Killing of Julia Wallace

Jonathan Goodman

Description

The brutal murder of Julia Wallace in 1931 became one of Britain's great unsolved murders. People began arguing about the case almost immediately and continue to do so to this day.Julia was the middle-aged wife of a mild-mannered Liverpool insurance agent, William Herbert Wallace. By all accounts they were a quiet, unassuming, devoted couple. In January 1931 William Wallace received a telephone message to come to an address in Liverpool the following evening to discuss an insurance policy. Unable to find the house after searching for hours, Wallace determined there was no such address and returned home. There he found Julia bludgeoned to death on the parlor floor. In addition to the terrible shock and his unbearable loss, Wallace was accused of the crime and ultimately convicted.Using original sources, Jonathan Goodman re-creates Wallace's trial, witness by witness. Through his meticulous reconstruction, it becomes evident that the police and the medical examiner went out of their way to twist and even manufacture evidence. Their attention to proving Wallace guilty ignored a lead to a likely suspect given to them by Wallace. The man was a fellow insurance agent, whom Goodman identifies in the book as Mr. X. The police ignored the suggestion.In 1969, when The Killing of Julia Wallace was first published in the United Kingdom, Goodman had picked up on the lead the police disregarded.As a result, he was convinced that Wallace was unjustly convicted. In 1981 Goodman revealed the name of the suspect, who was by then deceased. The suspect had a long record of criminal charges that had been dropped or dismissed due to his family connections-his father and uncle were local officials; his father's secretary was the daughter of the police superintendent.True crime fans will welcome the return of this classic unsolved mystery by the inimitable Jonathan Goodman.

Sujets

• Histoire
• True crime
• Greater Manchester
• Lancashire
• Merseyside
• Grand Manchester
• Lancastre

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631012563
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Killing of Julia Wallace
TRUE CRIME HISTORY SERIES
Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts · James Jessen Badal
Tracks to Murder · Jonathan Goodman
Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome · Albert Borowitz
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon · Robin Odell
The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair · Diana Britt Franklin
Murder on Several Occasions · Jonathan Goodman
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories · Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist · Andrew Rose
Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett · Thomas Crowl
Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon · Albert Borowitz
The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age · Virginia A. McConnell
Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones · Jan Bondeson
Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree that Gripped a Nation · James G. Hollock
Murder and Martial Justice: Spying, “Terrorism,” and Retribution in Wartime America · Meredith Lentz Adams
The Christmas Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
The Supernatural Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
Guilty by Popular Demand: A True Story of Small-Town Injustice · Bill Osinski
Nameless Indignities: Unraveling the Mystery of One of Illinois’s Most Infamous and Intriguing Crimes · Susan Elmore
Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping Richard T. Cahill Jr.
The Lincoln Assassination Riddle: Revisiting the Crime of the Nineteenth Century · Edited by Frank J. Williams and michael Burkhimer
Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee · Ann Marie Ackermann
The Killing of Julia Wallace · Jonathan Goodman
The Killing of Julia Wallace
Jonathan Goodman
The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio
Once again for Susan
© 2017 the Estate of Jonathan Goodman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First published in Great Britain in 1969 by George C. Harrap & Co. Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-60635-311-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
21 20 19 18 17    5 4 3 2 1
Preface
The Wallace case is unbeatable; it will always be unbeatable . RAYMOND CHANDLER
This murder, I should imagine, must be almost unexampled in the annals of crime .
LORD WRIGHT OF DURLEY
Either the murderer was Wallace or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, then here at last is the perfect murder , JAMES AGATE
The Wallace case has provoked more conjecture, more argument, than any other murder case in living memory. There are people who believe that William Herbert Wallace was guilty of his wife’s murder, and there are others who believe no such thing, who say that he was as much a victim of the crime as his wife. The nonbelievers are vastly outnumbered.
Many words have been spoken about the case; many words have been written about it. The odd thing, though, is that hardly any of the literary theorists have bothered to do the slightest bit of research before putting their hair-raising (and often hare-brained) theories to paper. Not one of them has obtained the official transcript of the trial; they have all of them, every single one, relied upon an abridged version that was published two years afterwards. This, it seems to me, is rather like setting oneself up as an expert on Shakespeare after reading Charles and Mary Lamb.
The literary theorists have made a great many mistakes, have drawn any number of false conclusions. To point out all their errors would take up far too much space. What I have done, therefore, is this—within the narrative I have drawn attention to a few of the errors in one of the books, Two Studies in Crime , by Yseult Bridges. I have chosen this particular work, not because it contains more errors than the rest, but, on the contrary, because it is by far the most accurate and valuable.
After more than three years of research I am convinced that Wallace did not murder his wife. Although the main purpose of this book is to try to persuade others of his innocence, I believe that I have given a fair picture of the evidence presented by the prosecution. In writing about the people involved in the case I have tried to resist the temptation to draw conclusions from the facts, and have attempted to let the facts speak for themselves. I realize that I have not always succeeded, but I make no apologies for this; I believe the few conclusions that I have drawn to be irrefutable.
Unless otherwise stated, all conversations in this book are either taken from records or based on the recollections of the principals questioned by myself.
I should like to make it clear that my criticisms of the Liverpool City Police Force at the time of the Wallace case do not apply to the present-day force, which is one of the most efficient and enlightened in the country. If it is true that the public gets the police it deserves, then the people of Liverpool must be far more deserving now than they were back in 1931.
J. G.
Contents
Plans and Diagrams
The Year
The Night before the Killing
The Day of the Killing
The Day After
Investigation, Rumour, Arrest
The Committal
The Trial— I
The Trial— II
The Trial— III
The Trial— IV
The Appeal
Release …
A Different Verdict
Afterword
Appendix
Index
Plans and Diagrams
Richmond Park area of Anfield ( Trial Exhibit No. 15 )
29 Wolverton Street ( Blueprint prepared for the Defence )
Menlove Gardens area of Allerton ( Trial Exhibit No. 16 )
Wolverton Street
 

