The womanβwhose death is estimated to have occurred in βremains unidentified, and the current location of her skeleton and autopsy report is unknown. As he climbed, he glanced down into the hollow trunk and discovered a skull. At first he believed it to be that of an animal, but after seeing human hair and teeth, he realised that he had found a human skull.
As they were on the land illegally, Farmer put the skull back and all four boys returned home without mentioning their discovery to anybody. When police checked the trunk of the tree they found an almost complete skeleton, with a shoe, a gold wedding ring, and some fragments of clothing.
The skull was valuable evidence, in that it still had some tufts of hair and had a clear dental pattern, despite some missing teeth. The body was sent for forensic examination by the Birmingham-based Home Office pathologist James Webster. From the measurement of the trunk in which the body had been discovered, he also deduced that it must have been placed there "still warm" after the killing, as it could not have fit once rigor mortis had taken hold.
Police could tell from items found with the body what the woman had looked like, but with so many people reported missing during the Second World War, records were too numerous for a proper identification to take place. They cross-referenced the details they had with reports of missing persons throughout the region, but none of them seemed to match the evidence.
A case review by West Mercia Police was closed in A episode of the television programme Nazi Murder Mysteries [8] described a forensic facial reconstruction undertaken by the Liverpool John Moores University 's " Face Lab ", from photographs of the skull.
