Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?

We’re back! After a festive celebration and a grapple with illness, today marks the first morbid story of 2022, and I thought I’d kick off the new year with a classic unsolved mystery: Who put Bella down the Wych Elm? That’s not only the title of this particular tale, but also a piece of graffiti that would be scrawled across public monuments across Britain for a number of years. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning…

On 18 April 1943, four teenage boys traipsed through Hagley Woods on the outskirts of Birmingham, a major city of England. The woods were private land, so the boys were trespassing, but Bob Hart, Tom Willetts, Fred Payne and Bob Farmer were willing to break the law to poach a couple of rabbits or pilfer a handful of eggs from a nest. There was a war on, after all – any supplement to their ration-card led diet was worth attracting the wrath of an angry gamekeeper.

It was the promise of tasty bird eggs that motivated Bob Farmer to climb up a particularly dense Wych Elm he had spotted. Despite the name there’s nothing unusual about this type of tree – it’s not named after evil magic spinsters but the old English word for supple, and they’re a native tree to the British Isles. What Bob found embedded in the tree though is less common; after working his prize free, he realised it was not a particularly large egg but a human skull.

Although all the boys vowed not to tell anyone about their discovery, lest they get prosecuted for trespassing, the secret proved too much to bear for Tom Willets. He fessed up to his parents and they called the police. The coppers sealed off the tree and the surrounding era and got to work. They managed to extract the rest of the body from the trunk except for its left hand, the bones of which were found scattered around the tree’s base.

According to an examination from the pathologist in charge, the victim was a woman. She was approximately 35 when she died and had been suffocated with a piece of taffeta fabric, which was found stuffed in her mouth. From the state of decomposition, he estimated that the unidentified corpse had been killed some eighteen months ago, in October 1941. He also reasoned that she must have been murdered close to the tree, because otherwise rigor mortis would have made her body too stiff to fit into the trunk.

The woman had a distinctive jawline – one of her front teeth in the upper jaw was significantly larger than others, creating a pronounced overbite – and police hoped that this would help them identify her and track down her killer. Their hopes went unfounded, however: no one claimed the body, and the police weren’t able to progress with their inquiries.

The case went cold for six months, until a bizarre piece of graffiti was spotted at Christmas time. Scrawled in chalk on the side of an abandoned house in Birmingham was the message: ‘who put Luebella down the wych-elm?’ This message quickly spread across the Midlands and is an early precursor to viral internet sensations, like the similar ‘Kilroy was here’ message favoured by American GIs. As it spread, the message mutated into the phrase ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm’. But who left the original message? Was it possible that someone in the community knew who was responsible for ‘Bela’s’ death? Or was this the killer taunting the police? No one knows.

Over the years several people have come forward with theories as to the nature of her murder. The most outlandish of these was proposed by Margaret Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. Although her academic career officially concerned all things Mummy, Murray was fascinated by the occult and witchcraft folklore in the UK. She claimed that Bela’s left hand being found separated from her body was a significant clue. She hypothesized that a group of satanic or black magic cultists had murdered Bella as part of an occult ritual to create a ‘Hand of Glory’, the baked remains of a human hand with candles made from rendered human fat stuck to its fingers. While the Lovecraft mythos-loving part of me wishes that a cult dedicated to The Black Goat of the Woods is responsible, this is somewhat unlikely. For one, there’s no other sign of any occult ritual, and second it’s said that a Hand of Glory can only be made from the hand of a hanged man – you can’t just cut off a person’s hand, stick it in brine and call it a day. Police put forward a rather more mundane explanation for Bella’s dismembered hand: animals eating it.

Another explanation was offered by writer Donald McCormick in 1968. He claimed that Bella was actually a German spy who had been killed, possibly by the British Secret Service. He pointed out that the photograph of a woman named Clara Baurele was found in the pockets of one Josef Jakobs after he was caught parachuting into the West Midlands. In a declassified British Intelligence dossier, Jakobs said that Clara had parachuted into the Midlands in 1941 but had disappeared before making radio contact. Clara was German, but she had worked as a cabaret performer in Birmingham before the war and had learned to speak English with a Brummie accent. The final clue is perhaps the most exciting: her performing name was ‘Clarabella’, which bares an undeniable resemblance to ‘Bella’ Was the mystery finally solved?

It seemed so… until 2016 when a blog dedicated to documenting the life of Josef Jakobs (who’s historically significant for being the last person executed in the Tower of London) claimed to unearth a copy of Baurele’s death certificate. She had supposedly died in a Berlin hospital from a lung infection in 1942. It’s also been reported that Baurele was 5’ 10” tall, whereas Bella’s remains measured only 5’, so Clarabella was too large to fit down the Wych Elm.

Our final theory comes from local author Keith Swallow. After four years of research, he concluded that Bella was killed by the same person that most women are murdered by: her partner. In this scenario, Bella’s unusual burial site was simply a convenient hiding spot already used by the killer. Swift hypothesises that Bella and her lover belonged to a community of itinerant people, either Romani or Irish Travellers, who later left the area, which would explain why no one in the local community came forward saying they’d noticed someone go missing.

The true identity of Bella still remains unknown, although her death is not forgotten. To this day you’ll still occasionally see the phrase ‘Who put Bella down the Wych Elm’ daubed across a local monument, a graffito memorial to the many disappeared people around the world.