There seems to be a lull in the graffiti outbreak because the next police reference is dated 1 August. Williams reported that the writing had been photographed on a wall in Wolverhampton and read ‘Hagley Wood – Luebella – her address was opposite the Rose and Crown, Hasbury’. Hasbury is a village on the road to Halesowen, about four miles from Hagley. Inspector Bache told Williams that a similar message had appeared on a gate opposite the Shelton Inn, Belle Vale, Halesowen and that DC Lee had seen it. Was this, at last, a breakthrough?
PC231 Albert Pitcher, on Bache’s instructions, visited Hasbury the next day. On a bridge wall near the gate was the incomprehensible ‘I use to Hagley Wood’ but the next part of the sentence was more interesting. ‘Lubella was no pross[titute]’.
The ever-diligent Constable Pitcher visited all the houses opposite the Rose and Crown and dutifully recorded details of all the residents (although the report is somewhat garbled). He had gone back six years. The Willetts family (four adults and one child and no known relation to Tommy who had helped find Bella’s body) had lived at Number 390 for forty years. Ernest and his wife had one child; Walter and his wife had no children. Harry Moore had lived four doors away for thirty years, along with his wife and four daughters. Mrs Withers lived at 396 with her small child; her husband Colin was serving with the armed forces and the family had lived there for five years. Hilda Argent’s husband had been killed by enemy action in 1941; she lived with her child at 398. At 400 lived Alfred Hardwick, his wife and three children. Next door was Albert Allsopp, his wife Annie and daughter who had lived there for thirty-five years. Their son, Samuel, was a leading Aircraftsman based in Suffolk. At 406 lived Arthur James, his wife, daughter and son-in-law. They had been there for twelve years. Number 408 was the home of the widow Mabel Basterfield and her son. John Laight, his wife and three small children lived at 410, except that the husband was somewhere with the armed forces. None of them knew anyone called Lubella.
The only Bella that Pitcher came across was a woman – Bella James – who occasionally visited the Allsopps who were distant relatives of hers but they had heard nothing of her for over four years and she was aged between 60 and 70. Subsequent enquiries found her alive and well in Kidderminster.
On the same day that Pitcher was knocking on doors in Hasbury, 24-year-old chemist Stanley Ray, employed at Mander Bros by the Ministry of Supply made a statement to DC L. White to the effect that he had seen another Rose and Crown graffito the previous day in Sun Passage, under an archway belonging to the railway. Chief Inspector Penderel visited the site with the words in white chalk and believed that they had been recently done. Penderel made sure that DI Williams was kept in the loop but by now everybody involved in the case must have been heartily tired of pranksters’ work appearing all over the place. The Wolverhampton Express and Star reported the latest outbreak on 7 August – ‘it can only be supposed that these chalkings are yet another hoax.’
Williams’ visit to Halesowen, however, elicited some potentially useful information. Opposite the Rose and Crown were the premises of J.T. Willetts (Pitcher had talked to the family at 390). This was a timber yard and Mr Willetts senior knew Hagley Wood well. He told Williams that either the wych elm was a piece of luck for the murderer or that the tree was known to him in advance. Willetts believed ‘that the woman was taken to the Wood and that some person attempted to have intercourse with her against her will and that her death occurred as the result of some violence being used’. He was convinced that Bella was not local. Williams knew the Willetts family and knew he could trust their knowledge. Against that, however, was Professor Webster’s assertion that the presence of the woman’s undamaged knickers precluded rape or any attempt; Willetts obviously did not know that.
In his report, Williams had been talking things over with Inspector Bache and they agreed that using local papers, especially the Express and Star with its big circulation, would be a good vehicle to prompt the public and elicit any information. Most CID units did this by the 1940s, but some were reluctant to give too much away as it brought out the prurient and frankly deranged – as would be the case with Bella.
