The fine weather of that Sunday in July 1919 had brought Bella Wright out on her bicycle, and by half past eight in the evening she was riding home along the quiet Leicestershire lanes, an hour of daylight still left in the sky. Her uncle and cousin had watched her go from their cottage at Gaulby, and they had seen the man on the green bicycle ride up and join her as she pedaled away. He had been waiting for her, and he called out as he drew alongside: “Bella, you have been a long time. I thought you’d gone the other way.

”

It was the last time anyone who knew her would see her alive. Bella Wright was a twenty-six-year-old worker at a rubber factory in the town of Stoughton, and the fifth of July had been her day off. That afternoon she had ridden out to visit her cousin Agnes, who had recently given birth, and she had spent the hours writing letters before setting out for Gaulby, some four miles from her home. On the way she had stopped to speak to the postmistress and left a letter to be posted, and then, somewhere along the road, her rear wheel had begun to give her trouble.

She dismounted to examine it, and while she stood over the bicycle a man appeared on a distinctive green bicycle and stopped to ask whether he could be of assistance. She asked if he had a spanner, as her rear wheel seemed loose. He did not, but he offered to ride with her to her destination to make sure she reached it without further trouble. They set off together, and numerous witnesses later remembered seeing them riding side by side, apparently chatting.

At the house of Bella’s uncle, George Measures, where Agnes and her husband were staying, the uncle noticed the stranger lingering after Bella had gone inside. He asked who the man was. Bella said she did not know, only that he had stopped when she had trouble with her wheel and had stayed with her since. She gave the impression that she thought him slightly odd but harmless, and said she expected he would be gone by the time she left.

George Measures took note of the man: somewhere between thirty and forty years old, wearing a flat cap, and riding a green BSA bicycle. The man did not go. He hung about outside the cottage, and after a while Bella decided to set off for home. Her cousin and uncle saw her off, and as she rode away the man on the green bicycle rode up and joined her.

It was 8:50 in the evening. The sun was declining. About thirty minutes later, at 9:20, a local farmer named Joseph Cowell was herding his cows along the road between pastures when he saw a lump in the road at Little Stretton. The sun was setting, and it was only when he drew close that he realized it was a figure lying on the road beside a bicycle.

Suspecting an accident, he ran up to the body and found it to be a young woman, and that she was dead. He put his cows into the field and hurried home to inform the local police constable at Great Glen. The constable, Alfred Hall, phoned a doctor, Edward Williams, and the two made their way to where the young woman had been found. It was 10:30 p.

m. when Hall arrived. Joseph Cowell was waiting for him, along with two other men, and the constable made a brief inspection at the scene. Bella was still wearing her hat and coat, and it appeared that a tragic accident had occurred.

Together they lifted her body onto Cowell’s cart, and Dr. Williams examined her. His opinion was that she had suffered a hemorrhage or seizure and had fallen from her bicycle. They took the body to a nearby disused chapel, where Dr.

Williams made a further examination by candlelight and noted bruising to her face. He advised Hall to write “hemorrhage” as the likely cause of death in his report. Hall had a restless night. He rose at six the next morning and rode out on his bicycle to the place where Bella had fallen, searching for any indication of what might have occurred.

He saw that a crow had been feeding on the blood, for there were the footprints of a large bird leading from the scene to a wooden gate, which had a smear of blood on its top bar. He found little else of note and cycled home in the afternoon, but he was still dissatisfied, and he returned in the early evening. This time, a little way from where the body had lain, he found a bullet buried in a cow’s hoof print. Hall had recently returned to his post as a police officer from the trenches in France, and he recognized it at once: a .

455 caliber bullet fired by a weapon he knew well, the Webley Scott service revolver, standard army issue for officers. He spoke to Dr. Williams, and that evening the two returned to the scene in the company of Joseph Cowell. They followed a track from the field where Bella had died and found a dead crow.

In the chapel, Dr. Williams and Hall cleaned the dirt from Bella’s face. They found a bullet entry hole on her left cheek that had exited behind her right ear. A post-mortem conducted by Dr.

