And the old man remembered something else. He joined the RAF towards the end of 1941 but he was back on leave three years later, when there seems to have been a burst of new activity on the Hagley Wood case. His sister had bought a copy of the national newspaper the Daily Sketch and saw an article by Professor Webster relating to the case and the shoes. The airman and his sister were convinced they were the shoes their mother had given the singer. They contacted the police and the paper, but heard no more. That was because their mother’s shoes were two-tone brown and cream, not the dark blue of Hagley Wood.
In August 1978, the Black Country Bugle carried an article about a Mr Cogzell (no Christian name supplied), a shoemaker who believed he had some answers. Cogzell had seen a television programme which Joyce Coley says was made featuring Professor Webster. The pathologist died in 1973 but had retired by 1955, so this was a very early example of this sort of ‘crime watch’ programme, in which Webster showed the shoes to his television audience (watching of course on small, grainy screens in black and white, 405 lines). As a shoemaker, Cogzell was fascinated and thought he recognized the distinctive stitching. He was adamant that the shoes he was shown by Dr R.T. Davies of Birmingham University’s Medical School and purporting to come from the wych elm were not those he had seen on television. The colour was right, as was the dilapidation, but a particular cut on one of the uppers, which had been stressed on the programme, was not there.
The Bugle was able at least to clear up the fact that the television programme had been aired in 1969 or 1970 and both the BBC and ITV were trying to trace it. Cogzell’s story was that, nursing his sick wife, he forgot about the programme until the Bugle’s article on the case in June 1978 had jogged his memory. He had lived in Lye for years near a cobbler and knew that the girls who worked in a local sheet metal works wore shoes that were damaged by sharp metal. The cobbler repaired them using a particularly distinctive type of stitch and Cogzell believed he could recognize it if he had access to the original shoes.
The wedding ring yielded nothing at all. An expensive piece of jewellery might have led to identification – jewellers keep careful records of such things – and Birmingham of course was linked with the gold and silver trade. But this was cheap rolled gold, worth about half a crown, the sort of ‘cover-all’ that many young women used to con nosy hotel and guest-house proprietors that they were married to the man they had come in with. It was not far above a plain old curtain ring, except that photographs show that it had designs all the way around it.
Inight and Williams probably put most faith in the peculiar teeth. Dentists keep careful records, like jewellers, and not only did the dead woman have overlapping incisors, she had also had a tooth removed within a year before she died, from the right side of her lower jaw. The problem was that many dentists, like doctors, had been called up for military service and we have no way of knowing how accurate record keeping was, given that manpower shortage. Then, there was the problem of amateurs, people who took out teeth with no anaesthetic and only a rudimentary idea of what they were doing. Like back-street abortionists, they kept no records at all.
What is astonishing is that, apart from requests in police newspaper reports, there is nothing on dentists in the Worcestershire Archive. Since it is likely that these would have been in a file unique to that source, an equal likelihood is that this has become separated over the years and subsequently lost. But the reality in 1943 was that, yet again, nothing was forthcoming.
The assumed scene of the crime was slightly more forthcoming, though. While the Surrey force had been able to construct a reasonably accurate thumbnail sketch of Joan Wolfe, only two items, other than scattered bones, were found in Hagley Wood. One was a green glass bottle which probably had no links to the case. It is described nowhere and such bottles, usually with ribbed exteriors, often carried poison. Even in the 1940s, it was possible to buy various dangerous chemicals over the counter in pharmacies. Professor Webster could not find a definitive cause of death, but poison would leave no trace on bones or the limited scraps of clothing found. The problem with any crime scene is that it can be littered before and after the event by just about anybody. According to contemporary reports, Hagley Wood was used widely by courting couples, ‘pleasure seekers’ and evacuees from bombing; the bottle could have been anybody’s.
Altogether more fascinating is the identity card. We know that Mrs Bradley of Hagley made covers for cards like this and it had to be carried at all times to be shown to officials in a country paranoid about a fifth column operating in darkness. This particular one had a woman’s name on it and an address. The police made enquiries.
