Season 02 Episode 01: Whispers in the Trees (RERUN)
50:46 Share

This is an iHeart Podcast.

is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

Now more than ever, Lowe's knows you don't just want a low price. You want the lowest price. And with our lowest price guarantee, you can count on us for competitive prices on all your home improvement projects. If you find a qualifying lower price somewhere else on the same item, we'll match it. Lowe's. We help. You save. Price match applies the same item. Current price at qualifying retailers. Exclusions and terms apply. Learn how we'll match price at Lowe's.com slash lowest price guarantee.

This season, let your shoes do the talking. Designer Shoe Warehouse is packed with fresh styles that speak to your whole vibe without saying a word. From cool sneakers that look good with everything to easy sandals you'll want to wear on repeat, DSW has you covered. Find a shoe for every you from the brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike, Adidas, New Balance, and more. Head to your DSW store or visit DSW.com today.

Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook experience, has arrived at Legends.com. With thousands of the best free-to-play casino-style games, chances to earn millions of bonus coins and win real money. Legends is revolutionizing the Vegas experience wherever you are. If you love winning, then you'll love playing at L-E-G-E-N-D-Z.com. Legends is a free-to-play social casino void where prohibited play responsibly. Visit Legends.com for more information. Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.

due to the recent arrival of another mini-McLean Smith. The next new episode will be with you next Friday, June 13th. In the meantime, we're heading back into the vault for this week's episode, going all the way back to the beginning of Season 2. England's Black Country, a region just west of Birmingham, is considered one of the birthplaces of the British Industrial Revolution. It's centred around a 30-foot-wide and unusually shallow coal seam.

A product of once living trees, compressed and buried for millions of years, returning to the surface like an irrepressible secret. There are some who say the trees can talk, and if they could, what secrets might they hold? In full for the first time, this is Unexplained, Season 2, Episode 1, Whispers in the Trees. Intro

At 1900 hours, on Wednesday, January 19th, 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe, propelled by the majestic Atlas V rocket, is launched into space. Having begun its journey at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the probe, which is part of the new Frontiers program, is the focal point of NASA's first ever mission to Pluto.

With the spacecraft being hurled towards its target at over 36,000 miles per hour, it will be another 10 years before it begins to uncover the secrets lying in wait at the outer regions of our solar system. Back home, a week after the launch, in a small bedsit in London, a far more earthly discovery is about to be made. On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 26, a team of housing officials are making their way towards a flat in Wood Green, North London.

The apartment is part of a complex known locally as Sky City, which forms an estate perched on top of a vast shopping mall. When the team arrive at the front door, noises from the TV can be heard emanating from inside the flat, an indication perhaps that the occupier is home. The officers' subsequent knocks, however, go unanswered, and after a few minutes they decide to break down the door.

Stepping into the gloom of the flat beyond, the officers are first struck by a cloying smell that hangs thickly in the air. Pushing the front door wider reveals a stack of unopened mail on the floor. All the while, the voices from the TV continue uninterrupted. A moment later, the officers step into the living room and make a gruesome discovery. Lying there on the sofa, illuminated by the incessant flickering of the TV screen,

are the skeletal remains of the tenant. A pile of Christmas presents lie unopened on the floor. The tenant was 38-year-old Joyce Carol Vincent, and her body had lain undiscovered and unreported for over two years. Filmmaker Carol Morley was so moved by this revelation that she began an investigation to uncover who this tragically forgotten woman had been.

Morley's beautiful and hypnotic film, Dreams of a Life, released in 2011, pieces together the story of Joyce's life in an attempt to rescue her existence from obscurity. It is surely a fate that haunts us all. The sadness of a life forgotten, an affirmation of a degree of meaninglessness too profound to comprehend.

We see it in the propensity for social media to so often operate not as a tool with which to explore each other, but rather a means with which to validate ourselves. Our way of saying not only that this is who we are, but in the way of old school room graffiti, perhaps it is more fundamentally a way of merely saying that we were here, that we exist. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean-Smith.

The British Industrial Revolution was a time of extraordinary physical and philosophical upheaval. A time, as the inimitable Humphrey Jennings once observed, that was born from a sudden synchronicity of vision and the means of production. But its fuel was of course the land. The raw materials that men and women ripped from the ground and smelted in the factories.

Throughout the country, colossal cauldrons of industry sprouted up around the places where such fuel was most in abundance. One such centre, perhaps the most intense of them all, was the Black Country, a region in the West Midlands of England whose very name proudly bears the scars of its past. As the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle once wrote of the place at the time, "...a dense cloud of pestilential smoke hangs over it forever."

blackening even the grain that grows upon it. And at night, the whole region burns like a volcano, spitting fire from a thousand tubes of brick. At the height of the revolution, the region was a city of chimney stacks, of iron foundries and steel mills, but its blood was coal.

