"I felt that I was in hell itself. All around me were great squat wych elm trees ... like round-bellied devils with beards and shaggy hair. Was it such a night as this that death visited the woods, turning, for the first time in criminal history, a tree trunk into a coffin? What happened that night? Was the wood in fact the scene of ghoulish rites ... was the body brought ... from some other place of execution and carried through that very undergrowth now clinging and clawing at my ankles, to it's secret resting place?"
The myths kick in almost at once.
***
Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which took place eighty years ago.
In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation.
Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since.
Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945.
Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right.
McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service.
The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime!
In this book, the author sets out to look in detail at the various stories, myths and speculative theories which have revolved around the case, since the discovery of her body by four boys in 1943. Everything from witchcraft to espionage as well as many other suggestions have been purported as theories of Bella's demise. Bella's identity was never discovered, let alone how or why she ended up dead inside of a tree.
This is the first book which pulls together all of these theories and examines them individually. It has been extensively researched and well written. It was easy to read and did not get too bogged down in any particular theory. Instead, the author presents us with a comprehensive guide to the case and the various opinions that have surfaced in the last eighty or so years.
The case was officially closed in 2005 as it was decided that there was no possibility of it being solved.
Whilst, the author has debunked the majority of the theories around this case, he does venture to impart his own, plausible theory of who Bella was and who murdered her.
ISBN: 978 1399066457
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Formats: e-book and hardback
No. of Pages: 224 (hardback)
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