“Who put Bella in the wych elm?”
This morbid query was repeatedly scrawled across the Wychbury Obelisk in Hagley, Worcestershire. Seemingly written by the same hand, this strange graffiti appeared from 1943 to 1999, perpetuating a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
On April 18, 1943, four local boys were poaching birds in Hagley Wood. While searching the high, tangled branches of a wych elm for bird nests, one of the boys made a grim discovery. As he peered into the tree’s hollow trunk, a fleshless skull stared back at him. The boys were trespassing and poaching, thus they had significant trepidation about reporting the find and agreed to keep it secret. However, the youngest of the boys could not bear the guilt and confessed to his parents later that night.
The subsequent police investigation uncovered scant evidence. They found a nearly complete skeleton, a shoe, a wedding ring, and rotted bits of clothing within the hollow. The remains of the victim’s severed hand were found in the woods near the wych elm.
After his forensic examination, Professor James Webster deduced that the remains were female, approximately thirty years old, five-foot-tall, who had likely given birth at least once. She had been dead for about 18 months, placing the crime around October of 1941. A wadded-up piece of taffeta was found inside her mouth, leading to Webster’s presumption of suffocation as the cause of death. The narrow space in which the body was discovered indicated that she was alive or recently dead when deposited there, as rigor mortis would have made such a feat impossible.
Recent dental work and a distinct crossing of her lower teeth provided initial hope that an identity could be discovered through dental records. However, after publishing the results in dental journals, scouring the missing persons reports, and exhaustive local canvassing, authorities deemed it unlikely that she was native to the region. Soon, the investigation withered from lack of evidence, and the crime quickly faded into the ongoing hardships of life during wartime.
It was around Christmas that year that the first message appeared written on a wall on Upper Dean Street, Birmingham:
“Who put Bella down the wych elm-Hagley Wood.”
This sparked a renewed and persistent interest in the murder that has spanned the decades since. The graffiti believed to be the by the same hand, continued periodically until 1999, possibly due to the author’s death.
There are numerous theories on the subject, all of them wild.
One states that there was a cult of Satanists operating out of Hagley Wood and that Bella’s murder was an act of ritual sacrifice, with the object of obtaining a “hand of glory .” Most investigators agree that the hand was most likely removed by animal predation. Likewise, there are no credible reports of any cult activity in the area at that time.
The prevailing theory posed by the police investigating the crime is that the woman was likely a prostitute from out of the area. She had either recently arrived or had been taken to Hagley Wood by her killer to be murdered. While plausible, there is little to support this theory as anything better than a guess.
Jack Mossop
One intriguing theory is that she was part of a Nazi spy ring operating in the midlands in 1941. A declassified MI5 report describes the account of a German spy named Josef Jakobs, who was captured after breaking his ankle parachuting into Cambridgeshire. At the time of his capture, he carried a photo of his girlfriend, a cabaret singer named Clara Bauerle. According to Jakobs, Clara was being trained as a spy and was meant to be deployed after him. Though not completely debunked, witness reports claim that Clara Bauele was nearly 6 feet tall, while Bella was barely 5 feet tall. Also, Clara Bauele reportedly died in Berlin in 1944.
In 1953, a journalist researching the Bella story began to receive anonymous letters, later revealed to have been authored by a woman named Una Mossop. Una claims that her husband and his friend, a Dutchman named van Ralt, met Bella at a pub in Hagley. Apparently, the woman became so intoxicated that she passed out during the car ride home. Mossop and Ralt then placed the woman in the wych elm to teach her some kind of lesson. There, she succumbed to the elements. Jack Mossop was later committed to an insane asylum due to reoccurring nightmares of the woman staring out at him from her wych elm grave. He died shortly before Una began writing the letters. The story is certainly possible, though critics cite the 10-year delay in the report and suggest that the story might have been conceived out of the contemporary interest in the Bella case. Still, elements of the story seem plausible, especially if you consider an alternate version, in which Mossop and van Ralt murdered Bella and then hid her remains in Hagley Wood. Perhaps van Ralt had a guilty conscience and a penchant for graffiti.
The key to unraveling the mystery lies in identifying Bella’s remains. Currently, that seems impossible. The remains had been displayed at the Birmingham Police’s “Black Museum” but were lost sometime in the late 60s or early 70s. Without them, all hope of a DNA match is lost. For now, we can only continue asking who put Bella in the wych elm?
Jason Roberts is a Seattle-based author noted for his acclaimed western horror series The Dead Wind Trilogy as well as other works of cosmic horror infused with historical fiction. His web-based series, Dark Distractions, examines paranormal mysteries, unexplained phenomena, and all things strange.
