Download or read book The Hagley Wood Tree Murder written by Keith Swallow and published by Choir Press. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed examination of an unsolved murder case that has baffled police for 80 years.
Download or read book The Hagley Wood Murder written by M. J. Trow and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2023-04-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which too place eighty years ago. In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation. Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since. Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945. Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right. McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service. The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime!
Download or read book Murder by Witchcraft written by Donald McCormick and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bella written by Michael Conley and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In an alternate 1800’s America, where magic is real and dragons soar through the skies of the American frontier -Topher had a good life, mostly. It wasn't great, but what can a young African girl expect living on the Edge of the World? She had a shack that she shared with her Ma, she knew what vendors she could pocket an apple from, and was better than anyone with a spitshot. What more could a girl in the slums expect? Then that chucklehead Wasco rolled out of the mountains like a toppled boulder. Topher had figured he might be good for a penny or two if she showed him around. Before she knew it he had her trompin’ around the Blacklands, getting shot at, almost eaten and damn near gutted by some bull-headed dandy! Jacob, who was about the handsomest gunfighter a body could imagine, might be some kind of monster. Old Ying turned out to be one of them wizards from the storybooks and Li had a magic sword! All because someone went and took Bella and Wasco aimed to get her back, and Topher had been too stubborn not to follow him.Yeah, it had been a good enough life. She just wasn't sure she was going to make it back to it, or if she even wanted to"--Back cover.
Download or read book Bella In The Wych Elm written by Andrew Sparke and published by APS Books. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A baffling unsolved 1943 Worcestershire murder - a woman's body stuffed into a hollow tree and not found for 18 months. Witchcraft or spies or just the vicious murder of a spurned lover? Missing evidence and even the skeletal remains mislaid. Conspiracy or incompetence or even the work of MI5? With contemporary photographs and original case documentation.
Download or read book The Witch Elm written by Tana French and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller and a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Amazon, The Boston Globe, LitHub, Vulture, Slate, Elle, Vox, and Electric Literature “Tana French’s best and most intricately nuanced novel yet.” —The New York Times An “extraordinary” (Stephen King) and “mesmerizing” (LA Times) standalone novel from the master of crime and suspense and author of the forthcoming novel The Hunter. From the writer who “inspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker) and has been called “incandescent” by Stephen King, “absolutely mesmerizing” by Gillian Flynn, and “unputdownable” (People) comes a gripping new novel that turns a crime story inside out. Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who’s dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life—he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family’s ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden—and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed. A spellbinding standalone from one of the best suspense writers working today, The Witch Elm asks what we become, and what we’re capable of, when we no longer know who we are.
Download or read book Murder by Witchcraft written by Donald McCormick and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unsolved Murders written by Amber Hunt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MURDERS THAT DEFY DETECTION. Discover the stories behind some of the most infamous unsolved murders of the last century, including the Black Dahlia, the Zodiac Killer and the JonBenét Ramsey case. Detailing essential evidence. Profiling key suspects. Tracking police investigations. Sorting facts from speculation.
Download or read book Who Put Bella In The Wych Elm Volume 2 written by Alex Merrill and published by APS Books. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More on the the body in the hollow tree mystery. Alex Merrill explores the people who lived and worked near Hagley Woods who could have pinpointed who Bella was and why she was murdered. Offering new revelations; a fresh perspective of all the different theories, thoroughly researched and referenced, and complemented by historical facsimiles, photographs, and bespoke maps and charts, Alex suggests the possibility that the identity of Bella was known to the police long ago and that the case was closed because prosecutors deemed there to be insufficient evidence that the police had solved a mere gypsy murder. It also asks how much of the spy stories told by Wilfred Byford-Jones, Una Mossop, Donald McCormick and others was sheer fantasy, invented for personal gain and to sell newspapers and books and whether the shoes discovered at the scene of the crime pushed Professor Webster and his colleagues into misinterpretations of the evidence setting the police off on the wrong trail from the outset. And surprisingly for some readers, the mystery now focuses more on the town of Halesowen and hardly at all on Hagley.
