Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?
38:18 Share

Ready to celebrate the magic of live music? South by Southwest Music Festival returns to Austin, Texas this March 10th through the 15th with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent. Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.

With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest. Explore the lineup at SXSW.com. SXSW.

Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it. That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.

Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for? That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Jerry. Oh my gosh, there's Chuck. Sorry, Chuck. And this is Stuff You Should Know, and we're off to a weird, weird start already. That's right. I forgot I was here. I just don't know what happened. My efference copy's on the fritz. Hey, real quick before we get started, and this just hit me, I went to a work function yesterday.

wherein we celebrated Jonathan Strickland, still our colleague, but our old buddy from the old HowStuffWorks Early Stuff podcast days, who was the long, long, long, long, long time host of Tech Stuff. And he has hung up his tech boots today.

Uh, to, as far as hosting that show, he's still around and, uh, executive producing a slate of shows, but he, he decided not to host tech stuff any longer. And we just, it was great seeing him. It's been quite a while and, uh, he's doing great and just hats off to Jonathan and what a, what a great body of work he's, he's given the world over all those years. Yeah, he has been. Hats off to you, John. Like that's amazing.

You should be very proud. We're all proud of you for sure. But keep your head on, Strickland, because you got that bald head. We don't want to get sunburned. Wow. That was really cool of you to bring up. I'm glad you did. Yeah, it was good. I saw some of the old crew and it's just it's been too long because, you know, we don't go to the office much anymore and nobody does. So it's not like if I went there, I would see all the old gang. But it was good. It was nice to catch up with some people. That's cool, man. Yeah. You sent me and Jerry some good pictures. Yeah, it was fun.

OK, well, on to the murder of a woman. Awful. So this is a pretty true, pretty famous true crime case, like really, really famous. I'm not sure if you'd heard of it before. Have you? No, no.

I'm not sure why or where it first got me, but I'm pretty sure. So I think Dave helped us with this. And he linked to a pair of pictures of a tree and then a diagram of the woman, the murdered woman in this case. And like, you know, like almost an anatomical diagram.

of like what was found where and what she was wearing and all that. And it has like a real Ripley's believe it or not look to it, the drawing does. And those things are as etched in my brain as pictures from like the Time Life Paranormal series. Oh, wow. From when I was a kid. So at some point I was exposed to this. So it's one of those things that I've always just kind of known about.

But I didn't know any of the details, really. And it's a truly fascinating case that I think one of the things that makes it appealing, too, is there's this level of

the sense of like witchcraft or some sort of like pagan cults involved or something like that. And it turns out that that's not true. That's not the case, that a lot of it is just associated with the tree that she was found in, a witch elm, which has nothing to do with witches, and that she might not have even been found in that kind of tree. So let's get into it, Chuck, because I like confusing everybody from the outset. Yeah, this definitely smacked of like a

Tales from the Crypt or a Weird Stories entry or something like that. This goes back to World War II in April of 1943 specifically. Robert Hart, Bob Farmer, Tommy Willits, and Fred Payne, four teenage boys...

went to what was called the, or what is called, I guess, Hagley Wood. This was a time in World War II where they were rationing things like food in Britain. So they were looking for food. They were looking to catch some rabbits or maybe get some eggs from bird's nest. And 15-year-old Bob Farmer

saw an opening in a tree, went up to check it out, and it looked like an eggshell. It turned out it was a skull, and so he got a stick, wrapped it with some cloth, and lifted the skull up out of there. And they were like, what kind of animal is this? Turns out it was a human animal. It had a clump of hair, a couple of crooked teeth,

had clearly been munched on by some animals. And so they were like, we're trespassing and we don't want to get in, like most kids would do, like, we don't want to get in trouble, so we're just going to put it back and never talk about it. Yeah, I think their quote was homina, homina, homina. Plus tax.

