This post relates to Wychbury Hill the Walk Midlands route published in the week commencing 2nd May 2022. Wychbury Hill is famous for its connections to the famous and perplexing story of an unidentified woman who was murdered in around about 1940 and her body discovered hidden in a wych elm tree several years later. A decision was taken to discus and explore the murder and its semi-mythical afterlife in a blog post rather than within the text of the walk itself. This is primarily to be sensitive, treat the issues at hand appropriately and show the poor tragic woman murdered 80 or more years ago due respect. And partly because a frank and honest discussion of the murder, its concealment and its afterlife in popular culture and memory may be upsetting or triggering for some readers.
Content Warning: misogeny, sex work, violence against women, sexual violence [including rape], murder, dismemberment, ritual murder, skeletal remains
There is no doubt that Wychbury Hill’s wild character and seclusion, despite being located near major population centres in Birmingham and the Black Country, is what made it the location for what has become one of the midland’s most famous and perplexing modern mysteries.
On the 18th April 1943, four local boys: Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne, were trespassing on Wychbury Hill looking for bird nests to poach.
Whilst in the woods they encountered a large, very ancient, highly gnarled, wych elm tree with lots of crevices. Thinking it was a good location for bird nests Bob Farmer climbed up to have a look. Part way up he spotted what he thought was an animal skull poking out of a hole. Thinking that it would make a cool trophy he grasped at it, wrenched it out and got a better look.
Looking at it properly he realised what he was actually clasping: a human skull, with crooked teeth, fillings and tufts of hair still attached to it.
Horrified and disgusted he thrust it back in the hole, jumped down, and the boys ran home, swearing to never speak of it. Nonetheless after he got home Thomas Willets, disturbed by what he and his friends found, told his parents who called the police.
When the police arrived to retrieve the body they found it was almost complete. Later they found the skeletal remains of an arm, and a human hand nearby, meaning that they had a complete body. Inside the tree, in addition to the remains of a human body were found a gold wedding ring, a shoe and some scraps of clothing.
The police investigation into this grisly discovery appears to have been competent and comprehensive by the standards of the 1940s. The skeleton was examined in Birmingham by the pathologist Professor James Webster. He determined: the body had been inserted into the tree within hours of the victim’s death, that the victim had died at least 18 months previously, that the victim was a woman aged 35-40, and that she had likely died through suffocating on a piece of taffeta (likely torn from her own clothes) which had been stuffed into her mouth.
After the examination of the body the police cross referenced these details with the missing person records. But given the chaos of wartime and the sheer volume of missing persons reports created through the effects of bombardment, internal displacement, conscription, as well as an increase in all manner of criminal activity during the conflict, this proved impossible.
This led the police to turn to trying to trace the wedding ring, shoe and scraps of clothing found with the body. However, the items were mass produced, available from chain stores, catalogue companies and market stalls across the country. They were completely impossible to trace without a receipt. Though their style and the condition they were found in confirmed to the police that the victim had died quite recently.
Running out of avenues to pursue, the police turned to dental records, hoping the distinctive profile of the victim’s teeth would enable a dentist to identify her. This process had become by the early 1940s a well established means of identifying who the remains of decomposed or dismembered corpses were.
The search of dental records, however, also drew a blank. This meant that with the methods investigators had at their disposal in the 1940s the case had gone cold.
In a bizarre coda to the story of the investigation, in 1944 graffiti appeared on Upper Dean Street, near the Bullring marketplace in central Birmingham, reading: “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood”. Similar graffiti apparently written by the same person, asking the exact same question, appeared in locations across the West Midlands for years afterwards.
Given the strange and macabre circumstances of the wych elm case, it seems likely that the graffiti is a direct reference and commentary on it. Some have speculated over the years that the graffiti was written by someone with a direct connection to the victim or knowledge of the case. Were they demanding justice? Trying to call attention to guilty parties? Or confessing in some way? Or alternatively it may just have been a sick joke or the actions of someone not altogether in their right mind.
Since the 1970s a similar piece of graffiti “Who put Bella in the witch elm?” has been spray painted from time-to-time on the Hagley Obelisk. At the time of writing (spring 2022) a faded and slightly defaced form of this wording can be seen on the base of the structure.
Various theories, some absurd, some displaying prejudice, ignorance and racism have been advanced as to who the woman whose body was placed in the wych elm was, and why she was killed. Each is a terrible example of the misogynistic thrill our society can get out of a woman’s all too real murder and grisly concelament.
