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.
Chapter 18
The Raggedy Rawney
For eighty years, we have been haunted by Bella in the wych elm. That is because we do not know who she was and without that basic information, we cannot hope to find her killer.
What do we know? For all DI Nicholls’ careful approach in 2005, not wishing to jump off the fence between murder and manslaughter, there is no doubt in my mind that Bella was murdered ‘with malice aforethought’. The fact that no one came forward to report her missing, even in the disjointed, nightmare world of the Second World War, is very telling. So is the fact that her clothing had no labels other than a code number in her shoes. The shoes were relatively expensive; the rest of her clothing was not. Despite the poor sketches in the police file, her cardigan had no sleeves; her skirt was too long for her. And that, surely leads to an obvious conclusion; Bella was wearing somebody else’s clothes. They were not the product of some European tailor/haberdasher under the yoke of Nazi oppression, the clothes worn by a spy. They were home-grown; home-made. Only the shoes told a different story.
Bella was indeed, as Superintendent Inight had said back in 1944, ‘a victim from another world’. But it was not the world of witchcraft. Or the world of wartime espionage. She was not known in the area or someone, surely, would have come forward as a relative or friend. She must have been born somewhere, been to school, held down a job. Born, yes, obviously. But school, I doubt it, at least on a regular basis. And I believe she did have a job, but it was one that was not considered respectable and was fraught with danger. When journalist Simon Askwith was working on a Bella-related article for The Independent in 2003, he met two octogenarians ‘out for a stroll, who told me that they thought she had probably been “on the game” as they put it. They laughed uneasily when I asked them if they had known her personally.’1 If Askwith was right about the ages of the couple, they would have been in their twenties during the war and might, indeed, have remembered Bella. The police, of course, considered the idea that Bella was a prostitute. The night job (although it is carried on in broad daylight too) is arguably the most dangerous in the world. The victims of Jack the Ripper and nearly all the victims of the ‘Blackout Killer’ Gordon Cummings and the creepy landlord John Christie, were prostitutes. But the police files offer little in the way of evidence in the pursuance of this line of enquiry. There are vague references to a woman who plied her trade on the Hagley Road and a letter discussing ‘women of this sort’ but there is no information on any interviews and no names or addresses. For that, and to find out who Bella really was, we have to go south from the Midlands, to the capital of prostitution as it was of the country; we have to go to London.
In 1954, when Bella had been dead for thirteen years, ex-superintendent Robert Fabian went into print with London After Dark, a fascinating glimpse of vice in the world’s second largest city. Fabian had been in charge of Scotland Yard’s Vice Squad – ‘the dirty mob’ – for years and knew all the ins and outs of the trade. At the centre of the ‘game’ was Soho, then, and for years afterwards, the heart of street prostitution and grubby little shops that flashed ‘Strip-Tease’, ‘Girls’ and ‘Books’. ‘Soho,’ wrote Fabian, ‘is not so much an area you could work out as an atmosphere that pervades part of the West End.’2 The Vice Squad had a ledger that contained the names of every known prostitute in the capital:
Their phony names and genuine names, ages, photos, descriptions, habits, weaknesses, regular cronies and haunts – even the names of their sorrowing, respectable relatives … We did a fairly sound job of checking upon the movements of the ‘regulars’ and noted when they left Town for a week-end or a brief holiday abroad. This we did in case they never came back. Being murdered is one of the risks that a prostitute takes in her trade.
I believe that one of these was Bella, but she had not gone to Hagley Wood for a weekend or a holiday. She was going home. And she was trying to escape.
In April 1936, the banner headline in the News of the World asked ‘Is There a “Jack the Strangler” At Large?’ There had been two murders of prostitutes, described coyly in the paper as of ‘uncertain virtue’, both in Soho, between 4 November 1935 and 16 March 1936. Before that, on 8/9 May 1935, the body of Dutch Leah (actually a British woman) was found in her Old Compton Street flat with her tongue slashed, perhaps, the media speculated, because ‘she knew too much’. The November murder had been of ‘French Fifi’ (actually a Russian woman).
