Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?

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1:01John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:20Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Jerry. Oh my gosh, there's Chuck. Sorry, All right, Chuck. And this is Stuff You Should Know, and we're off to a weird, weird start already. That's right. I forgot I was here. I just don't know what happened. My efference copy is on the fritz. Hey, real quick before we get started, and this just hit me. I went to a work function yesterday wherein we celebrated Jonathan Strickland, still our colleague, but our old buddy from the old HowStuffWorks early stuff podcast days, who was the long, long, long, long, long time host of Tech Stuff. And he has hung up his tech boots as far as hosting that show.

2:02He's still around and executive producing a slate of shows, but he decided not to host Tech Stuff any longer. And it was great seeing him. It's been quite a while, and he's doing great. And just hats off to Jonathan and what a great body of work he's given the world over all those years. Yeah, he has been. Hats off to you, John. Like, that's you should be very proud. We're all proud of you for sure. But keep your head on, Strickland, because you got that bald head. We don't want to get sunburned. Wow. That was really cool of you to bring up. I'm glad you did. Yeah, it was good. I saw some of the old crew and it's just it's been too long because, you know, we don't go to the office much anymore.

2:41And nobody does. So it's not like if I went there, I would see all the old gang. But it was good. It was nice to catch up with some people. That's cool, man. Yeah, you sent me and Jerry some good pictures. Yeah, it was fun. Okay, well, on to the murder of a woman. Right. Awful. So this is a pretty famous true crime case. Like, really, really famous. I'm not sure if you'd heard of it before, have you? No, no. I'm not sure why or where it first got me, but I'm pretty sure. So I think Dave helped us with this. and he linked to a pair of pictures of a tree and then a diagram of the woman, the murdered woman in this case.

3:24And like, you know, like almost an anatomical diagram of like what was found where and what she was wearing and all that. And it has like a real Ripley's believe it or not look to it, the drawing does. And those things are as etched in my brain as pictures from like the Time Life Paranormal series. Oh, wow. From when I was a kid. So at some point I was exposed to this. So it's one of those things that I've always just kind of known about, but I didn't know any of the details really. And it's a truly fascinating case that I think one of the things that makes it appealing too is there's this level of the sense of like witchcraft or some sort of like pagan cults involved or something like that.

4:09And it turns out that that's not true. That's not the case. That a lot of it is just associated with the tree that she was found in, a witch elm, which has nothing to do with witches, and that she might not have even been found in that kind of tree. So let's get into it, Chuck, because I like confusing everybody from the outset. Yeah, this definitely smacked of like a Tales from the Crypt or a Weird Stories entry or something like that. But this goes back to World War II in April of 1943 specifically. Robert Hart, Bob Farmer, Tommy Willits, and Fred Payne, four teenage boys, went to what was called the, or what is called, I guess, Hagley Wood.

4:51This was a time in World War II where they were rationing things like food in Britain. So they were looking for food. They were looking to catch some rabbits or maybe get some eggs from bird's nest. and 15-year-old Bob Farmer saw an opening in a tree, went up to check it out, and it looked like an eggshell. It turned out it was a skull, and so he got a stick, wrapped it with some cloth, and lifted the skull up out of there. And they were like, what kind of animal is this? Turns out it was a human animal. It had a clump of hair, a couple of crooked teeth, had clearly been munched on by some animals.

5:26And so they were like, we're trespassing, and we don't want to get, like most kids would do, Like, we don't want to get in trouble, so we're just going to put it back and never talk about it. Yeah. I think their quote was, hummina, hummina, hummina. Plus tax. So, yeah, they could have gotten in a decent amount of trouble. I couldn't find exactly what, but they were poaching, and poaching was a big deal still then. I think it still is now, but it's probably lost a little bit of its, you know, punishment. Sure. Regardless, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willits, he was 17. Despite this vow, went right home and told his parents.

6:00And I say, good boy, Tommy Willits, because it was clear to him, like, we just found a human skull in a tree. And that's something that we need to talk about. So very quickly, the police were called in and they started to investigate. And they brought in a guy named James Webster, who was a pathologist with the Birmingham Forensic Laboratory. And he essentially led the initial investigation and came to some pretty good basic conclusions. Because there's one thing to know about this case. It has been hijacked and molded in all sorts of different ways. And you really have to be careful that you're aware of what source you're getting your information from.