In fact, traditionalists consider the real black country to only include the region just west of Birmingham, where the 30-foot coal seam comes to the surface, a product of once-living trees compressed and buried for millions of years, returning to the surface like an irrepressible secret. There are some who say the trees can talk, and if they could, what secrets might they hold?

On the edge of the black country, there is an area of forest just outside of Birmingham that today is struck through by the busy A456 road. But in years gone by, it was a far more wild and darkly place. It is thought by some to be imbued with a sort of magic, a place where witches may have gathered, and perhaps still do.

or perhaps it is merely a place that echoes with the footsteps of ancient people who once walked and eventually settled on the land. Indeed, it is possible that settlers may have frequented the area as far back as Neolithic times. Certainly, the nearby Witchbury Ring Fort is evidence of a local community having existed here as far back as the 2nd or 1st century BC. By 1943, although signs of the fort can still be found,

They have faded well into the land. Half the world is in the grip of war, and for anyone who has found themselves mercilessly drawn into the horrors abroad, home is a distant and aching memory. For those left behind, home is a familiar but forever changed landscape, with or without the bombs. For Birmingham and the immediate surrounds, those bombs would come thick and fast,

being as it was the second most populous city in the UK and a major centre of industry. It is hard to imagine that in the midst of such turmoil, something hidden, a secret closer to home, might somehow penetrate the sound of those bombs. But in April of 1943, it did. What happened exactly one evening, under the cover of darkness, while explosives rained down only a few miles away, has never been fully accounted for.

It is a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. Barely ten miles to the west of Birmingham, in the shadow of the Clint Hills, lies the village of Hagley. On a warm spring evening, in the magic hour as dusk begins to fall, four young boys are roaming through the Hagley woods. The date is Sunday, April 18th, and the youngsters are Robert Hart, Thomas Willits, Bob Farmer and Fred Payne.

With rationing starting to bite, the boys, although they wouldn't tell you, are searching for food, birds' eggs or rabbits, if they're lucky. As their fathers fight in foreign fields to protect the green and pleasant lands of home, the boys might be forgiven for thinking such wide-open country to be as much theirs as any other Englishman. But such is the way of things. The land has been privately owned by the Lyttelton family since 1556,

and the boys are trespassing. The area is known as Hagley Park, taking its name from Hagley Hall, which in 1943 is home to Charles John Littleton, the 10th Viscount Cobham. The boys are about to make their way back home when something catches their eye, a tree unlike any of the others around. The trunk appears strangely squat, having at some point been heavily coppiced.

As a result, a shocking mesh of spindly branches has grown out of the top of it, forming the perfect sanctuary for nesting animals. Fifteen-year-old Bob Farmer volunteers to take a closer look and swiftly scrambles up through the branches. Having soon reached the top, he looks down into the gaping hollow of the tree. In the fading light, he can just make out the familiar dusty white hue of a bird's egg reaching down

he stretches his arm deep into the trunk but the egg remains tantalizingly out of reach with the aid of a stick he manages to move it but it's bigger than he expected and seems to be wedged inside with great care bob manages to dislodge the egg but as it starts to move free something dawns on him not only would this be the largest egg he had ever seen but that familiar dusty white hue

is a little darker and more yellow than it had at first appeared. It looks more like bone. When finally he lifts it from the hollow, it is clear that it is not an egg at all. It is in fact a skull, a human skull. Bob holds it aloft as the other boys look on with a mix of fear and wonder. A quick discussion ensues. Is it really what they think it is? How old is it? Should they tell someone?

Fred is keen to show it to his older brother Donald, but in the end they decide to keep it between them. Better that than risk punishment for poaching on private land. With night fast approaching, one of the boys notices some material protruding from the tree. Farmer pushes it into the skull and taking the stick, climbs back up the trunk and carefully lowers the mistaken treasure back into the hollow.

and there it might possibly have remained if it wasn't for the fact that, unsurprisingly, something of the event had followed the boy's home. The youngest, Tommy Willits, was finding it particularly difficult to erase the ghoulish image from his mind, an image that had found its way into his dreams. The next morning, unable to ignore it any longer, Tommy told his parents, who in turn wasted little time in telling the police.

