Was Karl Dickenoff [sic] really a Canadian?
This is McCormick’s version. Hans Caesar appears to have been German and even McCormick does not suggest any connection between him and Bella.
What did he do while he was living in Edgbaston?
He carried on his trade as a jeweller as he had before the war.
What happened to the dead woman’s child and who was the father?
This is impossible to answer. Professor Webster believed that Bella had given birth at least once but clearly could tell no more from her skeleton.
There are those on both sides of the Atlantic and in both hemispheres who you could ask these questions but why?
And we are back in the land of international conspiracies.
There is an eternal justice beyond earthly laws.
Perhaps, but writing garbled rubbish like this is not going to get us any nearer to any kind of justice for Bella.
The silly stories actually began long before Joyce Coley began collecting them. In the Worcester Archive is a letter from Alfred Armistead of Bath, Somerset, dated 26 November 1953 and addressed to the Chief Constable CID, Worcestershire Police. It referred to an article a year earlier in the Sunday Pictorial asking the public’s help in connection with a variety of unsolved murders and missing persons. The letter writer remembered ‘a case of some woman being stuck into a tree’ and he had a vivid picture in his mind of a man who had travelled for miles and could get no rest (the last two words were underlined in the original). Armstrong made a sketch of the man he pictured, with one leg raised on a bank or a stone wall and looking at the tree in question. The sketch is still in the Archive and is so vague and badly drawn as to be useless. Armistead had clearly come across the name Anna somewhere and wondered whether she was the sister of the man in the sketch. She ‘feels there’s an unwritten chapter still to be unfolded’.
There is no reference to any police follow-up to this and I suspect it was stashed into the ‘time-wasters’ folder at Worcester CID’s headquarters.
Another letter was sent to the chief constable, the long-suffering Captain J.E. Lloyd Williams on the same day as the one quoted above, which can only be a coincidence. This one was from a clairvoyant, Mrs Zita Boyden of Compton Road, Wolverhampton. She had visited Quaestor and was absolutely convinced that she had discovered the truth about Bella. She cited Scotland Yard, Carmarthen police, Richmond police and Halifax police in the context of recent murders, such as the Towpath murder and the Harries murder, both of which were headline-grabbing at the time, if only because the government was seriously toying with the abolition of the death penalty (not actually removed until 1965). Alfred Whiteway raped and murdered two teenaged girls, Barbara Songhurst and Christine Reed on the Thames towpath near Richmond. He withdrew a confession to the police and claimed that the axe which was the murder weapon had been planted on him by them. Albert Pierrepoint did not believe that any more than the jury did and he hanged Whiteway at Wandsworth on 22 December. The trial had only ended three weeks before Boyden wrote to the chief constable. Thomas Harries killed his relatives John and Phoebe for money at their farmhouse in Pendine, Carmarthenshire in October 1953. He was charged with the crime only a fortnight before Boyden wrote and did not meet Pierrepoint until 1954.
Did Zita Boyden pester the chief constables of London and Carmarthen in these cases as she did at Worcester? It seems likely, although what convicted both Whiteway and Harries was good old-fashioned police work and hard evidence. It was the era, however, of the psychic detective. Such people offered their advice, which was rarely taken, in the Meon Hill murder of Charles Walton in 1945, but the most celebrated was Dutchman Peter Hurkos who located the symbolic Stone of Scone stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalists in 1950 and helped Boston police with their enquiries into Albert de Salvo who strangled a number of the city’s elderly female residents in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Zita Boyden’s visionary ability – ‘call it what you will’4 – told her that Lou Bella, as she called her, was ‘a country type, slow-spoken, fresh coloured’ with brown hair. She worked as a domestic in some sort of Catholic institution. The man who put her body in the tree was ‘tall, blond, tanned, fresh skin’. He wore a leather jacket with a sheepskin collar. ‘He was, I believe, a Dutch Canadian with a name such as Franz or Franc (short for Francis).’ The surname could be Christener or Kristener. Boyden saw him as a motor-cycle ‘“cop”’, dressed in dark uniform and riding a motorbike. Bella’s dress denoted ‘Institute clothes’ and the place she worked had polished oak floors. She probably had a child aged about 12, who looked like her father. The ring she wore was worn on ‘the middle finger of her right hand and it may have had a depiction of a saint on it’.
The actual ring had appeared in umpteen newspaper photographs by this time and bore no relation to this. It was assumed to be a wedding ring worn on the left hand. ‘She had small, fat fingers with pointed ends.’ By this time, the fact that the dead woman’s right hand was found separated from her body was front-page news and being linked to the ‘hand of glory’ in the sensational witchcraft connection (see Chapter 14). Bella had ‘something wrong with her throat, maybe strangulation’. She was hauled into the tree using a rope ‘with a loop so that it could be removed’. No rope had been found in the wych elm but Boyden had to have an escape clause to explain this fact. She believed the name Hipkins might be relevant, but could not be certain. As for the Christian name, a popular song was Bella Bambina or it might have been ‘a joke that stuck to her that she was a daft loob, Ella’. Bella Bambina had been an Al Bowly number some years before but I can find no slang usage of loob meaning stupid anywhere.
