Read Online Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny - Free Book Online Page B

consideration of young viewers, prohibited any mention of it during the six o’clock news, and, more surprisingly still, the Sunday tabloids, all of which, a quarter of a century later, would dwell for weeks on the Bulger case and pay large sums to members of the Bulger family for their stories, rejected it altogether. The Sun at one point during the trial specifically refused the story of Mary Bell’s life as offered for sale by her parents Major trials were usually assigned to Court One, the largest in the
    * Sidney Foxcroft was Newcastle reporter for the People and the Sun.
    “A man phoned me one day,” he told me.
    “He said he was a friend of the Bells and they wanted to come and talk to me about something. I got a friend of mine to sit in on this meeting. You know, I could hardly believe it myself. They came along, Betty and Billy Bell and their pal, and they said they wanted to sell us the story of Mary’s life.
    Their kid was on trial for murder over there in Moot Hall and they sat here and said, “We tried to teach her right but we couldn’t do a thing with her…” Well, it was my job to listen to them, but I’ve never been so sickened in my life. I rang through to the office in London afterwards and told them. They said they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. “
    Moot Hall, but in this case the trial had been transferred to Court Two, a comparatively small room panelled in dark oak. It was considered less forbidding and had an adjacent waiting-room and lavatory which would make it easier to take care of the two children.
    It had no dock and thus allowed them to be seated in a row between their legal advisers in front and with their families behind them, which made them feel and seem less isolated, and it had excellent acoustics, which would permit them to be heard even when as frequently happened they whispered. (This was in sharp contrast to Preston Crown Court in 1993, where the dock was raised on a specially constructed platform, without which the two accused boys would have been invisible to judge and jury. The result was that the height of their seats, in line with the judge but above everyone else, totally isolated them from the only people who mattered to them, their families, who were seated in the body of the court underneath and behind them and whom they could not see. ) Despite the careful provisions made for the two girls, neither of them had been prepared for the solemnity of the court proceedings. For nine days two mutually incomprehensible languages would be spoken in that ancient chamber. One was the language of adults, and formal language at that; the other was the language of two highly disturbed children the working of whose minds was a mystery to virtually everybody present. (“Nobody told us anything,” Mary would tell me later.
    “Not about people coming in to watch, either.” ) Nor had they expected the crowds who attended the opening day of the trial, and both girls Norma reacting just an instant after Mary laughed with excitement when three knocks preceded the usher’s “Be upstanding in court!” (“We didn’t talk … hardly at all during the trial even when we could have,” Mary said.
    “But, yes, I remember: we laughed. I can’t think why and what about, but whenever we looked at each other, we laughed.” And twenty-five years later, in Preston, I noticed the two boys doing exactly the same almost every time their eyes met. ) I was sitting in the gallery above but just across from the two girls and noted how the difference between them Norma’s terror against
    Mary’s irreality -showed up almost immediately. As the judge in his red coat entered in slow and measured steps, the bewigged barristers and court officials bowed deeply, and the many police officers spread throughout the court stood stiffly to attention, Mary could hardly contain her pleasure at the spectacle. Norma, however, her whole body expressing bewilderment, turned round to her parents, her