The Hagley Wood murder

Trow, M. J.2023

Books, Manuscripts

Find it!
Remove The Hagley Wood murder from your current list Save The Hagley Wood murder to your current list

Total copies: 1

Availability by location

Place reservation

Summary

In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her 30s, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of 'Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm - Hagley Wood'. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case - Donald McCormick's 'Murder by Witchcraft' - and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. This book unravels the fiction of McCormick and others.