Actually, they did not. Donald McCormick wrote the first book on the Hagley Wood murder in 1968. Murder by Witchcraft linked Hagley Wood with the killing of labourer Charles Walton in Meon Hill in 1945, a fatal misconception that has dogged both unsolved murders ever since. According to McCormick, whose fabrications are analysed in Chapter 14, the owner of the card lived at ‘an address in the Midlands’4 and voluntarily gave her name. When the police called on her and asked to see her card, she could not find it. She admitted the card was hers, but she had no idea how it had ended up in Hagley Wood, a place she had never been to in her life. At this point, according to McCormick and others who have followed him, the police seem to have shrugged and wandered away.
This defies belief. Not having an identity card was a criminal offence. Being unable to explain how it got to a place where a murder had happened was, to say the least, suspicious. And, surprise, surprise, there is no mention of this incident in the Worcester Archive.
What there is, however, – and this, I believe, is where McCormick’s vague nonsense came from – is the finding of a lady’s handbag in 1944. It was 17 November and Special Constable R. Sheppard of Hagley was in the wood investigating shooting rights when he found the bag ‘some distance below’ the wych elm. The bag measured 9½ inches wide by 6½ and the moss covering on one side indicated that it had been there for some time. So much for the thorough search of the ground in April 1943, although conceivably the bag may not have been there that long. A letter T had been carved into the bark of a silver birch nearby.
Clent police had a record that a handbag had been reported stolen on 16 December from a car parked in Hagley Wood Lane. The woman who reported it was Dr Dorothy Edith Markham of 25, Elgin Rd, Alexandra Park, London N22. Police enquiries revealed that the doctor now lived in Compton Court, Compton Road, Wolverhampton. The bag itself was empty but Dr Markham had said that it had contained about fifteen shillings in cash, a fountain pen and a driving licence. To be fair to McCormick, he had no access to police files when he wrote his book because Hagley Wood was still an open case, so the driving licence morphed into the much more likely identity card.
Constable Jack Pound was sent to interview Dr Markham on 22 November and she identified the bag as hers. Pound was satisfied that the bag had no links with the body in the wych elm but leaving it at that seems just as irresponsible as McCormick’s version in which the police make enquiries of an anonymous woman in a Midlands town (Markham in Wolverhampton) and accept that being without an identity card for months was not unusual and no cause for concern. Few people had driving licences in the 1940s and motorists were not obliged to carry them. Even allowing for the fact that Dr Markham was working in the area in 1939, what was her (vacated) car doing in Hagley Wood Lane? It was December, hardly a time for a nature ramble. The fact is that Jack Pound may have been too easily fobbed off by a professional woman who was unlikely to have been intimidated by the sudden arrival of a policeman. Whatever the links between the doctor and the wood, the actual driving licence was never seen again.
In Murder By Witchcraft, Donald McCormick refers to a man who saw an article on the Hagley Wood case in the papers. Typical of McCormick’s style, we have no name, no date, not even the newspaper in question. He was, McCormick says, and everyone else has followed him, an executive of an industrial company who was living in lodgings on Hagley Common in the summer of 1941. He was walking to his digs, perhaps on 16 July and heard a woman’s screams coming from the wood. Minutes later, he met a teacher walking in the opposite direction and he had heard the same thing. The pair decided to call the police and a sergeant came to investigate. The three found nothing. Was a dead woman already lying, contorted in the confined space of the bole, inside one of the many wych elms they trudged past?
Knowing what we do about McCormick’s habit of running with all the rumours and half-baked truths, this story requires investigation. There is no report of the incident in the police files, no screams in the woods, no keenly searching sergeant. What time of day was this? If the executive was returning home, it was presumably after the day’s work, so early evening. The teacher would have finished his day too, by then, the school term still in operation on 16 July. To call the police, they would either have gone to whichever of their homes was nearest or to find a call box. Buttons had to be pressed and ‘999’ had to be dialled. The operator’s voice would have clicked in – ‘which service do you require?’ – and wires would be pulled to make the police connection. The days are long in July so it would be entirely feasible for a search to be conducted that evening. But if the screams were the last sounds made by the woman in the wych elm, her murderer would still be at large in the wood. Did he stuff the body in the tree and make a run for it while the walkers were finding their red-painted telephone kiosk? Possible, but unlikely.