One of these was the mysterious Mr Jones who had called at the Birmingham Gazette’s offices in search of the paper’s Hagley Wood murder file. He had been traced back in April 1944 and Williams had interviewed him. He was ‘a peculiar youth, over 6ft, protruding ears and teeth and looked abnormal’. John Jones lived at 106, Reservoir Road, Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham and worked as an electrician in the BSA works in Small Heath. Somewhat bizarrely, bearing in mind Williams’ opinion of him, he was attached to the Intelligence Section, 26th Battalion, C Company, Birmingham Home Guard. As to his sense that ‘something was going to happen’ near Hagley Wood Lane, Williams concluded that he had ‘either been reading too many detective novels’ or had read a journal called Armchair Scientist and saw himself as an amateur psychologist/sleuth. Jones had rung Digbeth police station over twenty times offering his advice and assistance. Williams got Jones to write out the Hagley Wood message found in Upper Dean Street (the first one that appeared) and believed he was responsible; Professor Webster disagreed although he was not an acknowledged graphologist. Attached to the police file on Jones is an extract from Armchair Science, August 1939 which attempts to identify murderers from their glandular peculiarities. When a certain type of man turns to crime, reads the section annotated in pencil by Jones:
… his will be the ‘perfect crime’ of fiction, carefully planned and carried out without a hitch. He’ll rob, but only for six-figure sums, and when he kills, you’ll find that love or its step-sister [hate?] was the motivating impulse … And if the police don’t catch him in the act, they’re hardly likely to catch him in the next six months. But when they do and if they’re glandularly minded, they’ll put him in a cell with a ream of paper and a dozen pencils. Then he’ll give himself away. Oh, no, he won’t confess. He never confesses. But he can’t resist the urge to write.
It is difficult to say who was more ‘peculiar’; John Jones or the author of Armchair Science!
Again and again, we come back to that first wall writing in Upper Dean Street. Later ones were almost certainly the work of hoaxers – and if the purpose was to distract the police and lead them in the wrong direction, it worked – but why Upper Dean Street? And was that first one actually written by someone who genuinely knew something? The street was a short one, just over 300 yards long, in the heart of the city centre, near the Rag Market and the Bull Ring. Tat of all kinds was sold in the area, as it had been for centuries and the Bull Ring itself rang to the shouts of costers and the rumble of their carts in the 1940s. There was a synagogue there and among its once more opulent Georgian homes, a pub called the Coach and Horses. The police determined that the chalk used for the graffiti was the bog-standard type, universally used in schools on blackboards and in pubs to mark up darts’ scores. What could be easier than for someone to sneak a piece into his pocket after a pint and use it to pose the question on nearby brickwork after closing time?
At the heart of the graffiti was the name itself. Later assertions (see Chapter 14) were that the name was associated with witchcraft, but this is an almost nonsensical generalization. It means ‘beautiful’ (as in ‘belle of the ball’) but this is a much later interpretation. ‘Belli’ is the plural of bellum, a war. A Bellatrix was a female warrior (largely, in Roman times, a literary convention). All of it came from Bellona, a war goddess. So, there was something appropriate about Bella’s body being found during the biggest war in history. The ‘beautiful’ meaning comes from belle, meaning well or nicely and is a far more Italian convention.
As an English name in the 1930s and 1940s, it was unusual, a derivation of Elizabeth, alongside Eliza, Isobel, Lubella and the commonest version, Betty. Today, Bella is rated sixty-second among popular girls’ names; in 1940, it is not even in the first hundred. Was the scrawled name on that wall in Upper Dean Street a generic one, almost like the Australian ‘sheila’ which fitted any female? Or did the writer know exactly who had been hidden in Hagley Wood and was that actually her name? If the writer of the original graffito knew Bella and was concerned that she had not, by Christmas 1943, got justice, why did he not contact the police with what he knew? Or was it just a matter of taunting the authorities, who had so far failed to catch anybody? In the case of the Whitechapel murders, the police and the press received upwards of 220 letters and postcards, most of them chiding the Metropolitan and City forces for their incompetence. What we do not have, unlike the Ripper killings, is anyone coming forward to admit responsibility. Often, the higher the profile of a murder and the more coverage it gets in the press, the more the pressure is on some people – usually men – to confess. In the case of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper who battered women to death in Leeds in the 1980s, the most blatant – and damaging – of these was the spurious confession on tape from ‘Wearside Jack’, whose identity would only be discovered years later and who had nothing to do with the Leeds murders at all. As far as we are aware, no one came forward to say ‘I put Bella in the wych elm’ and the police were no further forward.
