Murder of Julia Wallace

 

William Herbert Wallace (29 August 1878 – 26 February 1933) was an Englishman convicted in 1931 of the murder of his wife Julia in their home in Wolverton Street in Liverpool's Anfield district. Wallace's 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

William Herbert Wallace was born in Millom, Cumberland, in 1878. He had a younger brother and sister. On leaving school at fourteen he began training as a draper's assistant in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire. On finishing his apprenticeship he obtained a position in Manchester with Messrs Whiteway Laidlaw and Company, outfitters to the British Armed Forces and the Colonial, Indian and Diplomatic Services. In 1903, after five years' service, Wallace obtained a transfer to the company's branch in Calcutta, India, where he remained for two years. On the suggestion of his brother, Joseph, who lived in Shanghai, in 1905 Wallace sought another transfer to Whiteway Laidlaw's branch in that city.

A recurrent kidney complaint resulted in Wallace resigning his position and returning to England in 1907, where his left kidney was removed at Guy's Hospital. Little is recorded of his life after this time, until he obtained a position working for the Liberal Party in Harrogate, rising to the post of election agent in 1911. During his time in Harrogate, he met Julia Dennis (28 April 1861 – 20 January 1931), and they were married there in March 1914. All early sources suggested that Julia was approximately the same age as Wallace, but in 2001 James Murphy demonstrated from her original birth certificate that she was actually seventeen years older than he was. Julia's father was a ruined alcoholic farmer from near Northallerton.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the position of Liberal election agent in Harrogate was discontinued, owing to the suspension of elections and a parliamentary truce, and Wallace once again found himself looking for a job. Through the help of his father, he obtained a position as collections agent with the Prudential Assurance Company in Liverpool. The Wallaces moved there in 1915, settling in the district of Anfield. During the 1920s, Wallace supplemented his comfortable but mundane existence as collections agent by lecturing part-time in chemistry at Liverpool Technical College. His hobbies included chemistry, botany, and chess, and he learned to play the violin to enable him to accompany Julia, who was an accomplished pianist, in "musical evenings" at their home at 29 Wolverton Street, Anfield.

The crime

Wallace, aged 52, attended a meeting of the Liverpool Central Chess Club on the evening of Monday 19 January 1931, to play a scheduled chess game. 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, at 7.30pm the following evening to discuss insurance with a man who had given his name as "R.M. Qualtrough".

The next night Wallace duly made his way by tramcar to the south of the city at the time requested, only to discover that while there were Menlove Gardens North, South and West, there was no East. Wallace made inquiries in a nearby newsagent's and also spoke to a policeman on his beat, but nobody he asked was 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 neighborhood for directions, but to no avail.

After searching the district for about 45 minutes, Wallace returned home. Neighbors John and Florence Johnston were heading out for the evening when they encountered Wallace in the back alleyway, complaining that he could not gain entry to his home at either the front or the back. While they watched, Wallace tried the back door again, which now opened. Inside he found his wife Julia had been brutally beaten to death in their sitting room.

The investigation

Up to his arrest two weeks later, Wallace made two voluntary statements but was never intensively questioned by the police although he was required to attend CID headquarters every day and was asked specific questions about whether the Wallaces had a maid, why he had asked the man who had taken the telephone message at the chess club to be specific about the time he took it, and whether he had spoken to anyone in the street on his way back to his house from his abortive attempt to find Mr. Qualtrough. The police had evidence that the telephone box used by "Qualtrough" to make his call to the chess club was situated just 400 yards (370 m) from Wallace's home, although the person in the café who took the call was quite certain it was not Wallace on the other end of the line. Nevertheless, the police began to suspect that "Qualtrough" and Wallace were the same man. Wallace's legal team conducted timing tests that showed it was possible for someone to have made the call, catch a tram and arrive at the chess club when Wallace did, and it was equally possible for Wallace to arrive at the same time by boarding at the stop he claimed he had used, nowhere near the telephone box.

The police were also convinced that it would have been possible 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 probably could not have accomplished. The original assessment of the time of death, around 8 pm, was also later changed to just after 6.30 pm, although there was no additional evidence on which to base the earlier timing.

Forensic examination of the crime scene had revealed that Julia'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 bloodstains were found. The police formed the theory that a mackintosh, which was inexplicably found under Julia's corpse, had been used by a naked Wallace to shield himself from blood spatter while committing the crime. Examination of the bath and drains revealed that they had not been recently used, and there was no trace of blood there either, apart from a single tiny clot in the toilet pan, the origin of which could not be established.

Trial and appeal

Wallace consistently denied having anything to do with the crime, but was charged with murder and stood trial at Liverpool Assizes in 22 April 1931. After conducting a secret mock-trial in London, which unanimously found Wallace not guilty, the Prudential Staff Union, in a unique act, sponsored his defense. 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 only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch his tram — Wallace was found guilty after an hour's deliberation by the Liverpool jury, and sentenced to death.

F. J. Salfield, who was present in the courtroom, commented, "what probably harmed [Wallace] most at his trial was his extraordinary composure. Like every other observer, I found enigmatic his seeming indifference to his surroundings. Shock? Callousness? Stoicism? Confidence? We shall never know.”

In an unprecedented move, in May 1931 the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was "not supported by the weight of the evidence", and Wallace was set 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.

No other person was charged with the murder and it remains officially unsolved. A further mock-trial, conducted by the Merseyside Medico-Legal Society in 1977, presided over by Mr. Justice Lawson, also found Wallace not guilty.

