Mary Bell was 11 years old when she stood trial at Newcastle Assizes in December 1968 for the deaths of two small boys from Scotswood, in the west end of Newcastle upon Tyne. Martin Brown, who was 4, was found dead in a derelict house on May 25, 1968. Brian Howe, who was 3, was found on waste ground near his home two months later. Mary and another girl, a 13-year-old neighbor, N.B., were both charged with murder. On December 17, 1968, the jury acquitted N.B. of everything. It found Mary not guilty of murder and guilty of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility. She was ordered detained for life.
The case has stayed in the British news for more than half a century. Mary Bell spent about 12 years in custody and was released on licence in 1980, at 23, with a new identity. A book she helped to write in 1998, and the payment she received for it, brought protests from the boys' families, questions in Parliament and a press search for her that forced her and her teenage daughter from their home. In May 2003 the High Court granted the two of them anonymity for life, in an order that binds everyone.
Both boys lived in Scotswood, in the west end of Newcastle. The two girls on trial were playmates from the same area, BBC News recalled in its account of the verdict.
Little about Mary's early childhood was public in 1968. What is now known comes largely from the writer Gitta Sereny, who sat through the trial and who, almost 30 years later, interviewed Mary at length for a book. Sereny reported that Mary had been sexually abused as a small child, and she linked that abuse to Mary's mother. According to a 1999 Salon review of the book, Sereny also described a series of earlier incidents involving Mary before the deaths, to which the authorities paid little attention. In 2003 the High Court accepted that she had suffered serious abuse as a child and called her a "damaged child." Mary herself did not speak about the abuse for many years, in part, Salon reported, because she was afraid of her mother.
Martin Brown was 4. He was found dead on May 25, 1968, in a derelict house in Scotswood. At first his death was thought to have been an accident, La Nación reported in a 2020 account of the case. Mary was 10 at the time, The Sunday Post reported in 2013.
Martin's mother was June Brown, later June Richardson. She kept silent in public for many years, her daughter Sharon, Martin's sister, told The Sunday Post in 2013. For the family the case kept returning to the newspapers. "Every time this comes up it's devastating," June Richardson said in 2003.
Mary was not a suspect after Martin's death. Sereny told CBS News in 1999 that the girl had gone to an official and asked to be taken away, and that no one separated her from her mother to find out why.
Brian Howe was 3 and lived in Scotswood. He was found dead on waste ground near his home on July 31, 1968, according to La Nación; BBC News recorded only that he was found about two months after Martin. He had been strangled.
At the trial the prosecution said that Mary had strangled him. N.B. gave evidence that Mary had tried to strangle Brian and ignored her pleas to stop. Both girls denied the charges. The jury's verdicts were that Mary had killed both boys, as the High Court recorded in 2003, and it acquitted N.B. on both charges.
Police came to suspect two girls from the area, Mary and N.B., and Detective James Dobson questioned them, La Nación reported. La Nación reported that Mary mentioned scissors in connection with Brian's death before that detail had been made public. Both girls were taken to Newcastle West End police station and held there.
The prosecution's case, as it was later put to the jury, was that Mary had tried to throw suspicion on an innocent boy. Both girls were charged with the murder of both boys. Martin Brown's death, which had first been taken for an accident, was now brought into the same case.
The exact dates of arrest and charge were not reported.
The trial opened at Newcastle Assizes on December 5, 1968, La Nación reported, before Mr Justice Cusack. The evidence took nine days to hear, the London Review of Books recorded in 1998. Both girls pleaded not guilty.
The prosecutor, Rudolph Lyons QC, told the jury that the boys had been strangled "solely for the pleasure and excitement of killing," in the words BBC News later quoted. He said Mary had tried to put the blame on an innocent boy. Jurors heard that, despite the difference in age, Mary was the more dominant of the two girls.
N.B. testified that Mary had tried to strangle Brian Howe and had ignored her pleas to stop. Mary denied the charges, as N.B. did. For years afterward, Salon reported, Mary denied killing Martin and said her role in Brian's death had been secondary.