But in October 1944 came an unusual twist. At Halloween, a letter was sent to the chief constable at Newton Street, Birmingham:
Sir,
Just a line you are letting me Be at ease I mean about who put Bella Down the Wych Elm in Hagley Wood, you know the writing on the wall in Smithfield St. some months Back that was me Mr Wood. Well here is your chance to meet me in Market St of[f] Collshill St tomorrow Nov 1 at 5.30 and you shall hear the truth all for Now.
Yours truly
Mr Wood
Needless to say, the police followed this up and needless to say, no one turned up at the rendezvous. Neither could anyone called Wood be located in the area. Wood was the ‘Wearside Jack’ of his day, an oddball who probably took delight in taunting the police.
The war undoubtedly added to the complexities of the case. While it is true that no one could wander the countryside as freely as they had before 3 September 1939 and everybody and his wife was on the lookout for fifth columnists and suspicious activity, police forces were stretched and records were not kept. There was, for instance, no national census for 1941 because so many people were serving overseas in the armed forces and administrative units were needed elsewhere. Likewise, in Birmingham, there were no updated electoral rolls between 1940 and 1944. And the shady characters of the underworld had a knack of staying firmly under the radar, even given that it was Britain that invented it!
Grim as it was, the Second World War was a golden opportunity for some people. Professional criminals saw the openings at once. They became Black Marketeers, thieves and pilferers, getting around the restrictions of rationing. The unscrupulous factory worker could sneak out of his workplace with metal goods, fabric, machine parts under his coat. The dodgy stevedore could ‘mislay’ whole crates of imports. And there were ‘larks’ everywhere. The bomb lark saw people still living in untouched houses claiming compensation for bomb damage that had not happened. The billeting lark witnessed landlords and landladies claiming expenses for troops in their homes who had long moved on. After any air raid, the rate of looting was horrendous. Who knew how many peopled trudged past the Coach and Horses in Upper Dean Street, casually reading the chalked question that somebody had posed, with a few jars of jam in their pockets or a fur coat rolled up in an otherwise empty pram? The penalty for looting was fourteen years at His Majesty’s Pleasure, but it was a risk worth taking because the police could not be everywhere.
Women like Bella – the name stuck; the media and the police widely used it – were particularly at risk. A London magistrate warned about air-raid shelters. ‘The things that are going on now in those public shelters are very dreadful. For a young girl to go into a … shelter … without her father and her mother is simply asking for trouble.’ Because of the war, there was, at any given time, a sizeable number of missing persons. Some had been blown to pieces in the Blitz and their bodies never found. Others, down on their luck and deprived of the financial support of husbands and fathers, wandered the cities and the peripheries of army camps. The arrival of the Americans, with their gum, their nylons, candy, smart uniforms and, above all, their money, made this worse.
Let us look at the women we know were victims of murder in the same period. We have already met Joan Wolfe, whose body was found in Houndown Wood, Hankley Common in October 1942. She was the product of what today we would call a broken home, her mother Edith marrying three times. The man assumed to be Joan’s father suffered from what at the time was called sleeping sickness. He gassed himself while Joan was still at school. Edith’s letters to her daughter constantly carped about the girl’s behaviour – she stayed out late with older men and, at 16, began to ‘go with soldiers’. She was already engaged but broke off her relationship and went first to Aldershot, the ‘home’ of the British army, then to London to work, for a month only, in an aircraft factory. Edith was appalled, believed that her daughter had venereal disease and was probably a nymphomaniac. When she became involved with a number of Canadian soldiers, including August Sangret, who eventually killed her, she lived rough, in ‘wigwams’ in the woods, and was infested with lice. She only owned one set of clothes, the ones she was wearing when she died. She spoke French, wore a crucifix and did not, in her own words, understand men.
When Superintendent Fred Cherill, the fingerprint expert at Scotland Yard, first saw Nita Ward, she was ‘lying across a bed … with not even a sheet as covering … She was a ghastly sight. She had been the victim of a sadistic attack of the most horrible and revolting nature.’ She had been strangled and her killer had mutilated her with a tin-opener and a piece of broken mirror. Her real name was Evelyn Oatley, aged thirty-six. She had been an actress and a Windmill girl, performing nightly in the famous theatre that refused to close even at the height of the Blitz and she had left her husband. Lack of cash drove her to prostitution. There were 143 brothels operating in London in 1942 before the Met closed some of them down. Many more were in business two years later and the majority of their customers were Americans who were being ripped off by their outrageous charges. The ‘Hyde Park Rangers’ and ‘Piccadilly Commandoes’ as they were called, flashed torches at would-be clients in blacked-out alleyways. Some of them serviced fifteen men a night and the money was good. The fact that Evelyn had a flat in Wardour Street, London, on the edge of Soho, implied that she was a cut above the usual street girl.
