Discretion is advice.

This is a nightmare.

This is the newcastle.

The Wethering, Dynastonne, the withering, dying neighborhood of Scottswood, became the scene of extremes.

A new age of renovation and industry had the council knocking down and rebuilding streets of old Victorian terrace houses,

leaving rows of derelict empty buildings

as the home for some of Britain's poorest families.

With nowhere to go, some of those families moved into the houses

marked for demolition.

Others became the playground for neighborhood children,

left unattended for hours at a time as their

parents struggled to make ends meet. One of those children was Mary Bell, or May, as she went

by in the neighborhood. A dark-haired, blue-eyed, 10-year-old girl was pretty and seemed sweet.

She had a spark in her eye that spoke of her intelligence,

but the warm and unassuming masks she wore hid a myriad of suffering. Elizabeth Bell was only

17 years old when she had her second child, Mary Bell, and by then Elizabeth was already living

life on the edge. She was a sex worker who sometimes would

leave her children for days on end to travel up to Glasgow and work. But that was just the tip of

the iceberg when it came to what was really going on inside the Bell household. Relatives noticed

that May would often end up injured after she'd spent

time alone with her mother, a mother who by some accounts was rumored to suffer from

Munchausen's by proxy. But maybe this case would have turned out differently if May had only

...