Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

by Paul French

  With the Japanese occupation of Peking, Helen and Edgar Snow’s radical journal Democracy was shut down. Helen later wrote in her memoir that although the Pamela Werner ‘mystery was never solved or even reasonably guessed at . . . I never really believed the murder was directed against Ed or me, yet there was always a question.’ Edgar’s Red Star Over China, published in 1938, was a worldwide sensation, while Helen’s own record of her visits to the Communist bases, Inside Red China, was published a year later and became an important historical document.

  The Snows’ marriage became increasingly strained after the Japanese occupation. Helen returned to America in 1940, and the couple divorced in 1949. She spent the rest of her life in Connecticut, publishing her autobiography in 1984. She died in 1997, aged ninety.

  Inspector Botham, accused of drunkenness, consorting with prostitutes and contamination of evidence while in Peking, was dismissed by DCI Dennis soon after returning to Tientsin. He and his wife departed for England. Sergeant Binetsky, whose wife was imprisoned by the Japanese in northern China, made it out of Tientsin to Rangoon, along with a number of other White Russians. There they enlisted in the British army and reputedly showed great courage in battle. It appears that Binetsky died in combat against the Japanese in Burma in October 1943. Meanwhile Commissioner Thomas had died in 1941 at the age of sixty-two, while still secretary of the Legation Quarter’s administrative commission.

  The fate of Colonel Han is a mystery. He remained at his post at Morrison Street during the early years of the occupation, but it seems he fell foul of the puppet regime installed at Peking police headquarters after being ordered to investigate an assassination attempt on the pro-Tokyo president of China, Wang Kemin, in March 1938. It was widely known that Tai Li had ordered the killing of Wang as an example to other would-be collaborators. When Han failed to uncover any evidence in the case, or bring anyone to trial, the Japanese assumed he was working for the Kuomintang.

  Werner had continued to believe that Han was paid to steer the search for Pamela’s murderer away from 28 Chuanpan Hutong. And yet Han had always appeared determined to catch the killer, and DCI Dennis for one had believed him to be a capable detective. In Werner’s last communication with the colonel, a hurried conversation when they encountered one another on the street in 1938, Han apologised for never having obtained justice for Pamela. The question of the nature of the man’s duplicity in the case was one Werner was never able to resolve.

  As for DCI Richard Dennis, he was a marked man after the Tientsin Incident of 1939. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, London declared war in support of the United States, and in the early morning of 8 December, Dennis was arrested at his home by Japanese soldiers and taken to the Victoria Road police station. All across Tientsin his fellow officers were being rounded up and held at Gordon Hall, along with senior British diplomatic and municipal officials and army personnel.

  Dennis was placed under house arrest and told to report daily to the Japanese. On 20 December he was formally stripped of his uniform and told that his services had been terminated and he was to remain under house arrest. And so he stayed, shut up in his home on Hong Kong Road, alone. His wife and son had returned to England in 1939, before the situation worsened.

  On 4 May 1942 Dennis was arrested once again and this time imprisoned at the Japanese gendarmerie headquarters, a jail that had earned itself a fearsome reputation. He spent the next ninety-four days in solitary confinement, forbidden any communication with his fellow prisoners. The six-foot-plus Dennis was locked in a wooden cage measuring twelve foot by twelve foot. It had no furniture except a rudimentary toilet that he had to use in full view of the other prisoners in cages around him. He was not allowed to wash, or brush his teeth, and was fed only dry bread and water, and these at separate times so as to prevent him using the water to moisten the bread to make it edible. He was permitted just ten minutes’ ‘exercise’ a day.

  He was grilled regularly and for long periods, with the same repetitive questions. While he wasn’t beaten, as many prisoners were, a bare bulb above his cage was left on day and night, depriving him of sleep. His cage was positioned next to the main interrogation room so that he was able to hear the screams of tortured prisoners at all hours.

