The problem with the case of Bella is that it is full of anecdotes which cannot now accurately be evaluated. We have already come across, courtesy of Donald McCormick in 1968, the anonymous teacher and company executive who heard screams in Hagley Wood in July 1941. But there are others. Paul Newman cites a story told to him by David Taylor, ‘the local parasearcher [paranormal researcher]’ who was approached by an old lady in the Hagley area who remembered, as a young girl, travelling to work by bus in the 1940s. As she passed Hagley Wood, she saw a ‘gypsy’ girl covered in blood being chased by a ‘man with a stick or club’ but she decided to say nothing ‘because it was the war’! This story is so vague as to be useless. Who was this old lady? How old was she at the time? Where was she going and what time of day was this? Above all, what was the date? There is nothing in Professor Webster’s post-mortem to suggest bone damage or any trauma caused by a heavy object. Look again at the damage done to Joan Wolfe’s skull by August Sangret’s silver birch branch. It caused a hole nearly 5 inches long and 1½ inches wide.
In the war itself, little is heard on the national stage of the gypsies. Some, especially those who had intermarried with gorgjos (non-gypsies) served in both world wars. Along with everybody else in 1939, gypsy men were liable to be conscripted. Some fled to Ireland to escape this; others reported to barracks as ordered. As to clothing, the colourful ribbons, jewellery and blackened faces belonged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Descriptions of gypsies and photographs in the twentieth century show no distinction between them and ordinary working-class locals. Some of them, at least, became sedentary, returning to the road from time to time as their fancy dictated.
One of the traditional beliefs, possibly still current in the twentieth century, was that gypsies killed farm animals and claimed their bodies later from their owners. To ensure that the cause of death of a sheep, for instance, looked natural, they would suffocate the animal by forcing wool down its throat. This has echoes in Professor Webster’s assertion that Bella was asphyxiated in a similar way, although we have already discussed the problems with that thesis.
Reports from the nineteenth century have gypsies making cheap jewellery and passing it off as genuine gold. They hammered coins and pewter and made wedding rings out of them which they then sold to a gullible public. Was this the origin of Bella’s wedding ring, worth half a crown? Hardly, because it was stamped ‘rolled gold’ on the inside.
The case of the woman in the wych elm seemed destined to be shrouded in legend and rumour. All that is missing are the facts! Churchwarden Hodgetts blamed the gypsies through ignorance and deep-rooted racism. He believed the gypsies to have their own legal code and that Bella had somehow transgressed against her people. Even in paperwork-obsessed 1940s Britain, it was possible for a traveller to slip through the cracks and disappear. And in one respect only, he may just have been right.
Chapter 10
Anna and the Flying Dutchman
By 1953, Wilfred Byford-Jones had hung up his Home Guard uniform and had become ‘Quaestor’, writing occasional articles for the Wolverhampton Express and Star, adding titbits of second-rate journalese to inject a spookiness into a story that had none in its original form. If anyone is responsible for beginning the nonsense that has been written on the Hagley Wood murder, it is Byford-Jones.
In November a letter arrived on Quaestor’s desk:
Finish your articles re the wych elm by all means. They are interesting to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery. The one person who could give this answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts. The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moon night rites.
As we shall see in a later chapter, 1953 saw the first suggestion of a supernatural solution to Bella’s murder, hence the comments above.
Much as I hate having to use a nom-de-plume [the writer called herself Anna] I think you would appreciate it if you knew me. The only clues I can give you are that the person responsible for the crime died insane in 1942 and the victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall any more.
Intrigued, and obviously scenting a bigger scoop, Byford-Jones contacted the police. Tom Williams was by now a superintendent and doubtless had moved on to other problems but, like Quaestor, he could not leave this one alone. Donald McCormick, without access to police files, adds to the frisson of mystery. Anna was traced but would only talk to the police ‘at a place far out into the country outside Wolverhampton in a waiting room which could be viewed from outside without risk of detection and through which women were passing frequently without the company of men’. She did not want press there, except, it transpired, Byford-Jones and a minimum police presence. Williams took along a policewoman, thin on the ground though they still were in 1953, perhaps to put Anna at her ease. Today, such an interview, without counsel and tape-recording equipment, would contravene the PACE regulations of 1994, but it was standard procedure in the 1950s.