6:43Because it's just one of those cases that people have loved to talk about and add to and lie about and do all sorts of stuff with. But the stuff that comes from James Webster is definitely legit. He firsthand examined the body. That's right. So he cut this tree open. He found most of the skeleton in there. It was missing some small bones, and I think they got a tibia nearby. There was pieces of clothing. There was a shoe. There was a wedding ring. And they, you know, when you get a skeleton like that, you're going to reconstruct it and try and figure out who this person was or what they may have been, you know, shaped like.

7:20And they said, well, this is a woman, probably about 35, five feet tall, so, you know, quite short. with brown hair, because I think I mentioned there was a little bit of hair very gruesomely still on the skull. Yeah. Did you see the picture of that? I did. Yeah. And she's probably been gone about 18 months, maybe longer. And like I mentioned, animals had gotten into these bones and, you know, munched on them some. Right. So Webster was like, I'm pretty sure this is a murder. There's a few things that stand out to me. One, stuffed into the jaw, pretty deeply into the jaw, was a piece of the taffeta from the woman's dress.

8:01And enough that it was enough of the piece of the dress that he was like, this could have asphyxiated somebody if it was stuffed into their mouth while they were still alive. Yeah. Probably wasn't a dress eater. So maybe this is murder. He also said that there's no way that this person was placed into this tiny opening. So it was about 12 inches by 24 inches, like, say, a third of a meter by two-thirds of a meter. Okay. Yeah. Which is a very tiny place, even for a five-foot woman. Like, that's a—I get claustrophobic just thinking about that. and that if they were dead already, then like rigor mortis would have prevented them from being pushed into there even.

8:49And then also, this is not the kind of place that a person is just going to crawl into on their own accord. Like they were placed in there possibly while alive still, which is one of the ghastlier aspects of this case. And so Webster said, you know, you put all this together. I'm pretty sure this is a murder that we're looking at. The other thing they had to go on was, as far as clues go, was they had most of the jaw intact. And so they thought, hey, maybe we can find a dental match. They were not able to. Now that they had this kind of rough physical description, they thought, well, let's come through missing persons reports.

9:24Did not find anything matching that. And so the case went cold for a while. They just kind of put it on the shelf. Hagley Wood itself, we should describe it a little bit. That it is on a private estate, but it wasn't like gated and walled up such that you couldn't access it because people would use it. People would have picnics there while the blitz was going on and cities were being bombed. People would leave Birmingham sometimes and even sleep out there around Hagley Wood where it was a little quieter. And then a weird thing happened in March of 1944. So this is about almost a year afterward.

10:01uh their graffiti started popping up around town around birmingham and we'll see elsewhere with white chalk letters and all caps on these brick walls two messages at first one said haggley wood bella and another said who put bella down the witch elm w-y-c-h dash haggley wood Yeah. So this is where we get the name of the victim that everybody knows and the type of tree that the victim was found in that everybody knows from graffiti from an anonymous person. Yeah. And but it was enough that the police were like, OK, this seems a little weird. there were other people who started to kind of copycat the whole thing once the paper started writing about it.

10:51But there was at least a third one a couple of days later that was clearly written by the first person who wrote the first two. And they were like, maybe this person knows who it was and they want to find justice for the woman. And they looked, they reopened the case. And this I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated, having like both jaws. They're like, great, we'll do dental records and we'll find who it is. Nothing matched. They tried to comb through all of the missing persons reports. No one matched. They get this, Chuck. Did you see that they investigated the shoe and got really far with it?

11:30They traced the shoe that they found with her back to the Waterfoot Company in Lancashire. Okay. And they traced down all but six of the owners of all but six of the pairs. They were sold in a market stall. So this wasn't like looking through the market's credit card receipts. They didn't have credit cards. No. Like, they really were doing some legwork here. And, you know, hats off to them because let's not forget, England was getting bombed almost nightly by the Luftwaffe. There was food rationing. There was a war on. And they investigated this random, you know, dead person that hard. And then they reopened the case.

