The victim whose murder is approximated to have occurred in 1941, is unidentified, and the current location of her skeleton and autopsy report is unknown.
DISCOVERY: 18 April, 1943, four boys were poaching in Hagley Wood, part of the Hagley estate belonging to Lord Cobham near to Wychbury Hill when they came across a wych elm. Thinking the location to be a particularly good place to hunt birds' nests, one of the boys 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. As they were on the land illegally, he 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: When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete skeleton, with a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and some 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. Prof. James Webster 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 in her mouth, suggesting that she had died from suffocation. 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.
In 1944 a graffiti message, related to the mystery, appeared on a wall in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham, reading “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm - Hagley Wood”. This led investigators down several new leads tracing who Bella could have been. Other messages in the same hand appeared too. Since at least the 1970s, the graffiti appeared on the Hagley Obelisk near to where the woman's body was discovered, which asks the slightly modified “Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?”.
THEORIES: In a Radio 4 programme first broadcast in August 2014, Steve Punt suggested two possible victims. One possible victim was reported to the police in 1944 by a Birmingham prostitute. In the report, she stated that another prostitute called Bella, who worked on the Hagley Road, had disappeared about three years previously. 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. Another theory comes from an MI5 declassified file about Josef Jakobs - the last man to be put to death in the Tower of London on 15 August 1941. An Abwehr agent, he parachuted into Cambridgeshire in 1941 but broke his ankle when landing and was soon arrested by the Home Guard. 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. In September 2016, it was determined that Clara Bauerle had died in Berlin on 16 December 1942.In 1945, Margaret Murray, an anthropologist and archaeologist from University College London, proposed a more radical theory - witchcraft - where the severed hand was consistent with a ritual called the Hand of Glory, after Bella had been killed by gypsies during an occult ritual. In 1953, another theory surfaced, namely that Bella was a Dutchwoman named Clarabella Dronkers, killed by a German spy-ring consisting of a British officer, a Dutchman and a music hall artist, for "knowing too much."
