William Herbert Wallace (29 August 1878 – 26 February 1933) was a British man convicted in 1931 of the murder of his wife, Julia, in their home in Wolverton Street in Liverpool's Anfield district. Wallace's conviction was later overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeal, the first instance in British legal history where an appeal had been allowed after re-examination of evidence. The case, with its strange background, has long been the subject of speculation and has generated many books, being regarded internationally as a classic murder mystery.
Background
William Herbert Wallace was born in Millom, Cumberland, in 1878; he was the eldest of three children born to Benjamin and Margery Wallace, having a younger brother and sister. On leaving school at age 14 he began training as a draper's assistant in Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, and on finishing his apprenticeship he obtained a position in Manchester with Messrs Whiteway Laidlaw and Company, outfitters to the British Armed Forces and the Colonial, Indian and Diplomatic Services. In 1903, after five years' service, Wallace obtained a transfer to the company's branch in Calcutta, India, where he remained for two years. On the suggestion of his brother Joseph, who lived in Shanghai, Wallace sought another transfer to Whiteway Laidlaw's branch of that city in 1905.
A recurrent kidney complaint resulted in Wallace resigning his position and returning to England in 1907, where his left kidney was removed at Guy's Hospital. Little is recorded of his life after this time, until he obtained a position working for the Liberal Party in Harrogate, rising to the post of election agent in 1911. During his time in Harrogate, he met Julia Dennis (1861–1931), and they were married there in March 1914. All early sources suggested that Julia was approximately the same age as Wallace, but in 2001 James Murphy demonstrated from her original birth certificate that she was actually seventeen years older than he was. Julia's father was a destitute alcoholic farmer from near Northallerton, who had died in 1875, leaving her an orphan at the age of 13. In later life Julia exaggerated her antecedents, claiming her father had been a veterinary surgeon and her mother French.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the position of Liberal election agent in Harrogate was discontinued, owing to the suspension of elections and a parliamentary truce, and Wallace once again found himself looking for a job. Through the help of his father, he obtained a position as a collections agent with the Prudential Assurance Company in Liverpool. The Wallaces moved there in 1915, settling at 29 Wolverton Street in the district of Anfield. During the 1920s, Wallace supplemented his comfortable but mundane existence as a collections agent, working exclusively in the neighbouring Clubmoor district, by lecturing part-time in chemistry at Liverpool Technical College. His hobbies included chemistry, botany and chess, and in 1928 he learned to play the violin to enable him to accompany Julia, who was an accomplished pianist, in "musical evenings" at their home at Wolverton Street.
The crime
On the evening of Monday 19 January 1931, Wallace, aged 52, attended a meeting of the Liverpool Central Chess Club to play a scheduled chess game.Murder in the 1930s p. 42 While there he was handed a message, which had been received by telephone about twenty-five minutes before he arrived. It requested that he call at an address at 25 Menlove Gardens East,Murder in the 1930s p. 44 Liverpool, at 7.30 pm the following evening to discuss insurance with a man who had given his name as "R. M. Qualtrough".
The following night, Wallace duly made his way by tramcar to the south of the city at the time requested, only to discover that while there were Menlove Gardens North, South and West, there was no East. He called at 25 Menlove Gardens West, and asked several passers-by in the neighbourhood for directions, but to no avail. Wallace also spoke to a policeman on his beat, and made inquiries in a nearby newsagent's, but nobody he asked was able to help him in his search for the address or the mysterious Qualtrough.
After searching the district for about forty-five minutes, Wallace returned home.Murder in the 1930s pp. 43–44 Neighbours John and Florence Johnston were heading out for the evening when they encountered Wallace in the back alleyway, complaining that he could not gain entry to his home at either the front or the back. While they watched, Wallace tried the back door again, which now opened. Inside he found his wife, Julia, had been brutally beaten to death in their sitting room.
The investigation
Up to his arrest two weeks later, Wallace made four voluntary statements. While he was never intensively questioned by police, he was required to attend CID headquarters every day and was asked specific questions about whether the Wallaces had a maid, why he had subsequently asked the man who had taken the telephone message at the chess club to be specific about the time he took it and whether he had spoken to anyone in the street on his way back to his house from his abortive attempt to find Mr. Qualtrough. Police had evidence that the telephone box used by "Qualtrough" to make his call to the chess club was situated just from Wallace's home, although the person in the café who took the call was quite certain it was not Wallace on the other end of the line. Nevertheless, police began to suspect that "Qualtrough" and Wallace were the same man. Wallace's legal team conducted timing tests that showed it was possible for someone to have made the call, catch a tram and arrive at the chess club when Wallace did, and it was equally possible for Wallace to arrive at the same time by boarding at the stop he claimed he had used, nowhere near the telephone box. These tests were not introduced as evidence at trial since, ultimately, the Crown offered nothing to controvert Wallace's assertion that he had boarded the tram elsewhere and did not make the phone call.Antony M Brown, Move to Murder, Mirror Books, , pp. 183–186.
