Do you think William Herbert Wallace was guilty?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Logic left the building again?

Wallace was convicted despite a resolute NO from Beattie...

We may assume if he'd wavered, the jury would have licked their lips even moreso.

And the Court of Appeal may not have come to the rescue...

You really are showing yourself up here Rod. As you have done all evening.

Is the suggestion that Wallace made the phonecall using a disguised voice any more risky that the suggestion that Qualtrough was prepared to steal money from the Wallace’s home when he knew that he could be positively identified by Julia if caught? Of course it isn’t!

Before the murder had occurred Wallace would have known for certain that he had fooled Beattie. If Beattie had said ‘actually he sounded a bit like you,’ (just to see how Wallace reacted if Beattie had any suspicion) Wallace would have abandoned his plan with no harm done. Even if Wallace had sensed any doubt he wouldn’t have proceeded.

Recalling a strangers voice at a distance of time is notoriously difficult. Surely even you know that Rod? Even if Beattie had have had suspicions would he have been confident enough to voice them? Would he have been prepared, on such a flimsy point, to contribute in any way to a guilty verdict for his friend Wallace. Someone for whom he had the highest regard?

There’s absolutely no way that you can exonerate Wallace purely on the grounds that Beattie didn’t recognise his voice on the phone. It’s simply desperate wish thinking on your part.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Remember this?

Point out to me anywhere on these threads where you have said “oh, I’ve changed my opinion on whether Qualtrough handle the cash upstairs.”

I’ll wait why you look

I take it that you’re admitting that you didn’t own up to changing your mind?

[Herlock Sholmes]

And this.

To recap.

I said that a policeman had categorically told Wallace that there was no MGE.

Then Rod ‘integrity’ Crosby posts from the trial transcript but conveniently misses out the part where the Constable did indeed tell him categorically that there was no MGE.

Then the Constable says that he could try Menlove Avenue. And that he could find a directory at the Police Station. Which smacks of the Constable thinking “well if you don’t believe me try a directory.” Probably feeling slightly irked at Wallace suggesting that he didn’t know the area of his beat.

Let’s remember that Beattie had written down the message at the club. They had discussed it at some length. Wallace knew categorically that the address he wanted was Menlove Gardens East and not Menlove Avenue. The advice to try Menlove Avenue would have been completely useless to Wallace. A man without an ulterior motive would categorically have ignored it and gone straight home.

So......I was categorically right and Rod was categorically wrong.

Not for the first time


Going to dishonest lengths to prove that you are always right just shows how desperate you are.

To use a cliche, the silence is deafening on this.

You lost every single argument. Everyone can see.

Go find another hobby to annoy people with

[RodCrosby]

I should challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed...

[AmericanSherlock]

I should challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed...

He beats you at everything except coming across as an autistic joke.

[Herlock Sholmes]

No proper response from Rod, as per....

Just a childish insult.

It’s pointless trying to reason with a clown. They just resort to throwing buckets of water.

Feeble.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Dishonest too I might add.

[caz]

Yes, the caller was never seen. I would add to bear in mind that WHW left at 7:15 on his own accord and the call was made in a location 3 minutes away by walking distance...3 minutes later! This call (and critically the call box's location!) was only traced due to a technical error that the caller could not have foreseen! This is so strongly suggestive of Wallace's guilt, that the only attempt I have ever seen to mitigate this fact is to claim that WHW was being stalked and the caller made the call as soon as he disappeared from view on the way to the chess club. (Since barring this we are dealing with a 1 in a million coincidence that another caller happened to dial the club from the same phone box that Wallace could have walked by at that exact moment based on the uncontroversial timing of his departure and the location of the call box!)

Hi AS,

If Wallace was guilty, he lied about not passing that phone box and taking a different route. If Wallace was innocent, he didn't pass the phone box, in which case the person stalking him, presumably to be sure he was actually going to play chess that night before making the call, would have lost sight of him less than three minutes into the journey, so he could go off to the call box and fanny about in there while his quarry went off in another direction and could have been going anywhere.

With the whole object of watching Wallace lost, Qualtrough's plan B had to be another stalking session the following evening, to see if his mark would leave the house, and trust to luck that: a) he had actually got the message from the previous evening; b) he was responding to it and would be gone for some time; c) that Julia was not out herself, visiting a friend or relative, which would make breaking into the house necessary if it was just a burglary plan; and d) that she would answer the door. [When I lived in London I would rarely answer the door if I was alone in the house and not expecting anyone, or couldn't see who it was from a window.]

I realise that criminals operate on a 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' basis, but this was very far from an opportunist crime, which makes it very hard for me to understand why more care would not have been taken in the planning stage to avoid the main stumbling blocks to a successful outcome on the Tuesday - the day picked deliberately for this crime, or it would surely have been committed on the Monday night in exactly the same way, but without the whole convoluted Qualtrough business, which could so easily have f...ed everything up from the outset.

