Mary Bell killed two young boys in 1968. When she was released from prison after serving a 12-year sentence, she was only 23 years old.
In other words, Mary Bell was only 10 when she started committing her murders.
But her experiences of violence didn’t begin there — pain and death were her companions almost from the moment of her birth.
The Beginning Of A Child-Killer
Mary Bell was born to Betty, a 16-year-old prostitute who reportedly told doctors to “take that thing away from me” when she saw her daughter.
Things went downhill from there. Betty was often away from home on “business” trips to Glasgow — but her absences were periods of respite for the young Mary, who was subject to abuse, both mental and physical, when her mother was present.
Betty’s own sister witnessed Betty try to give Mary away to a woman who had been unsuccessfully trying to adopt; the sister quickly recovered Mary herself. Mary was also strangely accident prone; she once “fell” from a window, and on another occasion “accidentally” overdosed on sleeping pills.
Some attribute the accidents to Betty’s determination to rid herself of an encumbrance, while others see the symptoms of Munchausen syndrome by proxy; Betty longed for the attention and sympathy her daughter’s accidents brought her.
According to later accounts given by Mary herself, her mother began to prostitute her out when she was just four years old — though this remains uncorroborated by family members. They did know, however, that Mary’s young life had already been marked by loss: she had seen her five-year-old friend run over and killed by a bus.
Given all that had happened, it did not surprise them that Mary, by the age of ten, had become a strange child, withdrawn and manipulative, always hovering on the edge of violence.
But there was a lot they didn’t know.
A Pattern Of Violence And An Obsession With Death
For weeks before her first murder, Mary Bell had been acting strangely. On May 11, 1968, Mary had been playing with a three-year-old boy when he was badly injured in a fall from the top of an air raid shelter; his parents thought it was an accident.
The following day, however, three mothers came forward to tell police that Mary had attempted to choke their young daughters. A brief police interview and a lecture resulted — but no charges were filed.
Then on May 25, the day before she turned 11, Mary Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown to death in an abandoned house in Scotswood, England. She left the scene and returned with a friend, Norma Bell (no relation), to find they’d been beaten there by two local boys who had been playing in the house and stumbled on the body.
Police were mystified. Besides a little blood and saliva on the victim’s face, there were no obvious signs of violence. There was, however, an empty bottle of painkillers on the floor near the body. In the absence of better information, they assumed Martin Brown had swallowed the pills. His death was ruled an accident.
But Martin’s grieving family might have started to suspect otherwise when little Mary Bell showed up on their doorstep in the days after Martin’s death and asked to see him. His mother gently explained to her that Martin was dead, but Mary said she already knew that; she wanted to see his body in the coffin. Martin’s mother slammed the door in her face.