Who put Bella in the Wych elm?
The tragic tale of a unsolved murder and the question that sparked a generation of urban legends
It was April of 1943. The war had recently come to an end leaving the country licking its wounds and rebuilding its cities. In the chaos, medical records were lost and bodies were buried without names. It was at this time that three boys ventured onto private land to poach animals. When wading through the forested area known as Hagley Wood, they came upon a large Wych Elm.
Believing the tree to be the perfect vantage point from which to hunt birds, one of the boys, Bob Farmer, climbed its trunk. He had initially thought what he’d seen at the top of the tree had been an animal skull but soon the remnants of hair and teeth revealed the horrifying truth. Upon looking into the trunk below Farmer had discovered a human skull. Soon thereafter a police investigation was started with the tree and its surrounding area being searched for evidence.
What the police discovered inside the trunk of the Wych Elm, buried beneath the skull, was the almost complete skeleton of a woman. Due, in part, to lost records and missing information following the war the woman was never identified and her murderer was never found.
It wasn’t until a year later that a question would be asked turning the death of the woman in the Wych Elm into an urban legend that has fascinated locals for decades. A particular piece of graffiti in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham, around half an hour from the crime scene, sparked further investigation from police. The graffiti simply read — “ Who put Bella down the Wych Elm — Hagley Wood.”
Up on Wychbury Hill
Since its discovery, police turned their investigation to the perpetrator of the graffiti believing them to have had knowledge of either the victim or the killer but they were never found. In the time since the question “who put Bella in the Wych Elm?” has been found in multiple sites around the area where her body was found. Most famously, the phrase has continually appeared on the Hagley Obelisk on Wychbury Hill, last appearing at the site in 1999.
While the unsolved murder of Bella is tragic in and of itself, one potential theory as to what happened during her final hours deepens and darkens the mystery. Police noted that when searching the crime scene they discovered that the woman’s left hand had been severed and buried separately from the rest of her body.
One noted academic, anthropologist Professor Margaret Murray of the University College London, saw the removed and separate burial of the hand as having been part of a ritualistic black magic execution. She noted that witches were often buried within trees to ward off potentially evil spirits, something she again connected with the case of the woman in the Wych Elm.
The graffiti simply read — “ Who put Bella down the Wych Elm — Hagley Wood.”
No evidence of any ritualistic murder was found, however, leaving the case unsolved to this day. Earlier this year, Bella’s face was reconstructed speculatively by researchers at Dundee University through the use of photographs from the time. Since the original investigation the skeleton, including the skull, has gone missing along with any record of the case at the time leaving the mystery of who put Bella in the Wych Elm unlikely to ever be solved.
