In the spring of 1968, in the slums of Newcastle, England, an eleven-year-old named Mary Bell killed four-year-old Martin Brown in a ruined house; nine weeks later, she murdered three-year-old Brian Howe in a vacant lot near a munitions plant that the children called the Tin Lizzie. Soon after, she was tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to reform school and then prison, from which she emerged, somewhat unsteadily, in 1980.
By the time she reached her forties, Mary Bell had become the responsible, attentive mother of an adolescent girl. Profoundly changed by her love for her daughter, she was attempting, at great personal cost, to come to terms with the person she was, and had been.
No one could be better qualified to document these costly efforts than Gitta Sereny, whose Cries Unheard tells Mary Bell’s chilling, cautiously redemptive story—her gruesome childhood, her crime, her scandalous trial, her incarceration, and the “mystery of transformation” that turned a violent, disturbed girl into a “morally aware adult.” A Hungarian-born journalist living in London, Sereny is best known here for her powerful, unique researches into the evolution of conscience, and into our capacity for succumbing to—or resisting—evil at its most extreme and persuasive. Into That Darkness (1974) is a book-length interview with Franz Stangl, the happily married family man who served as the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) painstakingly attempts to fathom how a brilliant, thoughtful man could have thrown himself so wholeheartedly into the job of being Hitler’s chief architect and engineer.
What makes her books so controversial, so profoundly threatening—and so unlike anyone else’s—is Sereny’s unconventional and immensely brave refusal to demonize her subjects. She stubbornly insists on viewing them as complex human beings with histories, quirks, virtues, flaws, and needs—not unlike our own. (The Speer book begins, provocatively, “Albert Speer, whom I knew well and grew to like . . .”) Convinced that little is to be gained from exploring the reasons why monsters behave monstrously, she focuses instead on the desires, petty self-delusions, and equivocations that seduce sentient, apparently “normal” people into making unconscionable compromises and decisions.
Confronting these penitent or unrepentant sinners without prejudgment or condemnation, Sereny has devised a singular strategy, so simple and so brilliant that it’s hard to understand why no one else has employed it in quite the same way: she listens carefully, calmly, asks for repeated accounts, compares competing versions, monitors her own responses, and interviews the sort of collateral figures (Stangl’s wife, Speer’s secretary, Mary Bell’s probation officers and fellow prisoners) with whom conventional historians never bother. Sympathetic, unsentimental, alert to the vagaries of memory and to the possibility of manipulation, Sereny describes the excruciating self-examinations occasioned by her patient interrogations—and in the process she denies us the easy consolations and comforts of convincing ourselves that these criminals and mass murderers belong to an alien species.
Sereny has also written extensively about the moral lives of abused children; her book The Invisible Children is a study of child prostitution in Europe. In 1972, she published The Case of Mary Bell, an account of the little girl’s trial, which Sereny attended. She writes in Cries Unheard:
It seemed very obvious to me that there were elements of Mary Bell’s story that were either unknown or hidden from the court. And as she grew up in detention and was repeatedly mentioned in the press, I found myself hoping that one day Mary Bell and I could talk. By finding out not from others but from her what had happened to and in her during her childhood, I felt we might take a step toward understanding what internal and external pressures can lead young children to commit serious crime and murder.
In 1995, she heard that Mary’s mother had died and that Mary wanted to write “a serious book” about her life—and so their intense and often painful collaboration on Cries Unheard began.
Cries Unheard is structured rather like a detective story, an inquiry into the mystery of why the hapless eleven-year-old reached the breaking point, an explosion preceded and accompanied by a series of troubling incidents (Mary attacked other children, broke into the local preschool, ran away from home) that might have broadcast her wish to be stopped or caught—if anyone had been paying attention or been qualified to interpret her behavior.
