Spilsbury never got round to writing his definitive opus on forensic medicine, committing suicide in his laboratory after the war ended. Simpson, by contrast, wrote five books and in that he was shadowed by his indefatigable secretary, Molly Lefebure. He also wrote novels under the pseudonym Guy Bailey. Guy’s was his teaching hospital and the Old Bailey was the scene of many of his spectacular court appearances.
Simpson’s colleagues Francis Camps and Donald Teare were just as well known. Camps worked in Chelmsford and Teare at St George’s Hospital, London. The police called them ‘the three musketeers’ and their hero was not Spilsbury but Sydney Smith, head of Forensic Medicine at Edinburgh University.
One of the most bizarre aspects in researching this book has been the dearth of material on Professor James Webster who carried out the forensics on the body in the wych elm. Unlike Simpson and Camps, who wrote on their famous cases, Webster seems to have written nothing. He covered several high-profile murder cases in the 1940s and 1950s and had some stern criticisms to make over the running of various hospitals in the Midlands. Other than that, we are forced back to the brief entry in Who Was Who 1971–80.
He was born in 1898, making him of the same generation as Simpson and Co. and of most of the policemen in the Hagley Wood case. He was educated at St Andrew’s University, one of Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, with their scarlet gowns and the tradition there of awarding all their alumni Arts degrees, even if they read Sciences. In 1926, by which time Spilsbury was the doyen of pathologists, Webster was awarded his FRCS and in 1943, obtained his MD from Birmingham University. That was the year in which he became head of the West Midland Forensic Science laboratory a behalf of the Home Office. The Hagley Wood case would have been one of the first he handled in that capacity.
At Hagley Wood, on 20 April 1943, the first job was to take photographs. Today, this would be done by a scene of crime forensic photographer, but in the absence of anyone like that, Webster took the photos himself. Either the day was cloudy and the wood dark, or photography began late in the day, because neither the photograph of the tree nor the bones are very clear.
From the very first, irregularities have occurred, not with the pathologist’s work but with subsequent newspaper articles and books that have consistently used the wrong photograph. Because of what happened later, the actual tree was not available for later photographs and the one shown, usually with the label ‘body found here’ is another tree. It is the first of many errors that have become associated with Hagley Wood and accepted as fact by almost everybody.
Webster climbed up to point his camera into the tree’s hollow bole. We have no idea what type of camera he used. He was not a young man by this stage in his career and, from his own photograph, looks quite portly. Whether he needed help from the policemen present is not recorded, but if he did not, it is evident how easily a younger, fitter man could lift the body into its hole in the first place. Webster’s second photograph shows the discoloured skull lying in the debris of the rotting tree. This is not of course how it was when the body was placed there, but the result of a rattled Bob Hart pushing it back in with a stick. In the third picture, the skull has been moved so that we are looking at the top of the cranium. Sections of vertebrae and cloth material are clearly visible, including the stripes of a ‘top’ and the paler colour of a skirt. The toe of the right shoe is obvious too, minus laces.
The pathologist clearly could not reach all this easily or he wanted a clearer view so he ordered the tree to be cut away. The police had anticipated this and Constable Pound, with a labouring background, had brought his axe. The infamous wych elm was chopped and hacked, all the material extracted and taken away for forensic examination. It was probably now that the skull was photographed. If there was any hope of identifying the victim, this was the best bet.
In 2017, this photograph and all the others taken of the bones, was submitted to Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Director of the School of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University. The professor is an expert in craniofacial identification who became famous in 2013 for her work on the ‘king under the car park’, Richard III’s remains in Leicester. In that case, although she tried not to be swayed by existing portraits of the king, she did have a basic pattern known to everyone. The body in the tree had no pictorial back-up and Professor Wilkinson was working in the dark. Her problem was that the bones have now vanished, so the literal hard evidence has gone. The photographs, in black and white, were taken under a leafy canopy as night was falling and the quality is poor.
To a layman like me, the most obvious physical appearance focuses on the teeth. Webster reported that the left lateral incisor was missing as was the second right molar. The incisor was found in a subsequent search and when placed in position clearly presents a ‘snaggle-toothed’ appearance. These front teeth would have protruded slightly in life. Clinging to the left temple was a tangle of hair, reddish in colour as a result of the chemicals in the tree itself. For many years, as the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs were opened and their mummies unwrapped, it was assumed that many of them, too, were auburn. Again, it was the oxidation in their tombs that caused this. Both Professor Webster and Professor Wilkinson, nearly eighty years later, came to the conclusion that the hair was actually light brown, often referred to as ‘mousey’ by the police at the time.