Byford-Jones recorded the essence of what was said, without giving anything away. ‘My lips are sealed,’ clichéd the reporter:
I cannot tell the dramatic story I heard one cold winter’s night in an ancient habitat in the country together with Detective-Superintendent Williams and a woman detective. What I can say is that the details told were most impressive and contained names and that some details about the man concerned were verified by another person who had accompanied Anna.
This person had come out of left field, but he/she was probably there to give Anna moral support. Byford-Jones had assumed when he got Anna’s letter that she was ‘an educated woman of about sixty who was down on her luck’. He admitted he was wrong about that, without telling us why and that the testimony of Anna’s companion was every bit as impressive as Anna’s.
Williams’ comment after the interview was:
I cannot divulge who ‘Anna’ is or where I saw her. The matter is not by any means closed. Inquiries are now to continue through a contact in Holland to see whether there is any likelihood of a Dutch girl of that description being recognized by certain authorities. Inquiries have been made with the assistance of police forces in the Midlands, also in the London area, on the facts disclosed by ‘Anna’.
Persons who knew the man referred to by ‘Anna’ have been identified and interviewed, but none has been able to offer any useful lead to the identification of the victim. ‘Anna’ has been seen again, but she is not able to identify the victim and states that the story she has given was told to her by the person who died insane in 1942.
Williams’ handwritten notes on Anna’s story still exist in the police files. They are undated and it is not clear whether they were taken at the first meeting or subsequent ones. Bizarrely, Williams wrote in green ink (unusual in 1950s police procedure) but from this, it emerges that Anna was actually Una Ellen Hainsworth, formerly Mossop. She lived at Four Acres, Long Common, Claverley, a village near Bridgenorth nearly forty miles from Hagley. Her typewritten statement, undated, runs to two pages. She had married an engineer, Jack Mossop, in 1932 and they lived at the Bridge House, Wombourne, five miles from Claverley. Their only child, Julian, was born in the same year and was, at the time of her statement, ‘somewhere in America’.1 Although this is clearly not in the statement, Julian acquired a police record. The fact that Una had no idea where he was screams unhappy and broken home. In 1937, Jack Mossop joined the Air Service Training Corps as a pilot officer working for the Armstrong Siddeley Works in Coventry and later the Standard Aero Works at Banner Lane in the same city. The couple lived at 39, Barrow Road, Kenilworth, a small town complete with ruined castle, a few miles away in the Warwickshire countryside.
It was in 1940 that a man named Van Ralt came to our home … I believe this man was Dutch and as far as I know had no particular job and I have a suspicion that he was engaged on some work that he did not wish to talk about, but in my opinion it might have been that he was a spy for he had plenty of money and there were times that my husband appeared to have plenty of money after meeting him.
All this is very confusing. If Van Ralt had no job, how had he met Mossop? It could have been a casual pub situation, but this was wartime Britain. Mention 1940 and Coventry to locals even today and they will regale you with folktales of ‘coventration’. In November of that year, the city was pounded in a ten-hour raid that destroyed the city centre including its fifteenth-century cathedral. The Netherlands had recently been overrun by the Wehrmacht, but nobody was naïve enough to believe that every Dutchman was an ally of Britain. In fact, as we shall see, there were two parallel and popular Dutch Nazi parties and they were indeed supplying spies as agents for the Abwehr, the German secret service (see Chapter 11). Did no one find it odd that a foreign national (people who were routinely rounded up) was wandering around the industrial Midlands heartlands, flashing his cash and teaming up with a man who worked for an aircraft production company?
‘In March or April 1941,’ Una went on, Jack came home ‘white and agitated’. It was one o’clock in the morning and he asked Una for a drink. Reluctantly, she poured one for him and he told her that he had been to the Lyttleton Arms with Van Ralt and the ‘Dutch Piece’ who had got awkward. Perhaps it was Jack Mossop’s style to go drinking at a pub twenty miles away, but again, this was wartime; petrol was rationed, signposts had gone, car headlights were dimmed. Were there not pubs in nearby Kenilworth?