  During July 1942, temperatures soared to over 100º Fahrenheit for several weeks. Dirty, unshaven and lice-ridden, Dennis was photographed, and his picture published in a book produced by the Japanese entitled Local Criminals Album. At one point, he and his long-serving superintendent, Bill Greenslade, were taken from the jail, shackled and filthy, and made to stand on a flatbed truck. They were then driven around Tientsin on display, to reinforce Japanese ‘superiority.’ Crowds of Chinese stopped to watch in silence as the two well-known men were humiliated.

  Dennis was accused of espionage. He protested his innocence. After repeated interrogation sessions in which he refused to admit guilt or betray his former colleagues, along with weeks in his cage with barely any food, he was eventually forced to sign a confession. It was in Japanese and was never translated for him.

  In early August, the Swiss consul in Tientsin managed to secure Dennis’s release and repatriation. In a greatly weakened state he was taken to Shanghai and put aboard an overcrowded evacuation ship to Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese East Africa. From there he was transferred to another ship bound for London. He was now too weak to stand and had lost thirty-four pounds in weight.

  By the time he got back to London, he was unfit for active service and was allocated a desk job with the wartime Ministry of Food. After the war he was assigned to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and sent back to the Far East to work on the trials of senior Japanese military personnel, a list that included those who had imprisoned him in Tientsin. He returned again to England after the tribunals, where he divorced and remarried, and ran a hotel in West London called The Dennis, which had an active bridge club.

  He ended up running several pubs in the area, and was regularly seen propping up the bar at the Chepstow Arms near Notting Hill Gate. Dick Dennis died in 1972 at seventy-five years of age.

  Back in Peking the Badlands, including 28 Chuanpan Hutong, had kept running. Even in the depths of war and deprivation there was still a market for sex and narcotics, and there were those who found a way to flourish and profit. Some in the white underworld were protected by the Japanese, who continued to encourage the sale of narcotics to the Chinese.

  Joe Knauf and Thomas Jack seemed to slip away from both the Japanese and from history. Dr Capuzzo, who had left for Italy shortly after Werner questioned him, returned to a country at war with Great Britain. What neither the police nor E. T. C. Werner knew at the time was that Capuzzo’s roots into the Badlands and the Peking underworld went much deeper than they had imagined. As well as being a doctor attached to the Italian legation, Capuzzo had also owned a Badlands cabaret called the Roma, close to the Olympia and which was run for him by a half-Chinese, half-English manager who worked at many joints in the Badlands. During the Japanese occupation the Roma was burnt down and destroyed. John O’Brian was never tracked down by Werner or his agents, and was last heard to be living destitute in Shanghai’s Frenchtown. The prostitutes Marie and Peggy both died before they could be interned by the Japanese, Marie of a heroin overdose and Peggy in an insane asylum in Harbin.

  Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio left Shanghai’s Frenchtown for Japanese-controlled Tsingtao, with Leschinsky reportedly near death. George Gorman, the man who published his lies to protect Prentice, remained an overt mouthpiece for Japanese militarism as the editor of the Peking Chronicle until 1943, when he was repatriated to England. There he was immediately arrested and imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B of the Emergency Powers Act, 1939, which allowed for the internment of people suspected of being Nazi sympathisers.

  The White Russian hermaphrodite Shura evaded internment and spent much of the war in a Frenchtown brothel in Shanghai under a female identity. Shura was something
of a legend in underworld circles. According to the Shanghai Municipal Police, he was a suspect in a major bank robbery in early 1937, and was also thought to be organising the smuggling of drugs from Japanese-occupied China to Shanghai, using gullible white women as mules. He was also believed to be a persistent and daring jewel thief, who in a long career spent only a matter of months in a Peking jail and thereafter was never caught again. Though rumour had it that Shura escaped to Hong Kong with a fortune in stolen gems, it seems he stayed in China and, rendered virtually penniless after the turmoil of the war, ended up in a hotel in Tientsin in the 1950s before leaving for Russia, a country he had not seen since he fled as a teenager. Shura, one of the last White Russians left in China, was eventually swallowed up by the USSR. His fate is unknown, though according to those who knew him in Tientsin in his final days in China, despite impoverishment and losing his figure, he remained a bohemian with a love of life to the end.

