It has been given various descriptors—including “a perfect crime” and “a classic locked-room mystery”—but when I heard of the case and learned that mystery writer Raymond Chandler had designated it an “impossible murder” (Hunt and Thompson 2019, 37), it seemed to have my name written on it. After all, fellow investigative writer Massimo Polidoro once dubbed me “The Detective of the Impossible.” At length, I determined to “reopen” the Wallace case.
The whodunit fascinated, among other mystery writers, Dorothy L. Sayers in addition to sparking numerous true-crime articles and books as well as investigative documentaries. It had also made British legal history: It was the first instance—since the Court of Criminal Appeal was established in 1907—in which appellate judges concluded the jury had made a completely wrong decision in a death-penalty case and overturned the conviction (Goodman [1969] 2017, 251).
The Killing
William Herbert Wallace lived with his wife, Julia, in a poor district of Liverpool, England, named Anfield. On the day of her homicide—January 20, 1931—Herbert was a fifty-two-year-old insurance representative and Julia a housewife, her “age believed 52 years” also—according to his signed statement after the murder (Wallace 1931). (But Gannon [2012, 17] cites evidence she was much older.) The two had married somewhat late in life and were childless. Julia was a talented pianist, and her husband often accompanied her quite amateurishly on the violin while they sang duets (Goodman [1969] 2017, 21–22). He was also a science hobbiest—with a home chemistry lab and microscope—having once been a part-time assistant lecturer in chemistry at the Liverpool Technical College. As well, he was a chess enthusiast (Goodman [1969] 2017, 21–22, 28, 101–102).
On the fateful date—after his day’s work, dinner at home with Julia, and then a fruitless attempt to keep an appointment with a prospective client—Wallace arrived again back home. He discovered to his surprise that he was locked out, but when his next-door neighbors, the Johnsons, saw him seemingly perplexed, he tried the back (kitchen) door again. “It opens now,” he said. He walked inside but did not see or hear his wife. Oddly, he first went upstairs and looked around, noticing a bed with the covering pulled off (probably just from Julia’s housework). He returned to search downstairs and, finally, striking a match, saw his wife on the floor of the last room he searched, the parlor, in front of its gas fire. Feeling her hand, he concluded that she was dead and noted his mackintosh was lying on the floor underneath her bludgeoned body. To the Johnsons, who had entered behind him, Wallace spoke with notably little emotion: “They’ve finished her,” he said. “Look at her brains” (qtd. in Goodman [1969] 2017, 41).
Wallace (1931) asked Mr. Johnson to go for the police and a doctor. In his statement, he wrote that he discovered afterward about four pounds in currency had been removed from the household cash box kept in the kitchen. He added, “but I am not sure of the amount.” Also in the kitchen, a cabinet in which he kept “photographic stuff” had been broken open (Wallace 1931). When the police arrived and searched the house and surroundings, they noted there was no sign of breaking and entering, leading them to theorize Julia must have admitted her killer.
Early on, police were suspicious of Wallace’s fruitless business appointment (discussed presently) and began to consider him their prime suspect. Noting the absence of any blood spatter on his clothes, investigators theorized he might have worn the mackintosh (which was his) over his naked body during the fierce attack, then washed up after, before heading off on his business errand.
However, I have developed a very different idea: The killer, having conducted many “thought experiments” in advance, quickly threw the mackintosh over Julia’s head and shoulders and, forcing her down, struck her on the head repeatedly with his weapon (discussed later). Thus, the garment was not used to cover him (a protective measure full of problems) but instead to cover her and so confine the spatter in the first place. (As far as I have learned, this critically different hypothesis has never before found its way into print.) Unfortunately, police mishandled the raincoat—removing it from its position partially under the body for inspection, then placing it beside the body for the police photographer (Goodman [1969] 2017, 58–60).
True-crime writer Jonathan Goodman ([1969] 2017, 46) called the raincoat “probably the most controversial article of clothing in the annals of crime.” There was blood inside one sleeve and a burned edge that later suggested to prosecutor J.R. Bishop (1931) that the killer may have attempted to destroy it.
