u/queenofsmoke

Part 1 is available here. It covered the background to the case, the murder itself, and the police investigation; I now proceed to the court proceedings and consideration of suspects.

Part IV: The Trials

Court of Assize

William Wallace was tried first for his wife Julia's murder at St George’s Hall in the Liverpool Lent Assizes (precursor to the modern Crown Court) from Wednesday 22 to Saturday 25 April 1931. The crowds were so large that hundreds of members of the public could not be accommodated in the 300-person courtroom, and queues for entry began as early as 5.30 am. On days when William himself was scheduled to give evidence, the would-be observers turned away at the doors numbered in the thousands. This level of public interest was not unsurprising, in an era where fewer than half of all English homes possessed a radio and television broadcasts were essentially unheard of.

In the courtroom William cut a dour and unemotional figure, coming across to many as a remote intellectual callously unaffected by the brutal murder of his helpmeet. Though six foot two - he had loomed a foot over the petite Julia - he was hunched and ungainly. Sentiment in Liverpool veered against him, yet the investigation had been so bungled that it was difficult to see how a conviction could be achieved. In fact, the Prudential Staff Union - having conducted a secret mock trial in London which unanimously found William not guilty - went to the unique lengths of funding his defence,^(7) which was led by Roland Oliver KC.^(8) Meanwhile, Edward Hemmerde KC led for the prosecution.

Hemmerde posited that on 19 January 1931, William had made a phone call to Cottle’s Cafe posing as RM Qualtrough, disguising his voice and then feigning exaggerated confusion when his own message was conveyed back to him. The next day, he lured Julia into the parlour, donned a mackintosh over his nude body, and bludgeoned her with a poker. He then tried unsuccessfully to burn the bloodstained mackintosh, abandoned this idea to instead pull his wife’s body atop it, staged a robbery, dressed and left in haste for the tram. The poker was hidden on his person and discarded at some stage during his journey, far enough away that it had not been discovered. He then spoke to as many people as possible to generate an alibi, refusing to abandon the quest even after multiple locals expressed ignorance as to the location of Menlove Gardens East.

As for motive, the most credible seemed to be financial. The Wallaces were not in poverty: at the time of the murder William had £152 in his bank account, and Julia £90. Yet his diary entries expressed a certain miserliness. On 25 March 1930, for instance, he had written that ’Julia reminds me today it was fifteen years ago yesterday since we were married. Well, I don’t think either of us regrets the step. We seem to have pulled well together, and I think we both get as much pleasure and contentment out of life as most people. Our only trouble is that of millions more, shortage of £ s d.’

The life insurance policy on Julia was relatively modest, one source putting it at £20, but it was undeniable that her recurrent health problems necessitated a measure of financial outlay - she had, in fact, settled one outstanding bill with the family physician Dr Curwen on the night before her death. Health problems in any case appeared to exacerbate any tensions between the couple, as both Dr Curwen and William’s onetime nurse Mrs Wilson attested.

The prosecution’s gaps quickly became evident, however. All evidence against William was circumstantial. The police surgeon Dr MacFall’s initial estimate of an 8pm time of death was revised in court to 6 pm, facilitating the possibility of William’s guilt, but since he had failed to take a body temperature MacFall was unable to concretely guesstimate a time of death. Even more damningly, MacFall had neglected to take any written notes of his initial examination.

Other weaknesses in the Crown’s case abounded. A lack of preservation had led to contaminations of the crime scene. Then, since the police’s tram tests included detectives who had flatly sprinted in order to make the correct tram, it seemed unbelievable that the ailing William could have achieved the same timings without being notably discomposed. It appeared that the prosecution’s envisaged logistics were accomplishable by the fit young detectives who had conducted the tram tests but not by the actual middle-aged suspect.

For a man of William’s habitual stoicism, some aspects of the proceedings were undoubtedly a struggle: his diaries, for example, were read out in the courtroom to general amusement, and at one point he was noted to break down in tears after listening to an entry in which he had described his and Julia’s visit to a park. There were certainly times as well when the proceedings started to take on the nature of a farce. Asked straight-faced by his barrister whether he had ‘ever played the violin naked in a mackintosh’, William responded blankly that he had never played naked in his life.

A multitude of witness evidence too was in William’s favour, with chess club captain Samuel Beattie and Cottle’s waitress Gladys Harley insistent that the man who had identified himself to them as Qualtrough did not sound like William. Even when asked to consider that William had probably disguised his voice, Beattie rejected the proposition as a ‘great stretch of the imagination.’

