Telephone Murder

Ronald Bartle

Description

Describes how a man narrowly escaped the gallows in one of the UK's most famous murder acquittals. Peppered with snapshots of the times. Analyses competing views on Wallace's story. A key case in the annals of UK legal history.

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• True crime
• Legal history
• Greater Manchester
• Lancashire
• Merseyside
• Grand Manchester
• Lancastre

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910979556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Telephone Murder
The Mysterious Death of Julia Wallace
Ronald Bartle
Copyright and publications details
The Telephone Murder The Mysterious Death of Julia Wallace
Ronald Bartle
ISBN 978-1-909976-56-6 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-55-6 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-910979-56-3 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2018 This work is the copyright of Ronald Bartle. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the author in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2018 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com
Printed by Lightning Source.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
e-book The Telephone Murder: The Mysterious Death of Julia Wallace is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
First published in 2012 by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill
This version published 2018 by
Waterside Press Ltd
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon, Hook
Hampshire RG27 0JG.
Telephone [phone]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Email [e-mail]
Table of Contents
Copyright and publications details ii
Acknowledgements v
About the author vi
Dedication vii
Preface ix
Introduction 15 The Background Environment 25 The Characters of William and Julia Wallace 31 Who was R M Qualtrough? 41 The House that Wasn’t There 57 The Scene of Horror 71 The Police in Action 85 Investigation and Arrest 117 William Herbert Wallace on Trial 127 The Meaning of Circumstantial Evidence 189 The Appeal 197 Wallace: A Free Man 203 Richard Gordon Parry 225 The Finger of Suspicion 237
Postscript 253
Select Bibliography (in alphabetical order) 259
Index 260
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, the publishers of the first edition of this book in 2012, for giving their consent to its further publication in 2018 by Waterside Press.
I must also acknowledge in particular those source materials listed in the Select Bibliography at the end of this work.
Ronald Bartle
June 2018
About the author
Ronald Bartle was Deputy Chief Stipendiary Magistrate (now District Judge) for Inner London. His books include The Police Witness: A Guide to Presenting Evidence in Court (New Police Bookshop, 1984 onwards), Three Cases that Shook the Law (Waterside Press, 2016) and Bow Street Beak (Foreword Lord Hurd of Westwell) (Waterside Press, revised 2016).
Dedication
To my wife Molly with grateful thanks for all her enthusiastic encouragement
Preface
As the trial of William Wallace recedes further into history it becomes ever harder to visualise how in the 1930s a man’s life could turn so critically on issues of time, distance and location. Nowadays most of our public movements can be followed, our exact position discovered from the phone in our pocket and whether we use public or private transport we can be tracked via tickets, receipts, vouchers, CCTV and other methods of recognition courtesy modern technology. And if we happen upon a crime, as perpetrator, accomplice, victim or bystander, we leave traces, minute or otherwise, that link us to the events due to the wonders of modern-day forensic science.
The Telephone Murder is one of a number of capital and other serious cases from an era in which prosecutors, defendants, judges and juries listened with rapt attention to evidence concerning exact times, distances, estimates of speed and even in some cases whether a clock was fast or slow, a schedule running early or late. All recounted by witnesses whose recollections might be first-rate, mildly inaccurate, mistaken or wholly unreliable. A reading of Old Bailey and other Assize cases from that era suggest that, amongst certain criminal elements, there may have been an entire industry centring on the creation of ambiguity, smokescreens and convenient false alibis. It is easy to confuse people about time unless they have some special reason for remembering exactly when something happened. Advocates in turn demonstrated skill, ingenuity and persistence in cross-examination or constructing explanations, favourable or unfavourable according to whether they acted for prosecution or defence, in an effort to show that the accused would or could not possibly have been at a given place at a time consistent with his or her guilt or innocence. All things that nowadays might be resolved in the blinking of an eye. A lost world as to which the Wallace case might be deemed a poignant reminder, criminal law with nostalgia. For the truly innocent a trap.
Yet none of our modern developments help to solve the question whether Wallace was or was not the killer of his wife Julia. There have been other historic cases in which old clues or exhibits have been re-examined in the DNA-age to good (or sometimes questionable) effect (long stored exhibits can be subject to cross-contamination), even many years on. In one case for example a minute speck of blood was discovered behind a skirting board obscured by years of painting over. But the Wallace case is not one of these. Indeed, the somewhat casual approach to the hard evidence and even lack of notes (as happened in the case if the police forensic examiner) suggests that there may well be nothing to re-examine, the exhibits long gone, the rules different, the record-keeping not what it is today.
Rather, this ‘cold case’ remains one calling for the solving a puzzle not casting a fresh eye over a long-preserved garment or instrument. One that makes demands equally on lawyers or criminologists as it does on students of human nature. Why do people kill their spouses or partners? Were the considerations different in the 1930s when many people tended to stay in a relationship whatever the situation behind the lace curtains, have much narrower patterns of mobility and social inter-action, their lives governed less by social networks or dashing around the country than keeping to themselves, home life and for many a form of financial survival unknown in today’s credit ready world? One of the more interesting facts to emerge in this book is the extent to which Julia Wallace repaired her scant wardrobe. Who in today’s throwaway world patches their underwear? How many people enjoy musical evenings at home?
Is there a secret to the case that was never unlocked? Are key players still in the shadows, though as the book shows those we do know about they are, or are likely to be, dead? And why did Wallace save his ‘best defence’, that he knew the name of the real killer, for an article in John Bull magazine that only appeared long after his trials and tribulations were safely ended, including the threat of the noose, which might have shaken most people into a sense of action. Today, of course, as an inroad to double jeopardy you can be tried again for a serious crime on new evidence whereas in the old days you could beat the hangman with an acquittal and sell the story of how you ‘did it’ to the newspapers — as one or two seem to have done over the years. Not Wallace, though. He made a tidy sum peddling his innocence in the press and other publications trying to redeem his reputation after the world turned its back on him. Including his colleagues at the Gothic red terracotta Prudential Assurance Building in Liverpool (which like its mirror image in Holborn close to the heart of legal London still stands as a listed building). Most of his friends and associates seem to have given him the cold shoulder after his release. He was not paraded in triumph like some of those we see on the steps of the law courts today. Innocent or not he seems to have been tainted — become toxic as far as some were concerned. He died a broken man though in truth his health was never strong. Even by the time of his appeal he was a pale, gaunt figure.
I think the enduring interest of the Wallace case lies in a sharp division of opinion about whether the accused was a wholly innocent victim caught in a web of purely circumstantial evidence, or (as a man of unblemished record and a modestly adept chess player used to thinking several moves ahead) the originator of one of the most baffling false alibis ever to come before the courts. Did someone else kill Julia Wallace? Had the police been obliged in those days to disclose unused or discarded evidence we may have been closer to the truth. But in the 1930s (and well into the 1980s with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984) it was par for the course for them to interrogate suspects using well-honed techniques of intimidation and keep defendants in the dark if it suited their purpose. Some more modern cases show that the latter, withholding evidence, is a habit that dies hard. In one case the police even managed to ‘lose’ the entire files, which only turned-up after they and other witnesses were home and dry having been acquitted of corruption charges. But there are other concerns of a seemingly more routine nature.
Taking the most significant event in the Wallace case, everything turns on the use of one of those early telephone boxes with their then newfangled buttons A and B. To this day it is impossible to say who made the critical, murderous call though I do make some suggestions later in the book. What is also of interest to the would-be sleuth is the picture the case paints of a bygone age in which public