Boyden was nearly as interested in Bella’s child as she was in the woman herself. It (she does not specify gender) was ‘solid, plump, with straight hair … broad, flattish nose, blue eyes’. She assumed that the murder had a domestic motive – a quarrel with a man in her life – ‘perhaps the man was already married?’ And, as if the police did not have enough to do, Boyden suggested that they should try all the institutions (what we would call care homes) in the Midlands.
Armistead and Boyden pale, however, beside what one journalist at the time called ‘the ramblings of Mr Elwell’. John Wilcox of the Birmingham Gazette forwarded a tape from George Elwell of Merriden Avenue, Wolleston which the reporter had made with him on 10 January 1954. Elwell was able to put himself into a trance to solve the case for the police. A railway clerk, Elwell, like many locals, was fascinated by the case and took to wandering Hagley Wood late at night, to pick up what today we would call ‘vibes’. After ten minutes near the site of the wych elm, he went home and using a mirror and light bulb to create a ‘strobe’ effect, hypnotized himself and was able to pick up messages.
He had set an alarm clock to wake himself up and whatever entity he believed he was talking to gave him the name of the dead woman and of the man who killed her:
Cold … it is very cold. I hear a horse neighing somewhere … it is cold, very cold … rain dropping on the trees, on the leaves … dark, very dark … horse neighing again. A tree, yes, a tree … what has he got on his shoulder? Oh, God! Untying string … Oh, my God! Blood down her face on to her hair. Oh, she is dead … she is dead.
Name, name, name. What is her name? Bradman, no, no. Bradley – yes, that’s it. Annie Bradley, of Leeds. Yes, the man. Tall … moustache … five buttons down his jacket … narrow trousers … light blouse … funny sleeves … John Connor … John Connor … C-O-N-N-O-R. Tying it up. Got to get away.
The recording lasted about fifteen minutes. What are we to make of it? It reads like a bad B movie script; good lighting and tolerable acting might make it acceptable to a cinema-going audience. A tree was hardly remarkable – Bella had been found in one. It was safe to assume that the disposal of the body happened at night, which explains the darkness. The implication is that Bella was killed elsewhere and her body brought to the wood in a bag. Blood on her head, which would imply blunt force trauma and probable damage to the skull, is not reported by Professor Webster, who assumed that the cause of death was suffocation. The names Bradman, Bradley and Connor led nowhere; neither did Leeds. According to McCormick, who had not seen this file but quotes Elwell extensively (presumably from the John Wilcox article), the police followed up Elwell’s suggestions, but there is nothing in the Worcester Archive to suggest that they did. Another cold trail; another waste of police time.
By 1953, the papers, especially local ones, were full of the Bella story. Quaestor was particularly good at keeping the story alive. In the Express and Star 16 January 1958, he not only repeated the Anna of Claverley story but seems to have added his own embellishments. An officer had come to see her late one night ‘in fact, on a day which was consistent with the expert assessment of the day of Bella’s death – and told her that something terrible had happened to him’. Here, we have a wilful misconstruing of Webster’s suggestion – he gave a six-month window for the murder, which contains an awful lot of ‘consistent’ days. Here, too, we have George Elwell’s five-buttoned jacket, the usual pattern of an officer’s full-dress khaki at the time. ‘He confessed to her under secrecy,’ Quaestor went on, ‘that he had a friend, a male trapeze artist then appearing at the Coventry Hippodrome and a Dutchman, in a car.’ Here was a garbled version of the ice-skaters, not trapeze artists, Frick and Frack.
The officer was driving it. Between the other two men in the back was Bella. Suddenly, as the car was descending Mucklow Hill, Halesowen, something happened. The girl seemed to have collapsed. The officers stopped the car. The two men then told him to drive on. “She’s dead” they told him curtly.
The car was driven through the blacked-out town of Halesowen, then Hasbury. Finally, after several tentative halts, he was told to turn right off the main Bromsgrove road. He found himself in Hagley Wood. Here the body of the girl now known as Bella, was carried out and the officer was called on to help stuff it into the hollow trunk of the Wych Elm.
Quaestor claimed to have been present at the mysterious rendezvous with DI Williams and Anna, yet this is so far removed from the statement she made to that same police officer as to defy belief. The anonymous ‘officer’ was her own husband, Jack Mossop. There was only one man in the back seat, not two and nobody there was a trapeze artist. Bella was in the front passenger seat, not the back and she did not die; she passed out. If Anna was lying to DI Williams when she made her statement, why, how and when did she give Quaestor the ‘real’ version?
