Who put Bella in the wych elm?

"Who put Bella in the wych elm?" is the final form of a series of graffiti connected with the discovery in 1943 of the remains of a murdered woman inside a wych elm on the outskirts of Hagley in Worcestershire. The body has remained unidentified and the case unsolved since then, prompting many media articles and films, as well as dramas, an opera and a musical.

On 18 April 1943, four local boys poaching, or bird-nesting, in Hagley Wood decided to search a large wych elm for birds' nests. One of the boys discovered a human skull within the hollow trunk, and subsequently, the police searched the trunk and found a near-complete skeleton. Objects found with the skeleton included a gold wedding ring, fragments of clothing, and a single shoe. The remains of a hand were also found some distance from the tree. The forensic examination established that the victim was female and that she had been dead for at least 18 months, placing her time of death in or before October 1941. The examination indicated that she had died from suffocation.

In 1944, graffiti related to the mystery began to appear on the walls of nearby areas. The first, reading "Who put Luebella down the wych elm?", was found at Haden Hill Road, Old Hill, followed shortly by "Who put Bella down the wych elm, Hagley Wood?" on a wall in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham. Since the writing was too high to have been done by children, these were taken seriously and provided investigators with several new leads for tracing who the victim could have been. Since at least the 1970s, similar graffiti have sporadically appeared on the Hagley Obelisk, near where the woman's body was discovered. The most recent graffiti, which appeared in 1999, was modified to "Who put Bella in the witch elm?", favouring the witchcraft theory. Then in 2020, the "who" in white was overpainted in red with "hers", surmised by the Stourbridge News to be the name of a Birmingham graffiti artist.