Move to Murder: Who Killed Julia Wallace?

[Abby Normal]

The only evidence against wallace was circumstantial evidence and its extremely weak at that. The appeals court made the right decision.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The only evidence against wallace was circumstantial evidence and its extremely weak at that. The appeals court made the right decision.

The evidence against Parry or Parry and an Accomplice is none existent however and wouldn’t have even made it to court in the first place. We don’t have to shoehorn Wallace into place. We don’t need to resort to ‘well he must have panicked’ to explain bizarre behaviour. We don’t need to accuse the police or witnesses of being a part of a conspiracy.

All we have to accept for Wallace is a) that Alan Close left the Wallace’s at approximately 6.35 (as confirmed by neighbours on both sides. b) Wallace didn’t get drenched head to toe in blood. c) That Wallace didn’t more around the house at the speed of an astronaut on the moon. d) And that sometimes, when something gets hidden it doesn’t get found. None of which are anything approaching impossible.

The only person who could have had a motive to brutally murder Julia.

The only person that, if he left the house when he said that he did, would have arrived at the phone box just about exactly the time of the phone all.

The only person that could have been anything approaching certain that the plan would succeed because he had control of events.

The only person that could have asked Beattie for his own address during the phone call knowing full well that he didn’t know it.

The person that was ‘late’ mentioning the fact that he had indeed visited the Menlove Gardens area before. Yet he acted as if he was in a foreign country.

The person that lied to his friends about being cleared by the police.

The only person with a reason to turn off the lights.

The person who, despite fearing for his wife’s safety/life, walked past a parlour door that was within reach.

The only person with a reason to take away the murder weapon.

We can even provide a reason why he didn’t stage the robbery more thoroughly. Because Alan Close had a problem with his bicycle and so turned up later than usual giving William less time than he expected to have.

The phone operators described the voice of an older man. Wallace was 30 years Parry’s senior.

We might even mention that the operators were struck by the callers pronunciation of café. The caller said ‘cafay’ though they felt that most locals would have said ‘caff’ or ‘caffee.’ This Correct pronunciation might even have been called Posh in that locality. Who was more likely to use that pronunciation? Dodgy local lad Parry. Or a sophisticated, classical music loving, chess playing, chemistry lecturing, highbrow play appreciating (non local) Wallace.

Or do we believe...

Parry comes up with a plan despite his previous crimes amounting to lifting money from his round and hoping that no one noticed.

Parry the clever planner whose plan relies almost entirely on luck.

Parry the man lucky enough to find an accomplice willing to take 100% of the risks.

Parry who is alibi’d for the time of the murder.

An accomplice who is absolutely sanguine about being identified by Julia and yet still goes on to batter her brains out.

An accomplice apparently satisfied with splitting £4 with Parry without making any attempt to look elsewhere for cash or valuables.

If we then say that he panicked we can asked why he was calm’ enough to go around turning off lights.

An accomplice/sneak thief wearing gloves who takes away a bloodied weapon that can in no way be connected to him.

Julia being unable to recognise her own coat from William’s.

We surely have to see that William is by far the likeliest killer. Every part of the case points toward him far, far more than anyone else.

[RodCrosby]

<<tediousness snipped>>
We surely have to see that William is by far the likeliest killer.

No we don't, as the judges, and even the Police [!], explained...

OLIVER KC : What I am putting to you is that everything in that room is consistent with a knock at the front door, and the admission of someone, and the visitor being taken into the parlour ?

Supt. MOORE: It is quite possible.


"But it seems to me...that there must be on the evidence some possibility that someone else knew of the prisoner’s possible movements, prospective movements, with sufficient confidence to take some action upon them....The evidence is quite consistent with some unknown criminal, for some unknown motive, having got into the house and executed the murder and gone away... If there was an unknown murderer, he has covered up his traces."
Mr. Justice Wright, summing-up in Rex v Wallace


OLIVER KC: "If he did not send that message, he was an innocent man, and how can it be said that the Prosecution have even started to prove that he sent it ?"