Margaret Lowe was 43, ‘a handsome and finely built woman’ according to Cherril and everybody knew her as Pearl. She was widowed and had once kept a boarding house in Southend. Her body was found in her flat in Crosfield Street off Tottenham Court Road. She was working as a prostitute and there was a darned silk stocking tied tightly round her neck. Her naked body was hideously mutilated.
Doris Jouannet was the wife of a French hotel manager. Her husband had taken British citizenship in the 1930s and the couple lived in Sussex Gardens, already known for its availability of cheap rooms, often by the hour. Henri Jouannet had an alibi for the time of his wife’s death and had no idea that she was ‘on the game’. She had been strangled with a scarf and ripped open like the others. Her killer had nearly sliced off one of her nipples with a razor blade.
The three women above were all victims of the man dubbed the ‘Blackout Killer’ by the press – Aircraftsman Gordon Cummings. He was an extraordinarily inept murderer, leaving fingerprints, items of uniform and a gas mask behind at scenes of crime. Two failed attacks on women sealed his fate and he was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth on 25 June 1942.
It is true that Cummins’ first victim was the respectable Evelyn Hamilton, a 42-year-old pharmacist who was about to move back home to the north, where it was safer than much-bombed London. She had £80 on her when she met Cummins in an air-raid shelter (despite the caveats of the magistrate quoted above) and he strangled her, ramming her silk scarf into her mouth to stop her screams. But it is also true that the maniac’s other victims were all ‘good time girls’, as the Americans called them, as were the lucky pair who got away from him. The risks that these women took were huge.
‘Nita’, ‘Pearl’ and ‘Mrs M’ and ‘Mrs H’ (Greta Haywood and Mrs Mulcahy, also known as Kathleen King) were aliases used by women who offered their bodies to men for money. Was that also true of Bella?
Chapter 7
All the Bellas in the World
Every commentator of the Hagley Wood murder has followed Donald McCormick’s lead that the police tried to trace the 2,000 women missing in Britain between 1941 and 1943. This was within, according to McCormick, a radius of 1,000 miles from Hagley, which would have taken the enquiries well into occupied Europe – to be precise, halfway across Poland and the whole of France – which was, of course, a no-go area for any police force in wartime. Even if McCormick meant 1,000 square miles, it is still too vast an area for overstretched forces. That said, it is clear from the Worcester Archive that cooperation between constabularies was good and other forces would help if they could.
And because it was wartime, there were two conflicting elements operating, which actually made it quite difficult for a woman to ‘disappear’. One was the camaraderie, itself a product of fear, which made people group together and look out for each other. The other is the paranoia we have already noted, a natural extension of many people enjoying nothing better than to snoop – and to report certain activities to the authorities. In the recent COVID experience, equated, as we have seen, with the Second World War, it has been everybody’s delight to report on ‘Partygate’ and ‘Beergate’, catching the great and good of government out breaking their own rules.
We can see this happening in the case of Joan Wolfe that we have discussed already, a case which, unlike Bella, had a successful outcome. When Joan first ran away from home, her mother, Edith Watts, contacted the police who traced her to the army camps at Aldershot. The army brought her back. When she ran again, this time to London, Mrs Watts managed to trace her via a series of landladies. Admittedly, Joan kept up an intermittent contact with her mother through letters – as of course Bella might have done with somebody. When the runaway got to Godalming in Surrey, near to a Canadian army camp, she stayed with Kate Hayter, an old lady in nearby Thursley who looked out for her. A patrolling policeman saw her with a soldier in a Godalming park and he moved them on. Constable Timothy Halloran of the Surrey police took the pair to the station on another occasion. He quizzed her as a vulnerable person under the Children and Young Persons Act. Halloran was able to trace Joan’s mother in Tunbridge Wells but the girl did not want to know and the constable had no choice but to let the pair go (she was nineteen). She was ill two days later and booked herself in to the emergency ward of Warren Road Hospital, Guildford, where the staff looked after her. She had ignored Halloran’s advice to find quarters with the Church Army in the town.
