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'Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story Of Mary Bell' by Gitta Sereny

The lessons to be learned from kids who kill

Sunday, June 20, 1999

By Elizabeth Bennett

	Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story Of Mary Bell By Gitta Sereny Metropolitan Books $26.00

This book created an uproar when it was published last year in England. Front-page stories in British tabloids denounced 40-year-old Mary Bell, calling her a “child killer” and “evil monster” who was paid for her collaboration with Gitta Sereny.

It had been almost 30 years since Bell, at age 11, was convicted of strangling two boys, ages 2 and 3, but her name was still well-known in Britain. Sereny had covered the sensational 1969 trial, at which the prosecutor pronounced Bell “a most abnormal child: aggressive, vicious, cruel, incapable of remorse … a dominating personality (with a) degree of fiendish cunning that is almost terrifying.”

But Sereny, then a London journalist, had seen another side of Mary Bell.

“Like everyone else at the time, I was quite sure that Mary had killed,” Sereny writes. But “I did not for a moment see this 11-year-old child as a monster, and I was appalled that others did … she appeared to me nothing so much as a horribly confused child to whom something dreadful had at some time been done.”

This book is the story behind the story. It is also relevant for American readers, horrified by recent killings by young people.

It also focuses attention on the questions being asked about those tragedies:

Why do children kill? To what extent is their exposure to sex and violence to blame? To what extent are parents or parent substitutes to blame?

After spending many years dodging reporters, Bell agreed to talk to Sereny about her harrowing childhood, her terrible acts, her highly publicized trial and her years of imprisonment. Released from prison at 23, she has -- despite all odds -- carved out a respectable life with a man who loves her and a teen-age daughter for whom she has provided a happy, relatively normal life.

Sereny believes Bell became a pathologically disturbed child and a manipulative adolescent because of a mother who hated her and subjected her to “one of the worst cases of child sex abuse I have ever encountered.”

In interviews with relatives, as well as with Bell, Sereny learned that Betty Bell had rejected Mary from the beginning. “Take the thing away from me!” she screamed at family members who tried to put the newborn baby in Betty’s arms.

In the first four years of Mary’s life, her mother tried numerous times to give the child away, twice to strangers. Four times she tried to kill her. And during those early years, her mother, working as a prostitute, brought Mary into her bedroom and forced the small child to watch and participate in sexual activities, including oral sex and whipping clients for pleasure. (The latter was “the ‘speciality’ she was known for” as Betty once

confessed to a prison official.)

Betty Bell threatened to do terrible things to Mary if she ever talked about the abuse. Mary didn’t, not until Betty died in 1994, and Sereny convinced her to tell her story, including her five years in a reform school, where she was the only girl, and almost seven traumatic years in a prison of mostly convicts.

Mary, not surprisingly, was hardly a model prisoner. A fellow inmate said Bell “could be terribly aggressive, terribly rude. She used terrible language, about the officers and even to them.” But Mary got away with such behavior because she was a high-profile prisoner. Young, smart and pretty, she also stood out because her mother kept her story alive, often visiting her and selling new developments in her daughter’s life to the tabloids.

Sereny makes it clear she cannot excuse Bell’s crimes. But she believes it is only when children who commit serious crimes become adults that they can enlighten us about why they resorted to violence.

“If Mary’s painful disclosures of a suffering childhood and an appallingly mismanaged adolescence in detention succeed in prompting us … to detect children’s distress, however well hidden,” she concludes, “we might one day be able to prevent them from offending instead of inappropriately prosecuting and punishing them when they do.”

Elizabeth Bennett is a free-lance writer who lives in Houston.