Later life and death

After his successful appeal, Wallace returned to his job in insurance but public opinion in the areas where he lived and worked was strongly of the view that he had been guilty and had 'got away with it'. Many of Wallace's previous customers shunned him; he was subjected to hate mail and physical threats and had to take a clerical job at his employer's head office. At the same time, he moved to a bungalow in Bromborough, Merseyside. On 26 February 1933, less than two years after the appeal, and still employed by Prudential, William Herbert Wallace died aged 54 from uraemia and pyelonephritis at Clatterbridge Hospital. He was buried in Anfield Cemetery.

The Wallaces' grave in Anfield Cemetery

In the 1960s, crime writer Jonathan Goodman made inquiries that led him to a junior employee at Prudential who had worked with Wallace. This man had done some of Wallace's collection work for him when the older man had been ill in 1928. Wallace had then had first-hand evidence that the younger man did not pay in all the premiums which he had collected. Yet for whatever reason, Wallace did not seem to have passed this information on to his employer. About a year later, the young man left Prudential to join another insurance firm. Wallace was later told that while this man had not been sacked he had left under something of a cloud, his father making up some of his son's shortfall. The young man was also acquainted with Julia. Goodman mentioned him, but not by name, in his book The Killing of Julia Wallace.

Roger Wilkes, 1981

Roger Wilkes, an independent radio news editor, investigated the case for a radio programme to be broadcast on the 50th anniversary of the crime in early 1981. Wilkes learned that Goodman's suspect, a man named Richard Gordon Parry, had given the police an alibi for the time of Julia's murder – a woman to whom he was engaged. However, after Wallace's death and after being jilted by the suspect, the woman offered to swear to Wallace's solicitor that the alibi had been false. Wilkes also discovered that, on the night of the murder, Parry had visited a local garage where he had used a high-pressure hose to wash down his car. A mechanic at the garage had noticed that one of his gloves was soaked in blood. Wilkes attempted to track down Parry, only to learn that he had died but a few months previously.

In 1931, Parry was a spoilt young man of 22 who sustained a lavish lifestyle by spending recklessly. Wilkes claims that Parry knew that Wallace's insurance takings for the day would have been in a cash box at his home. Since he also personally knew Wallace's wife, 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. Julia's murder for the insurance takings was somewhat in vain as there was very little in the cash box that day. Parry was visited by the police as part of their inquiries but was given a false alibi by his girlfriend. Wilkes went ahead and named Parry in his radio programme, and later spelled out his case in a book called Wallace: The Final Verdict.

The case against Parry is much stronger than that against Wallace, and ascribes a more convincing motive. There was witness evidence of a blood-stained glove found in Parry's car on the night of the murder, when he took his car to the 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. However, when Goodman and his friend Richard Whittington-Egan confronted him on his London doorstep in 1966, Parry displayed an astonishingly detailed knowledge of the case, and was aware of the deaths of several obscure witnesses connected with it.

Parry may have been suspected long before Goodman or Wilkes began their investigations. In 1934 author Winifred Duke made oblique reference to the name of the killer as 'Harris', a common Welsh surname which is a cognate of Parry.

P. D. James, 2013

Writing in The Sunday Times Magazine in October 2013, P. D. James refers to the conclusions of Goodman and Wilkes, but speculates that Parry made the "Qualtrough" call as a practical joke in retaliation for Wallace's having reported Parry to their employers for dishonesty. She concludes that Wallace did in fact murder his wife and speculates that the murder weapon was an iron poker with which Wallace struck his victim, having first stripped and covered himself with the mackintosh found at the scene, spattered with Julia's blood, and that it was entirely possible for him to have done so within a reconstructed timeline of the events of that evening. She believes that "in the end justice was done, if only the fallible justice of men". This reading of the evidence must, however, be set against the fact that Wallace probably never reported his experience of Parry's dishonesty to their mutual employer and that Parry was not formally dismissed either at the time, or later. There is no evidence that Wallace attempted to use this information to coerce or blackmail Parry.

Ann Carlton, 2017

In 2017, Ann Carlton, in her book Penny Lane and All That: Memories of Liverpool, describes how her father—the late Sir Stanley Holmes—visited Wallace in his prison cell, at Wallace's request, after he had been convicted. Holmes was then a teenager working for Liverpool Corporation and was friendly with the sons of Wallace's regular chess opponent, a Mr Caird. According to Carlton, Holmes said that Wallace revealed the name of the man he thought was the murderer; it was a man who Holmes knew from Lister Drive School. Holmes stated the suspect was clever but a bad lot, and that some years after the murder he had seen the suspect in the dock; accused and convicted over a different matter. Speculating about Wallace's motives in asking to see her father, Carlton wrote that he may have suspected that the city's local government establishment wanted to protect the son and nephew of one of their own, and that the case against him was brought to do just that. She added that she believed that the young man her parents knew and thought was a bad lot - and very possibly a murderer – was Parry.

Antony M. Brown, 2018

Author Antony M. Brown surveyed all the published theories, both evidentially and logically, in his 2018 book Move to Murder, before concluding that, on balance, a previously-unpublished theory "is the best explanation for one of the most puzzling murder cases in British criminal history." The new theory, first posited in 2008 by Merseyside-based researcher Rod Stringer, holds that Parry was indeed the brains behind a distraction burglary, which turned to murder when his unknown accomplice was confronted by Julia after rifling the cash box – after first gaining entry to 29 Wolverton Street on the pretext he was “Qualtrough”.