Meanwhile others, such as his Prudential supervisor Joseph Crewe, insisted that William was a gentleman of honour and responsibility. The Johnstons next door, his friend James Caird, the charwoman Mrs Draper and others testified that the couple’s relationship was good and that William was an upstanding and productive member of society.

The evidence was such that, considered from opposing viewpoints, it was possible to hold that the clues confirmed either William’s guilt or his innocence. The extent of the confusion was summed up by the trial judge, Mr Justice Robert Wright:

>“almost unexampled in the annals of crime . . . murder so devised and arranged that nothing remains which will point to anyone as the murderer... no finger-prints... and no weapon that can be traced anywhere, and, so far as can be ascertained, no conceivable motive in any human being.”

Yet, after one hour of deliberation, the jury returned to declare that they unanimously considered William guilty. Wright - apparently so displeased that he omitted to thank the jury, as was customary - had no choice but to sentence William to death, with the black cap denoting capital punishment placed atop his head.

William’s execution date was provisionally set for 12 May 1931. Perversely, his apparent guilt swung the pendulum of public opinion in his favour. Many now began to consider him innocent, and unprecedentedly, Canon Frederick Dwelly at Liverpool Cathedral offered the special prayer of intercessions extraordinary on his behalf, beseeching God 'for His Majesty's Judges of Appeal, that they may be guided in true judgement.'

Court of Appeal

The next stage was to appeal the verdict, but the prospects of success seemed slim. The only possible grounds of appeal was that the verdict was ‘unreasonable, or cannot be supported having regard to the evidence’ under section 4(1) of the Criminal Appeals Act 1907, but this had never been successfully utilised for a sentence of capital punishment. However, the circumstances were unique enough that it was certainly worth the attempt. In the meantime, William was held in a cell for the condemned, where he passed his time reading books on astronomy and - ironically enough - playing chess.

The appeal was heard at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Monday 18 and Tuesday 19 May 1931. For this, William was transferred to Pentonville Prison, and he would later write of his joy at witnessing the ‘green countryside’ after months of incarceration.

As before, Roland Oliver KC acted for William and made the most of the prosecution’s failings. He also spoke of the ‘hostile’ jury, perhaps prejudiced by their close proximity to Liverpool (though non-Liverpudlians had deliberately been selected). Edward Hemmerde KC, again acting on behalf the Crown, riposted by suggesting that the pieces of the murder fit together like a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ with William as the obvious culprit.

Under the interventions and clarificatory questioning of the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart, the Crown’s case slowly began to fall apart. There was, for one thing, no actual evidence to suggest that William had indeed put through the telephone call masquerading as Qualtrough; while the timings made it physically possible, there were other explanations. Anyone, for instance, might have noted the announcement of the tournament on the chess club’s public noticeboard and known he would be there on the evening of Monday 19 January, though to ensure they placed the call before he actually arrived at the cafe (assuming they wanted to avoid speaking to him, in case of recognition) they would have had to be watching his movements. This would then explain why the call could be traced to such a proximate phone box.

It took the Court of Appeal 47 minutes to deliver their decision. As stated by Hewart:

>...the conclusion at which we have arrived is that the case against the appellant, which we have carefully and anxiously considered and discussed, was not proved with that certainty which is necessary in order to justify a verdict of guilty, and, therefore, that it is our duty to take the course indicated by the section of the statute to which I have referred [section 4(1) of the Criminal Appeals Act 1907]. The result is that this appeal will be allowed and this conviction quashed.

In effect, this meant that the original jury was held to have erred in law, and William walked free. His brother Joseph left the courtroom at his side.

This was the first time such an outcome had been achieved for a capital conviction, and William’s solicitor Hector Munro suggested later that to overcome a jury conviction for murder in the 1930s meant there was not even a ‘shred’ of evidence against the accused.

No other person has ever been arrested for the murder of Julia Wallace, and it remains - officially - unsolved.

Part V: Other Suspects

In concentrating their attentions on William, the police discarded a number of other suspects, at least one of whom arguably had stronger ties to the crime.

Richard Parry was a junior colleague at Prudential who had stood in for William as a premiums collection agent during the latter’s bedbound illness in 1928. William subsequently discovered that Parry had dishonestly retained some of these monies for himself, instead of paying them all in: perhaps convinced by Parry’s remorse, however, he did not alert Prudential to this discovery and Parry continued as an apprentice insurance salesman in Prudential’s employ until 1929, when he left to join the Standard Life Assurance Company. Nor does William seem to have blackmailed or otherwise used this information to exert control over Parry.

