"Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" is the final form of a series of graffiti connected with the discovery in 1943 of the remains of a murdered woman inside a wych elm on the outskirts of Hagley in Worcestershire. The body has remained unidentified and the case unsolved since then, prompting many media articles and films, as well as dramas, an opera and a musical.
On 18 April 1943, four local boys (Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne) were poaching or bird–nesting [n 1] in Hagley Wood, part of the estate belonging to Lord Cobham [1] [2] near Wychbury Hill, when they came across a large wych elm. [3] [n 2] Thinking the location to be a particularly good place to search for birds' nests, Farmer attempted to climb the tree to investigate. As he climbed, he glanced down into the hollow trunk and discovered a skull. At first, he believed it to be that of an animal, but after seeing human hair and teeth, he realised that he had found a human skull. As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody. [4] However, on returning home, the eldest of the boys, Willetts, felt uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his parents.
When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete skeleton, with a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and some fragments of clothing. The skull was valuable evidence, in that it still had some tufts of hair and had a clear dental pattern, despite some missing teeth. [5] After further investigation, the remains of a hand were found some distance from the tree. [4]
The body was sent for forensic examination by the Birmingham-based Home Office pathologist James Webster. [6] He quickly established that it was that of a female who had been dead for at least 18 months, placing time of death in or before October 1941; Webster also discovered a section of taffeta in her mouth, suggesting that she had died from suffocation. From the measurement of the trunk in which the body had been discovered, he also deduced that it must have been placed there "still warm" after the killing, as it could not have fit once rigor mortis had taken hold. [4]
Police could tell from items found with the body what the woman had looked like, but with so many people reported missing during the Second World War, records were too numerous for a proper identification to take place. They cross-referenced the details they had with reports of missing persons throughout the region, but none of them seemed to match the evidence. [7] In addition, they contacted dentists in the area since the dentistry was quite distinctive. [7]
A case review by West Mercia Police was closed in 2014. [6]
A 2018 episode of the television programme Nazi Murder Mysteries [8] described a forensic facial reconstruction, undertaken by the Liverpool John Moores University's "Face Lab", from photographs of the skull. [9] [10] It was commissioned by Andrew Sparke, for his books on the incident. [10]
In May 2023, the BBC launched an appeal to museums, to track down the victim's remains with the intention of carrying out DNA analysis. [6] The remains had, until the late 1960s or early 1970s, been in the Birmingham City Police's "black museum" at their Tally Ho! training centre. [6] The appeal was made in conjunction with a BBC podcast on the case, The Body in the Tree. [6]
In a Radio 4 programme first broadcast in August 2014, Steve Punt suggested two possible victims. One possible victim was reported to the police in 1944 by a Birmingham sex worker. In the report, she stated that another sex worker called Bella, who worked on the Hagley Road, had disappeared about three years previously. [4] The name “Bella” (or “Luebella”) suggested the graffiti writer was probably aware of the identity of the victim. [5]
A second possibility came from a statement made to police in 1953 by Una Mossop, in which she said that her ex-husband Jack Mossop had confessed to family members that he and a Dutchman called van Ralt had put the woman in the tree. Mossop and van Ralt met for a drink at the Lyttelton Arms (a pub in Hagley). Later that night, Mossop said the woman became drunk and passed out while they were driving. The men put her in a hollow tree in the woods in the hope that in the morning she would wake up and be frightened into seeing the error of her ways. [4] Jack Mossop was confined to a Stafford mental hospital because he had recurring dreams of a woman staring out at him from a tree. He died in the hospital before the body in the wych elm was found. [4] The likelihood of this being the correct explanation is questioned because Una Mossop did not come forward with this information until more than 10 years after Jack Mossop's death. [4]
Another theory comes from an MI5 declassified file about Josef Jakobs – the last man to be put to death in the Tower of London, on 15 August 1941. An Abwehr agent, he parachuted into Cambridgeshire in 1941 but broke his ankle when landing and was soon arrested by the Home Guard. On his person was found a photo purportedly of his lover, a German cabaret singer and actress named Clara Bauerle. [3] Jakobs said that she was being trained as a spy and that, had he made contact, she might have been sent over to England after him. However, there is no evidence that Clara Bauerle was parachuted into England, [11] and several witnesses describe that Clara Bauerle was around 6 ft (180 cm) tall, while Bella was 5 ft (150 cm). [11] In September 2016, it was determined that Clara Bauerle had died in Berlin on 16 December 1942. [12]
In 1945, Margaret Murray, an anthropologist and archaeologist at University College, London, proposed a more radical theory—witchcraft—because she believed that the severing of one hand was consistent with a ritual called the Hand of Glory after the victim had been killed by Romani people during an occult ritual. [7] Her ideas excited the local press and led investigators to consider another seemingly ritualistic killing of a man, Charles Walton, in nearby Lower Quinton. [3]
In 1953, another theory surfaced, namely that the victim was a Dutchwoman named Clarabella Dronkers, and she had been killed by a German spy ring consisting of a British officer, a Dutchman and a music hall artist, for "knowing too much". [3] [7] Available records and evidence were unable to support the story.