Dr David Westbury, a Home Office psychiatrist, gave evidence that Mary had a psychopathic disorder that needed treatment. That evidence went to the question of diminished responsibility, which the jury had to decide on the murder counts.
The jury returned its verdicts on December 17, 1968. N.B. was acquitted on both charges. Mary was found not guilty of murder and guilty of manslaughter, of both boys, on the ground of diminished responsibility. BBC News reported that she broke down and wept when the verdict was read. Members of her family in the court wept as well.
Mr Justice Cusack said that she was dangerous and that there was a "very grave risk to other children if she is not closely watched." He said no suitable hospital was available for her. He sentenced her to detention for life. The High Court, describing the sentence in 2003, said it was a sentence of detention for life under section 53(1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933; The Irish Times described it in 2003 as detention at Her Majesty's pleasure, meaning that she would stay in custody until the authorities, on expert advice, judged that she could safely be released.
Her name had been disclosed at the trial, the High Court later noted. It would follow her for the rest of her life, and decades of later court orders were made to keep the new name she was given from following her in the same way.
There was no obvious place to hold an 11-year-old girl ordered detained for life. After the trial she was kept at a remand centre while the authorities looked for somewhere suitable. In February 1969 she was sent to Red Bank approved school at Newton-le-Willows, in Lancashire, where a security unit was adapted for her, BBC News recorded. Her member of Parliament, Robert Brown of Labour, said she was receiving psychiatric supervision and full-time education. A plan to move her to a new center at Brentwood, in Essex, when it opened in 1972 was judged too disruptive and was dropped.
At Red Bank she was the only girl among about 20 boys, Salon reported. She was later moved to a maximum-security women's prison. The National Criminal Justice Reference Service, summarizing Sereny's book, recorded Sereny's view that the transfer took her away from a more stable setting where she had done well.
In 1977, at 20, she walked out of Moor Court, a low-security prison, and spent time with two young men before she was found, an episode La Nación noted drew wide tabloid coverage. She was returned to custody.
In all she spent about 12 years in young offender institutions and then in prison, the High Court found.
She was released on licence in 1980, at the age of 23. La Nación gives the date as May 14, 1980. At her own request she was given a new identity, which the Home Office fully approved, her counsel later told the High Court. She remains on licence for life and can be recalled to prison.
No offence by her since her release has been reported. CBS News reported in 1999 that she had kept out of public view and refused to speak to reporters.
Gitta Sereny, a reporter who had covered the Nuremberg trials and later interviewed Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, had attended Mary Bell's trial. Her book The Case of Mary Bell, published in 1972, covered the deaths and the trial. Her argument, then and later, was that children who kill are responding to harm done to them and are not driven by an evil inside them. "It isn't that they're motivated to kill by evil inside them," she told CBS News in 1999.
In 1984 Mary Bell gave birth to a daughter. Within days the child was made a ward of court. After the News of the World learned of the birth, Mr Justice Balcombe granted an injunction in the wardship proceedings that barred the identification of either mother or child, the High Court recorded in 2003. The High Court injunction was dated July 30, 1984, according to a government answer in the House of Commons in 1998. The injunction was to last until the daughter turned 18.
Injunctions of this kind, protecting a child by forbidding the press to identify the child or the parents, became known as "Mary Bell orders," the New Statesman explained in 2000.
The protection did not always hold. In 1988 the daughter's identity was revealed in the village where the family lived. There was a demonstration against her when she was 4. Later that year an untrue story about Mary was sold to a newspaper, an injunction followed, and the family moved again. In 1993, after the killing of James Bulger and the trial of the two boys convicted of his murder, the press wrote about Mary Bell at length once more. In all, the High Court found, the family had to move five times because of press intrusion and harassment.
In 1995, some 27 years after her conviction, Mary Bell began a series of long interviews with Gitta Sereny, held in secret over several months. The result was Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell, published by Macmillan in May 1998. It covered her early life and the abuse she had suffered, the deaths of the two boys, her public trial and her 12 years in custody, and included an appendix of her writings and drawings.
