychiatrist described Mary Bell as downright "intelligent but manipulative and dangerous".

On December 5, 1968, the nine-day trial of Mary Bell and Norma Bell began. He was followed by a large press presence at the time. During the trial, the girls accused each other, with Norma Bell's versions sounding more plausible. She also confirmed Mary Bell's behavior before and after the murders as the main culprit, as did records of the crimes that Mary Bell had left in a notebook. In addition, Norma Bell won significantly more sympathy from the jury through her heartbreaking behavior in court than the cool and at times aggressive Mary Bell. On December 13, 1968, Mary Bell was found guilty of double manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison. Norma Bell was acquitted, but was later sentenced to three years probation for breaking into day school and placed under psychiatric supervision.

Imprisonment

Since there were no institutions in England to detain child murderers and Mary Bell was too dangerous for the children of a normal correctional home , she was placed in a closed boarding school for boys in February 1969 . It was there that Mary Bell blossomed and saw the boarding school director as a surrogate father. In the meantime, her mother was selling Mary's story to the press.

At the age of 16, in November 1973, she was transferred to a women's prison against the resistance of the boarding school director. There she fell back into old behavior.

When she was taken to a minimal security prison in 1977, she escaped and lost her virginity to a young man who reported it in the newspapers after she was re-incarcerated.

In 1980, Mary Bell was released from prison at the age of 22.

Post-history

After her release, Mary Bell moved in with a man she married in 1984. She soon gave birth to a daughter. When the marriage fell apart in 1988, she moved to a village in northeast England with another man and their daughter. The neighbors, who learned their past, demonstrated in front of their home and asked them to leave their village. Articles from the tabloid The Sun added to the heated mood. The three of them moved to the south coast of England under a new name and a court forbade the press from announcing their new whereabouts.

In 1998, Mary Bell hit the headlines again when a book about her case appeared ( Gitta Sereny : Cries Unheard , in German: screams that nobody hears ). The fact that she was paid £ 15,000 for her work was viewed by politicians and the press as the exploitation of a crime. Laws were hastily passed prohibiting the purchase of stories from criminals. Some Labor - MPs even demanded a ban of the book.

Trivia

The song Lookout, Lookout by the American musician Perfume Genius refers to the story of Mary Bell. The American death metal band Macabre also refers to Mary Bell in the song Mary Bell on their 1993 album Sinister Slaughter . The NDH band Oomph! in her song Mary Bell on the album XXV with The Fall.

literature

See also

personal data
SURNAME Bell, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bell, Mary Flora (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English murderess
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Newcastle-upon-Tyne