At the age of playing dolls and making craft, She became breaking news of crime and terror in people’s eyes. Surely no one is a born criminal but exactly what made an Eleven year old girl become one?
Mary Bell, an 11-year old girl was convicted for manslaughter of two boys.
To know the reason and judge her, one has to learn more about her life :
Mary Flora Bell was born on 26 May 1957 to a quite famous local prostitute who was 17 years old. Mary was her second child. The identity of Mary’s biological father is still unknown. When Mary was a child, her mother married William Bell. He was alcoholic, and had a history of committing repeated crimes that even included robbery. Mary’s mother mostly left her at home alone with her father due to travelling for work. Her father used to beat her and torture her.
Mary’s own mother never accepted her as her own child and multiple times she hurt her brutally in hope to get rid of her. When she failed in all her attempts, she started getting her clients. The girl was barely 8 or 9 years old and her mother forcibly locked her up in a room with clients and forced her to perform oral sex.
With such a disturbing environment, she developed psychotic behavior at both school and home. She possessed violent behavior, mood swings. Initially when children used to come to play with her, there were incidents that out of the blue she became violent, she gave criminal gaze to children near her and sometimes she even beat them and strangled and suffocated them. With this behavior of her becoming more frequent, children started maintaining distance with her at school and home. Now they started playing with Norma Bell, a girl in her neighborhood. Despite having the same surname they were not related. Norma was 13 years old and Both the girls became friends with time.
On 25 May 1968, Bell strangled four-year-old Martin Brown in an upstairs bedroom of a derelict house located at 85 St. Margaret’s Road. This was her first criminal act when she killed a boy. Before this there were a lot of instances when children were assaulted by her physically and brutally but at least they were alive to complain and testify.
With time Norma and Mary started getting together more often and they together assaulted children. Though Norma was older, Mary was more dominating in the group.
On July 31 1968, both girls were playing with three year old boy Brian Howe and his dog. After that the boy didn’t return home. When the search party organized police found his dead body with strangled throat, bruised body, genitals mutilated.
When the investigation started both the girls called for questioning. Norma accepted the crime and said she was only watching Mary doing all the assault by herself. When Mary was questioned she denied and tried to manipulate and intimidate the officers.
With the case running for many months, both the girls went for psychiatric examination. It was found out that both were mentally ill and Mary Bell suffered from psychotic personality disorder.
After months of investigation and court procedures, the Nine Days trial came to an end and on the last day before arriving at the verdict the jury discussed the case for three hours twenty minutes.
The conclusion came that Brian Howe was killed by Mary Bell, and digging deeper they found Martin Brown too. She was Given life sentence by court and Norma Bell was acquitted of all charges.
After serving her Sentence, by the age of 23 Mary was released and after that she has been living with different pseudonyms with her family.
