Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In April 1943, during the dark days of World War II, four teenage boys in Birmingham, England, were hunting for birds' eggs in a remote woodland called Hagley Wood. The slightest of the boys stopped at a large witch elm tree.
Climbing up and peering down, he discovered it was hollow. Spotting something in the center, the boy carefully reached through the branches and pulled out the item for a closer look. His hope for bird's eggs were soon forgotten when he realized what he was actually holding was a human skull.
Their chance upon the remains of a woman in the Witch Helm sparked a murder case that has gone unsolved for 80 years. Her identity and the circumstances surrounding her death continues to baffle and surprise investigators to this day, instigating conspiracy theories and interest the world over. With vital evidence destroyed or seemingly missing,
Many believe this case is more than a local homicide, drawing direct links to Nazi Germany and espionage. But with the help of new technology, can we finally crack an 80-year-old case? Who was the woman in the witch elm? Who killed her? And more importantly, why? It was a skull with a bit of hair on it, and it looked horrible. How did the person know the tree existed?
You'd be very lucky to go into a wood with a dead body and just happen to find a suitable tree to hide it in. The police files, there's at least two folders that were not released to the archives. So it makes me wonder what's in them. The reason that the police were unable to identify her was because she was a German spy.
You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Janine Harony, and this is The Woman in the Witch Elm. Birmingham in the West Midlands is the second largest and most populous city in Britain.
It's a thriving and crucial hub of industry and culture. But during the Second World War, between 1940 and 1943, Birmingham had been identified as a place of huge interest by Nazi Germany. It was a major manufacturer of war industries, filled with factories producing artillery, aircraft, and ammunition.
During the Birmingham Blitz, the German Luftwaffe dropped over 100 tons worth of bombs on the city, including high explosives, parachute mines, and incendiaries, in order to thwart Britain's war effort. Joyce M. Coley is the author of Bella: An Unsolved Mystery, and at the time of the Blitz, she was a schoolgirl in Birmingham.
I remember the first air raid when they used the sirens. I went outside with my parents and I made my father turn his pipe upside down in case the plane saw him smoking. So as a child, yes, we were afraid. And we were afraid of the German airplanes. If we were coming home from school and the plane came over, we hid in the hedges in case they bombed or shot us. Numerous factories, houses and buildings were destroyed in the raids. And over 2,000 people lost their lives.
But in addition to the devastating aerial bombardments, Birmingham was also the scene of industrial espionage, Nazi spies, and a wartime murder, all of which are allegedly linked by a gruesome discovery of the woman in the witch elm. In 1943, four teenage boys were out poaching for eggs in Hagley Wood, which is part of the Hagley estate.
It was a young Bob farmer who noticed the stump of an old witch elm tree, thick with new sprouting branches. It seemed the ideal place to look for hidden nests. Discovering what he thought were animal bones, the boy's reaction turned from excitement to horror when he realized it was a human skull. Joyce Coley again. It was a skull with a bit of hair on it.
And it looked horrible. And when he saw what it was, I think it frightened him. They knew they were trespassing. They would have been in trouble if a keeper had caught them or anybody had. Unsure what to do next, but fearing reprisals from the fact they had been trespassing, Bob returned the skull, and they made a pact. And the boys told each other they must never tell anybody. They realized that if they went and reported it, that they would be in trouble, because why were they there?
But Tom Willits, the youngest of the four, was uneasy about what they had discovered. And when they got home, one of them told their uncle something about it, and he realized it was probably serious. They wouldn't have made that up. And because it was wartime, they were suspicious. Willits returned to the woods to guide a police officer to the location of the witch elm. And any doubts the police had about the boy's story was soon put to rest.
The boys hadn't just discovered a skull, they had discovered the complete remains of a murder victim. The area was quickly turned into a crime scene, but almost from the start, it became clear that this was not going to be a normal investigation. Andrew Spark is the author of Bella in the Witch Elm.
They put a guard on the tree and sent for specialists. They sent for forensic scientists from Birmingham University and they sent for senior police officers to investigate the scene.
There had recently been reports of a German parachute found in the Clint Hills, close to Hagley Wood. Could the authorities have suspected a link between the parachute and the body found in the tree? News of the body discovered in a tree soon spread around the area, and the newspapers were quick to run with the story. Joyce Coley again.