The next day, Sergeant Charles Lambourne is dispatched to investigate. En route to the forest, Lambourne calls in on Robert Hart, the oldest of the boys, to help lead him to the strange and haunting tree. A short time later, having pointed out the location, the young Hart watches on as Lambourne, along with Sergeants Richard Skerrat and Jack Wheeler and Constable Jack Pound, take it in turns to peer into the cavernous trunk.

The boys had indeed found a human skull, but what they didn't know was that the peculiar tree was also hiding the rest of the body. One of the men remarks that the tree is an old and rotted witch hazel, also known as witch elm, a tree long associated with the underworld. The name witch derives from the old English word meaning pliant and durable.

This feature of which elm wood is one of the reasons it was traditionally used to build coffins. The policemen request a forensic team to come and inspect the body, but they are unable to attend until the following morning. As a result, a volunteer is sought to guard the skeleton through the night. The task falls to squadron leader William Douglas Osborne, a former special constable, home on leave for a few days. That night, Monday, April the 19th,

Osborne kept watch over the remains of the unknown, encased like a missive from the underworld itself, inside the natural coffin of the old witch elm. The following morning, on Tuesday, April 20th, Douglas Osborne was relieved of his duty by Superintendent Sidney Knight, Deputy Inspector Thomas Williams and Constable Jack Pound.

Later that evening, at approximately 6.40, the police were joined by Professor James Webster, head of the newly established Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at nearby Birmingham University. Webster was a foreboding figure, described by writer John Mervyn Pugh in his book Execution as a large balding Scot with a glass eye and a monocle to enhance the vision of the other.

He would often arrive on the scene scruffily dressed in baggy trousers and an old brown Harris tweed jacket with his tie hanging loose halfway around his neck. With the ladder safely secured by the tree, the imposing Webster clambered up to take a look inside. It was clear immediately that greater access would be needed. An axe was called for and handed over to Constable Pound. As the other men stood back and watched, Pound swung the axe and cut into the bowl of the tree.

One blow was followed by another until a clear break had been made, large enough to pull the skeleton out. With great care, the men worked together to free the bones before laying them out gently on the forest floor. On the ground, the skeleton appears at first to be fairly intact, but Webster is quick to notice a number of missing fragments. After a quick search of the immediate vicinity, Webster stumbles upon the slightly chewed tibia of the left leg.

One small midnight blue shoe with a crepe sole is also pulled from the splintered trunk. With the pieces now laid out, from the size and frame, as well as the few bits of material that remained, Webster could see instantly that the boys had stumbled upon the skeleton of a young woman.

We are coming on the air with breaking news right now. We look for a constant. And from one era to the next, trust now.

is the anchor. For NBC Nightly News, I'm Tom Yamas. A new chapter begins. NBC Nightly News with Tom Yamas. Evenings on NBC.

You're great at protecting your own personal information. You probably even use things like two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN. But as much as you try to be in control of how your information is protected, there are lots of places that also have it, and they might not be as careful as you are. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second for identity threats.

If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock U.S.-based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf, guaranteed, or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the Million Dollar Protection Package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft.

You might not be able to control how others handle your personal information, but you can help protect it with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LifeLock and use promo code iHeart or go to LifeLock.com slash iHeart for 40% off. Terms apply.

I can't tell you how often I hear, "Oh, I'm a little OCD. I like things neat." That's not OCD. I'm Howie Mandel and I know this because I have OCD. Actual OCD causes relentless unwanted thoughts.

What if I did something terrible and forgot? What if I'm a bad person? Why am I thinking this terrible thing? It makes you question absolutely everything and you'll do anything to feel better. OCD is debilitating, but it's also highly treatable with the right kind of therapy. Regular talk therapy doesn't cut it. OCD needs specialized therapy.

That's why I want to tell you about NoCD. NoCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for OCD. Their licensed therapists provide specialized therapy virtually, and it's covered by insurance for over 155 million Americans. If you think you might be struggling with OCD, visit NoCD.com to schedule a free 15-minute call and learn more. That's NoCD.com.

Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook experience, has arrived at Legends.com. With thousands of the best free-to-play casino-style games, chances to earn millions of bonus coins and win real money. Legends is revolutionizing the Vegas experience wherever you are. If you love winning, then you'll love playing at L-E-G-E-N-D-Z.com. Legends is a free-to-play social casino void where prohibited play responsibly. Visit Legends.com for more information. Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.

