Mary Bell: The 11-Year-Old Serial Killer

hello everybody welcome back to another episode of the casual criminalist as always i am your host simon what happens here is uh callum uh the writer for this channel has written me a script which i have right in front of me here honestly this one i believe it's about an 11 year old serial killer because we use a project management software callum and i to like keep a track of everything we're making i used to suggest all the topics myself the callum lately has just been suggesting absolute crackers and i've been enjoying them greatly so mostly kind of just suggest things he's like simon can i make this one i'm like yeah i don't know what it is but i approve carry on and that's what we have today uh although children serial killers how cheery well you're listening to her for watching a podcast if you're watching on youtube by the way smash that like button if you're listening on uh podcasts wherever you get your podcast leave us a review unless you're listening on spotify where there are no reviews and there are no like buttons so i guess subscribe thanks spotify let's jump in kids can be so cruel it's a whirlwind cliche which usually refers to a bit of name calling in the playground or a game of keep away with a backpack what is keep away what is going on i've never heard of this game it's probably because i was left out of all this all the fun stuff that's so lonely when you start plumbing the depths of juvenile true crime however all that schoolyard stuff seems like well child's play here you discover exactly what our beloved little cherubs are capable of given the right conditions and let me confirm that their crimes can be every bit as bloody horrible as anything a grown adult can inflict while their peers are playing with doles and finishing up their homework these little terrors are sharpening their favorite knives torturing the local cats or worse yeah i mean look those like look out for future serial killer thing is it like torturing animals what was that tv show that was really nicely made i am drawing an absolute blank on it where they profile the serial killers and it's got those two i i don't even remember it it's got the woman from fringe ah never mind but there's this show where they profile people i'm like dude if you're torturing animals as a kid you're going to grow up to be a right psycho get into therapy now the subject of today's casual criminal is short is once callum this is a short uh listeners if you can't see this this seems like a fairly substantial script i'm not sure how short this was almost like calum 15 minutes yeah and then they arrive and also i add all my own fluff i suppose in this short is one of the youngest murderers in the history of the uk whose crimes will make any parent shudder but mainly this episode is for all you 30-something singletons out there the next time someone asks you why you don't have kids raise your finger to their mouth sit them down and recount the story of mary bell the 11 year old serial killer oh god i have a kid who's a little over one years old i hope they don't become a serial killer that would kind of be a bummer the murder of martin brown [Music] also because i i know i you don't want to blame the parents but look if you and i don't want to say that like every person who's a psycho because obviously there's mental aspects as well and maybe some of it's just how you're born but it's like yo there's definitely going to be a correlation between criminals and like the quality of the parenting or something like that so if your kid if my kid becomes a serial killer people are gonna be like simon what did you do wrong i don't want that don't do that kid it's the evening of saturday the 25th of may 1968. the parents of a four-year-old named martin brown are starting to get worried because their little boy hasn't come home yet martin and his family lived in a working-class neighborhood in scottswood newcastle in the northeast of england this was back in the days when it was normal to let kids roam the neighborhood from a young age because apparently stranger danger wasn't invented until the 1990s little martin was in the habit of heading out on his own to play with friends coming back home in the late afternoon for tea that's what we call dinner for all our non-brit listeners well i mean we also call dinner dinner don't we call him tease like at four o'clock where you have you know a cup of tea and some biscuits or something um i don't know does do people really do that my nan used to do that used to have tea with my nan and i think she would also call dinner tea this is all very confusing why can't we just agree on on some words british people also it's been a long time since i lived in the uk so i kind of forget this stuff his parents didn't think they had any reason for worry on that sunny weekend all the local kids knew each other and would generally look out for the younger ones among them as things turned out it was some of those local kids who ended up finding martin's body just one day after his disappearance and there that that is the point everybody you know i like to point out where this got dark quickly well it's in the sixth paragraph today so i think we're in for a bit of a rough ride today folks martin had died in an abandoned house not far from his own two boys from the neighborhood had been playing there when they came across the body and two girls joined them soon after they reported what they'd found and martin's parents were understandably devastated the police had little to offer them by way of consolation or explanation when they inspected the body they found no serious injuries to suggest the boy died violently there was only a small amount