The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (17 page)

Wallace elected to go into the box where his manner was mild and composed and his replies reasonable and lucid during the three hours of the ordeal. Mr Qualtrough was the only important character apparently who remained as invisible in the box as he had been throughout the drama in which he played a leading part. All the evidence was circumstantial and on certain vital issues there was no evidence at all; whoever had used the call-box on Monday evening had not been seen by anybody; neither did anybody come forward who had observed Wallace leaving his home on Tuesday. And at the end of it all only one thing was conclusive, either Wallace had done it or he had not.

The judge summed up for an acquittal. He left no doubt that he thought it would be improper to convict. Just over an hour later the jury brought in their verdict of Guilty. I had just come back from foreign parts, where I had been reading the trial, and saw the verdict with astonishment. “But it’s against the weight of the evidence” I said. I was soon to realize why. Factually Wallace had been able to stand up to the prosecution’s allegations and produce reasonable explanations to refute them; humanly he had not. With the strictly fair judge, the deadly Counsel for the Crown, and the brilliance of Mr Oliver’s defence, there was not enough to secure a conviction if Wallace had not gone into the box. People of unpleasing personality, especially if they are guilty, should be advised never to go into the witness box. The jury did not like the man, or his manner which could have been either stoicism or callousness. They did not understand his lack of expression of any kind and they knew that it hid something. It could have hidden sorrow or guilt and they made their choice.

Mr Oliver brought an appeal and won it for his client. The verdict of the jury was set aside as being not in accordance with the evidence. The Prudential Assurance Company magnanimously took him back but he was looked at askance wherever he went. Though he was considerately reinstated in an indoor capacity the suspicion and distrust of neighbours and business associates soon showed him it was hopeless to attempt to continue to earn a living in Liverpool. He was driven to retire to a cottage in the country before the middle of the year, where he died at the beginning of 1933 of what had been for a long time an incurable cancer of the kidneys.

It will be observed that I consider Wallace guilty. I do, for when I read the case I recalled the words of the great Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading, who was unendingly good to me when I was a young girl in pointing out matters of law. There had been an unimportant murder, in some little suburban house, for no imaginable reason, and I said: “Lord Reading, but why do people like that kill each other, for nothing at all?” and he answered me in what I shall always consider these memorable words: “My child, it is impossible to tell how hardly the presence of one person in a house may bear upon another.” For eighteen years Wallace had borne the presence of this little undistinguished water-colourist and accompanist, always there in the only place he had to go to at night except when he went to his Chess Club. Men marry when they are very young for various reasons, and they find themselves tied for life to a person who gets on their nerves. A kind of affection may still exist, but it is difficult to gauge what affection means in someone conceited and pretentious; and Wallace was both. Wishing ardently for respectability, this vain man had had to remain by the side of a woman he considered his inferior in every way, and when at last he broke out it was with extravagant violence. One, two, three . . . how many blows? It does not matter. It is my belief that Wallace came downstairs naked under his mackintosh, murdered his wife with this urgency upon him, tucked his mackintosh under her shoulder, washed himself in the kitchen, and set off into the dark January evening methodically to execute the remainder of what I hope chess players will forgive me for calling essentially a chess-player’s crime. Every move and its consequences were planned in advance. He was a punctual man of precise habits and every action was timed. As to the weapon used neither poker nor iron bar was ever found, though all drain-pipes and gratings had been diligently searched by the police. Later, when I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Hemmerde and the disposal of the weapon was discussed he smiled a little grimly and without a word picked up a ruler which lay upon his desk and slipped it up his sleeve. Perhaps early in the grey Liverpool dawn, before any suspicion rested on him, Wallace took a long walk by the river bank—but that is only supposition. If Wallace and Qualtrough were one and the same, ringing up the Chess Club the night before because he had reached a point when he could not support the pressure of a delicate inadequate wife any longer, then there is no doubt he was guilty. The only other possibility is that there was an airy-fairy Qualtrough whom nobody has ever seen. It is a name that comes from the Isle of Man. Did Wallace and his Julia once remark upon the oddness of that name while on a holiday on the island? Who can tell? When he died Wallace left behind him in the cottage a private diary containing a great many very highfalutin’ remarks about his beloved Julia . . . “If only she were still with me how lovingly she would have tended the garden . . .”, but this of course proves nothing. They were in execrable literary taste but to write badly is not enough, unfortunately, to prove a man a murderer.

Just before the war, my husband and I went to Liverpool to stay with the architect Professor Holford, now Sir William Holford, and on the Sunday afternoon I proposed going to see the Wallace house. Needless to say the men slumbered, but we women set off in search of the little grey house. We found the mean street—and streets, though perfectly respectable and not slums, can be very mean and grey in Liverpool—we found the house. It was occupied, and evidently by people who were houseproud. The front windows were shrouded thickly in white Nottingham lace curtains; surely more thickly than the windows of any other house in the district. We went round to the back entry to see the door that Wallace professed to have found closed against him that night so many years ago. The door was neatly painted in dark green, but on it, crudely chalked in white and quite newly done, was the figure of a hanging man. The unfortunate tenants of the house may have spent the greater part of their days trying to keep the back door free of such disfigurement but the legend of Wallace had not died. It had torn Liverpool in two; half of the great town had been for him and half had been against him; passions had run high. Grown-ups talk in front of children and children sort out for themselves as best they can the truth of what those extraordinary beings say. For all I know, though there have been worse monsters since, a hanging man in chalk may still be decorating from time to time the back door of that little drab house in Liverpool. Children collect legends and keep them long.