Map of the Anfield district of Liverpool, showing the location of Wolverton Street

Plan of the Wallaces’ two-storeyed, terrace-house home – Number 29 Wolyerton Street, Anfield, Liverpool.

Map of the Mossley Hill district of Liverpool, showing the location of Menlove Gardens North, South and West.

Plan showing the lay-out of Wolverton Street and its system of back ‘entries.’
The Year
1931 was given the usual quota of three hundred and sixty-odd days, but it could have done with a few more, if only to allow breathing space between one event and another. To use the title of a hit show of a few seasons before, the year was jam-packed with “One Dam’ Thing After Another”.
Some of the things that happened were good things, but mostly they were bad.
While children played with hoops and spinning tops, and ate sugar butties, and chortled at the antics of Pip, Squeak, and Wilfred, the year was shaken half a dozen times by earthquakes. Few people in Britain paid much attention to the reports from the far-away disaster regions: certainly not the people of the Rhondda, or those living in the Lancashire cotton towns, or on Tyneside, or in Paisley. They had other things to worry about.
How long’s the depression going to last? … How much longer am I going to be out of work? … How will I manage if there’s a strike—a close-down—a lock-out?
Then, in June, an earth tremor was felt over a wide area of England and Scotland. Many parents told their children that it was simply the earth sighing in its sleep. But other people had other ideas. Some of them said that God had whispered a warning of Armageddon. For a long time afterwards, until it became clear that the warning had been either misheard or premature, sign-writers did a roaring trade in posters that exhorted the unrepentant to change their ways while there was still time.
It was a hectic year. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Perhaps most people were simply in a hurry to get the year over as quickly as possible, to start on 1932.
Hardly a week went by without a record of some sort being broken by someone somewhere. Captain Malcolm Campbell, in his car Blue Bird , broke the world land-speed record; a couple of weeks later he was knighted. The millionaire sportsman Lieutenant Glen Kidston broke the air-speed record from London to Cape Town; the following month he was killed in a crash. C. W. A. Scott flew from England to Australia in 9 days 3 hours 40 minutes, and Jim Mollison took eight hours or so less to make the journey in the opposite direction. The Cheltenham Flier set up a record of 78 m.p.h. as the world’s fastest train; by flying at an average speed of 408 m.p.h. Lieutenant J. H. Stainforth became the world’s fastest man; the French athlete Ladoumegue ran a mile in the fantastic time of 4 minutes 9.2 seconds. Messrs Post and Gatty went round the world in nine days, and an Austrian schoolmaster named Karl Nanmestik crossed the English Channel on a pair of water-skis.
At least the mortality rate was average in this far-from-average year. Among the people who did not live to see 1932 were Anna Pavlova, the fragile flower of the ballet; Arnold Bennett, author; Dame Nellie Melba, the Australian songstress who gave her name to a dish of ice-cream; Thomas Edison, inventor of many things; Alfred Arthur Rouse, murderer; and Julia Wallace, murder victim.
The Night before the Killing
MONDAY, January 19th, 1931
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” 1
It had been a most unpleasant day. The strong winds that had blown around Liverpool during the morning had died away, but only to allow the clouds to interweave and slowly descend beneath their own weight. By midday a grey, damp blanket had been tucked in around the city. Mist had manufactured an early twilight. Then, just before tea-time, the rain had started—an insidious drizzle, that fine sort of rain that you hardly notice before you realize that you are drenched.
Twenty minutes past seven.
And outside Cottle’s City Café in North John Street the pavements were still damp from the rain. The dozen or so stone steps that led down to the café were covered with a thin film o