Parry was a Liverpudlian native, born in 1909 into a prominent middle-class family. His father William was a treasury official with the Liverpool Corporation, the city’s local authority, and would later be a key overseer of wartime rationing for Liverpool. By 1931, Parry was 22 years old, a handsome youth interested in dramatic pursuits and reportedly a spendthrift who enjoyed luxurious living that far outstripped his income.

He also had a string of criminal convictions dating back to adolescence, for acts ranging from vandalism to car theft and embezzlement (and one sexual assault charge five years after Julia’s murder, of which he was acquitted).^(9) William’s discovery of the financial discrepancies that dogged Parry’s activities was not in fact the first time he came under a cloud of suspicion at Prudential: William’s supervisor Joseph Crewe also oversaw Parry and had similarly noted underpayments by him some months previously. On that occasion, the incident was smoothed over by Parry’s parents.

As a former colleague who had stood in for William’s collecting duties, he was familiar with both William’s house and habits, including to the extent of being aware that William kept a cashbox of the takings in his house - though not, apparently, the fact that there was more money stored elsewhere in the house. Moreover, Parry knew Julia. In a statement to the police, William provided a list of men he considered that Julia would have admitted to the house without question, and Parry (described as a family friend) topped the 17-strong list, though by this time he apparently had not been to the house for several years. Still, William thought he would have found it relatively easy to enter the house on some pretext after luring William away with the Qualtrough appointment.

Another colleague of William’s, 28-year-old Joseph Marsden, was second on the list of men William supplied to the police. Like Parry, Marsden was a junior Prudential employee who had been caught stealing and required to leave. The pair were in fact friends with each other and, as onetime supervisees of William’s, had both been in his house and knew the location of the cashbox where he stored the premium monies. Moreover, they would have known that the pay-in day was Wednesday, and the cashbox was therefore at its fullest on Tuesday nights - as on the night of the murder. Ironically, William’s illness the previous week meant the cashbox held comparatively little; on an ordinary week it could have had perhaps £30 or even at times £100, compared to the mere £4 in coins (and an unusable cheque) abstracted by the burglar. Even Julia’s handbag did not appear to have been rifled through, and still contained another pound.

Speaking in 1981, Harry Bailey, a son of one of the detective sergeants who had been first onto the murder scene, claimed his father had told him that Parry was initially considered a ‘prime suspect’ after being named by William and was questioned by the police as to his activities on the night of the murder, and the preceding night of the phone call. Parry had sworn in a statement dated two days after the murder that he had spent the entirety of Monday evening with his girlfriend Lilian Lloyd, from 5.30 pm to 11:30 pm; she however contradicted this in her own statement, claiming that Parry had shown up at her house around 7.30 pm, and returned again after a brief interlude elsewhere. This was broadly corroborated by Lilian’s mother.

Parry also admitted to being aware that William frequented Cottle’s: his own drama club, the Mersey Amateur Dramatics Society, met there on Thursday evenings. In another coincidence, when investigating the identity of various individuals called Qualtrough who resided in Liverpool, the police identified an RJ Qualtrough who was a former client of Marsden - merely one letter removed from the fictitious RM Qualtrough.

Marsden’s alibi for the night of the murder consisted of a claim that he had been in bed with the flu. It is not clear whether this was ever validated by the police; in any case, unlike Parry, he does not seem to have provided them with a sworn statement. But Parry was flatly a dead end. One Olivia Brine and her nephew Harold Denison gave statements attesting that Parry had been present at a party hosted at Brine’s house, alongside others, from 5.30 to 8.30 pm that night. This of course ruled him out entirely. Lilian Lloyd also testified that Parry had been with her from around 9 pm; though she would contact Munro after being jilted in 1933 stating that this was untrue and Parry met her much later, his alibi did not hinge on her so the apparent change of heart was not pursued.

But investigation by the radio news editor Robert Wilkes for a 50th anniversary programme in 1981 uncovered what seemed to be damning indications against Parry. John Parkes, who in 1931 had been aged 24, told Wilkes that he had been working at the local Atkinson’s all-night garage when his former classmate Parry entered, demanding Parkes use a high-powered hose to wash down his car; Parkes also claimed that inside the car was a glove was soaked in blood.

When his supervisor William Atkinson was informed of these suspicious occurrences, Atkinson apparently recommended that Parkes maintain his silence on the matter - unless William was arrested for his wife’s murder, as indeed happened. Parkes claimed to Wilkes that although he then passed on his observations to the police, nothing more was made of this - though doubtless this was due to the soundness of Parry's alibi. Harry Bailey, who had been speaking as another interviewee of Wilkes, also suggested that forensic testing had been conducted on Parry’s car and clothing and they evinced no signs of blood.

