Who Put Bella in The Wych Elm?

 

On the 18th April 1943, four boys with an interest in ornithology, were enthusiastically going about their bird spotting in Hagley Woods, near Birmingham, England, when one of them made a grizzly discovery. Climbing a wych elm tree, one of the boys peered inside the hollow trunk, and discovered a human skull residing there. Understandably, the youngsters were traumatised by their discovery, and decided that the best course of action would be to remain silent on the subject. However, Tommy Willetts, the youngest of the boys, felt the need to unburden himself of this secret, and so he told his father, who immediately notified the police.

 

The Tree in Hagley Woods

 

Warwickshire police were quickly on the scene, and discovered not just a skull, but the entire skeleton of a young woman. Well, entire, minus one hand; the bones of which were soon found scattered near to the tree. In addition to the bones, the tree trunk also contained some scraps of clothing, a pair of old shoes, and a gold ring.  A piece of taffeta had also been stuffed into the mouth of the skull. The pathologist who examined the remains, determined that they were of a woman aged about 35, that she was around 5ft tall with mousy coloured hair, and that she had irregular teeth. He further concluded that the most likely cause of death was asphyxiation, due to the fabric found in the skull’s mouth, and that death had occurred approximately 18 months previously. The position in which she was found, suggested that she had been placed in the tree trunk shortly after death, as rigor mortis would have prevented the body from being arranged in such a manner.

 

The Skull With Hair Still Attached to The Forehead

 

A description of the woman, based on the pathologist’s work and details of the clothing found with the body, produced no leads for the police. Nor did a trawl through approximately 3,000 cases of missing persons from around the country. Rumours of a black magic sacrifice began to circulate, but by the end of 1943, and with World War 2 dominating life in the United Kingdom, the body in the tree soon faded from peoples memories. That is, until the case took a bizarre turn. Graffiti, referring to the woman in the woods, started to appear. The first said “Who Put Lubella Down The Wych Elm”  and a second read “Hagley Wood Bella”.  More followed, and whilst seeming to be the work of one person, eventually the phrase “Who Put Bella In The Wych Elm”,  frequently appeared on walls in the West Midlands of England. Was someone trying to tell the authorities something anonymously? If so, they chose a most enigmatic turn of phrase! Subsequently, the phrase has appeared on walls and monuments from time to time, occasionally with variant spellings. The last time was as recently as 1999!

 

Examples of The Mysterious Graffiti

 

As a result of the graffiti, the unidentified woman became known as Bella. With nothing else to go on, even the police adopted the moniker when referring to the case. The identity of Bella, however, remained a complete mystery; until that is, a journalist by the name of Wilfred Byford-Jones wrote an article about the case for the Wolverhampton Express and Star in in 1953. Subsequently, Byford-Jones received a letter claiming the woman in the tree was the Dutch girlfriend of a Nazi agent, whom he had strangled following an argument. The letter went on to name the woman as Clarabella Dronkers, and stated that she had been in her early thirties at the time of her death. Although the letter was signed only Anna, the details given in it ticked several boxes. Her age was about right, and the name was also a match, assuming, of course, that the original graffiti artist knew something about the case. The fact that she was not British, could also explain why she was not listed as a missing person. Interestingly, records indicate that a Nazi spy by the name of Johannes Marinus Dronkers, was executed at Wandsworth prison on 31 December 1942. Could ‘Anna’ have simply been unaware that the couple were actually married?

 

More recently, declassified MI5 files have revealed another candidate for the body in the woods. A Gestapo agent named Josef Jacobs, who had been arrested in 1941, was carrying a photograph of Clara Bauerle, a cabaret singer and German movie actress. Bauerle, who Jacobs said was his lover, had spent two years working in the music halls of the West Midlands, and spoke English with a Birmingham accent. Consequently, Jacobs said that she had been recruited as a secret agent by the Nazis, and was to have been used in the Midlands area. The name Clara Bauerle does not trip easily off of an English tongue, and it seems that she was colloquially known as Clarabella, or Bella. Bauerle was born in 1906, making her the right age for the dead woman, and more significantly, there are no recordings, movie appearances or live performances credited to her after 1941. Josef Jacobs is known to history as the last person to be executed at the Tower of London. He was shot by a firing squad on 15th August 1941. Could the spy ring Bauerle was involved with, have regarded her association with the captured Jacobs as an untenable risk, necessitating her disposal?

 

Clara Bauerle

 

Now I know what you are thinking. This should be an easy one to resolve in the twenty first century. Simply obtain samples of DNA from living relatives of the two women, and compare them to DNA from the remains of the dead woman. There is, however, a problem. The skeletal remains are missing! It seems that after the post-mortem, they were passed to a colleague of the pathologist at the University of Birmingham, to enable further tests to be carried out, but no records exist of what happened to them after that.

 

Perhaps, somewhere in the storerooms of the University, there is a box containing old bones, with the name Bella scribbled on it. Or maybe she was quietly laid to rest in a local cemetery. Whatever the current location, if her remains could be found, it might be possible to finally reveal the identity of the woman in the tree. However, even if Bella’s bones were to be rediscovered, after the passage of more than seventy years, the vexing question would still remain; who put Bella in the wych elm?

 

Sources:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/is-this-the-bella-in-the-wych-elm-unravelling-the-mystery-of-the-skull-found-in-a-tree-trunk-8546497.html

http://theunredacted.com/the-hagley-woods-mystery-bella-in-the-wych-elm/