SYMHC Classics: The Hagley Woods Murder

This 2016 episode covers a skeleton found in a tree near Birmingham, England in 1943. More than 70 years later, it's still unknown who the deceased was and how the body ended up in an elm tree.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. It is October one, the start of the
best month of the year. So today's Saturday Classic Pulse
from our previous October episodes, it is the Hagley Woods Murder,
which we covered on Halloween. Of this murder inspired graffiti
that continues to appear today with variations on the question

(00:22):
who put Bella in the witch Ell? An update that
I don't actually think has made it into an installment
of Unearthed in Professor Caroline Wilkinson and Sarah Shrimpton from
Face Lab Liverpool, John Warris University used photos of the
skeletal remains of this person who has become known as

(00:43):
Bella to create a reconstruction of what she may have
looked like. That reconstruction has appeared in various books and
TV shows, but the mystery of what happened to this
person remains unsolved. So enjoy this story. Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(01:11):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tray Wilson. And it's Halloween, Tracy Paray. It's the best
day of the year. Uh And today to celebrate Halloween,
we're going to talk about a history mystery. It's got everything.
It's got a mystery, a mystery body, it's got witches,

(01:31):
it's got espionage, it's got everything, and it's never been solved.
Though as we get to the end of the episode,
we're gonna get into some interesting math that tries to
sort out the situation. But I don't want to spoil
any of that, so let's just hop right in. So
in the nineteen four Days, a grizzly discovery was made
in a tree in Worcestershire, England, on April eighteenth of

(01:53):
ninety four teenage boys were looking for birds nests and
they sent the best climber up an elm tree. In
the hollow of the tree, he did not find a
bird's nest. He found a skull. Initially he thought it
might be an animal skull, but when he pulled it
from its place in the tree, he realized no, it

(02:14):
was a human skull. And there was also a little
bit of decomposing flesh still attached to the skull, as
well as a patch of hair, and this skull had
distinctive teeth, they were crooked, and there was sort of
what looked what looks a pictures like almost a pronounced overbite,
but also some lower jaw um deformation. The boys, whose

(02:36):
names were Robert Hart, Thomas Willett's, Bob Farmer, and Fred Payne,
were terrified. They were also really worried that they were
going to get in trouble because they had been trespassing
in Hagley Woods. This estate, which was near Birmingham, was private.
They had no permission to be in there looking for nests.
They had also been hunting rabbits, so they'd basically been poaching,

(02:58):
and they had been doing all of that that day
with no permission. So the boys promised each other that
they would keep it a secret. They put the skull
back in its spot in the tree and then they left.
But the youngest boy of that group, Tommy Willitts, did
not in fact keep their secret. He was really deeply
upset by the discovery, and he eventually confessed his troubles

(03:20):
to his father, and his father immediately contacted police, and
of course an investigation began. When the police examined this
elm tree, they found not only the skull, but also
additional remains, including the majority of the skeleton. There were
also pieces of clothing, a wedding band and a single
shoe with a crape sole. The skeletal remains of one

(03:41):
of the body's hands were also found buried near the tree.
Examination of the remains by a pathologist concluded that the
skeleton was a woman who had been between thirty five
and forty when she died. She was five ft or
one point five meters tall, brunette, and had probably given
birth at some point. Another man involved in the investigation

(04:03):
was forensic biologist Dr John Lund, who, at the age
of one hundred and one, told the BBC radio show
Punt p I about his examination of the remains. That
interview happened in twenty fifteen, so he had been working
under James Webster at the West Midlands Forensic Science Laboratory
and he kept notes on the case. The body arrived

(04:25):
at his lab on April, two days after it had
been discovered. The bones had absolutely no remaining flesh. The
hair that was attached to the skull was quite fragile,
but he determined that it had not been chemically treated
with color or any kind of curling solution, and the woman,
Webster in Land concluded had been asphyxiated by a piece

(04:46):
of tafoda that had been shoved in her throat. Additionally,
it was believed that the body had been hidden in
the tree while it was still warm, feet first, and
that it had been there for about a year and
a half, placing her death somewhere around October of nineteen
forty one. Efforts started immediately to try to identify what