Later that evening, the first of the bones are delivered to the West Midlands Forensic Science Laboratory to be formally assessed by Webster and his assistant, Dr John Lund. Over the course of the next few days, the various sections are deftly laid out by the two pathologists. Any external fabric is delicately removed and slowly, a body begins to take shape. Professor Webster proceeds while Dr Lund records his findings. He begins at the skull.

noting that it is undoubtedly that of a female, and there are no obvious marks of a fatal injury. On the side of the skull, it's a small clump of mousy brown hair. An examination of the jaw reveals a clean and healthy set of teeth, with one peculiarity, a noticeable irregularity of the front two incisors, which overlap slightly. A piece of material, part of a khaki or mustard-coloured dress that the deceased would have worn, is found lodged into the cavity of the mouth,

suggesting a possible cause of death, perhaps placed in the victim's mouth to hasten asphyxiation. Moving down the skeleton, Professor Webster notes no signs of disease or ill health, with the fine condition of both the hyoid bone and the sternum suggesting that the victim was a woman below the age of 40.

The pelvis reaffirms the victim as being indisputably female, with a particular feature in two of the hip bones suggesting a childbirth at some point, though this is deemed inconclusive. All in all, Webster finds little unusual with the major exception of one thing. The entirety of her right hand was missing.

Professor Webster concludes the victim to have been a female of approximately 35 years of age, of lower than average height, placing her at roughly five feet tall. The time of death is given as approximately 18 months previously, due to the state of decomposition and the age of the tree roots which had weaved their way through what remained of the clothes. Since the victim had to have been placed in the hollow before rigor mortis,

If, as Webster suspected, she had been murdered, it is likely that she would have been placed in the tree while she was still warm, possibly even alive. As such, she would likely have been murdered nearby or at least driven to the spot in a significant hurry. An assessment of the rotted fragments of clothing reveal the remains of a mustard-coloured cloth skirt as well as a dark blue and yellow striped knitted cardigan.

An inexpensive wedding ring is also found, which may have been worn for as long as four years. Back in the forest, members of the Home Guard with the assistance of a local scout group continue to comb the area. A second shoe is found not far from the tree, as well as a green glass bottle. A short time later, one of the volunteers notices something protruding from the soil. As he digs into the earth, he recoils in horror, as there, buried just below the surface,

is the missing right hand. Taking Webster's bone and material analysis, the Worcestershire Constabulary put together a poster campaign in the hope of encouraging any witnesses to come forward. But as the days turn to weeks and then to months, despite evidence that the victim had possibly been married at the time of death and may also have born a child, remarkably, nobody comes forward. Then, an identity card is found in the woods.

But when the police visit the owner's address, they are somewhat disappointed to find her alive and well, if a little bemused as to how her ID card was found so close to a possible murder scene. All in all, the police trawl through over 3,000 open reports of missing women, but are unable to find a significant match. The irregularity of the teeth offered a glimmer of hope, but a subsequent check of all UK dental records again yields nothing.

The green glass bottle is also analysed but reveals little of interest. But the police enjoy some luck when the Krep sold shoes are traced to one specific manufacturer by the name of Silsby's, located in nearby Northampton. Almost 6,000 pairs of the shoes have been made, but remarkably, all of the owners are traced except for those of six pairs that are eventually tracked to a market stall in nearby Dudley, where the trail goes cold.

A similar process is attempted with the clothes, but curiously, all of the labels have been cut or removed entirely. A strange state of affairs perhaps, but also one that was in keeping with the notion that the shoes might have been market bought, since stall owners would often remove the labels of the clothes they sold.

In spite of the distraction and devastation of war, the mystery of the skeleton found in Hagley Wood, now being referred to in the press as the Tree Murder Riddle, had continued to hold a firm grip on the local community. But as the months wore on, the tale of yet one more wartime death had begun to fizzle from the public consciousness. After six months, the police had drawn a complete blank, with no leads and not even as much as a name for the tragic, forgotten victim.

But all that was about to change. It was on one morning, sometime towards Christmas of 1943, that the rising sun revealed a cryptic message hastily scrawled across a wall in the nearby village of Old Hill. Written in chalk in three-inch-high capital letters were the words, Who put Lubella down the witch elm? Not long after, another message appeared scrawled on a wall in Birmingham, declaring, Hagley Wood, Bella.

Again and again, the messages continued to appear, evolving each time until eventually settling on what has perhaps become the most well-known phrase: "Who put Bella in the witch elm?" But who had authored these teasing questions? Do they really know who the dead woman was? Or what may have happened to her? And why are they not talking to the police? As if from nowhere it would seem, the authorities now had a name to work with.

But the mystery was only just beginning. As Christmas approached, at last, the authorities had something to work with. A name, or at least the derivation of a name. Now, the police began to focus their efforts on women with versions of the name Bella, who may have gone missing around the autumn of 1941.

