With the full-blown cynicism for which McCormick became famous, he ends Murder By Witchcraft with ‘As to the crime at Lower Quinton, I am convinced that witchcraft was a motive, although the murderer was neither a witch, nor a warlock. I do not pretend to have solved the crime [!] but I think I know who did it.’

If the whole sorry muddled story had ended there, we could write it off as a book for its time. For some, the 1960s was the end of civilization as we knew it. McCormick cites a tenuous link between Medieval witchcraft and ‘the LSD cult of today’. By 1968, Hammer horror films were in their heyday and they have been superseded by a whole industry devoted to hapless teenagers from America’s west coast who will persist in going unarmed and unprepared into lonely (usually haunted) cabins in the wilderness where they encounter (Shock! Horror!) a homicidal maniac with a machete. In these schlockers, nobody goes to a motel unless it is run by Norman Bates of Psycho fame. Nobody carries a gun for self-defence, despite the huge number of Americans who own them. Nobody even switches on a light in a darkened building they do not know at all.

This is, of course, good old-fashioned ‘entertainment’ and the human mind is notorious for being able to separate fact from fiction. Teenaged slasher movies are not real; the blood is fake; the victims get up again once the director yells ‘Cut!’ The reality, of course, is horrendous. Recently in the tragic shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a B-feature Western, the shock and grief is unimaginable. This time, the blood was not fake. And nobody got up just because it was a ‘wrap’.

In 2009, author Paul Newman trod McCormick’s road with his Under the Shadow on Meon Hill, again linking the Lower Quinton and Hagley Wood murders. He is absolutely right when he says:

Those drawn to the supernatural have poured a great deal of what they know into both murders and, as a result, they are now part of the Gothic-Nightmare heritage of the British Isles: half fact, half fable, standing beside films like The Wicker Man and the legends of Springheel Jack, Sawney Beane and Jack the Ripper. This disconcerting underworld has its roots deep in the national identity, the underbelly of empire, where shadows of violence, torture and oppression lurk …

As with McCormick, Newman tackles the Lower Quinton crime first, with some first-rate observations wholly missing in Murder By Witchcraft, then, on page 77 comes ‘Who Killed Bella?’ Unlike McCormick, Newman gives a credit to the infamous Bella sketch with its labels and unlikely hairstyle. He says it is a ‘police reconstruction of Bella’. This I doubt. It seems to have appeared first in an edition of the Birmingham Mail in 1968, which of course was the year of McCormick’s book. Who actually commissioned this work is unclear, but it is a wholly misleading piece of art in terms of identification and is still trotted out today by almost everybody (see Chapter 16).

In Newman’s version, we have the dialogue used by McCormick, for instance, in the police visit to the woman with the lost identity card which I demolished in Chapter 5. And we have the often-reproduced photograph of the hand of glory which of course is not Bella’s and comes from a different (usually uncredited) source altogether.

What Newman does well, apart from criticising McCormick, is to plot the direction that the Hagley Wood case has taken since the 1960s. He quotes composer Simon Holt who has written an opera Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? which premiered at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in June 2003, ‘Bella’s macabre story has become part of local mythology in South West Birmingham. Everybody has their own angle on who or what she was.’3 The composer saw a group of lads adding to the graffiti on the base of an obelisk on Wychbury Hill. It was probably they who changed the spelling from ‘wych’ to ‘witch’, making or missing the point, depending on one’s point of view. In his opera, Holt calls one of the skeleton-finders Matty after one of these lads but immediately falls into a McCormickesque trap of misinformation. ‘… a name I would use for the boy who had been the first to discover “Bella’s” body down the tree: he would soon die after from the shock and birds’-nesting would never be the same again for the other two boys.’ The boy who died, later in the 1940s, was Frederick Payne and the cause was not shock but kidney disease. Nor was he the first to find the body; Bob Hart was. And there were not two other boys, but three. Minor points, perhaps, but important when it comes to research into murder.

