Mary Bell, Child KIller: "I Was Abused"
MaryHedman
Tuesday April 28, 11:32 PM GMT
Bell: I Suffered Abuse
Child killer Mary Bell was subjected to a catalogue of abuse in the years
leading up to her attacks on two young boys, it has been claimed.
The allegations are made in a book about her life serialised in The Times.
The first instalment of Gitta Sereny's Cries Unheard was due to appear in the
paper on Saturday.
Extracts from the book have now been included now because of the outcry the
work has caused, The Times said.
In them, Bell, now 41, claims her mother Betty, a prostitute specialising in
sado-masochism, tried to kill her.
The child killer, who has a 14-year-old daughter of her own, also claims she
was sexually abused by men who visited her mother.
But she does not claim she was wrongly convicted and admits the horrific abuse
meted out at her home in Newcastle's west end was no excuse for strangling
Martin Brown, four, and Brian Howe, three.
She recalls her mother telling of the shame she had brought on the family.
"My mother had always said nobody did, nobody could feel compassion because I
was so bad ... such a shaming thing in her life," she said.
Bell says after she had been abused Betty would give her sweets and chips and
felt loved by her mother.
RChamp7927
Unfortunately the Internet version of the Times is _not_
serializing the Gitta Sereny book for copyright reasons.
However, the Times is reporting on the book in its
Internet Britain section and is probably the best source
of information about what is in it short of reading the
the work itself.
At the risk of repeating _some_ of what Mary has already
said, here is an excerpt from today's issue.
THE child-killer Mary Bell today describes in appalling
detail the constant physical and sexual abuse she suffered
at the hands of her mother when a small girl
Betty Bell, a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism, has
long been suspected of making several attempts on her
daughter's life. Now the extent of her ill-treatment of the
child and the way she allowed "clients" to use her daughter
as a sexual plaything have become apparent for the first time.
Bell says that the abuse did not excuse her for strangling
Martin Brown, 4, and Brian Howe, 3, in 1968, when she
herself was only 10. But she believed that her background
offered some explanation, so she decided to co-operate
with the author Gitta Sereny to find out "how could it have happened; how did
I become such a child?"
The result was the book, Cries Unheard, which begins
serialisation in the printed edition of The Times today.
Ms Sereny wrote the definitive account of Bell's trial in
The Case of Mary Bell in 1972, and she had hoped
ever since Bell's release from prison in 1980 to write
a sequel offering an explanation of what prompted
the killings and a study of what happened to the
young strangler. Now, she says: "She tells us what
she did and what she felt, what was done to her and
also for her, and what she became."
In her earlier book, Ms Sereny described a series of
"accidents" at the Bell family home in the Scotswood
Road area of Newcastle which could have been
interpreted as attempts by Betty Bell to kill her daughter.
Most involved pills, and on one occasion the child fell
from a third-floor window. In the new book, Bell - now
41 and the mother of a 14-year-old daughter - adds to
the grim picture with descriptions of how she was
sexually abused by men who visited her mother
at their home - the first assaults taking place before
she was five.
Ms Sereny writes that Bell broached the subject
two weeks after they started their interviews in 1996.
"Sometimes she would blindfold me, she called it
'playing blind man's bluff'," Bell says. "And she
would tie a stocking around my eyes and lift me up
and twirl me around, laughing."
She adds that after being abused she was given
sweets and chips by her mother, who she then felt
loved her. "I remember her then as very pretty.
She didn't call me names, and even taught me to knit.
But then she ripped all the stitches off and threw the
stuff at me."
Bell also recalls her mother frequently telling her that
nobody could be as bad as Mary, that she had brought
shame upon the family, and that nobody felt compassion
for her after her conviction. "When I was released she
said I was never to tell anybody that she was my mother,
that she couldn't live with the shame of it, and she
introduced me to her pub pals as her sister and at other
times as her cousin." Betty Bell died three years ago
and this, according to Ms Sereny, freed Bell to "set
the record straight" about her background and events
leading to the killings.
[End of excerpt.]
Mary Bell was a beautiful child, from the pictures I have
seen on her, and it is said that she was treated so
brutally. Yet when you read of these murders and
the way Mary tried to allay suspicion, leaving horrific
notes here and there, you can see why this case has
opened such wounds and why so many of the British
public are dismayed that she was paid for her
work with Sereny.
Sereny's book, however, is not sensation-mongering,
from all that I hear. It is a serious look at what looks to
be, both in Britain and here, a growing problem:
children killing children.
Bob Champ
.