Graffiti on the Hagley Obelisk, with a different spelling and word choice to the original. Image by David Buttery, via Wikimedia, public domain.
Finding Bella
After Mr Willets telephoned the police on April 18th 1943, action was swift. Investigators retrieved the skull the boys had found in the tree, along with almost a complete skeleton. As volunteers from the Home Guard and the local Boy Scouts combed the nearby wood, the remains of a hand were also found.
Home Office pathologist James Webster arrived on the scene from nearby Birmingham. He deduced that the body was female, and had been in the tree for at least eighteen months. She was probably “still warm” when she was placed there, and likely met her end sometime around October 1941, possibly suffocated by a piece of taffeta cloth from her own skirts jammed into her mouth. This is where reports grow a little sketchy, and no one seems certain whether the body was actually found with the taffeta in its mouth, or if it was the boys themselves who put it there when they discovered the skull.
The woman’s clothing was in a bad state of disrepair, and only scraps remained. A piece of blue crepe-soled shoe, remnants of of a zip-up cloth skirt with a peach taffeta under-skirt, and a fragment of knitted wool from a striped cardigan were all found, as were a light blue belt and a wedding ring of rolled gold. This was cheap gold, pressed and bonded with another metal during production.
Crucially, the skull displayed a very distinctive dental pattern – something the investigators hoped would help to identify the body. Tufts of hair also clung to the bone. The woman was estimated to have been around five feet tall, aged between 25 and 40 years old, and had given birth to one child.
The Mysterious Graffiti
The leads quickly ran cold. Webster and his team contacted dentists across the West Midlands in the hope of finding a match for the distinctive pattern in the victim’s jaw, but nothing came up. Police reopened missing persons cases from across the region, but so many people had been reported missing during the war, often with very little to identify them, that these investigations led nowhere. Then, something strange began to happen.
Some reports say the graffiti first appeared in 1944, on Upper Dean Street in Birmingham. Others suggest that the messages began in the autumn of 1943 – only six months after the discovery of the body. Numerous daubings sprung up across the region, varying in their spelling and their choice of words, but all asking roughly the same question – “Who put Bella down the wych elm?”
To this day, the question remains unanswered, and the case unsolved. Even in the 21st Century, decades after a poor, unidentified woman met her end in this corner of rural Worcestershire, graffitied messages still appear from time to time around the West Midlands, inquiring after the mysterious woman, and her grim fate.
Who Was Bella, and What Happened to Her?
Presented with so many unknowns, we need to begin with certainties. ‘Bella’ existed. We know this, and we also know that her body was discovered in the trunk of an elm tree on the Hagley Estate in 1943. Beyond these facts, the case gets murky, throwing up more questions than answers. So, who was Bella, and what happened to her?
The Theories
Bella was the Lover of a German Spy
A plaque commemorating the execution of Josef Jakobs, Tower of London. Image by McPhail, Creative Commons.
The idea of a German spy in the West Midlands in 1941 is not a fantasy. In January of that year, the German military intelligence agent Joseph Jakobs had parachuted into Cambridgeshire on a clandestine mission, but shattered his ankle on landing and was captured almost immediately. In August, he received the dubious honour of being the last man put to death at the Tower of London.
Jakobs reportedly had a lover, the cabaret singer and actress Clara Bauerle. On his arrest, the agent had a photograph of Clara in his pocket. Could this be Bella – a vague anglicisation of Clara’s surname, ‘Bauerle’? Investigators have pointed to the fact that the actress’ career seems to come to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1941. Had she followed her lover to England and met with a similar fate?
Almost certainly not. Bauerle was around 5’10”, possibly as much as 10 inches taller than Bella in the Elm, and with none of the body’s distinctive dental characteristics. Cambridgeshire is also nowhere near Hagley Wood, and is instead about one hundred miles to the southeast. Anyway, Berlin hospital records show that Clara passed away in Germany on December 16th 1942. We’ll need to look elsewhere for our Bella.
Bella was a Dutchwoman Caught Up in a German Spy Ring
The Clara Bauerle theory was not the only one to fixate on the ‘Bella’ of the graffiti. A decade later, when stories began to circulate of a woman named Clarabella Dronkers who had allegedly disappeared during the war, the rumour mill went back into overdrive.