Williams and another doctor confirmed that she had been shot. The bicycle accident was now a murder inquiry. Superintendent Herbert Taylor took charge of the investigation and visited Stretton Parva, where he matched the feet of the dead crow with the bloody bird footprints near the body. Bella’s mother had reported her daughter missing on the Sunday morning, and it was quickly confirmed that Bella was the young woman found at Little Stretton.

Police questioned George Measures and Agnes, and learned about the man on the green bicycle, whom other witnesses had also reported seeing in Bella’s company. On Monday the 7th of July, the police issued a poster seeking information and offering a reward of five pounds for the discovery of the man riding the distinctive green bicycle. A description was given: he was between thirty-five and forty years of age, approximately five feet seven inches tall, wearing a grey suit with collar and tie, and a flat cap. A bicycle shop owner named Harry Cox came forward to report that he had repaired a green BSA bicycle for a man who fitted the description.

The man had not given his name, but told Cox he was from London and had recently been demobilized from the Army. Scotland Yard sent Detective Chief Inspector Albert Hawkins from London to assist the Leicestershire police, but despite a more dramatic poster and a reward raised to twenty pounds, nothing came of it. An inquest was held on several dates throughout the summer of 1919. Dr.

Evans reported that pieces of metal and debris found in Bella’s head wound indicated the gun had been fired from a distance of approximately four to five feet. There were no suggestions of sexual assault; her purse was found on her, and nothing had been taken. Harry Cox gave a statement concerning the man whose bicycle he had repaired. “I had half an hour’s talk with him,” Cox said, “and he said he was staying with friends in Leicestershire.

He said he was a demobilized officer and working in London. He said the firm had told him he could have another two or three weeks’ holiday on full pay, as they were not busy. ” Cox also said the man had a cockney accent and spoke with a squeaky voice. Bella’s uncle and cousins told of the man hanging around outside the cottage.

A gunsmith gave evidence that the bullet was . 455 caliber, from a revolver or rifle, and certainly from an army weapon. The verdict of the inquest was one of willful murder against a person or persons unknown. The case went cold.

By the end of the year the police had begun to wind down their inquiry and privately held out little hope of finding the man with the green bicycle. Not a single useful piece of information had been gleaned in six months. Eight months after the murder of Bella Wright, an extraordinary piece of good fortune occurred. On the 23rd of February 1920, a canal boatman named Enoch Whitehouse was carrying coal on the River Soar when his tow rope snagged on something on the riverbed.

He pulled in the rope to free it and found that it was caught on what appeared to be a bicycle. The bicycle was green. Whitehouse recalled the story from the previous year, which he had read in the newspapers, and he recovered the bicycle and took it to the police. The police confirmed that it was indeed the green bicycle they had been looking for.

A BSA agent was called in to examine it. The serial numbers had been carefully filed off, along with the maker’s name, but the bicycle was a special order: painted bright green, with an unusual braking system, and it had been stamped with an additional serial number on the frame and forks. This was faintly visible. BSA records showed the bicycle had been manufactured in 1910 and dispatched to a dealer in Derby called Horton Brothers.

Joseph Horton went back over his records and was able to tell the police that thirteen pounds and thirteen shillings had been paid for the green bicycle in May 1910, by a man named Ronald Light. The police traced Light to an address in Cheltenham, where he was working as a mathematics teacher at a private school called Dean Close. Superintendent Taylor travelled to Cheltenham on the 4th of March to interview him. At first Light claimed he had never owned a green bicycle.

Then he said he had, but had sold it after only a short time to someone whose name he could not recall. He said he had never been to Gaulby and had never heard of Bella Wright. Light was well-spoken, plausible, privately educated, from a good background, and an ex-Army officer. On the face of it, he seemed an unlikely suspect for the brutal murder of a young woman.

But when the bicycle repairman travelled to Cheltenham and picked Ronald Light out from a ten-man lineup, Light was arrested and charged with the murder of Bella Wright. Ronald Light was born in 1885 to wealthy parents. He was educated at prep school and Oakham private school in Rutland, and in 1920 he was a mathematics teacher at a private school in Cheltenham. He was an engineer and had served as an army officer during the First World War.