Oddly, Webster focused at first not on the teeth of the upper jaw, but on the lower ones, which, he said, exhibited irregularities. This is not apparent either in the in situ photograph or later ones taken in the laboratory. Interestingly, Professor Wilkinson made no such comment on these teeth in 2017. One tooth was missing from the lower jaw; this had been extracted ‘long before death’.3
When the skeleton was cleaned and laid out in the laboratory at Webster’s West Midlands Forensic unit in Birmingham University, another photograph was taken. Perhaps because we are now used to Richard III’s scoliosis (spinal curvature) I was drawn to a similar curve in the case of the body in the tree. In fact, since neither of the professors comment on this it must simply be the way the vertebrae have been placed on the table that creates this effect. The hand bones are missing, as are the feet, although a number of small bones placed between the lower legs are clearly carpals and metacarpals. The left tibia is absent.
What did the jumble of old bones, cleaned and reassembled, tell a man of Webster’s experience? His report, typewritten at the science laboratory in Newton Street tells us that he got to Hagley Wood at 6.30 p.m. and found a human tibia (shin bone) 12 yards from the wych elm. Two days later, the police handed him a left pelvic bone, a right femur and a right fibula. It is not clear exactly where these were found, but presumably in the bole of the tree itself. Although the skeleton was now mostly complete, one patella, one tibia and some of the small bones of the hand and feet were missing, as was part of the hyoid bone in the throat.
The skull, Webster was sure, was that of a female. He notes the missing teeth in the upper jaw. These had dropped out post-mortem and had not been knocked out in a struggle. There was slight evidence of pyorrhoea (gum disease) but the teeth were clean. There were no marks of injury to the skull so the blunt force trauma often associated with violent death could be ruled out. The blood traces inside the skull were badly decomposed and it could not be ascertained whether this was ante- or post-mortem. The clear suture lines meant that the deceased was not middle-aged, probably being between 25 and 40 years old. The teeth, however, gave no clear indication of age at all. In the case of the lower jaw, Webster seems to have gone overboard. The first right molar had been extracted before death (the socket had fully healed) but the incisors overlapped slightly. This would have produced a ‘noticeable irregularity’ which is commented on in later reports, notably the notorious ‘police reconstruction’ which I will examine later.
Then, Webster stuck his neck out and, I believe, got it wrong. Tightly pressed over the lower jaw in the mouth cavity was ‘part of the khaki or mustard coloured dress the deceased was wearing at the time of death’.4 In fact, this is not a dress at all, but a skirt. ‘So far as this [material] thrust over the teeth margin and so fairly adherent to the teeth was this part of the apparel that I do not consider it likely – I cannot say impossible – that this came into the mouth accidentally after death. It appears much more probable that this had been forced into the mouth prior to death, and if so, this would have been capable of causing death from asphyxia.’ I do not know if Webster was aware that Bob Hart had shoved the material there himself before returning the skull to the bole of the wych elm. He admitted as much to the press years later.
The clavicles and scapulae were all present and irrelevant in terms of identification or cause of death. Webster found part of the hyoid bone, believing the rest of it to have been taken away by the ‘ravages of animals’. Because there was no ossification between hyoid and cornu, the deceased was under forty. Arm bones were not worthy of comment and Webster took the measurements. ‘The curvatures of the spine are normal’ and there would have been no abnormality in the woman’s posture.
It was the pelvis above all that made this body out to be female. The uniting of the epiphyses proved that she was over 22, but there were no distinguishing features. The leg bones were normal and the left tibia, found separately from the body, had been partly chewed away by animals. The foot bones, likewise, showed no malformations, such as bunions and this was borne out by an examination of the shoes.
Webster’s conclusions established that the body in the wych elm was female, aged between 22 and 40. He plumped for 35 ‘plus or minus a few years’. It was the dead woman’s height that should have made identification easier than things turned out. Webster used Karl Pearson’s formula, a standard calculation based on the length of leg bones in particular and posited 60 inches. In fact, in a subsequent report, the pathologist reduced this to between 4ft 9in and 4ft 10in tall. If Webster was right about age, she would have been born in 1908 and, depending on her social class and environment, would have been subject to all kinds of dietary deprivations. Even so, 5ft was short for a woman in the 1940s and she should have been more noticeable for that.