So, yeah, they could have gotten in a decent amount of trouble. I couldn't find exactly what, but they were poaching, and poaching was a big deal still then. I think it still is now, but it's probably lost a little bit of its punishment. Regardless, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willits, he was 17, despite this vow, went right home and told his parents. And I say, good boy, Tommy Willits, because it was clear to him, like,

We just found a human skull in a tree, and that's something that we need to talk about. So very quickly, the police were called in, and they started to investigate. And they brought in a guy named James Webster, who was a pathologist with the Birmingham Forensic Laboratory. And he essentially led the initial investigation and came to some pretty good basic conclusions. Because there's one thing to know about this case. It has been...

hijacked and molded in all sorts of different ways. And you really have to be careful that you're aware of what source you're getting your information from, because it's just one of those cases that people have loved to talk about and add to and lie about and do all sorts of stuff with. But the stuff that comes from James Webster is definitely legit. He was, he firsthand examined the body. That's right. So he cut this tree open. He found a,

Most of the skeleton in there was missing some small bones, and I think they got a tibia nearby. There was pieces of clothing. There was a shoe. There was a wedding ring. And they, you know, when you get a skeleton like that, you're going to reconstruct it and try and figure out who this person was or what they may have been, you know, shaped like. And they said, well, this is a woman, probably about 35, five feet tall. So, you know, quite, quite short. Right.

And with brown hair, because I think I mentioned there was a little bit of hair very gruesomely still on the skull. Yeah. Did you see the picture of that? I did. Yeah. And she's probably been gone about 18 months, maybe longer. And like I mentioned, animals had gotten into these bones and, you know, munched on them some.

Right. So Webster was like, I'm pretty sure this is a murder. There's a few things that stand out to me. One stuffed into the jaw, pretty deeply into the jaw, was a piece of the taffeta from the woman's dress. Yeah. And enough that it was enough of the piece of the dress that he was like, this could have asphyxiated somebody if it was stuffed into their mouth while they were still alive. Yeah.

Probably wasn't a dress eater. So maybe this is murder. He also said that there's no way that this person was placed into this tiny opening. So it was about 12 inches by 24 inches, like, say, a third of a meter by two thirds of a meter.

Okay. Yeah. Which is a very tiny place, even for a five foot woman. Like that's a, I get claustrophobic just thinking about that. Yeah.

And that if they were dead already, then rigor mortis would have prevented them from being pushed into there even. And then also, this is not the kind of place that a person is just going to crawl into on their own accord. They were placed in there, possibly while alive still, which is one of the ghastlier aspects of this case.

And so Webster said, you know, you put all this together, I'm pretty sure this is a murder that we're looking at. The other thing they had to go on was, as far as clues go, was they had, you know, most of the jaw intact. And so they thought, hey, maybe we can find a dental match. They were not able to. Now that they had this kind of rough physical description, they thought, well, let's come through missing persons reports. Did not find anything matching that. And so the case went cold for a while. They just kind of put it on the shelf.

Hagley Wood itself, we should describe it a little bit. It is on a private estate, but it wasn't like gated and walled up such that you couldn't access it because people would use it. People would have picnics there while the Blitz was going on and cities were being bombed. People would leave Birmingham sometimes and even sleep out there around Hagley Wood where it was a little quieter.

And then a weird thing happened in March of 1944. So this is about almost a year afterward.

Their graffiti started popping up around town, around Birmingham and we'll see elsewhere with white chalk letters and all caps on these brick walls. Two messages at first. One said Hagley would Bella and another said who put Bella down the witch elm W.Y.C.H. dash Hagley would. Yeah.

So this is where we get the name of the victim that everybody knows and the type of tree that the victim was found in that everybody knows from graffiti, from an anonymous person. Yeah. But it was enough that the police were like, okay, this seems a little weird. There were other people who started to kind of copycat the whole thing once the paper started writing about it. But there was at least...

A third one, a couple of days later, that was clearly written by this the first person who wrote the first two. And they were like, maybe this person knows who it was and they want to find justice for the woman. And they looked, they opened, they reopened the case. And this is I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated having like both.

Both jaws. They're like, great, we'll do dental records and we'll find who it is. Nothing matched. They tried to comb through all of the missing persons reports. No one matched. They get this, Chuck. Did you see that they investigated the shoe and got really far with it?