12:13I'm just saying I think they did a good job with what they were working with. Totally. And by the way, I don't know when credit cards came about. Maybe that's a good shorty. So if I'm wrong, I imagine they sprung from credit accounts like with a store or something. But, yeah, maybe we should do one on that. I bet it's a diner's club. I think it was diner's club, in fact, with Telly Savalas. No, that was Players Club. Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it? Mm-hmm. Okay, because he was a player. Yeah, he was. Yeah, you noted some other graffitis. One of the ones that seemed to be from the same hand. This was in Halesowen in another town nearby.

12:49This is different just because it had a different name. And this one said, who put Lubella, L-U-E-B-E-L-L-A, Lubella, in the Witch Elm? And we mentioned that even though it seems like a copycat had done it because it was in different script. It just gave them another name to look for. And so they looked for Lubella as well and came up cold as well. Yes. Yeah. They looked for everybody. Bella, Lubella, Isabella, Lubega, everybody. And nothing came up, right? You never know when he's going to pop up on this show. No, you don't. That was one of the best pranks ever played on us. Pretty good. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's just an Easter egg and listen to every episode and you'll learn.

13:34Yeah. Yeah. So the witch elm thing, for those of us who aren't familiar with British trees. Sure. The name witch elm does not mean witch, W-I-T-C-H. You spelled it before. It's W-Y-C-H. and it comes from an old English word, maybe vice, vis, W-I-C-E. And that means smooth or supple. And that describes the bark of a witch elm. Has nothing to do with witches. Witches are not associated with the witch elm. It's not even spelled the same. And yet there's been an association with witchcraft and this case, at least in part because of that, Even among Brits, like there was a folklorist and archaeologist named Margaret Murray who loved to spin a good yarn.

14:30And she was one of the first people to associate this case with witches and basically said witches killed this lady. Yeah. So she wrote a book, a prominent folklorist and archaeologist. She wrote a book, you know, many books, but one of them was called The Witch Cult in Western Europe. So she was really into this thing and this kind of idea. And she had a theory that she had been promoting that European witches were in part of this ancient fertility cult where they had, you know, sacrifices and things like that made. And she was there in Birmingham in 1945, investing, investigating a different occult murder where a farmer had been killed through the chest and pinned down with a pitchfork.

15:13While she was there, she hears about Bella and the witch elm. And she's like, well, that's right up my alley. and very quickly was like, oh, well, this was clearly some kind of witchy witchcraft occult sacrifice that happened because putting corpses in a tree is a form of ancient tree worship. And so that's obviously what happened here. Also, you know, this severed hand that we found near the tree with the bones, I guess the hand bones, That's part of an ancient thing called the Hand of Glory, which you dug up some stuff on, which I thought was super interesting. Yeah, it's nothing like what it sounds like with Hand of Glory.

15:55Instead, it's an old burglar's superstition that you would take a severed hand and put a candle in it, like make it hold a candle. Or you would basically attach candles to all five fingers, the tips of them, and then you'd light it. And if it stayed lit, then that meant that everybody in the house you were about to rob was asleep. If any of them went out, that meant that there was somebody still awake and you shouldn't rob that house. It had nothing to do with witchcraft. And then even more so, there was no hand found severed from the body. That doesn't appear in any of the initial police reports.

16:35Yeah. It's just a great example of the lies that came up. So to legitimize this idea that it was the hand of glory, somebody just said along the way, maybe even Margaret Murray, that the hand was severed and found at the trunk of the tree. And you will see that everywhere, even in ones that don't mention witchcraft. It's just that's how cases like this just get, you know, that's how they become unsolvable over time. But I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter. But for some reason, it's just always ticked me off. No, I get it. I don't know if you have your phone, but I just texted you a picture of, and I just want to shout it out because it looks so darn good, on Etsy, a Hand of Glory candle.

17:16Oh, yeah? The company is Wailing Dip Candles, and it is a frighteningly realistic old hand with candle wicks coming out of each of the fingers and the thumb. I got to check this out. Let me go grab my phone.

