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UNSOLVED CRIMES |
Date
Added |
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Who was R. M.
Qualtrough? |
March 2003 |
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William Herbert Wallace was a drab,
colourless, boring man who lived a drab, colourless, boring life.
He was thrifty and hardworking, mild mannered and a little snobbish,
soberly dressed and utterly, utterly respectable. His idea of a
night out with the boys was his regular fortnightly visit to a local
cafe to take part in chess tournaments. A swinging party at home
with his mousy wife, Julia, usually consisted of the couple playing
duets on violin and piano.
Herbert's meek and unassuming manner was greatly appreciated by his
employer, a solid dependable insurance company who employed him as a
collector and agent. In 15 years in their employment he had
proved to be utterly trustworthy. He was diligent and he never
pushed for promotion.
His admirable personal qualities and those of his shy little wife made
them ideal neighbours in their neat terraced house in Wolverton
Street, Anfield, Liverpool. He was never know to show outbursts
of exuberance or bad temper. In fact, the jury at his trial
decided, Herbert Wallace had all the characteristics of a sadistic
brutal murderer.
His wife had been battered to death so violently that her brains
had spilled out on to the floor. She had died at the hands of a
man who deliberately laid a meticulous trial of false clues to throw
the police off his scent.
There was no real evidence to connect her husband with Julia Wallace's
death. In fact he had a near-perfect alibi. But then
Herbert Wallace was a man who ordered his life with pedantic attention
to detail.
He was too good to be true. The jury's verdict seemed to be that
Wallace was so absolutely ordinary that he had to be capable of great
evil...
In spite of the flimsy police theories which hardly stood up to
defence cross-examination, in spite of a complete lack of motive on
the part of the accused man, in spite of a summing-up by a trial judge
who virtually begged the jury to acquit him, Wallace was found guilty
of his wife's murder.
He sat impassively in the dock when the verdict was returned. It
was this same lack of emotion which had led him there in the first
place. 'I am not guilty. I cannot say anything else,' he
whispered plaintively to the court as the judge prepared to pass
sentence.
The judge, Mr. Justice Robert Alderson Wright, showed more distress
than the convicted man. But he had no option under law.
Shaken by the jury's verdict, he donned his black cap and passed the
only sentence open to him: to be hanged by the neck until dead.
And the mystery man who actually bludgeoned Julia Wallace to death
heaved a deep sigh of relief. He had gotten away with the
perfect murder.
The first sign that Herbert Wallace's humdrum life was about to be
shattered came with a telephone call from a complete stranger to the
City Cafe in North John Street, Liverpool, at 8.15pm on Monday 19th
January 1931. Herbert Wallace was due at the cafe that night to
exercise his rather mundane skill as a chess player. He was
taking part in a tournament aptly named 'The Second Class
Championship'.
But the 52 year old insurance agent was not there to take the
telephone call. A waitress answered the phone and passed it to
Samuel Beattie, Captain of the chess club, who explained that Wallace
had not yet arrived. Did the caller want to phone back later?
The voice on the other end of the line asked to leave a message for
Wallace. The caller identified himself as 'R. M. Qualtrough' and
requested that Wallace should call on him at his home at 25 Menlove
Gardens East, Mossley Hill, the following night to discuss some
insurance business. Beattie wrote the message on the back of an
envelope.
About the same time Herbert Wallace was setting off from his home at
29 Wolverton Street to catch a tram to the City Cafe for the chess
club meeting.
The Wallace's had been married for 18 years, after a two year
engagement in their home town of Harrogate, Yorkshire. Herbert
had a worth, but lowly paid, job as political agent for the local
branch of the Liberal Party. When the meager party finds could
no longer support his salary, he moved to the quiet suburb of Anfield
in Liverpool.
Julia, five years younger than her husband, set about making their new
home in Wolverton Street neat and tidy, just like their lives.
In earlier years she had spent some time in the genteel studies of
music and painting, and a small upright piano took pride of place in
the parlour of their trim terraced house. As Herbert settled in
to his new job as a collector for the Prudential Insurance Company,
the childless couple could afford luxuries like the £80 which Mr.
Wallace had spent on a microscope.
He prided himself on being a diligent amateur scientist. He even
lectured part time in chemistry at Liverpool Technical College and
often he and Julia would spend the evening in the little laboratory he
had built just off his bathroom, examining slides on the microscope.
At the age of 50, Herbert had even started to learn the violin and
accompanied Julia on the piano.
His job
paid him an annual salary of £250 and the thrifty couple lived quietly
within their means. Herbert had a bank savings account of 152
and Julia had her own modest savings of £90.
As Herbert Wallace
wrote in his diary; 'We seem to have pulled well together and I think
we both get as much pleasure and contentment out of life as most
people'.
The only time he
left Julia alone were his visits to the chess club and his lectures at
the technical college. But when he stepped out that night to
catch his tram to the cafe, there was a nagging worry in his mind.