The women were linked with the ‘Brigade of Iron’, an underworld gang of pimps and prostitutes headed by Latvian Max Kassel from Riga, whose people included charmers with the street names Coco the Animal, Mariot of the Big Eyes, Albert the Arab, Bibi the Bitter and Titi the Big-Footed. Although this group sounds like characters from a radio comedy show, like the much-later Beyond Our Ken or Round the Horne, they were real-life gangsters and their molls that make television’s Peaky Blinders look like the fiction it is. It is likely that these names were in the Vice Squad’s ledger, as well as the personal notebook that Bob Fabian carried in his pocket.
In its 23 May 1936 edition, the journal John Bull read:
Soho is the place, for its area has a worse record for blood or violence and for darker forms of vice than any other in Great Britain … Decent, hard-working, clean-living foreigners … living cheek by jowl with the scum of continental gutters … And now the mixture is getting too strong for anybody’s taste.
Kassel himself was shot dead in Little Newport Street, Soho in January but that did nothing to stamp out the increasing vice in London. Chief Inspector Frederick Sharpe, who was leading the Kassel murder case, described him as ‘a very small-time ponce who lived on the earnings of one woman’. Kassel was found in a ditch near St Albans with six bullets in his body and, at the time of his inquest, two people were awaiting trial in France over his death. Kassel had died in a fight in the London flat, but his body had been taken by car to St Albans in an attempt to distance the crime from the people involved. Another hard-bitten detective, Fabian, had nothing but contempt for pimps like Kassel:
Many men in London live upon the immoral earnings of prostitutes. The name for such men is ‘Ponces’ or ‘Johnsons’ and they are the lowest form of animal life on the criminal scale, although you might not think so to look at them, for they can – when business is good – dress quite expensively and are often surly, determined-looking types … well able to look after themselves in a fight.
He speculates on the background of the pimps, ‘Some are army deserters [especially in wartime] but more often they are born into the underworld of London and know its warrens and its devices and its strange language, as a skilled gamekeeper knows the secrets of copse and hedgerow.’
What is interesting about the murder of Kassel, Dutch Leah and the others is the press’s xenophobia. Blithely ignoring the fact that prostitution in London was centuries old, they blamed it all on foreigners, like Kassel and Dutch Leah, despite the homeliness of her birth. The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene attributed the growing problem to Europeans on London’s streets. The police themselves, charged with coping with it all, pointed to ‘marriages of convenience’ by which British men could marry foreign brides, often years younger than they were, for a simple cash transaction. Such women were then farmed out to work the streets and there were headlines that screamed about white slavery.
There was something dark, ancient and, of course, racist about all this. One of the most successful ‘illicit’ books in the pre-Victorian era was The Lustful Turk (1827) in which a series of innocent white women were ravished by the potentate of the title. They were wholly victims, the Turk the disgusting perpetrator. As both Sharpe and Fabian knew, vice was a two-way street; without willing girls, there would be no ‘white slavery’ and no Soho sex trade. When William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had been brave enough to break every taboo of the Victorian era and actually write about prostitution,3 a surprisingly high percentage of the working girls he spoke to admitted that they offered their services because they enjoyed it as well as for the money. That was something the do-gooders of the 1930s did not want to hear; neither does the ‘sex-worker’ lobby of today.
The Yard’s Vice Squad dossier lists only 102 prostitutes of foreign extraction, out of an estimated 3,000 in C Division (the West End) alone. Stefan Slater in The London Journal March 2007, discusses what amounts to a ‘moral panic’ over this European human traffic and in doing so he highlights the shady world of London’s prostitution and the fact that powerful and eminent men effectively got away with using prostitutes’ services simply because of who they were. In 1922, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk to the Privy Council, was arrested for accosting women in Hyde Park, a crime as old as Hyde Park itself. Found guilty, he appealed and unsurprisingly, the verdict was overturned. The press-reading public was outraged, not, as they would be today, by perverts in high places, but by the fact that the Met had been too heavy-handed in arresting Fitzroy in the first place. As a result, arrest rates involving prostitutes dropped from 2,291 in 1922 to a mere 650 a year later.