In The Children’s Crusade (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) author Gary Dickson makes a distinction between history and what he calls mythistory. History is based on evidence and facts and draws conclusions from that. Mythistory is based on anecdotes, folklore and supposition. It is usually more satisfying, rather like a crime novel, in which loose ends are tied up by the final chapter and the perpetrator brought to book. This is what has happened with Bella, except that we still have no answers. She was a witch, wasn’t she? Wasn’t there something about spying? A Dutchman? A trapeze artist? The myths swirl around us partly because well-meaning, honest and talented people like Simon Holt use their fertile imaginations to weave something new out of the tangle of the old. And most members of the public do not know the difference. Because of that, I am sure that Simon Holt was right when he says, ‘Poor Bella, whoever and wherever you are – rest in peace. You have become more vivid to us in death than you possibly ever could have done in life.’4

And, in the ‘sillier stories’ folder, the shadow of haunted Meon Hill spreads further. Paul Newman quotes David Taylor, head of Parasearch, a paranormal research unit who visited the Badgers Sett pub in Hagley (called the Gypsy’s Tent in the 1940s) as a boy. In the 1970s, the ‘full monty’ of paranormal activity occurred there – cold spots, telekinesis, doors opening and closing by themselves. This was a manifestation by ‘Bella’, a former barmaid who may have ended up in a wych elm nearby. What the staff did not tell Taylor was that such manifestations long predated the body in Hagley Wood and were linked to the second Civil War, in the vague proximity of the Battle of Worcester, 1651.

Towards the end of Under the Shadow of Meon Hill, Newman wanders into supernatural irrelevance such as the occultist Cecil Williamson, Elizabeth I’s ‘mage’ Dr John Dee, ritual sacrifice and the ramblings of the opium addict Thomas de Quincy, who wrote ‘On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts’, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, in 1827. After all Newman’s common sense and shrewd observations on the Hagley Wood murder, in the end, he plumps for mythistory, continuing our international obsession with ‘things that go bump in the night’.

That insane playground of misinformation, the Internet, has only made matters worse. In the past, as is clear from Bella’s case, such casual mishandling of the truth was the domain of ‘red-top’ journalists, intent on a good story to boost sales. With the Net, everybody and his wife is at it. Scores of websites devoted to Bella regurgitate the witchcraft/espionage elements as if they are proven fact. One American website has Bella’s bones being distributed by a possum, an animal that has never existed in Britain. Another refers to the notorious tree as the wyke elm. In some, there is a lot of dry ice in gloomy glades, absolutely nowhere near Hagley Wood. People chat together in an amateur studio, cracking feeble jokes; they make ‘documentaries’ for Halloween. The podcasts have titles like The Monsters Under Our Bed, Dark Histories, Dark Curiosities and Haunted History. Some presenters wear witch makeup; others carry selfie-sticks. The worst have swathes of bad poetry and excruciating music. I counted nearly a hundred of them. There is at least one film, a 36-minute ‘short’ directed by Thomas Lee Ruther, an ‘enchanting piece of film-making, bound to delight fans of hauntology’ according to one review. Unfortunately, it cannot delight devotees of true crime. Neither could the BBC’s flimsy Radio 4 programme in August 2014, narrated by comedian Steve Punt, which simply regurgitated the paid and conflicted testimony of Una Mossop. Even the much trumpeted 10-minuter fronted by John Stalker, everybody’s favourite senior policeman in the 1980s, was filmed in the wrong wood!

Meon Hill and the spurious nonsense that emanated from the murder of Charles Walton is still casting its shadow, longer and darker than ever. Bella is lost in that darkness.

Chapter 16

The Fantasy Historian

I met Donald McCormick years ago in connection with a project that never came off. Despite his deafness, he was charming company, as was his wife. They were sparkling conversationalists and generous hosts, but McCormick had a tendency, I knew, to make things up. This is fine for a novelist, working long before the idea of ‘faction’ became an established literary convention, but it does not reach the bar necessary for an historian. And, despite the title of this chapter, used by a reviewer of one of his books, McCormick was not an historian; his background lies in journalism, which, as we have seen from various papers commenting on the Hagley Wood case, is a very different animal.

