Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?

One of the more famous unsolved true crime cases concerns a woman found stuffed into a tree in a woods outside Worcestershire during WWII. Despite an extensive effort by police at the time of her discovery, she still has never been identified. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:13Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Jerry. Oh my gosh, there's Chuck. Sorry Chuck.

• 1:20Josh Clark?

  And this is Stuff You Should Know and we're off to a weird, weird start already.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  That's right. You forgot I was here.

• 1:26Josh Clark?

  I just don't know what happened. My Efference copies on the fritz.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Hey, real quick before we get started, and this just hit me. I went to a work function yesterday wherein we celebrated Jonathan Strickland, our, still our colleague, but our old buddy from the old How Stuff Works, early Stuff Podcast days, who was the long, long, long, long, long time host of Tech Stuff.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And he has hung up his tech boots to, as far as hosting that show. He's still around and executive producing a slate of shows, but he, he decided not to host Tech Stuff any longer. And we just, it was great seeing him. It's been quite a while and he's doing great. And just hats off to Jonathan and what a, what a great body of work he's, he's given the world over all those years.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he has been. Hats off to you, John. Like that's, you should be very proud. We're all proud of you for sure.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  But keep it, your head on Strickland, cause you got that bald head. We don't want to get sunburned.

• 2:25Josh Clark?

  Wow, that was really cool of you to bring up. I'm glad you did.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was good. I saw some of the old crew and it's just, it's been too long. Cause you know, we don't go to the office much anymore and nobody does. So it's not like if I went there, we, I would see all the old gang, but uh, it was good. It was nice to catch up with some people.

• 2:40Josh Clark?

  That's cool, man. Yeah. You sent me and Jerry some good pictures.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  Okay. Well, on to the murder of a woman.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Awful.

• 2:51Josh Clark?

  So this is a pretty true, pretty famous true crime. Case like really, really famous. I'm not sure if you'd heard of it before. Have you?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  I'm not sure why or where it first got me, but I'm pretty sure. So um, I think Dave helped us with this. And he um, linked to a pair of pictures of a tree and then a diagram of a, of the woman, the murdered woman in this case. And like, you know, um, like a, a, almost an anatomical diagram of like what was found where and what she was wearing and all that. And it has like a real Ripley's Believe It or Not look to it, the drawing does. And those things are as etched in my brain as pictures from like the Time Life Paranormal series.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 3:37Josh Clark?

  From when I was a kid. So at some point I was exposed to this. So it's one of those things that I've always just kind of known about. But I didn't know any of the details really. And it's a truly fascinating case that I think one of the things that makes it appealing too, is there's this uh, level of the sense of like witchcraft or um, some sort of like pagan cults involved or something like that. And it turns out that that's not true. That's not the case, that a lot of it is just associated with the tree that she was found in, a witch elm, which has nothing to do with witches. And that she might not have even been found in that kind of tree. So let's get into it Chuck, because I like confusing everybody from the outset.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, this definitely smacked of like a. Tales from the Crypt or Weird Stories entry or something like that. This goes back to World War II in April of 1943 specifically. Robert Hart, Bob Farmer, Tommy Willets and Fred Payne, four teenage boys, went to what was called the, or what is called, I guess Hagley Wood. This was a time in World War II where they were rationing things like food in Britain. So they were looking for food. They were looking to catch some rabbits or maybe get some eggs from Bird's Nest and 15-year-old Bob Farmer saw an opening in a tree, went up to check it out and it looked like an eggshell. It turned out it was a skull and so he got a stick,

• 5:05Speaker 02

  wrapped it with some cloth and lifted the skull up out of there. And they were like, what kind of animal is this? Turns out it was a human animal. It had a clump of hair, a couple of crooked teeth, had clearly been munched on by some animals. And so they were like, we're trespassing and we don't want to get, like most kids would do, like, uh, we don't want to get in trouble, so we're just going to put it back and never talk about it.

• 5:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think their quote was hummina, hummina, hummina.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Plus tax.