Sereny concluded that Mary's childhood had strongly shaped what she did in 1968. Mary told her that at 11 she "didn't understand the concept of death," CBS News reported. Sereny's purpose, as the London Review of Books put it, was to show what drives a child to kill and to argue for legal systems that do not treat children who kill as small adults.
Reviewers were divided. A. L. Kennedy, in the London Review of Books, questioned whether Sereny had weighed the consequences of the book for Mary Bell and her family and wrote that Sereny's faith in human resilience may have made her a poor judge of whether to go ahead. Beth Kephart, in Salon, found the book important but said it did not answer the question of why children kill and gave too little weight to personal responsibility. Rosita Boland, in The Irish Times, noted that Bell had received part of Sereny's advance.
The payment made the book a political issue as soon as its contents became known. Mary Bell had been paid for her contribution, and The Times had bought serial rights. The Press Complaints Commission opened an inquiry into whether the paper had broken its code, which bars payments to criminals' associates unless there is an overwhelming public interest, The Irish Times reported on May 1, 1998.
About ten days after the news broke, reporters found Mary Bell, who was living with her daughter. The girl had not known about her mother's past, Rosita Boland wrote. On police advice the family moved. A bogus call was made to Mary's doctor's surgery, the High Court later recorded.
The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, began an inquiry into how she came to be paid. He met June Richardson, Martin Brown's mother, who demanded that Mary give her payment to charity and that Sereny's profits go to charity too; Straw said he shared her "anger and frustration." He was dismayed to learn that the probation service had told a junior Home Office official early in 1996 that a book was possible, and he said the information had not been passed to ministers. Sereny said she had warned Mary against the book and suggested she speak to a psychiatrist instead, and she called the outcry "the most shameful manipulation of a population that I have ever seen." The Attorney General, John Morris, asked the Commons to protect Bell's daughter from "press frenzy or mob rule," The Irish Times reported.
In the Commons on April 29, 1998, John Heppell, the Labour member for Nottingham East, asked the Prime Minister to condemn the payment. Tony Blair answered that most people would find it repugnant that anyone should benefit from such crimes, that the existing law was not retrospective and would not deal with the case, and that the Home Secretary would look at how the law might be tightened. "Most people would consider it wrong that any money is received or paid over in respect of books written about such crimes," he said.
In the Lords the next day, Lord Hoyle, for the government, said that the Home Office minister Joyce Quin had written to Richard Charkin of Macmillan about the payments and that the Home Secretary had asked the Attorney General whether anything could be done. He said the Proceeds of Crime Act 1995 applied only within six years of a conviction, and that it was not clear it could reach this case. He offered the government's sympathy to the parents of the two boys. Lord McNally, who had asked the question, described the daughter being driven into police protection by journalists. Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, said a complaint had been received and was being investigated.
On May 5, 1998, a Labour member, Hilton Dawson, asked what the government would do about media coverage of the person formerly known as Mary Bell in light of the High Court injunction of July 30, 1984. Geoff Hoon, for the Lord Chancellor's Department, replied that it was not for the government to act; any party to the injunction could refer a suspected breach to the court.
June Richardson told CBS News in 1999 that the book had brought pain to her family and to the Howe family, and she argued that Sereny wrote about the people who did harm and ignored their victims. Her family's anger, Sharon Richardson told The Sunday Post in 2013, was directed less at the release than at the new identity and the book. June called the payment "blood money," and a petition was raised for a law to stop criminals profiting from memoirs, a cause that the former Home Secretary David Blunkett later took up. It did not succeed, and the family was angered by that.
June Richardson went on to work with the National Victims' Association and with Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, alongside David Hines of the association and Denise Bulger, whose son James was killed in Bootle in 1993. She felt, her daughter said, that the James Bulger case was close to what had happened to her own family.
