Mary Bell: Born Evil or Damaged Child? - The Abuse, Exploitation, And Silence That Created a Ten-Year-Old Killer #984742

"The Child of the Devil."
"The Bad Seed."
"Born Evil."

You may have seen these headlines in the case of Mary Bell. What you may not have seen is the dark, systemic failure that unfolded before those headlines were ever printed.

Mary Bell was accused of strangling two small toddlers to death in Newcastle in the summer of 1968. She was convicted at just eleven years old and sentenced to life. The public desperately wanted to believe she was a supernatural freak of nature - because if she was born a monster, society didn't have to look at what it had allowed to happen to her.

The world wasn't privy to the knowledge that Mary was brutally rejected from infancy, repeatedly poisoned with barbiturates, and dropped from windows by her own mother. The world is unaware that she was systematically sold for sexual abuse, or that her schoolyard cries for help were dismissed by teachers as a mere "poor attitude."

Many people are also unaware that the British legal system put an eleven-year-old girl through an archaic adult trial, or that the warning signs of her violence were explicitly reported to the police weeks before the murders and entirely ignored.

Mary's story has been told countless times before. Let me offer it with more truth and less sensationalism. Was Mary Bell a monster? Many would scream "yes!" But let's look at how that monster was made.