They traced the shoe that they found with her back to the Waterfoot Company in Lancashire. And they traced down all but six of the owners of all but six of the pairs. They were sold in a market stall. So this wasn't like looking through the market's credit card books.

They didn't have credit cards. No. Like, they really were doing some legwork here. And, you know, hats off to them because let's not forget, England was getting bombed almost nightly by the Luftwaffe. There was food rationing. There was a war on. And they investigated this random, you know, dead person situation.

that hard. And then they reopened the case. I'm just saying, I think they did a good job with what they were working with. Totally. And by the way, I don't know when credit cards came about. Maybe that's a good shorty. So if I'm wrong, I imagine they sprung from credit accounts, like with a store or something. But yeah, maybe we should do one on that. I bet it's Diners Club. I think it was Diners Club, in fact, with Telly Savalas. No, that was Players Club. Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it?

OK, because he was a player. Yeah, yeah, he was. Yeah, you noted some other graffitis. One of the ones that seemed to be from the same hand. This was in Hales Owen in another town nearby. This is different just because it had a different name. And this one said, who put Lubella, L-U-E-B-E-L-L-A, Lubella in the witch elm?

And we mentioned that even though it seems like a copycat had done it because it was in different script, it just gave them another name to look for. And so they looked for Lubella as well and came up cold as well. Yes. Yeah. They looked for everybody. Bella, Lubella, Isabella, whatever.

Lou Bega, everybody. And nothing came up, right? You never know when he's going to pop up on the show. That was one of the best pranks ever played on us. Pretty good. If you don't know what we're talking about, it's just an Easter egg and listen to every episode and you'll learn. Yeah. Yeah.

So the witch elm thing, for those of us who aren't familiar with British trees. Sure. The name witch elm does not mean witch, W-I-T-C-H. You spelled it before. It's W-Y-C-H. And it comes from an old English word, maybe vice, vis, W-I-C-E.

And that means smooth or supple. And that describes the bark of a witch elm. It has nothing to do with witches. Witches are not associated with the witch elm. It's not even spelled the same. And yet, there's been an association with witchcraft and this case, at least in part because of that. Even among Brits, like there was a folklorist and archaeologist named Margaret Murray who

who loved to spin a good yarn. And she was one of the first people to associate this case with witches and basically said witches killed this lady. Yeah. So she wrote a book, a prominent folklorist and archaeologist. She wrote a book, you know, many books, but one of them was called The Witch Cult in Western Europe. So she was really into this thing and this kind of idea.

And she had a theory that she had been promoting that European witches were in part of this ancient fertility cult where they had, you know, sacrifices and things like that made. And she was there in Birmingham in 1945, investing, investigating a different occult murder where a farmer had been killed through the chest and pinned down with a pitchfork.

While she was there, she hears about Bella in the witch elm, and she's like, well, that's right up my alley. And very quickly was like, oh, well, this was clearly some kind of witchy witchcraft occult sacrifice that happened because putting corpses in a tree is a form of ancient tree worship. And so that's obviously what happened here. Also, you know, this severed hand that we found near the tree with the bones, I guess the hand bones,

That's part of an ancient thing called the Hand of Glory, which you dug up some stuff on, which I thought was super interesting. Yeah, it's nothing like what it sounds like with the Hand of Glory. Instead, it's an old burglar's superstition that you would take a severed hand and

and put a candle in it, like make it hold a candle, or you would basically attach candles to all five fingers, the tips of them, and then you'd light it. And if it stayed lit, then that meant that everybody in the house you were about to rob was asleep. If any of them went out, that meant that there was somebody still awake and you shouldn't rob that house.

It had nothing to do with witchcraft. And then even more so, there was no hand found there.

severed from the body. That doesn't appear in any of the initial police reports. It's just a great example of the lies that came up. So to legitimize this idea that it was the hand of glory, somebody just said along the way, maybe even Margaret Murray, that the hand was severed and found at the trunk of the tree. And you will see that everywhere, even in ones that don't mention witchcraft. It's just, that's how cases like this just get

You know, that's how they become unsolvable over time. But I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter. But for some reason, it's just always ticked me off. No, I get it. I don't know if you have your phone, but I just texted you a picture of and I just want to shout it out because it looks so darn good on Etsy. A hand of glory candle.

