Mary Bell: Britian's Youngest Female Killer

1960’s Newcastle upon Tyne, the withering, dying neighborhood of Scotswood became the scene of extremes. A new age of renovation and industry had the council knocking down and rebuilding streets of old Victorian terrace houses, leaving rows of derelict, empty buildings as the homes for some of Britain’s poorest families.

With nowhere else to go, some of those families moved into the houses marked for demolitions. Others became the playground for neighborhood children, left unattended for hours at a time as their parents struggled to make ends meet.

One of those children was Mary Bell, or May as she went by in the neighborhood. This dark-haired, blue-eyed, ten-year-old girl was pretty and seemed sweet. She had a spark in her eyes that spoke of her intelligence, but the warm and unassuming mask she wore hid a myriad of suffering.

Elizabeth Bell was only seventeen years old when she had her second child, May Bell, and by then, Elizabeth was already living a life on the edge. She was a sex worker, who’d sometimes leave her children for days on end to travel up to Glasgow and work, but that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to what was really going on inside the Bell household. Relatives noticed that May would often end up injured after she’d spent time alone with her mother, a mother who by some accounts was rumored to suffer from Munchausen’s by proxy.

But perhaps this case would have turned out differently if May had only suffered from a few bumps and bruises, but, unfortunately, Elizabeth had made her feelings about May clear from the very start and it only headed downhill from there. Accounts from hospital staff say that when May was born, Elizabeth began shouting and screaming, refusing to hold her child and instead ordering staff to “get that thing” away from her.

From then on, May was constantly in harm’s way. Her mother reportedly once tried to kill her by making her overdose on sleep medication. Another time, relatives watched as Elizabeth “accidently” dropped infant May out of a first storey window. May was left permanently injured after that, with brain damage to her frontal lobe that may have affected her ability to make decisions and control her emotions.

There is one more account of Elizabeth’s attempts to get rid of May and that was when she sold her child to a mentally ill woman on the other side of Newcastle. The woman had been unable to have children of her own and took Elizabeth up on her offer to buy May Bell. May was only reunited with her family because her older sister made the journey across Newcastle to go and get her back herself.

When May was only four years old, Elizabeth found a new way of exploiting her youngest daughter. With her family constantly asking for Elizabeth to hand care of May over to them, Elizabeth chose to go in a different direction entirely and that only involved more and more abuse. Elizabeth often brought clients home with her and she began actively encouraging them to live out their fantasies on her four-year-old daughter. May was tied up, blindfolded and often forced to perform oral sex on her mother’s clients, abuse that would continue well into the 60’s. 

When May was around eight years old, classmates and teachers noted that her behavior became more aggressive and violent. She’d switch from being a seemingly perfect and happy child one moment to attacking her classmates in the next. The other children knew to be afraid whenever May went quiet and got what they later described as a cold, steely look in her eyes. May would then stare intently at one of the other children around her and eventually end up violently attacking them.

May often went for the throat. She was caught numerous times trying to strangle other children and reportedly one time held down another girl and stuffed sand into her mouth.

The only one who seemed exempt from May’s attacks was an older girl and neighbor Norma Joyce Bell. The girls weren’t related, but had the same last name and a good few other things in common too. Norma was twelve but developmentally challenged and had a mental age of around eight years old, making her a good friend for another girl who had a hard time fitting in at school.

In May 1968, when May was ten years old, a three-year-old boy turned up in the neighborhood, dazed and confused and bleeding from a wound in his head. He claimed that he’d been out with May and Norma and had been playing on top of an old air raid shelter when one of the girls had pushed him. He’d fallen about two meters and split his head and though he couldn’t say exactly which one of the girls had pushed him, he wasn’t the only child to make a complaint about them that day.

Later that evening, three other families contacted the police to say that their children had been attacked by May and Norma. According to testimonies, including from May and Norma themselves, the children had all been playing in the sandpit when May decided she wanted to find out if someone could die from strangulation. She then began strangling one of the other girls until her face turned purple. Then she moved onto the second girl and did the same and she did the same thing again when a third girl approached the sandpit to see what was going on. 

May denied everything, but Norma openly admitted what had happened. The police, not quite sure what to do when everyone involved in the attack was so young, gave both May and Norma a warning and moved on.

A week later and a day before May’s eleventh birthday, the authorities were called yet again when the body of a four-year-old boy was discovered in one of the abandoned houses in Scotswood. Three other local children had found his body while playing and after hearing the news, a local workman rushed to the scene and attempted to resuscitate the boy. He was still performing CPR when first responders and someone else arrived shortly behind him.

May and Norma appeared at the door to the bedroom where a four-year-old boy was lying flat on his back, his arms stretched up above his head, foam and blood speckles around his mouth. The girls were quickly ushered from the room only to run across to a neighbor’s house and knock on the door.

“One of your sister’s bairns has just had an accident,” they told Rita Finley. “We think it’s Martin, but we can’t tell because there’s blood all over him.”

The boy was Martin Brown and his autopsy revealed no certain cause of death.

A day later, a local nursery was broken into and vandalized. The perpetrators left notes that read: “I murder SO that I may come back,” and “We did murder martin brown.” Investigators chalked it up to a childish but cruel prank.

Two days later, May and Norma showed up at the Brown household asking to see him. May specifically said that she wanted to see him in his coffin.

That same summer, in July 1968, the police were called out yet again to another horrific scene. The body of three-year-old Brian Howe was discovered crudely hidden behind two cement blocks out in the slums, the last people to be seen with him alive were none other than May and Norma. He’d been strangled, his genitals partially mutilated. There were puncture marks on his legs, his hair had been cut in places and a crude “M” had been carved into his stomach.

During interviews, Norma seemed agitated and on edge, May was calm and collected. They told investigators that they’d been out playing with Brian that morning, but hadn’t seen him since lunchtime. In a following interview, May claimed to have later seen Brian with another eight-year-old boy who had a pair of scissors with him and she sealed her fate.

The police had determined that the numerous puncture wounds on the boy’s legs had come from a pair of scissors that had also been found at the scene, but they hadn’t released that information to the public just yet. If May felt the need to include information about a pair of scissors to the police, they figured it was because she knew that scissors had been involved in the murder.

A few days later, investigators received a call from Norma’s family, claiming that she was ready to confess. Norma then said that May had taken her out to Brian’s body after May had already strangled him. She then showed Norma how she’d killed the boy and where she’d hidden the pair of scissors and a razor blade that the investigators had previously missed. Both girls were then arrested.

At trial, the girls turned on each other, both claiming that the other one had actually been the one to kill both victims before the defense teams changed tracks and went into damage control. Norma’s developmental issues and mental age became a huge factor. Her lawyers also claimed that she was afraid of her violent friend and was easily led astray even though she was the older of the two girls.

May’s team said that May had tried to stop the attacks but because Norma had been older and bigger, there was nothing she could do. May was also psychologically examined and was found to have a psychotic personality disorder. Her history of documented physical, psychological and sexual abuse painted the picture of the troubled and disturbed life May had been living up until then and influenced her sentencing.

May was imprisoned indefinitely for manslaughter charges and Norma was released. May went from institution to institution until she was twenty-three-years old, when she was released after spending over eleven years behind bars.