JMO, but I'm thinking asphyxia, given the lack of any noticeable trauma. Perhaps she choked on that piece of underskirt in her throat/mouth. Maybe her killer didn't even intend to kill her, but rather only to gag her while he assaulted her.
www.abc.net.au
I was just coming to link this, as it was my country's public media who posted it, but I was too slow to beat @imstilla.grandma !
Variations of the message scrawled on the wall in 1943 continue to pop up around Birmingham.
Four teenage boys were trespassing on an aristocrat's property when they found a human skull hidden in a tree.
WARNING: This article contains details readers might find distressing.
It was April 1943 and Britain was in the midst of World War II, enduring near-nightly air raids and tough food rationing.
The boys had crept onto the Hagley Estate in Worcestershire to hunt birds and raid their nests to help put food on the table.
But when Bob Farmer climbed into the creepy limbs of an elm tree, he realised that what he thought was an egg was actually a woman's head.
"There was a small patch of rotting flesh on the forehead, with lank hair attached to it. The two front teeth were crooked," he would later recall.
The terrified boys, fearing retribution for trespassing and uncovering a potential murder, made a pact of silence.
But the youngest boy could not keep the secret for long, confessing to his father what they found in the Hagley Woods.
Police descended on the property and found, in a hollow of a massive tree trunk, a woman's skeletal remains was hidden.
There were few clues for authorities to go on, except for some scraps of the woman's clothing and a fake gold wedding ring.
But the mystery took a strange turn when a message was scrawled on a wall in Birmingham in the middle of the night.
"Who put Bella down the wych elm?" it read.
When four boys found a woman inside a wych elm, it sparked a series of wild theories
Four teenage boys were trespassing on an aristocrat’s property when they found a human skull hidden in a tree. Eighty years on, the mystery of why she was put in a wych elm continues to haunt this English village. WARNING: This article contains details readers might find distressing.
This podcast series was an excellent listen. I checked on Jack Mossop and sadly as the podcast said his medical records have been lost.A BBC True Crime Podcast Is Asking Museums for Help Locating a Murder Victim's Remains to Solve a Cold Case | Artnet News
A BBC true crime podcast is asking museums to help track down the remains of a murder victim and solve a cold case.news.artnet.com
'A BBC True Crime Podcast Is Asking Museums for Help Locating a Murder Victim’s Remains to Solve a Cold Case
If the skeleton is recovered it may reveal the woman's origins or even her surviving relatives.'
Jo Lawson-Tancred, May 4, 2023 rbbm
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the skull of a woman recovered from a wych elm tree in Worcestershire, England in 1943. Photo: Public Domain.
The journalists behind a BBC Sounds true crime podcast are appealing to museums in the U.K. for help locating a murder victim’s remains.''
''There are many theories about the murder, including that it was a ritualistic killing based on how the bones were arranged. It has also been speculated that the victim, dubbed “Bella,” may have been a Nazi spy. Forensics determined that she was likely between 35 and 40 years old, and a professor of craniofacial identification at Dundee University reconstructed her face based on photographs of her skull in 2018.''
''The podcast’s host, Nicolas Goodwin, is now appealing to museums across the country to report if they have the skeleton in storage.
The hope is that, with today’s sophisticated DNA testing methods, scientists may finally be able to make some headway on identifying the woman.''
Agree, most stories are very ordinary, the fact (and I assume the police tried to ID her) that they couldn’t find her locally suggests she was someone who moved about.
I agree though there have been loads of cases where people were indeed local but either not reported missing (if she was killed by a spouse/partner or relative, she would not be reported missing) or reported missing but LE did not put any effort into it because the missing person was an adult. Also, well, it was in the middle of world war II. I guess they had other worries than IDing a woman.
I agree genetic genealogy is a useful tool, sadly (and IMO unforgivable) they need to locate her skeleton first.