Webster then posed the time-honoured question – accident, suicide or murder as the cause of death. First, nothing in the skeleton or clothing gave a hint on this, but it was the position of the body as found that was the real clue. Nobody, not even a boy climbing a tree looking for birds’ eggs, falls into a hollow trunk not to be found except by chance. And are we seriously supposed to believe that a woman in her thirties would be doing that? Accident was ruled out. The same arguments stand for suicide. The woman may have killed herself ‘when the balance of her mind was disturbed’ but would she have climbed inside a tree to do it or to create her own natural elm coffin? It defied belief, especially as such a little woman would have serious difficulty climbing in the first place.
Murder, however, was distinctly unlikely. The woman would have been pushed in feet first. Although Webster does not say so (this was the job of the police) it would have taken a strong man or perhaps two to get that done.
Webster then made what I believe was a mistake. He wrote that the body could only have been placed in the tree before rigor mortis had set in or after it had passed; and he opted for the former. Rigor mortis (literally the stiffening of death) is notoriously difficult to measure, because it depends on a number of variables such as external temperature, position of the body and even cause of death itself. Webster could not say with certainty whether the dead woman had been killed near the tree or elsewhere, because without flesh on the bones, the lividity of the body which might have offered clues was entirely missing. In normal conditions, the fingers, toes and facial muscles begin to stiffen within one to four hours; the limbs in four to six hours. After twelve hours, the body is rigid and it would have been impossible to shove it into the bole of the wych elm. After approximately another twelve hours, rigor mortis relaxes in the opposite way from which it developed. Webster’s supposition is that the woman was murdered and deposited within perhaps two to three hours after death. This is possible, but the implication is that the killer knew of the existence of the tree and took his victim there deliberately. This supposition was music to the ears of those who, as we shall see, came to the belief that this murder was linked to witchcraft and the supernatural.
It is, of course, equally possible (and here I believe Webster opted wrongly) that the woman was murdered and left perhaps overnight. The killer realized that the spot was very near to Hagley Wood Lane – the body would be found, sooner rather than later, and there was a need to hide it. When he got there, animals had already been at work. They had chewed the left leg below the knee, taken away the right hand entirely. He looked around in panic and noticed the rotten wych elm with its handy hollow. It was not perfect, but it would have to do and it was better than leaving a murdered woman lying in the open. And, had it not been for four lads birds-nesting, it might have been the perfect hiding place for ever.
Webster’s argument for pre-rigor stashing is based on the fact that putrefaction would have set in almost at once after death ‘and it is extremely unlikely that the murderer would have kept the body until it had got into this condition’. Clearly, Professor Webster lived too early to witness the grisly examples of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy who kept corpses close to them for days or weeks and had sex with them.
The time of death was contentious and it opened a can of worms for which the police at the time were not ready and which has led virtually all the writers on the case in the wrong direction. Because of the condition of the bones and the fact that the wych elm had sprouted through the clothes, Webster estimated that the murder had happened between two years and eighteen months previously. This meant that the woman was murdered in the summer or autumn of 1941 and, although the war was well and truly underway by then, it was at a very different phase which might have a bearing on the killing itself.
Webster, factoring in the clothes found in the wych elm, gave a ‘likely’ description of the deceased.
A woman aged between 25 and 40 years, most probably around 35 years of age, 5ft in height, with light (‘mousey’) brown hair; no undue prominence of the teeth but noticeable irregularity of the front teeth in the lower jaw; clad in a dark blue and light khaki or mustard coloured [this last added to the type in handwriting] striped woollen cardigan with cloth-covered buttons and a belt of a slightly brighter shade of blue than the blue stripes in the cardigan itself, a light khaki or mustard coloured woollen cloth skirt with a side [left] fastener, a peach-coloured taffeta rayon underskirt, navy blue interlock cotton knickers, corsets and black crepe-soled shoes. The above person has been missing for at least 18 months. She was wearing a rolled gold enamelled ring.
In a second report, dated the same day as the above, Webster went into more detail on the clothes. There were portions of five garments apart from the shoes, all seriously decomposed. The knickers were interlock cotton, ‘a cheap type’. The drawing made of them (not attached to this report) shows a voluminous ‘bloomer’ style which presumably was common in the 1940s. The slip was of silk taffeta material, used to line coats. It was a common material used to make slips by women at home; that is, it was not of a professional manufacture. Webster could find no trace of shoulder straps and believed it was rather long for someone 5 feet tall. The colour may once have been pink, but was more likely peach. Parts of a corset were present, little more than tufts of material still clinging to metal stays and suspenders. It was similar to the wrap-around pattern of the 1940s, sold for between 8 and 10 shillings.