The book begins with the trial at which Mary was sentenced to life imprisonment. Her codefendant and best friend, thirteen-year-old Norma Bell, was acquitted of all charges, though Norma undeniably knew about—and was perhaps complicitous in—the killing of Brian Howe. But the slow-witted Norma had the advantage of a demonstrably loving family, while Mary, far more intelligent and disturbed, came from a more problematic and (at least to the jury) less sympathetic background. Her biological father’s identity was unknown, and her mother, Betty, was a prostitute whose “specialty” involved whips, as well as a delusional sociopath who acted out at the trial, took suggestive photographs of Mary while she was in detention, and hawked personal information about her daughter to the tabloids.
Only after reading about the arraignment of the bewildered child (whom the press described as “a freak of nature” and “a bad seed”) do we learn the details of the criminal investigation that began after Brian Howe’s body, strangled and marked by peculiar scratches, was discovered between two cement blocks in the Tin Lizzie. Gradually, the detectives’ suspicions collected around Mary and Norma, who had been behaving bizarrely since Martin Brown’s death, nine weeks before. A few days after Martin was found, Mary “rang the Browns’ doorbell and, smilingly, asked Martin’s shocked mother to let her see the little boy in his coffin.” The girls protested their innocence until their inconsistent and improbable stories—and their eerily accurate knowledge of unpublicized aspects of the murders—pointed to their involvement, and they were arrested.
Sereny tracks Mary’s thorny, circuitous route from imprisonment to parole, a journey that began at Red Bank, an enlightened reform school for boys, headed by a compassionate former naval officer whose kindness first suggested to Mary that an adult could be trusted. But the progress made at Red Bank was rapidly undone in prison, where Mary responded to her rehabilitation with escape and suicide attempts, violence, and her endlessly inventive uses of sex and personal charisma to manipulate her surroundings.
In these sections, as in the rest of the book, Sereny is less engaged by facts of biography than by questions of consciousness and of epistemology. What was Mary’s experience of the crimes, the trial, and her detention? And what does she remember and understand in the light of what she subsequently learned? Cries Unheard has not even a vague familial resemblance to a “true crime” story, but is instead a profoundly philosophical and reflective psychological study of culpability and innocence, conscience and redemption.
Throughout, the tragic narrative of damage and misunderstanding is interrupted by interviews and encounters in which the adult Mary fearfully inches toward the truth of what she did, and what was done to her.
She invariably lost control of her emotions when trying to talk about the actual killings. In the early weeks of our talks, her distress at these disclosures would be so intense that I sometimes became afraid for her and urged her to lie down and rest or even to go home. . . . Her recovery from these terrible bouts of grief, however, was astoundingly quick, and at first these rapid emotional shifts raised doubts in me. After a while, though, I came to realize that they were part of the internal pattern that governs all of her feelings and her conduct. She has an exceptional range of opposing needs, all of which are constantly acute: her needs for disclosure and for hiding, for sociability and isolation, for talking and for silence, for laughing and for crying. Only one thing overrides them all: the discipline she has created inside herself in order to give her daughter a normal life.
Like many children, Sereny believes, Mary and Norma only dimly comprehended the finality of death. As Mary says of Martin’s killing, “I told him to put his hands on my throat and I put my hands on his. . . . Obviously, I must have been messed up inside, but I never associated it with the afterwards. . . . I think to me it was: ‘You’ll come around in time for tea.’” In addition, Mary and Norma were genuinely dumbfounded by the gap between the gritty realities of police custody and the glamorous fantasies of chase and escape they’d constructed from watching old westerns and hearing about the latest high-profile bank heists. “For children,” writes Sereny, “for whom there is a wide separation between what they should know or are believed to know and what they do feel and understand, the evidence that proves their crimes, once obtained, should become almost irrelevant. The only thing that should count is human evidence—the answer to the question ‘Why?’”
The why, in this instance, is quite obviously Betty Bell, whose initial, instinctive response to her newborn daughter was “Take the thing away from me!” Early in the narrative, Sereny informs us that when Mary was “between the ages of four and eight, her mother, then a prostitute, had exposed her to one of the worst cases of child sexual abuse I have ever encountered.” But, cannily, she waits almost until the book’s end—till we have come to know Mary, to see her through Sereny’s eyes, to recognize “Mary’s two best qualities, compassion and humor”—to disclose the specifics of Betty’s attempts to poison her and give her away, and of the appalling sexual uses to which Betty and her clients put the little girl.