Oh, yeah. The company is Wailing Dip Candles, and it is a frighteningly realistic old hand with candle wicks coming out of each of the fingers in the thumb. I got to check this out. Let me go grab my phone. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. So Josh really did go get his phone. Like, it doesn't even look old. It looks like they just severed a hand and planted some wicks on it. Like, wow. Well, it doesn't look young.

Well, OK, so it looks like an aged person's hand, but it's not like a mummified. No, no, no, no. It looks like a real hand. And I'm hoping we move these things. It's for this company. It's kind of pricey. It's 85 bucks. But I reckon if you amortize that over like 10 Halloweens, that's not too bad. It's like 850 a year to have a good spook.

Yeah. I do feel like we need to change the name Hand of Glory, though. First of all, it doesn't make sense. And secondly, it really does sound dirty. Let's just be honest about it. Unfortunately, attaching the word glory to other objects is just not so good. Yeah, that's true. Blaze of Glory? Yeah, just ask Jerry Jones. So...

The idea that it's witchcraft was, like we said, really just sort of invented by Margaret Murray, who happened to be there investigating another case altogether. Yeah, by the way, that was Charles Walton, who was murdered almost certainly by his employer in a raid. Yeah, that's right. So that wasn't witchy either. It was just like, I'm pitchforking your hay and I get mad at you. And so I'm going to kill you with the thing in my hand. Right. And you know what? Actually, we should probably take a break here.

Oh. Because we've been going for 19 minutes now, and it's kind of a good little cliffhanger. Okay. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

Ready to celebrate the magic of live music? South by Southwest Music Festival returns to Austin, Texas this March 10th through the 15th with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent. Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.

With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest. Explore the lineup at SXSW.com. SXSW.

Hey, everybody. It's Chuck and Josh here to talk to you about Squarespace. Squarespace makes it easy to build the website of your dreams and do whatever you like with it. That's right. They make it really easy to sell access to content on your websites like online courses, blogs, videos, and memberships. You can earn recurring revenue by gating your content behind a paywall even. Simply set the price and choose whether to charge a one-time fee or subscription for access.

Yeah, and when it's time to collect that money, Squarespace offers an easier way to collect payments so you can focus on growing your business. You can invoice clients and get paid for your services, turn leads into clients with proposals, estimates, and contracts, and simplify your workflow and manage your service business on one platform. What else could you possibly ask for? That's right. Just go to squarespace.com slash stuff for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

Here everybody, it's your favorite play cousin Junior from the Steering Warning Show. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, combining raw power with precision engineering. All backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. Climb inside a Tundra and experience the uncompromising strength with its available i-Force Max engine. The Tundra delivers exceptional power, torque, and towing capacity. Plus,

the spacious and high-tech cabin keeps you connected on the run. Or check out a Tacoma, agile, dependable, and unstoppable. The Tacoma is designed for those who go beyond the trail. Stay ahead of the pack with available off-road features like crawl control. Or break out your tunes with the available portable JBL speaker. Toyota trucks are built to last. Year after year, mile

after mile. So outlast every adventure and outlive the moment. Buy a Tundra or Tacoma today. Visit buyatoyota.com, Toyota's official website for deals, or stop by your local Toyota dealer to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. All right, so I mentioned a cliffhanger. It wasn't really a cliffhanger. I'm not sure why I said that, but let's jump forward a little bit to 1953 where the story takes a turn. There was a journalist there named Wilfred Biford-Jones.

Apparently had a pen name that was Quaestar. Basically, yeah. Q-U-A-E-S-T-O-R. You can see the A and the E join, too. Yeah, I could see that. But old Wilfred wrote a bunch of very speculative articles about Bella's murder, which only led to confusion and falsehoods.

