Who put bella in the wych elm tree

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Who put bella in the Wych Elm tree is a murder that has puzzled police for more than 60 years. The location is Hagley Wood which is located on the A456 between Kidderminster and Birmingham. It is the same site as the Wychbury Obelisk and is in the shadow of Clent Hills.

On 18 April, 1943, 4 boys ( Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne)from nearby Stourbridge are in the woods poaching when they come across a large Wych Hazel (later to be confused with a Wych Elm).

They believed this would be a good place to hunt birds nest so Bob Farmer attempted to climb the tree to locate said nests. As he was climbing he glanced down into the hollow trunk and saw two eye sockets looking back at him. Reaching into the trunk he pulled out the skull, believing it to be animal. However, he quickly realised after seeing human hair and teeth that he was holding a human skull. As they were on the land illegally he put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their gruesome discovery to anybody.

On returning home the youngest of the boys, Tommy Willetts, felt uneasy about what he had witnessed and decided to report the find to his parents. When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete skeleton, a shoe and some fragments of clothing. After further investigation a severed hand was found buried in the ground near to the tree.

The body was sent for forensic examination by Prof. James Webster. He quickly established that the skeleton was female and had been dead for at least 18 months, placing her time of death around October 1941. He found taffeta in her mouth indicating that she had died from asphyxiation. From the measurement of the trunk he also deduced that she must have been placed into the trunk still warm after the killing as she couldn't have fit in once Rigor mortis had taken hold.

Since the woman's killing was so soon after the war, identifying this strange woman was nearly impossible. They could tell from items found with her what she looked like but with so many people being reported missing from the war and people regularly moving house the records were too vast for a proper identification to take place.