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  So yeah, they could have gotten in decent amount of trouble. I couldn't find exactly what, but they were poaching and poaching was a big deal still then. I think it still is now, but it's probably lost a little bit of its, you know, punishment.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 5:43Josh Clark?

  Regardless, the, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willets, he was 17, despite this vow, went right home and told his parents.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:52Josh Clark?

  And I say, good boy, Tommy Willets, because he, it was clear to him like, we just found a human skull in a tree and that's, that's something that we need to talk about. So very quickly, the police were called in and they started to investigate. And they brought in a guy named James Webster, who was a pathologist with the Birmingham Forensic Laboratory. And he essentially led the initial investigation and came to some pretty, pretty good, basic conclusions. Because there's one thing to know about this case. It has been.

• 6:26Josh Clark?

  Hijacked and molded in all sorts of different ways. And you really have to be careful that you're aware of what source you're

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:34Josh Clark?

  getting your information from. Because it's just one of those cases that people have loved to talk about and add to and lie about and do all sorts of stuff with. But the stuff that comes from James Webster is definitely legit. He was, he firsthand examined the body.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  That's right. So he cut this tree open. He found most of the skeleton in there. It was missing some small bones and I think they got a tibia nearby. There was pieces of clothing. There was a shoe. There was a wedding ring. And they, you know, when you get a skeleton like that, you're going to reconstruct it and try and figure out who this person was or what they may have been, you know, shaped like. And they said, well, this is a woman, probably about 35, five feet tall. So, you know, quite, quite short. With brown hair, because I think I mentioned those little bit of hair very gruesomely still on the skull.

• 7:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Did you see the picture of that?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  I did.

• 7:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And she's probably been gone about 18 months, maybe longer. And like I mentioned, animals had gotten into these bones and, you know, munched on them some.

• 7:39Josh Clark?

  Right. So Webster was like, I'm pretty sure this is a murder. There's a few things that stand out to me. One stuffed into the jaw, pretty deeply into the jaw, was a piece of the taffeta from the woman's dress.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:54Josh Clark?

  And enough that it was enough of the, the piece of the dress that he was like, this could have asphyxiated somebody if it was stuffed into their mouth while they were still alive.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Josh Clark?

  Probably wasn't a dress eater. So maybe this is murder. He also said that there's no way that this, this person was placed into this tiny opening. So it was about 12 inches by 24 inches. Like say a third of a meter by two thirds of a meter.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Which is a very tiny place, even for a five, five foot woman. Like, that's, that's a, I get claustrophobic just thinking about that. And that if they were dead already, then like rigor mortis would have prevented them from being pushed into there even. And then also, this is not the kind of place that a person's just gonna crawl into on their own accord. Like, they were placed in there possibly while alive still, which is one of the gaslier aspects of this case. And so Webster said, you know, you put all this together, I'm pretty sure this is a murder that we're looking at.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  The other thing they had to go on was, as far as clues go, was they had, you know, most of the jaw intact. And so they thought, hey, maybe we can find a dental match. They were not able to. Now that they had this kind of rough physical description, they thought, well, let's come through missing persons reports. Did not find anything matching that. And so the case went cold for a while. They just kind of put it on the shelf.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Hagley Wood itself, we should describe it a little bit. It is on a private estate, but it wasn't like gated and walled up such that you couldn't access it because people would use it. People would have picnics there while the blitz was going on and cities were being bombed. People would leave Birmingham sometimes and even sleep out there around Hagley Wood where it was a little quieter.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  And then a weird thing happened in March of 1944. So this is about almost a year afterward. There graffiti started popping up around town, around Birmingham, and we'll see elsewhere, with white chalk letters in all caps on these brick walls. Two messages at first. One said Hagley Wood Bella. And another said, who put Bella down the witch elm, W Y C H dash Hagley Wood?

• 10:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So this is where we get the name of the victim that everybody knows and the type of tree that the victim was found in that everybody knows from graffiti, from an anonymous person.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:31Josh Clark?

