Author Gitta Sereny sparked a national outcry in 1998 after she paid a North-East child killer for a book in which she chronicled her crimes. Nigel Burton explains how the journalist dedicated her life to explaining why murderers committed the most monstrous acts

WHEN she was a child everyone loved Mary Bell. But when she was revealed as the murderer of two young boys, Mary Bell became a figure of hate. Only Gitta Sereny loved her.

Sereny, who has died aged 91, built a career writing books about monsters.

From Hitler’s best friend, Albert Speer, to the commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps, Sereny never shied away from confronting uncomfortable truths.

The Austrian-born author was famous for her in-depth research. She spent more than 60 hours interviewing Franz Strangl, who ran the Treblinka death camp. When she was finished, Strangl – who took pride in this “work” at Treblinka and had the blood of 900,000 prisoners on his hands – finally admitted his culpability.

“My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here.”

It was a crushing final interview and Strangl died of a heart attack 18 hours later.

Sereny, who wrote her first book about Mary Bell in 1972, was fascinated by the notorious Tyneside child killer.

Bell grew up on the close-knit working-class Scotswood estate in Newcastle.

She started by bullying other kids in the playground.

Sometimes she would set her pet Alsatian on a particularly unfortunate victim. Other times, she would grab a pigeon and throttle it.

Despite her predilection for violence, Mary was popular with other children and they all knocked around together. The kids sometimes got into trouble, but they always came home for tea.

But one summer’s day in July 1968, four-yearold Martin Brown didn’t come home.

Martin’s body was found in a block of condemned properties that had become a playground- of-sorts for the local children. Two men from the gas board were alerted to his body by a couple of girls – Mary Bell and her friend Norma.

Initially, Martin’s death was put down as a tragic accident – even after the two girls broke into the local nursery and left behind two signed “confessions”. The authorities put it down to the actions of a couple of attention-seeking children.

Three months later, another child – Brian Howe – was discovered on a railway line near the estate. He had been strangled, beaten and cut with a razor. A post-mortem examination revealed that the fingerprints on his neck were too small to be from an adult, and police realised they were dealing with a child killer.

FOR her first book, The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered, Sereny interviewed Mary’s friends, family and the professionals who cared for her during the trial. When it was reprinted, shortly after the murder of Jamie Bulger in 1994, Sereny penned a new preface explaining her reasons for writing it: “Due process in British High Courts allows only the facts of the case to be presented: and according to these facts... there was no reason, and so these chuldren, who had most certainly committed evil deeds, were stamped ‘evil’ and tried, convicted and sentenced as adults.

“So... I decided to ask the questions a British Court is not in a position to ask, and to protest against a judicial system which is totally outdated.

How... can it be right to subject young children to the awesome formality of a jury trial? How can a jury be expected to understand the thought processes, the emotions or language of children?

“It is possible for children to be sufficiently hurt to be damaged for life. But an enlightened society cannot presuppose this. An enlightened society, it seems to me, has to believe in the essential guiltlessness of children.”

Maybe that is why Sereny grew to love Mary Bell. Perhaps that’s why she paid Bell £50,000 to help her write a second book – Cries Unheard – in 1998.

“Mary is part of my life and will remain so if she wants to,” Sereny said at the time. “She loves my family very much and we have grown to love her.”

In the book, Bell tries to put her actions into context. She grew up in a broken home, beaten by a prostitute mother and used to please male clients when she was older. Her father was a criminal and she was taught to hate authority.

Of the murders, Bell said she wasn’t old enough to understand what she had done. “I hadn’t intended for them to be dead for ever,” she explained. “My dog had died two or three times... but I can’t really remember because each time my dad brought me the same – well, to me the same – dog the next day.”

Sereny was convinced that Bell, who was married with a daughter of her own by 1998, deserved a chance to put her murderous past behind her. The British judicial system agreed.

In 2003, it granted Bell and her daughter lifelong anonymity.

June Richardson, the mother of Martin Brown, didn’t agree. She felt Sereny’s book allowed Bell to profit from her crimes and never gave up campaigning for a law to prevent killers making money from memoirs. She got her wish in 2009.

Rachel Calder, Sereny’s literary agent, told The Independent: “The aim of her writing was always the quest for the deepest understanding of the motivations of people who carried out horrific acts of violence.

Her books will be remembered as some of the most important and significant writings... on violence towards children.”

• Gitta Sereny died peacefully in hospital on June 14. She is survived by a son, a daughter, two grandchildren and one great-grandchild.