A lot of it had to do with witches, of course, and blaming stuff on the Romani people, you know, what they called gypsies at the time, like coming through town, doing something like that. And all this to say, one of these stories was caught by a reader who wrote in to Bifur Jones under the name of Anna of Claverley and basically was like, I know the deal.

I'll just read it real quick. Um, finish your, finish your articles, R E the witch Elm crimes by all means. They are interesting to your readers, but you will never solve the mystery. The one person who could give you the answer is now beyond the jurisdiction of earthly courts. Uh, in other words, dead, uh,

The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic or moonlight rights. 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 illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall anymore. Right. And the police said, well, T.S., because you're going to have a secret meeting. Yeah, I guess they they found Anna and like brought her in for an interview.

Yeah, and Anna's name was Una Mossop. And she eventually became Una Hainsworth. But during the time of the murder, she was married to a guy named Jack Mossop. And I saw alternatively that he worked in a local munitions factory or that he was a RAF instructor or that he worked in a factory building plane engines. Regardless, he existed. He was married to Una. And...

Una told the story to the cops that one night Jack brought home a friend named Van Ralt, a Dutchman, and that apparently at some point Jack admitted to Una that he was on Van Ralt's payroll and Van Ralt was a spy for the Nazis. And apparently Jack was feeding him information about local factories and stuff to help the Luftwaffe plan their bombings. Right.

So Jack was a real grade-A bastard as far as things went because he traded his country in for some spending money. And Una said one day Jack came home.

in March or April of 1941, came home late. He was drunk, but he was super agitated. Right. Said, you know, pale as a ghost. He said he'd been at a pub with Van Ralt and what he called a Dutch piece, who was this Dutch woman. I didn't know they used that kind of language back then. Or maybe it meant something else. I have no idea. But those were the words that he used. And then he said things got awkward. We can just chalk that up to understatement of the year.

Yeah, she, I guess, was also drunk, passed out in Van Ralt's car. And Van Ralt supposedly, as this story goes, had a very strange idea was, hey, let's go stick this woman in that tree and she'll she'll sober up in the morning and come to her senses. And Jack, apparently, Una said, was never the same. He started drinking more and more, quit working, still had this money, you

But eventually Una said, I'm out of here and I'm leaving you. I'm taking our kid. She saw him again about a year later in 1942 when he was really coming apart at the seams, saying that he keeps seeing this woman in his mind, in the tree. She was leering at him and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital where he died about eight months before Bella's body was discovered.

Yeah, he died of, as far as his death certificate is concerned, a combination of cerebral softening, myocardial degeneration, chronic nephritis, and acute...

A cute something insanity. I can't even remember my own abbreviation. But you put those together and that guy is like dead, dead, dead. So Una's story sounded like this actually all makes sense. From what I can tell, she provided information that you wouldn't have just been able to glean from the papers. And what's more, she didn't really have much to gain. No.

She wrote in anonymously and resisted coming forward. So it wasn't like she was a publicity hound. It'd be a weird thing to make up. She would be like a mastermind attention getter to really like, yes, it would be a weird thing to make up. Yeah, I mean, it's a weird thing to do to have that idea like, hey, let's go stuff that woman in a tree. I mean, it's beyond the, no, that's weird. And then it's a weird thing for that not to have happened and for this woman to sort of invent it. It's all just beyond the pale.

Exactly. One of the things is, though, is so like if this was a joke, what, you know, what tree? How did Van Ralt know that that tree was there in the first place and that it had this 12 by 24 tree?

you know, space in it. The thing is, this is far and away the most legitimate explanation for what happened. This is an unsolved case. It's an unsolved mystery. But for my money, like, this is as close as we're ever going to get. No, I agree. You know, cops obviously searched for Van Ralt. They searched for, you know, records-wise, a Dutch national who may have fit the description that Una gave. But it went cold yet again.

And then we flash forward to 1968. There's a writer named Donald McCormick who picked up the case for a book he was writing called Murder by Witchcraft. And this is when he I mean, this guy doesn't have a very good reputation as a writer because it seems like he would just they call them a fantasy historian, like he would just make stuff up.

make a lot of weird claims and theories. He would say things like, you know, I was able to interview someone exclusively who was anonymous and that no one else could talk to.

