Hagley is a village of less than 8,000 people, but its history is long and its claim to fame a rather macabre one.
The earliest evidence of human presence in Hagley comes in the form of Wychbury Ring, a large circular mound which is all that remains of a hill fort dating back to the Iron Age.
It takes its name from its location on Wychbury Hill, a large hill that is home to a grove of 28 ancient yew trees. It’s also home to Wychbury Obelisk, a listed monument originally built as a family memorial in 1758 by Lord Lyttelton who, around the same period, constructed the nearby Hagley Hall.
Wychbury Hill has become a popular meeting spot for Pagans, particularly around Samhain, due to it’s Yew grove. The “Wych” in Wychbury has its roots in the Saxon kingdom of Hwicce and shares completely different etymological roots than witchcraft. The homophone is just a happy coincidence.
Bizarrely, neither of these words has anything to do with the tree species Wych Elm, which traces its roots back to an Old English word. And, coincidentally, Hagley Hall is home to a large Wych Elm tree, which brings us to the mystery that has haunted Hagley for eighty years.
On April 18th, 1943, four teenage boys, Bob Farmer, Thomas Willets, Robert Hart, and Fred Payne, were hunting for small game and trespassing on the land of Lord Cobham, who now owned Hagley Hall. The boys came across the Wych Elm tree, which caught Farmer’s attention when he saw a bird flying out of it and thought it might be home to a nest from which they could swipe a couple of eggs.
Farmer climbed the tree and peered inside into the hollow trunk where he saw not a nest but what looked to be an animal skull.
When the boys retrieved the skull from the tree they saw its teeth and tufts of brown hair stuck to the bone and it became clear that it wasn’t animal at all but a human skull.
The boys returned the skull to the tree and made a pact to never tell anyone what they’d seen. The pact was broken a few hours later when a nervous Willets confessed what had happened to his parents, who alerted the police.
Within the tree, police found an almost complete female skeleton, complete with fragments of clothing, a gold wedding ring, and a shoe. The only part of the skeleton missing—a hand—was ultimately found broken and scattered near the tree.
A forensic examination revealed that the woman had likely been dead for at least eighteen months, placing her death in or before October 1941. No cause of death could be predicted with certainty, but a piece of fabric found in her mouth suggested that she may have died of suffocation.
The medical examiner, Professor James Webster, said that the body must have been placed in the tree while it was still warm, and was clear in his belief that the woman died as a result of murder. He suggested that she must have been killed nearby in order for the killer to move her to the tree before rigor mortis set in.
Other details found from examination of the body were that the woman had brown hair, stood around five feet tall, had given birth to at least one child, and died in her mid-thirties.
Police searched through many missing person reports and appealed to dentists all over the country for help in identifying the body, but their search would prove fruitless and the body in the tree would remain unidentified.
The next development came in 1944 when two pieces of graffiti appeared in the Midlands, both within driving distance of Hagley Hall.
The first read “who put Luebella down the wych elm?” and the second, which police suspected was written by the same hand, read “Hagley Wood Bella.”
This graffiti gave a name to the victim but provided no other clues and even the name was completely unverifiable.
The only new theory came courtesy of Margaret Murray in 1945. Murray was, among many things, an anthropoligist and folklorist who, in 1898, became the first female lecturer of archaeology in the United Kingdom.
Murray wrote extensively about witchcraft and her studies had significant influence in the direction of modern paganism, earning herself the nickname “the grandmother of Wicca.”
It was this interest in the supernatural that drove Murray to put forward a theory that so-called Bella was killed as part of some kind of occult ritual.
This theory seems to be based solely on Bella’s missing hand, and on Murray drawing a link between that and the Hand of Glory, a magical artifact said to be possess the power to protect and control others.
Precisely what connected these two things other than the fact that Bella’s hand may have been removed is unclear.
The Hand of Glory refers to an artifact created by severing the hand of a hanged man and pickling it. Often, the ritual requires fat from the body to be formed into a candle and placed in the hand. The hand was typically the left hand, unless it belonged to a man hanged for murder, in which case the hand that committed the crime would be removed and enchanted.
Bella, as far as we are aware, was not a murderer. Nor was she hanged, so why Murray considered her a good candidate for a Hand of Glory ritual is uncertain.
Additionally, there is no evidence at all that the missing hand was intentionally removed from the body. In fact, Bella’s corpse was shielded only by the trunk of the Wych Elm in which she lay and was otherwise exposed to the elements. This clearly took a toll on the body as it was completely skeletonised within eighteen months. It’s also possible that larger animals had been picking at the body—such as the bird that Bob Farmer chased away.