In 1944, graffiti related to the mystery began to appear on the walls of nearby areas. The first, reading 'Who put Luebella down the wych elm?', was found at Hayden Hill Road, Old Hill, followed shortly by 'Who put Bella down the Wych elm, Hagley Wood?' on a wall in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham. Since the writing was too high to have been done by boys, they were taken seriously and provided investigators with several new leads for tracing who the victim could have been. [13] Since at least the 1970s, similar graffiti have sporadically appeared on the Hagley Obelisk, near where the woman's body was discovered. The latest, dating from 1999, was modified to 'Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?', favouring the witchcraft theory. Then in 2020, the "Who" in white was overpainted in red with "Hers", surmised by the Stourbridge News to be the name of a Birmingham graffiti artist. [14]
In 2003, Simon Holt composed a chamber opera with the title "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" and libretto by Caryl Churchill. [15] A play with the same title was later commissioned from the Los Angeles writer and director Katherine Vondy in 2019 and produced in 2022. [16] There have also been a number of smaller scale dramatic presentations in Britain, for the most part serving as staged docudramas or as educational exercises. They include "Bella in the Wychelm" by David Morris at The Stourbridge Theatre Company in 2007; [17] Tom Lee Rutter's film Bella in the Wych Elm (2017); [18] Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? at London's The Space in March 2018, written and adapted from archive sources by Leah Francis and director Tom Drayton; [19] a musical of the same title by Ellis Kerkhoven, and score by Adam Gerber, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2019; [20] Francesca Haydon-White's 2021 theatrical documentary in Durham; [21] and the ME Dance Company's project in Walsall (2023) and Wolverhampton (2024). [22]
A Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man, often specified as being the left hand, or, if the person was hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed."
Stourbridge is a market town in the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in the West Midlands, England. Situated on the River Stour, the town lies around 10 miles west of Birmingham. Historically in Worcestershire, it was the centre of British glass making during the Industrial Revolution. The 2011 UK census recorded the town's population as 63,298.
Ulmus glabraHudson, the wych elm or Scots elm, has the widest range of the European elm species, from Ireland eastwards to the Ural Mountains, and from the Arctic Circle south to the mountains of the Peloponnese and Sicily, where the species reaches its southern limit in Europe; it is also found in Iran. A large deciduous tree, it is essentially a montane species, growing at elevations up to 1,500 m (4,900 ft), preferring sites with moist soils and high humidity. The tree can form pure forests in Scandinavia and occurs as far north as latitude 67°N at Beiarn in Norway. It has been successfully introduced as far north as Tromsø and Alta in northern Norway (70°N). It has also been successfully introduced to Narsarsuaq, near the southern tip of Greenland (61°N).
The Bridgewater Four are four men who were tried and found guilty of killing 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, who was shot in the head at close range near Stourbridge, England, in 1978. In February 1997, after almost two decades of imprisonment, their convictions were overturned and the three surviving defendants were released; the fourth defendant had died in prison two years into his sentence. Bridgewater's murder remains unsolved.
Wychbury Hill is a hill situated off the A456 Birmingham Road, at Hagley, Stourbridge, on the border of West Midlands and Worcestershire.
