One of the more famous unsolved true crime cases concerns a woman found stuffed into a tree in a woods outside Worcestershire during WWII. Despite an extensive effort by police at the time of her discovery, she still has never been identified.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the mystery of Bella and the Wych Elm?
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Jerry. Oh my gosh, there's Chuck. Sorry, 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's 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.
He's still around and executive producing a slate of shows, but... He decided not to host Tech Stuff any longer. And we just, 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.
Uh, 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. Uh, cause you know, we don't go to the office much anymore and nobody does. So it's not like if I went there, we, I would see all the old gang, but, uh, it was good. It was nice to catch up with some people.
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Chapter 2: How was the body in the Wych Elm discovered?
This 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. Um, 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? Um, 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. And so they were like, we're trespassing and we don't want to get like most kids would do like, uh, 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 humming, humming, humming. 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 punishment.
Regardless, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willits, he was 17, despite this vow, went right home and told his parents. And 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, because 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 was, 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. And they said, well, this is a woman, probably about 35, five feet tall. So, you know, quite, quite short with brown hair, because I think I mentioned there was a little bit of hair very gruesomely still on the skull.
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Chapter 3: What theories exist about the Wych Elm case?
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. Graffiti started popping up around town, around Birmingham, and we'll see elsewhere, with white chalk letters in all caps on these brick walls. Two messages at first.
One said, HAGLEY WOOD BELLA. And another said, WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WITCH ELM WYCH-HAGLEY 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. But it was enough that the police were like, okay, 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.
But 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 reopened the case. And this is, I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated having like both 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? They traced the shoe that they found with her back to the Waterfoot Company in Lancashire.
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. I'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 Diners Club.
I think it was Diners Club, in fact, with Telly Savalas. No, that was Players Club.
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Chapter 4: How did the graffiti influence the investigation?
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.
Yeah. 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, vice. 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.
And 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 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 investigating a different occult murder where a farmer had been killed through the chest and pinned down with a pitchfork.
While she was there, she hears about Bella in 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.
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Chapter 5: Was witchcraft involved in the Bella case?
Okay.
We'll be right back.
This is Jonathan Strickland from Tech Stuff. Did you know over the course of your lifetime, on average, you'll listen to 681 audiobooks, create 987 playlists, and discover 2,365 new music artists? It's hard to name one thing that'll last you a lifetime, except Frontier Fiber, with reliable 100% fiber optics powered by the speed of light.
Now, get fiber 7 gig with Wi-Fi 7 for insanely fast, reliable internet, and so much more. Wi-Fi security, whole home Wi-Fi, and premium tech support, all on Frontier Fiber. Frontier Fiber, good to go. In select areas, max speeds wired. Actual average and Wi-Fi speed vary.
Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you feel stuck in a job or a place or a relationship. Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, over on She Pivots, where I explore the inspiring pivots of women, dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them, and leave you with the inspiration you need to make your next pivot.
Every Wednesday, I sit down with women like Kamala Harris, Vanessa Hudgens, and armchair expert host Monica Padman. This March, we are continuing to uplift women in honor of Women's History Month with episodes from powerhouse Governor Gretchen Whitmer. I fell in love with public policy, and that's kind of when I pivoted. Then later, we dive into the rise of women's sports.
to learn how leaders like sports investor Carolyn Tish Blodgett and former Gotham FC champion turned coach Michelle Betos are shaping the industry. Come join us and listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, Will. Do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Constantly. I'm like, ah, there's so much science.
I can't keep track of it all.
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Chapter 6: What role did Margaret Murray play in the investigation?
It'd be a weird thing to make up.
She would be like a mastermind attention getter to to to really like. Yes, it would be a weird thing to say to make up.
Yeah, I mean, it's a weird thing to do to have that idea like, hey, let's go stuff that woman in a tree. I mean, it's. Oh, God. Beyond the. No, that's weird. And then it's a weird thing for that not to have happened. And for this woman to sort of invent it, it's all just beyond the pale.
Exactly. One of the things is, though, is so like if this was a joke, what, you know, what tree? How did Van Ralt know that that tree was there in the first place and that it had this 12 by 24, you know, space in it? The thing is, this is far and away the most legitimate explanation for what happened. This is an unsolved case. It's an unsolved mystery.
But for my money, like this is as close as we're ever going to get.
No, I agree. You know, cops obviously searched for Van Ralt. They searched for, you know, records wise, a Dutch national who may have fit the description that Una gave. But it went cold yet again. And then we flash forward to 1968. There's a writer named Donald McCormick who picked up the case for a book he was writing called Murder by Witchcraft.
And this is when he I mean, this guy doesn't have a very good reputation as a writer because it seems like he would just they call them a fantasy historian, like he would just make stuff up, make a lot of weird claims and theories. He would say things like, you know, I was able to interview someone exclusively who was anonymous and that no one else could talk to. And here is that interview.
And in this case, he said, you know, this interview that I got with this guy that no one else knows about or will talk to and who shall remain anonymous was a former Nazi spy recruiter hiding in Paraguay. And Bella was a Dutch born German spy named Clara or Clara Bella. And I've even got Nazi intelligence files on this. I'm not going to show you.
But it says that she parachuted into Birmingham in March or April 1941. So the timeline fits. And she happened to look just exactly like who was described by Una.
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Chapter 7: What are the modern perspectives on the case?
Yeah, they they did some research. They looked for obviously for records for Clara Bowerly. And they did find information and confirm, yes, she was a cabaret singer in Germany. She would have been 35 years old at the time of the murder, just like the skeleton, you know, seemingly confirmed. But had she had she come to England was the big question.
All they found was a Clara with a K, Clara Sophie Bowerly, who was 35, who did go to Germany. I'm sorry, from Germany to England and stayed from 1930 to 32. But that was kind of it. No information at all about what she did in England. But they ran with it anyway.
They did. I mean, think about it. So like she left a full eight, nine years before Bella and the Witch Elm happened was was killed. And yet, yeah, the independent's like, so what? So based on all this, with a bunch of pie filling that they mashed in with it, the independent came up with a new theory. And I say we take a little break and come back and talk about it after this.
This is Jonathan Strickland from Tech Stuff. Did you know over the course of your lifetime, on average, you'll listen to 681 audiobooks, create 987 playlists, and discover 2,365 new music artists? It's hard to name one thing that'll last you a lifetime. except Frontier Fiber, with reliable 100% fiber optics powered by the speed of light.
Now, get Fiber 7 gig with Wi-Fi 7 for insanely fast, reliable internet, and so much more. Wi-Fi security, whole home Wi-Fi, and premium tech support, all on Frontier Fiber. Frontier Fiber, good to go. In select areas, max speeds wired.
Actual average and Wi-Fi speed vary. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you feel stuck in a job or a place or a relationship. Join me, Emily Tish Sussman, over on She Pivots, where I explore the inspiring pivots of women, dig deeper into the personal reasons behind them, and leave you with the inspiration you need to make your next pivot.
Every Wednesday, I sit down with women like Kamala Harris, Vanessa Hudgens, and armchair expert host Monica Padman. This March, we are continuing to uplift women in honor of Women's History Month with episodes from powerhouse Governor Gretchen Whitmer. I fell in love with public policy, and that's kind of when I pivoted. Then later, we dive into the rise of women's sports.
to learn how leaders like sports investor Carolyn Tish Blodgett and former Gotham FC champion turned coach Michelle Betos are shaping the industry. Come join us and listen to She Pivots on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, Will. Do you ever get overwhelmed by how much science happens these days? Constantly.
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