Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Satisfied that 25 Menlove Gardens East did not exist, Wallace gave up the search and made his way home. He arrived back home at quarter to nine to find the house in darkness. Feeling his way into the parlour, the front room, Wallace found the battered body of his wife lying face down on the floor on top of his mackintosh. She was lying rather too neatly to have fallen like that; it looked as if someone had straightened the body up and laid it on the raincoat. There was also some money missing.

  The police photographs of the crime scene have survived. They show the pathetically genteel home that Julia had created, with its traditional set-piece fireplace and a large mirror above. Framed family photographs line the mantelpiece and four large pictures fill the wall on each side. It is a shock to see Julia’s body lying so tidily on the carpet, her feet near the fireplace and head towards the door. This position suggested that she was not afraid of whoever killed her; the murderer must have been well into the room, struck her from behind so that she fell towards the door – unless of course the body was moved from a very different position, which is possible.

  The police arrived, found no sign of a forced entry, and found Mr Wallace in a remarkably detached and composed state. He said something about a poker being missing from the fireside set. They suspected at once that he had done it. There was something odd about his account of entering the parlour at quarter to nine, in near total darkness, apart from the glow from the fire, and going to the gaslights on each side of the fireplace to light them; only then, he claimed, or so the prosecution said, did he see Julia’s body. That is peculiar, because Julia’s body, as the crime scene photographs show very clearly, filled the space between the doorway and the fireplace. It would scarcely be possible to enter the room and reach the gaslights without tripping over the body. On the other hand, Wallace would not have incriminated himself particularly if he had said that he saw on entering the room that there was someone lying on the floor and that he stepped over them to put the lights on. His account was nevertheless peculiar and two weeks later, when Wallace was staying with his sister in Aigburth, the police arrested him and charged him with Julia’s murder.

  The case for the prosecution hinged on the police view of Wallace as a cold, calculating, scheming man. It was easy to portray him in this way. He had discovered his wife’s body at a quarter to nine. Only fifteen minutes later he was able to speak to PC Williams about this moment of discovery in unusually matter-of-fact terms.

  At 6.45 p.m. I left the house in order to go to Menlove Gardens, and my wife accompanied me to the backyard door. She walked a little way down the alley with me, then she returned and bolted the backyard door. She would then be alone in the house. I went to Menlove Gardens to find the address which had been given me was wrong. Becoming suspicious I returned home and went to the front door. I inserted my key to find I could not open it. I went round to the backyard door: it was closed but not bolted. I went up the backyard and tried the back door, but it would not open. I again went to the front door and this time found the door to be bolted. I hurried round to the back and up the backyard, and tried the back door, and this time found it would open. I entered the house and this is what I found.

  He sounded like an entomologist showing a colleague a specimen. What he was actually indicating to the policeman was the appalling aftermath of his wife’s murder, her battered head lying in a pool of her blood. He was just too cool and calm to be true.

  The prosecution maintained that there was no such person as Qualtrough. The ‘Chess Club Murderer’ had set up the Qualtrough alibi himself from start to finish. It was Wallace himself, the prosecution alleged, who had phoned the City Cafe and left the message. The lengthy journey and the nonexistence of the address given would explain why he was out of the house for such a long time, round about the time the murder was committed. But the prosecution argued that Wallace could have committed the murder at the beginning of the evening, before setting off to catch the tram. They also alleged that Wallace’s persistent reminders about the stop at Menlove Gardens where he wanted to alight were simply a device to make the tram conductor remember him. In a similar way, asking for confirmation of the time in the newsagent’s and asking a policeman to direct him to the address he was looking for were ways of ensuring that there were witnesses for his alibi.

  The prosecution had more trouble explaining the lack of blood on Wallace’s clothing. The scenario the counsel for the prosecution presented in court was as follows. Julia Wallace was in the parlour. Her husband, perhaps upstairs, took all of his clothes off and then came into the parlour wearing only his mackintosh. He then bludgeoned his wife to death, sending spatters of blood in all directions. He spread the mackintosh on the floor, put his wife’s body on top to ‘explain’ the spots and splashes of blood on it, then went upstairs naked to wash the blood off. Then he put his clothes back on and went off for the meeting with Qualtrough.

  There were in fact many difficulties with this scenario. One of them was that Wallace was known to have boarded the tram at ten past seven, and at a point three miles from the house. It would have taken Wallace a full twenty-five minutes to cover the three miles, making it likely that he was telling the truth about leaving the house at a quarter to seven. Could he have bludgeoned Julia to death, washed and dressed and been out on the streets by a quarter to seven? The ‘forensic’ report gave the estimated time of death as earlier than six o’clock, but it seems likely that the police indicated to the pathologist their preference for a time of death that would fit the scenario they were assembling. A major problem with having Julia dying at six o’clock or earlier is that she was seen, alive, by a delivery boy at half past six. That means that there was only a window of fifteen minutes – at the very most – in which Wallace could have committed the murder and done all the cleaning up. It was simply not long enough.