17:40Oh, my gosh, it's amazing. So Josh really did go get his phone. Like, it doesn't even look old. It looks like they just severed a hand and planted some wicks on it. Like, wow. Well, it doesn't look young. Well, okay, so it looks like an aged person's hand, but it's not like a mummified hand. No, no, no, no. It looks like a real hand. And I'm hoping we move these things for this company. It's kind of pricey. It's$85, but I reckon if you amortize that over, like, 10 Halloweens, That's not too bad. It's like$8.50 a year to have a good spook. Yeah. I do feel like we need to change the name Hand of Glory, though.

18:14First of all, it doesn't make sense. And secondly, it really does sound dirty. Let's just be honest about it. Yeah. Unfortunately, attaching the word glory to other objects is just not so good. Yeah, that's true. Blaze of Glory? Yeah, just ask Jerry Jones. so the idea that it's witchcraft was like we said really just sort of invented by Margaret Murray who happened to be there investigating another case altogether yeah by the way that was Charles Walton who was murdered almost certainly by his employer in a raid yeah that's right so that wasn't witchy either it was just like I'm pitchforking your hay and I get mad at you and so I'm going to kill you with a thing in my hand Right.

18:57And you know what? Actually, we should probably take a break here. Oh. Because we've been going for 19 minutes now, and it's kind of a good little cliffhanger. Okay. We'll be right back.

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21:59All right. So I mentioned a cliffhanger. It wasn't really a cliffhanger. I'm not sure why I said that. But let's jump forward a little bit to 1953, where the story takes a turn. There was a journalist there named Wilfred Wilfred Biford Jones apparently had a pen name that was Quastar. Basically, yeah. Q-U-A-E-S-T-O-R. And you can see the A and the E join to. Yeah, I could see that. But old Wilfred wrote a bunch of very speculative articles about Bella's murder, which only led to confusion and falsehoods. A lot of it had to do with witches, of course, and blaming stuff on the Romany people, you know, what they called gypsies at the time, like coming through town, doing something like that.

22:47And all this to say, one of these stories was caught by a reader who wrote in to Bifer Jones under the name of Anna of Claverly and basically was like, I know the deal. I'll just read it real quick. Finish your articles, re, the witch elm crimes. By all means, they are interesting to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery. The one person who could give you the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts. In other words, dead. The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moonlight rights. The only clues I can give you are that the person responsible for the crime died insane in 1942.

23:29And the victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall anymore. Right. And the police said, well, T.S., because you're going to have a secret meeting. Yeah, I guess they found Anna and like brought her in for an interview. Yeah, and Anna's name was Una Mossop. And she eventually became Una Hainsworth. But during the time of the murder, she was married to a guy named Jack Mossop. And I saw alternatively that he worked in a local munitions factory or that he was a RAF instructor or that he worked in a factory building plane engines. Regardless, he existed.

24:13He was married to Una. And Una told the story to the cops that one night Jack brought home a friend named Van Ralt, a Dutchman. And that apparently at some point Jack admitted to Una that he was on Van Ralt's payroll and Van Ralt was a spy for the Nazis. And apparently Jack was feeding him information about local factories and stuff to help the Luftwaffe plan their bombings. So Jack was a real grade A bastard. as far as things went because he traded his country in for some spending money. And Una said one day Jack came home in March or April of 1941, came home late. He was drunk, but he was super agitated.

24:56Right. Said, you know, pale as a ghost. He said he'd been at a pub with Van Ralt and what he called a Dutch piece, who was this Dutch woman. I didn't know they used that kind of language back then. or maybe it meant something else. I have no idea, but those were the words that he used. And then he said, things got awkward. We can just chalk that up to understatement of the year. She, I guess, was also drunk, passed out in Van Ralt's car. And Van Ralt supposedly, as this story goes, had a very strange idea. It was, hey, let's go stick this woman in that tree and she'll sober up in the morning and come to her senses.

25:37and Jack apparently Una said was never the same. He started drinking more and more, quit working, still had this money. But eventually Una said, I'm out of here and I'm leaving you. I'm taking our kid. She saw him again about a year later in 1942 when he was really coming apart at the seam, saying that he keeps seeing this woman in his mind in the tree. She was leering at him and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital where he died about eight months before Bella's body was discovered. Yeah, he died of, as far as his death certificate is concerned, a combination of cerebral softening, myocardial degeneration, chronic nephritis, and acute something insanity.