Murder is also one of the very few human activities that can horrify and delight us. Crime fiction promises delight; true crime gives us horror. We all curl up with a good book or snuggle down in front of the telly and watch Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Sherlock Homes and a host of lesser-known fictional detectives go through their paces. We love nothing better than seeing them arrive at a satisfying conclusion and say to our nearest and dearest – ‘Of course!’ with a click of our fingers. Or, ‘I knew it was him by page five/after the second ad break.’ or, more honestly, ‘Well, I didn’t see that coming.’
But true crime is not like that. Some people are repelled by it. They don’t read books like this one, or watch TV documentaries because they find them too upsetting. Other people cannot actually tell the difference between crime fiction and crime fact.
And that has been the problem I encountered in writing The Hagley Wood Murder: Nazi Spies and Witchcraft in Wartime Britain. I expected a case, cold, it is true, because of the passage of the years, but one in which the facts are spelt out and we can draw various conclusions. What I found instead was a confused mish-mash of ‘faction’, what one historian has called ‘mythistory’, in which ever more farcical and far-fetched ideas are allowed to proliferate because someone, somewhere, did not do their job properly.
As you will read in the pages ahead, four teenaged boys found human remains inside a wych elm in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire in April 1943. There was a war on which meant that newsprint was in limited supply and the details which today would be all over the media, were dealt with scantily. Journalists, however, are journalists, who know what sells papers and they ‘juiced up’ the story of the wych elm to grip their readers. They indulged, as the media still does, in fictions because they had so few facts to go on. Today, because of that, we cannot be sure which of the four boys actually found the body. Nor, because it was destroyed by the police to remove the remains in the first place, do we know exactly where the tree was. Nothing daunted, newspapers photographed another tree labelled ‘Body Found Here’, the first of many fictions that appear.
There was an inquest, as there had to be, in Stourbridge, but there are no newspaper accounts of that inquest, the first and most important part of any murder enquiry. Worcestershire CID then began their enquiries. The effect of the war on constabularies was huge. Hagley Wood lies at the edge of a large and militarily important industrial conurbation centring on Birmingham, the target of serious and sustained bombing raids. ‘Careless talk costs lives’ and the police had to deal with a whole raft of new, paranoid legislation designed to keep Britain safe. It meant that coppers, from the bobby on the beat to the chief constable, were busy as never before and could not give their all to the investigation in Hagley Wood.
What they did – a basic error of humanity – was to latch on to something which was only tangentially relevant. Within months of the body being found, a series of writings appeared on the walls of buildings all over the Midlands – ‘Who put Bella in the wych elm?’ The police wasted hundreds of man hours trying to discover the author/s of these daubings and failed. Would a solution to this have led to detection of the killer? Almost certainly not, but the police pursued it anyway.
The forensics disappointed. There were various tell-tale pieces of evidence – the dead woman’s dentition, her clothes, her shoes – but these led nowhere and the wrong conclusions were drawn. Bella became the established name for the dead woman, although it was certainly not her name, so even that is fiction.
As the case settled into the past and police and press turned to other issues and other problems, no new leads were forthcoming and Bella became part of the folklore of the industrial Midlands.
Then, fiction kicked in again. What could explain the most bizarre body disposal method in the history of true crime? It had to be the supernatural, very much in vogue in the 1950s and in the realms of witchcraft, nothing is real. So much hokum has been written about what is actually an historical and social phenomenon, that a reader has to tread very warily to separate fact from nonsense. Larger than life figures, like the ‘beast’ Aleister Crowley and the ‘wizard’ Gerald Gardner, both of whom would probably be sectioned today, took centre stage. Ask anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the Bella case and they will say, ‘She was a witch, wasn’t she?’ That angle appeals to our darkest fears – and again, we are in the realms of fiction. What scared us in the darkness of our nursery years? ‘Ghoulies and ghosties and long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.’ We shudder; Bella was part of all that.
‘Oh, no, she wasn’t,’ the more rational were saying by the 1960s. This was a wartime case – it had to be to do with espionage. Why else could the dead woman not be traced? Why did no dentist recognize her teeth? Why were there no labels in her clothes? Because she was German or Dutch and had been parachuted into the area by the Luftwaffe to carry out acts of sabotage or at least report back to Berlin on key military installations.
What happens when a journalist, one of those people paid to ‘juice up’ stories, has links with the shady world of espionage? He writes fiction, but I am not talking about Ian Fleming, involved in Naval Intelligence during the war, who went on to create the most famous fictional spy of them all, James Bond. I am talking about a friend of his, Donald McCormick, who wrote the first – and worst – book featuring Bella in 1968: Murder By Witchcraft.
The clue is in the title. McCormick muddies the waters by linking the Hagley Wood case with another murder in nearby Warwickshire four years later. There is no comparison at all between the two, but that did not deter McCormick, who was able to use his spurious espionage connections to invent pure fiction.
And the generation of writers that followed fell for it. The two unrelated cases are linked forever in the public mind and ever-more-lurid ideas emerged, with seances being held at Bella’s possible murder site, novels being written, at least one opera, several folk songs. None of this gets us remotely near to who Bella really was or why she was murdered or who killed her.