'Mr. Justice Branson asked Mr. Hemmerde:
''Assuming the murder was not committed by the appellant, what evidence is there that the telephone call was put through by him?"

There was of course no such evidence.'
Hargrave Lee Adam in Murder Most Mysterious (1932)

"Are you not really saying that if it be assumed that this man committed the murder, other circumstances fit in with that?"
The Lord Chief Justice, Court of Criminal Appeal 19 May 1931, 23 Cr. App. R. 32

The Court of Appeal then quashed the conviction because it was founded on mere suspicion.

"I thought then, and looking back on the evidence I still think that the case was insufficiently strong to convict. There was no point against him which did not seem to be too weak or break down. There were a number of points which might have told against him but when you analysed them each one broke down at some stage."
Lord Wright of Durley, recalling the case, 1958

We now have new evidence, unavailable in 1931, which points strongly to Parry & Accomplice.

[moste]

That seems to put everything into prospective Herlock.

[RodCrosby]

That's what we need.

Perspective, not....obsession.

[moste]

That seems to put everything into perspective, Herlock.

[Herlock Sholmes]

From Rodders (Chairman Of The St William Wallace Appreciation Society.)

.
We now have new evidence, unavailable in 1931, which points strongly to Parry & Accomplice.

And would that ‘new evidence’ happen to be the utter fantasy that is the Parkes testimony?

Absolutely nothing points to an accomplice and Parry has an alibi and so wasn’t involved. It can’t get much simpler.

[Herlock Sholmes]

And on the Parkes nonsense we might also ask why Parry coughed to a crime which, according to Rod, he didn’t commit himself. Parry knew that he had an alibi and couldn’t be connected to events at Wolverton Street. Even if the Accomplice was later caught and tried to tie Parry into the case Parry could have simply denied all knowledge.

So not only is it unbelievable that he would, and I really don’t mind repeating this:

- get his car cleaned at a garage where he’d previously been caught searching through drawers in room where they had cash and so was unwelcome and treated with suspicion.

- by a person who neither liked nor trusted him and had told him to his face.

- he ditches the clean glove (or was it a mitten, has anyone ever heard of a thief wearing mittens by the way) but keeps the bloodied one in a box in plain view.

- he tells Parkes that the glove could get him hanged.

- he tells him where the weapon was dumped.

- he doesn’t bother telling Parkes to keep his mouth shut.

- then Moore completely ignores his statement. A statement that would have taken all of a few minutes to confirm or deny.

- why didn’t Parkes or any of his mates go and have a look for the weapon, see that it was there, and then go to the police again saying “we’ve found the weapon.”

- then there’s the nonsense suggestion that the murder was committed by Parkes wearing fishing waders

- and there’s even the suggestion that super confident Parkes even borrowed an item of clothing from a policeman to commit the crime.!

Is that the ‘evidence’ that you’re talking about Rod?

[Herlock Sholmes]

That seems to put everything into perspective, Herlock.

Cheers Moste

[Herlock Sholmes]

That's what we need.

Perspective, not....obsession.

Look in the dictionary under ‘obsession’ and there’s a phot of Rod.

[Graham]

I've read very little about the Wallace Case, so am far from being knowledgeable about it, but could someone perhaps tell me, if Wallace did actually kill his wife, what was his motive for so doing?

Graham

[RodCrosby]

HEMMERDE KC: In fact, so far as the happiness of this household is concerned, the Crown knows nothing to the contrary of the view that these two people were very happy together.
Opening speech for the Crown

"As far as the question of motive is concerned, you will form your own view about it, but of course as far as the prisoner is concerned there is no apparent motive.... Indeed, the evidence is quite consistent with some unknown criminal, for some unknown motive, having got into the house and executed the murder and gone away."
Mr. Justice Wright, summing up in Rex v Wallace

[Herlock Sholmes]

I've read very little about the Wallace Case, so am far from being knowledgeable about it, but could someone perhaps tell me, if Wallace did actually kill his wife, what was his motive for so doing?

