Martin Brown was strangled and dumped on waste ground near the Scotswood area of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on May 25th, 1968. He was four years old. Mary Bell, responsible for his death, was aged 11, no more than a child herself. Nine weeks later she strangled another little boy, Brian Howe, who was three.
At her trial, it must have been hard to believe that the thin little girl before the court, with her large dark eyes and mop of dark hair, could have been responsible for those terrible crimes. She was locked away from the world and moved from a secure home to an adult prison. In 1980 she was released and began a new life with a different name.
Just two years ago, the writer Gitta Sereny approached Mary Bell to ask if she would tell her story. She did not want to dwell on the minutiae of the murders, but to dig around in Mary's past to find out what had driven the little girl, abused by her mother and her "clients", to strangle two playmates.
As the two women sat and talked, sometimes for eight or 10 hours a day, the awful truth of what she had done and the sadness of Mary Bell's life came tumbling out.
Sereny's "Project X" was kept secret for two years, since she knew the Brown and Howe families would be deeply upset by the contents of the book and repulsed by the fact that Mary Bell would be paid for her story.
Sereny was well aware of the controversy her books had caused in the past. She had written about the Holocaust, published an in-depth investigation into the murder of Jamie Bulger in Liverpool and written numerous articles about neo-Nazism, all of which caused her to "battle with truth".
But the difference with the Mary Bell book, Cries Unheard, is that Sereny went right to the source of the murder. Not only that, but she paid Mary for her co-operation. Reports suggest as much as £50,000, although Sereny has denied them.
Sereny says she paid Mary Bell because she didn't want to "use" her and that the book is simply a chance to understand what made her kill the two boys. Her justification fell on deaf ears. In an open letter to the Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, Martin's and Brian's mothers wrote of their very ordinary desire for Mary Bell to remain in the shadows.
"Over the past 30 years our pain has never gone away, and our memories are as vivid and agonising as ever. But we have learned to live under the terrible burden of the past . . . but somebody dangled a carrot in front of Mary Bell's face and she just could not resist it. She accepted cash to speak about her traumatic childhood, her problems and explain what she did.
"We would have preferred if this book was never written. It has done nothing but reopen our wounds and rubbed salt into them. But it is going to be published, and nothing we can do or say can stop that."
The Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, acknowledged their understandable horror when this week he described the payment as "inherently repugnant".
The Attorney General's office is looking at the possibility of banning the book, and Mr Straw has assured the families he is considering a change in the law to prevent criminals profiting from their crimes. He has admitted it will be difficult to legislate in retrospect, and Mary Bell may get to keep her money after all.
Even the support of 14 MPs for a campaign calling for the book to be banned will not prevent the public reading about Mary Bell. The London Times began the serialisation of Cries Unheard yesterday, and its editor, Peter Stothard, argued that if Mary Bell had not been paid, the book would not have been written.
"It is a fundamental function of journalism to shed light in the dark corners of human life," he wrote. "Only by trying to understand what could conceivably have driven an 11-year-old girl to kill two small boys who trusted her can we come any closer to stopping these crimes that outrage any society the most."
In the midst of all the controversy, the group Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, has begun a campaign to urge bookshops not to sell Sereny's book.
The Times of London reported this morning that Mary Bell had been taken into protective custody after Journalists converged on her home on the Sussex coast, and that the Court Of Session in Edinburgh had been told that as a result her 14-year old daughter had discovered her mother's true identity.