It is possible that the teacher and the executive are figments of McCormick’s imagination or a misreading of a newspaper article. We shall come across two teachers in the Hagley Wood Archive later, but there is no one who fits the pattern of the executive.
In the end, like so much else in the Hagley Wood murder, it was all smoke and mirrors. Asked for his comments late in 1943, Superintendent Sidney Inight admitted they had no real clue as to the identity of the dead woman. She might as well, as someone in the original investigation put it, have come ‘from another world’.
Chapter 6
The Writing on the Wall
Sixty-three years before the Hagley Wood murder, a series of killings took place in London’s East End which have assumed iconic status. Seven women1 all of them prostitutes, were attacked and mutilated in the adjacent parishes of Whitechapel and Spitalfields by a blitz-style killer who, thanks to over-the-top journalese, came to be known as Jack the Ripper.
On the night of 31 September, the killer struck twice. His first victim was Elizabeth Stride, known as Long Liz, whose body was found by a passing carter in Dutfield’s Yard off Berner Street. It is likely that the arrival of Louis Diemschutz, with his pony and trap, interrupted the killer who hid until the coast was clear, then moved west, probably out of his comfort zone. This brought him out of the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan police and into that of the City force.
In Mitre Square, the Whitechapel murderer came across Catherine Eddowes, whose particular patch that was, and he killed her. This time, there would be no interruptions and despite the frequency of police patrols in the area, ‘Jack’ cut the woman’s throat, slashed her cheeks, earlobes and eyelids, ripped open her abdomen and removed a kidney and ovaries. Where he went then must be conjecture, but a piece of evidence came to light which has an indirect link with the Hagley Wood killing.
Constable 254A Alfred Long of the Met was patrolling his usual beat along Goulston Street, to the east of Mitre Square, and he noticed a scribbled sentence, written in chalk, on the black brick facia of Numbers 108–19 Wentworth Model Dwellings, a tenement block typical of dozens all over the East End. Lying in the basin of a stand pipe below it was a piece of bloody cloth which had been ripped from an apron. Subsequent research proved that the cloth – and the blood – came from Catherine Eddowes. In all probability, the murderer had a considerable amount of blood on his hands and had taken the cloth away to wipe them. Heading to what was almost certainly his home in Whitechapel, he chanced upon the stand pipe and washed his hands more thoroughly.
Had he also written the chalk message of the wall nearby? Unfortunately, detectives who arrived to view the scene did not record accurately what the words said; neither, although the technology was available, were they photographed. According to the official police line, backed by the Home Office, the words read ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ The misspelling of ‘Jews’ was noted but changed at least three times by the time of the coroner’s inquest. Fearing that this overt anti-Semitism would inflame the non-Jewish population of the area (where over 90 per cent were Jewish) the Commissioner of the Met, the clueless Charles Warren, ordered the words erased.
As with the writing that appeared in the Hagley Wood case, the Goulston Street Graffito opened a can of worms and has itself reached iconic status in the febrile world of Ripperology. A number of detectives at the time did not believe that the words had any connection with the Whitechapel killings, and this, of course, is the problem with all sorts of evidence at crime scenes. To take another example from the Ripper case, a leather apron was found near the body of another victim, Annie Chapman, in a yard behind No 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. This ‘evidence’ was leaked to the press who brazenly asserted that the apron belonged to the killer. Accordingly, a local named John Pizer, who not only, as a shoemaker, owned such a garment but actually had the nickname ‘Leather Apron’, was attacked by a mob and had to be rescued by the police. It was later discovered that the apron belonged to one of the seventeen occupants of No 29 who had washed it and left it out overnight to dry.