According to Una, Jack was driving Van Ralt’s Rover and the Dutch girl sat next to him, with Van Ralt in the back. Suddenly, she slumped against Mossop, presumably passed out with drink. Van Ralt told Mossop to drive to a wood ‘and [he] stuck her in a hollow tree’, assuring his friend that she would come to her senses the following morning.
From then until December 1941when they left Kenilworth, Jack’s mood grew worse. He drank more heavily and appeared to have more money than usual. He was also often off work and Una could not understand where the money was coming from. He had his own car, a Standard, and he would often drive off in it for days.
Una left Jack that December, with no reason given and moved to Henley-in-Arden, where she lived for ten years. ‘We [presumably this refers to her second husband, Jack Hainsworth] lived there for ten years.’ In 1951, they went back to Kenilworth and two years later, shortly before Una contacted Quaestor, to her present address.
Back in 1941–42, she saw Jack Mossop three times ‘after I was forced to leave him’. She was trying to sort out the furniture and on the last occasion he told her that he was ‘losing his mind as he kept seeing the woman in the tree and she was leering at him’. In June 1942, Una heard that Jack had been taken to the ‘Mental Hospital’ in Stafford. He died two months later.
Una told the police that she had no knowledge of the Hagley Wood murder until she read Quaestor’s articles. She was concerned that now that she had married and had three small children, she did not want her name splashed all over the papers. She admitted that she had no proof of anything she had said.
A number of things from Una’s statement should ring alarm bells. The police, no doubt heartened by any scrap of information relating to the murder, would have had no truck with Mossop’s assertion that he and Van Ralt shoved the Dutch girl into the wych elm to sober up, but they may have put her corpse there to avoid an accusation of murder. It was possible to convict without a body – as John George Haigh found to his cost in 19492 – but it was considerably more difficult. Despite the misgivings they must have had, Worcestershire CID contacted the City of Coventry police in relation to the players in Una’s story. Jack Mossop had been born in 1912 in Kenilworth and did a number of factory jobs before starting in the assembly shop at Banner Lane in November 1940. Before the war, he had been discharged from the RAF (why was unknown) and he had worked for two years at the Lockheed factory in Leamington Spa. There is an unexplained complaint made by him in February 1942 of a missing car and driver.
Jack Hainsworth was actually Alfred James Ainsworth and once again we are in the shady wartime world of aliases, however little removed from the truth. He was born in 1917 and worked, like Mossop, in Banner Lane from 3 September 1940 until January 1944 when he was transferred to Aircraft Production at Anstey Aero. He too had been discharged from the RAF in August 1940 (at the height of the Battle of Britain) after four months – again, no reason given. Before that he had been a garage mechanic in Berkswell, Warwickshire and had moved twice while at the Banner Lane works.
Williams also traced Bill Wilson, who lived at 45 Birches Lane, Kenilworth and he made a statement at the end of December 1953. He had known the Mossops well, lodging with them at 39 Barrow Road. He remembered Jack Mossop as a heavy drinker, becoming increasingly unstable and had a lot of absenteeism. The Standard car that he drove was a four-door black saloon model – he and Wilson shared its running expenses. Wilson knew nothing about Mossop’s complaint to the police relating to the car and driver but he told police that Mossop had been invalided out of the RAF after a bad landing in a plane and that he had head injuries.
The only Rover that Wilson knew about was a write-off he and Mossop had bought from a scrap merchant and which they could never get going. He knew nothing about the Lyttleton Arms. Jack Mossop knew lots of people, but ‘foreigners, I don’t think’. The police had clearly given Wilson a vague description of Van Ralt with his expensive car and wads of cash. The only person Wilson could equate with this was a 20-year-old Englishman with bad skin. He worked at Banner Lane and may have been called Vic. Jack was a flirt and would often buy girls drinks – ‘I think they felt sorry for him,’ Wilson remembered, ‘the type of fellow that would not harm anyone … he did not have much backbone.’