But by now the journalist was in full flight. The terrified officer returned to Hagley Wood the next night and told Anna ‘There’s no mistake. The body is there all right, just as we left it.’ And it was Anna who told her husband this story ‘long ago’.
Concerned that such a murder remained motiveless, Quaestor then came up, via Anna of course, with the idea that the Dutchman in the car was a German spy, often dripping with cash, who asked questions about aircraft factories in the area. Bella ‘or “Lubella” had entered the country illegally “after Dunkirk”’ and was a spy who had fallen foul of her fellow agents and was killed by them. The officer was so unnerved that he had a nervous breakdown and was ‘taken to a mental home’ where he died.
All of this brings us back to the vicious circle concocted by Donald McCormick; it has virtually no bearing on Una Mossop/Hainsworth’s statement to the police. In true journalistic style, Quaestor concludes that MI5 were brought into the case and the trapeze artist was probably never discovered. Because, of course, he did not exist.
Quaestor saves his best piece of nonsense for the end of his article, supposedly quoting ‘the pathologist’ (presumably Webster) on ITV as saying ‘But after extensive inquiries by the superintendent [Williams] he was able to identify [Bella]. It was a classic piece of detection.’
And the Quaestor article is a classic piece of misinformation. There are a number of items in the police Archive which seem out of place, but they clearly all had relevance at the time of the investigation and had to be followed up. There is a black and white snapshot of a woman who may be Ethel Prosser, standing with two men. She is wearing a bright summer frock and is squinting into the sun. she is clearly not Bella – her teeth are too regular and she is too tall. The Archive contents give us her name, but no other information and her significance is now lost.
Then there is the letter from Lieutenant Colonel O. Gibson of GHQ (India), New Delhi, dated 24 January 1943. This was written to a Leonard Hughes, c/o Stewarts and Lloyds Coombs Wood Tube Works of Halesowen. This is simply a ‘hello’ letter, reminiscing on rabbit-hunting in Britain and lamenting the fact that Gibson does not have time to take pot shots (actually, with a tommy-gun!) at the Indian wildlife. There is no reference to Bella or Hagley Wood, largely because it was written four months before the body was found!
This India connection may have links with another photograph in the Archive, that of Billy Gibson. Despite the spelling of the Christian name, Billy was a woman. The photograph shows an attractive girl, with blonde hair and shorts, standing between two men. A separate sheet tells us that she was the wife of Gerald Gibson and they lived at the Manor House, Hagley. However, since the couple moved to India in 1938, neither the photograph nor the letter can have any relevance to the Hagley Wood murder at all.
Among several letters offering solutions to the Hagley Wood murder in the Express and Star, some point to gypsies, others claim that local foxhounds would have smelt the decomposing body long before it was found. Then there was this one of 23 November 1953:
Is it not possible that the adherents of the cult of witchcraft, who, it would appear, were responsible for the death of Bella, adopt some form of commemoration of the date of her death which would be of significance to members of the group, but to no one else? By coincidence, there appeared in the Express and Star on the day [Quaestor’s] second article was published, an “In Memoriam” notice referring to a woman named Bella. Obviously, this notice did not refer to the woman in the wych elm, but might not a study of “In Memoriam” notices possibly provide a slender clue?
And was there anybody out there who could carry out such a study into cults and the occult? In fact, there was. Her name was Dr Margaret Murray.
Chapter 14
Lord of the Gallows
Something very odd happened soon after the end of the Second World War. Today we have seen another outbreak of it in response to the Covid pandemic. In the recent case, the mass stupidity of whole nations has been manifest by a panic, a blind belief in ‘the science’, all of it fanned by the hysteria of social media. The result has been serious damage to economies, children’s education and increasing mental health problems. It has brought the oddballs out from under their rocks, giving ammunition to Quanon, for example, a group that believes that the pandemic was yet another example of the American government’s cabal of cannibalistic child-killers intent on ruling the world. Anti-vaxxers appeared from nowhere, stepping back into a Medieval hell where there was no science that actually worked. A definitive book on all this has yet to appear, but the responses are not unique. Wherever there is upheaval to the normal, the routine, elements of society go haywire and this is certainly true of the immediate post-war period.
On 24 June 1947, experienced pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. He was looking for the wreckage of a plane that had crashed there earlier, when he saw nine objects flying in formation. He estimated their air speed at over 1,000 miles an hour, faster than any known aircraft at the time. ‘They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water,’ he told reporters, and the concept of the flying saucer was born. Governments across the world have invested millions into projects to prove or disprove the existence of alien life on other planets and in other galaxies. In 1952, even a realist like Winston Churchill could write to the Air Ministry, ‘What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?’
