Double child killer Mary Bell secured a job at a local children's nursery a month after leaving her North Yorkshire prison, it has emerged.

In the controversial book about her life, Bell reveals that she did not appreciate there would be a problem in taking a job with children, even though she had served 12 years behind bars for strangling two young boys.

In Cries Unheard, which went on sale in York yesterday, Bell recounts how she coped as an adult with the world she had not seen since childhood.

Yesterday, the Evening Press reported her revelation that she became pregnant while serving her sentence at Askham Grange open prison, near York.

She says in the book that aborting the baby - whose father was a local married man - was like killing a third child. "Almost the first thing I did after 12 years in prison for killing two babes was to kill the baby in me..." she told the book's author, Gitta Sereny.

After prison, Bell was taken under the wing of a Quaker family who lived 10 miles from Askham Grange, though she does not say exactly where.

Just a week after the abortion, which was itself a month after she left prison, she found a job at the local nursery. But, she says, she was forced to quit by the probation office, which said there was absolutely no way she could be allowed to work with children.

Author Gitta Sereny says: "She didn't make the association between a nursery and the crime for which she had been convicted."

In Cries Unheard, which Yorkshire bookshops are cautiously stocking - most keeping it out of sight behind the counter - Bell says her Quaker family were "good people" who took in those who needed a roof over their heads. The couple, whose names are changed in the book, had two sons, one of whom was 14 and did not know of Bell's past, and two daughters.

Describing how she had got pregnant with the unnamed "respected man in the community" when she was allowed out of prison on home leave, Bell says: "I wasn't unwilling.

"He said he was determined to show me I wasn't a lesbian. It...it was a power thing, you know...He knew it, I knew it, and he even said it, that it was...that I was like an animal that needed to be trained."

See COMMENT: Staying ever aware

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.