Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?

"**Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?**" is a graffito that appeared in 1944 after four teenagers discovered the skeletonized body of a woman inside a whych elm, in Worcestershire, England, in 1943. Skeletonization is the last stage of decomposition after death. It means that the last bits of soft tissue have dried or disappeared; the bones of the body are visible. Today, the woman is still unknown, the case has not been solved. People believe she died in 1941. The phrase is sometimes spelled in a slightly different ways, for example using "witch" instead of "whych", or using the preposition "down" (so that it reads: ..put Bella down in the which/whych elm). An autopsy was done, but the location of the autopsy report is currently unknown. Many media articles, movies, dramas, an opera and a musical have been made from the case. 

## Discovery 
On 18 April 1943, four local boys (Robert Hart, Thomas Willetts, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne) were poaching or bird–nesting in Hagley Wood, part of the Hagley estate belonging to Lord Cobham near Wychbury Hill. They came across a large whych elm. They thought that the place was a very good place to search for a bird's nest. Farmer tried to climb the tree, to investigate. When he climed, he looked down into the hollow trunk, and saw a skull.  At first he believed it was that of an animal, but when he saw human hair and teeth, he realised that he had found a human skull. As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody. After further investigation, the remains of a hand were found some distance from the tree. He quickly established that it was that of a female who had been dead for at least 18 months, placing time of death in or before October 1941; Webster also discovered a section of taffeta in her mouth. This suggested she had died from suffocation. From the measurement of the trunk in which the body had been discovered, he also deduced that it must have been placed there "still warm" after the killing, as it could not have fit once *rigor mortis* had taken hold. In addition, they contacted dentists in the area since the dentistry was quite distinctive. described a forensic facial reconstruction done by  the Liverpool John Moores University's "Face Lab", from photographs of the skull. It was commissioned by Andrew Sparke for his books on the incident. and several witnesses describe that Clara Bauerle was around  tall, while Bella was .

In 1945, Margaret Murray, an anthropologist and archaeologist at University College, London, proposed a more radical theory—witchcraft—because she believed that the severing of one hand was consistent with a ritual called the Hand of Glory, after the victim had been killed by Romani people during an occult ritual. This provided investigators with several new leads for tracing who the victim could have been. Other messages in the same hand appeared too. Since at least the 1970s, similar graffiti has sporadically appeared on the Hagley Obelisk near to where the woman's body was discovered, which asks the slightly modified *Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?*

## Cultural references 
In 2003, Simon Holt composed a chamber opera with the title "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" and libretto by Caryl Churchill. A play with the same title was later commissioned from the Los Angeles writer and director Katherine Vondy in 2019 and produced in 2022. There have also been smaller scale dramatic presentations in Britain, for the most part serving as staged docudramas or as educational exercises. They include Tom Lee Rutter's film *Bella in the Wych Elm* (2017); *Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?* at London's The Space in March 2018, written and adapted from archive sources by Leah Francis and director Tom Drayton; a musical of the same title by Ellis Kerkhoven, and score by Adam Gerber, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2019; Francesca Haydon-White's 2021 theatrical documentary in Durham; and the ME Dance Company's project in  Walsall (2023) and Wolverhampton (2024).

## Notes
## References 

## Other websites 
* "Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm" article on Atlas Obscura
* Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm, article from Brian Haughton's website
* Casefile True Crime Podcast - Case 04 - Who Put Bella In The ‘Witch’ Elm - 30 January 2016
* Bella in the Wych Elm- Christmas and Crime, Confessed Obsessed podcast
* *The Body In The Tree* podcast
* *Hoe Bella Stierf* A Dutch podcast series about the case