William Herbert Wallace
Background
Wallace, born in in Millom, Cumberland, was an agent for the Prudential Assurance Company and attended a meeting of the Liverpool Chess Club on the evening of the 19 January 1931. While there he was handed a message, which had been received by telephone about 25 minutes before he arrived. It requested that he call at an address at 25 Menlove Gardens East, Liverpool, the following evening to discuss insurance with a man who had given his name as “R.M. Qualtrough”.
The next day Wallace duly made his way by tramcar to the address in the south of the city at the time requested, only to discover that whilst there was a Menlove Gardens North, South and West, there was no East. Wallace made inquiries in a nearby newsagents and also spoke to a policeman on his beat, but neither were able to help him in his search for the address or the mysterious Qualtrough. He also called at 25 Menlove Gardens West, and asked several other passers-by in the neighbourhood for directions, but to no avail. After searching the district for about 45 minutes he returned home. There he found his wife Julia had been brutally beaten to death in their sitting room.
The Investigation
Arrested two weeks later, Wallace was questioned at some length. The police had discovered that the telephone box used by “Qualtrough” to make his call to the chess club was just four hundred yards from Wallace’s home, although the person in the cafe who took the call was quite certain it was not Wallace on the other end of the line.
The police were also convinced that it would have been possible, just, for Wallace to murder his wife and still have time to arrive at the spot where he boarded his tram. This they attempted to prove by having a fit young detective go through the motions of the murder and then sprint all the way to the tram stop, something an ailing 52-year-old Wallace could never have accomplished.
Forensic examination of the crime scene had revealed that Julia Wallace’s attacker was likely to have been heavily contaminated with her blood, given the brutal and frenzied nature of the assault. Wallace’s suit, which he had been wearing on the night of the murder, was examined closely but no trace of bloodstaining was found.
Trial and Appeal
Wallace consistently denied having anything to do with the crime, but was charged with murder and stood trial at Liverpool’s Crown Court. Despite the evidence against him being purely circumstantial, and the statement of a local milk delivery boy who was certain he had spoken to Julia Wallace only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch his tram Wallace was found guilty after an hour’s deliberation, and sentenced to death.
In an unprecedented move, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was “not supported by the weight of the evidence”, and Wallace walked free. The decision meant that the jury was wrong appeals are usually brought on the basis of bad decisions by the presiding judge at the original trial, or by the emergence of new evidence.
After his successful appeal, (1931) 23 Cr App Rep 32, Wallace returned to his job in insurance but ill health and a whispering campaign led to his retirement, and he moved to the Wirral, dying in 1933 in Clatterbridge Hospital.
No other person was charged with the murder and it remains officially unsolved.
In Popular Culture
Since the murder various people have investigated the case, a few convinced of Wallace’s guilt, most of the others of his innocence. Several features of the case have captured the imaginations of a host of crime-writers; Wallace’s stoic demeanor throughout, the chess-like quality of the puzzle, and the fact that almost every piece of evidence could be interpreted in two ways, pointing equally to Wallace’s guilt or innocence.
Quotes
‘This murder, I should imagine, must be almost unexampled in the annals of crime . . . murder so devised and arranged that nothing remains which will point to anyone as the murderer.’ (Mr. Justice Wright, summing-up in R v Wallace)
‘The Wallace murder had no key-move and ended, in fact, in stalemate. (Dorothy L. Sayers in The Anatomy of Murder)
‘It was planned with extreme care and extraordinary imagination. Either the murderer was Wallace or it wasn. If it wasn, then here at last is the perfect murder.’ (James Agate in Ego 6)
lmost every fact in the evidence was accepted by both prosecution and defence; but every fact could be interpreted in two ways. (John Rowland in The Wallace Case)
hoever killed Mrs Wallace attained a distinction accorded to few murderers. His was the perfect crime, undetected, unexplained, motiveless, unavenged. (Winifred Duke in Six Trials)
he case began to assume the unique character for which it is famous; it was not so much that the weight of the evidence swung evenly from one side to the other, it was that the entire evidence pointed equally convincingly in both directions. (F. Tennyson Jesse in Checkmate)
‘[The Wallace case] is more than a classic, it is the classic of criminology.’ (John Brophy in The Meaning of Murder)
… as a mental exercise, as a challenge to one powers of deduction and analysis, the Wallace murder is in a class by itself. It has all the maddening, frustrating fascination of a chess problem that ends in perpetual check. … Any set of circumstances that is extracted from it will readily support two incompatible hypotheses; they will be equally consistent with innocence and guilt. It is pre-eminently the case where everything is cancelled out by something else. (Edgar Lustgarten in Verdict in Dispute)
he Wallace case is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries … I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn have done it, and neither could anyone else. … The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable. (Raymond Chandler, in Raymond Chandler Speaking)
`Still unsolved, fascinating its permutations absolutely typical of the 1930s. Couldn’t have happened at any other time, not in precisely the way it did happen… What is interesting is that the evidence, such as it was, could support either the prosecution or the defence depending on how you chose to look at it. (P. D. James in The Murder Room, through character Conrad Ackroyd).
he Wallace case of 1931 is regarded as the classic English whodunnit, a labyrinth of clues and false trails leading everywhere except, it seems, to the identity of the murderer… The setting is wintrily provincial, the milieu lower middle-class, the style threadbare domestic. J.B. Priestley’s fog-filled Liverpool remembrance of “trams going whining down long sad roads” is the quintessence of it. Events turn tantalisingly on finical questions of time and distance; knuckle-headed police jostle with whistling street urchins for star billing, while at the centre of the drama stands the scrawny, inscrutable figure of the accused man, William Herbert Wallace, the Man from The Pru…’ (Roger Wilkes, editor, The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes, 2005)
The real murderer?