In 2005, West Mercia police, as the Worcestershire constabulary now were, declared the case closed. By that time, ‘all persons involved’ (to use police jargon) were assumed to be dead and with the Freedom of Information Act hovering in the background, the facts of the case at last came to light. Speculation and nonsense could now cease and a solution could be found.
Yes and no. The Worcester Archive is chaotic. The inquest is not there; neither is the first part of the police investigation. There is a great deal of duplication which serves no current purpose and a number of articles – letters, reports and photographs – that have no clear relevance to the case. Either the police did not keep all the information and it never reached the files in the first place or it has been removed/lost/misplaced since.
More unforgivably, the remains themselves have vanished. The bones, the shoes, the clothing fragments, which today could provide so much valuable information, are nowhere to be found. They were in the safe keeping of the forensic unit of Birmingham University, but they are no longer there; neither is the information relating to the burial of the bones. Bella has disappeared for a second time. The first was after her murder some time in the summer or autumn of 1941; the second had probably already happened by 1978.
And into the mix of lost evidence, poor quality original photographs and fanciful storytelling, comes that melting pot of confusion, the Internet. What ought to be a storehouse of information, unparalleled in history, is a disastrous mess, where anybody can post any nonsense they like in pursuit of a pet theory. So you can listen to excerpts from Simon Holt’s opera on Bella, but you cannot find out who she was. You cannot even find out very much about Professor James Webster, who carried out her post-mortem, even though he was a Home Office pathologist, one of the most distinguished men of his generation.
For too long, the story of Bella in the wych elm has been shrouded in mystery, made worse by anecdotes without sources, pamphlets written and published by well-meaning amateurs.
Have I, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple-style, solved the case? And can we now, at last, put the shade of Bella to rest?
You’ll have to decide that for yourself.
Chapter 1
The Wych Elm
I felt that I was in hell itself. All around me were great squat wych elm trees … like round-bellied devils with beards and shaggy hair.
Was it such a night as this that death visited the woods, turning, for the first time in criminal history, a tree trunk into a coffin? What happened that night? Was the wood in fact the scene of ghoulish rites … was the body brought … from some other place of execution and carried through that very undergrowth now clinging and clawing at my ankles, to its secret resting place?
I stopped suddenly for the wood had become alive … Red eyes pierced the darkness … I could imagine her clearly there in the wood. Only one feature of her physical appearance seemed absent – her face. Instead … I saw only a leering and enigmatic skull. It made me shudder as I thought of it.1
The myths kick in almost at once. Which of us has not stood in the dark tangle of a wood and heard the whispers in the trees, the sighing of the leaves? As though nature itself has recorded an unnatural horror and replays it over and over again in some ghastly time-loop. Such ideas raise the hairs on the back of the neck; they also sell newspapers. The words above were written for the Wolverhampton Express and Star by a journalist with the nom de plume Quaestor, which is at once enigmatic and false. The Latin words sounds as if the writer is a questioner, an avid seeker of the truth. In fact, a quaestor was a Roman tax official and in this context he was Wilfred Byford-Jones, a part-time columnist for the Express and Star in the early 1950s.
A wych elm is a standard English tree, the only variant native to the country. It can grow to a height of over 30 metres and has the Latin botanical name Ulmus glabra. Its bark is dark grey and its leaves irregular, broad and with a distinctive sudden point. Its flowers, a striking red-purple, appear before the leaves in early spring and grow in clusters. It is generally found in watery areas, mostly in the north and west of Britain.
And then, only a few lines into most websites on the tree, man’s obsession with the supernatural begins:
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould
E’en the very flames are cold.2
The wych elm is a tree associated with melancholy and death, perhaps because its branches can drop suddenly, without warning. An old verse ran, ‘Elm hateth man, and waiteth’. It was often used for coffins and in folklore was equated with prophetic dreams. Welsh longbowmen of the Middle Ages used elm for their weapons. The Old English wych (wice) has nothing to do with witch but means pliant or supple, referring to the springy qualities of the wood which made ideal bows. In the herbal medicine of the Medieval period, the outer bark of the wych elm was boiled down as an ointment for burns. The inner bark was ground into a compound for sore throats. In one or two modern accounts of what happened in the years before Byford-Jones walked there, the elm is confused with witch hazel, which is a different tree altogether; in fact, it is a shrub. Even botanical experts like Jacob Strutt confused the two as in his Sylva Britannica (British Woods) in 1822.
Websites will tell you that the wych elm is associated in Celtic mythology with burial mounds and the passage to the Underworld. In fact, this is just one of the legends that has grown up around the central figure in this book. As we shall see, the Celts worshipped the oak, the mistletoe, the ash, the yew and the hazel, not the elm.
The trees described above stood in the now re-landscaped grounds of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire. Today, it is difficult to find the heart of Hagley. True, we were looking for a particular spot in Hagley Wood, to the east of the village, but the reality is that the village is now strung out along the busy A456 stretching north-east towards Halesowen and the behemoth that is Birmingham. Everything in our time is geared to the car – the dual carriageways, roundabouts, traffic lights. The Hagley we wanted to find has all but disappeared in a mass of new building and housing estates. There was no sign of the school and the church, once at the centre of the community. Even the pub, the Lyttleton Arms, much altered and gentrified, stands oddly at a road junction beyond the village, like an afterthought because new road layouts have changed the lie of the land.