I have not been able to pinpoint the first appearance of the Hagley Wood graffito but it was certainly there by Christmas 1943 when the message was reported on an external wall of Upper Dean Street, Birmingham. It was written in block capitals in chalk, each letter approximately the height of a brick. It read ‘Who put Bella down the Wych elm – Hagley Wood’. There was no question mark, implying perhaps that the author was not much of a writer, but ‘wych’ was spelled correctly, as it usually was in later editions of the question. One, slightly nearer to Hagley – Old Hill, Birmingham – read ‘Who put Luebella down the Wych Elm?’ and was followed by ‘Hagley Wood Bella’. The most common form of the dozens that appeared in the weeks and months that followed read ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?’
The first reference (of many) in the police files is dated 28 March 1944, eleven months after the body was found and nearly three years after she died. Detective Constable Frank Kedward wrote to Superintendent Hollyhead at Stourbridge to tell him that Wilfred Lawson White, a 40-year-old fruiterer of Beale Street in the town had seen some wall writing that morning on his way to work at Smithfield Fruit Market in Birmingham. The inscription was on the wall of Messrs Francis Nicholls Ltd, but the confusion over the address – ‘either Pershore Street or Dean Street, Birmingham’ – is a cause of confusion itself. The words were identical to those found in the same area since the previous December – ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm Hagley Wood’.
Both DI Williams at Worcester and Birmingham City Police were informed. Worryingly, Williams’s version of the same incident on the same day reads differently – ‘Who put Bella in the Wytch Elm tree at Hagley Wood?’ The devil, as is the case with all murder enquiries, was in the detail. And the detail was careless and confused. Detective Inspector Dillon of the Birmingham force was to look into the matter.
Three days later, DI Williams was in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham with the local officers Chief Inspector Davis and DS Renshaw. The writing was on the wall of empty premises next to those of Messrs Williamsons. The manager was helpful, as were the Boffeys, father and son, who worked as warehousemen on the premises. Raymond Boffey, the son, had his attention drawn to the writing by a lad named George Bond (both boys were in their teens). Boffey had written ‘No parking here’ nearby, obviously tired of the world and his wife blocking the Williamsons’ yard. Boffey denied writing anything else, but admitted he had read about the Hagley Wood murder recently in an old newspaper. Under pressure from the police, the 16-year-old cracked and admitted his writing the ‘Bella’ message. He subsequently withdrew this statement, so Williams got him to write it down. This proved to be a disaster. ‘He is absolutely,’ the inspector wrote in his report, ‘an illiterate youth, having only reached the third standard at school.’ Boffey’s scribble is still attached (one of four made) and only in one was the spelling correct, simply because Williams had told him how to spell the words!
Enquiries in the area drew a blank. No one in the markets and coffee houses knew anyone called Bella. The next day, Williams had a phone call from Sergeant Renshaw; another message had appeared, on the wall of Messrs Whites near the Williamson buildings. This time it just read ‘Hagley Wood Bella’ and must have been written late on 29 March or early on the 30th. So, back Williams went on the next day, a Thursday.
The enquiries at Whites’ included interviews with lorry drivers who came from all over the Midlands, as far away as Shrewsbury in the west. Out of this came a possible suspect, for the writing if not the murder itself. On Saturday, 25 March, a man had called at the offices of the Birmingham Gazette and asked to see the file on Hagley Wood. He was between 30 and 40 years old, wearing work clothes and an overcoat, had dark hair and was 5ft 10in tall. He spent half an hour perusing the cuttings, and Frederick Anderson, the desk reporter, asked if he could help. He told him that he had been passing Hagley Wood at about the time of the murder and felt that ‘something terrible was going to happen’. He had been talking this over with workmates and wanted to check on the dead woman’s wedding ring. Anderson was naturally suspicious and asked to see the man’s identity card. The name was John Jones, of Reservoir Road, Selly Oak but Anderson had not written down the National Registration Number nor the actual address.
Williams took Anderson to Reservoir Road but he could not identify ‘Mr Jones’ at all. There were two hundred houses along the road but the local fire-guard officer was very helpful and whittled down the likely address to 264 or 266. No one was in at either house, so Williams called it a day; by now it was 8.30 p.m. and getting dark. In wartime, of course, with a blackout in force, that meant very dark indeed.