(05:07):
appeared to be the victim of a murder. Missing persons
reports were called through for anybody who might line up
with this mystery discovery. There were detailed descriptions of what
she had probably been wearing based on what Webster had
been able to extrapolate from this shoe and the clothing
remains that had been collected. That there was a whole
reference through the dental records with dentists from all around

(05:28):
Great Britain, but because of the war, missing persons records
were something of a mess at this point, but even so,
all known listings were reviewed for a possible connection, literally
thousands and thousands of records, but nothing matched. No results
with dental dental records either. Despite the fact that she
had some unique features, including that jaw deformity and a

(05:49):
recently pulled tooth that had been pulled shortly before she
had died, and they really cast a wide net by
placing this information in dental journals, hoping that they would
find a dentist that recognize any of this information. But
the case went cold. A small clue finally came from
a man who had been working in management in one
of the area's industrial companies. He had reported to police

(06:13):
in July ninety one he was walking to his home
near Hagleywood and he heard a scream. Another person, a teacher,
who was also on a path but coming in the
opposite direction, had confirmed that he too had heard this screaming,
and police were called to the scene at the time
that these two men heard the scream, which would have
been close enough to the October death estimate to have

(06:35):
been a possible connection to the murder. But police in
nineteen forty one found nothing where the two men had
heard the woman screaming, and they found nothing when they
revisited the scene in nineteen forty three after reviewing that
ninety one report. Just as the case seemed to be
running entirely cold, in December of nineteen forty three, odd

(06:55):
graffiti started popping up in the area. Scrawled in various
places were the words who put Bella down the witch elm?
There were actually a lot of variant variations on the phrase,
including who put Luebella down the witch elm? And who
put Bella in the witch elm? There were also some
more instances of graffiti that's strayed from this question format

(07:17):
and said things more like hagleywood Bella. And as a
point of note, as we say this, we're not saying
which here, uh in the sense you might be thinking,
what with this being Halloween, when we say witch elm,
the spelling is w y c H. That's a tree
also known as a Scotts elm. However, uh, In several
things that I read, there were people that were adamant

(07:38):
that this was in fact not a witch elm, but
another type of elm that's often mistaken for one. Just
wanted to include that in the interest of horticultural history
and to clarify that it is not which is in
the halloween e sense at this point it is creepy though, Yeah,
even without that spelling difference, still creepy. These graffiti messages

(08:00):
appeared to be the work of a single person. They
were all written in the same type of chalk and
block letters, uh, And it was considered that they maybe
were just somebody trying to play a prank, But there
had been no leads in the case that had actually
panned out up to that point. So these bizarre missives
opened up two new lines of investigation. Number one, was
there really someone named Bella who might be involved in

(08:23):
this body that had been found in Hagley Woods? And
number two, who was the artist behind the graffiti? And
did they actually know something about the murder? But nothing,
not the name Bella, not the dental records, not the
hunt for the graffiti artists, seemed to lead to any
actual information. This woman seemed to be entirely untraceable, and
as the months dragged into years, all kinds of other

(08:46):
theories started to pop up about the identity of this
woman in the tree. And before we get to those
theories that started popping up in an effort to explain
the skeleton in Hagley Woods, let's take a brief break
and we'll how of a word from one of our sponsors.

(09:09):
So we promised you a little witchiness at the beginning,
in the actual which sense, not in the W Y
C H three sense. So we're getting there, Professor Margaret
Murray of University College London, who was an anthropologist, egyptologist,
archaeologist and folklorist, put forth the theory that Bella, as
she had at that point become known thanks to that graffiti,

(09:31):
had been the victim of a ritualistic occult murder. Murray's
evidence to support this theory was the fact that the
handbones had been found away from the body, and she
believed that the ceremony that had claimed Bella's life, which
is one which is called the hand of glory in
which the hand cut from the victim could be used
for divining or protection as part of the practice of witchcraft.