His record did not look quite as good on closer inspection. He had been expelled from his private school at the age of seventeen for lifting a young girl’s skirt above her head. He had graduated from Birmingham University and begun an engineering apprenticeship with the Midland Railway in Derby. Although well liked, he was dismissed for setting fire to a store and drawing obscene graffiti on the toilet walls.

When the First World War broke out, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers and dispatched to France in 1915. He was involved in trench construction, but after only ten weeks he was sent home on the grounds that he lacked initiative as an officer. There were suggestions that this was a cover for a different reason for his dismissal: that of assaulting a French postmistress. Shortly after this, in 1916, Ronald Light’s father died as a result of a fall from a window, which was probably suicide.

Mrs. Light said he had been very worried about Ronald beforehand. Around the same time, Ronald was twice investigated by police: for attempting to seduce a fifteen-year-old girl, when he was in his thirties, and for improper conduct with an eight-year-old girl. Light worked as a laborer on a farm in 1916, where he set fire to a haystack and was dismissed.

Thereafter he enlisted as a gunner in the reserves. Twice the reserves were ordered to France, and twice they received mysterious counter-orders instructing them to stand down. An investigation revealed that Light was forging the counter-orders. He was court-martialed and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment.

He was released after four months and sent to France in 1917, where he suffered deafness and tinnitus as a result of artillery fire, and possibly also shell shock. He was sent home after ten months and hospitalized in military hospitals, where he received psychiatric treatment until the end of the war. After being demobilized in early 1919, he returned to live with his mother in Highfield Street, Leicester. He had moved to Cheltenham in January 1920 to take up his post as schoolmaster at Dean Close.

After his arrest, Light was removed to Leicester and remanded in custody while the police built their case. The canal was dredged and searched. A leather holster and bullets were found, and also the rear bicycle wheel — but not the Webley revolver. At committal proceedings, Ronald Light said only: “I am innocent, and by the advice of my legal advisers I reserve my defense.

” He was remanded to stand trial at Leicester Castle for the murder of Bella Wright. The trial of Ronald Light began on the 8th of June 1920 before Justice Thomas Horridge. With the assistance of his mother and a family friend, Light secured the services of the best defense barrister that money could buy: Sir Edward Marshall Hall. The prosecution was led by the Attorney General, Sir Gordon Hewart.

Mrs. Light’s housemaid gave evidence that Ronald had ridden his bicycle frequently until the time of the murder, after which it had remained in the kitchen until it disappeared, and that he had said he had sold it. She also testified that all his clothes from that day had either been sold or destroyed. Two girls, Muriel Nanny and Valeria Cavin, aged fourteen and twelve, gave evidence that they had been approached by Light on the day of the murder.

They stated that a man on a green bicycle had approached them and tried to persuade one of them to go for a ride with him alone, but they had refused and ridden away. They had subsequently picked Light out from a police lineup. The testimony of Bella’s uncle George Measures, her cousin Agnes, and Agnes’s husband James Evans was heard, relating to Bella and the strange man on the bicycle. Firearms and forensic testimony was given concerning the holster, the bullets, and the injuries caused by the bullet wound.

The defense argued that the two girls had been led by the police, and that their statements had been given after Light was taken into custody, when the case was already prominent in the newspapers. Marshall Hall said that Light had lied initially to protect his mother, who suffered from heart problems; that he had undoubtedly been wrong not to come forward to eliminate himself from inquiries, but that he was suffering from nerve damage as a result of shell shock incurred in France. He also said that Light had reasoned that, as he could give the police no information in the matter, he had not thought he could assist them in any way. It was submitted to the court that although Light had owned a Webley revolver, he had left it in France in 1918 at a casualty clearing station and did not know what had become of it.

Above all, Marshall Hall said, Ronald Light had no motive for killing Bella Wright. He did not know her. There was no quarrel. She had not been sexually assaulted or robbed.

