‘Man from the Pru’ whose hobby was playing chess; he was rumoured to be a Grandmaster. His wife Julia was equally ‘proper’, and their neighbours in Liverpool believed they were the very picture of happiness.
One night at his chess club, Wallace received a message that a man named Qualtrough had called, asking Wallace to visit his home on a ‘matter of business’, 6 km (4 miles) away at 25 Menlove Gardens East, Mossley Hill. Wallace had never heard of Qualtrough, but presuming the address was near Menlove Avenue, where he had clients, he travelled to the location – only to discover that no such man and no such place existed. When he got home, later that night, Wallace discovered his wife dead in the parlour. She had been bludgeoned.
The Julia Wallace case was the real-life whodunit that captured imaginations in the Britain of the 1930s. To this day it has never been solved. But after years of painstaking research one man thinks he may have finally solved the case.
John Gannon, a crime writer from Liverpool who wrote the book The Killing of Julia Wallace, was the first person to be given access to the files of both Merseyside Police and William Wallace’s solicitor, Hector Munro. He says:
At the time of the investigation the police identified that the anonymous caller had used a telephone box only 400 yards away from the Wallace’s home. The police became convinced that the whole thing had been an elaborate plan by Wallace to murder his wife. She was last seen alive ten minutes before his alleged departure time by a milk boy making his rounds. They thought that he could have killed his wife and still have had time to make the journey to Menlove.
The judge, however, disagreed and instructed the jury to move for an acquittal. But the jury had been swayed by the police’s version of events. Wallace was sentenced to death by hanging. Less than two weeks later, the appeal judges quashed the verdict on the grounds that the prosecution had not proved their case sufficiently.
So if it wasn’t Wallace, who was it? During his interrogation Wallace told the police about one man who might have been responsible for his wife’s murder. That man was called Gordon Parry. John explains, ‘Parry had worked briefly for Wallace before he was fired. He also had a criminal record, and knew where Wallace kept his insurance takings. During the murder £4 [approximately £240 today] had been stolen, according to Wallace. Parry was heavily in debt, and may have held a grudge towards Wallace.’ There was one final piece of evidence pointing towards Parry. At the time of the murder a young mechanic named John Parkes had seen Parry arrive at his garage and wash his car down. ‘Parkes saw a glove in the car and realised it was wet with blood.’
Wallace’s 11-hour acquittal at Liverpool Crown Court marked a turning point in the British legal system, says criminologist Barry Godfrey.
The King vs Wallace was arguably one of the most important cases in recent British legal history. It marked the transition from a Victorian legal and moral framework to that of an enlightened, modern, evidence-based one. The judiciary was for the first time saying that even if a jury convicts someone, if there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty, then a jury’s verdict can be overturned.
Such an important precedent was set because the jury had condemned Wallace on the police’s belief that he was guilty, not on actual evidence. ‘By overturning the verdict the judiciary was proving that the legal system works, that a man is innocent until proven guilty,’ says Barry.
But whilst legal history had been made, Julia Wallace’s killer was as anonymous as ever. Perhaps it was Gordon Parry. It could still even have been Wallace. Or perhaps, as John Gannon believes, there was a third man.
William Wallace had found out that he had a terminal illness and had only a few years to live. Wallace had had a kidney removed surgically and his remaining kidney was starting to fail – as was his marriage. Gannon suspects that as a result of his illness Wallace was now impotent and Julia Wallace was paying men for sex. William even discovered an amount of cash hidden in Julia’s corsets – the equivalent of £70 in today’s money – and that Wallace’s younger colleague at ‘The Pru’, Joseph Marsdon, was a regular visitor to the Wallace household. Could Wallace have been inspired by this set of circumstances to plan the perfect way to get rid of Julia? John explains:
Wallace knew that Marsdon was broke, but he was also set to marry into a wealthy family. Wallace threatened Marsdon, cleverly. He said he was going to divorce Julia on the grounds of her affair with Marsdon. That would drag Marsdon’s name through the divorce courts and ruin his chances of marrying into money. Marsdon had no choice but to commit the murder on Wallace’s behalf.
But there’s still the issue of the phone call from the strange Mr Qualtrough. ‘That,’ suggests John, ‘was a simple matter of bribing the destitute and unwitting Gordon Parry to make the phone call, leaving Wallace himself free to create his alibi while looking for the fictional Qualtrough.’ All this whilst Marsdon committed the murder.
The Julia Wallace case has been described as an example of the perfect murder. Now, more than 80 years later, there is a third possible version of events. Has John Gannon solved the killing that changed legal history? The verdict is up to you, the jury. However, don’t forget what happened when it was up to the original jury.
Wallace returned to his Liverpool home after being released. But local rumours about his guilt dogged him and he moved to the suburbs of the city. He died two years later, aged 54. No one has been charged with Julia’s murder and as there is no statute of limitations for murder the case is still open, albeit very cold.
THE BOOK OF JOHN HORWOOD
John Horwood was convicted and executed for the murder of Eliza Balsom in 1821, but the case was on shaky ground from the start.
Horwood, from Hanham near Bristol, had been romantically pursuing Balsom, from Kingswood, also near Bristol, for some months. Seeing her one day with another young man, Horwood threw a stone at her in frustration.
She was bruised by the incident but otherwise, it seemed, unharmed. Two days later, and after walking some four miles from Kingswood to the centre of the city, she reported to the Bristol Infirmary feeling unsteady on her feet. She was treated for a head wound but died within days. A surgeon, Richard Smith, inspected her body and found an abscess. The fact that this was more likely to have been from an infection such as sepsis, caused by a dirty bandage applied in the hospital, was not considered, and Horwood was arrested and charged with her murder.
Horwood was hanged at a massively attended public execution outside the gates of the City’s New Gaol. The moment he was pronounced dead, his body was commandeered by Richard Smith. Smith dissected the body during a public medical lecture.
Smith subsequently had Horwood’s body skinned and tanned. After it was given a further chemical treatment in Bedminster, what was left of Horwood was dispatched to a bookbinder in Essex, who used it to bind a book written by Smith about the Horwood case. (This practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, wasn’t wholly uncommon at the time.) The book remains in the city archive and the gruesome tome is made available to the public by appointment.
Horwood’s skeleton was retained by the clearly obsessed Smith, who kept it at home. It was bequeathed to Bristol Royal Infirmary and later given to Bristol University, who kept it in a cupboard. John’s fate was made all the more undignified by the fact that the noose that hanged him was kept in place around his neck. In 2011 John Horwood’s skeleton was released to his surviving family and he was finally buried, next to his father, at Christchurch in his hometown of Hanham.
DID FABIAN SACRIFICE THE TRUTH FOR A CRACKING YARN?
In 1954 the BBC broadcast a
