Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (17 page)

Mary and Norma’s trial opened on the 5th December 1968 at the Assizes in Newcastle upon Tyne. Mary looked intelligent and alert whereas Norma appeared frightened and kept glancing at her parents for reassurance. It was to set the pattern for the entire nine day trial. As a result, the public – and doubtless the jury – quickly formed the opinion that Mary was the coldhearted ringleader who had led the educationally-challenged Norma astray. In truth, Mary was suffering from her usual insomnia and was having night terrors when she did get to sleep.

But no one was very interested in the background of either child, though Gitta Sereny – in her book
The
Case
Of
Mary
Bell
– became increasingly aware that ‘Mary’s mother was… the principle source of all her troubles.’ Betty Bell attended the trial with her own mother who sat between her and her estranged husband Billy. Billy looked distressed but remained silent whereas Betty frequently broke into histrionic sobs and seemed determined to have centre stage.

Norma said that she’d watched Mary squeeze Brian’s throat until he went purple. Then she,
Norma, had run away and made pom poms with other girls. Later the two girls returned to the corpse and Mary cut a little chunk off Brian’s hair. Mary disputed this, saying that Norma had done the hair cutting and had also cut Brian’s knee with the razor blade.

Most of the trial consisted of such childish testimony. There were also psychiatric statements in which Norma was described as ‘a simple backward girl of subnormal intelligence.’ She was kept in a hospital during the trial whereas Mary was put into a remand home, probably indicative of the way both children were already being pigeonholed by the system and by the press. One court-appointed doctor said that Mary had psychopathic tendencies and that such tendencies were usually partly environmental. Unfortunately the importance of Mary’s environment wasn’t even touched upon. Her relatives could have testified to the times that her mother had tried to kill her and others could have told the courts of how Betty had worked as a prostitute in the presence of Mary and her brother. By now, Betty was also beating Mary’s younger half-brother with increasing severity so perhaps he could have told about the pain he and Mary had suffered at their mother’s hands.

Instead, the trial ended with the impression that Mary was simply a bad seed who had led a weaker girl astray. As such, the sentences weren’t a surprise for Norma was found not guilty and Mary found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished
responsibility. This applied to both the murders of Martin Brown and Brian Howe. In his summary the judge said that ‘quite young children can be wicked and sometimes even vicious.’ It was a view soon echoed by laypeople for this author can remember her own mother, a housewife who knew nothing about criminology, stating that ‘Mary Bell was a little bitch.’

During the trial, Betty and Billy Bell went to the tabloids and tried to sell the story of Mary’s life, but the newspapers refused.

Over the years various psychologists and group
therapists
tried to get Mary to talk about her childhood but she always answered ‘My mum said for me not to say anything to you.’ Betty had originally phoned Mary’s lawyer during the trial saying that Mary must never talk to a psychiatrist. After all, Betty knew that on some level Mary would remember being sexually abused from age four to eight whilst Betty held her down.

Now that Mary was in a reform school, Betty visited every few weeks to reinforce this warning and after her visits Mary was always unsettled. But visits from Billy always cheered her up.

Betty continued to have a strange attitude towards her oldest daughter. One day she got the young teenager to pose in her underwear for a series of photos, with
Betty’s mother watching. Betty then sold the photos to the press.

For the next twelve years Mary lived in various remand homes and adult prisons. At first she remained
disturbed
and allegedly strangled two hamsters in the first remand home she was sent to (She’d also tried to strangle a kitten one night during her trial). But as the staff of the remand home continued to love and care for her, her behaviour markedly improved. She was considered manipulative as a teenager – but, in
fairness
, she was still being manipulated by her
increasingly
alcohol-driven mum.

Becoming aware that the hatred Betty felt for her wasn’t normal, Mary asked her mother again who her natural father was. ‘Was it your dad?’ she asked as she’d found love poems that Betty had written to him and feared she was the result of an incestuous union. But (according to Mary’s biographer, the respected Gitta Sereny) Betty’s father had died when she was fourteen and she didn’t get pregnant until she was sixteen so the dates don’t add up. Mary also asked a friend of the family but he simply said ‘It’s best that you don’t know.’

Mary was released from prison in 1980 at the age of twenty-three. She soon found herself a husband and in 1984 she gave birth to a daughter. But after she became ill her spouse became violent and she left the marriage,
taking the child with her. For the first few years of her daughter’s life, the authorities watched very carefully, ready to intercede if Mary harmed the baby. But it became clear that she was a good and loving mother and that her daughter felt secure. And Mary herself soon formed another relationship, one which has lasted to the present day.

Unfortunately, Betty Bell did much to undermine Mary’s newfound security, continuing to sell stories to the tabloids. Betty remarried but eventually her second husband left her, saying that he’d suffered years of misery and couldn’t take any more. Mary asked him who her biological father was but he said it was best not to know. Betty still saw herself as a martyr, saying ‘Jesus was just nailed to the cross but I’m being hammered.’ She continued to emotionally hammer Mary on the few occasions that they spent time together and these emotional cruelties only ceased with Betty’s death in early January 1995.

Though Mary has never harmed anyone as an adult, she carries a deep sadness within her, a sadness that was apparent to psychologist Gitta Sereny. She suffers from frequent migraines and finds it difficult to concentrate on work or on any kind of project or
educational
course. And the love she feels for her own daughter has made her fully aware of the pain she caused to the families of her little victims, Martin Brown and Brian Howe.

She is continually hounded by the tabloids who refuse to believe that a battered child who killed can become a caring adult. As a result she has had to move
house several times to protect her family. Yet, as crime writer Brian Masters has stated, her voice is ‘one of maturity and remorse.’