Police were also convinced that it would have been possible for Wallace to murder his wife and still have time to arrive at the spot where he boarded his tram. They attempted to prove this by having a fit young detective go through the motions of the murder and then sprint all the way to the tram stop, something an ailing 52-year-old Wallace probably could not have accomplished. The original assessment of the time of death, around 8 pm, was also later changed to just after 6 pm although there was no additional evidence on which to base the earlier timing. A milk-boy witness who claimed to have spoken to Mrs. Wallace on her doorstep sometime after 6.30 pm further undermined the Crown's case, leaving Wallace an extremely narrow window in which he could possibly have committed the "frenzied" crime, yet emerge blood-free and composed only minutes later to catch his tram.
Forensic examination of the crime scene had revealed that Julia's attacker was likely to have been heavily contaminated with her blood, given the brutal and frenzied nature of the assault. Wallace's suit, which he had been wearing on the night of the murder, was examined closely but no trace of bloodstains were found. Police formed the theory that a mackintosh, which was inexplicably found under Julia's corpse, had been used by a naked Wallace to shield himself from blood spatter while committing the crime. Examination of the bath and drains revealed that they had not been recently used, and there was no trace of blood there either, apart from a single tiny clot in the toilet pan, the origin of which could not be established, but was alleged to have been the result of inadvertent cross-contamination by police.
Trial and appeal
Wallace consistently denied having anything to do with the crime but was charged with murder and stood trial at the Liverpool Assizes on 22 April 1931. After conducting a secret mock-trial in London, which unanimously found Wallace not guilty, the Prudential Staff Union sponsored his defence. Despite the evidence against him being purely circumstantial, and the statement of the milk-boy—who was certain he had spoken to Julia only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch his tram—Wallace was found guilty after an hour's deliberation by the Liverpool jury, and sentenced to death.
F. J. Salfeld (1905–2001), who was present in the courtroom, commented, "what probably harmed [Wallace] most at his trial was his extraordinary composure. Like every other observer, I found enigmatic his seeming indifference to his . Shock? Callousness? Stoicism? Confidence? We shall never know."
In an unprecedented move, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the verdict in May 1931 on the grounds that it "cannot be supported, having regard to the evidence", and Wallace was set free.Murder in the 1930s p. 51 The decision meant that the jury was wrong in law, and in fact there was no evidence against Wallace—appeals are usually brought on the basis of bad decisions by the presiding judge at the original trial or by the emergence of new evidence.
No other person was charged with the murder, and it remains officially unsolved. A further mock trial, conducted by the Merseyside Medico-Legal Society in 1977, presided over by Mr. Justice Lawton, also found Wallace not guilty.Liverpool Echo, 24 March 1977 Robert Montgomery QC led for the prosecution while Richard Whittington-Egan led for the defence.
Later life and death
After his successful appeal,(1931) 23 Cr App Rep 32 Wallace returned to his job in insurance but resigned after suffering from declining health and moved to the Wirral. On 26 February 1933, less than two years after the appeal, he died from uraemia and pyelonephritis at Clatterbridge Hospital at age 54. He is buried in Anfield Cemetery with his wife.
Richard Gordon Parry Jonathan Goodman, 1960s In the 1960s, crime writer Jonathan Goodman made inquiries that led him to a junior employee at Prudential who had worked with Wallace. This man had done some of Wallace's collection work for him when the older man had been ill in 1928. Wallace had then had first-hand evidence that the younger man did not pay in all the premiums which he had collected. Yet for whatever reason, Wallace did not seem to have passed this information on to his employer. About a year later, the young man left Prudential to join another insurance firm. Wallace was later told that while this man had not been sacked he had left under something of a cloud, his father making up some of his son's shortfall. The young man was also acquainted with Julia. Goodman mentioned him, but not by name, in his book The Killing of Julia Wallace.Jonathan Goodman, The Killing of Julia Wallace, 1969, Harrap, .
Roger Wilkes, 1981