One woman was of particular interest, whose name Bella Lua bore a striking similarity to the name Lua Bella as depicted in the earliest of the graffiti linked to the case. Bella Lua's friends had become concerned when they lost all contact with her after she moved to Birmingham from Stamford Hill in London. Although Lua's whereabouts were never officially established, she was eventually deemed irrelevant to the case.

As for all the other missing Bellas that the police looked into, they were found alive and well. Before long, the investigation hit a brick wall. In defence of the Worcestershire Constabulary, 1941 was a difficult time to be keeping track of British citizens. And with resources stretched to the limit, it is much to the credit of the force that such an extensive investigation was conducted at all.

As the months passed and war eventually came to an end, the public interest in the case soon diminished. By the summer of 1945, with the nation celebrating an end to hostilities while mourning their countless other dead, the tree murder riddle was fated to remain unsolved and forgotten. But someone was about to make a startling claim concerning a vital piece of the evidence that they believed had been criminally overlooked: the severed right hand.

Back in 1898, at the age of 35, Dr Margaret Murray was making a name for herself in the field of Egyptology. She had just become the first female lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, having accepted a post at University College London. She would continue to work and teach at the university until her retirement in 1935 at the age of 72.

Although formerly an anthropologist and historian, Murray was perhaps best known for her highly controversial views regarding the history of witches. Her primary theory became known as the witch cult hypothesis.

The theory suggests that rather than being the hapless victims of vile and arbitrary witch hunts, witches persecuted throughout European history were in fact followers of a definite religion with beliefs, rituals and organization as highly developed as that of any cult. What drew her attention to the Hagley Wood case was the curious revelation that the right hand had been found separated from the rest of the skeleton and buried in the ground.

The police merely assumed it to be the work of an industrious forest animal. To Dr Murray, however, it suggested something far more sinister. She believed that instead of being a gruesome but incidental offcut, the hand had in fact been removed and placed in the ground deliberately as part of an elaborate occult ritual. Dr Murray suggested that the severed hand may have been used to create a magic artifact known as a "hand of glory".

Traditionally, such totems were made by removing the right hand of a convicted criminal, followed by the casting of a spell to invest the separated extremity with magical power. A bizarre suggestion, you might think, but not so, she believed, if the victim had been considered to be a witch. The theory was given more weight by the location of the body. As outlined in James George Fraser's groundbreaking book, The Golden Bough,

There is a rich tradition in Celtic and pagan beliefs of investing trees with spirits and sometimes souls of their own. In addition, there are some who believe that certain trees have the power to bind magic. There are some who believe Hagley Wood to have long been a traditional meeting place for covens of witches. And it certainly wouldn't have been the first time that an occult ritual had been conducted in England during the Second World War.

In August 1940, Gerald Gardner, a well-known follower of pagan witchcraft, along with a number of other members of the New Forest Coven, performed a magic ritual that became known as Operation Cone of Power. It was hoped that the operation would ultimately dissuade the high command of Nazi Germany from invading the United Kingdom.

It is also important to note that Dr Murray's theory wasn't based on any personal belief in the magic of witchcraft, but rather the notion that such practices did occur. Whether or not a hand of glory had any discernible power, it remains that somebody willing to believe in such things may have enacted some form of ritual in the murder of the unknown woman.

In any case, despite influencing a number of well-known authors such as Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves, Murray's Hagley Wood theory and her witch cult hypothesis have been roundly discredited, and in reality, there is little to support her claim that the victim had been subject to a ritualistic killing. What Murray's theory did do, however, was to enact a sort of magic of its own.

Such spells tend to be most potent during times of uncertainty, when a scapegoat is required to make sense of the ills of the world. Perhaps it was only ever going to be a matter of time, but soon a bogeyman would be brought forth from the fog of truth. With all the talk of ritual murder and black magic, fuelled by a press ever ready to fan the flames of a salacious story, many became convinced that local travellers were to blame.

The rumour would persist for 10 years, but all that was about to change.

Ever had a thought like, is my partner the one?

Maybe we should break up since I'm not sure, even though I'm happy. Or what if I lose control and hurt someone with this knife, even though I don't want to? I should hide all the knives and maybe stop cooking. I'm Nicole Raffi. I have OCD, and that's what OCD actually looks like. Not the stereotypes about cleanliness. Real OCD overwhelms with unwanted, distressing thoughts.

Thank you.

If this sounds familiar, visit nocd.com for a free call to learn how they can help. That's nocd.com.

Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook experience, has arrived at Legends.com. With thousands of the best free-to-play casino-style games, chances to earn millions of bonus coins and win real money. Legends is revolutionizing the Vegas experience wherever you are. If you love winning, then you'll love playing at L-E-G-E-N-D-Z.com. Legends is a free-to-play social casino void where prohibited play responsibly. Visit Legends.com for more information. Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.

You're great at protecting your own personal information. You probably even use things like two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN. But as much as you try to be in control of how your information is protected, there are lots of places that also have it, and they might not be as careful as you are. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second for identity threats.

If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock U.S.-based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf, guaranteed, or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the Million Dollar Protection Package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft.

You might not be able to control how others handle your personal information, but you can help protect it with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LifeLock and use promo code iHeart or go to LifeLock.com slash iHeart for 40% off. Terms apply. In 1953, a journalist at the Wolverhampton Express and Star, writing under the name Quester, decided to reassess the evidence.

His real name was Wilfred Bifford Jones. Bifford Jones, who had never been convinced by the reductive traveller theory, revisited the case in a series of articles appearing in late November of 1953. Concluding the series in a third and final article published on Friday, November 20th, Bifford Jones notes...

Whether the young woman is supposed to have been a gypsy who was ritualistically murdered with witchcraft or after a trial by her tribe, well, I do not accept it. It is true that there had been gypsies for years in the area, but every crime is laid at the door of Romanies. For Bifford-Jones, the suggestions of witchcraft had been a gross and fanciful obscuring of the facts.

It was a gallant and single-minded campaign that fought to wrestle the case back from acceptable fiction to more unsettling fact. But nobody could have anticipated what came next when a few days later, a strange letter landed on Bifford Jones's desk. It was postmarked clavily, Wolverhampton, and dated 18th November 1953. It read...

My dear Questa, finish your articles regarding the witch elm crime by all means. They are interesting to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery. The one person who could give the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts. The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moonlight rites. Much as I hate having to use a nom de plume, I think you would appreciate it if you knew me.

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 in England illegally about 1941. I have no wish to recall any more. Yours sincerely, Anna. It is not uncommon for people to claim knowledge of crimes they have no connection to, but something of Anna's letter rang true to Bifford-Jones.

After a series of pleas for Anna to come forward and reveal herself, a few days later, against all expectation, she did. And so it was, on one cold morning at the local police station, that Anna proceeded to reveal everything that she knew. Her name was Una Hainsworth, and this was her story. Sometime in the early 30s, Una had met and fallen in love with a dashing young man called Jack Mossop.

Not long after, the young lovers would be married and expecting their first child. Sure enough, in 1932, with the couple still in their teens, a son, Julian, was born. As the country slowly clawed its way back from a decade of economic stagnation, here, encapsulated in the face of their newborn baby, was a renewed sense of hope for the future. But that hope would be short-lived, for there was a shadow looming over the young family.

a shadow that was soon to fall across most of the world. On Sunday, September 3rd, 1939, at 11.15am, families up and down the land huddled around the wireless as Neville Chamberlain announced that the country was at war. Less than a year later, on Friday, August 9th, 1940, the first of many bombs dropped on the Midlands.

What followed was just under two years of sustained bombing of the heavily industrialized region. For Jack, perhaps to his relief and shame, as a skilled factory worker, he was exempt from the draft and was instead assigned to work in Coventry building munitions. But as the months wore on, Una's relief that Jack had avoided the draft was tempered somewhat by a sudden change in his character. He started to drink more and stay out later.

often at a new favourite haunt, a lively place on the edge of the Clint Hills called the Lyttelton Arms. He started buying new clothes, including an RAF officer's jacket, to which he was not entitled. He had also started to accrue money from an unknown source. Una was particularly suspicious of the new crowd he seemed to be hanging out with, a suspicion that was further aroused when one of the crowd turned up one night at their home.

The enigmatic man who gave his name as Van Rolt was well-dressed and claimed to be from Holland, with a seemingly endless disposable income, despite no discernible occupation to speak of. One evening, in the spring of 1941, after yet another late night, Jack returned home, drunk and agitated. He'd been at the Littleton Arms again with Van Rolt, where they were joined by what he described as the Dutch Peace Corps.

Jack claimed that the woman had become awkward and later passed out, at which point Van Rolt decided to play a trick on her. After carrying the woman to Van Rolt's car, the pair drove to a nearby wood and dropped her unconscious body into the hollow of a tree. They had only meant it as a joke, he said, believing in the morning that she would come to her senses. In the weeks that followed, it was clear to Una that something was playing on Jack's mind.

