Who Put Bella In The Wych-Elm Volume 2

Book excerpt: More on the the body in the hollow tree mystery. Alex Merrill explores the people who lived and worked near Hagley Woods who could have pinpointed who Bella was and why she was murdered. Offering new revelations; a fresh perspective of all the different theories, thoroughly researched and referenced, and complemented by historical facsimiles, photographs, and bespoke maps and charts, Alex suggests the possibility that the identity of Bella was known to the police long ago and that the case was closed because prosecutors deemed there to be insufficient evidence that the police had solved a mere gypsy murder. It also asks how much of the spy stories told by Wilfred Byford-Jones, Una Mossop, Donald McCormick and others was sheer fantasy, invented for personal gain and to sell newspapers and books and whether the shoes discovered at the scene of the crime pushed Professor Webster and his colleagues into misinterpretations of the evidence setting the police off on the wrong trail from the outset. And surprisingly for some readers, the mystery now focuses more on the town of Halesowen and hardly at all on Hagley.