Further to the “mackintosh theory,” an upstairs bathroom water closet bore on its top rim “a bloodstain which, there is no doubt at all, was of the same period of time as the murdered woman’s death” (Bishop 1931). The blood presence, I note, suggests the killer may have gripped the rim to steady himself when he stepped inside. It does indicate a tall man, and Wallace stood six feet two inches tall. There was also a blood clot in the porcelain lavatory bowl, believed by the medical examiner to also be “an indication that the murderer had washed himself in the bathroom before leaving the house” (Goodman [1969] 2017, 20, 60–61).
There was, to my mind, an even more telling blood clue. While the blood in the lavatory and on the water closet pointed only to an unknown killer, blood elsewhere seemed to point specifically to Wallace. Police discovered four one-pound banknotes in an ornamental vase in a bedroom upstairs, and on one of these there was a smear of human blood, as from a finger or thumb (Goodman [1969] 2017, 131, 288). This suggests that Wallace, a frugal man in Depression-era Liverpool, in staging a fake burglary of his premises, decided neither to place extra bloody cash (presumably from the cash box) in his pocket nor destroy it. He could retrieve it from the vase later, not taking valuable time to sort the stained from the unstained bills at the moment. But the police discovery of the hidden bills was extremely revealing.
Prosecutor Bishop (1931) learned that the cash box had been “on a high shelf where one would not expect to look for a cash-box.” Additionally suspicious was the fact that the thief/killer had replaced the inside tray, closed the box, and returned it to the high shelf—unlikely behavior for a thief indeed! It could instead indicate a lapse in thinking if Wallace staged the “robbery.”
Wallace’s ‘Appointment’
Wallace’s alibi—the unlikely after-work appointment—came about in a curious way. The day before the murder, that is, on the evening of January 19, Wallace visited his club—for a game, something he did infrequently. (He attended only about once per fortnight and had not been there since before Christmas.) It was therefore unusual—to say the least—that someone he did not know had unexpectedly called for him there. Club Captain Samuel Beattie took the phone call.
Beattie told the caller he would relay the message if possible but that Wallace “may not be here tonight,” adding, “I suggest you ring up later.”
“Oh no, I can’t. I’m too busy,” the voice said. “I have my girl’s twenty-first birthday on, and I want to do something for her in the way of his business. I want to see him particularly.” He stated he wanted Wallace to come see him at his home the next night at 7:30 p.m.
Beattie took the man’s name, “R.M. Qualtrough,” and address, “25 Menlove Gardens East,” which he wrote on the back of an envelope. When Wallace later arrived at the club, he took the note and, putting it in his pocket, said he did not know anyone by that name but would keep the appointment tomorrow anyway (Goodman [1969] 2017, 19–22).
In investigating the mystery telephone call, police suspected Wallace had himself cleverly phoned the cafe where the chess club meetings were held. They thought he had been careful to disguise his voice when giving his message to Beattie, “because his normal voice would have been recognized” (Bishop 1931). Investigators found that three telephone personnel (two operators and a supervisor) agreed that the voice of the caller in question had been “quite ordinary,” while Beattie had described the voice as particularly “strong and gruff.” Moreover, in a stroke of luck, the very telephone box from which the call had been made was identified: It stood just 400 yards from Wallace’s house! He could have walked to the phone, made the call to the chess club, then—the stop being just twenty-five yards away from the telephone—taken a tram to the club (Goodman [1969] 2017, 77–79)!
As it happened, the appointment did prove a ruse. After Wallace had finished work the next day (January 20, the day of the murder), he went home and had dinner with Julia, then set off on his quest for 25 Menlove Gardens East. In his travels by train and on foot, he queried a surprising number of people as to the location, but everyone told him there was no such place, including a tram inspector, policeman, and others. There was a Menlove Gardens but no Menlove Gardens East. Prosecutor Bishop (1931) assessed Wallace’s actions:
He says that having been unable to find this address, he became suspicious and felt that something was wrong, and so he returned home. Why should he become suspicious that something was wrong at home because some address that had been given to him turned out to be wrong? I suggest that he, in fact, knew what was wrong, and that the time had come for him to make the discovery [of his wife’s body]. He says he hurried home, but as a matter of fact, he was seen in conversation with some man within a very few yards of his home, apparently standing and talking.
The prosecution believed he was actually waiting until he could meet one or two persons who would go into the house with him to make the discovery (Bishop 1931). They believed his trouble with the back door lock—which had nothing wrong with it, although he claimed it would stick sometimes (Wallace 1931)—was part of his delaying tactic.