As he retreated further into himself, and his behavior became increasingly erratic, Una eventually had enough. So she left, taking their son with her. For Jack, now without his wife and child to keep him company, things began to unravel drastically. It wasn't their leaving that tortured him every night, but rather what had crept in in their absence. Later, after Una and Jack had divorced, Jack confided in Una.

He told her that he was being driven mad by the recurring image of a woman's face leering at him from inside a tree. But it wasn't until Una heard that a skeleton had been found in Hagley Wood that she put the two events together. Back in the police station all those years later, the interviewing officers are dumbfounded by Una's statement and immediately demand a contact address for her ex-husband. But she couldn't give them one.

Jack had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in Stafford in 1942. A few months later, at the age of 29, he was dead, apparently driven insane by his recurring nightmare. But what really shook things up was Una's parting thought on the matter. Van Rolt, she believed, was a spy. There is no firm evidence to suggest that Jack Mossop had found himself embroiled in a spy ring, so what to make of Una's story?

Certainly, much of it is true. She did indeed have an ex-husband called Jack Mossop, who had been a regular visitor to the Littleton Arms. It is also true that he would later die in a psychiatric hospital in 1942. Police also had some luck in tracing the mysterious Van Rolt figure, but nothing untoward could be found. It could be said that much of Una's story begins to make more sense if her spy theory is applied.

Certainly, in his capacity as a munitions worker in Birmingham, Jack would have been uniquely placed to pass off useful information to the German Air Force. Although Una's spy theory was never officially confirmed, it was a theme keenly picked up 15 years later by writer Donald McCormick. In 1968, McCormick is alleged to have conducted a series of interviews with a former Nazi called Franz Rathgeb.

It turned out that a number of spies had been active around the Midlands after all, at precisely the time that the unknown woman would have gone missing. One of those spies was Rathgeb. Although he claimed not to know anything of the murdered woman, he did recall a fellow spy by the name of Lera who had a Dutch girlfriend called Dronkers, Clara Bella Dronkers, who was herself a spy living in the Birmingham region.

Intriguingly, she would have been around 30 years old at the time of the murder and had irregular front teeth similar to those noted on the skeleton. Could it be that the fruitless search of dental records all those years ago hadn't failed because of an administrative error but merely because the woman had not actually been from the UK?

McCormack further alleged that he later came across some interesting information in declassified papers from German military intelligence. The papers suggested that a spy had been parachuted into the Midlands in 1941 but had then failed to make contact with their handlers. The name listed for the spy was Clarabella. Needless to say, this theory too remains unconfirmed. However, on the 18th of May 1942,

The British Navy intercepted an unregistered boat just off the coast of the UK. In it were three Dutch nationals who were promptly interrogated. After routine questioning, two of the men were deemed rational and of little threat. The third, on the other hand, became hysterical at the first sight of the British officers. He was immediately arrested and later convicted under the 1940 Treachery Act on suspicion of being a spy.

His name was Johannes Marinus Dronckers. Was this the man Franz Rathgeb knew as Lehrer, come in search of his missing wife? Sadly, we will never know. On New Year's Eve of 1942, Johannes Dronckers was executed in Wandsworth Prison in London. Towards the end of the 20th century, a number of British wartime files were declassified, with one proving of particular interest to our case.

On the evening of January 31, 1941, just above the town of Ramsey in Cambridgeshire, high up in the night sky, a man was silently drifting down to earth. No one saw the black spot as it fell hard and fast, landing with a bump in a field next to Dove House Farm. Two men, Charles Baldock and Harry Coulson, had been walking by the area shortly after when they heard the sound of a revolver being fired into the air.

Locating the source of the gunshots, Baldock and Coulson were astonished to find a man lying on his back in a field surrounded by the silken canopy of a parachute. The man, who was in some distress, had clearly broken his leg. Coulson ran immediately to fetch James Godfrey, a member of the Home Guard, who in turn telephoned Ramsey Police Station before accompanying Coulson to take a look at the prostrate man.

Godfrey later noted that the man had been wearing civilian clothes underneath his flying suit. They also found in his possession an attaché case, four to five hundred pounds in one-pound notes, and a wallet. Together, the three men bound the parachutist's leg and waited for further instructions. A short time later, Captain William Henry Newton arrived on the scene and began to question the mystery man.

He gave his name as Joseph Jacobs and claimed to have flown over solo from Luxembourg before bailing out of his plane. Jacobs was then loaded onto a horse and cart and delivered to Ramsey Police Station. Once detained, Jacobs was asked to open the attaché case. Inside, they found a wireless set as well as a pair of headphones and batteries. They also found a map on which was marked the location of two RAF satellite stations nearby.