of blood on his face near the body was an empty bottle of painkillers suggesting that martin had somehow got his hands on the pills and accidentally overdosed that was enough for the police to rule the death as accidental even though nobody could explain how martin had acquired the pills in the first place let me remind you this was 1968 and forensic science was very much a thing it makes you wonder why the police didn't bother with any of that fancy pants toxicology stuff that we've always talked about on the show immediately i'm thinking well he ate the pills danny so is there any reason to do that what we might want to investigate is was he forced to eat the pills did someone like shove them down his throat or something but maybe there's some foreshadowing although to be fair i've been to newcastle before in some parts the locals still think camera's still souls it might just be a while in the uk if you're from the south i'm from the south we kind of you know there's a little bit of friendly banter between the south and the north of the uk i'm gonna guess with this i don't know where callan's from actually um but i'm gonna guess that he's probably from the south it might be a while before they fully make it to the 20th century also i had a friend who went to university in newcastle and we used to go we used to go visit him you know once or twice a year me and a friend i went to university with and uh i was walking on the street and some i can't even remember what he said but some guy asked me for a cigarette in some northern slang i had no idea what he was saying because he had a super strong accent and he used all these like um slang words that i didn't understand it's like they speak a different language you go to scotland even more confusing regardless there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious perhaps the most kind i think the camera's stealing the souls oh let's go back to the horror perhaps the most glaring was the incident at martin's nursery school it was broken into and vandalized several weeks after his death someone had smashed up the furniture and thrown tables around the classroom when the police came to investigate they found four scrapply written handwritten notes claiming that martin's death was not an accident one read i murder so that i may come back and another said we did murder martin brown i mean this could just be kids like i mean throwing tables around definitely something i never did at school allegedly those are slightly strange things for a bunch of four-year-olds to draft up with their crayola oh they're four okay i mean it could be older kids messing around i mean in a really horrific way i think i didn't know there were no murders when i was a school none of no one in my school as far as i'm aware was murdered and i think like even if you were really into pranks and messing around and you know being a bit naughty or whatever i don't think we'd ever have gone that far so it was clear that they had been left behind by whoever trashed the classroom the cops must have had their top detective pulling a 24-hour shift staring endlessly at the notes on his pinboard wondering what does it all mean all they had was 400 admissions of murder placed inside the classroom of a child who died mysteriously who could have possibly known it meant he was murdered not the newcastle police anyway they decided actually had nothing to do with the crime apparently the kids of scottswood had a pretty dark sense of humor as the police just wrote off the affair as an act of juvenile vandalism look i mean i would i'm i did that same thing myself but i'm not a police officer responsible for investigating this case and i'm not saying that that you know at the end of all these things and it turns out that it was just juvenile kids being juveniles but you're a police officer you should at least look into it a little bit in my day we used to just set fire to wheelie bins oh i know i'm going off on a lot of tangents today but a friend of mine from university he uh he's a very smart chap and he got like an internship over the summer at some big american university doing some big science stuff and i remember i think we were we were i think we were living together in a house at that time and he was saying how he was applying for it it was an absolute nightmare to get a visa because he had a criminal record because when he was a kid he set fire to a trolley like uh i think americans called him karts the thing you put around a grocery store it was full of newspapers and he just sat at a light for a laugh he got arrested got a criminal record and it was still following me around like he was 19 20 years old trying to get a to get a visa to go do an internship at some big university however nonchalant the police might have been martin's grieving families still held some reservations about the cause of death you know because all of the written messages explicitly stated he was murdered what's more while they were preparing for the little boy's wake in the days after his body was found they received a visitor to the door this was little mary bell a neighborhood girl who just turned 11 on the day martin's body was found apparently she hadn't heard the news she was asking to see martin june the heartbroken mother had to explain to mary that martin had passed away doing her best to explain it in a way that wouldn't upset or frighten her wait isn't mary bell the title of this episode so she's is she the murderer she's 11. good lord um also we mentioned previously on an episode of casual criminalist uh i think i we were talking about a young kid who committed a crime and i said the age of criminal responsibility i think was 12. he's actually 10. so mary you