In wartime, clothing was a problem. Material itself was, as we have seen, reduced in quantity, but prices had rocketed. Fourteen guinea (£14 14s) coats and skirts cost £42 by 1943; a guinea handbag was £6. A nightdress that cost £1 5s before the war was now £12. Handmade garments for the wealthy were subject to long delays because the seamstresses themselves had been called up in the war effort. All clothing was bought using coupons. In November 1943, an overcoat required eighteen points, a woollen dress eleven and even a pair of knickers was two. The dead woman’s clothes bore all the hallmarks of ‘make do and mend’, one of the many mantras of the war, but the odd thing was that they had no labels at all, a fact which gave the espionage-obsessed observers of the Hagley Wood murder all the ammunition they needed.
The skirt was of good quality wool of ‘pale khaki, perhaps with a tinge of beige’. The female units of the army wore such skirts, whereas most Land Girls wore breeches instead, often corduroy. The belt buckle, which might have given a clue, was mentioned, but clearly yielded no useful information. There were no sleeves with the cardigan, which was unusual and Webster merely comments that such garments usually had sleeves. The two crayon-coloured versions of this cardigan in the police files are not only very different from each other, they both have sleeves, which runs counter to Webster’s observation. There is nothing in the files to say when the drawings were made or by whom. There was no sign of stockings, but in wartime that was hardly to be wondered at. The clothes were generally poor and the dead woman was dressed for outdoors, given the time of year presumed to be summer or early autumn. Oddly, Webster makes no mention of a brassiere. No respectable woman would be seen without one in the 1940s.
The dead woman’s hair was present in large quantities, not merely the portion attached to the right temple. There was no sign of permanent waving and the hair had not been dyed or bleached. Webster found some hairs 7 inches long but this was not consistent and he could only conclude the hair to be of average length. The presence of a corset implied that the body was not that of a young girl.
All this was digested into a police report which covered national criminal events. Under Worcestershire, the headline reads ‘Body Found’. The age of the dead woman is listed as ‘Age 1903 to 1918, most probably 1908’ and the damning mistake by Webster already perpetuated ‘no undue prominence of the teeth but noticeable irregularity of the front teeth in the lower jaw’. The ring is described in more detail – a ‘faceted wedding ring, 2mm wide “Rolled gold” stamped inside, when new would have cost about 2s 6d; this type of ring came into fashion about 10 years ago and the cheap model on the market about 5 years ago.’5
Bizarrely, the article claims that the Hagley area was ‘visited nightly by a large number of people from Birmingham, West Bromwich and Smethwick about 18 months to 2 years ago during the enemy raids on those districts’. The area is ‘also much frequented by pleasure seekers and courting couples’.
Fast forward to 2017 and there was little that Professor Caroline Wilkinson could add to Webster’s forensics. Her brief, of course, was very different from that of 1943. She had to reconstitute a living face from a photograph of a skull and we can have nothing but admiration for her efforts. Her conclusions were that the dead woman was of broad Caucasian origins with some Middle Eastern or Indian characteristics. Professor Wilkinson makes the obvious point that Webster did not. ‘The upper incisors were prominent, with some overlapping of the central incisors producing an overjet over the lower teeth and mild prognathism (forward protruding oral cavity).’6 The nasal bones suggested a short nose, deviated slightly to the right.
Using Photoshop’s mask, wrap, liquify and resize tools, Wilkinson could make an intelligent guess at the dead woman’s eyes, ears, hair and skin tone but on her own admission, this is an approximation only. ‘It must be noted that this facial reconstruction is NOT an accurate portrait of the face of the person, but rather a representation of the face based on the available skull images.’
What is it that stands out about a person? Their hair, their eyes, their teeth when they smile; in other words, the very things that craniofacial reconstruction cannot pin down. Fascinating though the science (and art) is, we are no nearer to knowing who was dumped into a wych elm in Hagley Wood.
Chapter 5
The Victim From Another World
On Wednesday, 7 October 1942, the Marines were patrolling the sand dunes on Hankley Common near the village of Thursley in Surrey. The soft ground had been churned up by tanks manoeuvring in the area and in one of the twisting ruts, POX 100381 William Moore saw a human hand protruding from the mud. The thumb and two fingers had been gnawed away, probably by rats. There was a foot visible too. Moore reported his grisly find to Sergeant Jack Withington who in turn relayed the message to Lieutenant Norman McLeod. He called the police.
The Surrey Constabulary were as stretched as any other police force during the war, but a body was a body and action had to be taken. Sergeant Benjamin Ballard from Milford police station arrived at the scene with Constable A.W. Bundy, Thursley’s beat bobby.