  And but it was enough that the police were like, okay, this seems a little weird. There were other people who started to to kind of copycat the whole thing. Once the paper started writing about it, but there was at least a third one a couple of days later that was clearly written by this, the first person who wrote the first two. And they were like, maybe this person knows who it was and they want to find justice for the the woman. And they looked, they they reopened the case. And this is, I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated, having like both, both jaws, they're like, great, we'll do dental records and we'll find who it is. Nothing matched. They tried

• 11:12Josh Clark?

  to comb through all of the missing persons reports. No one matched. They get this Chuck, did you see that they investigated the shoe and got really far with it? They they traced the shoe that they found with her back to the Waterfoot Company in Lancashire.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:29Josh Clark?

  And they traced down all but six of the the owners of all but six of the pairs. They were sold in a market stall. So this wasn't like looking through the market's credit card receipts.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  They didn't have credit cards.

• 11:44Josh Clark?

  No, like, they really were doing some legwork here. And, you know, hats off to them, because let's not forget, England was getting bombed almost nightly by the Luftwaffe. There was food rationing, there was a war on.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:58Josh Clark?

  And they investigated this random, you know, dead person that that hard. And then they reopened the case. I'm just saying, I think they did a good job with what they were working with.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Totally. And by the way, I don't know when credit cards came about. So maybe that's a good shorty. So if I'm wrong. I imagine they sprung from credit accounts like with a store or something.

• 12:18Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  But, uh, yeah, maybe we should do one on that. I bet it's Diners Club.

• 12:22Josh Clark?

  I think it was Diners Club, in fact, with Telly Savalas. No, that was Players Club.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it?

• 12:30Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Okay, because he was a playa.

• 12:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, it was.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you noted some other graffitis. One of the ones that seemed to be from the same hand. This was in Hales Owen in another town nearby. This is different just because it had a different name. And this one said, uh, who put Lu bella, L U E B E L L A, Lu bella, in the witch elm? Uh, and we mentioned that even though it seems like a copycat had done it because it was in different script. It just gave them another name to look for. And so they looked for Lu bella as well and came up cold as well.

• 13:05Josh Clark?

  Yes. Yeah, they looked for everybody. Bella, Lu bella, Isabella, um, Lu Vega, everybody. And nothing came up.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  You never know when he's gonna pop up on this show.

• 13:16Josh Clark?

  No, you don't. That was one of the best pranks ever played on us.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Pretty good. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's just an Easter egg and, uh, listen to every episode and you'll learn.

• 13:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  So, um, the witch elm thing, for those of us who aren't familiar with, um, with British trees.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  The name witch elm does not mean witch, W I T C H. You spelled it before. It's W Y C H. And it comes from an old English word, maybe vice, vis, W I C E. And that means smooth or supple. And that that describes the bark of a witch elm. Has nothing to do with witches. Witches are not associated with the witch elm. It's not even spelled the same. And yet. There's been an association with witchcraft and this case, at least in part because of that, even among Brits, like, there was a folklorist and archaeologist named Margaret

• 14:18Josh Clark?

  Murray, who loved to spin a good yarn, and she was one of the first people to associate this case with witches, and basically said witches killed this lady.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so she wrote a book, a prominent folklorist and archaeologist, she wrote a book, you know, many books, but one of them was called The Witch Cult in Western Europe. So she was really into this, this thing and this kind of idea. And she had a theory that she had been promoting that European witches were in part of this ancient fertility cult, where they had, you know, sacrifices and things like that made. And she was there in Birmingham in 1945, investigating, investigating a different occult murder, where a farmer had been killed through the chest and pinned down with a pitchfork. While she was there, she hears, hears about Bella in the witch elm, and she's like, well, that's right up

• 15:10Speaker 02

  my alley. And very quickly was like, oh, well, this was clearly some kind of witchy witchcraft occult sacrifice that happened. Because putting corpses in a tree is a form of ancient tree worship. And so that's obviously what happened here. Also, that, you know, the severed hand that we found near the tree, with the bones, I guess, the hand bones, that's part of an ancient thing called the Hand of Glory, which you dug up some stuff on, which I thought was super interesting.