Marshall Hall advanced the theory that she had been shot by someone out shooting with a rifle in the fields, possibly at crows, and that it had been a tragic accident. Ronald Light was placed in the dock and subjected to five hours of cross-examination. He never faltered or contradicted himself. He said he had encountered Bella leaning over her bicycle, had inquired if he might help, and she had asked for a spanner.

He did not have one, but the two rode on together to her uncle’s cottage, where he was given to understand that she wished him to wait for her. He had in fact left, but got a puncture, which he mended, and as he commenced his journey he saw her emerge from the house and he joined her. He said they had parted soon after leaving her uncle’s house, when she stopped and indicated she was going another direction. They said goodbye, and that was the last he had seen of her.

He said he had not even known her name until he saw it in the newspaper on the 8th of July. Contradicting the testimony of George Measures, he told the court: “I knew from newspaper reports the next day that she was the girl I had been with just before she died. I knew the police wanted to question me. I got rid of everything that could have connected me with her.

I was afraid. I see now, of course, that I did the wrong thing. ”

After the judge summed up, the jury retired for three hours. They returned with a verdict of not guilty.

Ronald Light was freed. The press and public were satisfied with the outcome, because they were well disposed toward him. He had proved an excellent witness in the dock, had given a good account of himself, his conduct was flawless, and his explanation was plausible. But no one else was ever arrested or tried for the murder of Bella Wright.

And the question that has been asked ever since is whether Ronald Light was guilty of her murder. Light was helped greatly in his defense by four things. First, he had a good background: a public school boy, well educated, working at a private school, with a university degree, and an officer — albeit briefly — during the war. Second, he was well-spoken and gave excellent accounts, which appeared frank and believable, and which seemed to have been accepted by those present.

Third, none of his adverse history of sexual impropriety and misdemeanor came out in court or in the press at the time, although the police and prosecution certainly possessed those details; it enabled the defense to present Light as an officer and a gentleman, which was really only at best a half-truth. Fourth, and finally, he had the best defense barrister in England at that time, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, whose record in successfully defending accused murderers and diminishing the impact of the most damning evidence was second to none. Taking all in all, on the accumulation of evidence against Light — including that not presented at trial — the argument for his guilt is persuasive. He had a long history of sexual impropriety and minor misdemeanor which had led to his expulsion and dismissal from numerous institutions and jobs.

That mark ran indelibly through his life and had even resulted in a brief spell in prison. Bella’s uncle and cousins testified that Bella had felt uneasy about Light, and that she had hoped to evade him by lingering at the cottage. The reappearance of Ronald Light as they rode off suggested, in spite of his claims that she had wished him to wait for her and that he had suffered a puncture, that he had attached himself to her in that persistent and unwanted way which characterized his behavior and appeared to unsettle people, especially women. No one else was seen with Bella or in the vicinity by any witnesses.

Ronald Light was the sole stranger and suspicious person seen in the area. Although the weapon was never found, the fact of Light’s ownership of a Webley revolver, which was surely the murder weapon, and his discarding of a holster and . 455 caliber bullets, is highly suggestive. So much of Ronald Light’s psychological profile fitted the killer.

His strange and aggressive solitary pursuit of vulnerable women, together with an antisocial predilection for reacting badly when things did not go his way or circumstances did not suit him, fitted him well for the role. If Bella had tried to evade him further when they continued their journey, and her unease had increased, it seems likely he would have reacted badly. The fact that he tried to persuade one of the two girls to ride alone with him suggests he was on the prowl. Being thwarted once by them would only have raised his ire and increased his determination with Bella.

The events of that day present a narrative that leads irrevocably to Ronald Light. Bella’s attempts to evade him by remaining at her uncle’s house did not deter him, and he caught up with her with a thinly disguised irritable remark: “I thought you’d gone the other way. ” It is safe to assume that Bella’s unease would have been significantly increased by his sudden reappearance when she believed she had shaken him off. The route she took home was a longer one, and her sole motive for taking a longer route with the sun going down must have been to part company with a discouraged Light.