Download or read book Under the Shadow of Meon Hill written by Paul Nigel Newman and published by Abraxas Editions. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UNDER THE SHADOW OF MEON HILL THE LOWER QUINTON & HAGLEY WOOD MURDERS By PAUL NEWMAN Who d kill a gnarled old man going about his daily toil in the late evening of his life? The murder was an outrage that seemed to run counter to the decorum of natural law. Within a few years, the shadows would have claimed him as their own and the earth taken him in gently. So why this violent intrusion, this flagrant disruption of the natural course, so that a person who had lived so humbly and inconspicuously, in apparent harmony with birds and nature, should meet a blood-spattered fate that more befitted a doomed tyrannical king in a Greek tragedy On February 14th, 1945, Charles Walton, aged 74, a hedger and ditcher of Lower Quinton, Warwickshire was found dead on Meon Hill. A pitchfork had been thrust through his neck, pinning him to the ground, and what looked like the sign of a cross slashed across his chest. Classing it as a major murder enquiry, the police selected the most famous detective of the day, Inspector Robert Fabian of Scotland Yard, to investigate. Employing modern techniques, Fabian combed the crime scene and surrounding area, using surveillance aircraft and metal detectors to search for clues. He interviewed locals, POWs from the camp at nearby Long Marston and individual soldiers, but found no convincing leads. Neither did Fabian find the locals especially confiding. Doors were closed in his face; people refused to talk and the atmosphere turned hostile. Abruptly the investigation took an unexpected twist after one of the detectives drew Fabian s attention to a work on folklore that suggested Walton had been killed in the way that witches once were stanged or pierced with a pitchfork on a sacrificial date. Eventually the enquiry turned devilish, bizarre and tortuous. Black dogs, bizarre coincidences and macabre threats were overwhelming the detective work. Years later, incredibly Aleister Crowley s mistress was cited as organising the crime. Academics and experts on witchcraft were invited to give their views, including the famous anthropologist, Dr Margaret Murray, and psychics held s ances to contact Walton s disembodied spirit. What started out as a hard-headed investigation dissolved into a disturbing occult morass. Making use of Fabian s original papers, the whole story is now set down for the first time in Paul Newman s bone-chilling account of this historically significant and gruesome enquiry. The second case highlighted in Under the Shadow of Meon Hill is the killing of Bella in Hagley Wood, near Birmingham, commonly twinned with the Walton Murder. Taking place two years earlier (1943), a group of country children, playing around the Clent Hills, came across the rotted body of a young woman stuffed in a tree trunk. Her hand had been cut off and she had formerly been pregnant. This hapless corpse was nicknamed Bella but who was she? A gypsy? A witch? A prostitute? A German spy? The investigation stoked up tales of vengeful magic, espionage and conspiracy. Who put Bella in the Wych Elm became a catch-cry. However, despite the thoroughness of the investigation, no one was able to identify Bella, and the case remains open.
Download or read book The Meon Hill Murder 1945 written by M J Trow and published by Pen and Sword True Crime. This book was released on 2023-10-30 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the closing months of the Second World War, an old hedger was found bludgeoned and hacked to death in a Warwickshire field. His name was Charles Walton and the place was the little village of Lower Quinton, under the shadow of Meon Hill. They called in the local CID; they called in Scotland Yard; they interviewed hundreds of people; they asked thousands of questions. But somebody wasn’t talking. The whole village was silent, as if someone had drawn down a blind. After the case was scaled down, the rumors remained. Was Meon Hill the center of a witches’ coven? And was old Charlie Walton, with his ability to talk to birds and toads and his magic watch, a witch himself? For eighty years, the supernatural has hovered over the murder of Charles Walton, with vague, haunted memories of secret rites and black dogs. Even the dead man’s grave has vanished. Rumor has been piled on innuendo, adding to the excesses of writers determined to make a supernatural mystery out of a very local tragedy, until the dead man himself has disappeared into a morass of hocus pocus. This is the first book to get past the nonsense, accessing original police files that say precisely nothing about witchcraft. Analyzing the facts from the time and removing the ever-more ludicrous layers of fiction, it gets as near to solving the mystery as we are ever likely to.
Download or read book Doctor Syn written by R. Thorndike and published by Рипол Классик. This book was released on 1970 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Woods written by Tana French and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years after witnessing the violent disappearances of two companions from their small Dublin suburb, detective Rob Ryan investigates a chillingly similar murder that takes place in the same wooded area, a case that forces him to piece together his traumatic memories.
Download or read book This is Not Your Final Form written by Hannah Silva and published by Emma Press Anthologies. This book was released on 2017-02-16 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Argentine Perspectives on the Falklands War written by Nicholas van der Bijl and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new assessment of the Falklands War from the Argentine perspective. In 1982, the United Kingdom and Argentina fought a war over an historical disagreement over the colonial “ownership” or rights over the Falkland Islands. Within months of the Argentinian defeat, General Edgardo Calvi, then the Argentine Head of the Army Joint Chief of Staff, was instructed to undertake a wide-ranging and formal inquiry to investigate the performance of the Argentine Army during the Falklands. Calvi concluded that while the Army had the motivation, it lacked the organization, equipment, training, and ability to oppose an army capable of operating in a variety of environments. The war exposed political, military, and public weaknesses in a period of considerable internal unrest during the seven years of the Dirty War. Several senior officers who fought in the Falklands were imprisoned for offenses committed during the Dirty War. Secrecy and political disagreements isolated the Service chiefs of staff from the logistic and operational planning. This book tells the story of the Falklands War from the Argentine Army perspective.
Download or read book Lore of the Ghost written by Brian Haughton and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2008-08-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lore of the Ghost is an original and thought-provoking exploration of the numerous categories of ghosts and hauntings throughout the world. It discusses the possible motives for each type of haunting? from phantom white ladies and spectral black dogs to haunted highways and ghostly vehicles—what they represent, why they occur, and their possible functions.
Download or read book Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton written by John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Baron Acton and published by London : Longmans, Green. This book was released on 1917 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