Once out of hospital, Joan lived with her lover August Sangret in a wigwam the Meti soldier had made for her in Houndown Woods. Various guards at Witley Camp moved them on because soldiers were forbidden to ‘set up house’ with civilians. The police took Joan into custody and returned her to hospital in something akin to desperation. They could not hold her at a police station as she had committed no crime. Days later, she was living (on and off with Sangret who slipped out of his barracks) at a cricket pavilion in Thursley; the ARP warden, William Featherby, saw them there and kicked them out. Two children had seen them looking for digs in the village. True, the involvement of a number of people, including the police, failed to keep Joan Wolfe alive, but her lifestyle, in the weeks before her death in September 1942, was documented and known. Surely, a similar pattern could be found for Bella in the wych elm?
The obvious difference was that the Hagley Wood victim had no identity, but the name Bella caught the imagination of police and public alike. If that actually was her name, tracing her could not be that difficult; and three Bellas came to light.
The first was Bella Tonks. When the Hagley Wood investigation was closed in 2005, West Mercia police (as the Worcestershire force was now called) produced a detailed report (see Chapter 16). It reads ‘Bella Tonks was raised as a possibility following a media circulation’ and it says a great deal about how determined – or desperate – the police of 1943 were that the 2005 report says, ‘The name “Bella” was seemingly derived from the chalk writings on the walls throughout the West Midlands conurbation and as such the link to the enquiry was questionable.’ It was as though the Met in 1888 were looking for a man called J.T. Ripper! Bella Tonks was found, living under her maiden name (not given in 2005) in Heath Hayes, a village near Cannock nearly twenty miles away from Hagley. There are no further details, but presumably some long-suffering plod had to go door to door in the same way that Constable Pitcher had in Hasbury.
The Worcester Archive says that this Bella was a teacher at Clent School, very close to Hagley and that she was in her mid-fifties in 1943, which would make her too old for the woman in the wych elm. She was described as plump, with gold-brown hair and ‘a good set of even teeth’. She was 5ft 4in tall. On all counts, Bella Tonks could not be the woman in the tree. She was ‘very fond of the company of men’, however, and that probably rang alarm bells for investigating officers. She was believed to be living in Wednesbury, near Heath Hayes and was married with four children. This was on 4 April 1944 and she was found, very much alive, soon afterwards.
Bella Luer was an altogether better bet, if only because several of the chalk writings had the name Lubella attached. According to the 2005 closure report, she moved from London, almost certainly to escape the Blitz, to work in a factory in the Birmingham area, which has an air of frying pans and fires about it! There is a letter in the Archive from Alfred Richardson of Stamford Hill, N16, to the effect that Bella Luer was a neighbour of his. She had planned to get married but had subsequently disappeared. She lived in lodgings with Mrs Dora Harris, a 50-year-old housekeeper who received a Christmas card from Bella in 1942. This effectively ruled her out as the Hagley Wood victim, who, at 24 was just under Professor Webster’s estimation of age. She was also, however, 5ft 4–5in tall with a ‘good set of teeth, her own, not false’ and was a Jewess. Since the last line in the report of May 1944 reads ‘She lives at 10 Railway Cottages, Goring-on-Sea’ we must assume that she was still alive and that the police had drawn a blank again.
What about Bella Beech? Like Luer, she had left London when the Luftwaffe targeted her stomping ground in West Ealing. The police could find no one named Beech in the Birmingham areas where the first graffiti had been found, but James Beech, a railway porter, lived in Stourbridge. He was Bella’s twin brother and had lived for a while at Upper Dean Street. Someone else who lived nearby was Harry Trueman, who had fallen out with his wife and lived with another woman, who may have been Bella. The Worcestershire Archive is infuriatingly vague about him, probably because in May 1944, Isobel Eleanor Beech was found alive and well, working as a nurse in a hospital in Muswell Hill, London. The process of elimination of these women was all very laudatory – and probably necessary – but it cost the overstretched constabulary a vast amount of time and resources.