• 15:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's, it's nothing like what it sounds like with Hand of Glory. Instead, it's an old burglar's superstition that you would take a severed hand and put a candle in it, like, make it hold a candle, or you would basically attach candles to all five fingers, the tips of them, and then you'd light it. And if it stayed lit, then that meant that everybody in the house you were about to rob was asleep. If any of them went out, that meant that there was somebody still awake, and you shouldn't rob that house. It had nothing to do with witchcraft. And then even more so, there was no hand.

• 16:21Josh Clark?

  Found severed from the body. That doesn't appear in any of the initial police reports.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:28Josh Clark?

  It's just, it's a great example of the lies that came up. So to legitimize this idea that it was the hand of glory, somebody just said along the way, maybe even Margaret Murray, that the hand was severed and found at the trunk of the tree. And you will see that everywhere.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:45Josh Clark?

  Even in ones that don't mention witchcraft. It's just, that's how cases like this just get, you know, that's how they become unsolvable over time. But, I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter, but for some reason, it's just always ticked me off.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  No, I get it. Um, I don't know if you have your phone, but I just texted you a picture of, uh, and I just want to shout it out because it looks so darn good. On Etsy, a Hand of Glory candle.

• 17:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  The company is Wailing Dip Candles. And it is a frighteningly realistic old hand with candle wicks coming out of each of the fingers and the thumb.

• 17:22Josh Clark?

  I gotta check this out. Let me go grab my phone.

• 17:33Josh Clark?

  Oh, my gosh, that's amazing.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  So Josh really did go get his phone.

• 17:35Josh Clark?

  Like, it doesn't even look old. It looks like they just severed a hand and planted some wicks on it. Like, wow.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't look young.

• 17:44Josh Clark?

  Well, okay, so it looks like an aged person's hand, but it's not like a mummified hand.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. It looks like a real hand. And I'm hoping we move these things for this company. It's kind of pricey. It's 85 bucks, but I reckon if you amortize that over like 10 Halloweens, that's not too bad. It's like 850 a year to have a good spook.

• 18:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I do feel like we need to change the name Hand of Glory, though. First of all, it doesn't make sense. And secondly,

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:08Josh Clark?

  it really does sound dirty. Let's just be honest about it.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, unfortunately, attaching the word glory to other objects is just not so good.

• 18:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's true. Blaze of Glory, good.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, just ask Jerry Jones.

• 18:22Josh Clark?

  Um, so.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  The idea that it's witchcraft was, like we said, really just sort of invented by Margaret Murray, who happened to be there investigating another case altogether.

• 18:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, by the way, that was Charles Walton, who was murdered almost certainly by his employer in a raid.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. So that wasn't witchy either. It was just like, I'm pitchforking your hay and I get mad at you. And so I'm going to kill you with a thing in my hand.

• 18:49Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  And you know what? Actually, we should probably take a break here.

• 18:52Josh Clark?

  Oh.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Because we've been going for 19 minutes now and it's

• 18:56Josh Clark?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  It's kind of a good little cliffhanger.

• 19:00Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  We'll be right back.

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• 19:58Josh Clark?

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• 21:08Speaker 02

  All right, so I mentioned a cliffhanger. It wasn't really a cliffhanger. I'm not sure why I said that, but let's jump forward a little bit to 1953 where the story takes a turn. There was a journalist there named Wilfred Biford Jones, apparently had a pen name that was Quaestor?

• 21:27Josh Clark?

  Basically, yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Q-U-A-E-S-T-O-R.

• 21:32Josh Clark?