I was actually at school and it was in the local press, the county express. And in those days there weren't many murders reported in the papers. The public wanted answers and an investigation was soon underway. The remains, comprising of bones and fragments of clothing, was sent for examination to pathologist Professor James Webster and Dr. John Lund at the West Midlands Forensic Science Laboratory.
Webster quickly established that the remains were that of a woman, aged 35 to 40 years old, but could find no obvious signs of injury or cause of death. But how long had she been in the tree? It was springtime. Plants were growing. This is how they knew how long it had been since she'd been killed. By measuring the growth of the plants around the remains, Webster was able to determine that the body had been placed in the tree 18 months prior to discovery.
Dr. Lund was tasked with investigating the items found around the bones. Having died in 2015, his son, Richard Lund, inherited the detailed diaries his father kept from his time working on the case. When my father was asked to look at these remains by Webster, he recorded in his diary that this was an extraordinary case, I suppose because the bones had been found in the tree. Wednesday, the 21st of April, 1943,
A most extraordinary case came in. Last evening Webster went to examine a very large hollow tree stump about five and a half feet high in which children had found some bones. From this tree Webster extracted an almost complete skeleton and some much rotted clothing. My job is to see how much I can learn from these remnants. It will be an interesting but very difficult task. This can hardly be anything other than homicide.
As well as the clothing, they found a pair of shoes. One was found away from the tree, and the other was found in the hollow, underneath the bones. The shoes were dark blue, with crepe soles, and the police were able to trace 600 pairs from one specific factory. Andrew Spark again. The shoes were manufactured sometime in 1940, and they had had at least six months' hard wear.
Incredibly, the investigation located the owners to all but six pairs. The remaining six had been sold in a market, which made it impossible for police to identify if these shoes were purchased by any missing persons. They now pin the hopes of identifying the remains on a forensic technique relatively new to the time: dental records. Her teeth were very odd. They were crossed.
She'd had a tooth out within the last 12 months. So if we go around all the dentists, we shall find some records of that. So what was at first sent out to all the registered dentists in England was a photograph of the lower jaw. And they were asking whether that could be checked against dental records to identify who the woman was. They thought from those clues, they'd probably discover who she was.
They went around, oh, about a thousand dental people. They couldn't find anything. They got very frustrated. They did try for a long time. They tried very hard. Finding no match for the shoes, dental records or missing persons lists, the police were at a loss.
What we're talking about, of course, is a cold case. By the time the police found the skeleton, she had been dead at least 18 months. There were no witnesses. Nobody saw anybody put the body into a tree. There were precious few clues to follow up, and there were real resource issues in wartime. And at some point, the police investigation was getting nowhere, and it ran out of steam, and probably they had to go on to other things.
The ongoing war effort meant a huge strain on the police and forensic services. Due to the increasing number of new cases coming in every day, the investigation into the body found in the Witch Elm was ceased until the sudden appearance of graffiti in the local area sparked renewed interest in the mystery. Joyce Coley.
The police around here tried very hard for two or three years and they didn't get very far. And then all of a sudden, somebody reported some writing on a wall, "Who put Bella in the witch-home?" Soon, cryptic messages containing Hagley Wood and variations of the name Bella suddenly started appearing on walls, fences, and buildings around the West Midlands.
It didn't take long for both the police and the public to make the link between the graffiti and the remains found in Hagley Wood. But who had written it? What did they know about the case? And was Bella the real name of the woman found in 1943? So it was obvious that somebody knew something. It was done in chalk.
So they had the chalk analysed and they found, to their horror, that it was used by every pub to chalk up the darts matches in the pubs. It was that sort of chalk, so it didn't help them. So they started to look for Bellas in the missing people's lists and they looked at all the other sorts of Bella, Lou Bella, Isabella. They went after one hair after another, but they just could not find out who'd done it or what it was about.
As the mysteries got deeper, so did the stories attached to it. Andrew Spark. All sorts of other theories starting to come out of the woodwork, in particular, the possibility that the reason that the police were unable to identify her was because she was not British, she was not English, that she was a German spy. But why would people suspect that the remains belonged to a Nazi spy?