The injunction protecting the daughter was due to end when she turned 18. Mary Bell and her daughter applied to the High Court for orders to protect them both for life, and an interim injunction was granted in those proceedings on April 17, 2002. They named News Group Newspapers and MGN as defendants. MGN said it would not oppose an extension of the interim order on certain terms. Tom Crone, News Group's legal manager, predicted in September 2002 that if Bell succeeded, Myra Hindley would be the next to seek such an order, Press Gazette reported.
Press attention rose again ahead of the hearing. In April 2003 the Newcastle Evening Chronicle ran the headline "Time to unmask Mary Bell," with an article in which relatives of one of the boys said she should be named, the High Court recorded.
The case was heard on April 14 and 15, 2003, by Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President of the Family Division. Edward Fitzgerald QC, for Mary Bell, argued that two features made her case unique: her extreme youth at the time of the offences, and the new identity she had lived under since her release with the Home Office's full approval. He said both women faced a "serious risk of harassment and attack." Andrew Caldecott QC, for the Attorney General, said the case raised "very delicate issues" in balancing private and family life against open justice; the Attorney General intervened so that the public interest would be fully argued and any order would be strictly justified. The newspaper groups no longer opposed an injunction in principle, and the Official Solicitor supported one. The judge reserved her decision until after Easter.
Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss gave judgment on May 21, 2003, in X (A Woman Formerly Known as Mary Bell) and Y v O'Brien and others. She granted both women injunctions for life.
The judgment set out the case in the court's own words. In 1968, at 11, Bell killed two young children and was convicted of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility. She was sentenced to detention for life, served about 12 years, was released in 1980 with a new identity, and remains on licence for life. The judge accepted that she had been rehabilitated.
She rejected the argument that Bell's life was at risk in the sense required by Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The hostility shown to Bell was not of the kind of specific threats that had justified lifelong anonymity for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the two boys convicted of killing James Bulger. The order rested instead on Article 8, the right to respect for private and family life, which the judge held included mental health. A forensic psychiatrist described a chronic anxiety and depressive disorder and warned that press intrusion would amount to further psychological harm; Bell's doctor described a serious panic and anxiety disorder that her fear of recognition kept her from getting help for. The judge called Bell's mental health the most important reason for the order. The Washington Times reported that the court accepted evidence that Bell and her daughter faced "considerable risk of press intrusion and harassment, public stigma and ostracism."
The judge weighed that against Article 10, freedom of expression, and the press's right to report. She was clear that notoriety alone would not entitle an offender to such protection; that would "open the floodgates." What tipped the balance in this case was a combination of factors: Bell's young age at the time, the abusive childhood behind the diminished responsibility verdict, the time that had passed, her rehabilitation, her mental health, the narrowness of the information to be protected, and the fact that the positions of mother and daughter were "inextricably linked," as The Irish Times quoted her. Those factors, she wrote, "tip the balance firmly in favour of granting the relief sought."
The daughter's protection, the judge found, could not be separated from her mother's: identifying one would identify the other. The press code of practice alone was not enough, because a single breach could never be undone. The injunctions were granted contra mundum, binding everyone and not only the newspaper groups before the court. The judge added that the decision "is not to be taken to be, a broadening of the principles of the law of confidence."
The order protects only a narrow set of facts. It forbids publishing anything likely to identify Mary Bell or her daughter, or their current whereabouts, and any picture or description of Bell's appearance or voice after 1980. It also forbids soliciting such information. It does not stop anyone reporting the 1968 case, discussing it or commenting on it, or publishing what was already lawfully public. Material is not treated as public merely because it has appeared online or abroad. Medical confidentiality is preserved. Any party may apply on 24 hours' notice to vary or discharge the order.
Press Gazette's legal commentary noted that much about the case was already in the public domain and that the court found the remaining facts, known to only a small number of people, could be protected by the law of confidence.
The Brown family attended the judgment, The Scotsman reported. Sharon Richardson, Martin's sister, said, "It takes us no further forward," and said she wanted restrictions to stop Bell making money from the case. June Richardson said she would accept the ruling if Bell "then vanished." "I just want it to end," she said. Relatives of the boys complained that no guidelines had been set to stop Bell profiting from books or films about the case, RTE News reported.