(09:54):
And the sensational nature of this idea really took hold
in both the press and the public imagination surminds me
of the satanic ritual abuse panic. It is absolutely the
same thing that that was not really founded in reality.
So when another murder victim was discovered in a neighboring village,
this when a man who was pinned to the ground

(10:16):
with a pitchfork, people started linking the two deaths, even
though it had been two years between the two. Scotland Yard,
who was spurred on by Margaret Murray, started investigating this
witchcraft angle because there had been no other new leads
in the case, and as with all the other leads
got them nowhere had no real information that was gathered

(10:37):
as a result of Murray's theories. And as a side note,
While Margaret Murray was famous for a time in the
early twentieth century as an expert and I should put
that in the air quotes on witchcraft, most of her
writings on the subject were controversial at the time, and
they were eventually debunked and she was largely discredited. She's
actually on my short list for an episode all her own.

(10:59):
But she was basically kind of making stuff up. Yeah,
the first time I read through this outline, I got
to this description of her purported satanic not satanic, but
like her purported ritualistic occult murderer, and I was like, really, yeah, really,
actual anthropologist for real? Did you did you just make
this up? Like? What? Really? You know? She used logic

(11:22):
that made sense to her, but I don't know that
she was kind of fabricating these in an effort to
be um, to be misleading or sensationalist. I think she
might have believed them, but I will do more research
on her. Perhaps in the future. Maybe that will be
in October episode next year. I maybe can't wait till then,

(11:43):
But what's that's cool too then? So ten years after
that initial grizzly discovery in the tree, there was another
possibility that came to light. This time, a woman going
by the named Anna from Cleverley contacted the Press a letter.
She was responding to a series of articles that had

(12:03):
been written in nineteen fifty three about the murder, saying
she knew who had killed Bella. Anna's claim was that
Bella had in fact been part of an espionage play
gone wrong, and the letter read, finish your articles regarding
the witch Elm crime. By all means, they are interesting
to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery.

(12:26):
The one person who could give the answer is now
beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts. Much as I hate
having to use a nomba plume, I think you would
appreciate it if you know me. The only clues I
can give you are that the person responsible for the
crime died insane in nineteen forty two, and that the
victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about nineteen

(12:47):
forty one. I have no wish to recall anymore. Anna's
story cast Bella as a Dutch woman who was passing
information from a British officer to a trapeze artist who
appeared in local theatrical product. That trapeze artist would then
pass that intel onto the Germans. Bella in the story
had become too knowledgeable about this chain of of information,

(13:10):
and she was killed because of that knowledge, and then
her body was taken to Hagleywood's where it was hidden
in the tree. Of course, this fleshing out of the
story passed. That initial letter came because uh, the police
got involved. Of course, once the press got this letter
h and they questioned her because the area around Worcestershire
was home to a number of munitions factories during World

(13:31):
War Two. It had been scrutinized by the Nazis for
information during the war. It had also been a target,
so authorities did pursue this new German spy ring angle
with some level of vigor. Some aspects of Anna's story
checked out. There had been a British man connected to
a German spy ring in the area, but he had
died in Stafford Mental Hospital in ninety two, and as

(13:54):
it turned out, that man was related to Anna. Anna's
real name was Una massip Una had, she told police,
been married to Jack Mossa and he had confessed the
murder to her before his death. It was her understanding
that he, along with a dutch Man named Van Raalt
who was also involved, meant to scare this woman by

(14:14):
leaving her in the tree when she was passed out
because she was inebriated. They did not actually intend to
kill her. Yeah. The idea was that she would wake
up stuck in this tree and see the error of
her ways and being foolish, uh, and would straighten up
an act right. The police were unable to locate this
Venrault character, and it appears that they sort of abandoned

(14:37):
the trail there. Years later, however, another woman named Judith
O'Donovan told police and investigators that she was Jack mossa
sort of distant cousin. I think her he might have
been her husband's cousin, and that their entire family basically
knew that Jack had been a trader and that he
had been connected to a woman's death. So it sort
of supported this spirring idea. Uh. And the fact that

(14:59):
he may have been connected to the woman in the
witch Holm. Another decade passed before another theory emerged, and
this one kind of combined the previous two notions. In
nineteen sixty eight, a book called Murder by Witchcraft was published,
written by David McCormick, and McCormick penned an explanatory narrative