You have got manufacturing capacity, you've got docks, you've got important military targets right across the country. And so therefore, Birmingham was a legitimate military target, and we can be very clear that there were German spies operating within the West Midlands. Being an island, spies were more often than not parachuted into remote areas of the UK, where their arrival would go undetected.
However, many spies were captured during wartime, and one in particular, Joseph Jacobs, may have provided a clue to solving the mystery. His granddaughter, Canadian-born Gigi Jacobs, has been researching Joseph's life for many years, including his connection to the remains of the woman now known as Bella. Gigi is in London, tracing Joseph's final footsteps. My grandfather was Joseph Jacobs. He was a German.
He came here in January 31st, 1941. He was parachuted into England as a German spy. He was sent to send back weather reports.
Unfortunately, when he left the aircraft, he injured his ankle and so when he landed, he broke it quite badly. So he lay there all night and then he was found the next morning by some farmers and was eventually sent to London where he was interrogated for several months by MI5. And on August 15th, 1941, he was taken to the Tower of London where he was executed by firing squad.
Jacobs holds a place in history for being the last ever person to be executed at the Tower of London. But before his execution, Jacobs had been interrogated at length by MI5, the records of which have only recently been declassified. The MI5 files, the interrogation files, they have quite a bit of questioning of him on his previous life. He got into a lot of trouble.
gold counterfeiting prison sentence in Switzerland, black market passport fraud in Berlin, and he was sent to a concentration camp for that. In his possession, he had a picture of an attractive and glamorous woman called Clara Bowler. And on the back, there was a personal message.
"My dear -- I love you forever. Yours, Clara. Landau, July 1940." Now, MI5 was very interested in this postcard. They were like, "Who is this woman? Why is she -- why do you have her postcard?" You know, and he eventually admitted that she was his mistress and a German cabaret singer.
Clara Bowler was a German-born recording artist and actress. Having starred in several films, she was a minor celebrity in Nazi Germany, and as such, was well connected to those in power. What Jacobs told his interrogators at the time
was that this woman had senior connections with the Nazi party, that her former lover, deceased, had been a U-boat captain, and that she had volunteered to spy. She spoke English, and that she would in many ways have made an ideal spy, except that she was actually probably too strikingly good-looking. But the story was that she would be parachuted into the West Midlands once Jacobs reported back that the coast was clear and that he was established and safe.
Hello, I'm Violet Manners and welcome to Hidden Heritage, the podcast that brings you inside Great Britain's favourite destinations. From the same team that brought you the number one history podcast, Duchess, Hidden Heritage will uncover the fascinating stories behind the UK's brightest, shining hidden gems.
You'll hear from top experts in British heritage, including custodians, historians, artisans, experts and even the craftsmen and restorers who've worked on some of the most celebrated historic buildings.
We will share the untold and unique stories that celebrate UK heritage, from landmarks, architecture, artefacts to myths and legends. Hidden Heritage will highlight a side of British history you have never seen before. I'm your host, Violet Manners, and founder of HeritageX, and I invite you all to join us on this exciting journey. This is Hidden Heritage. You can find Hidden Heritage wherever you listen to your podcasts.
So he had a transmitter and he was supposed to radio back when he got here and he got set up and then they were going to send Clara after him. Could Clara Bella actually have been a German spy called Clara Bowler? The pieces of the puzzle seem to be coming together.
It did seem plausible. The Germans were sending quite a few agents over via parachute in late 1940, early to mid 1941. So the idea that they had sent over Clara Bauerle as a spy was not outside the realm of possibility, for sure. And the area around Birmingham was definitely of interest to the Germans.
There was a belief that a parachute had been discovered, that it was a German manufacturer, that somebody had parachuted into the West Midlands, close to the Clint Hills, and that that person was at large, because they were never discovered.
Dr. Webster's pathology report had estimated the date of death of the woman found in Hagley Wood to be between 1940 and 1941. So, investigations were made to determine Clara Bowler's whereabouts during this period.
Clara had a recording career, singing for a record label called Tempo. They were recordings in Berlin. And the recording stopped, which made some people very suspicious. Because what happened to her? That's right around that time that Dr. Webster suspected that Bella had been murdered. The date of death coincided with the fact that no further record of Clara Bowler could be found after 1941.
