This historical mystery has fascinated me more than any other. It’s comparable to the identity of Jack the Ripper and has been a subject of my research and interest since I began writing Murder Mayhem UK.
Bella down the Wych Elm is a case so bizarre that the police may never solve it, one shrouded in mystery. Who was Bella? What was her real name and who murdered her? All of these questions remain unanswered from this 1940s wartime mystery.
The Area
In 1941, war raged in Britain. The West Midlands was subjected to regular raids, comparable to the London Blitz. It was estimated that 1,852 bombs were dropped on the city and surrounding area during this time.
The Germans were convinced that Birmingham contained several munitions factories, and intelligence had suggested that spy rings and secret agents surrounded the area; a fact that could be relevant in this case.
Near Birmingham along Hagley Road is a track that looks forbidden. The trail leads to Hagley Wood, which is the location of our mystery. Standing in the centre of this is an old tree with a hollow trunk known as the Wych tree; not for its species, but because the long roots and suckers look like witch hair.
Finding Bella
On 18th of April 1943, four boys were hunting for birds’ nests in the wood. Trying to substitute their meagre rations with poaching, they were trespassing in the wood. One of the boys, Bob Farmer, found a large tree and climbed it to see if there were any nests. The other three stayed as lookouts.
At the top, he looked down, and what he saw made him freeze. There, in the hollow of the wide trunk, was a skull. That was when he noticed mousy brown hair stuck to the forehead and crooked teeth, with a piece of cloth in the mouth. This was not an animal skull.
Bob brought the skull out to his friends, knowing they would not believe him if he didn’t. The four boys, frightened that they would get into trouble for poaching, agreed never to mention it again. Bob climbed the tree again, threw the skull back, and they ran home.
However, it wasn’t long before the youngest, Thomas Willetts, broke down and told his father what he had seen. His father phoned the police, who found the body as described by the boys. The body in the tree was a complete skeleton, except for a missing hand. On the other hand was a cheap imitation wedding ring; stuffed in her mouth was a crumpled piece of taffeta. Her body also contained scraps of inexpensive clothing and a shoe. The police found the missing hand buried near the tree.
Bella
The bones were collected and taken to Professor Webster’s Forensic Science laboratory in Birmingham. He concluded that the woman was between 35 and 40 years old and 1.5 metres tall.
She had been suffocated and placed in the tree almost immediately before rigor mortis had set in. She had been murdered eighteen months before discovery. The woman had a strange lower jaw and crooked teeth. She had also been a mother to at least one child.
Investigation
Regrettably, the case quickly went cold. No dental records could identify the woman, and no one in the local area claimed to have seen or known her.
The police went through missing persons records, but due to the extensive bombing of the time, there were 3,000 missing people, yet none of them seemed to be Bella.
The police followed every lead, including locating the manufacturer of her shoes and tracing all the owners except for one pair; none provided any identification.
Then six months into the case, the woman was given the name we all refer to her by now when graffiti appeared on a wall in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham asking, “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?“
The police then had a new line of enquiry, pursuing the writer of the graffiti as much as the murderer, presuming the two were linked. This too hit a dead end.
Theories
Even with the lack of evidence, several theories exist about what happened to Bella. A prostitute came forward claiming her fellow streetwalker Bella had disappeared about the time of the murder. The police looked into it, but they couldn’t find any proof that the two Bellas were the same person.
Una Mossop came forward claiming that her cousin Jack had hidden a woman in a tree. Jack had been talking to a Dutchman, Van Ralt, and a female companion in the local pub. The trio went for a drive, but the drunk woman passed out on the back seat. The pair dumped her body in the hollow of the tree to sleep it off. Jack had subsequently gone mad with the guilt and died in a mental hospital. The police asked why Una had taken so long to come forward and she had no answer; the lead grew cold, however several of the names would surface in a later theory.
Professor Margaret Murray stated that the murder scene resembled a witch’s black magic ritual known as the Hand of Glory. The hand was severed and placed near the body to encourage magic for all purposes. Although respected, most people thought the Professor’s explanation was not realistic.
Ten years after this was suggested, writer Byford Jones started writing several articles about the mystery. He received a mysterious letter signed by Anna Cleverly claiming she had information about the murders.
She claimed that Bella was a foreign spy who was part of a team sent to Britain to discover the location of munitions factories. They were then reporting this information to Germany. She claimed Bella was Dutch and had been killed by one of the other agents. Anna’s ex-husband had been part of the ring, whose name was Van Ralt. No evidence could be found to back this up.
Another popular theory that emerged was that she was the wife of Dutch spy Johannes Dronkers. Dronkers had been executed by the British in 1942, but his wife was described as having unusual teeth. Moreover, she had disappeared at the time of his arrest; her name was Clarabella. None of this could be substantiated until 30 years later.
Declassified MI5 files revealed that Czech Gestapo Agent Josef Jakobs, who had been arrested parachuting into Cambridgeshire, had a photograph of a woman he called Clara Bauerle, a Stuttgart-born music hall singer and secret agent. Clara was due to parachute into the Midlands in 1941 to gather intel on munitions factories, but the two had never met up.
Unfortunately for investigators, Jakobs was executed by firing squad on 15th August 1941, the last man to be put to death in the Tower of London. Investigation reveals that Bauerle had no billboards after spring 1941; she vanished. Bauerle was considered tall; Bella was only five feet. Later, authorities would discover that the actress had passed away in a German hospital in 1942.
Will We Ever Know?
After government files were released, internet detectives revisited the case. Many theories revolve around a spy ring, and the declassified documents supported these theories. However, in 2009, West Mercia Police closed the case.
You might be asking yourself if DNA has helped identify Bella, even if the killer could not be found, and this is where the case takes another strange twist. Bella’s skeleton disappeared from Birmingham University Medical School. This further led people to speculate that she may have been a spy and that removing the body was part of a cover-up by the British government.
It seems unlikely that we will ever know Bella’s story or the circumstances that surrounded her death. As a result, her identity will remain forever a mystery. As it stands, there is no body and no tree. A lightning strike killed the tree, so it was removed.
Another interesting factor was that the graffiti kept coming, the last known sighting being in 1999.
Don’t miss our in-depth article on Monday, which explores another unsolved female murder, that of Dian Fossey, the author of Gorillas in the Mist.
Subscribe today: I spend hours digging through archives, old testimony, and forgotten files to bring these cases to life. Free posts are just the beginning, paid subscribers keep this work possible and get access to my full vault of articles.
If you’ve enjoyed this story and want to see more, please consider upgrading. It’s readers like you who keep Murder Mayhem UK alive.
Don’t want to commit then consider leaving me a tip if you enjoyed this article.
If this had occurred in the Southern U.S. around that time, some residents might have concluded that Bella had been "goophered", "hoodooed", or been the victim of some other supernatural manifestation. That is just how it looks from here, though...