When we consider the above in the light of Wallace being the criminal, however, he'd have had no choice but to have this kind of game plan, seeing the moves in advance like he was playing chess. It worked in the end, but only just.

There was a similar case the other morning on the BBC's Murder, Mystery and My Family, featuring a woman who was bludgeoned to death with a poker in her Manchester home in 1933. The argument that the convicted man would have had blood on him had he been guilty was seriously undermined by a forensic scientist, who experimented with the original crime scene and blood spatter evidence, putting herself in the position of the murderer and doing a reconstruction using fake blood. She tried it in three different positions, without taking any particular measures to avoid the blood spatter and yet she got no blood on either herself or her disposable white suit.

Here's a link to the episode:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09vgcy1/murder-mystery-and-my-family-series-1-episode-7

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

There have been times where I couldn't recognise someone's voice over the phone even when they weren't trying to disguise themselves. And that's without even getting into prank calls.

Hi Harry,

Thank goodness I'm not the only one! I've made this same point several times on this thread and surely personal experience has to count for something. My ex used to explain how phone lines worked - and I'm talking about modern times. It was something to do with the voice being broken up to send the sound waves down the line then cobbled together at the other end, losing quality and clarity in the process. It's generally good enough for the average human ear to interpret what's being said, but it's never the same as talking face to face. I often find it quite hard to recognise even my nearest and dearest without additional clues, and my hearing - not wonderful at the best of times - always suffers more when I'm on the phone.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi AS,

If Wallace was guilty, he lied about not passing that phone box and taking a different route. If Wallace was innocent, he didn't pass the phone box, in which case the person stalking him, presumably to be sure he was actually going to play chess that night before making the call, would have lost sight of him less than three minutes into the journey, so he could go off to the call box and fanny about in there while his quarry went off in another direction and could have been going anywhere.

With the whole object of watching Wallace lost, Qualtrough's plan B had to be another stalking session the following evening, to see if his mark would leave the house, and trust to luck that: a) he had actually got the message from the previous evening; b) he was responding to it and would be gone for some time; c) that Julia was not out herself, visiting a friend or relative, which would make breaking into the house necessary if it was just a burglary plan; and d) that she would answer the door. [When I lived in London I would rarely answer the door if I was alone in the house and not expecting anyone, or couldn't see who it was from a window.]

I realise that criminals operate on a 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' basis, but this was very far from an opportunist crime, which makes it very hard for me to understand why more care would not have been taken in the planning stage to avoid the main stumbling blocks to a successful outcome on the Tuesday - the day picked deliberately for this crime, or it would surely have been committed on the Monday night in exactly the same way, but without the whole convoluted Qualtrough business, which could so easily have f...ed everything up from the outset.

When we consider the above in the light of Wallace being the criminal, however, he'd have had no choice but to have this kind of game plan, seeing the moves in advance like he was playing chess. It worked in the end, but only just.

There was a similar case the other morning on the BBC's Murder, Mystery and My Family, featuring a woman who was bludgeoned to death with a poker in her Manchester home in 1933. The argument that the convicted man would have had blood on him had he been guilty was seriously undermined by a forensic scientist, who experimented with the original crime scene and blood spatter evidence, putting herself in the position of the murderer and doing a reconstruction using fake blood. She tried it in three different positions, without taking any particular measures to avoid the blood spatter and yet she got no blood on either herself or her disposable white suit.

Here's a link to the episode:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09vgcy1/murder-mystery-and-my-family-series-1-episode-7

Love,

Caz
X

These are all telling points Caz.

Rod the genius however says on one hand it was a brilliant plan but on the other Parry wouldn’t have been at all bothered by the 5 or 6 very obvious ways that it could have crumbled at the first hurdle!

I watched that programme too Caz. I immediately thought about the Wallace case

[Herlock Sholmes]

Rod also came up with this gem:

“we've all seen notes with traces of blood in our time]”

Well I’m 52 years old and have never seen blood on money. Don’t know about anyone else?

I don’t know what kind of world Rod lives in

[RodCrosby]

From the the random £1000 in my pocket at the moment, there are several with marks on them, this being the most noticeable.


And the scabrous, pecuniary-challenged troll implodes one more time...

[AmericanSherlock]

WTF??? Did Rod just prick himself?

This is very disconcerting



But seriously... wtf?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Nope. He just never tells the truth.

Firstly it’s a mark and not blood. I didn’t say I’d never seen a note with a mark on it (it’s called ‘reading’) I said that I’d never seen a note with blood on it.

Simple.

Oh, and of course Rod’s over-inflated ego surfaces, he has to use it as a childish boast.

Completely and utterly pathetic!!

[Herlock Sholmes]

WTF??? Did Rod just prick himself?

This is very disconcerting



But seriously... wtf?

Im afraid that only one of the words in your post is apt AS.