A "penniless" thief has been found guilty of murdering a foster mother and setting fire to her house to destroy the evidence. Norma Bell, 79, who had fostered more than 50 youngsters, was found strangled in her burning home in Westbourne Road, Hartlepool, in April. He had denied murder and arson during his trial at Teesside Crown Court. The father-of-four started fires in Mrs Bell's terraced home and turned on the gas in a bid to cause an explosion.
DNA matches were found inside the property, which Dack claimed were a result of him carrying out odd jobs for the pensioner. When he was asked why he did not answer detectives' questions after he was arrested, he could only say he thought the police were corrupt and had not wanted to help. He added there was no evidence that he had sexually assaulted her, but said police had not ruled out the possibility. In addition to being strangled, Mrs Bell had injuries to her ribs and shoulders consistent with someone kneeling on her.
Her escorts hugged and comforted her. She was just a little girl. Mary Bell , on the other hand, stood terribly alone during the trial: tearless, defiant, bandying words with the prosecution, apparently untouched by remorse, certainly not touched by those around her, never hugged and held.
With a kind of relief, the public could name Mary Bell as a freak of nature, a sweet-faced chilling monster. Her extraordinarily pretty, heart-shaped face looked out beneath headlines, as it looks out again now: a beautiful icon of evil. Mary Bell was not found guilty of murder, but of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.
The public reaction was appalled yet also fairly restrained: there was a sense of social responsibility and acknowledgement of social failure. She had had an devastating childhood herself: her increasingly despairing cries for help had gone unheard. After the trial, she was named both monster and victim. She served 12 years for her crime, in secure units and in prison.
The only girl among 20 or so boys at an approved school in Merseyside, she was allegedly subject to sexual abuse by a member of staff and also by fellow inmates, to which the rest of the staff turned a blind eye. Unsurprisingly, she was often a mutinous prisoner, once escaping to a renewed flurry of press attention.
For 18 years she has been free, deemed by law to have paid her debt to society. She was given a new name and the possibility of a new life. Her disappearance into unknown freedom and silence allowed the families of the two murdered boys also to have the possibility of a partial freedom from their past hell. I thought of her as dead I tried to have a decent life. I started to learn not to hate her, because she had died and become someone else.
Now Gitta Sereny has resurrected her. 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. Reaction was at first predictable. Newspapers questioned whether the murderer should profit from her crimes leading articles covered the ethical dilemmas raised by Bell's case. One paper put the figure paid to Mary Bell at pounds 50, - about three times the actual amount, as we reveal on our front page today - but only one fifth of the pounds , that the German magazine Stern is offering.
The mothers of the victims, who had only discovered about the book through The Observer's original article, entered the fray, demanding that the money be given to charity. The victim has great power in our society we tend to think suffering confers moral authority, and that because the two bereaved mothers continued to grieve, Mary Bell should continue to be punished.
This voice of acute personal sorrow threw petrol on the flames. The story became venomous and hysterical. Arrogance and greed masqueraded as morality under banner headlines.
Journalists fastened on to the mothers' grief. Ethical shades of grey were blotted out by black and white. Bell was released from the Risley remand centre 18 years ago and, ever since, has been hunted by the tabloids. The ' Mary Bell Order' - a court ruling that protects her identity for the sake of her daughter - has not stopped journalists from stalking her as she moved from town to town, nor from offering her large sums of money to tell her story.
Four years ago, amid the furore over the Bulger case, she was traced by reporters and forced once more to change her name. Two weeks ago, editors could not justify such stories in the public interest.
But with the row over payment for her collaboration with Sereny, the witch-hunt began anew. The two richest newspapers - the Sun and the Daily Mail - set off in pursuit of the year-old mother. Her new name, it appears, was provided by police sources. By last Tuesday they had tracked her down. The Mail pulled out of the chase at this point, leaving the Sun to claim the tabloid triumph.
Bell and her family had been living in a south coast resort for 18 months. Their home had been a small flat overlooking the sea but, using the proceeds from the book as a deposit, they had just moved into a Victorian terrace.
The house is perched on a hillside, on a road rumbles with passing lorries. It has been freshly painted, sparsely furnished, quickly abandoned. Her partner mistook him for a man from the Inland Revenue. He and Bell refused to talk to him. More reporters gathered as Bell and partner hid. By midnight, the police were called. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Bell and her teenage daughter were taken to a safe house by undercover officers. By the next morning, there was a media siege outside the house.
A year-old neighbour says: 'The first thing we noticed were men in suits wondering up and down the road. We initially thought it was to do with the local elections. We realised they were reporters when they asked me if I knew who lived opposite.
There were about six cars with reporters moving up and down and a white surveillance van. But then you realise it's all about the murder of children, and you feel disgusted. He walked to the beach, followed by a posse of cameramen, took off his shoes, paddled and cried.
Later, in a dingy bar, he drank whisky and beer and poured his heart out, into a series of headlines: Mary was the most gentle person he had ever met he loved her so much it hurt to be parted she had always wanted to work with children. The Government has been quick to join the chorus of condemnation, although by the end of the week there were signs that it was starting to wonder if it had become too closely identified with one side.
The tone was set when, one week ago, Downing Steet chose to express Tony Blair's outrage through a tabloid newspaper, the Mail on Sunday. On Wednesday - the very day the Sun was trumpeting its success in tracking down Bell - Blair was twice asked about the case: once during an interview broadcast on the Internet, and once in the Commons, directly after an acrimonious exhange about trade unions with William Hague, in which both appeared to be vying for the support of Rupert Murdoch.
His line was that 'most people would find it repugnant that anyone should benefit from crimes as heinous and appalling as those'. There was not a word about the tabloid pack beating a path to Mary Bell 's door, but the Prime Ministers defenders argue that - unusually for a politician - he was simply answering the question he was asked. Norma Bell murder: Gareth Dack jailed for life. Image source, Cleveland Police. Gareth Dack declined to answer police questions.
But DNA matches were found inside the property. Dack set fire to Mrs Bell's home to destroy evidence of his crime. Related Topics. Published 26 January
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