![Bella graffiti](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/Bella_graffiti.jpg)
"Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?" is
graffiti
Graffiti (plural; singular ''graffiti'' or ''graffito'', the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from s ...
that appeared in 1944 following the 1943 discovery by four children of the
skeletonised remains of a woman inside a
wych elm
''Ulmus glabra'' Hudson, the wych elm or Scots elm, has the widest range of the European elm species, from Ireland eastwards to the Urals, and from the Arctic Circle south to the mountains of the Peloponnese and Sicily, where the species reaches i ...
in Hagley Wood,
Hagley
Hagley is a large 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 20 ...
(located in the estate of
Hagley Hall
Hagley Hall is a Grade I listed 18th-century house in Hagley, Worcestershire, the home of the Lyttelton family. It was the creation of George, 1st Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773), secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales, poet and man of letters an ...
), in
Worcestershire
Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see His ...
, England. The victim—whose murder is estimated to have occurred in 1941—remains unidentified, and the current location of her skeleton and
autopsy report is unknown.
Discovery
On 18 April 1943, four local boys (Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne) were
poaching
Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights.
Poaching was once performed by impoverished peasants for subsistence purposes and to supplement meager diets. It was set a ...
or
bird–nesting in Hagley Wood, part of the
Hagley estate belonging to
Lord Cobham near
Wychbury Hill
Wychbury Hill is a hill situated off the A456 Birmingham Road, at Hagley, Stourbridge, on the border of West Midlands and Worcestershire.
It is divided between the parish of Hagley and former parish of Pedmore. It is one of the Clent Hills. ...
when they came across a large
wych elm
''Ulmus glabra'' Hudson, the wych elm or Scots elm, has the widest range of the European elm species, from Ireland eastwards to the Urals, and from the Arctic Circle south to the mountains of the Peloponnese and Sicily, where the species reaches i ...
.
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
The skull is a bone protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of four types of bone i.e., cranial bones, facial bones, ear ossicles and hyoid bone. However two parts are more prominent: the cranium and the mandible. In humans, the ...
. As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody.
However, on returning home, the youngest of the boys, Willetts, felt uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his parents.
Investigation
![Bella Skull](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Bella_Skull.jpg)
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.
After further investigation, the remains of a hand were found some distance from the tree.
The body was sent for
forensic examination
Forensic science, also known as criminalistics, is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and criminal p ...
by James Webster. 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
Taffeta (archaically spelled taffety or taffata) is a crisp, smooth, plain woven fabric made from silk, cuprammonium rayons, acetate, and polyester. The word is Persian (تافته) in origin and means "twisted woven". As clothing, it is used in ...
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 fitted once ''
rigor mortis
Rigor mortis (Latin: ''rigor'' "stiffness", and ''mortis'' "of death"), or postmortem rigidity, is the third stage of death. It is one of the recognizable signs of death, characterized by stiffening of the limbs of the corpse caused by chemic ...
'' had taken hold.
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.
In addition, they contacted dentists all over the country since the dentistry was quite distinctive.
In 1944, a graffiti message, related to the mystery, appeared on a wall in Upper Dean Street,
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...
, reading ''Who put Bella down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood''. This provided investigators with several new leads for tracing who the victim could have been. Other messages in the same hand appeared too. Since at least the 1970s, similar graffiti has sporadically appeared on the
Hagley Obelisk near to where the woman's body was discovered, which asks the slightly modified ''Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?.''
Facial reconstruction
An episode of the television programme ''
Nazi Murder Mysteries
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
''
described a
forensic facial reconstruction
Forensic facial reconstruction (or forensic facial approximation) is the process of recreating the face of an individual (whose identity is often not known) from their skeletal remains through an amalgamation of artistry, anthropology, osteol ...
undertaken by the
Liverpool John Moores University
, mottoeng = Fortune favours the bold
, established = 1823 – Liverpool Mechanics' School of Arts1992 – Liverpool John Moores University
, type = Public
, endowment =
, coor ...
's "
Face Lab
The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affe ...
", from photographs of the skull.
It was commissioned by Andrew Sparke, for his books on the incident.
Theories
![The Lyttelton Arms, Hagley](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/The_Lyttelton_Arms%2C_Hagley.jpg)
In a Radio 4 programme first broadcast in August 2014,
Steve Punt
Stephen Mark Punt (born 15 September 1962)[Mr Stephen Mark Punt](_blank)
company-director-c ...
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.
The name “Bella” (or “Luebella”) suggested the graffiti writer was probably aware of the identity of the victim.
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
Hagley is a large 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 20 ...
). 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.
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.
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.
Another theory comes from an MI5 declassified file about
Josef Jakobs
Josef Jakobs (30 June 1898 – 15 August 1941) 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 unde ...
– the last man to be put to death in the
Tower of London
The Tower of London, officially His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which is separa ...
, on 15 August 1941. An
Abwehr
The ''Abwehr'' (German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', but the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context; ) was the German military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ''Wehrmacht'' from 1920 to 1944. A ...
agent, he parachuted into Cambridgeshire in 1941 but broke his ankle when landing and was soon arrested by the
Home Guard
Home guard is a title given to various military organizations at various times, with the implication of an emergency or reserve force raised for local defense.
The term "home guard" was first officially used in the American Civil War, starting wi ...
. On his person was found a photo purportedly of his lover, a German cabaret singer and actress named Clara Bauerle.
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,
and several witnesses describe that Clara Bauerle was around tall, while Bella was .
In September 2016, it was determined that Clara Bauerle had died in Berlin on 16 December 1942.
In 1945,
Margaret Murray
Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was an Anglo-Indian Egyptology, Egyptologist, archaeology, archaeologist, anthropology, anthropologist, historian, and folkloristics, folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a l ...
, an anthropologist and archaeologist at
University College, London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = ...
, proposed a more radical theory—
witchcraft
Witchcraft traditionally means the use of magic or supernatural powers to harm others. A practitioner is a witch. In medieval and early modern Europe, where the term originated, accused witches were usually women who were believed to have us ...
—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
The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with sig ...
during an occult ritual.
Her ideas excited the local press and led investigators to consider another seemingly ritualistic killing of a man,
Charles Walton, in nearby
Lower Quinton.
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
Music hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment that was popular from the early Victorian era, beginning around 1850. It faded away after 1918 as the halls rebranded their entertainment as variety. Perceptions of a distinction in Bri ...
artist, for "knowing too much".
Available records and evidence were unable to support the story.
Notes
References
External links
"Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm" article on Atlas ObscuraWho Put Bella in the Wych Elm article from Brian Haughton's website
Casefile True Crime Podcast - Case 04 - Who Put Bella In The ‘Witch’ Elm- 30 January 2016
Bella in the Wych Elm- Christmas and Crime Confessed Obsessed podcast
{{DEFAULTSORT:Who put Bella in the wych-elm?
1943 murders in the United Kingdom
1941 in England
1941 murders in the United Kingdom
1943 in England
April 1943 events
1944 works
20th century in Worcestershire
Graffiti in England
Female murder victims
Unidentified murder victims
Unidentified murder victims in the United Kingdom
Unsolved murders in England
Murder in the West Midlands (county)
Hagley Hall