And here is that interview. And in this case, he said, you know, this interview that I got with this guy that no one else knows about or we'll talk to and who shall remain anonymous was a former Nazi spy recruiter hiding in Paraguay. And Bella was a Dutch born German spy named Clara or Clara Bella. And, uh, I've even got Nazi intelligence files on this. I'm not going to show you. Um, but it says that she parachuted into Birmingham, um,

In March or April 1941, so the timeline fits, and she happened to look just exactly like who was described by Una. Yeah, so Dave points out that this guy had a habit of making his puzzle pieces fit together a little too neatly. Yeah.

So essentially he found out about Una Masap's story and decided to make it real by corroborating it with his imagination. His book, though, is the book that we get the very famous pictures that I was familiar with that caught my attention as a kid. Yeah.

But it's really important to point out here, the tree that he shows is not the tree that she was found in. You said toward the beginning of the episode that the cops chopped that tree down to look for more evidence. So that tree doesn't exist anymore. And yet that's that picture that Donald McCormick put forth as the tree is what you see on the Internet still today is the tree she was found in and that that's

possibly not even the kind of tree, that she might not have been found in a witch elm. The cops mentioned that she was found in an elm, but that's it. And then apparently some people have been able to examine the photos of the original tree and said it's not a witch elm because you don't cut witch elms down that way. That story about you seeing that picture, when did that happen? I was probably like 10, 11. I think probably in like a school library book or something like that about mysteries. I thought you saw it recently. Okay.

No, no, no. That's how I was walking around with this case for that many years. Like I saw it in some book when I was a kid. I got you. That makes it so much better. I can even remember like the cellophane covering of the book cover even. I can feel it in my fingers right now. I can smell it. It smells awful. That makes much more sense because you were talking in those –

sort of ways about it. And I thought it was recent. And I was like, that's a weird nostalgia for something that happened a few weeks ago. It makes me nostalgic for yesterday. I can still remember that moment in December. Right. No, not like that. I got a little kid stuff. All right. So that's that book aside. Another twist came in 2013. The Independent ran a story about Bella connecting it to a spy who

named Joseph Jacobs, who's a German spy who evidently parachuted into a field near Cambridge in February 1941, got hurt really badly, could not walk, fired his pistol in the air to attract some help, ideally. He said, hey, fuzz. Yeah, so the cops come and he's in police custody. He has a wireless transmitter, a fake ID, almost 500 pounds in cash.

but also a headshot, a photograph of a woman, but like a professional headshot of this, you know, attractive, smiling woman. And on the back of it in English, it said, my dear, I love you forever. Your Clara Landau, July 1940. Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot that's weird about this. So, um,

Clara Landau, this picture of Clara Landau was actually a picture of Clara Bowerly, who was a well-known, I saw her described as a movie star, but at least a movie actress and a cabaret singer, a German. Lili von Stupp. And so, yeah, exactly. I think that's almost exactly who this could have been based on.

She was apparently, as far as Josef Jacobs has said to MI5 in multiple interviews, that this was his mistress, that they met in Berlin. Bowerly was singing with a group called the Bernard Edda Orchestra. It just goes to show you Dave's dedication to research. And that Jacobs and Bowerly were both sisters.

crypto-Nazis, meaning that they were not actual Nazis. They were pretending to be Nazis. And they had fooled the Germans, or at least Yaakov had, into taking him on as a spy and sending him to England. He planned to get to England, defect, and make his way to America. But first, he wanted to set up a fake operation enough to convince the Germans to send Bowerly after him. And

This this is that's it. Like, that's that's what Yosef Yaakov said. But the Independent was like, oh, let's fill in some blanks and come up with our own theory. Donald McCormick style. Yeah, they they did some research. They looked for obviously for records for Clara Bowerly.

And they did find information and confirm, yes, she was a cabaret singer in Germany. She would have been 35 years old at the time of the murder, just like the skeleton, you know, seemingly confirmed. Right.