There had been a spate of burglaries in Anfield in the past few weeks
and Wallace often kept large sums of his insurance company's money at
home. 'Don't open the door to any strangers while I am gone,
dear', he reminded Julia as he left.
Samuel Beattie
never actually saw Wallace arrive at the City Cage but shortly after
the phone call he saw him seated, taking part in a game and he passed
on Qualtrough's message.
Wallace seemed
puzzled by the telephone call. He did not know any Mr.
Qualtrough. The address was on the other side of the sprawling
Liverpool suburbs, quite outside his normal insurance sales territory.
On the way home from the club that night, he quizzed the other members
about the location of Menlove Gardens East. Which tram should he
take to get there? How long would the journey take?
The following day
Wallace set out, regular as clockwork, on his appointed rounds in
Anfield, collecting a premium of a few pence here, paying out a claim
of a few pounds there. He returned home punctually for lunch at
2.00pm, went back to work for the afternoon and finished in the
evening at 6.00pm. While Julia prepared tea, Wallace went
upstairs, washed and changed and filled his jacket pocket with
insurance quotation and proposal forms.
At 6.30pm, their
meal over, Julia Wallace answered a knock at the door. It was
the milk boy, 14 year old Alan Close. He handed Mrs. Wallace a
pint container of milk and she took it into the kitchen to empty the
contents into her own jug, returning to the front door to give the boy
the dairy's can. That was the last time she was seen alive.
About 15 minutes
later Herbert Wallace left the house. He walked a few hundred
yards and boarded a tram in Belmont Road for the first leg of his
journey to meet the mysterious Mr. Qualtrough. at 7.06pm, after
travelling a mile and a half, he switched to a second tram in Lodge
Lane. His behaviour was unusual for the normal reserved Herbert
Wallace. He chatted amiably to the train conductor Tom Phillips
about his high hopes of selling a big policy at his destination.
At 7.15pm he arrived at Penny Lane and switched to a third tram to
complete his five mile journey. He asked conductor Arthur
Thompson to let him off at the stop nearest Menlove Gardens East.
'Don't know it,'
Thompson admitted. 'But we stop in Menlove Avenue. Just
ask around, it's bound to be near there.
For the next half
hour Wallace tramped busily around the streets of Mossley Hill.
He found Menlove Gardens North. He found Menlove Gardens West
and Menlove Gardens South. But no Menlove Gardens East. He
knocked on the door of Mrs. Katie Mather at No. 25 Menlove Gardens
West and she told him there was no Menlove Gardens East. He
remembered his Prudential Insurance supervisor, Joseph Crewe, lived
nearby and found his home and knocked on the door, he got no reply.
He met Police
Constable James Sargent on his beat in nearby Allerton Road and was
advised to go to the local post office to check a street directory for
Mr Qualtrough's address. Wallace agreed. Then he remarked
on the late hour.
'Yes, almost eight
o'clock', the policeman agreed. There was no directory available
at the post office and Wallace found a newspaper shop. He
pestered the owner, Mrs. Lily Pinches, into checking the names of
customers on the shop's newspaper delivery round, explaining his
errand to her in great detail. No, she confirmed, there is no
Menlove Gardens East.
Wallace gave up
and went home.
He arrived back at
Wolverton Street shortly before 9.00pm and his neighbours, John
Johnston and his wife, Florence, saw him struggling with the handle of
his back door. Finally he managed to get the door open and went
inside. The Johnston's were still watching as Wallace emerged a
few moments later and calmly invited them in. 'It's Julia,' he
explained flatly. 'Come and see, she has been killed.'
Within minutes the
police were summoned. Julia Wallace was dead. Her skull
had been battered by ten separate blows, any single one of which would
have been fatal. There was blood everywhere. A total of £4
was missing from the little cash box in the kitchen cabinet. She
had been killed, the forensic experts decided later, between 6.30pm
and 8.00pm that night.
Herbert Wallace
appeared to be almost unmoved by the sight of his dead wife.
Later that night he left the murder house and moved in with his
brother's family a few miles away. The detectives, meanwhile,
moved in to 29 Wolverton Street. And the tongues wagged
furiously.
Why had Herbert
Wallace talked of his business so freely to tram conductors and total
strangers in his quest to find Menlove Gardens East? Had he
deliberately drawn the patrolling policeman's attention to the time?
And who was R. M. Qualtrough, whose call the night before had lured
him away from home? If the address in Mossley Hill never
existed, did R. M. Qualtrough exist?
On 2nd February
1931, a week after the body of Julia Wallace was buried in Anfield
Cemetery, Herbert Wallace was charged with her murder. Cautioned
by the police, he said simply and sadly, 'What can I say in answer to
a charge of which I am absolutely innocent?' The press headlines
had become so sensational and strident that when the trial opened at
St George's Hall seven weeks later, even the prosecution made little
objection to a defence request that no residents of the city of
Liverpool should sit on the jury.
