Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?

On April 18, 1943, four boys living in Worcestershire, England were poaching in Hagley Wood, part of the Hagley estate belonging to Lord Cobham. Their names were Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne.

Nearing the Wychbury Hill, they came across a large wych elm tree. Thinking it was a good place to hunt for birds’ nests, Bob 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 realized 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. However, after returning home the youngest of the boys – Thomas Willetts, felt uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his parents.

When police went and checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete skeleton, with a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and even some fragments of clothing. The skull was valuable and important evidence, in that it still had some tufts of hair and had a clear dental pattern (was missing some teeth). After further investigation of the area, the remains of a hand were found some distance from the tree.

The body was sent for forensic examination by Prof. James Webster. He quickly established that the victim was a female who had been dead for at least 18 months, placing time of death around October 1941. Webster also discovered a section of taffeta stuffed in her mouth, suggesting that she had died from suffocation.

From the measurement of the tree trunk in which the body had been discovered, he also deduced that she must have been placed there still warm after the killing, as she could not have fit once rigor mortis 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 war, records were too vast 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. In addition, they also contacted dentists all over the country since the dentistry was quite distinctive.

In 1944, a graffiti messages related to the mystery began to appear. Things like, “Who put Luebella down the wych–elm?”, “Hagley Wood Bella”, “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood”.

These led investigators down several new leads tracing who Bella could have been. Since at least the 1970s, the graffiti has sporadically appeared on the Hagley Obelisk near to where her body was discovered, which asks “Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?”.

From the first sign of graffiti, the woman found in the tree would be known as Bella, even by the police. They were never able to find who was responsible for the graffiti and were no closer to answering its question.

Was the writer of the graffiti toying with the police? Had they killed Bella, or knew who had?

Folklorist Margaret Murray suggested Bella may have been killed in an occult ceremony, the removal of the hand typical of a black magic execution. This theory was popular for a while, but with the absence of any genuine leads from the police the case eventually went cold.

It wasn’t until 1953, when journalist Wilfred Byford-Jones started to write about the case, that interest was revived. Byford-Jones would soon receive the first solid lead in nearly a decade.

A letter that was signed only ‘Anna’, offered new details of what had happened to Bella. According to the letter, Bella had been murdered because of her involvement with a Nazi spy ring operating in the Midlands in the early 1940s. This theory seemed more rooted in reality than talk of witchcraft. Hundreds of German spies were captured in Britain during the war, and the Midlands would have been a valuable source of intelligence because of its prevalence of munitions factories.

Was Bella part of a Nazi spy ring? In her letter, Anna states “The one person who could give the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of the earthly courts. The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moonlight rites…”

Whoever wrote those words were believed to have first-hand knowledge of what had happened. After subsequent correspondence, Anna revealed herself to be Una Mossop – and told the full story.

Her husband, Jack had worked in a munitions factory in the early 1940s and had come into some money after meeting a mysterious Dutchman. Jack later admitted to Una that the Dutchman was a Nazi agent. Jack had been passing him information about local industrial sites, which in turn was passed to another agent posing as a cabaret performer at local theaters.

One day Jack met his Dutch contact at a pub close to Hagley Wood. He was arguing with a Dutch Woman. He ordered Jack drive them both out to the Clent Hills, but the argument had grown extremely violent and the Dutch agent strangled the woman in the car.

Fearing for his own life, Jack helped carry the body into nearby Hagley Wood, where the pair buried it in the hollow of the old elm tree.

Una’s husband was apparently so traumatized by the brutal murder of Bella that he had a nervous breakdown, tormented by horrific visions of a woman’s skull in a tree. Jack was institutionalized in 1941 and apparently died later that year.

The timescales fit quite well with Bella’s death. The pathologist had estimated she died about 18 months prior to her discovery, which would have been in the middle of 1941. The information Una gave Byford-Jones was convincing enough that the police and MI5 got involved. They verified some details of Una’s account but were unable to find any of the remaining perpetrators.

With the involvement of the intelligence services, some have speculated there may have been a cover-up over the investigation of the information. This theory was also bolstered by the curious fact that Bella’s remains had gone missing, precluding any further forensic examinations.

The story faded back into semi-obscurity. An occasional piece of graffiti would appear and briefly revive interest, but there were no new leads for another 15 years – and a book by Donald McCormick.

McCormick’s ‘Murder by Witchcraft’, despite its name is built upon the spy ring theory. McCormick had obtained Abwehr files, the records of German Military intelligence.

According to this information, A Nazi agent by the name of Lehrer was operating in the Midlands in 1941 and he had a Dutch girlfriend living in Birmingham called Clarabella Dronkers.

Was Clarabella the Bella found in the wych elm? Like Bella, she was about 30 years old and – she also apparently had crooked teeth.

What’s especially suggestive about the identification is that a real Nazi spy was captured in mid-1942 and executed at Wandsworth prison on New Year’s Eve that year. His name was Johannes Marinus Dronkers.

The official closure of the Police’s investigation and publication of the case file has allowed it to be re-examined – and a startling conclusion presented itself. The police’s final review acknowledges that while there would be some merit in a DNA investigation, they have been unable to ascertain where Bella was laid to rest.

They overlooked that after the post-mortem, Bella’s remains were not buried by the local constabulary. They were in fact passed to one of Professor Webster’s colleagues at the University of Birmingham for more unofficial tests. The police were looking for Bella in the wrong cemetery. No one is certain where she is.

McCormick’s theories lacked hard evidence, in the 1960s there were only limited lines of enquiry available. He certainly couldn’t have had access to wartime MI5 files, which detail the interrogation of a Czech-born Gestapo agent named Josef Jakobs, arrested by the Home Guard after parachuting into Cambridgeshire in January 1941.

His declassified file contains a photograph carried by Jakobs at the time of his arrest, which bolster McCormick’s claims. The woman in the photograph was named by Jakobs as cabaret singer and German movie actress, Clara Bauerle.

Jakobs told his interrogators that Clara was his lover and that they had first met in Hamburg where she had been singing with the Ette Orchestra. She was well connected with senior Nazis and had been recruited as a secret agent.

She was supposedly due to parachute into the Midlands after Jakobs had established radio contact, but he claimed that since he had been captured before he could send word, this was now unlikely to happen.

MI5 learnt that Bauerle had been born in Stuttgart in 1906, making her 35. She was indeed a cabaret artist – in fact, she spent two years working the music halls of the West Midlands before the war and was said to speak English with a Birmingham accent.

It isn’t difficult to see how the name Clara Bauerle might have been more easily remembered as “Clarabella” by English music hall audiences. And the Anna letter would later allege a connection between “Bella”, espionage and the music hall in 1953.

The timings of these strands of the story are remarkably convergent. Jakobs said that Clara had been due to parachute into the Midlands in the spring of 1941. Curiously, there appear to be no recordings, live performances or movie appearances bearing her name after this date. Her singing career appears to have come to an abrupt end.

McCormick’s Agent “Clara” parachuted into the West Midlands in early 1941 and subsequently failed to make radio contact.

Jakobs failed to convince MI5 that he could be reliably ‘turned‘. In any case, MI5 noted in a memo that news of his capture was no secret, “on account of the inability of the Home Guard to keep their mouths shut”. On August 15, 1941 he was executed by firing squad, the last man to be put to death at the Tower of London.

Unless the remains of the woman found in the wych elm can again be located, she’ll most likely never be identified. Along with the question of who put Bella in the wych elm, we’ll probably never know who she is.