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Witchcraft, Nazi Spies And Unsolved Murder

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 21:54

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(Before It's News)

dead-hand

Mysterious Universe

Andrew May

They found the woman’s body jammed inside a tree. As Nazi bombs rained down on wartime Britain, her death might have been passed off as just another statistic. Instead, it became one of the most intriguing mysteries of the war. It was murder, but the victim was never identified. There were hints she had been an enemy agent, and that the authorities knew more than they let on. There were ritual aspects to the murder strongly suggestive of witchcraft and the occult. Finally there were the anonymous graffiti messages, popping up everywhere, asking the question that remains unanswered to this day: “Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?”

It started in April 1943. A decomposed human body – by this time little more than a skeleton – was found inside a hollow tree trunk in Hagley Wood, about ten miles from the industrial city of Birmingham in the English midlands. Tattered fragments of clothing and a cheap, imitation gold ring indicated the victim had been a woman. The skeleton was complete except for one thing: The woman’s severed right hand was found 40 feet away.

A wad of fabric had been stuffed inside the victim’s mouth, and the pathologist concluded she had died from asphyxiation. He estimated her age as 35, and the time of death as approximately 18 months prior to the discovery of the body – October 1941. The police scoured missing person reports from all over the country, but without success. They failed to identify her from dental records, and no labels were found on any of the clothing. The woman’s identity remained a total mystery.

The Wych Elm and the body (images from 1943)

There may be a clue in the date of the murder. In October 1941, early in the Second World War, German bombers regularly targeted industrial sites around Birmingham. There was a constant threat of invasion, and people were always on the lookout for Nazi parachutists. A Home Guard soldier remembered finding a parachute near Hagley Wood some time in the fall of 1941, and seeing a suspicious-looking car parked in the woods near where the parachute had come down. In 1953, a local newspaper received an anonymous letter claiming the murder victim was a Dutch woman who had been working as a Nazi agent. Allegedly she was part of a spy ring that acted as forward air controllers for German aircraft, signalling their way to prime industrial targets using flashlights.

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