The bad seed

"Cries Unheard" is ostensibly about the consequence of not paying attention -- about what happens when too many people look the other way, or do not look at all, at a precarious family structure; about what happens when a child repeatedly sends up unheeded flags that she is not just in danger but a horrific danger herself. Mary Bell was the product of a most heinously abusive mother -- a young (16 when Mary was born), volatile prostitute who not only "tried repeatedly to rid herself of this unwanted child" but forced her young daughter to service her clientele in the most despicable, unimaginable, horrific fashion. While Mary's physical life was saved by a concerned posse of nearby relatives, the sexual abuse went undetected, sending her emotional life into a tailspin. No one heard Mary cry out.

Moreover, in the weeks surrounding the two murders, Mary, often in Norma Bell's company, "either behaved conspicuously or actually offended the law" 13 separate times. She threw her 3-year-old cousin John over an embankment. She was accused of attacking -- indeed, trying to strangle -- three girls at play in a sandpit. She was heard screaming, after Martin's death, the bone-chilling words "I am a murderer." But again and again, her trips to the police amounted to little more than knuckle rapping, with John's precipitous fall decreed an accident and the sandpit incident going unsubstantiated and the self-declaration of murder chalked up to the stuff of childhood games. "Children are always squabbling around here," a social worker explains the laissez-faire stance to Sereny. "We have to be very careful not to intrude too much on families. It is easily resented and then we can do nothing with them. We need their trust."

Finally, Mary Bell, once arrested, tried and convicted, was not given a safe, therapeutic environment in which she might venture to tell the truth, either about the crimes visited upon her by her mother or about the crimes she herself had committed. Mary made a career out of denying that she had killed Martin Brown and insisting that her role in Brian's death was secondary. She never, for fear of maternal repercussions, admitted her own history of abuse. The "who" of Mary Bell was left unexplored by a system solely intent upon the "how" of the crime and the housing of the criminal. Nothing, Sereny contends, was ever done to give the child her voice, to enable her to grow into an accountable, self-knowing adult. "To leave children who have gone through the trauma of committing serious and often horrific crimes without the opportunity to confront what they have done seems to me synonymous with 'cruel and unusual' punishment," Sereny, who is decidedly pro-psychotherapy, declares.

Children, Sereny says, are brought to a breaking point, and it is not their fault but ours. "The uncertainties of our moral and -- yes -- spiritual values have caused a fracture in the bulwark of security with which earlier generations protected children from growing up prematurely," she says. "Far too few parents now accept the necessity for children to grow up slowly, nor do they realize their own pivotal importance to the development, which only they can nurture, of the child's self-image. It is, I think ... the interference with the creation or, worse still, the corruption or destruction of this self-image in the early years of childhood that plants the seeds of serious troubles."

Self-image is one thing. Understanding the eternal consequence of death is another. Sereny believes that before punishment can be attached to child murderers, their ability to comprehend death's abiding finality should be scrutinized and assessed. Sereny "helps" Mary recall her own confusion on this point. "I didn't understand the concept of death [being] forever," Mary sobs. "It was unreal, incomprehensible. I had nothing against Martin or him against me. I didn't mean to kill him forever ... I think to me it was: You'll come around in time for tea." All of this sounds plausible, of course, until one remembers Brian Howe, killed nine weeks later, when Martin clearly had not come around for tea. It is Mary - intelligent, guilt-stricken Mary - who consistently leads the conversation toward the thicket of its true complexities. What made her so buoyantly enamored with the idea of finding, with her best friend Norma Bell, the "most dangerously naughty things" that could be done? What made Mary take Martin, a child she just simply happened upon, and "press ... press ... press" her hands against his throat? What made her show up at Martin's door four days later and, with a giggle, ask to see the boy in his coffin? What made her not only strangle her neighbor Brian Howe to death, but return to his body and, with deliberate care, razor-blade a letter "M" across the skin of his stomach, clip his hair, cover his body with grasses and little flowers? What made me who I am, Mary wants to know. What made me capable of evil?

It's the mother, Sereny insists. The mother, Betty Bell, who -- with her misfitting blond wig covering her pitch-black hair, her tall heels clicking against the courtroom floor, her histrionics exploding throughout the proceedings -- was the most conspicuous member of the trial audience. Betty Bell, who left her daughter a documented emotional mess following sporadic visits through the detention years. Betty Bell, who kept the tabloids fed with stories about her daughter long after the case had been closed. Betty Bell, says Sereny, is the "why?" of this story. Betty Bell triggered the murder of innocents.