  You could see the A and the E join, too.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could see that. But old Wilfred wrote a bunch of very speculative articles about Bella's murder, which only led to confusion and falsehoods. A lot of it had to do with witches, of course, and blaming stuff on the Romani people, what they called gypsies at the time, like coming through town, doing something like that. And all this to say, one of these stories was caught by a reader who wrote in to Biford Jones under the name of Anna of Claverley, and basically was like, "I know the deal." I'll just read it real quick. "Finish your articles, r.e. the witch elm crimes. By all means, they are interesting

• 22:17Speaker 02

  to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery. The one person who could give you the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts," in other words, dead. "The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic, or moonlight rites. The only clues I can give you are that the person responsible for the crime died insane in 1942, and the victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall anymore."

• 22:47Josh Clark?

  Right. And the police said, well, TS, because you're going to have a secret meeting.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess they they found Anna and like brought her in for an interview.

• 22:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and Anna's name was Una Masup. And she eventually became Una Haynesworth, but during the time of the murder, she was married to a guy named Jack Masup. And I saw alternately that he worked in a local munitions factory, or that he was a RAF instructor, or that he worked in a factory building plane engines. Regardless, he existed. He was married to Una. And Una told the story to the cops that one night, Jack brought home a friend named Van Ralte, a Dutchman. And that apparently at some point, Jack admitted to Una that he was on Van Ralte's payroll. And Van Ralte was a spy for the Nazis.

• 23:39Josh Clark?

  And apparently, Jack was feeding him information about local factories and stuff to help the Luftwaffe plan their bombings.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:46Josh Clark?

  So Jack was a real grade A bastard as far as things went because he traded his country in for some spending money.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:54Josh Clark?

  And Una said, one day, Jack came home in March or April of 1941. Came home late. He was drunk, but he was super agitated.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Right. Said, you know, pale as a ghost. He said he'd been at a pub with Van Ralte and what he called a Dutch piece. Who was this Dutch woman? I didn't know they used that kind of language back then. Or maybe it meant something else. I have no idea. But that's those were the words that he used. And then he said, things got awkward. We can just chalk that up to understatement of the year. She, I guess, was also drunk, passed out in Van Ralte's car. And Van Ralte supposedly, as this story goes, had a very strange idea. Was, hey, let's go stick this woman in that tree. And she'll she'll sober up in the morning and come to her senses.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  And Jack, apparently, Una said, was never the same. He started drinking more and more, quit working. Still had this money. But eventually, Una said, I'm out of here and I'm leaving you. I'm taking our kid. She saw him again about a year later in 1942, when he was really coming apart at the seams, saying that he keeps seeing this woman in his mind, in the tree. She was leering at him. And he was eventually committed to a mental hospital, where he died about eight months before Bella's body was discovered.

• 25:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he died of, as far as his death certificate is concerned, a combination of cerebral softening, myocardial degeneration, chronic nephritis, and acute, um, acute something insanity. I can't even remember my own abbreviation. But you put those together and that guy is like dead, dead, dead. Um, so Una's story sounded like this actually all makes sense. Uh, from what I can tell, she provided information that you wouldn't have just been able to glean from the papers. And what's more, she didn't really have much to gain.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 25:56Josh Clark?

  She wrote in anonymously and resisted coming forward. So it wasn't like she was a publicity hound.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  It'd be a weird thing to make up.

• 26:05Josh Clark?

  She would be like a mastermind attention getter to, to, to really like, yes, it would be a weird thing to say, to, to make up, right?

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's a weird thing to do, to have that idea, like, hey, let's go stuff that woman in a tree. I mean, it's

• 26:18Josh Clark?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Beyond the, no, that's weird. And then it's a weird thing for that not to have happened and for this woman to sort of invent it. It's all just beyond the pale.

• 26:27Josh Clark?

  Exactly. One of the things is though, is so like, if this was a joke, what, you know, what tree? How did Van Ralte know that that tree?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:35Josh Clark?