  There were other problems with the prosecution’s hypothesis. The bath was completely dry. There was no sign that anyone had taken a bath in the recent past. If Wallace had indeed committed the murder naked, then climbing into the bath would have been the obvious and only way of making absolutely sure every spot of blood was removed. It is inconceivable that Wallace would have risked missing blood splashes by having a mere washdown. None of the towels were damp either, so no-one had had a bath or a washdown in the previous few hours.

  The area round the body in the parlour was found to have been sprayed with Julia Wallace’s blood. The murderer must have been covered in it. Yet there were no drops of blood outside the parlour. If Wallace had hurried, naked and blood-spattered, out of the parlour to go and wash upstairs, there would be some spots of blood elsewhere. The forensic investigators were delighted when they found one drop of coagulated blood on the rim of the lavatory bowl. This was taken by the prosecution to prove that Wallace had indeed gone to the bathroom to wash. But the single drop of blood could easily have been picked up by one of the police officers on his coat hem, and accidentally transferred from the parlour to the bathroom as he made a tour of the house. The fact that it was a coagulated blob of blood suggests that it was moved a couple of hours after the murder rather than immediately after, and probably transferred on the hem of a detective’s raincoat as the house was investigated – an unintentional plant. All in all, the prosecution case was unconvincing. Yet, in spite of the evidence, after only one hour’s deliberation, the jury found Wallace guilty. He was sentenced to death.

  Legal history was made when William Wallace appealed. His case was heard on 18 May by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, who ruled that the verdict must be overturned on the grounds that it had been made against the weight of the evidence. Lord Hewart commented, ‘We are not concerned here with suspicion, however grave, or with theories, however ingenious. Section 4 of the Court of Criminal Appeal Act of 1907 provides that the Court of Criminal Appeal shall allow the appeal if they think the verdict of the jury should be set aside on the ground that it cannot be supported by the evidence. The decision is that the case again
st the appellant was not proved with that certainty which is necessary in order to justify a verdict of Guilty.’ Wallace’s conviction was quashed. But the wording chosen by Lord Hewart makes it very clear that he was far from exonerated, that ‘grave suspicion’ still hung over him.

  On the evidence as presented at the trial, Wallace should have been acquitted. Wallace came within a hair’s breadth of the gallows, and was then freed. He tried to go on living at 29 Wolverton Street, and tried to go on doing his life insurance job, too, but the whispering and the gossip just would not stop. People would cruelly call, ‘Julia! Julia!’ in ghostly voices through his letterbox, just as he had himself that night late in January. He realized that he could not go on living in Anfield. He had to move away. He went to live in Cheshire, where he died only two years later of renal cancer.

  The murderer of Julia Wallace was never caught, and never even identified. The police only considered one suspect, her husband, and there was insufficient evidence against him. But over the years since 1931 a prime suspect has emerged. His name is Gordon Parry. He had worked with Wallace in the insurance business and was a frequent visitor to the Wallace house. At the time of the original murder investigation, Gordon Parry was one of the names given to the police as someone Julia Wallace would have felt safe inviting into her house. She would have opened the door to Parry. The police even got as far as asking Parry where he was on the evening in question, but they were satisfied with his answer.

  Gordon Parry was tracked down in the 1960s by two crime writers, Richard Whittington-Egan and Jonathan Goodman, when Parry was living in London. Parry would not let the two writers into his home – but then again why should he have trusted two strangers? How many of us would allow into our homes two men who want to accuse us of murder? The two investigators were surprised how much Parry knew. He seemed to know everything about everyone involved in the murder investigation. That in itself does not strike me as odd. The Wallace murder case was a sensational news story of its time. As a work associate of Wallace and a ‘friend’ of sorts to both Wallace and his wife, he would naturally have taken a great deal of interest in the case and its media coverage, even if he himself was entirely blameless.

  Gordon Parry did however give the investigators one snippet of information that was suggestive. He told them that Wallace was ‘sexually odd’. What that meant is very hard to tell, but on the whole people in 1931 did not normally discuss their sex lives; it was not the 1960s. The Wallaces seem very unlikely people to have shared this sort of information about themselves in the course of a social conversation, even with someone they regarded as a friend. So, if it was true that William Wallace had unusual sexual tastes, how did Gordon Parry know about them? One possibility is that Parry’s relationship with Julia was more than just a friendship. If they were flirting, possibly even more, maybe Julia revealed one of her reasons for being dissatisfied with her husband. It was found that Julia was not wearing normal ladies’ underwear when she was killed, but a nappy, and perhaps that was part of the ‘oddity’ that Parry was referring to.

  In 1980, a radio presenter called Roger Wilkes researched the Wallace case. Startlingly, after almost fifty years some new evidence had come to light. A new witness came forward, a car mechanic called John Parkes. He had been given a car to clean by Gordon Parry on the night of the murder. While he was cleaning the interior, he found a bloodstained glove, which Parry snatched away from him, muttering, ‘That could hang me’. Parkes did not say anything to the police at the time because he was afraid of Parry, who had a violent streak and a nasty temper. Parry was a dangerous man to cross. Unfortunately, Wilkes made this breakthrough just too late to confront Gordon Parry with it. Parry had died in North Wales a few weeks earlier.