The 2003 ruling is often described as the origin of lifelong anonymity in English law, but the judgment itself relied on the earlier Venables case and distinguished it. What the term "Mary Bell order" first described, as the New Statesman explained in 2000, was the wardship injunction of 1984 and the many orders made later on its model to protect children by forbidding identification of their parents. In 2003 the judge stressed that her decision was exceptional and set no general precedent, and later commentary by the media law chambers 5RB noted that the press had warned the limits of the jurisdiction were unclear. 5RB pointed to the later case of Maxine Carr, in which a credible death threat assessed by police led to a new identity and wide orders.
June Richardson died in April 2013, aged 68, of lung cancer, The Sunday Post reported. Her daughter Sharon said she had been comforted at the end by the thought of being with Martin again, and had spoken of wanting to "build sandcastles in the sky" with him. Asked whether her mother had ever forgiven Mary Bell, Sharon said she had "learned to live with it."
In September 2020 La Nación described Mary Bell as a free woman, living under the identity she was given in 1980 and protected for life by the order of May 21, 2003. The order also protects her daughter. She remains on licence for life.
Proven by final verdict: the manslaughter of Martin Brown and of Brian Howe, on the ground of diminished responsibility (Newcastle Assizes, December 17, 1968). She was found not guilty of murder. Her co-defendant, N.B., was acquitted of both charges.
Details on which sources differ: the payment for Cries Unheard, reported variously as part of Sereny's advance (The Irish Times, 1999) and as a larger sum (The Sunday Post, 2013, describing it as reported); the description of the sentence, as detention for life under section 53(1) (High Court, 2003) or as detention at Her Majesty's pleasure (The Irish Times, 2003); and the date of her release, given as May 14, 1980, by La Nación, while the court records only the year. Several later reports call the deaths "murders" or say she was convicted of murder; the record shows convictions for manslaughter only.
Her own account has changed over time. At trial she denied the charges. For years afterward she denied killing Martin and said her part in Brian's death was secondary, Salon reported. By the time of the interviews with Sereny she was speaking about her responsibility and about the abuse she had suffered as a child.
May 25, 1968: Martin Brown, 4, is found dead in a derelict house in Scotswood, Newcastle upon Tyne; his death is first thought to be an accident.
July 31, 1968: Brian Howe, 3, is found dead on waste ground near his home in Scotswood.
1968: Detective James Dobson questions Mary Bell and N.B.; both are held at Newcastle West End police station and charged with murder.
December 5, 1968: the trial opens at Newcastle Assizes before Mr Justice Cusack.
December 17, 1968: N.B. is acquitted; Mary Bell, 11, is found not guilty of murder and guilty of the manslaughter of both boys on the ground of diminished responsibility, and is ordered detained for life.
February 1969: she is placed at Red Bank approved school, Newton-le-Willows, in a unit adapted for her.
1972: Gitta Sereny publishes The Case of Mary Bell.
1977: she walks out of Moor Court open prison and is returned to custody.
1980: released on licence, at 23, with a new identity.
1984: her daughter is born and made a ward of court; Mr Justice Balcombe's injunction (dated July 30, 1984) bars identification of mother and child.
1988: the daughter's identity is revealed in their village; the family moves.
1993: renewed press coverage after the James Bulger case.
1995: Bell begins interviews with Sereny.
April to May 1998: Cries Unheard is published; reporters find Bell and her daughter, who move on police advice; Jack Straw orders an inquiry into the payment; questions in the Commons (April 29) and Lords (April 30) and a written answer (May 5).
April 17, 2002: interim High Court injunction for Bell and her daughter.
April 14 to 15, 2003: High Court hearing before Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss.
May 21, 2003: lifelong anonymity granted to Bell and her daughter, contra mundum.
April 2013: June Richardson, Martin Brown's mother, dies.
September 2020: La Nación describes Bell as living free under the order.