This feels like a Sherlock Holmes mystery
A new book aims to shed light on a young woman’s unsolved murder. WARREN MANGER reports
THE water glints like bottle-green glass as dragonflies dance across the surface, but it hides a deadly secret. This quiet stretch of the Grand Union Canal could hold the key to cracking a case that has mystified police and historians for nearly a century.
Annie Bella Wright, Bella to her friends, was found dead in a lonely lane outside Leicester on July 5, 1919.
The 21-year-old factory worker had been shot in the head, leaving a bullet hole below her left eye.
Beside her lay the bicycle she was riding when she left her uncle’s house in the village of Gaulby, seven miles east of Leicester, shortly before 9pm.
A trail of bloody bird tracks led from Bella’s body to a nearby gate. In the meadow beyond, a crow lay dead and the long grass was freshly flattened into a path leading to the distant cornfields. Author Antony Brown, whose new book The Green Bicycle Mystery analyses the different theories about the case, says: “It feels like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. You could almost imagine him standing at the crime scene examining the evidence as the last of the evening light faded.
“It’s a very puzzling case. Deaths like this can cast a shadow over a family for generations, so I wanted to try to find out what happened to her so there was finally some closure.”
The bullet, just a few feet from Bella’s head, was only found the next day. With no scientific evidence to call upon back then, local bobby Alfred Hall and colleagues had to construct a case by tracing the victim’s last known movements on the day she died.
Bella, who worked at a local tyre factory covering the shortage of men due to the First World War, rose late after the evening shift.
She finished writing a letter to her boyfriend Archie Ward – stationed aboard HMS Diadem in Portsmouth, waiting to be demobbed – said goodbye to her mother and rode to the post office.
Meeting the postmistress en route, she handed over the letter then made for her uncle’s house. Bella picked up an unlikely travelling companion, a small, unshaven man with a squeaky voice. He showed up again as she was leaving and offered to accompany her.
Bella insisted he was a stranger she had met on the road, but relatives suspected otherwise. Her uncle George Measures claimed the man used Bella’s name and her cousin Agnes said they seemed familiar.
The family were able to give police one more vital detail. The man rode a distinctive pea-green bicycle.
Seven months later, the frame of an identical bike was found in the canal in Leicester. The identification number was filed off, but an expert reconstructed it and traced it to a shopkeeper in Derby, who said he sold the bike to former soldier Ronald Light, 34, sent home from the front line with hearing loss and shell shock.
Light denied owning a green bike, then backtracked, insisting he sold it to an anonymous buyer.
Canal dredgers found a brown leather army holster. There was no revolver inside, but it was filled with the same .455 calibre bullets as the one found near Bella.
Light was charged with murder. At trial the prosecution claimed she rejected his advances and tried to get away, but he caught up. In a fit of rage he allegedly knocked Bella to the ground, pulled out his service revolver and shot her. If the bullet was fired down into the road, that explained why it was found close by, the prosecution claimed.
When Light took the stand he admitted owning the bicycle, meeting Bella on the road and even throwing the holster into the River Soar as he feared being accused by the police. But he denied killing Bella.
Light was acquitted in June 1920 after his defence barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall, regarded by many as the best, raised doubts about much of the evidence.
Light changed his name, moved to Kent and married a widow. He died in 1975 aged 89. With no other leads the case grew cold, though a series of amateur sleuths have tried to investigate it.
The “shooting crows” theory proved particularly popular.
First published by Trueman Humphries in The Strand Magazine in 1922, it accepted Light was innocent. The fields outside Leicester were popular for rooking – shooting birds. Humphries claimed Bella may have been accidentally shot by youths shooting a crow on the gate, explaining the bloody bird tracks and dead crow.
Experts believe it would have been possible for a boy lying in the meadow to shoot a crow on the gate at such an angle that the bullet subsequently hit Bella.
Years later, rumours began to circulate that Light admitted to killing Bella while collecting his belongings from the police station three days after his trial. This “signed confession” was supposedly locked in a safe there and seen by several officers.
Light allegedly said he and Bella were riding home when he agreed to show her his revolver, hidden in his coat pocket. Not realising it was loaded, he took it out but as he handed the gun to Bella it went off. An alternative theory is he took the gun out without telling Bella, to impress her, but it snagged on his pocket and fired.
Either way he supposedly admitted to running off in a panic, then throwing his revolver and another handgun into the canal at a quiet spot near his home. Several weeks later he smuggled his holster and green bicycle out of his mum’s home and dumped them further along the canal.
Antony has reproduced much of the evidence he discovered – including the document from the police safe and PC Hall’s memoirs.
He says: “The police did their best to find the gun that killed Bella, but didn’t know where to look. They never saw the documents I’ve seen. That is why I believe the revolver might have been thrown into the canal at a dark spot more than a mile away from where the bicycle was found.
“Trying to find those guns after nearly 100 years is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it would be a sensational discovery.”