But why would the Nazis have sent a cabaret singer to spy in the West Midlands? MI5 had posed that very question and searched for any connection that Baller may have had to Britain before the war.
So MI5 had done some background research, they looked in the home office records for any information that Clara Bauerle, the German cabaret singer, had been to England before. And they found a Clara Sophie Bauerle, who was born June 29th 1906, and who had come to England in 1930 and left in 1932. Andrew Spark. They had three strands of proof, the first being Joseph Jacob's story.
The second being that this woman's recording career in Berlin had stopped in the 1940s. Well, if she died in late 1941 in Britain, then that would explain that. And that there was no record of her in Berlin after that time. It all seemed to fit together, that Clara Bauerle had actually been sent over to England and had somehow ended up dead in a, you know, and stuffed in a witch elm.
the mystery seemed to have been solved. And the tantalizing prospect that her grandfather's lover had, in fact, been the woman found in Hadley Wood in 1943 led Gigi to further research the life of Clara Bowler, which turned up some surprising information. I came across one reference on the internet, her birth date and her death, and it said she died December 16, 1942.
and requested her death certificate. It turned out that Clara Bauerle, real name Hedwig Clara Bauerle, had died in Berlin of an accidental overdose in 1942. For me, it's clear. Clara Bauerle, the German cabaret singer, died in Berlin December 16, 1942, of a very tragic overdose. And she is definitely not Bella in the witch-ill.
So the Joseph Jacobs story was a red herring. But if the remains in the tree were not Clara Bowler's, then whose were they? The mystery of the skeleton in the witch elm remained unsolved. But links with Nazi spying continued. Over 60 years after he had originally worked on the case, Dr. John Lund found himself once again delving into the mystery.
His son Richard recalls the day in 2004 when his father went looking for clues.
For some reason he checked on the internet and then he discovered how famous it had become. Like everybody else, he became a bit obsessed about it, you know, it really is a bottomless mystery. He actually uses the word 'seduced' in one of his writings. He became seduced by some of the other theories and began to entertain that they could be credible. He did at one point say that he thought that the spy theories might have something about them and particularly the one about Mossop and Van Routt.
In the 1950s, a local newspaper received an anonymous letter, purporting to know not only the identity of the remains, but also the identity of the murderer, Andrew Spark. The police were aware from the graffiti that there were people out there who must know something about who Bella was and how she got there. But they didn't get any concrete leads at the time.
until a woman who was writing to the newspaper under the nom de plume Anna of Claverley made a declaration about the case. And at first she was saying, "The case is closed. The person who did it is dead. I know that this is true. You're wasting your time investigating this. Go away." The police tracked down the so-called Anna of Claverley
and insisted she provide them with a statement about the information she had and reveal the identity of those involved. Gigi Jacobs again. Anna of Claverley, whose real name was Una Hainsworth, formerly Una Mossop. It was her ex-husband, Jack Mossop, that she was talking about. And she said that Jack Mossop had been hanging around with a Dutchman named Van Ralt. Her estranged husband had befriended a Dutchman
who had a lot of money and appeared to be spreading it about to get information about what was happening in the munitions factory. So if he existed, he was almost certainly a spy. It was suspected that Van Rout had been working for the Nazis, tasked with gathering information on the Birmingham factories producing arms, aircrafts, and ammunition for the war effort.
There's also a separate issue because there was research going on at Birmingham University into atomic bomb production, very top secret. And so any spy worth their salt would have wanted to know that that was happening. Una Masip also revealed during the interview that her husband Jack had been a local factory worker, but she had seen him leave the house several times wearing an RAF uniform.
She went on to suggest that he may have been involved in gathering information for Van Ralt and that the pair were responsible for the woman in the witch elm. Jack Mossop and this man, Van Ralt, were drinking in a local pub with the Dutchman's girlfriend, who was also Dutch, and that a row broke out. Maybe she knew too much or discovered something she shouldn't have.
But Una Masip's statement claims that Van Ralt had felt that his girlfriend had become a liability. At some point, the Dutchman killed her and the two men were saddled with a body which they had to dispose of and that they did so by putting the body in a hollow tray. But after the event, Jack Masip allegedly struggled to deal with what he had done and confessed his involvement in the murder to his ex-wife.