(15:20):
in which the woman from the Tree had been a
Nazi spy named Clara Bella, who was also an occultists.
According to McCormick, who said that he had been able
to look at German intelligence reports that listed the woman
by her code name, she was called Clara. His assertion
was that the Bella and the graffiti was referencing Clara Bella.
McCormick's book indicated that Clara had been sent into the

(15:41):
County of West Midlands by parachute in nineteen forty one,
but that she was never heard from again. Of course,
these roads all proved to be fruitless, just like all
the others had in terms of churning up any real
information on the case at the time. Three full decades
after McCormick's book was least, the case of Bella's identity

(16:02):
once again gained attention, and at this time pieces the
puzzle started to come together in the minds of interested parties.
For one, when the case closed, which was actually in
two thousand five, h the case file was published and
in it there was a mention of a search for
Bella's body to be exhumed so that DNA evidence could
be gathered, because that would certainly be helpful. But that

(16:23):
search was for her body was unsuccessful. It turns out
that this failure to find her body was in part
because they had been looking in completely the wrong location.
It had been presumed that Bella had been buried locally,
but in fact her remains had gone to the University
of Birmingham, to a colleague of the original pathologist in
the case, for additional testing, and that was a detail

(16:44):
that had sort of been lost in the sixties, some
years since the case had been active before it was
closed in two thousand five, and unfortunately, the skeletal remains
disappeared from the university's records and their lab lost forever
to time. Any records from the University of Birmingham about
any testing that was done on those remains have also vanished.

(17:05):
This has led to some speculation of a cover up,
but it could also just be really terrible bookkeeping. Yeah,
I'm gonna hold out hope that one day it will
be one of those. Look what we found in our
own collection of human remains that nobody correctly. And the
thing to keep in mind too, um, and I know
this from my years working in the library, is that

(17:28):
there were things that happened during more time that really
messed up record keeping. You know. It wasn't necessarily that
people were lazy or trying to cover anything up. There
was just there were times when an air raid would
happen and everything would be shuffled around and stuff got lost. Yeah. Well,
and even if you are really careful, human beings still
make errors. And if you have a gigantic and are

(17:50):
still accurate, that's a bunch of errors. Anyway, coming up,
we're going to talk about an m I five file
that might actually give some weight to the narrative is
that McCormick had had reconstructed. But first we're going to
take a quick break for a word from one of
our awesome sponsors. So another bit of information that also

(18:15):
shed light on this possibility that McCormick's theory had some
truth to it a declassified file in the British National
Archives on Gestapo agent Joseph Jacobs, who was an inexperienced,
undertrained agent that was sent to gather information on weather
patterns in the London area. Jacobs had parachuted into Cambridgeshire

(18:35):
in broken his ankle in the drop and was arrested
by the Home Guard, which was a World War two
defense organization that was part of the British Army. One
of the items that Jacobs was carrying when the Home
Guard apprehended him was a photograph. That photo was a
picture of a woman named Clara Bowerley, a singer and
film actress that Jacob said was also his paramore. He

(18:58):
also told his caw apters that Clara Bowerley was a
Nazi secret agent and was supposed to parachute into West Midlands,
that the two of them were supposed to have made contact.
Jacobs was executed by firing squad in the late summer
of nineteen forty one, and this turned out to be
the last execution at the Tower of London. UH He
could also easily be an episode subject on his own.

(19:21):
These m I five records on Jacobs included an investigation
of Bauerley. She was born in nineteen o six, meaning
that in nineteen forty one she would have been thirty five,
which was the right age to pit the pathology report
of the witch Elm victim. And she did work in
music halls in the West Midland area for two years
before World War two began, and she learned to speak

(19:41):
English with no trace of a German accent. When the
woman who had been calling herself Anna contacted the police
in the nineteen fifties claiming to have knowledge of the crime,
she had mentioned a music hall in the information that
she gave to the police. And while this might seem
to tidily wrap up the identity of Bella quite nicely,
because the pieces do seem to fit together, uh, Joseph

(20:03):
Jacobs's granddaughter, who has long examined the details of her
grandfather's life, actually obtained a death certificate for Clara Bauerley,
indicating that in fact, she died in Berlin in December
ninety two of aronal poisoning. I eat not stuffed into
a tree in England. Of course, gossip turned up a
huge variety of other possibilities about Bella's identity. She might