Additionally, the feet and hands are relatively weak joints that become easily disarticulated from a body. It’s really no surprise that after eighteen months left to the elements, Bella’s body would be missing a hand.
But despite the complete lack of evidence, the witchcraft association created by Margaret Murray was macabre and interesting and it caught on in the local community.
The same year that Murray put forth this theory, a man named Charles Walton was murdered not too far away from Hagley in what some have described as a ritual killing.
Murray was stabbed with his own pitchfork and left pinned to the ground with his throat cut. It vaguely mirrored a murder in 1875 when Ann Tennant was killed with a pitchfork. It is rumored that Tennant was killed as she was a practicing witch.
There is, however, absolutely nothing to back up the claims that either of these murders had anything to do with the occult, or that there was any connection whatsoever with Bella in the Wych Elm, and there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Murray was following a real thread of enquiry with her Hand of Glory theory.
The next theory popped up in 1953 when Una Mossop told police that her ex-husband had confessed to her his involvement in the crime.
According to Una, Jack Mossop had been drinking with a friend, known only by his surname, van Ralt, when they met a woman at the local pub who joined them and quickly became drunk to the point of passing out.
Mossop and van Ralt decided to teach her a lesson and play a prank, so they carried the woman out to the old Wych Elm and left her inside it, thinking she would soon wake up in this strange place and learn her lesson.
Jack Mossop was reportedly tormented by nightmares in which a woman looked out at him from within a tree and was ultimately confined to a mental health facility where he died before Bella’s body was discovered.
Again, this theory relies on very little. In fact, there’s nothing at all to back it up beside the testimony of Una Mossop, who parted with Jack on bad terms. The theory also fails to explain the fabric found in Bella’s mouth.
A theory that has gained a lot of attention in this case is that Bella was a German spy. This theory traces its roots back to an anonymous tipster in 1953 who went only by the pseudonym “Anna.”
Anna claimed that Bella was killed for knowing too much about a German spy ring. Two German spies had reportedly landed near Hagley by parachute in 1941 and belonged to this spy ring.
According to Wilfred Byford-Jones, a reporter to whom Anna relayed this information, MI5 were able to verify some aspects of Anna’s story, but were unable to find any trail back to Bella in the Wych Elm.
This theory gained further traction, though, when MI5 declassified a file on a German spy named Josef Jakobs.
Jakobs was born in Luxembourg in 1898 and served in the German infantry in the First World War. Not long after the Second World War broke out, Jakobs joined the intelligence department of the German army.
It was in this role that Jakobs was sent to England on January 31st, 1941. He was flown from the Netherlands to Cambridgeshire with food supplies, £500 British currency, a radio transmitter, and forged identity papers.
What Jakobs’ longterm goals were is unknown as he was captured shortly after his arrival. Having parachuted from his plane, Jakobs broke his ankle on landing and was forced to seek help from two local farmers.
Jakobs was apprehended and it would later transpire that MI5 had already been aware of his impending arrival due to information provided by Welsh double agent Arthur Owens.
On August 15th, 1941, Josef Jakobs was executed by firing squad at the Tower of London. He became the last person to be executed there.
Among Jakobs’ possessions when he was captured was a picture of his lover, German actress Clara Bauerle, who had reportedly been hired as a spy due to her experience performing for several years in the West Midlands, which gave her the ability to speak English in a perfect Birmingham accent.
According to Jakobs, Bauerle was due to fly over and meet him in England, but he was unsure if that trip would still be made when he had failed to make radio contact due to his arrest.
For many years, the whereabouts of Clara Bauerle were unknown and this fuelled speculation that she did arrive in England and was murdered, ultimately becoming Bella in the Wych Elm.
Despite many years of speculation, though, this theory was officially debunked in 2016 when Clara Bauerle’s death certificate was unearthered and revealed that she died of veronal poisoning in Berlin on December 16th, 1941.
Unfortunately, there has been little progress in the case for many decades now. There has been interest in using modern DNA technology to try to shed new light on the murder, but the whereabouts of Bella’s remains are currently unknown.
Upon the death of James Webster, who conducted the post-mortem examination, the remains were gifted to a fellow professor. Where they are now, or have been in the decades since, nobody knows.
Ultimately, none of our theories adequately explain what happened to Bella, or who she might have been. And with the significant amount of time that has passed without new information coming to light–it seems likely that the case will never be solved and will remain a mystery.
The graffiti continues to appear to this day in and around Hagley, always asking the question that will probably never be answered: “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?”