The prosecution
made much of a key piece of evidence. They had traced the source
of the call from 'R. M. Qualtrough'. By sheer chance, the call
to the City Cafe the night before Julia Wallace's murder had to be
routed through a telephone supervisor because the coin mechanism
in the public phone box had been faulty. The call and the defect
were duly logged. The call had come from Anfield 1627, a kiosk
in Rochester Road, only 400 yards from Wallace's home.
Of course Wallace was not at the cafe to receive the call from
'Qualtrough', prosecuting counsel Edward Hemmerde, explained
triumphantly. For the same reason, 'Qualtrough' couldn't phone
back later to speak to Wallace after he arrived at the chess club,
because Herbert Wallace was 'R. M. Qualtrough'.
Wallace, Hemmerde claimed, had made the telephone call himself then
sprinted for a tram and arrived at the cafe to receive the message he
had phone through as 'Qualtrough'.
His pestering inquiries of tram conductors, the policeman and the
residents of Mossley Hill the following night were all part of the
plan to establish his alibi, the prosecutor insisted
and Wallace's unflurried demeanour when he returned home and found his
wife's body was the action of a man who already knew murder had been
committed.
Herbert Wallace's
defence counsel, Roland Oliver, outlined his case simply. His
client had not committed the murder and it was not for the defence to
prove who had wielded the murder weapon. Wallace was not
'Qualtrough' and the defence did not need to establish the identity of
the mystery man. Wallace made a fuss of finding Menlove Gardens
East, he explained, because it was a break from his usual routine, a
chance to earn the unexpected bonus of a sale. He was displaying
an emotion that was rare for him, excitement. He had only
reverted to character when he found his wife's dead body. He
became placid and introspective. Wallace had no motive for
killing his own wife.
By all the rules of criminal law, Roland Oliver
was absolutely right. The police had no evidence, only
suspicions. Herbert Wallace had to be presumed innocent.
But on the fourth and final day of trial, the jury took only an hour
to reach their verdict : Guilty.
It is almost routine for a judge to express his
agreement with a jury's verdict in a complex, tasking case. Mr
Justice Wright, however, did not even offer them a word of thanks for
their efforts. He pronounced the mandatory sentence of death by
hanging.
The defence lodged an immediate appeal and a
week after he should have been hanged Wallace was taken from the
condemned cell to London, to appear at the Royal Courts of Justice in
the Strand. Far from the hysteria and prejudice of Liverpool,
three judges sifted through the hard evidence against Wallace.
After a two day hearing they retired for 45 minutes and pronounced
their verdict : Appeal allowed, conviction quashed.
Wallace left the courtroom free - but
spiritually broken.
Two days later he returned home, Liverpool
police pointedly announced they would not be re-opening their
investigation into Julia Wallace's murder. The cruel implication
was not lost on Wallace's hostile neighbours and workmates. The
insurance company gave him a desk job to try to shield him and a year
later he retired on a pension.
In February 1933, just over two years after the
death of his wife, Herbert Wallace became ill with a recurring kidney
disease and died in a local hospital. Five days later he was
buried in Anfield Cemetery beside his beloved Julia.
So who murdered Julia Wallace? Who was R.
M. Qualtrough? There were only 14 people in the whole of
Liverpool with the name Qualtrough and the police interviewed and
cleared all of them. In the atmosphere of outrage which followed
the murder, Liverpool police reached the single-minded conclusion that
Wallace was guilty. Squads of detectives armed with stop watches
and timetables spent days riding trams and walking briskly around
Anfield trying to demolish his timing of events.
Herbert Wallace had his own suspicions. In
the long nights of lonely agony after his wife's murder, he wondered
which of his small circle of acquaintances knew he was due at the City
Cafe that fateful night and left the tantalizing telephone message for
him. Julia, he knew, would only have opened the door to a
familiar face. Even facing the hangman's noose, shy Herbert
Wallace could not bring himself to scream in righteous anger and point
a forceful finger of accusation.
He apologetically mentioned to the names of two
men to the Liverpool detectives investigating the case. Both men
were in their early 20's and both were former employees of the
insurance company. At different times, they had both parted
company from the insurance firm after cash shortages were found in
their accounts. On separate occasions, they had filled in for
Wallace on his rounds when he was ill. They knew all about his
social routine, about his chess club meetings. And they knew
that on some Tuesday nights, as on the night Julia was murdered, the
cash box in the kitchen could hold as much as 50. Indeed when
they stood in for him they had been inside his home and had handled
the cash box. Julia would have readily opened the door to them,
knowing they were former colleagues of her husband.
Police records
show that detectives only interviewed one of these men - and even then
accepted without question his assurance that he had an alibi for the
night of the murder.
The police
concentrated all their energies on the man they wanted ... the mousey
little insurance agent whom everyone so desperately wanted to believe
was a murdering monster. |
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