can be i mean you're not going to go to prison for the rest of your life you'll go to like a it's not still called a borstal is it or wherever naughty kids go juvenile something or other look prison for kids is what i'm guessing she's going to prison for kids hopefully maybe but then mary clarified no she didn't want to play with martin she knew he had died all she wanted to do was see his body june was horrified she told mary to stay the hell away and shut the door in that creepy little corpse hunter's face yes also i feel maybe i need to clarify in the uk we don't look at that i've never seen a dead body in my life i've been to funerals it's always a closed cast casket and not because uh someone's been in some horrible car accident they don't have a face anymore it's just because we don't like looking at dead bodies like in the uk we don't go look at the the the corpse sitting there we find that weird like it's just not really done what she didn't know was that this wouldn't be the first time mary had seen martin's body she had been one of the girls who'd arrived after the two local boys found him in the first place the other girl was norma joyce bell who was no relation despite their matching surnames although the gene pool up north is pretty small callum you're being savage taking taking it too far the poor northerners but true so you're already aware that this episode isn't called mary bell the little girl who liked looking at coffin so i'll stop beating around the bush when the two girls went to the abandoned house on the 26th they had actually been returning to the scene of mary's crime she had lured martin there the day prior promising him sweets once inside she strangled the little boy to death with her bare hands she was just 10 years old at the time the next day she had told norma herself just 13 what she had done and took the and took her to the crime scene to prove it when mary returned to school a week after she started bragging to her classmates about her crime kit this is so messed up what are you up to mary however she was a renowned bs merchant so like the police her classmates just wrote it off as a bit of childhood make-believe and let's return to the police for a second mary had essentially committed the perfect crime meaning newcastle's finest had been outboarded by a killer who wasn't even old enough to buy cigarettes what happened next though would make everyone start paying a bit more attention to the boasting of this troubled little kid i free does trouble really cover it there calum she murdered someone and then bragged about it the murder of braun howe it's now several months after martin brown had been laid to rest and several weeks since mary and norma broke into the nursery school the first crime had gone basically undetected despite their very best efforts so the two girls started plotting an even more severe act of violence to follow it on the 31st of july 1968 the two girls went up playing together they came across a little boy wandering around the streets this was three-year-old brian howe what is going on he's three years old and he's just wandering the streets i get like stranger danger wasn't a thing into the 90s and don't think that's because there were no predators out there it's just because people were less aware of the prayer it was like the past was the better do you remember like the 1950s the glorious time you could play outside in the street and not have to worry it's like no no there were still dangers people just didn't worry about them as much it's like kids were still getting kidnapped and stuff it's just you always remember the past it was worse you might not like the present but the past was worse almost always except for 2020 and 20 uh 21. covert sucks yes kids as young as three were let out alone those days i'm sure your grandparents will say it was a safer time when nobody had to lock their doors and nothing bad ever happened yes that sarcasm from calum right there but of course that's all fantasy the past was just as awful as the present this is one thing about when you don't read the scripts ahead uh probably even more so case in point on that day martin mary and norma led the toddler after a piece of wasteland overgrown with weeds they reached a spot hidden from sight by a scattering of concrete blocks it was here that mary strangled little brian to death mary you absolute psycho after the deed was done the two girls uh left like nothing had happened and waited for some uh of the infamy that they apparently craved when brian's panic family sent out word that he was missing mary and norma even offered to help his older sister go looking they wandered around the neighborhood together at one point walking through the scrubland where the girls knew the boy's body lay when his sister suggested checking him on the concrete blocks mary told them there was no chance of finding him in there so they continued on when brian's body was eventually found there was no chance the police ruling his death accidental fair warning everyone already struggling with how heartbreaking or horrible this is should skip about 10 seconds forward i'll pause if you want to you could do the whole hey siri thing click ahead 10 seconds uh the little boy had the letter m carved into his chest his hair had been cut off in clumps and his genitals have been mutilated good lord he was three years old guys thankfully there wasn't a bottle of paracetamol to throw the canny george geordie cops off the scent this time they admitted that yes someone had most probably killed this kid what gave it away guys what possibly gave it away given the gruesome state of the body they assumed a sexual predator was to blame and started interviewing the local