One theory is that the murder is that it was a ritualistic slaying of some kind. Some have suggested that the woman was a member of the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller (GRT) community murdered and partially dismembered, as part of either a dark magical rite or an “honour killing”. This suggestion is slanderous, racist and patently false. GRT people, if they are religious tend to be Christians, and none of the communities that comprise the group have traditions of engaging in “honour killing”.
Another suggestion is that there was a dark magic or occult element to the killing. Proponents of this theory point to the body’s location on Wychbury Hill and partial dismemberment, claiming it as evidence of occult intent. This seems wildly improbable, not least in the context of late 1930s or early 1940s Britain. It is also deeply ignorant and insulting given the peaceful beliefs and practices of pagan, animist and other pre-Chritian inspired religions in Britain.
A theory that is perhaps worthy of slightly more credence, given that historians like Thomas Waters have shown that a belief in witches undertaking evil works continued to be held by a significant minority of British people throughout the 20th Century, is that the murder and partial dismemberment was a witch killing. This theory ultimately, however, is also at the incredibly unlikely end of the spectrum.
In his research Waters uncovered plenty of evidence that as late as the 1960s a popular belief in evil witches causing people harm was far from confined to rural backwaters. This means it is not impossible that it persisted amongst some people – even on the fringes of the West Midlands conurbation – as late as the 1930s and 1940s. However, what Waters’ evidence typically shows, is that it was disputes between neighbours in the first half of the 20th Century – much as in the Early Modern period – which led to people being accused of witchcraft. Sometimes these disputes saw the accused “witch” being subjected to violence, however, in no instances during the 1930s and 1940s did that violence come close to murder. By that period stories of accusations of witchcraft were appearing in the popular press and being brought to court less and less frequently, anyway, in comparison with the first three decades of the 20th Century.
The final farfetched theory about who the victim was, and how the body came to be placed in the tree, draws upon the fact that the crime appears to have taken place in the early days of World War II. This crop of theories holds that the woman was either murdered by a German spy and placed in the tree or was a German spy and was murdered (whether by another German spy or some agent of the British state depends on who is telling the story) leading to them being placed in the tree.
One of these theories – advanced by a former Birmingham City Council Conservative Councillor – holds that the partial dismemberment and placement of the arm and hand was a deliberate ploy by the security services to make it look like the woman placed in the tree was a witch or had been ritualistically killed.
This all seems rather unlikely, as on several occasions during World War II when Nazi Germany’s rather lacklustre attempts to create spyrings in Britian were broken up, several of their members were arrested by the British state, tried, and executed either by hanging or firing squad. This was completely legal and little questioned under the laws which existed at the time, so why go to the trouble of murdering someone you knew was a spy and hiding their body in a tree in northern Worcestershire?
The likely truth, of course, is aso pretty horrific as well as being horribly predictable and well within the realm of human understanding.
There are two plausible theories for who the woman was and how her body came to place in the tree. Both are tragic, harrowing and deeply rooted in misogyny.
Sex work was widespread in mid-20th Century Britian. On street sex selling in various forms, as well as the purchase of on street sex workers’ services, was far more wide spread than it is today.
There were several reasons for this. One was the simple fact that young men had to undertake several year’s military service away from home, whilst older men in certain professions such as sales, construction, transport and engineering also often had to travel for extended periods.
A second reason was that mid-20th Century Britain was systematically sexist, arguably misogynistic, in ways throwing the uneven progress of the last 60 years into stark relief. Women were barred from virtually all even vaguely well paying jobs by virtue of a lack of access to education. Even those women could access education, up until the 1940s and 1950s (and in practice the social expectation continued long afterwards) to give up their jobs if they married. This made women incredibly dependent upon the men in their lives for money. If a man died, became disabled, or left (even if only temporarily for military service or for work) women and anybody they were caring for could be thrown into abject poverty. This gave women in these situations – if in many cases only sporadically – a significant impetus to take up sex work as a way to make ends meet.
The third driver of sex work in the mid-20th Century was something which impacted both men and women, albeit in quite different ways. At the start of the Second World War significant reform of the divorce law and the decriminalisation of the abortion were a generation into the future.
This meant that there were a lot of loveless marriages where either both partners were living separately, or where the marriage had effectively broken down even through the couple was still living together. The cruelty of the divorce law at the time meant that many of these marriages could not be dissolved even if both parties wanted it. This created a situation where there were many women for whom sex work, at least sometimes, was an economic neccessity, and many men who were keen to purchase their services.
As well as divorce being difficult, especially for those with little money, abortion was completely illegal. This forced many women who wanted to procedure to find ways to raise the money that they needed to visit an illegal abortionist. Again, in many cases if only temporarily, sex work was the means that they turned to to get the money that they needed quickly.