In assessing Wallace’s unusual alibi, the police focused carefully on the timeline. Their tests involving witnesses (notably a milk delivery boy) indicated Wallace could not have left the house any later than 6:49 p.m. They deduced that Julia had already been murdered by that time, and they found a window of opportunity, for Wallace as killer, of some eighteen minutes duration—quite long enough. Unfortunately, any estimate of the time of death was questionable, because the medical expert declined to measure such elementals as the temperature of the body or that of the parlor in which she had lain (Goodman [1969] 2017, 48–49, 119).
A Game of Chess
Wallace’s alibi seemed to have him moving about like a chess piece during the time of his wife’s murder. Sherlock Holmes had a pointed opinion of chess-playing: As he observed to his companion, it is “one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind” (Doyle 1930, 1320). The Liverpool public seemed to agree, interpreting Wallace’s being a chess player as evidence that he would be able to devise a murder plan more cunning than that of the average person. Goodman ([1969] 2017, 102) states he was reportedly “a master player; a mind as brilliant as it was perverted, trained to think ahead to the next moves, and to anticipate the moves which his opponent would make.” Strikingly, in his diary, several days before the murder, Wallace had written (though it was a bit garbled): “Work out some definite scheme of study of properly planned and rigorously adhered to each particular difficulty consistently tackled and overcome.” Gannon (2012, 30) concedes it could “mark his determination to plan the perfect murder.”
While Goodman himself thought that Wallace’s chess skill was exaggerated, Wallace had additional skills. Recall that, not unlike Sherlock, he also had a mind for chemistry and microscopy. These could have proved useful in his planning—with regard, say, to the detectability of minute droplets of blood spatter. None of this is direct proof of his guilt, but popular sentiment was still against him. One spectator at court made a remark that punned on prosecutor Bishop’s surname: “Wallace, the chess-murderer, got rid of his queen, but now he’s having trouble with a Bishop” (Goodman [1969] 2017, 131).
Wallace’s “cadaverous” appearance (Wilkes 1984, 13), and even his distant manner, worked against him. One observer of the trial, crime writer F. Tennyson Jesse, stated: “The jury did not like the man, or his manner which could have been either stoicism or callousness. They did not understand his lack of expression … and they knew it hid something. It could have hidden sorrow or guilt and they made their choice” (qtd. in Hunt and Thompson 2019, 35–36). There being only highly circumstantial evidence and a lack of any clear motive, at the end of the four-day trial the jury deliberated just one hour before finding William Herbert Wallace guilty and sentencing him to go to the gallows. After the case was overturned on appeal, the police declined to try Wallace again, and he died just two years later. He was buried beside Julia (Goodman [1969] 2017, 251–271).
Crime writers have cast about for another suspect. In 1969, Jonathan Goodman pounced on Richard Gordon Parry, whom Wallace had once caused to be fired. Police subjected him to “the most vigorous investigation, even to the point of examining seams of his clothes for traces of his blood” (Wilkes 1984, 159). His alibi was imperfect; the woman who told police he was with her for the evening admitted that did not include the exact time of the murder, but she remained steadfast in her defense of him until his death in 1980 (Goodman [1969] 2017, 300–304). Parry was named again by Roger Wilkes, who admittedly relied on his “gut feeling” for his speculative book Wallace: The Final Verdict (Wilkes 1984, 11). Yet again, John Gannon (2012, 174–191) complicatedly theorized that Wallace persuaded Parry to make the phone call and blackmailed one Joseph Caleb Marsden into murdering Julia—who was imagined as having a sexual relationship with him. However, Marsden appears to have been only an acquaintance of the Wallaces (Hunt and Thompson 2019, 36–37).
Whether Wallace or some other person murdered Julia, there was much mystery over the missing murder weapon. Police believed it was an iron bar, fifteen inches long and a half inch in diameter, kept by the gas stove and used for raking spent matches and cigarette butts from underneath. It would have been most convenient to an empty-handed killer! After learning of its existence from a former once-weekly charwoman who detailed its appearance at trial (Wilkes 1984, 117), police searched in vain for it—even outside the house and along streets Wallace had walked in supposedly searching for the mystery caller. Goodman ([1969] 2017, 72) concedes Wallace would not have wanted the iron bar found, because “it would provide damaging evidence against him.” If no murder weapon was found, that would seem to suggest it belonged to the supposed robber-killer. The iron bar finally came to light in the mid-1930s when the stove was removed by later tenants, in converting the house to electricity. It was lying in a narrow gap between the wall and hearth, but nothing further is now known of it. Although it is not impossible to have accidentally found its way into the gap, I believe that was Wallace’s long-lost hiding place, and he made a mistake regarding it. After police learned of the bar, he brought more suspicion on himself by disclaiming any knowledge of such a rod (Goodman [1969] 2017, 71–73, 279).