kids to find out if any strange man had been spotted in the area investigation and arrest [Music] the community was understandably terrified martin brown's family were informed that their son's death might not have been an accident after all oh so that's what the handwritten murder note and nursery murder graffiti meant i feel like we've cracked the zodiac cipher the police were now on the hunt for a potential serial killer but the murderer they wanted looked nothing like they expected rather than a creepy middle-aged gin with a dodgy moustache and a transit van it was a girl who wasn't yet out of primary school the detectives brought in both mary and norma to ask them if they had noticed anything strange on the day of the murders all in all they interviewed more than 1 200 local kids and more than a few of them had mentioned the strange behavior of these two girls and accounted the public confessions and all that stuff in addition brian's parents were reported seeing mary on the day of the funeral she was watching the procession leaving their house while laughing and rubbing her hands together oh my god what mary mary i know we've already established you as a total crazy what is going on with you you're like a 11 year old super villain when norma was brought into the interview room she could barely contain her excitement at the mention of the murders she smiled when she told what had happened but didn't offer up any useful details treating the murder of a three-year-old like a joke was strange enough but mary was acting even stranger when detectives quizzed her on her schoolyard boasting she wouldn't give them a straight answer eventually she opened up a little telling them that she'd actually seen someone with brian howe on the day of his murder a local eight-year-old boy was playing with him near the wasteland as she walked by the two of them she even saw the older boy hit the toddler in the face there was just one problem with that version of events though the boy mary accused had actually been at the airport on the day of the murder what's more mary had curiously mentioned one thing which she had no right knowing she told them that the boy was holding scissors the details of the murder hadn't been released to the public yet the only people who knew brian's body had mutilated with scissors were the police and his killer yeah i mean normally i'd you know make fun of the person who committed this crime because it's like you're an idiot come on you're terrible at crime but mary's 11. so she that's enough of a she's 11. as if that wasn't incriminating enough norma had finally stopped giggling long enough to elaborate on the rumors surrounding her and mary she told the police that mary came to her the day after the first boy went missing and admitted the murder she had described the feeling of straight strangling someone to death and said that she enjoyed it before taking norman to see the body mary denied it all calling norma a liar after a time she admitted to being there when the second boy was killed but asserted that norma was the one who actually ended his life anyone with young kids will recognize this as the exact same game every little one plays when they get in trouble with their friends just with somewhat higher stakes and at any rate it seems like both of them went back later with the scissors to deface the body forensic analysis revealed that the m carved into the chest actually started as an n before being modified yes um also i believe i'm not certain but if this was let's just assume they're adults and it's present day obviously i'm not sure of the law in the 1960s they would both be guilty of murder because uh whoever did it the other one went along with the crime and knew that uh would it be grievous bodily harm would be committed so they'd both be guilty of murder i'm not certain of that it's been a long time since i studied that stuff um but because it's some sort of gang thing so like to to get people you know if you're in a gang and you foresee that someone else is going to murder or commit gbh then you'll also be guilty of the crime to stop gangs i think it's been a long time anyone in the comments go feel free to correct me on that in the end though both girls were arrested and both were charged with murder eventually though mary confessed that she had been the one who actually killed both of the kids while norma stood on the sidelines norma was eventually let off the hook as a bystander rather than a perpetrator but i hope someone in the court system hooked her up with a psychiatrist regardless oh my god yes please yes i mean not to question the wisdom of a judge of the british crown and esteemed jury of our citizens but if norma had carved her first initial into the body i'm pretty sure that that in itself is a crime maybe we can get some legal experts to look into the matter but i'm 99 certain it's not cool to cut corpses with scissors yeah there's got to be some like desecrating the dead or something right whatever the case it would be mary who bore the brunt of the consequences in court mary's home life [Music] now i'm sure you can imagine that the tabloids had a field day with this one when it went to trial the only thing they love more than sports and gossip are stories about killer children as far as they were concerned this was a classic case of a bad seed a young girl who was evil by nature rotten to the core but we here at casual criminalists consider ourselves something of an anti-tabloid good the tabloids are the worst let's the news in general is the worst and it's just become i feel i don't want to be you know i rally against people like oh everything was better in the past like do you feel like news journalism was a little bit