Dronkers was, it was said, from the Netherlands originally, and had made her way to the United Kingdom at some point before or during the war. She’d fallen in with a bizarre spy ring, featuring a British officer double agent, a Dutch male, and a circus trapeze artist. When it was decided that Clarabella was a liability, her fellow spies murdered her, and hid her body in the elm in Hagley Wood.
In 1953, Una Mossop gave a statement to local police that seemed to offer weight to this theory. Back in 1941, Una said, her second husband Jack had been out drinking at the Lyttelton Arms pub in Hagley with a Dutchman named van Raalte and a young woman, someone Jack referred to as ‘the Dutch Piece’. This young woman became very drunk, and the two men decided to teach her a lesson, driving her out to Hagley Wood and placing her in the trunk of an old elm tree to sober up.
The idea was to frighten the lady into sobriety when she woke up all alone inside a tree in the woods. Only, she never woke up. She died in that tree. According to Una’s statement, Jack Mossop and van Raalte were the killers of the woman found on the Hagley Estate.
Jack Mossop was a peculiar man. He worked at a munitions factory in Coventry, and yet was seen wearing an RAF uniform on occasion. He appeared to live far beyond his means, with a flashy dress sense and a gaudy splendour to match his natural good looks. He also hung around with a Dutchman who no one really knew, and some believed the pair were up to no good, possibly working with the enemy. He was no officer, but he certainly liked to present himself as one. Could this be the strange spy ring? Could the woman in the tree be Clarabella Dronkers?
Guilt over the young woman’s death drove Mossop mad. He reported recurring dreams of a tree, and of a woman inside it staring out at him. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital in nearby Stafford, where he died in 1942, before the body of Bella was even discovered. Mossop was 29 years old.
At around the time of Una’s statement, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, received a letter in response to a series of articles the local paper had run on the mystery. The letter writer said that the conjecture was all very interesting, but that she had the truth – the murderer was dead, having passed away in a psychiatric hospital back in 1942, and the victim was a Dutchwoman. The author signed her letter ‘Anna, Claverley’.
This could be an interesting development, but for one detail. Several decades later, Judith O’ Donavon, the daughter of Jack Mossop’s cousin, came forward, claiming to know the identity of this ‘Anna’ from Claverly. Anna was, according to Judith, no other than Una Mossop herself. So Una’s story remains uncorroborated, and van Raalte was never identified, despite investigations into people named van Raalte living in England at that time.
While the knowledge of a woman in a tree around Hagley is an intriguing coincidence, it is not confirmation, and questions remain. Why were van Raalte and Clarabella Dronkers never traced beyond small town stories and rumours? Why did Una take so long to tell her story? And could Jack’s frantic confession been just another symptom of his severe mental illness?
Bella was a Victim of Witchcraft
It may seem strange to talk of witchcraft in connection to a 20th Century murder case, but it’s an avenue worth exploring. Almost two years after the discovery of Bella, a man named Charles Walton was found murdered in rural Warwickshire, thirty miles from Hagley Wood. He’d been beaten, his throat cut with a farmer’s slash hook, and he’d been pinned to the ground by a pitchfork around his neck.
The Warwickshire murder was almost as sensational as the one in Hagley Wood, not least because of the rumours that sprung up around Walton’s association with the occult. In this part of the West Midlands, it seemed, anxiety around black magic and witchery continued long into the 20th Century.
There are even stories of an occult ceremony that took place on the south coast in the weeks following the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940. With German invasion now a real threat, a group of occultists allegedly met in Dorset, raising what was described as a “field of energy” designed to repel any force that might try to cross the channel.
Nicknamed Operation Cone of Power, the ceremony mirrored those that supposedly took place during the Napoleonic Wars in the 19th Century, and during the Spanish Armada crisis of 1588. There is little historical evidence that any of these ceremonies actually happened, but the very existence of the story suggest that at least some people did believe in occultism back in the 1940s.
