A Child Serial Killer: the Case of Mary Bell

Anthropology 230

December 10, 2008

A Child Serial Killer: The Case of Mary Bell

The case of Mary Flora Bell begins in Scotswood, Newcastle with the manslaughter of four year old Brian Howe on May 25, 1968, the day before Mary’s eleventh birthday, and the manslaughter of three year old Martin Brown on July 31, 1968. In the case of Brian Howe, Mary’s neighbor, Norma Bell, accompanied her while committing the violent act. But in the case of Martin Brown, Mary Bell killed and mutilated her victim single-handedly. The case of the mere eleven year old Mary Bell became one of the first of its kind, but the number of children who kill is dramatically increasing. Most interestingly, Mary had no real motives behind the killings besides her deeply scarred childhood, and the lack of in-depth psychological analysis on the part of court psychiatrists put Mary in jail until the age of 23.

Now a relatively wealthy town, Scotswood in the late 1960’s had one of the highest petty crime, alcoholism, and unemployment rates in Britain (Sereny 1999; 3). As a small pauper’s town with many families, children were left to play in the streets at very young ages. As June Brown’s older sister Rita Finlay, the guardian of Martin Brown on the day of his death, indicates, “...we didn’t think to watch when they came and went, you know--all the kids are all over the place” (5). Almost all of the inhabitants of Scotswood knew each other, and despite financial disparity and resentment, residents mostly experienced a friendly and sociable life with neighbors (4). Direct supervision of children was not an issue as almost all families allowed their young ones to play outside until meal time; that is until two young boys were found dead from the brutality of a trusted peer.

To understand this case further, Scotswood was made up of two main residential streets, Whitehouse Road and St. Margaret’s Road, which overlooked the railway lines, an industrial plant, a waste-ground called the...