Not least during the chaos of wartime, there were people, in no way occult or supernatural but inarguably evil, who took advantage of this state of affairs. Men like Gordon Cummins, an RAF serviceman who in the early 1940s engaged in a sadistic, sexually motivated campaign of assault and murder against women in the areas where he was posted. Many of his victims came into his sights because they engaged in sex work.
Another killer and sadist, who took advantage of the wartime state of exception was John Christie. He murdered a baby, as well as raping and murdering at least seven women, a number of whom were sex workers, and at least one of whom was conned into believing that he would provide her with an abortion.
What these two cases show is that assault and murder was a very real danger that women, especially women who sometimes engaged in sex work, faced during World War II.
Wychbury Hill lies close to the Hagley Road which is, and was in the mid-20th Century, one of the main roads out of Birmingham to the south. Hagley Road runs into the centre of Birmingham past Five Ways. Just before it reaches Five Ways the road provides the dividing line between leafy Edgbaston, historically the wealthiest and most prestigious area of Birmingham, and Ladywood which in the 1930s and 1940s was impoverished and home to some of the worst housing conditions in the city. One of Birmingham’s redlight districts was situated on and around this stretch of road for many years, including during the Second World War.
One of the more plausible theories, not least considering the wider context of sexually motivated violence during World War II, is that the victim placed in the tree was a sex worker. The precise reason or circumstances in which she was killed can never be known. Nor can whether it was before or after her death that she was transported down the Hagley Road to the woods around Wychbury Hill where her corpse was hidden in the tree. This has none of the excitement of the earlier farfetched explanations, but unfortunately knowing what we know about violence against women and against sex working women in particular, it sounds a likely and tragic explanation for the murder and concealment.
Another tragic and likely explanation is the one which the police presented as the solution to the case in 1943. In 1940 and 1941 Birmingham and the Black Country in common with the rest of Britain’s industrial heartlands was subjected to a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment by the German Luftwaffe. This wave of destruction demolished 2,000,000 houses, injured over 100,000 people, and killed 40,000 at a minimum, accounting for roughly seventy percent of the British civilians killed during World War II.
During that phase of the conflict Wychbury Hill and its woods was a place people fled to during air raids to shelter. The police suggested that the woman and her killer had been amongst those who did this, even if the murderer may already have had darker motives in mind when they set off from home. Whilst there whether during a robbery or a rape, the woman had her mouth stuffed with the scrap of clothing that caused her to suffocate and die. This led her killer to hide the body in the tree which was conveniently close by.
Proponents of fanciful theories about the murder point to the partial dismemberment as reason to doubt these two grimly plausible explanations. It is therefore worth noting that the pathologist’s report stated that the crevice the body was placed in was so small that the body could only have entered it in the 5-6 hours after death before rigour mortis set in. Bearing this in mind it is easy to understand, but best not to dwell on how the arm came to no longer be attached to the body, and instead concealed some distance from it.
Amidst this grisly modern legend and the myths which have built up around it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that the victim was a human being full of life. They were a person who once had hopes and dreams, who had quirks, opinions, favourite things just like you and everybody you know. After all, one thing we know about the victim is that they bought their clothes and had jewellery bought for them in chain shops, or from catalogues, or from market stalls just as you probably do today.
Eighty years is also not an especially long period of time, it is roughly the average length of a human life in this country. Another detail about the woman’s life that the pathologist was able to deduce from the remains was that she had given birth at least once. It is quite possible that that child, or those children are still alive. And of course, if they themselves had children then the victim’s grandchildren and great grandchildren are almost certainly still alive and on the balance of probabilities living in the Midlands, probably in Birmingham or the Black Country.
So there we have it, a woman approaching middle age, almost certainly not a wealthy one one, brutally murdered probably in the persuit of someone’s gratification, partially mutilated, and hidden away from those who knew and loved her. Hidden in such a way that by the time her remains were found quite by chance, it was too late with the techniques and technology of the era to properly identify her.
The indignities have continued in death. West Midlands Police have lost the body and samples taken from it, as well as the original autopsy report. They also continue in the form of the bizarre and fantastical conspiracy theories which surround her death and concealment in the wych elm. Eight decades on the perpetrator(s) will be long dead, and the case is almost certainly unsolvable. The simplest explanation is the most likely explanation, even if it does contain within it the sickening punch of recognition, not least of the fact that as a society we have not moved far from the misogyny, structural oppression and material deprivation which cause this tragically unfortunate woman’s murder.