better before the 24-hour news cycle before you know click-bait headlines it's just all these days isn't it as far as they were concerned you don't come here for me to spew some fire and brimstone and condemn the wicked of the world to hell that's what my upcoming channel is for the erase evangelist instead people would be because i have so many i've got so many if you're just listening to this and you have no idea who i am you're just like this guy does this casual criminalist podcast there like nine other youtube channels and podcasts and stuff so it's not people will be like simon is gonna start this he's going to start the irate evangelist i'm not don't worry it's just a joke or is it instead we understand that monsters aren't born they're made usually in tragic circumstances beyond their own control perhaps it's easier to dismiss the worst criminals of born evil rather than face up to the ways that society collectively failed them yes but also there is certainly going to be a genetic element like we talked about you know there's going to be people who are more prone to some things than others i don't think it's all uh nurture some of it's gonna be nature i'd guess more nurture but early trauma can have devastating effects in later life and christ it's hard to imagine a more traumatic young life than mary's it started with the rather depressing episode of her birth mary's mother was a teenage prostitute only 16 years old when she gave birth to her she had no idea who the father was and amazingly for her age this wasn't her first child some reports state that betty ordered the midwife to take that thing away from me when her newest bundle of joy was born her attitude hardly improved as the years went on mary's older sister once had to go recover her from another woman's house because her mother had tried to give her away the woman who took her in had been unable to have children of her own and was desperate to adopt still when mary's sister came knocking she readily returned her to where she belonged i don't know sounds like she'd probably be better off with just about anybody else all things considered this was probably a terrible turn of events mary missing out on her chance at a home where she might have actually been truly wanted even if the other woman had been an awful mother she would have been 100 times better than a biological one and career criminal billy bell the stepfather from whom she took her name neighbors noticed that mary was a particularly clumsy child prone to falling down the stairs and even one time falling out of a window in another accident she swallowed a huge dose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to hospital how do you i i guess kids are kids they can they can do it i'll be like we have you know as a kid as a kid as having a kid there's all these child proofing and stuff you got to be so careful because you just be like look look away for a second it's like why is that in your mouth how did that get in your mouth and what is it open your mouth now really her mother was the one behind the vast majority of these misfortunes oh brilliant well done whether or not she was actually trying to end mary's life is up for debate some psychiatrists would diagnose betty with a condition called munchhausen syndrome by proxy which i believe i know because of the tv show house md munchaus is where someone wants attention from doctors and munchausens by proxy is going to be where they use someone else like a relative or a child to get attention on them from doctors manchester syndrome is when a person feigns illness or injury or eventually intentionally induces it purely for the sympathy and attention it gains them ah so not just from doctors but the sympathy in general the same symptom by proxy as you probably guess is when someone else does this to someone close to them perhaps betty was inflicting misery on her daughter because she was addicted to the soothing words of her friends and neighbors or perhaps it was really just simple sadism that's not the worst of it though in later years mary revealed that her mother had actually forced her to work as a prostitute from a young age good lord what is this it's never been explicitly backed up by anyone who knew her back then but if the story is true it could have begun when she was as young as four years old what is going on one can only imagine the kind of psychological trauma that would cause a kid jesus christ it's also reported that when she was around that age mary watched one of her friends was ran over and killed by a bus perhaps this planted the seed which led to her fascination with death in the years that followed this is super intense by the time she reached double digits mary had already suffered more than most people endure in a lifetime unfortunately without anyone to save her from that environment or help repair the damage it caused she turned to inflicting the same pains in other children a desperately twisted way of reclaiming the power which had been so violently taken from her for years yeah this is something i mean not having you know this is so much psychological trauma and it's like we i don't know how it is elsewhere in the world but in the uk mental health services are super underfunded compared to like you break your leg they're going to fix you you know the nhs is great and it will heal you but the like psychological stuff is not properly budgeted for there's not enough money going into it today and i can't imagine that i can't imagine what it was like in the 1960s in may 1968 mary was present when a three-year-old fell off the top of an air raid shelter in scottswood suffering broken bones not long after several mothers from the local area reported that the