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Britian's Youngest Female Killer: Mary Bell · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:08
  Distress. Nineteen sixties, Newcastle upon Tyne, the withering, dying neighborhood of
• 0:42
  Scottswood, became the scene of extremes. A new age of renovation and industry
• 0:48
  had the council knocking down and rebuilding streets of old Victorian terrace houses, leaving
• 0:54
  rows of derelict empty buildings as the home for some of Britain's poorest family With
• 1:00
  nowhere to go, some of those families moved into the houses marked for demolition.
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  Others became the playground for neighborhood children left unattended for hours at a time
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  as their parents struggled to make ends meet. One of those children was Mary
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  Bell or May As she went by in the neighborhood. A dark haired,
• 1:22
  blue eyed ten year old girl was pretty and seemed sweet. She had a
• 1:26
  spark in her eye that spoke of her intelligence, but the warm and unassuming
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  mask she wore hid a myriad of suffering. Elizabeth Bell was only seventeen years
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  old when she had her second child, Mary Bell, and by then Elizabeth
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  was already living life on the edge. She was a sex worker who sometimes
• 1:47
  would leave her children for days on end to travel up to Glasgow and work,
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  but that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to what
• 1:55
  was really going on inside the Bell household. Relatives noticed that May May would
• 2:00
  often end up injured after she'd spent time alone with her mother, a mother
• 2:05
  who, by some accounts, was rumored to suffer from Munchausen's by proxy.
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  But maybe this case would have turned out differently if May had only suffered from
• 2:14
  a few bumps and bruises. But unfortunately, Elizabeth had made her feelings about
• 2:20
  May clear from the very start, and it only headed downhill from there.
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  Accounts from the hospital staff say that when May was born, Elizabeth began shouting
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  and screaming, refusing to hold her child and instead ordering staff to get that
• 2:35
  thing away from her. From then on, May was constantly in harm's way.
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  Her mother reportedly once tried to kill her by making her overdose on sleep
• 2:45
  medication. Another time, relatives watched as Elizabeth air Quotes accidentally dropped the infant
• 2:53
  May out of a first story window. May was left permanently injured after that,
• 3:00
  with brain damage to her frontal lobe that may have affected her ability to
• 3:04
  make decisions and control her emotions. There is one more account of Elizabeth's attempts
• 3:09
  to get rid of May, and that was when she sold her child to
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  a mentally ill woman on the other side of Newcastle. The woman had been
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  unable to have children of her own and took up Elizabeth on her offer to
• 3:23
  buy may Bell. May was only reunited with her family because her older sister
• 3:28
  made the journey across Newcastle to go and get her back herself. When May
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  was only four years old, Elizabeth found a new way of exploiting her youngest
• 3:38
  daughter. With her family constantly asking for Elizabeth to hand over care of May
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  to them, Elizabeth chose to go in a different direction entirely, and that
• 3:49
  only involved more and more abuse. Elizabeth often brought clients home with her,
• 3:54
  and she began actively encouraging them to live out their sick fantasies with her four
• 4:00
  year old daughter. May was tied up, blindfolded, and often forced to
• 4:04
  perform acts on her mother's clients, abuse that would continue well throughout the nineteen
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  sixties. When May was around eight years old, classmates and teachers noted that
• 4:16
  her behavior became more aggressive and more violent. She'd switch from being a seemingly
• 4:23
  perfect and happy child one moment to attacking her classmates the next The other children
• 4:29
  knew to be afraid whenever May went quiet and got what they later described as
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  a cold, steely look in her eyes. May would then stare intently at
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  one of the other children around her and eventually end up violently attacking them.
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  May often went for the throat. She was caught numerous times trying to strangle
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  the other children, and reportedly one time held down another girl and stuffed sand
• 4:53
  into her mouth. The only one who seemed exempt from May's attacks was an
• 4:58
  older girl in neighbor Norma Joyce Bell. These girls were not related, but
• 5:02
  had the same last name and a good few other things in common too.
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  Norma was twelve but developmentally challenged, and she had a mental age of around
• 5:12
  eight years old, making her a good friend for another girl who had a
• 5:16
  hard time fitting in at school. In May nineteen sixty eight, when May
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  was ten years old, a three year old boy turned up in the neighborhood,
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  dazed and confused and bleeding from a wound in his head. He claimed
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  that he'd been out with May and Norma and had been playing on top of
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  an old air raid shelter when one of the girls had pushed him. He'd
• 5:38
  followed about two meters and split his head, and though they couldn't say exactly
• 5:42
  which one of the girls had pushed him, he wasn't the only child to
• 5:46
  make a complaint about them that day. Later that evening, three other families
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  contacted the police to say that their children had been attacked by May and Norma.
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  According to testimonies, including from May and Norma themselves, the children had
• 6:00
  all been playing in the sand pit when May decided she wanted to find out
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  if someone could die from strangulation. She then began strangling one of the other
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  girls until her face turned purple. Then she moved on to the second girl
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  and did the same, and she did the same again when a third girl
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  approached the sand pit to see what was going on. May denied everything,
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  but Norma openly admitted what had happened. The police, not quite sure what
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  to do when everyone involved in the attack was so young, gave both May
• 6:33
  and Norma a warning and moved on. A week later, and a day
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  before May's eleventh birthday, the authorities were called yet again when the body of
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  a four year old boy was discovered in one of the abandoned houses in Scottswood.