What occurred between them as they rode on can only be guessed at, but it seems fair to assume that the companionship deteriorated, that Bella said goodbye and tried to take a different route across a narrow track, and that Light guessed her intention and headed her off, now with a furious determination about him, an internal rage at the affront of her rejection. How better to counteract this than by forestalling her and waiting at the gate where he guessed she would emerge? When Bella appeared at the entrance to the gate at Stretton Parva, it would have been a shock to her to find Ronald Light awaiting her again — and something of a triumph for him. But her reaction, which can only have been fear or even an expression of fright, would only intensify Light’s fraught psychological state.

He had triumphed over her attempts to evade him, but the psychological game would be out of his control. He may have produced a revolver to frighten her, or there may have been an exchange between the two, but the dynamics would have been rapidly escalating beyond anyone’s control. He had power over her at that moment, but that power was temporary and would result in his defeat if he withdrew. She may have tried to turn away, wheeling her bicycle with the intention of withdrawing — and that would have been her last move.

Ronald Light shot her as she turned, or at least at the critical point in the transaction between them. A rejection perceived as an act of contempt was met by its perfect riposte. He killed her. There is a fascinating postscript to this case.

Four years after Ronald Light’s acquittal, there were stories of a confession made by Light being kept in a safe in Leicester police station, but such stories are common in murder cases, and these were given little credence. Then, after the Leicestershire police records were archived in the Leicestershire Council archives in the late 1990s, a memo was discovered, typewritten and signed by Superintendent Levi Bowley. It stated that Ronald Light had returned to the police station three days after his trial to collect some personal possessions. He had met with Superintendent Bowley, and, as the two had got on well while Light was on remand, Light had said to Bowley: “Well, you’re a good sport.

If I tell you something, can I depend on you keeping it to yourself? ” Bowley had of course agreed. “Well, I’ll tell you, but mind, it must be strictly confidential. No other person knows about it, and if you divulge it I shall, of course, say I never told you anything of the kind.

”

Then, apparently, Ronald Light said: “I did shoot the girl, but it was completely accidental. We were riding quietly along. I had my revolver in my raincoat pocket, and we dismounted for her to look at it. I’d fired off some shots in the afternoon for practice, and had no idea there was a loaded cartridge in it.

She put her hand out to take it when it went off. She fell, and never stirred. I was frightened, and altogether unnerved, and I got on my bicycle and rode away. ”

Since the discovery of this memo in 2007, its authenticity has been questioned.

Examinations of the document show that it was typed on pre-1950s notepaper, and the signature of Superintendent Bowley appears genuine. A further exchange that gives the appearance of corroborating the memo’s authenticity was found in letters between the Chief Constable of Leicestershire and the Attorney General, Hewart, concerning the possibility of bringing perjury charges against Ronald Light after the trial and his acquittal. Although the letters do not directly refer to the grounds on which such charges could be made, it is believed that they do indeed refer to the memo written by Bowley — because under the rule of double jeopardy enforced at that time, Light could not be tried for the same crime twice, but he would be capable of being prosecuted for perjury, given that his account given under oath would, by virtue of his apparent confession, be false. The Attorney General made clear in the subsequent exchange with the Chief Constable that further evidence would be necessary before the Crown could contemplate such a step.

Nothing further was discovered, however, and as far as is known, that was the end of the matter. It would have been a bold step for Light to confess to a police superintendent that he had shot Bella. Any policeman would feel duty-bound to report such a conversation. But Ronald Light was an odd and bold character, as the many incidents in his life attest.

He was, of course, buoyant and brimming with confidence from his recent acquittal, as the account suggests, which lends the incident a certain credibility. In any case, it came to nothing, and whether the confession was made or not does not alter the weight of probability, based on the facts themselves, that beyond a reasonable doubt Ronald Light killed Bella Wright on the 5th of July 1919 at Stretton Parva. After the trial, Ronald Light maintained a low profile. He changed his name for a while to Leonard Estelle and moved from Leighton-on-Sea into Kent.

He married Lillian Lester, an older woman and war widow, in 1934. Little was known of him afterwards, except that his neighbors remembered him as an old man who liked to lean on his gate, watching the world go by, perhaps recalling a certain day in July fifty years earlier. Ronald Light died on the 15th of May 1975, at the age of eighty-nine.