William Herbert Wallace

William Herbert Wallace (29 August 1878 – 26 February 1933) was convicted in 1931 of the murder of his wife Julia in their home in Wolverton Street in Liverpool's Anfield district. His conviction was later overturned by the Court Of Criminal Appeal, the first instance in British legal history where an appeal had been allowed after re-examination of evidence.

The case, with its strange background, has long been the subject of speculation and has generated many books, being regarded internationally as a classic murder mystery.

Background

Wallace, born in in Millom, Cumbria 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. In other words, the jury was wrong — appeals are usually done on the basis of bad decisions by the presiding judge of 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 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 "Rex 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’t. If it wasn’t, then here at last is the perfect murder.' (James Agate in "Ego 6")

‘Almost 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")

‘Whoever killed Mrs Wallace attained a distinction accorded to few murderers. His was the perfect crime, undetected, unexplained, motiveless, unavenged.’ (Winifred Duke in "Six Trials")

‘... as a mental exercise, as a challenge to one’s 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")

‘The Wallace case is the nonpareil of all murder mysteries ... I call it the impossible murder because Wallace couldn’t have done it, and neither could anyone else. ... The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable.’ (Raymond Chandler, in "Raymond Chandler Speaking")

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". ["The Killing of Julia Wallace", 1969, by Jonathan Goodman, Harrap, ISBN 0747230196, ISBN 978-0747230199.]

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. ["Unsolved Murders and Mysteries", edited by John Canning, ISBN 0708882811, ISBN 978-0708882818 — Wallace story written by Colin Wilson]

Wilkes's book ["Wallace: The Final Verdict", 1984, by Roger Wilkes, Grafton, ISBN 0586064524, ISBN 978-0586064528] 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 girl-friend.

The case against Parry is much stronger than that against Wallace, and ascribes a more convincing motive. 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 his 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 Herbert (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 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.

ee also

*Rex v Wallace
*Miscarriages of justice

References

External links

* [http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/wallace.html Chess and the Wallace Murder Case by Edward Winter ] at www.chesshistory.com
* [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-entertainment/echo-entertainment/2008/04/07/riddle-of-man-from-the-pru-100252-20728447/ "Riddle of the Man from the Pru"] "Liverpool Echo" newspaper link
* [http://www.geocities.com/stevenhortonuk/juliawallace.html Juliawallace ] at www.geocities.com
* [http://www.trivia-library.com/b/life-after-trial-murder-and-william-herbert-wallace-part-1.htm Life After Trial Murder and William Herbert Wallace Part 1 - Trivia-Library.com ] at www.trivia-library.com
* - TV drama based on the case.