• 6:49
  Three other local children had found his body while playing, and after hearing
• 6:54
  the news, a local workman rushed to the scene and attempted to resuscitate the
• 6:58
  boy. He was still performing CPR when first responders came, and someone else
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  arrived shortly behind him. May and Norma appeared at the door to the bedroom
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  where the four year old boy was lying flat on his back, his arms
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  stretched out above his head, foam and blood speckles around his mouth. The
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  girls were quickly ushered from the room, only to run across to the neighbor's
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  house and knock on the door. One of your sister's bairns has just had
• 7:26
  an accident, they told Rita Finley. We think it's Martin, but we
• 7:30
  can't tell because there's blood all over him. The boy was Martin Brown,
• 7:34
  and his autopsy revealed no certain cause of death. A day later, a
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  local nursery was broken into and vandalized. The perpetrators left notes that read,
• 7:45
  quote, I murder so that I may come back, and we did murder
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  Martin Brown. Investigators chalked it up to a childish but cruel prank. Two
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  days later, May and Norma showed up at the brown household asking to see
• 8:01
  him. May specifically said that she wanted to see him in his Coffin the
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  same summer, in nineteen sixty eight, the police were called out yet again
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  to another horrific scene. The body of three year old Brian Howe was discovered
• 8:15
  crudely hidden behind two cement blocks out in the slums. The last people to
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  be seen with him alive were none other than May and Norma. He'd been
• 8:24
  strangled, his genitals partially mutilated, there were puncture marks on his legs,
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  his hair had been cut in places, and a crude m had been carved
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  into his stomach. During interviews, Norma seemed agitated and on edge. May
• 8:41
  was calm and collected. They told investigators that they'd been out playing with Brian
• 8:46
  that morning but hadn't seen him since lunch time. In a following interview,
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  May claim to have later seen Brian with another eight year old boy who had
• 8:54
  a pair of scissors with him, and she sealed her fate. The police
• 9:00
  had determined that the numerous puncture wounds on the boy's legs had come from a
• 9:03
  pair of scissors that had also been found at the scene, but they had
• 9:07
  not released that information. Just yet to the public. If May felt the
• 9:11
  need to include information about a pair of scissors to the police, they figured
• 9:16
  it was because she knew that scissors had been involved in the murder. A
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  few days later, investigators received a call from Norma's family claiming that she was
• 9:26
  ready to confess. Norma then said that May had taken her out to Brian's
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  body after May had already strangled him. Then showed Norma how she'd killed the
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  boy and where she'd hidden the pair of scissors and a razor blade that the
• 9:39
  investigators had previously missed. Both girls were then arrested. At the trial,
• 9:46
  the girls turned on each other, both claiming that the other one had actually
• 9:50
  been the one to kill both victims. Before the defense teams changed tracks and
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  went into damage control. Norma's developmental issues and mental age became came a huge
• 10:00
  factor. Her lawyers claimed that she was afraid of her violent friend and was
• 10:05
  easily led astray, even though she was the older of the two girls.
• 10:09
  May's team said that May had tried to stop the attacks, but because Norma
• 10:13
  had been an older and bigger girl, there was nothing that she could do.
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  May was also psychologically examined and was found to have a psychotic personality disorder.
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  Her history of documented physical, psychological, and sexual abuse painted the picture
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  of the troubled and disturbed life May had been living up until then, and
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  it influenced her sentencing. May was imprisoned indefinitely for manslaughter charges and Norma was
• 10:41
  released. May went from institution to institution until she was twenty three years old,
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  when she was released after spending over eleven years behind bars. That's ten
• 10:58
  mins Murder for today, brief and binge abul true crime. I'm Joe the
• 11:03
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• 11:07
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• 11:22
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• 11:30
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• 11:33
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• 11:35
  neurodivergent person. The corny jokes and quips at the end also help, and
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• 11:45
  to cover. It looks very interesting anyway, Thanks for the great podcast.
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  everyday thoughts separate? If I binge too many true crime podcasts, which is
• 12:01
  another reason I like this one, only ten minutes of suspense, I worry
• 12:03
  that someone is in the house ready to bludgeon me to death at any time.
• 12:07
  The dog lifts her head off the bed in the middle of the night.
• 12:11
  Really, how do you do it? That's Jen f in Shimokin,
• 12:15
  Pennsylvania. Gen First of all, thank you so much for taking the time
• 12:18
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• 12:24
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• 12:28
  answer is I don't. I try. I definitely try. I've documented on
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  this podcast before that I get nightmares, and the only way that I can
• 12:37
  really almost guarantee that that doesn't happen when I've spent a lot of time either
• 12:43
  doing the podcast or research for the podcast is stand up comedy. I listen
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  to a lot of stand up comedy on Spotify or on SiriusXM, or I'll
• 12:54
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• 12:56
  bed, and that usually will keep me out of that mental space as I'm
• 13:01
  falling asleep, where I won't have a nightmare. And then aside from that,
• 13:05
  not outside of the nightmares, I'll just take breaks from researching true crime
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  cases. I have to take breaks every now and then because I can't do
• 13:13
  it every single day, because I mean, that would put me in a
• 13:18
  really dark place if I even attempt to do that, So I don't attempt
• 13:20
  to do that. So I take breaks and I listen to stand up comedy.
• 13:24
  That's the TLDR of that. Thanks again, Jen for your email.
• 13:26
  If you've got an email that you want to send me, Joe at ten
• 13:30
  Minute Murder dot com and that's going to do. It's another ten Minute Murder
• 13:33
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