Some years ago, I attended a crime writers’ conference at which a panel of experts debated the idea that ‘murder was the only game in town’. Other crimes, like fraud, larceny, blackmail, even grisly ones like grievous bodily harm and rape, do not have the same impact on society.
Murder is also one of the very few human activities that can horrify and delight us. Crime fiction promises delight; true crime gives us horror. We all curl up with a good book or snuggle down in front of the telly and watch Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Sherlock Homes and a host of lesser-known fictional detectives go through their paces. We love nothing better than seeing them arrive at a satisfying conclusion and say to our nearest and dearest – ‘Of course!’ with a click of our fingers. Or, ‘I knew it was him by page five/after the second ad break.’ or, more honestly, ‘Well, I didn’t see that coming.’
But true crime is not like that. Some people are repelled by it. They don’t read books like this one, or watch TV documentaries because they find them too upsetting. Other people cannot actually tell the difference between crime fiction and crime fact.
And that has been the problem I encountered in writing The Hagley Wood Murder: Nazi Spies and Witchcraft in Wartime Britain. I expected a case, cold, it is true, because of the passage of the years, but one in which the facts are spelt out and we can draw various conclusions. What I found instead was a confused mish-mash of ‘faction’, what one historian has called ‘mythistory’, in which ever more farcical and far-fetched ideas are allowed to proliferate because someone, somewhere, did not do their job properly.
As you will read in the pages ahead, four teenaged boys found human remains inside a wych elm in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire in April 1943. There was a war on which meant that newsprint was in limited supply and the details which today would be all over the media, were dealt with scantily. Journalists, however, are journalists, who know what sells papers and they ‘juiced up’ the story of the wych elm to grip their readers. They indulged, as the media still does, in fictions because they had so few facts to go on. Today, because of that, we cannot be sure which of the four boys actually found the body. Nor, because it was destroyed by the police to remove the remains in the first place, do we know exactly where the tree was. Nothing daunted, newspapers photographed another tree labelled ‘Body Found Here’, the first of many fictions that appear.
There was an inquest, as there had to be, in Stourbridge, but there are no newspaper accounts of that inquest, the first and most important part of any murder enquiry. Worcestershire CID then began their enquiries. The effect of the war on constabularies was huge. Hagley Wood lies at the edge of a large and militarily important industrial conurbation centring on Birmingham, the target of serious and sustained bombing raids. ‘Careless talk costs lives’ and the police had to deal with a whole raft of new, paranoid legislation designed to keep Britain safe. It meant that coppers, from the bobby on the beat to the chief constable, were busy as never before and could not give their all to the investigation in Hagley Wood.
What they did – a basic error of humanity – was to latch on to something which was only tangentially relevant. Within months of the body being found, a series of writings appeared on the walls of buildings all over the Midlands – ‘Who put Bella in the wych elm?’ The police wasted hundreds of man hours trying to discover the author/s of these daubings and failed. Would a solution to this have led to detection of the killer? Almost certainly not, but the police pursued it anyway.
The forensics disappointed. There were various tell-tale pieces of evidence – the dead woman’s dentition, her clothes, her shoes – but these led nowhere and the wrong conclusions were drawn. Bella became the established name for the dead woman, although it was certainly not her name, so even that is fiction.
As the case settled into the past and police and press turned to other issues and other problems, no new leads were forthcoming and Bella became part of the folklore of the industrial Midlands.
Then, fiction kicked in again. What could explain the most bizarre body disposal method in the history of true crime? It had to be the supernatural, very much in vogue in the 1950s and in the realms of witchcraft, nothing is real. So much hokum has been written about what is actually an historical and social phenomenon, that a reader has to tread very warily to separate fact from nonsense. Larger than life figures, like the ‘beast’ Aleister Crowley and the ‘wizard’ Gerald Gardner, both of whom would probably be sectioned today, took centre stage. Ask anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Bella case and they will say, ‘She was a witch, wasn’t she?’ That angle appeals to our darkest fears – and again, we are in the realms of fiction. What scared us in the darkness of our nursery years? ‘Ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.’ We shudder; Bella was part of all that.
‘Oh, no, she wasn’t,’ the more rational were saying by the 1960s. This was a wartime case – it had to be to do with espionage. Why else could the dead woman not be traced? Why did no dentist recognize her teeth? Why were there no labels in her clothes? Because she was German or Dutch and had been parachuted into the area by the Luftwaffe to carry out acts of sabotage or at least report back to Berlin on key military installations.
What happens when a journalist, one of those people paid to ‘juice up’ stories, has links with the shady world of espionage? He writes fiction, but I am not talking about Ian Fleming, involved in Naval Intelligence during the war, who went on to create the most famous fictional spy of them all, James Bond. I am talking about a friend of his, Donald McCormick, who wrote the first – and worst – book featuring Bella in 1968: Murder By Witchcraft.
The clue is in the title. McCormick muddies the waters by linking the Hagley Wood case with another murder in nearby Warwickshire four years later. There is no comparison at all between the two, but that did not deter McCormick, who was able to use his spurious espionage connections to invent pure fiction.
And the generation of writers that followed fell for it. The two unrelated cases are linked forever in the public mind and ever-more-lurid ideas emerged, with seances being held at Bella’s possible murder site, novels being written, at least one opera, several folk songs. None of this gets us remotely near to who Bella really was or why she was murdered or who killed her.
In 2005, West Mercia police, as the Worcestershire constabulary now were, declared the case closed. By that time, ‘all persons involved’ (to use police jargon) were assumed to be dead and with the Freedom of Information Act hovering in the background, the facts of the case at last came to light. Speculation and nonsense could now cease and a solution could be found.
Yes and no. The Worcester Archive is chaotic. The inquest is not there; neither is the first part of the police investigation. There is a great deal of duplication which serves no current purpose and a number of articles – letters, reports and photographs – that have no clear relevance to the case. Either the police did not keep all the information and it never reached the files in the first place or it has been removed/lost/misplaced since.
More unforgivably, the remains themselves have vanished. The bones, the shoes, the clothing fragments, which today could provide so much valuable information, are nowhere to be found. They were in the safe keeping of the forensic unit of Birmingham University, but they are no longer there; neither is the information relating to the burial of the bones. Bella has disappeared for a second time. The first was after her murder some time in the summer or autumn of 1941; the second had probably already happened by 1978.
And into the mix of lost evidence, poor quality original photographs and fanciful storytelling, comes that melting pot of confusion, the Internet. What ought to be a storehouse of information, unparalleled in history, is a disastrous mess, where anybody can post any nonsense they like in pursuit of a pet theory. So you can listen to excerpts from Simon Holt’s opera on Bella, but you cannot find out who she was. You cannot even find out very much about Professor James Webster, who carried out her post-mortem, even though he was a Home Office pathologist, one of the most distinguished men of his generation.
For too long, the story of Bella in the wych elm has been shrouded in mystery, made worse by anecdotes without sources, pamphlets written and published by well-meaning amateurs.
Have I, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple-style, solved the case? And can we now, at last, put the shade of Bella to rest?
You’ll have to decide that for yourself.