Stuff You Should Know - Who Put Bella In the Wych Elm?

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

One of the more famous unsolved true crime cases concerns a woman found stuffed into a tree in a woods outside Worcestershire during WWII. Despite an extensive effort by police at the time of her discovery, she still has never been identified.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilburger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives. Join us for heartfelt conversations with remarkable guests like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter. Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is My Legacy. Welcome.

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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. You forgot I was here. I just don't know what happened. My efference copies 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 How Stuff Works 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 as far as hosting that show. He's still around and executive producing a slate of shows, but he decided not to host Tech Stuff any longer, and it was great seeing him.

It's been quite a while, and he's's doing great and just hats off to Jonathan and what a great body of work he's he's given the world over all those years. Yeah he has man. Hats off to you John like that's you should be very proud we're all proud of you for sure. But keep that 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. Okay, well, on to the murder of a woman. Right. Awful. Um, so this is a pretty true, pretty famous true crime, um, 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, um, 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, um, like, almost an anatomical diagram of like what was found where and what she was wearing

and all that. And it has 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 the Time Life Paranormal series 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,

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 Willetts, 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, like most kids would do, like, uh, 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, -"Hummin' to hummin' to hummin' to hummin' to hummin' to hummin'." Right, 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, you know, punishment. Sure. Regardless, the, the, I guess the oldest boy, Tommy Willis, he was 17, despite this vow, went right home

and told his parents. And I said, good boy, Tommy Willis. Because it was clear to him, 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 most of the skeleton in there. It 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 gonna 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 short, 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 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, I get claustrophobic just thinking about that. And that if they were dead already, then like 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 gonna crawl into on their own accord.

Like, they were placed in there, possibly while alive still, which is one of the gaslier 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,, 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. Hagleywood itself, we should describe it a little bit. It is on a private estate, but it wasn't 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.

Graffiti started popping up around town, around Birmingham and we'll see elsewhere, with white chalk letters in all caps on these brick walls. Two messages at first. One said, Hagley Wood Bella, and another said, who put Bella down the witch elm, W-Y-C-H-Hagley Wood. 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, and the type of tree that the victim was found in that everybody knows, from graffiti, from an anonymous person. Yeah. Um, and, but the, it was enough that the police were like, okay, this seems a little weird. Um, there were other people who started to,

to kind of copycat the whole thing, um, once the paper started writing about it. But there was at least, third one a couple days later that was clearly written by the first person who wrote the first two. And they were like, maybe this person knows who it was and they wanna find justice for the woman. And they reopened the case.

And this is, I mean, they'd already really extensively investigated, having like both jaws. They're like, great, we 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 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 receipts. They didn't have credit cards. No, like they really were doing some legwork here. And 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 dead person 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 so maybe that's a good shorty. So if I'm wrong, I Imagine they sprung from credit accounts like with a store or something. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but uh, 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. Ohers club. I think it was diners club in fact. With Telly Savalas. No, that was players club.

Oh yeah, yeah. Was it? Mm-hmm. Okay, cause 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 Hailzoen, 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, Lou Bella, Isabella, Lou Baga, everybody. And nothing came up, right?

You never know when he's gonna 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. 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, an archeologist named Margaret Murray, 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 sacrifices and things like that made.

And she was there in Birmingham in 1945 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, the 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 Hand of Glory.

Instead, it's an old burglar's superstition that you would take a severed hand 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. Um, and then even more so, there was no hand found 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, 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 wanna 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 gotta check this out, let me go grab my phone. ["Jingle Bells"] 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 okay, so it looks like an aged person's hand but it's not like a mummified hand. No, no, no, no, it looks like a real hand and I'm hoping we move these things 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 8.50 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. Yeah, unfortunately, attaching the word glory to other objects is just not so good.

Yeah, that's true. Blaze of Glory could be. 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 gonna kill you with a thing in my hand. Right.

And you know what, actually, we should probably take a break here. Oh, well. Because we've been going for 19 minutes now and it's kind of a good little cliffhanger. Okay. We'll be right back. Something about Mary Poppins?

Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun. I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing.

Oh, French dressing. Exactly. Oh, that's good. Now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun.

Let's try this one. Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mayim Bialik, Julie Bowen, Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more. Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's awful, and I should have seen it coming. Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III, and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King, and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilburger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives.

