April 18, 1999

A Bad Seed?

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The day before her 11th birthday, Mary Bell killed a child. Nine weeks later, she killed another.

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First Chapter: 'Cries Unheard'

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By ALEX KOTLOWITZ

CRIES UNHEARD Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell. By Gitta Sereny. 382 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $26.

n the spring of 1968, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, two boys, ages 3 and 4, were found dead, nine weeks apart. At first the deaths appeared unrelated. In fact, the police thought the first child died accidentally. Then it became clear that not only had both boys been murdered but they had been murdered by another child, a girl named Mary Bell. In December of that year, Mary, 11, and another girl, Norma Bell (no relation), who was 13 at the time, were tried for the crimes. The British public was enraged, especially because Mary Bell seemed without remorse. Five days after strangling the first boy, Martin Brown -- the day before her birthday -- Mary had knocked on the door of Martin's home and, smiling prettily, asked his mother to see the boy in his coffin. The British press referred to her as ''a freak of nature'' and as ''evil born.'' She was convicted of manslaughter; the 13-year-old was acquitted. Mary Bell spent the next 12 years in detention and since her release in 1980 has lived a fairly normal life, raising a daughter, though she has had to move or quit a job to elude reporters.

At one point, Bell tried unsuccessfully to write a memoir. She had also rejected a number of offers from popular magazines, including one in Germany that reportedly offered £250,000. Along came Gitta Sereny, who had written a book about the trial in 1972, ''The Case of Mary Bell,'' and who has become something of an authority on crimes and conscience. In her book ''Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth,'' she exacted from the former Nazi official a tacit acknowledgment of his complicity in the Final Solution. Bell agreed to sit for a series of marathon interview sessions, which extended over a period of many months, and the result is ''Cries Unheard.'' ''I . . . believed for many years,'' Sereny writes, ''that if anyone could ever help us one day to understand, firstly, what can bring a young child to the point of murder, and second, what needs to or can be done with and for such children, then with that strange intelligence of hers which I assumed would endure, Mary would be able to. I always thought the day would come when she herself, without outside pressure, would want to tell her story.''

Sereny, who also interviewed many others associated with the case -- from detectives to prison guards to Bell's probation officers -- first brings us back to 1968 and leads us through the investigation into the deaths of Martin Brown and Brian Howe. She then recounts the trial itself, Bell's first and until now only public testimony. Britain was transfixed by the seemingly unrepentant 11-year-old who, witnesses testified, laughed while attending Martin's funeral and in an earlier incident had attacked and squeezed the throats of three younger girls playing in a sandbox. Bell's demeanor did not help her case much. Sereny writes of her ''straight back, the blankness in her face and that awful self-control which could so readily be interpreted as an incapacity to feel.'' She also mentions an episode before the murders, in which Mary and her friend broke into a nursery and left a note that read, ''I murder so that I may come back.''

Sereny is telling us all this with a purpose. After the first third of the book you will begin to ask, Is this girl, in fact, simply a ''bad seed''? The remainder of the book will divest you of that notion. Sereny, to her credit, pulls the reader along ever so slowly and gently, so that it's only by the end, having got to know Bell intimately and having heard her story in its entirety, do we realize how wrongheaded we are in attributing adult reasoning to young children who commit violent acts.

BOOK EXCERPT "As the two children sat through the proceedings in court, Norma's attention span, we would see very quickly, was short . . . Mary, on the contrary, was astonishingly attentive. She hardly appeared to notice her mother's dramatics, nor did she seem puzzled or particularly distressed. The general impression she gave was one of intense interest. Her face, intellectually alive when she spoke either in whispers to her solicitor, David Bryson, who sat next to her, or later when she testified, had a perpetual listening quality though it was, except in anger, emotionally blank." -- from the first chapter of 'Cries Unheard'

