Diagnosis – symptoms of psychopathy
Age – 11 years
Where – England
1. Daughter of prostitute Betty Bell, Mary was born in Newcastle, England, in 1957, when her mother was just 17 years old. The girl is the most famous case in the world of a child with possible antisocial personality disorder. As a child, she suffered from abuse: her mother forced the 5-year-old girl to perform oral sex with strangers in exchange for money and rubbed her face in her own urine when she wet the bed.
two. Betty even left her daughter for adoption, but Mary’s aunt took the girl back home. In other attempts to get rid of her daughter, Betty tried to drug her with different types of pills, from amphetamines to iron supplements. In these episodes, the girl (and sometimes her brother) was helped by her grandmother or uncles, who lived close to her. The family, however, turned a blind eye when Betty pleaded not guilty.
3. The girl already showed signs of cruelty by mistreating animals and “beating up” dolls. However, it was after witnessing a boy get hit by a bus that she really changed. Close people reported that, after the episode, she became uncontrollable. With a toy, Mary Bell broke her uncle’s nose and, at school, she started strangling other children.
4. It’s possible that Betty had «Munchausen syndrome by proxy» (MPS), a psychological disorder in which people put other people’s lives at risk to make their own more exciting. The typical mother with SMP feels forced to give up the child just because the two need to be drastically reunited – the episodes have a traumatic effect on the child’s development.
5. Late in childhood, Mary and a friend, Norma Bell (they were not related), became involved in thefts and acts of vandalism, always managing to get away with it. In 1968, almost 11 years old, Mary was suspected of pushing her 3-year-old cousin, who was left with serious head injuries. A few weeks later, the body of 4-year-old Martin Brown was found in an abandoned house. Witnesses saw Mary and Norma at the scene
6. A few days later, on her 11th birthday, Mary and Norma broke into a day care center, where they left four anonymous manuscripts with scribbles confessing to Martin’s murder. The police dismissed the evidence as a bad joke. And he only considered the girls as suspects two months later, after another strangulation. This time the victim was 3-year-old Brian Howe.
7. Found in an abandoned area, Brian’s body had skin on his genitals and the letter M carved on his stomach. As the types of injuries led to suspect a child, the local detective questioned more than a thousand of them until he reached the two friends. Norma ended up handing over Mary, who impressed the police due to her coldness and inability to understand the seriousness of her actions.
8. The two girls went to a popular jury in 1968. Norma ended up acquitted, while Mary Bell, accused of the murders, was sent to the Red Bank Special Unit, a maximum security psychiatric institution, and then taken to prison in 1973. After treatments and assessments, Mary Bell was considered recovered and released on May 14, 1980, aged 23
9. The woman’s new identity and address are kept confidential by the «Mary Bell Order», an English law created in May 2003 that protects the identity of any child involved in legal proceedings. It is known that Mary married and became a mother in 1984. In 2007, after her mother’s death, she collaborated with journalist Gitta Sereny for the book Gritos no Vazio, her biography. The British government tried unsuccessfully to ban the work.