Our sympathy for Mary and our outrage at her mother are further intensified by the fact that Sereny reveals the full history of their catastrophic relationship immediately after the very different, and very moving, account of Mary’s own labor and delivery: “Then they said, ‘It’s a little girl. You’ve got a little girl,’ and I burst into tears and I held her and they said they had to take her away to clean her up. . . . And then they brought her back all swaddled and I held her to me . . . and I said, or I thought, ‘Hello, I’ve been waiting a long time to see you.’”
At a cultural moment when so much in our society—criminal defenses based on histories of childhood abuse, the growing popularity of the notion that past suffering absolves the victim of moral responsibility—persuades us to blur or eradicate the line between compassion and forgiveness, both Mary Bell and Gitta Sereny are fiercely meticulous in drawing and maintaining the all too rarely made distinction between sympathy and absolution. Cries Unheard reminds us that understanding and accountability can coexist, that we need not choose between them. While Mary’s abysmal childhood helps explain her violence and catastrophic disassociation, it does not excuse her crimes. Thus, when Sereny asks Mary whether she ever associated Martin Brown’s death with a vicious physical fight that she had with her mother on the day of the murder, Mary recoils from what she interprets as an attempt to diminish her culpability: “‘I didn’t ever want to say it. Not today either. . . . It sounds too much . . . too much like . . .’ I waited. She couldn’t, wouldn’t say the word. ‘Nothing can justify what I did,’ she finally said. ‘Nothing.’ Mary knows her guilt is permanent. Nothing can remove it, nothing can allay her sadness for what she has done. But her dream—a modest one, I feel—is to work, to study, to live in peace, to be allowed, as she puts it, ‘to be normal.’ . . . She allows herself no mitigation, and in her despair for an answer has repeatedly said, ‘There are many unhappy, very disturbed kids out there who don’t end up robbing families of their children.’”
Sereny’s journalistic—and, one wants to say, spiritual—disposition serves her well in a project that is in itself an ethical minefield. Preemptively, she raises the vexing moral questions even before they occur to the reader.
There has not been a day in the two years I have worked on [the book] when the two little boys—who would now have been thirty-five and thirty-four years old—have not been in my mind. And there has not been a day, either, when I have not asked myself whether writing this book was the right thing to do . . . for Mary Bell, from whom, with great difficulty and agonizingly for her, I extracted her life, for the families of the children she killed, and for her own family, above all her child, who now is her life.
Regardless of her private apprehensions, Sereny is certain about her motives for writing the book, confirmed in her faith 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 and can be done with and for such children, Mary would be able to . . . If Mary’s painful disclosures of a suffering childhood and appallingly mismanaged adolescence in detention succeed in prompting us . . . to detect children’s distress, however well hidden, we might one day be able to prevent them from offending instead of inappropriately prosecuting and punishing them when they do.
Evidently, too, Sereny has weighed the implications of Mary’s participation in the project—as have the British tabloids, which swarmed all over the fact that the convicted killer was paid for her cooperation. Unrelenting and sensational media attention helped whip up the frenzied scandal that has greeted the book’s publication in Great Britain. In 1998, reporters tracked Mary Bell to the house in which she was living with “Jim,” her partner of many years, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, who had been unaware of her mother’s past until the press besieged them. (“‘I knew there was a secret,’ the girl said. ‘But Mum, why didn’t you tell me? You were just a kid, younger than I am now.’”)
Such passages are extremely painful and troubling to read, but—as in all of Sereny’s books—these harrowing, probing, and empathetic glimpses of her subjects’ psyches and domestic intimacies are essential for her method, and her purpose. They compel us to examine and deconstruct our received or simplistic notions of innocence and wrongdoing, and to confront the complicated, discernible humanity of the very people we are most eager to despise and dismiss. In Gitta Sereny’s competent hands, the faces of the guilty become distorting mirrors in which we are forced to acknowledge skewed but still recognizable versions of the faces we have seen, and lived with, all our lives.