  Was there in the first place and that it had this 12 by 24, you know, space in it? The, the thing is, this is far and away the most legitimate explanation for what happened. This is an unsolved case. It's an unsolved mystery, but for my money, like this is as close as we're ever going to get.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  No, I agree. Uh, you know, cops obviously searched for Van Ralte. They searched for, uh, you know, records wise, um, a Dutch national who may have fit the description that Una gave. But it went cold yet again. Uh, and then we flash forward to 1968. There's a writer named Donald McCormick, who picked up the case for a book he was writing called Murder by Witchcraft. And this is when he, I mean, this guy doesn't have a very good reputation as a writer, because it seems like he would just, they called him a fantasy historian. Like, he would just make stuff up, make a lot of weird claims and theories. He would say things like, you know, "I was able to interview someone exclusively,

• 27:36Speaker 02

  who was anonymous and that no one else could talk to. And here is that interview." And in this case, he said, you know, "This interview that I got with this guy, that no one else knows about or will talk to and who shall remain anonymous, was a former Nazi spy recruiter hiding in Paraguay. And Bella was a Dutch-born German spy named Clara, or Clarabella. And I've even got Nazi intelligence files on this. I'm not going to show you. But it says that she parachuted into Birmingham in March or April 1941, so the timeline fits. And she happened to look just exactly like who was described by Una."

• 28:14Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so Dave points out that this guy had a habit of making his puzzle pieces fit together a little too neatly. So essentially, he found out about Una Masup's story, and decided to make it real by corroborating it with his imagination. His book, though, is the book that we get the very famous pictures that I was familiar with, that caught my attention as a kid. But it's really important to point out here, the tree that he shows is not the tree that she was found in. You said toward the beginning of the episode, that the cops chopped that tree down to look for more evidence, so that tree doesn't exist anymore.

• 28:55Josh Clark?

  And yet, that's that picture that Donald McCormick put forth as "the tree", is what you see on the internet still today, is the tree she was found in. And that that's possibly not even the kind of tree, that she might not have been found in a witch elm. The cops mentioned that she was found in an elm, but that's it. And then apparently, some people have been able to examine the photos of the original tree and said, "It's not a witch elm, because you don't cut witch elms down that way."

• 29:24Speaker 02

  That story about you seeing that picture, when did that happen?

• 29:30Josh Clark?

  I was probably like 10, 11.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 29:32Josh Clark?

  I think probably in like a school library book or something like that about mystery.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I thought you saw it recently. Okay.

• 29:38Josh Clark?

  No, no, no. That's, that's how I was walking around with this case for that many years. Like I saw it in some book when I was a kid.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  I got you. That makes it so much better.

• 29:45Josh Clark?

  I can, I can even remember like the cellophane covering of the book cover even.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  That's the best.

• 29:50Josh Clark?

  I can feel it in my fingers right now. I can smell it.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 29:53Josh Clark?

  It smells awful.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  That makes much more sense because you were talking in those sort of ways about it. And I thought it was recent and I was like, that's a weird nostalgia for something that happened a few weeks ago.

• 30:03Josh Clark?

  Right. It makes me nostalgic for yesterday.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  I can still remember that moment in December.

• 30:11Josh Clark?

  No, not like that. Little kid's stuff.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  All right. So that's that book aside. Another twist came in 2013. The Independent ran a story about Bella connecting it to a spy named Josef Jacobs, who's a German spy who evidently parachuted into a field near Cambridge in February 1941, got hurt really badly, could not walk, fired his pistol in the air to attract some, some help ideally.

• 30:41Josh Clark?

  He said, hey fuzz.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the cops come and he's in police custody. He has a wireless transmitter, a fake ID, almost 500 pounds in cash, but also a headshot, a photograph of a woman, but like a professional headshot of this, you know, attractive, smiling woman. And on the back of it in English, it said, my dear, I love you forever. You're Clara Landau, 19, July 1940.

• 31:08Josh Clark?

  Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot that's weird about this. So Clara Landau, this picture of Clara Landau was actually a picture of Clara Bowerly, who was a well-known, I saw her described as a movie star, but at least a movie actress and a cabaret singer, a German.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  Lily von Stup.

• 31:25Josh Clark?

