No matter how glamorous the guest-list, or how luxurious the food photographed sliding down the hostess’s gullet, there is an occasion which, deep down in his thoracic cavity, the average tabloid editor knows he would rather snoop on than the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It is the 19th birthday party next month of the daughter of Mary Bell, who as an 11-year-old killed two children in Newcastle upon Tyne, and became for a while the nation’s favourite figure of hate.
Since her release from custody on licence in 1980, the reformed and renamed Ms Bell has led a life of anonymity. This week she went to the High Court to ask for that privilege to be extended for life. She has already had a taste of the future she faces should she fail. In 1998 she co-operated with Gitta Sereny in a book, Cries Unheard, which revealed the depravity of her upbringing: repeated sexual abuse and no fewer than four attempts by her mother to murder her.
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