Many modern theorists disagree with Miss Jesse’s conclusion that Wallace murdered his wife. Three years after starting to research the case, Jonathan Goodman published
The Killing of Julia Wallace
(Harrap, London 1969) which suggested that not only did Wallace not murder his wife, but that the real culprit got away with it. At the time,
“Mr X ” (as Jonathan Goodman was legally obliged to call him) was living in south London. But in 1981, on the fiftieth anniversary of the killing, a Liverpool radio station, Radio City, broadcast a drama-documentary that unmasked “Mr X ” (who had died the year before), naming him as Richard Gordon Parry. Parry, a petty thief, had worked alongside Wallace in his insurance business. Gordon Parry had a grudge against Wallace for reporting various minor defalcations to the Prudential, and there was a hint of curious sexual shenanigans between Parry, twenty-two at the time of the murder, and Julia Wallace, a post-menopausal thirty years older. The radio researchers also discovered that Parry’s uncle, Liverpool’s city librarian, was uniquely placed to get his hands on the levers of the investigation; quite apart from his exalted position with the Corporation, Parry’s uncle employed a secretary whose father was the city’s top detective and the man in charge of the Wallace inquiry. Wallace had given Parry’s name to the police within thirty-six hours of the murder, but they had seemed satisfied with the young man’s alibi that he had spent the evening with his girlfriend. The radio team tracked down this woman, who disclosed that Parry was not, in fact, with her at the crucial hour of Mrs Wallace’s death.

A few weeks after the programme, an old man called John Parkes was interviewed. His extraordinary testimony (pooh-poohed by the anti-Wallace police in 1931) seemed to clinch the case against Parry. On the murder night, John Parkes was working as a car cleaner at a Liverpool garage. According to Parkes, Gordon Parry (whom he knew) turned up at the garage demanding to have his car washed, inside and out. Inside the car Parkes found a bloodstained glove. Parry snatched it from him, exclaiming:
“If the police found that, it would hang me!”

(Sacco and Vanzetti, 1920)

Louis Stark

The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder in the course of an armed payroll robbery, convulsed the American political and penal systems during the 1920s. The two men, Italian immigrants drawn together by their radical politics, were indicted as members of a gang of five who killed the paymaster and guard of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in April 1920, escaping with nearly $16,000 in wages. Identification evidence was strong, but the prosecution argued for a conviction mainly on the two men’s
“consciousness of guilt”. Defence lawyers for Sacco and Vanzetti countered that Attorney General Mitchell Palmer campaigned for the deportation of alien radicals during 1920–21 and argued that their clients’ “consciousness of guilt” related to politics and not armed robbery. The case became entangled in political as well as legal issues. After a lengthy trial, both men were convicted of first-degree murder, but the verdict triggered an unprecedented campaign to establish their innocence. Among those signing petitions for clemency were the British playwright George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein and the authors H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy. A review of the case ordered by the state governor pointed to grave political bias on the part of the trial judge, but failed to question the verdict. Accordingly, in 1927, Sacco and
V
anzetti went to the electric chair. Doubts about their guilt continued to rankle, and half a century later their names mere cleared in a special proclamation signed by the governor of Massachusetts. The author, Louis Stark, was a young reporter on the
New York Times
at the time of the Sacco
–
Vanzetti trial and later became the paper’s labour correspondent.

“What do you know about the Sacco–Vanzetti case?”

This question was addressed to me one evening in February 1922, by Ralph Graves, then Sunday editor of
The
New
York
Times
.

I said I had read a few newspaper articles on the case.

“Are the men guilty?” asked Mr Graves.

“I don’t know,” was my reply.

“You’re just the man I want,” he said. “Take a week off, go to Boston, get both sides of the case and then write a piece giving the facts in impartial review. We want the pros and cons and let the reader make his own decision.”

That was my introduction to the celebrated case which rocked the world and whose echoes still reverberate every August upon the anniversary of the execution of the two Italians in Charlestown State Prison.

I went to Boston. In due time a 4,000-word summary appeared in the
Times
. Five years later I was in Boston again for the final three weeks of the case, weeks marked by riots all over the world, picketing of the State House, scores of arrests, feverish investigations, desperate eleventh-hour moves on behalf of the two men. All elements of drama were present. Condemnation, suspense, last-minute reprieve, more suspense, appeals, uncertainty, doubts. Then the seven-year climax—execution!

The Sacco–Vanzetti case!

Never had there been one like it in the annals of American jurisprudence, possibly excepting the Mooney case. A seven-year Golgotha for the fish peddler and the shoe worker. The focal point of worldwide discussion of “American justice”; agitation and propaganda that flared into extraordinary demonstrations at home and abroad, all to one purpose, stay of execution, mercy.

The Sacco–Vanzetti case!

The “American Dreyfus” affair in which the sympathies of eminent men from Europe to Asia were enlisted. Anatole France, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland.

The Sacco–Vanzetti case!

A judicial drama enacted in the golden-domed State House in Boston, in the severely plain Dedham courthouse, in Harvard’s august halls, in jails, on street corners, in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Buenos Aires.

The characters—humble working people, labourers, shoemakers, railroad workers, storekeepers, salesmen, lawyers, doctors, pistol experts, prosecutors, judges, jailers, Harvard professors. All interested in the two principals—those philosophical anarchists, draft dodgers, convicted murderers, two humble Italians, one a shoe worker who had scarcely missed a working day in seven years, thrifty, home-loving; the other a gentle man, loved by children and neighbours.

What was the Sacco–Vanzetti case?

On 15 April 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alexander Berardelli, his guard, were fired upon and killed on the main street of South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the payroll of Slater and Morrill’s shoe factory, amounting to $15,776.51, was stolen. The two murderers threw the payroll boxes into a car which contained several other men and were driven off at breakneck speed.