Wilson tended to lose touch with the Mossops towards the end; he had noticed increasing moodiness but he put this down to tensions at home. He worked in Baginton, two miles away, while Jack stayed on at Banner Lane and it was from there that he was committed.
From somewhere – remember, the police archives are incomplete – comes ‘Frak or Froak’ – no one of that surname could be found by Coventry police. Elsewhere in the file the names are found, but no explanation is given. On the same day that Wilson was interviewed, DS Murray of Worcestershire CID was reporting on Frick and Frack, a Swiss ice-skating duo who had performed at the Hippodrome theatre in Coventry in 1938. The police had contacted theatrical agent Tom Arnold but he was hazy about them. In fact, by 1953 the pair were very well known. Frick was Werner Groebli; Frack was Hans Mauch and they had gone to the States in 1937 to join the Ice Follies Show. They performed a comedy sketch act wearing lederhosen and were so good that the term ‘frick and frack’ became synonymous with two people being indistinguishable from each other. Bill Wilson was clearly asked something about this because he said he had no knowledge of any ‘theatrical types’ in the context of the Mossops.
As time went on, the dramatic intervention of Anna of Claverley assumed an importance way beyond its bodyweight. The place ‘far out in the country’ was actually the Dick Whittington pub in Stourbridge and the ‘waiting room which could be viewed from outside’ was a snug on the premises. In the midst of all this, the mysterious Dutch girl left in the wych elm to sober up disappears. Una clearly had no idea who she was and the police were hoping that finding Van Ralt would give them some answers. They found two of them.
Bizarrely, Laura van Raalte is listed in the police files as a potential victim (i.e. Bella) but she clearly is not. On 6 January 1954, the chief constable of Nottingham contacted Worcestershire CID with the information that Laura Frances Ryllis van Raalte had been the subject of police correspondence before, in fact in the ‘Spitfire Summer’, August 1940. She was born in London to German parents in 1899, had a home address in Golders Green and was lodging in All Saints Street, Nottingham. She had been a teacher since 1936, employed to teach German at Mundella Grammar School in the city. Since she had held seven teaching posts between that and May 1940, we are entitled to doubt her teaching abilities. In that month, an anonymous letter accused her of teaching the German national anthem to her charges. May 1940 was the month that Winston Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Europe was reeling from the speed of the Blitzkrieg advance of General Heinz Guderian and his panzers and a shattered British Expeditionary Force was limping back from Dunkirk; perhaps it was not the best time to get British girls singing Deutschland Uber Alles!
Fraulein van Raalte seemed determined to draw attention to herself. On 17 August she wrote to the chief constable of Worcestershire telling him that she was staying in Malvern for a week (the school holidays) and she wanted a guide book for walking and touring purposes.
The anonymous letter ‘fingering’ van Raalte is in the Archive. She is described as ‘M. Van Ralty (an alien) … I am sure you will realise that [teaching the German national anthem] is a gross insult to girls whose brothers and fathers are at the present moment faced with grave peril from our enemy.’ There were threats to contact the Home Office and have her imprisoned. Since van Raalte clearly stopped the exercise and behaved without suspicion during her stay in Malvern, no further action was taken. Clearly this van Raalte has no links with Hagley Wood or the Mossops, despite the fact that she stayed briefly in Worcestershire on her holiday.
The only other van Raalt was Marius Pieter (the right gender at least!) who came to Britain in 1948. The police could find no record of employment and assumed that he was simply a tourist. His passport had been issued at Leiden in October of that year and he could not possibly be the Van Ralt that Una Mossop claimed to know.
Days after Superintendent Williams had spoken to Bill Wilson, he wrote to the police with more information. The Vic he remembered was tall and fair with a surname Draco or Drarco. He drove several cars and one of them could have been a Rover but he worked at Banner Lane throughout the war and Una Mossop would not have confused him with anyone named Van Ralt. Then again, Bill Wilson himself referred to Vic as an Englishman, when, certainly by the sound of his name, he was not.