In England, where ''Cries Unheard'' has been a No. 1 best seller, Sereny has been castigated by politicians, by the press and by the victims' families for her decision to give Bell money in return for cooperation with her book project. Sereny has been condemned for allowing Bell to profit from her crimes, but there is also the lingering question: Did paying Bell affect the tenor or substance of her story? (Like other authors, I have shared book profits with subjects, though the decision to do so was made after the project was completed.) It is a journalist's role to probe and dissect, and to do so in an atmosphere that, it is hoped, does not encourage either embellishment by the subject or a glossing over by the writer. Sereny appears remarkably evenhanded and appropriately skeptical of some of Bell's memories. Indeed, there are times when Sereny finds fault with Bell's version of events and seeks out other participants for a truer picture. Nonetheless, the promise of money nagged at me, and on occasion I wondered whether it might have somehow tainted the storytelling.

Still, this is an extraordinarily important and powerful work. As Bell's story unfolds we learn that on four separate occasions, her mother, Betty, had tried to kill her -- and that Betty, a prostitute, used her daughter as a sexual prop in some of her sadomasochistic encounters. Betty, who died shortly before Sereny entered the picture, abused her daughter horribly. (In later years, when Bell served time in prison, Betty would sell stories about her daughter, as well as photographs, to the tabloids; at one point she told her daughter that she was ''the devil's spawn.'') Sereny tells us all this by way of helping us make sense of Bell's brutal crimes. Bell, now in her early 40's, is unusually thoughtful and reflective, a woman seeking redemption. Recalling the murders, she tells Sereny: ''I didn't know I had intended for them to be dead . . . dead forever. Dead for me then wasn't forever,'' adding, ''When I think of it now, it's really funny to think that nobody, nobody at all, ever talked to me in a way that could have made what I did real to me.'' It wasn't until Bell had a child of her own that she began to acknowledge the injury she had done to these boys' families.

While the story itself is riveting, what makes this book more than just a voyeuristic journey is the question Sereny persistently poses: How should a civilized society deal with children who commit violence? Do we punish them as we would adults? Or do we offer them treatment, recognizing their immature emotional development, with the hope that we can steer them toward a moral life? Can a child of 11 form intent? Can a child of 11, especially one so physically and emotionally abused, fully understand the consequences of her actions? In this respect, ''Cries Unheard'' couldn't be more timely, especially for American readers. In recent years, we've had our share of children killing children, including one eight-month period in which, at four schools across the country, boys between the ages of 11 and 16 opened fire on classmates and teachers, killing 15 and leaving 42 wounded. And there is the case that's been etched in the national conscience, when in 1994 two boys in Chicago, 10 and 11, dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse from a 14th-floor window because he wouldn't steal candy for them. What to do with these children?

Mary Bell was handled, Sereny writes, as if she were a ''miniature adult.'' Court officials made no effort to understand what could possibly have brought a child that age to such a point. Sereny vividly reminds us that the judicial system was dealing with someone who couldn't comprehend the seriousness of what she'd done. ''She was more concerned about her torn shoes than anything else,'' a policewoman told Sereny. ''I tried to calm her, you know, talked to her quietly, and after a while she said that she was frightened she'd wet the bed. 'I usually do,' she said.'' Once sentenced, Bell was sent first to a juvenile institution, where she was for most of the time the only girl, and where she developed a trusting relationship with the director, but toward the end of her stay she was sexually assaulted by a staff member. At 16, she was sent to a women's prison, where treatment consisted of occasional group therapy and the administration of tranquilizers. From prison Mary Bell wrote friends that ''the absolute enormity of my crime has suddenly dawned on me, that I have actually taken a life. I just cannot bear to hardly think of it. . . . I know too in my heart of hearts that I couldn't do such an awful thing on purpose. I can't remember exactly what happened.''

''Cries Unheard'' will throw you off balance. It will agitate, provoke and poke and prod your preconceptions. It will, I suspect, make it impossible to look at children accused of violent crimes the same way again. ''There, in that small girl,'' Sereny writes of Bell, ''I sensed not evil but some kind of deep and hidden distress.'' After reading ''Cries Unheard,'' I sensed the same.

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Alex Kotlowitz's most recent book is ''The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death and America's Dilemma.''

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