As in Hagley Wood six months later, by nightfall on that Wednesday, a cluster of policemen were standing under the evergreens on the slope of Hankley Common. It was a measure of how seriously everybody regarded the finding of a body that the chief constable of the county, Major Nicholson, was there, along with two superintendents, Richard Webb and Thomas Roberts, together with a police photographer. Eric Gardner, consulting pathologist at Weybridge Hospital was in the company of a man we have met already – Keith Simpson, lecturer in forensic medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London – and his long-suffering secretary, Molly Lefebure.
‘The stench of putrefaction was strong,’ Simpson reminisced in his Forty Years of Murder. ‘The air was buzzing with flies and the remains of the body were crawling with maggots.’1
Molly Lefebure stood loyally by CKS, making notes, collecting specimens of beetles, maggots, earth and heather and sealing them in buff envelopes. Everybody else moved away from the smell.
The body was that of a woman. She was wearing a shabby green and white summer frock with a lace collar. There was a piece of knotted rope around her waist serving as a belt. Under the frock were wide-legged French knickers, a slip, a vest and a bra. Her ankle socks still clung to her feet but her shoes had gone. Simpson estimated that her skull had been shattered by a heavy, blunt object, perhaps a wooden stake. Gardner estimated that the woman had been buried five or six weeks earlier, so that she had probably been murdered in late August or early September of that year. She was taken to Guy’s, with the permission of the local coroner Dr Wills Taylor, and ‘by tea-time, thousands [of maggots] were struggling for life in a carbolic bath in [the] Hospital mortuary’.
Having examined the body more carefully in laboratory conditions, Simpson moved the probable murder date to the middle of September. The thirty-eight pieces of the skull were painstakingly reassembled by him and Gardner and what was left at the back was a gaping hole, 5¼ by 1¼ inches. The single blow would have caused immediate loss of consciousness and death minutes later, from shock and brain damage. There was also a series of peculiarly shaped stabs to the forehead and the front teeth were missing. Simpson estimated that the victim had been attacked by her assailant from the front, using some sort of knife and had then been finished off with the heavy object from behind. Her teeth would probably have been knocked out because she was already on the ground, face-down, when the fatal blow had been struck.
X-rays of the victim’s bones and teeth, as well as the measurements of the pelvis, told Simpson that the dead woman was between 19 and 20 years old. She was 5ft 4in tall and slim. Her hair, what little of it was left, was a mousy brown. Significantly, it was her missing front teeth that gave the most important clue. Their position in the skull clearly told Simpson that they protruded slightly, rather like the woman in Hagley Wood.
The most common assumption in the finding of a female murder victim is that the killing was sex-related. Yet the girl’s underwear was intact and there was no sign of assault. Neither was there in the Hagley Wood case.
What clinched the identity of the girl on Hankley Common was her clothes, the green and white frock. The sharp-eyed Superintendent Webb remembered seeing a frock like that – and recently. He checked his diary. He had been at the station on 23 July when a constable brought in a girl wearing that very dress. She was 19 and had brown hair and protruding teeth. She was one of those girls who became increasingly common during the war, a runaway. Her name was Joan Pearl Wolfe.
In the days that followed the finding of the body, sixty coppers in uniform trudged through Houndown Wood and on to Hankley Common, elbow to elbow, turning over the leafmould with sticks. On 12 October, they found a tooth, a piece of skull and a tuft of hair. And two shoes, about ninety paces apart. Later that day, more was found, corroborative evidence for Webb’s memory. There was a canvas bag containing a rosary, a bar of soap and a water bottle. Three days later, the most vital evidence of all, an identity card and National Health Insurance card with the name Joan Pearl Wolfe. Ironically, only in wartime would those things exist; nobody in peacetime Britain routinely carried identity information, least of all 19-year-old girls. Six days later, Constable Joseph Armstrong of Surrey police found the murder weapon, a broken branch of a silver birch tree measuring 38½in long. Joan’s hair still clung to the peeling bark.
The police were even able to find two places where Joan had spent her last days. On high ground in Thursley village was an old cricket pavilion, beaten by the wind and rain. Inside was a pair of stockings, an elastic garter and a knitting instruction booklet. And on one of the wooden planks of the pavilion’s walls, a child-like drawing under a smiling sun and the words ‘Our little grey home in the west’. It was a schoolgirl’s dream, of sharing for ever with her lover; with the man who had killed her.
The identification of a victim is a huge step forward in a murder case. It creates a set of parameters within which the police can work. Relatives, friends and colleagues can be located and interviewed. Murder by a random stranger is far rarer than most people think, so the chances are that, during those interviews, the police will happen across the killer they are looking for.
