By July 2005, the anonymous murder victim known as Bella had been dead for approximately sixty-four years. In all probability, most of her contemporaries were gone by then. Professor Webster, who had performed the post-mortem on her, died in 1973. Donald McCormick, who wrote the first ever book on her, in 1998. The others are just names on faded documents, typed out on battered typewriters and consigned to brown cardboard boxes. And by that time, with no realistic hope of confirming Bella’s identity or finding her killer, the West Mercia police, as the Worcestershire force had become, decided that enough was enough and shut operations down.
In reality there had been nothing new for years. The odd wall writing would reappear, mostly on the monument on Wychbury Hill, from time to time and journalists, historians and paranormal researchers would produce the occasional article before the creative world of poetry and music took over and Bella became a wandering wraith indistinguishable from the Arthurian Morgana Le Fay or Titania of the Faeries. We need to get back to reality.
The 2005 closure report was written by Detective Chief Inspector I. Nicholls and had been commissioned by his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent T. Abbutt. They were the successors to Williams and Inight who had handled the original case from April 1943:
The purpose of this document is to record the review of the … file which pertains to the investigation surrounding the recovery of the remains of a female from within the naturally hollowed-out trunk of an elm tree located within Hagley Wood adjacent to the main Birmingham to Kidderminster Road … now designated … the A456.1
Nicholls makes an important point in the second paragraph. ‘The nature of the bones missing would induce a presumption that the absence was as a result of wildlife intervention rather than being removed at the time of or immediately after death.’ In other words, there was no ritual dismemberment, no ‘hand of glory’ and, by definition, no witchcraft. To be clear, this had never been part of the original investigation. The first mention of the occult that I have come across is in Quaestor’s version of what Anna/Una Mossop said in 1953 – ‘The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moon night rites’ – and this came about as a result of the new obsession with witchcraft prevalent in the 1950s and the fact that Quaestor had just paid Anna one hundred pounds.
Because of the way the body had been stuffed feet first, Nicholls reminds us, this was certainly a case of murder, echoing the police view of the time that it was neither accidental nor suicide. Oddly, he then seems to backtrack, claiming that because there was no discernible cause of death (Webster, of course, had suggested suffocation) ‘to make the leap to a murder is questionable’. It is a marvellous piece of police double-speak and legalese to claim that ‘in line with the current standards contained within the National Crime Recording Standards (Revised April 2004), specifically the “Balance of Probability” test, the balance is that the individual was subjected to unlawful actions, which led directly or indirectly to death.’ This hedging of bets was clearly designed to allow a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder, as it was impossible, without a bona fide suspect, to confirm motive. Murder has to mean pre-planning – ‘with malice aforethought’ – and since nothing was known about Bella or her last moments, this was not definite.
The ‘Executive Summary’ section noted that the death occurred at the height of the Axis bombing in the area and that the deceased had still not been identified. Her final resting place is unknown. By the 1970s when the shoe factor Mr Cogzell made enquiries at Professor Webster’s laboratory at Birmingham University, the bones had gone. So had Bella’s clothing in that the shoes he was shown were not those retrieved from the wych elm. Nicholls goes on to say that the ‘investigation was skewed by false reports’ which is probably true of any murder enquiry given the unreliable nature of witnesses and some people’s compulsion to get in on the act. These would include Anna of Claverly’s assertions and the rash of wall writing hinting at some arcane knowledge. No more witnesses had come forward after 1953 and the forensic evidence, though at first promising in terms of Bella’s shoes and teeth, had led nowhere. ‘Two potential suspects were identified as a result of information in 1953, one of whom was dead, the other remains unknown.’ This has to refer to Jack Mossop, who died insane in 1942, and the enigmatic and probably non-existent Van Ralt.
Nicholls points up the bizarre background to the case. In the people’s war, ‘death without record’ was far more frequent than in peacetime and the movement of people, especially in the Blitzed industrial Midlands, made police progress difficult.
Particularly galling were the chalk graffiti that appeared over a wide area and Nicholls is gently reproving of the time wasted in this. Although he does not say so, what could the police have hoped to prove by finding the culprit(s)? Anyone can copy a line for any number of reasons and they may well have no actual links to a crime at all.
In terms of missing persons, the 2005 report lists: Mary Lee, aka Wenham, aka Beaver; Bella Tonks; Ann Forrest; Bella Beech; Bella Luer; and Violet Goode. I could find no mention of Goode in the police Archive. Nicholls reports that she was the ‘other woman’ in a domestic breakdown between Thomas (Harry) Truman and his wife Gladys. Truman got back with his wife but there was a suggestion that he had killed Violet (his mistress) to make this rapprochement possible. In fact, Violet Goode was found alive and well in Stourbridge. There is no mention in the report of Billy Gibson, a short woman whose photograph is in the file; this is perhaps because she did not come to light until 1951 and did not feature in the original investigation.
In the section called ‘Line of enquiry not finished’. DI Nicholls includes the tortuous tales of Dinah Curley aka O’Grady (see Chapter 7) and adds the curious addendum: ‘There are on file a number of connections which it would seem prudent not to follow as the basis for the content is at best questionable.’ This presumably refers to the ‘ramblings’ of George Elwell and the offer to meet from A. Wood.