But had she had she come to England was the big question. All they found was a Clara with a K, Clara Sophie Bowerly, who was 35, who did go to Germany. I'm sorry, from Germany to England and stayed from 1930 to 32. But that was kind of it. No information at all about what she did in England. But they ran with it anyway.

They did. I mean, think about it. So like she left a full eight, nine years before Bella and the Witch Elm happened, was killed. Yeah. And yet, yeah, the Independent's like, so what? So based on all this, with a bunch of pie filling that they mashed in with it, the Independent came up with a new theory. And I say we take a little break and come back and talk about it after this. Ooh.

Hey, everyone. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that grinds just as hard as you do. And that hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. Yeah. So when you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

That's right. Those qualified candidates, you know, at the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is going to be the quality of those candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're going to be getting the best. Yeah. And actually, based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Just post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. That's LinkedIn.com slash S-Y-S-K. And you can post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Ready to celebrate the magic of live music? South by Southwest Music Festival returns to Austin, Texas this March 10th through the 15th with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent. Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.

With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest. Explore the lineup at SXSW.com. Hey everybody, it's your favorite play cousin Junior from the Steel Ray Morning Show. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, combining raw power with precision engineering. All backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability.

Climb inside a Tundra and experience the uncompromising strength with its available i-Force Max engine. The Tundra delivers exceptional power, torque, and towing capacity. Plus, the spacious and high-tech cabin keeps you connected on the run. Or check out a Tacoma, agile, dependable, and unstoppable. The Tacoma is designed for those who go beyond the trail. Stay healthy!

Toyota, let's go places.

So, like I was saying, the Independent came up with their own pet theory for the Bella and the Witch Elm case. And what they said was, OK, so Clara, Clara Bowerly, had come to England in the 30s and was a performer, a cabaret singer here as well as in Germany. And that she became known as Clara Bella. Like maybe this is a stage name she adopted or something like that. But it was a mashup of her name, Clara Bowerly. And that was the foundation that they based everything else on. Yeah.

They said, here's what she did. She parachuted into England in 1941. She was, you know, trying to catch up with her parachuting boyfriend, Joseph Jacobs. And they thought that was the only way to get into a country, I guess.

to drop into the middle of a field. And they said, hey, what if this Clara was who was in that tree, who was killed by Van Ralt? Like, we think that that's who was in the witch elm and that graffiti artist had to have known that Clarabella or Bella was her name and tried to get justice for this murder. Right. And they walked away like this. Yeah. Could you hear that? Did that come through? Yeah, I think so.

So, yeah, so there's some problems with this theory. Number one, she was not Clara Bowerly was not five feet tall. She was approaching six feet tall. That's the biggest problem with this, right?

That's a pretty big problem. I would say that there's an even bigger problem than this, and that is that she died a full year after Bella did in a German hospital of a barbiturate overdose. Yeah, those two very large problems with this story that did not keep them from running the story. No, and this is 2013. This isn't the independent, you know, decades ago. This was...

Well, I guess a decade ago, but still. It was recent enough that they should know better than making up basically new theories and printing them as if they're basically facts. So one of the good things that came out of this was of Yosef Yakov's being brought into this case.

Although just totally like that was the independent that did that. That was like he was not mentioned that he was not tangential. The case he had nothing to do with it, basically. But his granddaughter, Giselle K. Jacobs or Jacobs, I'm not sure which one she goes by. She has a Ph.D. in ancient history. So she knows about being a historian and she's applied some of that to the bell in the witch elm.

case on a website called yosefjacobs.info and it is very well researched and well written information about this case so if you're interested in it at all go check that out yeah finally which is great if you were wondering about DNA you know sometimes they can you know find DNA on old stuff

but everything has been lost apparently. Everything was being passed around and moved around in different boxes and different labs. And this is in the 1940s and 50s. And no one knows if it even exists at all anymore, if it's hidden away besides the...