girl had tried to choke their children while they were out playing mary got off with a light warning which soon led us to the events that had you losing your faith in face faith in humanity for the past 20ish minutes prison and life after [Music] mary and norma went to trial for what they had done on december 17th less than six months after the death of brian howe norma was acquitted while mary was convicted of manslaughter manslaughter come on that's murder her defense argued that she could not reasonably be held fully responsible for her actions on account of her age and the fact that psychological evaluation showed signs that she was she was a psychopath so the chance that charges were downgraded and mary received the most british sounding sentence is imaginable being detained at her majesty's pleasure this essentially means that you're in for indefinite imprisonment until all queenless decide that she fancy letting you out or more likely the prison service that acts in her name yeah everything in the uk if you're a criminal case it's uh you so you'd be like whistler and r which stands for regina which stands for queen serbia you versus the queen the queen isn't there it's just the justice system acts on her behalf it's a weird and interesting quirk it turned out not to be as bad as it sounded for mary because she only ended up serving a little over 11 years behind bars with a hiatus nine years in due to a short-lived jail break so she was 20 and she broke out a good lord those quick with child level maths will have worked out that this made mary 23 at the time of her release meaning that she had her whole life still ahead of you that makes you angry considering that she took two young lives away i'd encourage you to think about the whole context this was an incredibly sick and miserable young girl who needed medical help more than anything yes i don't believe that in that case i mean what she did was horrific like i mean losing faith in humanity horrific but she was 11 years old and you can't i don't just a very quick judgment here but i don't really think it's moral to lock someone who's done that up for the rest of their lives i know there was an interesting article it might have been in some magazine like wired probably not wired but one of these you know magazines has these long-form pieces of journalism are often quite interesting about life without parole in the united states and how kids had committed crimes bad crimes horrible crimes but they were sentenced to life without parole so you are in prison until you die which is super intense and i don't think in this case i would want that for mary she needs help she's a psychopath which you know i don't know she always needs to be looked at but i don't think she should spend the rest of her life in prison and i don't think god that's so hard to say but what if it was your kid who was killed because i'm like i don't think i'd want that but then i think about my kids and i'm like maybe i would want her to go to prison forever well good news this is the casual christmas where we look at cases it's not the moral judgment criminalist that would be a terribly named show let's move on however the judge at her sentencing lamented it is a most unhappy thing that in all the resources of this country it appears there is no hospital available which is suitable for the accommodation of this girl samaria was shipped off to an all-boys facility where as reported by the bbc that she had been at the center of a sex and pornography scandal hardly the environment that a mentally ill child needs so she was moved to a suitable juvenile prison in cheshire and several other facilities afterwards by the 1980s psychiatrist ruled that mary had been cured of her violent conditions and was fit to re-enter society but the opinions of some fancy university folk weren't going to make this fly with the tabloids well who cares goddamn tabloids leave it alone despite the fact that mary's release was subject to strict observation and terms the papers were loath to letter off the hook with just 11 years the authorities did their best to avoid a media circus by giving the young women a new identity to live under but that only delayed the inevitable when a vulturous reporter puts their mind to it there's no ethical violation too great as if you needed proof of that fact oh boy we didn't uh tabloid journalism but for years the papers allowed mary's mother to turn a pretty profit from the tragedy selling stories which often included letters and notes she claimed were written by her daughter and the time the parent and by the time the parasitic press found mary herself she wasn't the only one whose safety was at stake mary had given birth to a daughter on the 25th of may 1984 the exact same day she had taken a life of a child 16 years prior she had brought she had brought her own into the world mother and child soon had to flee from their home when an investigative reporter tracked them down after uprooting their lives and moving to a new town the family managed to live in peace for 14 years before the papers found them again at this point mary's teenage daughter had no idea about her mother's past it wasn't until the news vans and reporters descended upon their street on mass that she had to explain to her who she to her daughter who she really was and what she had done they ended up fleeing the house as well covering their heads with bed sheets in an attempt to prevent their faces from being broadcast to the public smart move the people of britain were worked up into a frenzy over the case each time bell resurfaced her story had left such a black mark in the memories of a whole generation that some thought she might be subject to mob justice