Under ‘Suspects’, Nicholls summarizes the case against Jack Mossop and Van Ralt as outlined by Una Hainsworth. Even though the police file contains an entire folder on Julian Mossop, Nicholls quite rightly discounts him as a suspect; he was only 11 when the body was found. He also makes the comment that ‘Mrs Hainsworth seemingly had some history, as it would appear that the removal from the Kenilworth address left behind considerable debts.’ The inspector was absolutely right that the whole nonsense regarding an espionage connection comes from Anna of Claverly; before that, it did not exist.
Reviewing ‘status of crime’, DI Nicholls makes the point that forensic science has moved on considerably since Professor Webster’s day (although, I contend, not necessarily in the right direction) and today perhaps different conclusions would be reached about the cause of Bella’s death. As Nicholls says, this, without the body in question, gets us nowhere.
The inspector analyses the effectiveness of media appeals and communication strategy. The problem is, and was even in 1953, that such appeals usually bring out what Nicholls euphemistically describes as ‘obsessional theorists’, the oddballs who long to be involved and who seriously hamper police enquiries. We all see ourselves as armchair detectives and some of us are not very good at it. Nicholls applauded the rational, factual documentary approach of the television programme fronted by John Stalker in 1994 and laments that that led to no new leads. In fact, the odds were stacked against it. The Stalker programme was only ten minutes long and it was broadcast over fifty years after the body was found.
Nicholls identifies a number of strategies relating to the case. In the ‘arrest strategy’, the death of Jack Mossop and the inability to find anyone called Van Ralt mean that there are no leads to follow and ‘an arrest is not envisioned’. The ‘search strategy’ would fail too, because any potential offender would probably himself be dead. Without such a person, the ‘interview strategy’ could not happen. In terms of ‘identification strategy’, the obvious development of DNA has effectively revolutionized the search for missing persons and identification of the deceased. Today it would be possible to fix Bella’s identity exactly, as that of Richard III was in 2013; existing members of the Plantagenet family gave samples that could be categorically linked with the bones in the Leicester car park. Without Bella’s body, however, such a line of enquiry cannot happen. Nor can we trace existing members of her family, because we do not know who they are. ‘Extensive enquiries’ to find Bella’s bones have failed, although, as is also true of the murder itself, someone knows, or at least knew. At some point between 1943 and 1978, Bella’s bones disappeared. They did not, of course. Someone in the corridors of science in Birmingham University either threw them away or gave them a decent burial in a pauper’s grave under what is known in police jargon as ‘disposal of evidence’. And that person is not talking.
DI Nicholls lists the formidable array of experts who could today be wheeled in to resolve who Bella was and how she died. Forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, environmentalists, palaeontologists and odontologists all have a role to play. Particularly annoying is the lack of photographic evidence from the crime scene itself. If Superintendent Inight and his team had begun earlier in the day on 19 April 1943 or taken photographs the next day, we might know more. The Worcester Archive has a photograph of the wych elm, showing how low the bole was in connection with the ground. The pollarded branches radiate out from it like the rays of the sun, as one journalist at the time put it, and the early leaves of spring are sprouting from it. The photograph in almost all newspapers and books that followed shows the wrong tree; because Constable Pound had to hack at the wood to get the bones out, it had gone for all practicable purposes by the end of April. This was a pity, because even in 1943, the bark of the wych elm would potentially have had recoverable fingerprints of Bella’s killer.
The photographs of the body are of little help in comparison with the actual bones themselves, although of course they were all that craniofacial expert Professor Caroline Wilkinson of FaceLab had to work with. The first photograph shows Bella’s skull from the left side, which is presumably how Bob Hart had left it that April Sunday eighty years ago. From a different angle, we see the skull, some vertebrae, clothing debris and one shoe. It is not clear where the full-frontal photograph and the right side were taken, but since the bones have not been cleaned and the background suggests undergrowth, this was probably in Hagley Wood itself. We have no idea who took these photographs. Was it Webster himself? His assistant, Dr Lund? One of the police personnel present? There is simply no record.
Another photograph shows Bella’s shoes, of which the original investigation was so hopeful. The laces have gone and they are damaged and bent out of shape, as we might expect from over a year of decay in the wych elm.
Nothing is made in the 2005 report of Bella’s clothes. Bizarrely, the slip and skirt are mocked up using material of approximately the right colour, but the wrong medium. The slip is certainly not taffeta. The cardigan and knickers are drawings, done in coloured crayon and there are two versions of the cardigan, markedly different from each other. Contrary to Professor Webster’s description, both are shown with sleeves.
The conclusion that DI Nicholls reached in 2005 was inevitable:
At this stage with the passage of time, there are no clear investigative leads. If the location of the remains were established, development of the DNA processes has not afforded investigative opportunities. Any person involved, if surviving, would be in excess of eighty years of age [today, of course, mid-90s] and the prospect of a prosecution would be at best remote. I therefore make the following recommendations:
• The case is identified as being closed
• Consideration should be afforded to placing the documentation in the Worcestershire Records Office as an historic document
That duly happened and they lie there, warts and all, in duplicate and triplicate, raising as many questions as they answer. As an Addendum, on 28 July, Nicholls adds: ‘this file has now been declared closed and is not henceforward to be regarded as a live investigation.’
But, for some of us, the investigation is very much alive.