  And so, yeah, exactly. I think that's almost exactly who this could have been based on. She was apparently, as far as Yosef Jakobs has said to MI5 in multiple interviews, that this was his mistress, that they met in Berlin. Bowerly was singing with a group called the Bernard Etta Orchestra. Just goes to show you Dave's dedication to research.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:50Josh Clark?

  And that Jakobs and Bowerly were both crypto Nazis, meaning that they were not actual Nazis, they were pretending to be Nazis. And they had fooled the Germans, or at least Jakob had, into taking him on as a spy and sending him to England. He planned to get to England, defect, and make his way to America. But first, he wanted to set up a fake operation enough to convince the Germans to send Bowerly after him. And that's it. Like, that's what Yosef Jakobs said. But The Independent was like, "Ho, ho, let's fill in some blanks and come up with our own theory, Donald McCormick style."

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, they did some research. They looked for, obviously, for records for Clara Bowerly. And they did find information and confirm, yes, she was a cabaret singer in Germany. She would have been 35 years old at the time of the murder, just like the skeleton, you know, seemingly confirmed. But had she come to England was the big question. All they found was Clara with a K, Clara Sophie Bowerly, who was 35, who did go to Germany, I'm sorry, from Germany to England, and stayed from 1930 to 32. But that was kind of it, no information at all about what she did in England. But they ran with it anyway.

• 33:15Josh Clark?

  They did. I mean, think about it. So like, she left a full eight, nine years before Bella in the Witch Elm happened, was killed.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:24Josh Clark?

  And yet, yeah, The Independent's like, "So what?" So, based on all this, with a bunch of pie filling that they mashed in with it, The Independent came up with a new theory. And I say we take a little break and come back and talk about it after this.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 33:53Speaker 02

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• 34:07Josh Clark?

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• 34:35Speaker 02

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• 34:46Josh Clark?

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• 35:09Josh Clark?

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• 35:48Josh Clark?

  So like I was saying, The Independent came up with their own pet theory for the Bella in the Witch Elm case. And what they said was, okay, so Clara, Clara Bowerly, had come to England in the 30s and was a performer, a cabaret singer here as well, as in Germany, and that she became known as Clara Bella. Like, maybe this is a stage name she adopted or something like that. But it was a mashup of her name Clara Bowerly. And that was the foundation that they based everything else on.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. They said, here's what she did. She parachuted into England in 1941. She was, you know, trying to catch up with her parachuting boyfriend, Josef Jakobs, and they thought that was the only way to get into a country, I guess, to drop into the middle of the field. And they said, hey, what if this Clara was, who was in that tree, who was killed by Van Ralthe, like, we think that that's who was in the witch elm, and that graffiti artist had to have known that Clara Bella or Bella was her name, and tried to get justice for this murder.

• 36:49Josh Clark?

  Right. And they walked away like this?

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:52Josh Clark?

  Could you hear that? Did that come through?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so.

• 36:56Josh Clark?

  So, um, yeah, so there's some problems with this theory. Number one, she was not, Clara Bowerly was not five feet tall. She was approaching six feet tall.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  That's the biggest problem with this, right?

• 37:10Josh Clark?

  That's a pretty big problem. I would, I would say that there's an even bigger problem than this. And that is that she died a full year after Bella did, in a German hospital of an arbitrate overdose.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, those two very large problems with this story did not keep them from running the story.

• 37:29Josh Clark?

  No. And this is 2013. This isn't The Independent, you know, decades ago. This was- Well, I guess a decade ago, but still, it was recent enough that they should know better than making up basically new theories and printing them as if they're basically fact. So, um, one of the good things that came out of this, um, was of Yosef Jacobs being brought into this case, although just totally like that was the independent that did that. That was like, he was not mentioned, that he was not tangential to the case. He had nothing to do with it, basically. But his granddaughter, Giselle K. Jacobs, or Jacobs, I'm not sure which one she goes by, she has a PhD in ancient history. So she knows about

• 38:11Josh Clark?

  being a historian and she's applied some of that to the Bella in the Witch Elm case on a website called yosefjacobs.info. And it is very well researched and well-written information about this case. So if you're interested in it at all, go check that out.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, finally, uh, which is great. Um, if you're wondering about DNA, you know, sometimes they can, you know, find DNA on old stuff. Uh, but everything has been lost, apparently. Um, all, everything was being passed around and moved around in different boxes and different labs. And this is in the 1940s and 50s. And, uh, no one knows if it even exists at all anymore, if it's, you know, hidden away besides, uh, the, um, Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse or something.