  Parry fits the profile of Julia’s killer well. He had worked with Wallace and evidently harboured some sort of resentment against him. He had been in the same insurance business and knew about the pattern of collection. The Prudential worked on a weekly cycle that ran from Wednesday to Wednesday. It was not unusual to be storing a significant sum of money in the cash box on a Tuesday night, representing the week’s takings, as Wednesday was account day, when the money was banked. If anyone who understood the insurance system was going to rob someone like Wallace, Tuesday night was the night to do it. Julia was murdered on a Tuesday evening. Parry, as a former work associate of Wallace, would have known all about the pattern of takings. As it happened, Parry or whoever else it was, only got away with £4 from Wallace’s cash box, but the attack on a Tuesday does not look random. We also know that Parry was a dangerous thug with a criminal record, easily capable of beating someone to death with a poker.

  Although it has been alleged that there is something suspicious about Wallace’s account of his discovery of Julia’s body, there is not. He did not, as the prosecution alleged that Wallace claimed, cross the darkened room, crossing the area where Julia was lying, to turn on the gas lights before he saw the body. In his police statement, Wallace said, ‘I then came down and looked into the front room and struck a match and saw my wife lying on the floor.’ So there was nothing suspicious about his account.

  The wild goose chase looking for Qualtrough’s nonexistent house could as easily have been set up by Gordon Parry, to lure Wallace away from his home for a good hour or two, giving Parry time to go in, kill Julia, take whatever money was there and, in effect, frame Wallace for murdering his wife. A marvellous revenge.

  Why did Wallace remind the conductor that he wanted to get off at Menlove Gardens? The explanation may be very simple and ordinary. It may be that Wallace had had the bad experience of being whisked past the stop where he wanted to get off, and having to waste time and shoe leather walking back. He was keen not to be late for the appointment. That in turn explains why he kept asking people to verify the time for him: he had an appointment to keep. There is no more to it than that.

  But there was a side to Wallace that does generate suspicion. After he was released, but only then, people in Liverpool began to turn against Wallace. It was mainly because of an autobiographical sketch, his Life Story, which he had published in the local press. Its style was a distinct contrast to the cool statements he made to the police and at his trial; it was emotional, mawkish and sentimental. The wheedling tone seemed designed to elicit sympathy. He did not get it. A more significant problem was that Wallace’s Life Story contained details that were untrue or at best extremely misleading, even on matters that were unimportant. A typical detail is the claim that he was brought up in the Lake District. A childhood in Millom on the Duddon estuary hardly qualifies for the Wordsworthian upbringing in the ‘glorious country of mountain, lake and fell’ which he claimed. It was not a lie, but many reading Wallace’s self-account were uneasy at the evident concealments and duplicities. He came across as evasive and devious, someone who had evaded justice.

  In Life Story, Wallace described the happiest years of his life as beginning in 1911 in Harrogate, where he met his future wife. Wallace was a minor political activist for the Liberal Party, and enjoyed addressing meetings, though he was conscious of his lack of polish, poise and education. At Harrogate, Wallace consciously insinuated himself into literary and artistic circles as part of his programme of self-improvement.

  Julia Wallace remains a shadowy figure, and the little that is known about her derives from Wallace’s Life Story which, in the circumstances, cannot be quoted uncorroborated. He described her as ‘a lady of good birth and social position. She was an excellent pianist, no mean artist in watercolour, a fluent French scholar, and of a cultured literary taste.’ The reality was that Julia was an unexceptional lower middle class woman of perhaps slightly higher social class than Wallace. As usual, Wallace gilded the lily.

  In Life Story, Wallace says that he lost his job as Liberal Party agent because of the outbreak of war, but as he was immediately replaced by Mr A. Cotterill, he must have lost his job for some other reason. It may have been that Wallace had fallen into debt, but the c
rucial fact is that whatever the reason was for losing his job Wallace concealed it. Overall, William Herbert Wallace comes across as a vaguely dislikeable man, a cold, metallic and unsympathetic man.

  I do not like thee, Dr Fell;

  The reason why I cannot tell:

  But this I know, and know full well:

  I do not like thee, Dr Fell.

  But whatever reservations we may nurse about Wallace as a person, his release on appeal was perfectly proper. The fact that neither the police nor the lawyers could come up with any other suspect at the time does not mean that (by elimination) Wallace must have been the murderer. Now that another suspect has emerged, in the shape of Gordon Parry, Wallace recedes significantly.

  The murder of Julia Wallace, with its mysterious, nebulous, unidentifiable Qualtrough lurking in the background, gripped the newspaper readers of the day and has gone on exercising the imaginations of crime writers ever since. It was made into a film in the 1990s, The Man from the Pru, starring Jonathan Pryce and Anna Massey. Was Gordon Parry the evil genius behind it all, the envious murderer who killed Julia, who widowed and robbed Wallace and then framed him? Or was Wallace, the cold and cunning Chess Club murderer, the real culprit all along, just as the police believed at the time? Raymond Chandler described the Julia Wallace case as ‘unbeatable’. For him it was the perfect murder. No one was ever convicted for it, and still, even after seventy years, it is no nearer being solved.