When Williams reached the station, he got a phone call about yet another outbreak of graffiti, this time in Old Hill, Staffordshire, with the phrase ‘Who put Luebeller in the Wych Elm’.
The next morning saw him with Detective Constables Kedward and Venables looking at the writing on the wall of an old cottage on the Old Hill to Halesowen road. Williams believed the handwriting to be identical to the others he had seen. He contacted an old teacher friend of his, John Cox, head of Old Hill School and asked his professional opinion. Contrary to the report that Williams had only received the day before, Cox told him that the graffito had been there since before the previous Christmas. Still following his hunch about Jones of Reservoir Road, Williams conferred with Inspector Bache of Halesowen in respect of a firm, Gaskell and Chambers, who had recently moved premises from Dalesend to Hayseed, only a quarter of a mile from the Old Hill writing. Williams was sending telegrams in all directions, keeping everybody in the loop, including the journalist Anderson, in case the elusive Mr Jones should call back. He suggested keeping watch on various premises in the area for a possible return of the graffiti writer.
Two days later, on what was, ironically, April Fools’ Day, Sergeant Renshaw was letting Williams know that he had taken photographs of the Upper Dean Street writing and had taken scrapings of the chalk itself, trying to pinpoint the origin of the material.
The previous day, teacher John Cox of Haden Hill, Old Hill, made an official statement to Detective Archie Venables. His involvement went way back, in fact to the previous summer (1943) which, if correct, makes it the closest graffito we have relating to the finding of the body. At the time, Cox did not equate it with Hagley Wood. But he was not the only eyewitness to this. Venables also interviewed James William Rowley, a laboratory assistant aged 18, of High Haden Road, Old Hill. Rowley was walking to work on 30 March 1944 carrying a copy of the early edition of the Birmingham Gazette and had just read of similar writings. There it was on a cottage wall – ‘Who put Luebeller in the Wych Elm’. Venables’ search of the Burgess List, a sort of street directory, revealed no one called Bella, Luebeller, Christabella or any other likely variant. Enquiries at the Food and Registration office also drew a blank.
Venables added in this report that he had heard of a conversation in the Star pub in Halesowen on that day, in which one of the men concerned said that he knew who the murderer was. Inspector Bache, whose manor this was, was dealing with it. We have already noted the paranoia of wartime Britain and ‘guilty’ conversations of any sort were taken very seriously by the authorities. As a footnote, are Messrs Rowley and Cox the actual origin of McCormick’s duo who reported the screams in Hagley Wood? Cox was a teacher and even though Rowley, as a laboratory technician, hardly equates with a company executive, it is easy to see how one member of an establishment could be confused with another. They had both gone to the police with information linked with Hagley Wood, although not as directly as McCormick would have us believe.
On 12 April, another graffito was reported and this one had a cynical, if sinister, twist. At some time after 10 a.m., the following words appeared on a wall at Mucklow Hill, Halesowen. It was, as usual, in white chalk and read ‘Who put Bella in the wytch elm, Hagley Wood. Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper. Anna Bella. Died in Hagley Wood?’
Bearing in mind the Goulston Street Graffito (see p49) and its red-herring goose-chase by the police in 1888, this one underlines the point of the Bella writings; virtually all of it was a joke. Jack the Ripper was – and remains – the best-known unknown murderer in the world; and Bella’s killer was unknown too. Two things, however, emerge from the Halesowen daub of 12 April 1944 – the second name Anna (later to have sinister echoes) and the valid, unanswerable question, did Bella actually die in Hagley Wood? Detective Constable John Lee was to follow this one up.
He reported that the lettering was very roughly done about 5ft 6in from the ground. It had appeared soon after a group of lads from local factories had been seen loitering in the area (as they did routinely during their lunch break) and one of them was likely to have been responsible. DI Williams had seen this message too, on his way to a detectives’ conference in Birmingham with Sergeant Skerratt from Clent. In his opinion, the writing style was nothing like the others he had seen.