The writer Alec Waugh was as fascinated by Soho as Fabian and the editor of John Bull: ‘There is a glamour about the word [allegedly originally an eighteenth-century hunting cry to call foxhounds],’ he wrote in the first volume of Wonderful London in 1926. ‘It is crude and rough. It suggests mystery and squalor and romance … It has a dusky swarthiness and oriental flavour, a cringing savagery that waits its hour.’
‘Why go to Paris for a good time?’ Stephen Graham asked in 1925 in London Nights. ‘It can be arranged in London just as well.’ An estimated 87 per cent of French prostitutes (whether they were actually French or not) operated not in sleazy Soho but the ‘swanky’ apartments of Piccadilly, Mayfair and Bayswater. By the outbreak of war, local property owners were working with the police to clear them out.
On 4 November 1935, by coincidence or design the day on which French Fifi (Josephine Martin) was murdered, police arrested Fernand Modena, known as ‘Little Pascalle of Marseilles’ in the Charing Cross Road. He was charged with making a false statement to an immigration officer, but at Vine Street police station, he was found to have nine house keys in his pocket. They were to the flats of prostitutes that he ran as a professional pimp. One of them was his own wife, Martha Pirie; two others were Marie Andrews and Germaine McEvoy, whose surnames may refer to the fact that they were involved in the marriage of convenience trade. Two other women are not named, but the sixth is and unlike the others, she was British. Her name was Lavonia Stratford, she was 21 and she was from Birmingham.
I believe that Lavonia Stratford was Bella.
It would be fascinating to know Lavonia’s physical details. Was she dark haired, with snaggle teeth? Did she stand 5 feet tall in her stockinged feet? Was a photograph taken of her? Was she included in Scotland Yard’s dossier? It seems unlikely, in that the discovery of Modena’s harem had clearly come as a surprise to the Met. Would they include her in their files now? Was her name added to Bob Fabian’s little pocket book?
What stood out for me was the fact that Lavonia is singled out as being from Birmingham, whereas the others were probably brought over by Modena from France. He and they were deported once the case for procuring and soliciting was heard, but because Lavonia was British, she stayed here. The moral indignation of the public over white slavery and prostitution generally was not matched by the punishment meted out by the law. The fines for prostitution were ridiculously light in comparison with their earnings. If a prostitute solicited in the street, she could only be charged with the same penalty as a public obstruction by a barrow boy or a pavement artist. Lavonia Stratford may have paid as little as £2 which was far less than she paid Modena for his ‘protection’; it was an occupational hazard. But there would, ultimately, be a far heavier price to pay.
When I first came across Lavonia Stratford, I was struck by the name. Lavonia could, of course, be a typo or a mishearing of Lavinia, but both are highly unusual names, far more so than Bella. I looked up Stratford in the Journal of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society and there it is, listed as a fairly common ‘gypsy’ name. As for Lavonia, it too is a gypsy name and the Romany word luvvani means prostitute.
When I read the views of Churchwarden Hodgetts of Hagley on the gypsies of the 1940s, I wrote them off at first as a typical Englishman’s take on all things foreign and different. Bella, he believed, was a gypsy who had fallen foul of her tribe and had been punished by them, according to traditions that Hodgetts did not understand and her body had been buried in some arcane rite in the wych elm. I did not accept that, but in one respect, I believe Hodgetts was right – Bella was indeed from another world, the world of the travelling people. Interestingly, when Professor Caroline Wilkinson examined Professor Webster’s photographs of the Hagley Wood skull, she came to the conclusion that the dead woman was Caucasian, but with a suggestion of Indian sub-structure. And where do Roma people actually originate? India.