McCormick gave the impression of having been involved in espionage in the Second World War, which he was not. Undeterred, using the pen-name Richard Deacon, he wrote a number of books on the subject. In the preface to one of these, Spy!, written with his long-suffering researcher Nigel West, he says:

It is not without significance that in the jargon of the world of espionage, a spy, Intelligence agent, or even a spy-catcher, is referred to as a ‘spook’ … Their lives are, to some extent, ghostlike. Even if they themselves can be seen, their real purpose must remain unseen. And, like ghosts, they often inhabit a kind of twilight world of their own.

And no one more so, he might have added, than Donald McCormick himself.

His generation of intelligent men, often with a public school and ‘Oxbridge’ background, dominated the corridors of power in the 1940s and 1950s, as the SS’s Walter Schellenberg had noted in his Black Book – 1 per cent of British society controlling 80 per cent of it. McCormick was not quite of that breed. He attended Shrewsbury, a minor public school that had produced the First World War poet Wilfred Owen, but did not go on to university, let alone ‘Oxbridge’. Whether this gave him a chip on his shoulder, I do not know, but he mixed with the elite whenever he could. One of his closest friends was genuinely involved in espionage – Ian Fleming of Naval Intelligence and creator of the most successful spy franchise of all time, James Bond. Another was Dennis Wheatley, tasked by the Secret Service in Whitehall to write a blueprint for a successful invasion of Britain in 1940 from the Nazi viewpoint. He went on to write ever-more-lurid tales of the occult, many of which were turned into films.

I first came across McCormick’s work in The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959) when several of the Whitechapel murderer’s crime scenes were still (just about) standing. The man knew what sold books and the Ripper crimes have spawned an entire industry proffering solutions to the world’s most famous unsolved murders. In one of the better books to emerge from this, Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner produced Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell in 2001. They include a chapter called ‘The Mysteries of McCormick’ which is written by Evans alone because he and Skinner could not agree on the extent to which McCormick made his research up. I know both authors personally and have the highest regard for them both, but in this instance, I have to side with Stewart!

To be fair to McCormick, he was writing at a time when sources were not deemed that important and a certain amount of licence was acceptable. His real problem, though, was lack of training. He did not have the rigorous discipline of an historian and most people were happy to take journalese with a pinch of salt as long as it was not actually libellous. The Identity of Jack the Ripper was acclaimed at the time but has since been totally discredited. It includes dialogue, which is a highly debatable literary form in true crime and the rhyme that begins ‘Eight little whores with no hope of Heaven, Gladstone may save one; then there’ll be seven’ has been found nowhere other than in McCormick’s book.

And it was not just in the world of Ripperology that the man went overboard. In Hayek: a Collaborative Biography Part III (Palgrave MacMillan 2014), editor Robert Leeson describes McCormick as a fraud. He cites a (very short) list of McCormick’s admirers – Terence Hutchinson, Professor of Economics from the University of Birmingham and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Trevor-Roper’s own legacy lies in tatters today because he believed the clearly fraudulent Hitler Diaries to be genuine. The list of detractors (Leeson calls them McCormick’s ‘victims’) is much longer. Arthur Pigou was president of the Economic Society and founder of the ‘modern market failure school’ with a Cambridge background. John Maynard Keynes was also a Cambridge man, a neo-classical economist who was the government’s go-to adviser in the 1920s and 1930s. Rudolf Peierls, John Habbakuk, Wilfred Noyce and Raymond Carr were all academics with impeccable records; McCormick had a pop at them all. Among many other detractors was the historian E.P. Thompson, who described McCormick’s The British Constitution as ‘warmed-up fourth-rate crap’.

Leeson sums up McCormick’s skills brilliantly – he was ‘a failed fiction writer; his prose is both flowery and plodding. Yet when disguised as non-fiction it is sensational.’ He was a full-time journalist on The Times and also wrote regularly for the Spectator and Encounter. His output was prodigious, ranging from The Talkative Muse in 1934 to The Life of Ian Fleming, 1993. He wrote Erotic Literature: a Connoisseur’s Guide in 1992 and, perhaps most tellingly of all, Taken For a Ride: the History of Cons and Con-men in 1976.