  E. T. C. Werner remained in Armour Factory Alley until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which he was forced to move into the British Legation’s compound. He was now a refugee in the place he had first come to as a student interpreter, more than half a century earlier.

  Then, in March 1943, all Allied nationals remaining in Peking were rounded up by the Japanese for internment, or, as the Japanese officials put it, ‘for their safety and comfort.’ But the internment camps were neither safe nor comfortable. Along with others, Werner was sent two hundred miles south to Shantung province, to what Tokyo called the Weihsien Civilian Assembly Centre.

  He was just one of many foreigners required to assemble at Peking Central Railway Station with no more than a single suitcase. They were a ragtag bunch—British, American, Australian and other nationalities; they were schoolteachers, businesspeople, dope addicts rousted from their garrets. That day they all travelled third class, by order of the Japanese military.

  As the foreigners were marched to the waiting train, the Chinese residents of Peking were made to line up and witness the reduced state of Western power and prestige in China. It was too much for some of the internees—one man dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot and was left where he lay. Werner, with his own weak heart, had to leave behind the things that had defined his life—his books, papers, antiques, family heirlooms and mementos. He had to cease his investigation into his daughter’s murder and was no longer able to make his pleas to the Foreign Office for the case to be reopened.

  The Weihsien Civilian Assembly Centre was a former American Presbyterian mission. It was surrounded by sorghum fields and had an Edwardian-style church close to the huts, guard towers, machine-gun posts and electrified barbed wire. Two thousand foreign nationals were crammed inside with no plumbed toilets, so that a cesspool stench and swarms of flies pervaded. There were long queues for food, and when it rained the camp became a sea of mud, with walls collapsing and roofs leaking. There were pests aplenty, bedbugs and filth. The Shantung winter evenings were bitterly cold, the summer stiflingly humid.

  Werner was allocated a bed in Block 47. His room—K—measured nine by twelve feet. Among the room’s inmates was a tempestuous American ex-marine given to violent rages, a junkie called Briggs who was forced to go cold turkey in the camp, and, for a while, a young boy from Tientsin who had attended the grammar school and had known Pamela.

  Werner was excused from work due to his age. He was also issued a green badge that gave him priority in the food queues. Once he settled in he gave daily lectures as part of the camp’s activities program—‘Chinese History from a Sociologist’s Standpoint’ was a lecture that one inmate remembered attending.

  The camp was very mixed company—American missionaries, former marines, teachers, a sprinkling of Peking’s underworld, now finally rounded up, and at least one former madam of a Badlands brothel, along with several of her daughters who’d worked as prostitutes in her establishment. There were several former managers of Badlands cabarets and nightclubs as well as several women who had been members of Shura’s dancing troupe. There were also a number of British policemen from Tientsin who had served under DCI Dennis, and members of the British Municipal Council in Tientsin who had convened to deal with the problem of Sydney Yeates.

  Most people in Weihsien knew who Werner was, and they knew about Pamela. One man in particular certainly did—the camp dentist and fellow internee, Wentworth Baldwin Prentice.

  Prentice was kept busy. Poor nutrition led to gum disease, and toothpaste for the inmates was dried cuttlefish ground into a powder. Fillings consisted of copper amalgam, although bad teeth were usually just pulled. Prentice spent hours pumping the treadle that powered his drill, or trying to disinfect his equipment.

  It’s difficult to imagine just how hard it must have been for Werner to be locked up with the man he suspected of murdering his daughter. Some inmates later recalled him pointing at Prentice and calling out, ‘You killed her, I know you killed Pamela. You did it.’

  At other times he seemed to point to people at random. Some feared for his sanity, but he was forgiven his odd behaviour. His advanced years and tragic past, combined with internment, explained his actions to most.