Jack told her he was having a reoccurring nightmare. He would find himself back in Hagley Wood, confronted by the tree he and Van Ralt had used to hide the girl's body. Tormented by those nightmares, Jack Mossop spent the remainder of his life in an asylum. Gigi Jacobs again. I did actually order his death certificate and he died.
essentially of insanity. The death certificate says softening of the brain and then chronic kidney disease and then insanity. So he did die in a mental institution in Staffordshire. But was Jack telling the truth? Had he really been involved in the murder of a Dutch spy's girlfriend? Or was it just the ramblings of an unwell mind? This was surely a crucial lead for the police investigating the murder.
Potentially the missing piece that could finally reveal the identity of Bella. It's an intriguing lead and what I find interesting is one of the reasons why the police files are so frustrating is that the police didn't track down any of this information. They tracked down all sorts of information on the shoes but nothing on a lead like Van Ralt.
There is pretty well no supporting evidence as to who Van Rout was, the friendship with Jack Mossop, what they did, and most importantly of all, who the supposed Dutch woman actually was. It's quite a plausible story, and it might well be the truth. But proving it is something else.
Due to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the remains and links to Nazi spies, the case has gained the interest of generations of historians, journalists, and amateur researchers, many of whom called the case to be officially reopened. But there was a problem. Almost all of the significant evidence that was held by the police or the National Forensic Service at Birmingham University has disappeared.
The body itself has disappeared, the skeleton, there are none of the bones available to us. Even the report from the coroner, 1943, is missing. If that wasn't astonishing enough, even parts of the police report have vanished from the archives.
I actually did order a copy of the police files from the Worcestershire archives. And the actual crucial material, you know, the witness statements of the boys who found the skeleton, of anyone who was involved in collecting the bones, of interviewing people within the community, all that is not in the police files.
In his continued research, decades later, Dr. John Lund, one of the forensic scientists on the case back in 1943, had begun to suspect something dubious was going on. His son Richard explains: He did say to me one day, he did say, you know, because as he went on and found so many things had disappeared, he began to think that perhaps the cover-up theory had some merit to it after all, you know, that it was a plausible thing. The only thing he couldn't work out was what was being covered up.
The fact that the majority of the evidence has disappeared has caused some to speculate on the involvement of the security service. Andrew Spark: They suspected that she was a spy or that she was in some way entangled with Britain's security services, that there might still be military secrets or issues which have caused the establishment to close ranks and to suppress as much of the evidence as was necessary.
With so many years having passed, and nearly all the useful evidence missing, will we ever find out just who Bella was, and how she ended up in a hollowed-out tree in Hadley Wood? At this point, it's very unlikely that it'll
really ever be solved. The culprit is probably long dead. Witnesses are long gone. The bones of Bella are lost. The police files, there's at least two folders that were not released to the archives. So it makes me wonder what's in them. The only thing worth researching is where the bones are. If the bones could be rediscovered, then we have the DNA techniques which didn't exist back in the day. But maybe all is not lost.
While most of the key evidence is missing, Facelab, which is part of John Moores University in the UK, used their latest technology to reconstruct what Bella may have looked like. Facelab are internationally renowned in facial reconstruction, having worked with countless museums, Interpol, and even the FBI.
Incredibly, by using only the remaining photos in the police file, the team have revealed the face of the woman who has come to be known as Bella. Bright-eyed, with wavy hair and a distinctive nose and teeth, could this image, widely available on the internet, be the key to finally identifying the woman in the tree?
But was the woman in the witch elm involved in Nazi espionage? And what, if anything, is being covered up?
These questions will continue to fascinate and spark debate until the woman's identity can be solved. Whether or not there's something being hidden, that's a whole other thing. Has everything been released? No, I don't think so. And my question then would be why? Why is material being withheld? Another opinion that Dad had, which I think is probably quite a common one, was about how did they know the tree was there? How did the person know the tree existed?
you'd be very lucky to go into a wood with a dead body and just happen to find a suitable tree to hide it in. So Dad took the view that whoever put the body in the tree must have already known about it. In one sense, one hopes it's never solved because the mystery and all of the folklore, the legends that have accrued around the story of Bella and the Witch Elm are much more fascinating probably than the truth will ever be. You've been listening to Forbidden History.
A Like A Shot production in association with Viasat History, part of Viasat World Limited.