Paranormalities?
Unsurprisingly, some paranormal claims have surfaced in the case but provide little more than amusement. When new tenants at 29 Wolverton Street tired of visitors peering in their front window, lured by reputed sightings of Julia’s ghost, they prepared a surprise for ghost seekers: a large doll positioned as Julia had lain in the parlor, its throat cut, and sawdust scattered on the floor. It unnerved at least one young curious police constable! A subsequent tenant, apparently unaware of the place’s notoriety, lived there for an indefinite time undisturbed (Goodman [1969] 2017, 311).
Among crank calls to police came one from an astrologer, who offered assistance from the stars in learning the murderer’s identity, and one from a faith healer, who wanted to try to revive Julia. Both offers were declined. A “spiritualist lady” had more success, even claiming to have gotten through to the alleged Other Side. She reported having heard Julia’s disembodied voice, speaking more in sorrow than in anger: “Herbert, how could you?” (Goodman [1969] 2017, 70, 103–104).
Then there was a legend that circulated in Liverpool, picked up by Goodman in his research ([1969] 2017, 307): Supposedly, “Julia, the day before she died, pleaded with a neighbor for protection—she had a feeling, you see, a premonition if you like, that her husband wanted her out of the way.” The story is tantalizing, and it is unfortunate that it comes to us without any real documentation, because such feelings are not uncommon in homicide cases.
Conclusions
In the final analysis, I think we can dispense with the usual extraneous suspect, Mr. Parry. To those who cannot find a motive for William Herbert Wallace, I suggest he may have tired of being corralled into his wife’s sphere of performing duets. I suspect he wished to be left alone with his science experiments—a useful irony if science gave him the idea of thwarting the estimation of time of death by carrying out his attack on her so as to leave her body right in front of the gas fire. Finally, Julia’s brutal bludgeoning seems to speak of personal animosity.
It may appear that I was suspicious of Wallace from the outset. I must have been. I was after the killer, and his cleverness was too obvious—at every turn. I have saved until the end a very interesting final clue suggestive of his guilt. On the fatal day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, a police constable named James Rothwell was cycling to work. He saw Wallace, whom he knew, out making his insurance rounds. Wallace’s face was pale, drawn, and haggard, and he seemed “unusually depressed.” He appeared to Rothwell to have been crying and, in fact, had his head down, while dabbing at his eyes with his coat sleeve (Wilkes 1984, 35, 95; Gannon 2012, 55). This otherwise mysterious distress, so close to Julia’s impending murder, seems a telling forecast of what Wallace—and only he—knew was coming.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Julia Lavarnway, SI managing editor, and Tim Binga, director of CFI Libraries, for help in obtaining source material.
References
Bishop, J.R. 1931. Text of the Assistant Prosecuting Solicitor’s indictment speech, Tuesday, February 3. (Reproduced in full in Goodman [1969] 2017, 127–131.)
Doyle, Arthur Conan. 1930. The adventure of the retired colourman. In The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1312–1323.
Gannon, John. 2012. The Killing of Julia Wallace: Liverpool’s Most Enigmatic and Brutal Murder Finally Solved? Gloucestershire, Great Britain: Amberley Publishing.
Goodman, Jonathan. (1969) 2017. The Killing of Julia Wallace. Great Britain: George C. Harrap & Co. Ltd. Reprinted: Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press. (Except as otherwise noted, information for this article has been taken from this highly regarded source.)
Hunt, Amber, and Emily G. Thompson. 2019. Unsolved Murders: True Crime Cases Uncovered. New York, NY: DK Publishing.
Wallace, William Herbert. 1931. Signed statement volunteered to Detective-Inspector Gold about midnight after the murder, Tuesday, January 20, in Goodman ([1969] 2017, 313–314).
Wilkes, Roger. 1984. Wallace: The Final Verdict. London, UK: The Bodley Head.