The Hagley Obelisk stands close to the summit of Wychbury Hill in Hagley, Worcestershire, approximately 150 metres (490 ft) from the border with the West Midlands. Visible for miles around, and accessible from public footpaths, it was for a while connected with a murder victim discovered on the nearby Lyttelton estate.
Josef Jakobs was a German spy and the last person to be executed at the Tower of London. He was captured shortly after parachuting into the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Convicted of espionage under the Treachery Act 1940, Jakobs was sentenced to death and shot by a military firing squad. He was not hanged since he was captured as an enemy combatant.
Hagley is a village and civil parish in Worcestershire, England. It is on the boundary of the West Midlands and Worcestershire counties between the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley and Kidderminster. Its estimated population was 7,162 in 2019.
The Dyatlov Pass incident is an event in which nine Soviet hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains between February 1 and 2, 1959, under uncertain circumstances. The experienced trekking group from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, led by Igor Dyatlov, had established a camp on the eastern slopes of Kholat Syakhl in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union. Overnight, something caused them to cut their way out of their tent and flee the campsite while inadequately dressed for the heavy snowfall and subzero temperatures.
Simon Holt is an English composer.
Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.
The Green Bicycle Case was a British murder investigation and subsequent trial pertaining to the fatal shooting of Bella Wright near the village of Little Stretton, Leicestershire, England, on 5 July 1919. Wright was killed by a single bullet wound to the face. The case takes its name from the fact that on the evening of her death, Wright had been seen cycling in the company of a man riding a green bicycle.
The Crawford family murder was the killing of pregnant mother Therese Crawford and her three children at their home in Glenroy, Victoria, Australia, in July 1970. The family car was located at the bottom of a cliff at Loch Ard Gorge in Port Campbell on 2 July with the bodies of the four victims still inside. The husband and father of the decedents, Elmer Kyle Crawford, is the prime suspect in the murders and has not been seen since.
Uffmoor Wood is a semi-natural woodland in Worcestershire, in the English Midlands. It is one of over a thousand woods cared for by the Woodland Trust. The wood has an area of 84.84 hectares, and grid reference SO952811. Sitting at the foot of the Clent Hills and about 3 km southwest of Halesowen, Uffmoor Wood is a popular recreational destination for local people. Adjacent to Hagley Woods, with its mystery of 'Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?', and the site of several pre-war murders, Uffmoor has developed a reputation for the supernatural.
John Walter Guerrier Lund CBE FRS was an English phycologist.
Punt PI is a fact-based comedy radio series on BBC Radio 4 in which Steve Punt investigates mysteries in Britain.
The Mineral, Washington murders, dubbed by the media as "the Tube Sock Killings," is a series of unsolved murders that occurred in remote areas of Lewis and Pierce County, Washington, near the remote community of Mineral, Washington, in 1985. The murder cases were widely publicized, and were featured on the television series Unsolved Mysteries in 1989.
The wych elm cultivar Ulmus glabra 'Nitida' [:'shining', an allusion to the smooth upper surface of the leaves], the smooth glossy-leaved wych, was described by Fries from specimens collected by P. C. Afzelius in 1841 on the island of Stora Karlsö, Sweden, as Ulmus montana nitida, in Novitiae Florae Suecicae: continuatio, sistens Mantissam III: 20 (1842). The Novitiae Florae Gotlandicae (1844) confirmed U. montana f. nitidaFr. as present on the islands of Stora Karlsö and neighbouring Lilla Karlsö off Gotland, Sweden, but did not report it from Gotland proper. A Stora Karlsö specimen from the Herbarium E. Fries is preserved in the Botanical Museum of Uppsala. The tree was listed by Rehder as U. glabraHuds. f. nitida (1915), a designation adopted by Krüssmann (1984), the latter copying Rehder's 'Norway' provenance error.
"Clocaenog Forest Man" refers to an unidentified murder victim found in the Clocaenog Forest in Denbighshire, Wales, in November 2015. The body had lain undiscovered for over 10 years and despite extensive investigations by North Wales Police, national and UK appeals and input from serial killer Peter Moore, the identity of both the body and the murderer(s) remain a mystery.
The Witch Elm is a 2018 novel by Tana French. The novel is a standalone, not related to her Dublin Murder Squad novels.