even after all the time that had passed should she or her daughter's face become known her legal anonymity was expiring soon too which would have opened up the floodgates so in 2003 mary launched a successful court case to guarantee lifetime legal anonymity for her and her family including her future granddaughter if you're still angry at the fact that marybel's daughter and granddaughter escaped ongoing punishments for her crimes no we're not why would be they're not they're completely different people then i don't know what to tell you except that i reckon you've got a promising career in the dprk's ministry of justice yeah if you don't know i mean as much as we know about north we don't know about north korea apparently there are you know the internment camps where if you've committed some crime against the state or whatever they'll ship you off to but not only you they'll also ship off your children and your children's children so there's like three generations of punishment for one person committing crime which is obviously insane but it's the dprk so okay we in the modern world don't really go in for multi-generational sentences though so it's probably for the best that the courts declawed the reporters who were set on shaming mary bell for life she had been unmasked for the last time and it's thought that she's still alive and well living out her life somewhere under the name something something and that's the way things will stay i really hope but also the courts and the justice system i really really really hope you're still keeping an eye on her because you know who she is and there are people out there who know who she is and i hope they're extremely competent police people wrap up whatever your opinion on the punishments handed out to mary bell i think we can all agree that there are no winners in her story i'll simply we'll watch this is the casual criminalist column there are rarely winners our sympathy goes out to the victims the little kids who never got a chance to grow up go to school get married or have kids of their own after that though it's only right to recognize mary as a victim in her own right because basically kids don't do this stuff it takes a massive amount of deeply inflicted pain to turn them towards extreme acts of violence even if some might have more of a predisposition than others what i mean is that even if you believe that some people are just born with innate violence inclinations it's undeniable that with a safe and loving home the lives of these kids turns out very very differently no doubt nurture trumps nature in the end but in mary's case she was a child so horrifically treated that she likely forgot what it meant to be kind at all today we've covered two stories really the first about a horrible pair of murders the second a horrific study of childhood abuse and its consequences with that in mind we've dropped some important phone numbers in the description to cool if you believe a child you know might be suffering any abuse of any kind thanks for doing that callum that will be on youtube i'll also read the numbers at the end of this episode for people who are listening the hotlines are completely anonymous and i think we'll be covering uh yeah us and uk which is the majority of the listenership and um i'm sure google will if you're in a different country will provide thankfully our attitudes and safeguards have evolved a bit since 1968. so a little bit of whistleblowing can go a long way and might even save a life or two that's baby a bit of a heavy note to end on but you are listening to a show about a child who killed children did you expect to finish with a spring in your step no it did not dismember dependencies number one maribel's account of a horrific history of sexual abuse arose in a 1998 book by biographer gita cereni titled cries unheard the story of mary bell the book caused a bit of a stir to say the least it was revealed that mary had received payment for the interviews within which drew the ire of the papers and the government of tony blair who tried to ban it before he went to press number two a quick word on that jailbreaker glossed over earlier in 1977 mary was imprisoned at moore court open prison at stoke on trent which she just decided to leave yeah open prisons uh like for super low risk offenders or like people at the end of their sentences stuff like that where you can't just wander off they trust you to stay there because you know you probably don't have long on your sentence anyway and you don't want to go back to real big prison uh it was an open prison after all sumerians another inmate just decided to take a little hitchhiking and boozing trip police caught up with them after a couple of days and slapped their unlucky new boyfriends with charges for harboring fugitives that's unfortunate uh so this has been an episode of the casual criminalist just let me quickly mention those numbers just in case you know social responsibility etc the nspcc is the one in the uk and that's 0808 800 5000 and then in the us it is the uh national child abuse hotline [phone] and on that note um well thank you very much for watching or listening to the casual christmas depending on how you get this show if you are watching on youtube please do give us a like subscribe to this show uh wherever you're listening to this podcast if you want to leave us a review that is most welcome thank you for doing that it helps get this show in front of more people which is uh well much appreciated and thank you for [Music] listening [Music] you

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 769,266

Keywords: true crime

Id: bn8N_8blfMg

Length: 34min 40sec (2080 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021