Let us look again at her clothes. A skirt that was too big for her – it belonged to someone else in the tribe. A slip that showed beneath it without the belt to hold it up – belonging to that same larger person. The sleeveless hand-me-down cardigan and the non-matching blue belt – not only somebody else’s but very much what a gypsy of the 1930s and 1940s would wear. There are online today a number of photographs from the period showing gypsy camps. Horses and vardo wagons are still very much in evidence and a whole range of multi-coloured, rather outlandish clothes are worn, especially by the women. Constable Pound, who had chopped down the wych elm to retrieve Bella’s body and had made enquiries into the ‘Smith’ family of gypsies in the Hagley area in 1942, also reported the stash of clothes that they left behind when they moved on. It was found 115 yards from the site of the wych elm at Christmas time 1942 (before the body was found) and included a pair of red-painted shoes and a knife. It was all filthy and ragged, as of course were Bella’s clothes in the wych elm.
But Bella’s shoes were different. They were her own, costing 13/11d and more than any traveller could afford, reflecting her very different life in London. Perhaps she could not bear to part with them.
The police report on Fernand Modena gives Lavonia’s age as twenty-one. This was in 1935, so she would have been born in 1914 and at the time of her death would have been 27, within Professor Webster’s age range for the body in the tree. It is true that he personally veered to the slightly older likelihood of 35, but that was not his first conclusion and, on his own admission, such estimates were largely informed guesswork. Can we find a Lavonia Stratford, born in 1914, in any records? Nearly. A Lavinia F. Stratford was born in London on 17 October 1914. It may be that Lavonia was a misprint when the police arrested her along with Modena and that this is the same person. If that is so, how can she be called a Birmingham woman and how can I believe she came from a gypsy community?
Because we know nothing about her parents, we cannot be sure, but I believe they hailed from the great gypsy centre of Black Patch, on the outskirts of Birmingham. This is only twelve miles from Hagley and we know it was closed down by local authorities in 1905. We also know that many families refused to move, while others left and drifted back. I believe that the Stratfords were one example of this. Like countless people before and since, they perhaps hoped that the streets of London were paved with gold, as legend said, and they drifted to the capital to make a living any way they could. They may even, as large numbers did, became sedentary for a while, adopting a more or less conventional lifestyle. Then, for whatever reason, they may have drifted back to the Midlands, if not to Black Patch Park as it was by now, then to the Hagley area generally.
A little girl like Lavonia was now effectively under the radar. She may have attended school from time to time as the family moved around, but never for long enough for any teacher or classmate to remember her and report her missing in 1941. This would also explain why there is no record of Lavonia Stratford in the 1921 census; she was 7 by this time, on the road and invisible to the authorities. Note that whenever in the Worcester Archives we have references to locals seeing gypsy camps, like that of the ‘Smiths’ at the Nimmings, children are never mentioned. The travellers kept them hidden in case the authorities came nosing around, asking too many questions. By 1931, Lavonia may still have been living with her people. She was 17 by now and would have left school, had she attended with any kind of regularity, three years earlier. Unfortunately, the figures for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire, so even when they become due in another eight years from now, we will still have no idea if she was registered then or not.
Was it now that she gave birth? Professor Webster believed that the woman in the wych elm had produced at least one child, but of course he could not be certain when. In view of what happened later, I believe that Lavonia left this baby with her tribe to be raised by them. There is no record of a birth to anyone called Lavonia Stratford, but that should not surprise us, given the ‘outsider’ status of the travelling community. Neither, more ominously, is there any record of her death.
Four years later, she was arrested for prostitution in London. Once again, was the lure of the bright lights too much to resist? We know that Marthe Watts, a French prostitute who got to London in 1937, described the grim conditions of the brothels she had worked in, in France and Spain, and they were regulated by the government! J.B. Sandbach, a Metropolitan magistrate, was talking about French prostitutes, but the lifestyle for many would have been the same and Lavonia had been arrested with a troupe of French girls. ‘Instead of lying in bed and at about midnight,’ wrote Sandbach, ‘going out for a drink before having a meal in a café, they get up early, do their own shopping and cook at home. This is not only healthier but a cheaper mode of life.’4