But Jacobs is also carrying something else. Something found tucked away deep inside his pocket. A picture photograph of a glamorous looking woman, on the back of which was a message written in English. It read, My dear, I love you forever. Your Clara. Landau, July 1940. The woman is Clara Sophie Bowler.

Born in Ulm, Germany on the 29th of June 1906, in 1941 she would have been 35 years old. She is a cabaret singer and sometime actress, who not only worked for a number of years performing in music halls across the West Midlands, but speaks fluent English with a Birmingham accent and was known locally as Clarabella.

Not only that, but according to Jacobs, she is extremely well connected to the Nazi party and had been recruited as a spy with plans to drop her into the Midlands region. Finally, it seemed that the pieces were coming together. Is it possible that Clara Bauerle is our unknown woman? Not so, according to Jacobs' granddaughter Giselle, whose own website on the subject provides an exhaustive account of the life of Joseph Jacobs.

As Giselle's research details, the skeleton found in the witch elm tree suggested a woman of around five foot in height. Clara Bauerle, as has been well documented, was substantially taller, at almost six feet in height. In a final blow to the theory, it was also discovered that Clara had in fact died in Berlin on the 16th of December 1942.

Joseph Jacobs was eventually tried and convicted of being a spy and sentenced to death by firing squad. Jacobs protested his innocence to the end, declaring that he was a friend of England and had arrived to help in her fight against the Nazis, but it was to no avail. On the 13th of August 1941, Joseph Jacobs became the last man ever to be executed at the Tower of London.

Thinking about the mystery in its entirety, it is quite striking when you consider that perhaps the least strange element of the whole thing is that a woman had been murdered, and most likely by a man, and not only had she been disposed of with such apparent ease, but there seemed nobody willing to come forward on her behalf.

According to writer and broadcaster Steve Punt, who investigated the Witch L murder as part of his Punt PI series broadcast by the BBC, there was one report at the bottom of a police file that is so often overshadowed by the louder, more colourful components of this compelling mystery. It notes a missing persons report logged sometime around October of 1941. A sex worker by the name of Bella had gone missing.

Could it be that that same Bella, a woman whose initial disappearance had perhaps been deemed unworthy of investigation, was the woman they had been searching for all along? There was one other report, recorded shortly after the skeleton had been discovered,

An eyewitness account by two home guards who had been wrapping up their nightly patrol near Hagley Wood one evening in the autumn of 1941 when the sound of an approaching engine stopped them in their tracks. As the guards looked down to a turn at the bottom of the road, a scattering of light is followed shortly by a vehicle appearing from around the bend before swiftly pulling in to the side of the road.

The guards approach with caution, surprised to see a private vehicle driving round these parts at this time of night. As they near the vehicle, one of the guards holds a light up to the driver's window and knocks on the glass. The driver blinks into the light and rolls down his window. He smiles awkwardly as he hands over his ID. The guards are surprised to discover, judging by the jacket he is wearing, that the man is an RAF officer.

Shining a light into the vehicle, the patrolman noticed there is someone else in the car, huddled under an overcoat, lying very still in the passenger seat. At the look on the faces of the guards, the officer gives an embarrassed shrug. The guards return the ID, which is gratefully received by the driver, who proceeds to roll up the window before driving away back into the night. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean-Smith.

All other elements of the podcast, including the music, were also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.

Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through Twitter at UnexplainedPod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.

Legends, the greatest social casino and sportsbook experience, has arrived at Legends.com. With thousands of the best free-to-play casino-style games, chances to earn millions of bonus coins and win real money. Legends is revolutionizing the Vegas experience wherever you are. If you love winning, then you'll love playing at L-E-G-E-N-D-Z.com. Legends is a free-to-play social casino void where prohibited play responsibly. Visit Legends.com for more information. Legends with a Z.com is legendary fun.

It's Wednesday night after a long day, and the last thing you want to do is cook dinner from scratch. But you still want a satisfying, tasty meal without the guilt? Enter your freezer's sidekick, Cauliflower. From thin and crispy cauliflower crust pizzas to all-natural white meat chicken tenders and more, Cauliflower is gluten-free always, satisfies every craving, and is ready in minutes. Cauliflower is available in freezer aisles nationwide. Visit eatcauliflower.com slash where to buy to find a store near you.

The stakes do not get any higher. The two very best in the NBA. Pace it.

The NBA Finals, presented by YouTube TV. Continue on ABC. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can send money to kids quickly, set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an

This is an iHeart Podcast.