In the 1950s, he was focusing largely on murder, including a load of tosh on the con-man Maundy Gregory as an unlikely killer and the pre-Victorian pot-boiler the Red Barn Mystery where he claimed to have found new evidence. The 1960s were largely dominated by books on espionage. A right-wing Conservative, many of his sources originated with The News of the World, a now defunct newspaper that specialized in shock horror tales of sex scandals, ’orrible murder and UFOs. Shortly before his death, he sold his private papers, at auction, to Ian Sayer; it would be fascinating to know what, if anything, he has to say on the Hagley Wood case.

Why is all this important? Why have I spent the last three pages devoted to just one of the writers on Bella? Because some books are important and assume an influence far beyond their actual worth. When Peter Benchley’s Jaws first hit the bookshops (and even more so when the film came out) seaside towns were seriously hit by the timidity of American bathers. The cause of the great white shark was put back decades. On a more serious note, Harriet Becher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is revered today as a blow struck against the evils of slavery. In fact, Mrs Becher Stowe had never seen a slave nor set foot on a plantation. The work was fiction. When the president, Abraham Lincoln, met her, he said, ‘So you’re the little woman who has caused this great war of ours.’ He was not wrong.

Because Donald McCormick was the first writer to produce a full book (or rather, less than half a book) on the Hagley Wood case, he has assumed a central role which has done considerable damage to the researches of those of us who have followed. Paul Newman (Under the Shadow of Meon Hill) is wise to him, but other writers – and, more importantly, readers – are not. Throughout this book I have tried to point out the areas where McCormick is clearly sailing by the seat of his pants, but he is a clever writer and would have us believe that he is making various assertions more in sorrow than in factual accuracy. He is plain wrong on the number of boys who found the bones and the time of day that this took place. He claims that one of the lads died from shock at the find; this is not true. He invents dialogue between the boys. In reality, we have no idea what was said. He claims that Professor Webster set up Sheffield’s first forensic science laboratory in 1929 although there is nothing about this in the man’s record. McCormick claims that a mannequin was produced, complete with wig and clothes with the correct height. If so, there is nothing of this in the Worcester Archive and, as ever, McCormick does not give his sources.

We have the story of the anonymous woman’s identity card and that she was interviewed by police in an equally anonymous Midlands town. We even have dialogue from the police interview with her, though none of this exists in the police files. There is the story of the anonymous teacher and industrial executive hearing screams in Hagley Wood in July 1941 which had been reported to the police. If it had, the report is not there any longer and the original files make no reference to it – ‘Eight little whores …’

McCormick claims to have insight into the police mindset. They rejected, he says, the idea that Bella was a ‘street walker … lured by car to her death’. He does not explain why. They dismissed the idea, too, that the woman was a gypsy, largely because gypsies expel troublesome women rather than kill them. This predisposes that Bella was the victim of some sort of Romany judicial process, not that a psychopath had met her. The police warmed to the notion, McCormick said, that Bella may have been a temporary refugee from the bombing of nearby Birmingham and perhaps her killer was too. This may have been discussed at the various CID conferences referred to in the Archive, but if so, such a discussion was not entered into the minutes.

‘But why was it?’ McCormick asks, ‘that shortly after the murder of Charles Walton, the police took another look at the files of the Hagley Wood case?’ The answer is that they did not, as McCormick probably knew full well. There was a flurry of activity in 1944 because of the wall writings and again in 1953/4 because of the emergence of Anna’s story. Claiming disingenuously that ‘to this extent the murder of Bella had a slight resemblance to that of Charles Walton’ is good old-fashioned McCormick wishful thinking.

Hagley Wood, McCormick contends, ‘had the reputation of being the haunt of witches’ covens and also there was an ancient tradition that the spirit of a dead witch could be imprisoned in the hollow of a tree and thus prevented from wreaking any harm in the world’. There is no evidence of covens in Hagley Wood. All writers on the occult in the twentieth century claim that the new witchcraft movement which would morph into Wicca was urban, not rural and the hollow tree is the kind of detail that McCormick relished. In various Iron Age burials, including the ‘bog people’ of Denmark, branches of trees have clearly been laid criss-crossed over corpses, presumably to pin their souls to the earth. But this is only an informed assumption, and it never consists of an entire tree.

