This week: Who put Bella in the wych elm? Edited by: Arakun the Twisted Raccoon  
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Quote for the week:
"Mystery spread its cloak across the sky
We lost our way
Shadows fell from trees
They knew why"
~From "House of Four Doors" by the Moody Blues |
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On April 18, 1944, four young boys were looking for bird nests and eggs in Hagley Wood in Worcestershire, England when they came upon an enormous wych elm tree. A wych elm is a tree of the species Ulmus glabra and is also called a Scots elm. The name comes from the Old English word wice, possibly meaning "plant" or "supple."
The boys thought the big tree might be a good place to find bird nests, so one of them climbed it. When he looked down into the hollow trunk, he was horrified to see a human skull. Since the boys were illegally trespassing on private land at the time, they went home and agreed not to say anything about it. However, one of them felt guilty and told his parents.
When the authorities came to investigate, they found an entire skeleton inside the tree, minus one hand that was later found some distance away. Along with the skeleton they found a shoe, scraps of clothing, and a gold wedding ring.
The skeleton was sent to Professor James Webster, a forensic scientist at the University of Birmingham. He determined that the skeleton was that of a woman between 35-40 years old, approximately 5 feet tall, and that she may have given birth to at least one child. He believed that the body had been put inside the tree very soon after death, because rigor mortis would have prevented wedging it in the way it had been. He found a scrap of cloth stuffed in the mouth, which led him to believe she had been suffocated. He estimated that she had been dead approximately 18 months.
About six months after the woman's remains were found, someone painted the words "Who put Bella down the wych elm?" on a wall in Upper Dean Street in Birmingham. Other similar messages in the same handwriting began appearing in the area, too, but the writer was never identified. The graffiti artist may have been someone who had knowledge of the crime or just a prankster looking to stir things up.
Police searched records of all known missing persons from the area, but were not able to find anyone who matched the evidence. They also contacted all dentists in the country because the victim had very distinctive crooked front teeth. In spite of all their efforts, the victim was never officially identified.
Several theories about the woman's identity have been put forth. One suggested possibility was a Birmingham sex worker named Bella or Lubella who had disappeared approximately three years earlier. Another theory stated that she might be a Dutch woman named Clarabella Donkers who was rumored to have been killed by a German spy ring because she had found out about their operations. A third theory stated that she might be a German cabaret singer and actress named Clara Bauerle who was possibly trained as a spy. However, Bauerle was said to have been at least six feet tall, and there was no record that she had ever gone to England. In 2016, it was determined that Bauerle had died in Berlin in 1942.
In 1945, anthropologist Margaret Murray proposed that the victim might have been killed as part of an occult ritual called the "Hand of Glory," in which the hand of a felon is reportedly removed after death and enchanted to give the bearer supernatural powers.
In 1953, a woman named Una Massop stated that her ex-husband Jack Massop had confessed that he and another man had placed the woman in the tree after she had gotten drunk and passed out. They had reportedly done thins in hope that she would "see the error of her ways" after she woke up. Jack Massop had been confined to a mental hospital partly due to dreams that a woman was staring at him from a tree. He died in the hospital before the skeleton was found. Police did not take this explanation seriously, because Massop was a mental patient and because Una Massop had waited ten years after his death to come forward.
The task of identifying the dead woman was made more difficult due to the large number of people who had gone missing during and after World War II. Over the years, the bones were stored in several locations and eventually became lost. In February 2018, Dr. Caroline Wilkinson, a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University used photographs to perform a facial reconstruction of the victim which can be seen here:
https://strangeremains.com/2018/04/02/is-this-the-face-of-bella-in-the-wych-elm/...
Something to try: Write a murder mystery in which a character finds a body in an unusual place. |
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Mystery: October 19, 2022 Issue [#11617]
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