Ark of the Covenant in some warehouse or something. You know, I mean, it's possible that someone will find it at some point, you know? Yeah, it might still be out there or it could have been lost or a building could have burned down. Like, who knows? Like our lost episode. Jerry has no idea. No idea. That's gone for good. That's not in any warehouse anywhere. No, which is probably a good thing. And now we'll wrap up this episode with five minutes on the ancient woodland management technique of coppicing. Very funny.

You got anything else? I have nothing else. Well, go forth if this floated your boat and read more about Bella and the Witch Elm, the case. Just be wary of where your information's from. And there's a lot more to it. There's a lot, well, there's a lot more out there to read. How about that? And in the meantime, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to read this and preface it with,

Uh, we got quite a few emails. Remember when you, um, tied John Williams, uh, I guess, uh, Star Wars people are gonna be so mad. Is it Darth Vader's theme or the Imperial death March? One of those Imperial something or other, something like that. Uh, you tied that to, um,

Who was it? Bach? I don't remember. Chopin's Funeral March. And I stand by it. That's right. And we got quite a few music people that wrote in and were, you know, gave us the old, hey, well, actually, these differences here and there and here and there. Fair enough. Not knocking those people for knowing much more about that kind of thing than us. You just know what your ears told you.

Well, also, I called up John Williams, and he was like, yep, I love that funeral march. Keep up the good work, boys. He wrote our theme song, too, by the way. Sure. No one knows that. No. But this is from Ladd, who gets your back. Hey, guys, hope all is well. Finally, somebody said it. Josh, John Williams likes to borrow heavily from classic works. Please listen to La Sacre du Printemps.

The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, and you will hear the theme from Jaws, as well as many other hits that Mr. Williams has taken on loan. Not saying he hasn't done a lot for the genre, but if this is a sampling issue, he'd be paying a lot of money to those composers. Keep up the work and stay sexy, and that is from Ladd.

Thanks, lad. Appreciate that. Loved your turn as the little kid in Lost Boys. Yeah, and I, by the way, we watched The Lost Boys with Ruby the other night. What'd she think? It's her second sort of adult movie in a row after Terminator 2. She loved it. I looked it up beforehand. I was like, surely Lost Boys has some gratuitous nudity or some awful, like, sexy stuff. And it really doesn't. It's some kind of gruesome stuff, but she's totally good with that. And a little bit of language, and she knows all that stuff.

Sure. And she really dug The Lost Boys because she likes all that spooky witchy stuff. Yeah, it's a really good movie. And, you know, it was pretty fun. It holds up in the way that 80s movies like that hold up. Yeah, it definitely did. I saw it not too long ago and I was like, this is, like I said it before, I'll say it again. It's a good movie. Yeah, agreed.

Well, thanks a lot, Ladd. Again, I appreciate being backed up. That was very refreshing. And if you want to be like Ladd and back me up about some stand I took that everybody tried to shout me down on, and I said, no, I'm not going to be shouted down. They're like, yes, you are. And I said, no, I'm not. And then it just kind of hung out there until you email in. We love that kind of thing. You can send us that email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Ready to celebrate the magic of live music? South by Southwest Music Festival returns to Austin, Texas this March 10th through the 15th with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent. Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.

With hundreds of showcasing artists performing across six days in over 50 venues, Discovery is right around the corner at South by Southwest. Explore the lineup at SXSW.com. Creativity doesn't wait. It moves, shifts, evolves, just like you. And with a Yoga PC from Lenovo, your tools finally keep up.

Stunning, smart, and sustainably sourced, Yoga PCs from Lenovo are designed to amplify your creativity with AI-powered performance. Whether you're sketching, editing, animating, or composing, Yoga moves with you, adapting to your creativity, to your rhythm. With beautiful displays and the flexibility to shift from laptop to tablet, Yoga PCs

Empowering creators everywhere.

Hey, it's Rich Davis from Covino & Rich. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. So get in a Tundra with the available i-FORCE MAX hybrid engine, delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma.

with available off-road features like crawl control. It could take you back to the trails. Toyota trucks are built to last, year after year, mile after mile. So don't wait. Get yours today. Visit BuyAToyota.com for deals and more. Toyota, let's go places.