Wilkes attempted to track down Parry, who evaded him by the simple expedient of having passed away some months earlier in April 1980. Wilkes however was able to establish that, after a chequered career which included stints as a soldier and shop manager, Parry had retired to the remote village of Llanhernyw in north Wales in 1969. There he worked part-time as a switchboard operator for the Colwyn Bay Hospital.

Prior to that, in 1966, he had been living in London - where he was confronted by crime writer Jonathan Goodman and his friend Richard Whittington-Egan, a criminologist and expert on Jack the Ripper. He struck the pair as ruthless and violent, under a thin veneer of charm. Parry apparently displayed a detailed interest in the case, including an awareness of the deaths of several obscure witnesses connected to it,^(10) but informed the pair he could not be induced to talk about it even for the sum of £2000. He apparently implied that his father’s death (and of course, the application of a financial incentive) would loosen his tongue. To them Parry claimed that he and Julia had frequently enjoyed ‘musical interludes’ together, away from and unknown to her sexually ‘peculiar’ husband.

This marks the last known engagement of Parry with the Wallace case. Wilkes, tracking down Parry’s only child Barbara, found she apparently knew nothing about the case; his remaining siblings refused to engage with Wilkes.

Marsden, for his part, died in 1967. Little is known of his antecedents or activities.

Epilogue

William may have escaped death by the hangman’s noose, but he was not to enjoy his liberty for long. Following the 1931 Court of Appeal judgment and the first heady rush of victory, which he had celebrated with a month’s holiday in Broughton-on-Furness with his brother Joseph, he returned to work as an insurance agent, but - contrary as ever - those Liverpudlians among whom he lived and worked considered that he had got away with murder. Many of his former customers refused to engage with him, and he was the subject of threats and hate mail. For his own safety, his supervisor Joseph Crewe retired William from his job on the streets and he took up a clerical position at Prudential’s head office. In June 1931 he also moved to a bungalow in Bromborough, in the Wirral, some ten miles away from his previous dwelling.

His writings during this period express anguish at the loss of Julia, and fear that he himself would suffer the same fate at the hands of the perpetrator. In 1932 he published a remarkable series of articles in John Bull magazine detailing his experience from the outset of the murder and afterwards; women, he observed, treated him though they were his ‘bitterest enemies’, next to whose behaviour the language of Mr Justice Wright in sentencing him to the death penalty felt compassionate. He also noted that, being in possession of a home laboratory filled with chemicals, he could have deployed these to murder Julia in a less violent and suspicious way, had he truly wished to do so. Though not named, he obliquely suggested that he considered Parry the murderer.

On 26 February 1933, less than two years after his successful appeal, William died of uraemia and pyelonephritis at Clatterbridge Hospital. He had been a free man for just 22 months and one week. He is buried in Anfield Cemetery with Julia; their joint headstone, organised reportedly by Joseph Wallace, declares them simply to be ‘at rest.’

Notes

^(7) This concept was the brainchild of Hector Munro, the solicitor whom William instructed on the day after his arrest. Munro was also a member of Cottle’s chess club and his law firm offices - Herbert J Davis, Berthen and Munro - were coincidentally within the same building as the Prudential headquarters. Aware that William’s defence was likely to require considerable funds, Munro had contacted James Wild, Prudential’s Chief Clerk in Liverpool, and adroitly pointed out that William had been essentially abroad on company business at the time of Julia’s murder (or at least, had thought he was). Other funds before Prudential agreed to sponsor the entire defence were contributed by William himself (£100) and his younger brother Joseph (£300), who had travelled back from British Malaya to be with him.

^(8) Among other notable criminal trials, Oliver was involved in the famous 1922 case of Edith Thompson and her lover Frederick Bywaters, who were found guilty of murdering Thompson’s husband Percy. Thompson’s hanging was controversial due to doubts over the extent of her knowledge that Bywaters, who committed all the violence, in fact planned to murder her husband.

^(9) In an ironic coincidence, the same Dr MacFall who had provided forensic expert witness evidence for the prosecution at William’s trial would this time be a witness for the defence at Parry’s sexual assault hearing.

^(10) According to Goodman, Parry was aware Joseph Crewe and Alan Close were now dead; he even knew that William’s nephew Edwin, son of Joseph and Amy Wallace, had passed away in North Borneo despite it not being widely reported.

Sources

• ... Welcomes You .....In A City Living .
• The Murder of Julia Wallace | The Julia Wallace Murder Foundation
• William Herbert Wallace - Wikipedia
• R v Wallace - Wikipedia