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To start the conversation, visit TalkAboutVaping.org, brought to you by the story takes a turn. There was a journalist there named Wilfred Byford Jones, apparently had a pen name that was Quaestar? It's 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, 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 Bifer Jones under the name

of Anna of Claverley and basically was like, I know the deal, I'll just read it real quick. 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. In other words, dead. The affair is closed and involves no witches, black magic, or moonlight rites.

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 with us. Yeah, I guess they found Anna and like brought her in for an interview. Yeah, and Anna's name was Una Massap. And she eventually became Una Hainsworth,

but during the time of the murder, she was married to a guy named Jack Massap. 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 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 Raalt's payroll,

and Van Raalt 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. So Jack was a real grade A bastard as far as things went, because he traded his country in for some spending money. Right.

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 Rolte 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. 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. It was, hey, let's go stick this woman in that tree and 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. 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 seam, 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 something insanity. I can't even remember my own abbreviation. But you put those together and that guy's 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... Oh, gotcha. 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 Raalt know that that tree was there in the first place and that it had this 12 by 24 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, this is as close as we're ever going to get. No, I agree. You know, cops obviously search for Van Ralt. They searched for, you know, records-wise, a Dutch national who may have fit the description that Oona 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. 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 called him 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 will 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 I've even got Nazi intelligence files on this, I'm not gonna show you,

but it says that she parachuted in Birmingham 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. 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. 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 gotcha, that makes it so much better. I can't 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. Right. It makes me nostalgic for yesterday. I can still remember that moment in December. Right. No, not like that. 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 named Josef Jakobs,

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. And then- 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 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. Lily Bunchdup. And so, yeah, exactly. I think that's almost exactly who this could have been based on. She was apparently, as far as Josef Jakobs had 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 Etta Orchestra, that just goes to show you Dave's dedication to research. And that Jakobs and Bowerly were both crypto-Nazis, meaning that they were not actual Nazis, they were pretending to be Nazis, and they had fooled the Germans, or at least Jakob 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 is it. That's it. That's what Joseph Jacob said. But the Independent was like, ho ho, let's fill in some blanks and come up with our own theory, Donald McCormick style. Yeah, 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. But 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 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 independents 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. ["Spring Day in the City"] Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins, exactly about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun.

I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing. Oh, French dressing. Exactly. Oh, that was good. Now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is.

And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun. Let's try this one. Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mayim Bialik, Julie Bowen, Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more. Listen to the Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That's awful, and I should have seen it coming. Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III, and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King, and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilburger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives. Each week, we'll sit down with inspiring figures like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter.

And their plus one, their ride or die, as they share stories never heard before about their remarkable journey. Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is My Legacy. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious? podcasts. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No Seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you to start the conversation visit talk about vaping org Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council 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, okay, 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 trying to catch up with her parachuting boyfriend, Joseph Jakobs, 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 Raalt?

Like we think that that's who was in the witch elm and that graffiti artist had to have known that Clara Bella Urbella 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 Yaakob's being

brought into this case, although just totally, like that was the independent that did that. That was, like he was not mentioned, he was not tangential in 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 PhD in ancient history so she knows about being a historian and she's applied some of that to the Belle and the Witch Elm case on a website called yosefyakobs.info and it

is very well researched and well written information about this case so So if you're interested in it at all, go check that out. Yeah, finally, which is great. If you were wondering about DNA, sometimes they can 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, you know, 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 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 gonna read this and preface it with, we got quite a few emails. Remember when you tied John Williams, I guess, 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, sure.

Something like that. You tied that to, 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 gave us the old, hey, well actually, these differences here and there and here and there, fair enough. 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 Ladd, 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. Which you think? That's her second sort of adult movie in a row after Terminator 2. She loved it. I looked it up beforehand and I was like, surely Lost Boys has some gratuitous nudity or some awful like sexy stuff. No. 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 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 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 wanna 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 gonna 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, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III, and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King, and our dear friends Mark and Craig Kilburger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives.

Join us for heartfelt conversations with remarkable guests like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter. Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is My Legacy. Welcome. My name is Paola Pedroza, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy Podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones.

It's about learning through them and their new perspective. I think God sent me this gift so I can show it to the world. And most of all, I help people every single day. Listen to the Ghost Therapy Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It came back to my own personal pinpoint. So we had to go out to farmers and convince them.

Following that curiosity is a superpower. You have to be obsessed with the human condition. Listen to Building One on the iHeartRadio app, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.