The story starts on Sunday, 18 April 1943, ironically on the day that the Russians announced that over 4,000 Polish soldiers found in a mass grave at Katyn were the victims of Nazi violence. They were not; the Russians themselves were responsible for the murders. None of what was happening in Eastern Europe had much effect on four boys wandering Hagley Wood that day. Some accounts today – the myths and mistakes continue – contend that there were only three of them, so for the record, they were Robert Farmer, Robert Hart, Fred Payne and Thomas Willetts. And they were not, as reconstructions claim, technically schoolboys. Two of them were fifteen and had left school the previous year, the school-leaving age at the time being fourteen. By April 1943 they were both at work, although what they did is not recorded.
Accounts differ, too, as to where the boys came from. They certainly did not live in the village of Hagley. Local historian Joyce Coley3 has them coming from Lye, a village four miles away, with its curious placenames of Lye Waste and Careless Green. Lye’s most famous son was the actor Cedric Hardwicke, but in 1943 he was on stage in New York, not coming back to Britain until the following year. According to Coley, Bob Hart lived in Pearson Street, Bob Farmer along Balds Lane and Fred Payne in Stocking Street. No address is given for Tommy Willets, the youngest lad. Other accounts have the boys hailing from Stourbridge on the edge of the Black Country with its distinctive dialect. The small town was famous for its glass-blowing industry, dominated by the Jeavons family, a parochial success story in the shadow of the Clent Hills and Kinver Edge. The boys had their dogs with them, lurchers called Trix, Jock and (unthinkable today) Nigger. If they came from Lye, they could have reached Hagley Wood in fifteen minutes or less than three-quarters of an hour with a casual stroll.
What were they doing in the Wood? Casual accounts call them poachers, but that is a twenty-first-century misreading of 1940s reality. One website today contends, ludicrously, that the lads were poaching to supplement their families’ incomes at a time of extreme rationing. The boys were actually looking for birds’ nests. It was spring, the egg-laying season and every red-blooded boy of that generation saw it as a mark of skill and courage to climb the tallest tree to reach the eggs. As a boy in the 1950s, I had a collection of twenty-five eggs, all lifted by me, ‘blown’ with the aid of a needle and kept carefully in cotton wool. We have only started to worry about such things recently.
In those more innocent days, the shock that Tommy Willets and the others had would stay with them for years; some said, all their lives. In the tangle of undergrowth stood one of those squat, round-bellied wych elms which ‘Quaestor’ described. Judging by its limited height and the ‘shaggy’ thicket of branches bristling out of its trunk, the tree was damaged and probably dying. The trunk had broken off at 3½ft from the ground. It also looked an ideal nesting site for birds – the lightly speckled blue of the thrush, the glossy white of the collared dove.
The photographs taken of this soon-to-be-notorious tree are themselves enigmatic. All versions that I have seen in newspaper accounts and subsequent books show another tree altogether. True to the sensationalism of bad provincial newspaper journalism of the time, Quaestor’s caption in the Express and Star records ‘The body was found in this repulsive tree, known as the wych elm, although its common name is witch hazel [sic] because hags of old days used hazel twigs for divining rods.’ The reason for the wrong photograph is an innocent one. By the time the media cameramen reached it, the actual tree had been cut down by the police. It had been pollarded and dozens of branches radiated out from the decaying bole in the centre.
Most accounts today have Bob Farmer climbing the wych elm alone. In fact, according to the Evening Dispatch of 29 April 1943, the boy who made this climb was actually Bob Hart. In subsequent newspaper editions and magazine articles, both Bob Farmer and Tommy Willets are credited with the find, but the Dispatch was reporting from the coroner’s court at the time and was covering a bizarre and important story that sold newspapers; surely it can be relied upon more heavily than subsequent re-imaginings. Hart had done this before, countless times. He forced his arm into the thicket of branches, peering down into the hollow bole below him. The hole was 2 feet wide at the top, tapering to 17 inches at the bottom. A skull stared back at him with sightless eyes. He poked it with a stick and it slipped to one side, severed by the years from its neck. Hart reached further and pulled it out, calling his mates to see what he had found. A fox, surely? A badger, perhaps? ‘Come here. Have a look at this.’
They did and recoiled in horror as Hart brought the skull down to ground level. A clump of reddish hair still clung to the right temple. Some teeth were missing and the front two upper incisors overlapped. And, even allowing for the often-chaotic teaching in wartime Britain, there was no mistaking this find. The skull was human. Hart used some of the rotten clothing near the skull to push it back into the hollow tree with the aid of a stick. And the boys ran. To add to the ghoulishness of the scene, some later accounts have darkness descending on Hagley Wood at that moment. In fact, according to the boys’ testimony to the coroner, it was midday. We reached Hagley Wood and the approximate site of the wych elm on April 21, seventy-nine years and three days after the boys were there. The trees were in full bud in the spring sunshine and the day was bright.