A hand of glory in Whitby Museum, image via Wikimedia, by badobadop.co.uk
So was Bella the victim of a witchcraft-related murder? Professor Margaret Murray, investigating the murder several years later, was immediately drawn to Bella’s hand, which had been removed from the body and was found some distance away. This, Murray claimed, was evidence that the assailants had tried to render a Hand of Glory – a grisly candlestick made from the severed hand of a hanged felon. If lit within a property, the Hand of Glory casts the occupants into a deep sleep, allowing thieves free access to the home.
There are several problems with this theory. One, the hand was in fact found nearby, and had not been used as a Hand of Glory. Two, there were no hanged female felons in 1939, 1940, or in 1941 – so Bella could not have been a Hand of Glory candidate anyway. Three, Margaret Murray has shown herself to be somewhat obsessed with witches, and her study may be a bit on the fanciful side.
Ronald Hutton, a professor of pagan studies, doesn’t agree with his fellow professor’s opinion either. According to Hutton, there are no hallmarks of the Hand of Glory ceremony, nor is there any evidence that the killing was related to occultism or witchcraft at all.
Bella was Killed in a German Air Raid
Devastation in Aston Newtown, during the Birmingham Blitz. By Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer. This photograph D 4126 comes from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain.
Investigators at the time favoured a more mundane theory – Bella was a local woman who fled into the woods during a German air raid on Birmingham, hid herself in a tree, and never got herself out.
Huge amounts of ordinance were dropped on Birmingham during the war, claiming 2,241 lives. It’s entirely possible that residents of Hagley found themselves suddenly spooked as the bombs drew closer, and fled out into the woods. In fact, Professor David Taylor states that many people did do this, and that Hagley Wood would have been viewed as a safe haven to locals during the Blitz.
The way the body was found, though – and, possibly, the scrap of taffeta in the mouth, depending on when this was placed there – suggest that others were involved. An air raid could explain why Bella was in the woods in the first place, but it doesn’t tell us anything about who she was, who killed her, and who put her in the elm.
Bella was Murdered by an American GI
Plenty of American soldiers were stationed in Birmingham during the war. A photo taken on Wake Green Road in the city even shows American troops playing baseball outside Mosely Grammar School in 1944.
It wasn’t unusual for these GIs to get involved with local women either, and it’s estimated that American troops were responsible for around 22,000 births in Britain during the war and just after.
It all seems to fit together – Bella was a local girl engaged in a passionate affair with a GI. When she became pregnant, it all got too much for her American lover, and he killed her, hiding her body in a tree in the woods. Except it doesn’t fit together, mainly because pathologist James Webster found that Bella was likely killed in October 1941, three months before the USA even entered the war.
Bella was Murdered by the British Authorities, and the Crime was Covered Up
In more recent years, a new theory has emerged – a theory of conspiracy and clandestine activity. Could Bella have been murdered by the British armed forces, or by the government itself? Could the whole thing be a conspiracy, a cover-up?
Some researchers seem to think so. Bella’s body was originally kept by the Birmingham City Police at their training centre, known informally as the Black Museum, but by the 1970s it was nowhere to be found. John Lund, a forensic biologist who worked as part of Webster’s team, describes methodical record keeping by he and his colleagues during the investigation, but these records are now also missing.
A couple of mysterious events have given more credence to the theory of a high level coverup. One occurred when a Home Guard unit patrolling Hagley Wood around the time of the death encountered a suspicious car in the area. When challenged, the driver of the car produced an RAF ID, but the Home Guard members believed another person was in the car, lying very still under a large coat. Thinking they had interrupted a romantic tryst in the woods, the patrol stood down and sheepishly left the RAF man alone. It’s unlikely that this man was Jack Mossop, as the Home Guard soldiers believed he was not local, and there were no reports of a third person on the scene.
The second event took place after Bella’s body was discovered. The task of watching over the crime scene fell to the father of local man Peter Douglas Osbourne. Speaking in 2014, Osbourne, by now a local government councillor, described how his father had related this story to some RAF intelligence officers on their way back to Britain from Italy in 1945, and how these officers had told him something remarkable. They had seen a file, dated from the early 1940s, relating to a woman of around Bella’s age and stature. She was foreign, multi-lingual, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and, they said, one of Hermann Goering’s inner circle. In other words, she could be a high ranking German spy – one of the top targets for MI5 during the war. What’s more, she displayed the distinctive dental patterns identified on Bella’s skull.