Crime writer Jonathan Goodman made inquiries which led him to a man who had worked with Wallace at the Prudential. This man had been sacked for stealing money and he had a record of various petty crimes. He knew Julia Wallace well. Goodman mentioned him, but not by name, in his book The Killing of Julia Wallace.
In 1980, Roger Wilkes, a news editor, investigated the case for a radio programme. He learned that Goodman’s suspect had given the police an alibi for the time of Julia’s murder. The alibi had been a woman to whom he was engaged, but, after being jilted, she swore to Wallace’s solicitor that the alibi had been false. Wilkes also discovered that, on the night of the murder, the man had visited a local garage. He’d used a high-pressure hose to wash down his car and a mechanic at the garage had noticed that one of his gloves was soaked in blood.
Wilkes’s book named the suspect as Richard Gordon Parry, a junior employee at Wallace’s insurance firm. Parry was a petty criminal aged 22 who was always short of money. Wilkes’s case is that Parry knew that Wallace’s insurance takings for the day would have been in a cash box at Wallace’s home. Since he also knew Mrs Wallace personally it would have been no trouble to visit her on some pretext once Wallace had been lured out of the house by means of the phone call sending him to a non-existent address. The murder of Julia Wallace for the insurance takings was somewhat in vain as there was very little in the cash-box that day. Parry was seen by the police as part of their investigations but given a false alibi by his girlfriend.
The case against Parry is much stronger than that against Wallace, and ascribes a more convincing motive (although there are still some logical flaws in it[citation needed]). There was witness evidence (suppressed at the time by the police) of a blood-stained glove found in Parry’s car on the night of the murder, when he took his car to a local garage for cleaning. The evidence from the man who cleaned the car was deliberately suppressed by the police at the time. Wilkes argues that there was, moreover, no motive or reason for Wallace to kill his own wife, and that he was charged because the immense publicity surrounding the case impelled the police to get a conviction at any cost. Parry died in 1980 without admitting any involvement in the crime.
Fiction
P.D. James’s 1982 crime fiction novel The Skull Beneath the Skin parallels the fictional murder of Lady Ralston with the real-life Wallace case. In the novel Lady Ralston dies a similar death to Julia Wallace (battered face) which leads the police to suspect her husband, Sir George Ralston. The presiding officer refers to the Wallace case to suggest that we should learn from Herbert’s appeal that it is not always wise to initially place guilt upon the husband. James also directly refers to the Wallace case in The Murder Room, a book in her Adam Dalgliesh series.
Television
A highly-regarded drama-documentary, Who killed Julia Wallace?, was made by Yorkshire TV in 1975, with Eric Longworth playing William Herbert Wallace.
Another TV drama based on the case, The Man from the Pru, was made in 1990, starring Jonathan Pryce, Anna Massey, Susannah York and Tom Georgeson. It strongly hints at Parry’s guilt.
See also
Rex v Wallace
Miscarriages of justice
References
^ The Murder Room, 2003, by P.D. James, Faber and Faber Limited, London, ISBN 0-571-21822-9, pp.10-12.
^ The Killing of Julia Wallace, 1969, by Jonathan Goodman, Harrap, ISBN 0747230196, ISBN 978-0747230199.
^ Unsolved Murders and Mysteries, edited by John Canning, ISBN 0708882811, ISBN 978-0708882818 Wallace story written by Colin Wilson
^ Wallace: The Final Verdict, 1984, by Roger Wilkes, Grafton, ISBN 0586064524, ISBN 978-0586064528
^ born 12 January 1909 in Liverpool, died 14 April 1980 in Llangernyw, North Wales
External links
Verdict in Dispute by Edgar Lustgarten, online copy at The Internet Archive
Chess and the Wallace Murder Case by Edward Winter at www.chesshistory.com
Inside story: 29 Wolverton Street Daily Telegraph article, 12 May 2001
Riddle of the Man from the Pru Liverpool Echo newspaper link
Juliawallace at www.geocities.com
Life After Trial Murder and William Herbert Wallace Part 1 – Trivia-Library.com at www.trivia-library.com
The Man from the Pru at the Internet Movie Database – TV drama based on the case.
Julia and William Wallace’s grave at Anfield Cemetery
29 Wolverton Street, Anfield at Google Streetview
Categories: 1878 births | 1933 deaths | 1931 crimes | Unsolved murders in the United Kingdom | Murder in England | People from Millom | Liverpool murder cases | Overturned convictions in the United Kingdom | English prisoners sentenced to death | People acquitted of murderHidden categories: Articles to be merged from November 2009 | All articles to be merged | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from January 2010
I am a professional writer from Cheap On Sales, which contains a great deal of information about $keyword_li, welcome to visit!
Processing your request, Please wait....