(20:27):
have taken shelter in the tree during an air raid
and gotten stuck. She might have been murdered by a
lover and clumsily hidden in the tree. She may have
been a traveler or a romani who was killed out
of mere suspicion. And there was even a lead that,
at least in terms of plausibility, seems fairly valid. So
on April seven of nineteen forty four, a sex worker

(20:48):
from Birmingham told police that a woman that she knew
had gone missing on Hagley Road or in that area
three years earlier, and that woman's name was Bella. If
this information garnered follow up from the police, it does
not appear to have gotten much traction. Incidentally, this whole
graffiti of who put Bella in the witch Elm has

(21:09):
continued in the seven decades since the murder was discovered.
There's an obelisk in Hagley Park called the Witchbury Obelisk,
and it's been the most frequently tagged location since the
nineteen seventies. Presumably at this point it's kids trying to
be spooky, and the spelling has changed from w y
c H to w i t c H. It's definitely

(21:30):
not somebody trying to communicate a kind of clue about
the unsolved murder case. At this point, it is like
was here but exactly, And it's very possible that it
never was anything that people pulling pranks, but we just
don't know, uh In. A statistical analysis of all of
the known data in the Hagleywood's murder was done by

(21:53):
researchers Norman Fenton and Martin Neil using Bayesian analysis, and
they determined umber of things. They they're actually in that
BBC radio piece that we mentioned earlier, but then they
also wrote a paper separately where they explained it all
and that thing is fabulous. Um, so it'll be in
the show notes. But the first thing that they determined

(22:16):
is that there is a probability that the cause of
death was criminal. That one is the completely unsurprising correct.
There's a nine seven percent probability that Bella was not British,
less than two percent chance that she was Dutch, and
an eighteen percent chance that she was German. There is

(22:38):
a nine percent probability that Bella was still alive when
she was put in the tree. That's awful. That kind
of holds with that whole story that the men had
put her there to scare her, and that she had
somehow become stuck. There's a thirty three percent possibility that
Jack Mossup was involved in her death and seven percent

(22:59):
that was some kind of intelligence service. In order to
increase that probability to a nine pcent chance that Massif
was involved, the researchers model would have required four additional
witnesses in addition to Una mass Up and his cousin Judith,
And there is a twenty five percent probability that Bella
was a spy and a six probability that she was

(23:22):
a prostitute. In their paper on this study, the researchers
were very clear that there are lots of variables that
could quit really quickly change the whole statistical picture. For example,
they're working under the assumption that police involved in the
investigation really did exhaust all the leads in each instance
where they felt like there was a dead end. If

(23:42):
they left a stone unturned here there, then the models
shifts significantly. Additionally, there's the credibility of various witnesses. Yeah,
if you um increase or decrease the credibility rating of
various witnesses, that model changes really quickly. As well. But
of course, all of those numbers do not settle this
crime conclusively, and Bella story remains a mystery, and considering

(24:06):
the age of the case, it is unlikely that this
murder will ever be solved unless, as Tracy mentioned earlier,
the remains UH or the University lab files suddenly turn up.
So that is our spooky unsolved mystery for Halloween. UH.
And we hope yours is safe and that you do
not end up in a tree stuff. Please don't mean

(24:26):
you can climb a tree safely if you want to
do that. I have never climbed a tree. Really. Yeah. Uh,
they're They're dirty and I'm scared. That's the bottom line.
My mother had very clear rules about how large the
branch could be for us to safely climb the tree,

(24:50):
and if we climbed up into branches that were narrower
than that, I think it had to be at least
as uh as big as our arm I can't remember
it was our armor leg there was a body part
that we had to compare before we put our weight
on any tree limb. Yeah, my mother, My mother is
very concerned with safety. I've had many friends through the

(25:12):
years who are big into tree climbing, and they always
look at me like I'm some sort of mutan when
I'm like, I've never climbed a tree and I feel
no urge to change that. That's fine. Thanks so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address

(25:32):
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Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
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(25:55):
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