This is a compelling argument, but let’s not forget that it relies on anecdotal evidence, passed down second-hand across generations. Author James Hayward, who researched the case, is not so convinced of a mega-conspiracy involving high-ranking Nazis and German super spies. Hayward explained that the only spy caught in the West Midlands during the war was a Swede named Goster Corolli, and that MI5 believed there were no other intelligence agents at large in the area. While at least one known spy, a mysterious man who parachuted into the country in the autumn of 1940, did manage to evade capture, it seems unlikely that the woman in the wych elm in Hagley Wood is a foreign intelligence agent who slipped through the cracks. As most of the papers from this time are now de-classified, there should be a record of any suspected operatives who did not face trial.
Bella was a Local Sex Worker
In 1944, Birmingham police received a report from an unnamed woman describing a missing sex worker in the city – a depressingly common occurrence in the United Kingdom, at a time when such individuals were even more marginalised and vulnerable than they are today.
As part of the report, the woman also mentioned another disappearance some three years earlier, of a sex worker plying her trade on the Hagley Road; a sex worker who went by the name of Bella.
This seems to be confirmed. In one of the case files that has not been lost, investigators found a note from a Detective Sergeant Renshaw, dated 1944. In this note, Renshaw states that he “spoke to a prostitute from Birmingham, who told me of another prostitute, named Bella, who has been missing for three years”.
Could this be Bella from Hagley Wood? It’s certainly possible. The graffiti suggests that this woman was known to those around Birmingham, if not to the local authorities. This would fit the profile of a sex worker. Isolated from broader society, and without a strong support network, a missing woman in the sex trade wouldn’t have attracted much attention at all. However, if this was the Bella of the Hagley Estate, it still doesn’t tell us who killed her, or who put her in the wych elm.
The Forlorn and Enduring Mystery of Bella
The graffiti daubed on Hagley Obelisk, and elsewhere across Birmingham and the Black Country over the years, asks us a stark question. The sad truth is, we may never know the answer.
With no body, modern DNA techniques are no good. With no laboratory files, 21st century forensic examination is impossible. Whether you believe the body and the files were destroyed on purpose as part of a large-scale cover-up, or lost by accident, the outcome is the same – they aren’t available, and so we cannot solve this mystery.
But there are some modern techniques we can apply. One is Bayes’ Theorem; a method of statistical analysis that examines probable outcomes and circumstances. Working with Bayes’ Theorem, and helped by computer modelling software, researchers have reached a few conclusions about the case.
They believe that it’s 97.8% certain Bella was a foreign woman. Clarabella Dronkers, then? It’s unlikely. The analysis suggests a probability of only 25% that Bella was an enemy intelligence operative. It’s more probable that Bella was a foreign visitor, or perhaps a foreign sex worker, as many women born overseas did work in this trade in Britain in the early 20th century.
Another high probability is that Bella was murdered – the research team stated this with 99.6% certainty. Was Mossop the killer? The numbers don’t think so – the computer model gave a probability of 33% that Bella died at Jack Mossop’s hand.
But these are probabilities, not proofs. With the evidence left to us, it’s almost impossible to push those figures up to the 100% mark.
It’s easy to see why this mystery still fascinates the West Midlands, and Britain as a whole. An anonymous graffiti artist, rumours of spies and enemy intelligence, a supernatural element involving witchcraft and magic, even plays and literature imagining the vengeful spirit of Bella stalking Hagley Wood – there’s much for the modern true crime fan to get their teeth into.
But beneath of all of this – beneath all the conspiracies and conjecture, beneath all the data and devilment – there is something that so often gets overlooked in these cases: the human story of Bella herself. This was a young woman, likely far from home, who was murdered and stuffed into a tree – a young woman who will never be laid to rest, and for whom justice will never be served. The story of Bella in the Wych Elm may be mystifying and fascinating, but at its heart, it’s also deeply tragic.
REFERENCES
- https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/does-graffiti-hold-the-answer-to-this-73yearold-murder-mystery/news-story/829fafafc67ae1e94580e4e6756a939c
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