• 38:56Josh Clark?

  You know, I mean, it's possible that someone will find it at some point, you know?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might still be out there, or it could have been lost, or a building could have burned down. Like, who knows? Like our lost episode, Jerry has no idea.

• 39:08Josh Clark?

  No idea. That's gone for good. That's not in any warehouse anywhere.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  No, which is probably a good thing.

• 39:14Josh Clark?

  Uh, and now we'll wrap up this episode with five minutes on the ancient woodland management technique of coppicing.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Very funny.

• 39:23Josh Clark?

  Uh, you got anything else?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  I have nothing else.

• 39:27Josh Clark?

  Uh, well, go forth if this floated your boat and read more about Bella in the Witch Elm, the case. Just be wary of where your information's from. Uh, and there's a lot more to it. There's a lot, well, there's a lot more out there to read. How about that? Uh, and in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  I'm gonna read this and preface it with, we got quite a few emails. Remember when you tied John Williams, I guess, Star Wars people are gonna be so mad. Is it Darth Vader's theme or the Imperial Death March? One of those?

• 39:59Josh Clark?

  Imperial something or other, sure.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Something like that. You tied that to, who was it? Bach? I don't remember.

• 40:06Josh Clark?

  Chopin's Funeral March, and I stand by it.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  That's right. And we got quite a few music people that wrote in and were, you know, gave us the old, hey, well, actually, these differences here and there and here and there. Fair enough. Not knocking those people for knowing much more about that kind of thing than us. You just know what your ears told you.

• 40:26Josh Clark?

  Well, also, I called up John Williams and he was like, yep, I love that Funeral March.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Keep up the good work, boys.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  He wrote our theme song, too, by the way.

• 40:37Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  No one knows that.

• 40:39Josh Clark?

  Nope.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  But this is from Lad, who gets your back. Hey, guys, hope all is well. Finally, somebody said it. Josh, John Williams likes to borrow heavily from classic works. Please listen to La Saca du Prantin, The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, and you will hear the theme from Jaws, as well as many other hits that Mr. Williams has taken on loan. Not saying he hasn't done a lot for the genre, but if this is a sampling issue, he'd be paying a lot of money to those composers. Keep up the work and stay sexy. And that is from Lad.

• 41:16Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Lad. Appreciate that. Loved your turn as the little kid in Lost Boys.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, by the way, we watched The Lost Boys with Ruby the other night.

• 41:26Josh Clark?

  Would she think?

• 41:27Speaker 02

  It's her second sort of adult movie in a row after Terminator 2. She loved it. I looked it up beforehand and I was like, surely Lost Boys has some gratuitous nudity or some awful sexy stuff. And it really doesn't. It's some kind of gruesome stuff, but she's totally good with that. And a little bit of language, and she knows all that stuff.

• 41:44Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  And she really dug The Lost Boys, because she likes all that spooky witchy stuff.

• 41:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's a really good movie.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, it was pretty fun. It holds up in the way that 80s movies like that hold up.

• 41:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it definitely did. I saw it not too long ago and I was like, this is, like I said it before, I'll say it again, it's a good movie.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed.

• 42:03Josh Clark?

  Well, thanks a lot, Lad, again. I appreciate being backed up. That was very refreshing. And if you want to be like Lad and back me up about some stand I took that everybody tried to shout me down on, and I said, no, I'm not going to be shouted down. They're like, yes, you are. And I said, no, I'm not. And then it just kind of hung out there until you email in. We love that kind of thing. You can send us that email to [email protected].

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 42:45Josh Clark?

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• 43:30Josh Clark?

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• 44:12Speaker 00

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