Kip was born on 30th August 1982 to Bill and Faith Kinkel, both successful schoolteachers. The couple already had a daughter, Kristin, who was almost six, a high achiever like themselves. Bill and Faith were in their early forties by the time they had Kip, but they were physically fit and sure that they could cope.

The family lived in Springfield, Oregon, in an expensive house at the foot of the Cascade Mountains. The couple taught Spanish and Faith also taught French. They encouraged the children to explore the outdoors on regular camping trips and to participate in various sports.

In what should have been Kip’s first year at a local school, the family went to Spain. Kip was put into a class of Spanish children with a teacher who only spoke Spanish. He’d just mastered English and now everyone was speaking in a foreign tongue so he felt understandably frustrated and out of his depth. At the school he was also bullied by a bigger boy and generally had a difficult time.

At the end of the school year, the Kinkels returned to Oregon. By now Kristin was proving herself a natural gymnast who repeatedly earned her parent’s approval – but Kip was comparatively unco-
ordinat
ed
. Bill himself was a tennis ace with a highly competitive nature who forced his little son to keep playing the game. Kip was small and light, and much preferred
picking wild berries or swimming to batting a ball about for hours on the court.

But Bill continued to coerce his son to play competitive games, determined that the boy would become a sporting hero. As a family friend would later say ‘Bill had his son’s future mapped out.’ Photos taken during this time show the other family members smiling widely during football games whilst Kip stares at the camera looking lost and sad.

There were similar problems at school. Kip struggled to keep up with the curriculum. He’d work hard in class all day – then come home and be tutored by his parents for hours every night. As the family home was somewhat isolated, he didn’t have schoolfriends over with whom to have fun. (Though he did have a
neighbourhood
friend called Kasey who noticed that he was very young for his age.) For recreation he cycled through the surrounding woods and did chores for the neighbours, playing with their grandchildren and mowing their lawns.

Kip tried and tried but he was never going to be a sporting hero or an A-grade student. Thinking that he might be able to compete better with younger students, the Kinkels asked Kip’s school to let him repeat a year. As a result, he lost his few friends and had to make new ones, a momentous task for such an awkward boy.

Kip continued to have problems in second grade, remaining unco-ordinated and having exceptional difficulty with spelling. His teacher noted that he was a hard worker but an extremely anxious child.

Unable to understand what his parents were trying to teach him, Kip’s ability to concentrate on the nightly tutoring sessions decreased. Dog trainers can see the same behaviour in a young dog – if you ask it to do something it doesn’t understand, the dog will ‘go silly’ on you. So Kip started to act out, for example sliding down the laundry chute. Faith and Bill then decided he must be hyperactive and took him to a doctor who duly prescribed the powerful anti-hyperactive drug Ritalin.

Bill’s father had been a minister and Bill had a strong moral code that he expected his children to live by. He frequently grounded Kip – or forbade him to watch his favourite television programmes – as a
punishment
for high spirited pranks. The cute little boy with the freckled face and neat haircut began to feel that he could do nothing right.

A family video taken during Kip’s junior school years shows his sister effortlessly performing
cartwheels
and handstands out of doors for recreation. Kip tries to emulate her and promptly falls over. Behind the camera, his father says ‘Kip needs more work’ and urges him to try again.

By the time he was in third grade, his school was giving him extra help with reading and trying to allay his frustration at not being able to master English. It was only with language and motor skills that he had a problem. He had a high IQ and showed promise in
science
and maths.

That same year, Bill retired from school-teaching so he now had little to do with other teenagers though he continued to teach Spanish to adults at night. He was an excellent tutor and his Spanish students liked him. But Kip still couldn’t understand what his parents were trying to teach him, something that was explained the following year when he was diagnosed as having a learning disability, a form of dyslexia.

Kip began to view himself as stupid so made friends with the less academically able boys on the school bus, boys who were disruptive and violent. He started acting like they did, karate kicking other pupils and calling the girls names.

Kristin now transferred from the local university to Hawaii Pacific on a cheerleading scholarship. She’d taken Kip’s side in the past, pointing out to her parents that he was high spirited rather than bad. She often had to remind her older parents that Kip was just doing the sort of things their own younger students had done. She’d later admit that ‘each little thing that he would do would be awful’ to them. They were
academically and sports-inclined adults in their fifties who didn’t understand their adolescent son at all.

Thirteen-year-old Kip really missed Kristin though they often spoke on the phone. Soon he and his friends were using the school computer to order books about making bombs but the books were intercepted as they were mistakenly sent to the bank on which the cheque was drawn.

Later Kip researched the subject on the internet and even gave an illustrated talk at school on how to assemble an explosive device. He took his homemade bombs into the woods and allegedly used them to kill cats and squirrels and birds. He also told friends that he’d blown up a cow.

He believed that his mother considered him a good kid who did some bad things but that this father saw him as a bad kid who did bad things. The father-son relationship was increasingly poor.

Kip was storing up all his anger, unable to articulate his feelings. He started to go to the local quarry to
detonate
explosives to get rid of his rage.

Kip had always been interested in guns, but the Kinkels understandably didn’t believe in violent toys
so he’d never even had a toy gun. But now he asked for a real gun as a Christmas or birthday gift. Bill Kinkel had inherited a rifle from his own father, and after much soul-searching he gave it to Kip.

The couple thought that guns had become exciting to the boy because they were forbidden fruit–and that maybe he’d get them out of his system now that he had his own rifle. Trying to find some common ground with the teenager, Bill showed Kip how to shoot cans off a wall. He had no idea that his son also sneaked the gun into the woods to kill wildlife.

Kip couldn’t create the clever essays and sporting wins that his father desired – but he could become an expert at destruction. He told friends that he was going to join the army when he grew up.