A special Observer report: The mob will move on, the pain never can

• Published in: The Observer (London)
• Main Author: NICCI GERARD, RICHARD BROOKS, JONATHON CALVERT, LUCY JOHNSTON, ANDY MCSMITH
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 03.05.1998
• ISSN: 0029-7712

FIRES CAN be difficult to light, but once started, they are hard to control. Over the past week, a great fire has been burning, ignited when The Observer broke news that Gitta Sereny had collaborated on a book with Mary Bell. It has been fanned by the press, the Government, the families of Mary Bell's victims and the writer of Bell's life for their own particular gains. Thirty years ago, on 25 May 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown was strangled by 11-year-old Mary Bell. At the time, it was unclear how he died and an open verdict was returned. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave, where his mother still leaves flowers. Three months later, on 31 July, three-year-old Brian Howe was murdered by Mary Bell. His body was discovered in scrubland, concealed by flowering weeds. Sereny has resurrected her into a less forgiving society, it seems; one which behaves as if the passage of time and the process of law stand for nothing. As with the James Bulger trial, as with the furore over the released paedophiles, the lynch-mob mentality and tabloid-sensibility reveals a terror and irrationality that is reminiscent of the time of witches. Sereny's book, with its emphasis on Bell as victim of childhood abuse, demands our compassion not our fear and loathing. But she has reckoned without the press and New Labour's courtship of the tabloids and public opinion. Sereny has been, at the very least, nave in her payments to Mary Bell, and unconvincing in her claims to be uniquely above the moral ambiguities of the case. Sereny often presents herself as if she were a scientist, a psychoanalyst or an unimpeachable moral authority. She is not. She is a journalist, publishing her work to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of Martin Brown's murder, earning substantial money from it, defending her work as in the public interest yet refusing interviews with the press because of her commercial deal with the Times, which is serialising the book. In her letter to the victims' families she writes that she paid Mary Bell because she did not want to 'use' her - but of course she has: she is a writer with a scoop. And she has failed adequately to prepare herself and her subject for the storm that the book has unleashed.