The Case Of Mary Bell

Unlike the Moors murders, the story of Mary Bell, eleven, who in the company of her friend - not sister - Norma Bell, killed two little boys of three and four at an interval of more than two months, was muffled in the press. It was too unthinkable. And actually Miss Sereny who covered the trial and followed it up for three years never raises her voice above a quiet rebuke at the world which neglected this child - her mother, teachers and the society at large where until recently there have not existed the right facilities in which to confine and perhaps rehabilitate her. Mary Bell is a psychopath and her condition has never been properly separated from her crime, reviewed here along with the extensive Assizes trial in Newcastle where both girls blamed each other but only Mary - intelligent, variable ( I couldn't hurt a fly or I like hurting people ) but above all manipulative - committed the strangulations. And as she most rightly declared, I've got no feelings. With less wide-ranging social commentary than Pamela Hansford Johnson's On Iniquity (1967) but equal regret, author Sereny discusses the aftermath for each family involved and in particular Mary's own terrible history - a mother as disturbed as the child and the various prefatory accidents since Mary's infancy. She has also informed it with caution (we cannot afford sentimentality) as weft as compassion and cool reason. (Kirkus Reviews)