For 50 years police have hunted the perpetrator of a murder so hideous it rocked the West Midlands - even in the midst of war.
Was it witchcraft, a German spy plot - or a crime of passion? And why did the police suddenly close their files to the Express & Star?
"If it wasn't for Tommy Willetts opening his big mouth, that skeleton would probably never have been found.''
It's 50 years on, but Bob Farmer's annoyance at his old friend is still apparent -and perhaps not surprising.
"He could have landed us in court for poaching,'' he says.
But of all the crimes committed in Hagley Wood, poaching was probably the last thing on any policeman's mind those five decades ago.
Hagley Wood lies just east of Hagley village, its northern edge running parallel with the busy Birmingham to Kidderminster dual carriageway.
By day it is a peaceful and beautiful woodland - but at night, even nowadays, it has a reputation for strange goings-on that keep even its owner Lord Cobham away after sundown.
But none of Hagley Wood's secrets was so strange as that discovered on a sunny Sunday in 1943 when four young lads from Lye, near Stourbridge, set off with their lurchers for a day's illicit rabbiting and bird-nesting.
Bob Farmer, Tom Willets, Bob Hart and Fred Payne were regular companions on such trips, and walked the several miles to Hagley Wood and the Clent hills three or four times a week.
Mr Payne died of kidney disease in the 1940s - but his friends are still alive and living around Lye, where they were tracked down by the Express & Star.
The mystery began as they passed close to a great Wych Elm, actually a hazel renamed for its hideous appearance - repeated wood-cutting had turned it into a huge hollow trunk with hundreds of thin whippy branches, supposedly like witch's hair.
From the hollow bole several birds flew out - and the teenagers decided to investigate.
At his home in Vicars Walk, Wollescote, Bob Farmer, now 65, remembers how he climbed the tree and, glancing down, suddenly saw the empty eye-sockets of a skull, still with hair attached, glaring up at him.
Unable to believe what he was seeing he got a branch and hooked it out.
"It was a real skull - it had hair and teeth still on it but it was so dark in the tree we could not tell until we got it out.
"We decided not to tell anyone what we had found because then they would know we had been poaching - so we put it back and went home.''
There the Wych Elm mystery could have ended - but for Tom Willetts who told his dad, who in turn went to the police.
Tom, now 68, and living in Hardwicke Way, recalls how the police came to his factory and took him and the other three back to the wood to find the tree.
"We had to lead the way there. We didn't care about the skeleton. We were just scared of getting into trouble,'' he says.
Inside the tree the police found an almost complete skeleton and some faded scraps of clothing. Nearby in the woods was a severed hand.
It was enough for Professor James Webster, head of the Home Office's West Midland Forensic and Science Laboratory, to build up a picture.
"It was a woman, aged about 35, only five feet tall, with brown hair, two front teeth protruding and slightly crossing, who had given birth at least once.'' he reported.
It appeared, he said, that she had been killed around October 1941 - and that she had been suffocated on her own underwear, which was found still in her throat.
That was probably a mistake - according to Mr Farmer he accidentally pushed some of the clothing into the mouth as he hooked the skull from the tree. But for some time it led police to presume it may have been a crime of passion.
Professor Webster's estimate of the date of death was, however, probably right.
It also fitted with reports from two witnesses, one a teacher, the other a businessman, who said they heard screams in late summer, 1941, and who had checked the wood then with a policeman - but to no avail.
A nationwide search followed. Dozens of officers checked all the 3,000 missing-women cases within a thousand square miles.
But all was in vain - despite all the clues not a single lead could be found. The investigation was grinding to a halt when suddenly the case was revived with a vengeance with strange messages chalked on walls and fences across the region.
The first recorded was in Upper Dean Street, Birmingham, in March 1944. "Who put Bella down the Wych Elm, Hagley Wood,'' it asked.
The name Bella, often associated with witchcraft, was the first suggestion of occult involvement. More was to follow.
Police investigated - and again got nowhere. But soon other witchcraft links were suggested.
Why, for example, was the woman's hand found separately from the body? Was it wild animals? Or was it, as Professor Margaret Murray of University College, London, suggested, a classic sign of a black magic execution?
Again the trail went cold - until the tenth anniversary of the gory discovery when an Express & Star columnist, "Quaestor'' - otherwise known as Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred Byford-Jones - published a series of melodramatic articles that took the case in a very different direction.
Quaestor's articles were rewarded by a letter signed "Anna''. It said that the victim had been a Dutch woman and that one of her killers, a British army officer, had died insane in 1942.
After several appeals, "Anna'' eventually revealed herself to police and Quaestor in a secret meeting. Her story, involving a trapeze-artist and a Dutch spy, was an incredible one. Stranger still, much of it could be proved to be true.
The officer, she said, had been aclose relative who had become involved with a spy-ring selling secrets to Germany.
He had told her how he, a Dutchman and the trapeze artist, then appearing at the Birmingham Hippodrome, had killed the woman in a car while driving through Halesowen, and then taken her to Hagley Wood. The woman had "become dangerous''.
According to Anna,the officer had handed over locations of various munitions factories in the region to the Dutch man. These were later heavily bombed. The officer eventually had a nervous breakdown and died in a mental home - something which the police confirmed.
Quaestor added: "Other facts were also verified but the Dutchman could not be found although efforts to locate him were made in Holland."
And there it rests. The only other clue to whether the police solved the case was a 1958 television appearance by Professor Webster in which he claimed police HAD identified the body. He refused to elaborate and so did the police.
It is the police who also provide the epitaph to this strange affair. The case now rests with West Mercia Police, whom we asked if we could look at their files.
"Yes, of course" was the enthusiastic initial response from Inspector Mick Brunger. But soon after came another call. Inspector Brunger's bosses had now read the papers and with regrets, we could not see them.
Why? "It's just our policy."
Could it be that the skeleton has come out of the tree - only to be consigned forever to the cupboard?