It is in the context of Dr Margaret Murray that I find McCormick’s behaviour most reprehensible. He wrote Murder By Witchcraft five years after the Egyptologist’s death and we only have his word for her views on Hagley Wood, Meon Hill and the conversations between them. We can accept Dr Murray’s articles in various newspapers because they are a matter of public record, but the casual chats he had with her may never have happened at all. Certainly, she makes no mention of either McCormick or Hagley Wood in her autobiography My First Hundred Years. She went to Hagley, he says, but there is nothing about her in the police files. McCormick’s quotations from her are extensive, reading either like a written report or perhaps a telephone conversation taken down in shorthand. Either way, McCormick, as ever, does not give his sources. Instead, he wanders off for four pages into child sacrifice, citing the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Marquis de Sade and the alleged1 child-killer Gilles de Rais, none of whom has any connection with Bella; but they sell books!

McCormick then focuses on the Hagley Wood victim’s right hand, claiming that Dr Murray probably believed that its burial away from the tree was proof of a witchcraft connection. He waxes lyrical about the magic hand featuring in West Indian voodoo and African cultures as often as it does in Britain. He quotes, inevitably, the ‘hand of glory’ and a 200-year-old murder case he had read in that tome of scholarship and authenticity Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book (1936) ‘Dr Murray had insisted that there was evidence that ghoulish rites were performed in secrecy on dark nights in remote parts of the Midlands and that they included devil-worship.’ This does not sound like the same sensible, sceptical academic who said that the Hagley Wood murder had ‘possible’ occult connotations.

When it comes to fantasists like George Elwell, McCormick is again less than honest. He says that, in his self-imposed trance, the railway clerk names Bella’s killer, but there is no such name in the police files. In the case of Anna of Claverly, we have already noted the mysterious ‘far out in the country’ meeting place between her, her friend, Quaestor and a policeman. Clearly, McCormick had no idea where this was and he is happy to go along with Quaestor’s overblown journalese because that was the sort of style he himself used. On the question of Bella’s shoes, we only have McCormick’s word that all but four pairs were traced, even though the enquiries are covered at length in the Worcester Archive. Similarly, of the 200 or so missing women in 1943, all but twelve were traced, alive and well; again, no hint of these in the police files.

We then come to the most ludicrous part of McCormick’s research – the ease with which he traces wartime records in both the Netherlands and Germany. He glosses over this with five pages describing the espionage situation as it was in 1939–41, throwing in Rudolf Hess and his flight to Scotland and establishing an agent – Lehrer – who appears in no one else’s account (‘eight little whores …’) and whose name is obtained from a Nazi in hiding in Paraguay. And he is disingenuous in the extreme when he says ‘In my quest for the truth about the Hagley Wood crime, I had allowed myself to be lured into a blind alley and all I had to show for my pains was a sub-plot in the whole story, an interesting digression, but little more.’ In fact, it is clear that McCormick, having rejected witchcraft as a motive, is making espionage the plot, not the sub-plot – and he has just spent nine pages delineating it. And the next line does not sound like Donald McCormick at all – ‘I was no professional detective and where professionals had failed, how could I hope to succeed?’ How indeed!

McCormick admits that he did not link Hagley Wood with the murder of Charles Walton, yet by placing them together in the same book and discussing the witchcraft angle in both cases, he is doing just that. He concedes at one point:

The problem when an author tries to be an amateur detective is that he is apt to become too interested in playing with ideas and in the purely literary aspects of what he discovers. Shrewd as he may flatter himself to be, the subconscious mind will too often draw him from facts to fantasy.

And despite that, in the middle of the chapter on Charles Walton’s watch, he plunges into Aktion Hess, Fraulein Dronkers and Jan Willem Ter Braak which I believe had nothing whatever to do with Bella.

His conclusion, limp and wrong though it is, is that Bella ‘probably was Clara, alias Fraulein Dronkers’ and that ‘only Fraulein Dronkers’ dentist could prove that.’

McCormick’s evidence does not add up in Murder By Witchcraft any more than, according to others, it did in any of his books. As to Bella’s killer, he merely falls back on the inquest verdict – ‘murder by person or persons unknown’.

Chapter 17

Case Closed

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.