  Prentice himself continued to say nothing at all about the murder. He had perhaps found religion. He certainly gave religious books to several young boys who visited his makeshift surgery. Was it a genuine conversion, or a case of any reading matter in a time of shortage? Or was it evidence of a guilty conscience?

  The U.S. authorities were certainly never persuaded of Prentice’s moral standing. In August 1942, the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence agency, had opened a file on Prentice to investigate his possible collaboration with the Japanese in Peking. But they never managed to gather any firm evidence. Once again, Prentice had got away with it.

  And then, in August 1945, Weihsien was liberated by American forces as the Japanese scuttled out of China in defeat. The internees emerged malnourished and downtrodden. Imprisonment had broken many of the once wealthy and socially important inmates, those who had either been unable to leave China due to their official position or who had simply refused to read the writing on the wall of the Japanese invasion. Ripped from their lives, their grand houses and their elevated status in Peking and Tientsin, they had never adjusted to living in cramped barracks, using fetid toilets, queuing for meagre food rations, and clothing themselves in virtual rags. Many of the older prisoners had succumbed to disease, or simply given up and died.

  But not Werner. Despite being in his eighties, he walked out of the camp and took the train home to Peking. He moved back into his old house on Armour Factory Alley, where his loyal staff had stayed on in order to stop squatters taking possession.

  He found himself in a China that was irrevocably changed but still fighting a civil war. The Japanese were out of the picture, but the Nationalists and the Communists remained enemies. Peking had forgotten Pamela; the British Legation had forgotten Werner. He made several further enquiries to the Foreign Office and the legation, but they too were ignored. Werner’s findings were a potential embarrassment to the British diplomats and officials in China, who’d worked so strenuously to close down his daughter’s case and to discredit him. It was a pursuit into which they’d put far more effort than they ever did into solving the crime.

  And then he stopped contacting them. Had his tenacity to see Pamela’s killers brought to justice finally been exhausted? Or was it because of the death of Prentice, the man Werner believed most directly responsible for his daughter’s death?

  Prentice too had returned to Peking after Weihsien, and he died at his flat on Legation Street in July 1947, aged fifty-four. His relatively young age was perhaps Werner’s one consolation.

  Throughout the years of civil war, Werner stayed stubbornly on in Peking as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army began its prolonged retreat. Eventually it crumbled, and the remnants of its forces fled with their generalissimo to the island of Taiwan. In January 1949 Mao Tse-tung
’s forces claimed Peking for the Communists, and in October Werner became a resident of the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China. The new regime soon shuttered the brothels and opium dens and gambling joints of the Badlands for good.

  By January 1951 Werner was one of just seventy British subjects left in the city, and by October the number had dwindled to thirty. An obstinate, independent man, Werner could find no accommodation with China’s Communist rulers, and he finally decided to leave.

  He returned to an England he hardly recognised, having not been back there since 1917. He had no family left—his closest relative, his sister Alice, had died in 1935. E. T. C. Werner eventually passed away on 7 February 1954 and was buried at Ramsgate in Kent. It seems that nobody who’d known him was left alive to attend the short service.

  He had lived eighty-nine years. He had seen China as a dynasty with an emperor, as a republic with a generalissimo, and finally as a people’s republic with a dictator. On 16 February the Times of London ran a lengthy and detailed obituary of his life, noting his long diplomatic career, his prolific contribution to the West’s understanding of China, and his marriage to Gladys Nina Ravenshaw. Its final comment noted that ‘their adopted daughter Pamela was murdered at the age of 20 in Peking.’

  Pamela Werner’s body now lies somewhere deep under modern Beijing’s Second Ring Road, in what was once the British Cemetery. For these past seventy-odd years she has been what she claimed to have always been—alone.

  The Fox Tower still looms over Armour Factory Alley, and over what is left of the messy rookery of hutong that were the Peking Badlands. It looms over the ancient Tartar Wall, where Pamela was found that freezing morning in January 1937. Only very elderly Pekingers call it the Fox Tower now; only the very old talk of fox spirits. Few, if any, are left who remember the day that the mutilated body of a foreign girl was found at its base.