Graham

The problem is that the Wallace’s weren’t exactly a The Kardashians. No hectic social life for them and few could say that they knew them well. Most said that they appeared to be a happy couple. Mrs Johnston for example didn’t even know Julia’s Christian name. Most people, as you know, don’t air their dirt linen in public; they put on a show in front of guests. Didn’t everyone say that the Crippen’s appeared a happy couple. We do have something to go on though.

Eight years before the murder Mrs Wilson actually lived with them for three weeks nursing Wallace through pneumonia so she would have seen them at close quarters when guards were down. She said:

“Their attitude towards each other appeared strained and that the feeling of sympathy and confidence which one usually found existing between man and wife appeared to be entirely absent. They were not the happy and devoted couple some people thought.”

She said of Julia: “....was peculiar in her manner and dirty.”

Whilst William: “....appeared to have suffered a keen disappointment in life.”’

Wilson had no reason to lie. And how might the Wallace’s relationship have deteriorated over the proceeding eight years?

Dr Curwen said that Julia had implied that Wallace had malingered. He also said that Wallace appeared indifferent to the state of Julia’s health.

Again, what reason would a Doctor have to lie.

Alfred Mather, a former colleague of William’s called him “the most cool, calculating, despondent and soured man” he had ever met and that he had an evil temper. He’d met Julia and found her ‘very offhand’ and a ‘proud and peculiar woman’ who believed she’d married beneath herself. Rod calls this a grudge but, of course, there’s no evidence of that.

Wallace’s sister-in-laws Amy felt that Wallace was condescending towards his wife.

We might add that Wallace was an intelligent, cultured man who had been stuck in the same job for 15 years or so; trudging around the streets in all weather collecting money. Julia not only lied about her past she’d taken 16 years off her true age. She was actually old enough to have been William’s mother! She was also estranged from her family.

Is it a beyond the realms that Wallace (not in the best of health himself) might have seen the rest of his life as nursemaiding a wife who was more and more resembling his mother in age and health? We could even speculate....what if William had somehow discovered Julia’s true age? Perhaps from her family or when trying to arrange some kind of insurance policy. How might that have affected him?

Motives can remain hidden below the surface away from friends and family. How many times though have we seen the news and a murder has taken place and a neighbour says to an interviewer “they always seemed such a happy couple.”

[Graham]

Thank you, Rod.

I said I'd read very little, which does not mean that I've read nothing about the Wallace Case. As I understand it, the judge's summing-up was in favour of Wallace, but after a relatively short deliberation the jury found him guilty. (There are certain similarities between this and the A6 Case, in which the judge's summing-up was favourable to James Hanratty, yet the jury - after a very prolonged deliberation - found him guilty).

It seems to have been established that Wallace was actually fond of his wife, had no known affairs with other women - correct me if I'm wrong here - and as a lifelong keeper of diaries wrote lovingly of his wife and his marriage, and after her death made heart-rending entries as to why she had been taken from him. Well, yes, he could have been making it all up, but why should he, in what was evidently a personal and private diary?

I have also read a very little about Wallace's sister-in-law Amy (the wife of his brother Joseph) who had according to one writer been a member of a 'flagellation sect' when she and her husband were living in Malaya in the 1920's. It has, I understand, been suggested that Amy was Wallace's mistress, and that she murdered Julia to get her out of the way. Sounds incredibly far-fetched to me, but so does most of this weird case......

I understand that Wallace was asked by the investigating officers to draw up a list of callers to his house who might have been trusted by, and admitted by his wife. He apparently named 15 people, including Amy and Gordon Parry.

Parry, I understand, was a bad 'un through and through: heavily in debt; an embezzler due to his failure to pay in insurance premiums he had collected for his employer Prudential Assurance; and, according to what I've read, charged over the years with theft and indecent assault. He had, it seems, been described at his trial for indecent assault as a sexual pervert by an independent medical expert. Not a nice chap at all. Is there any information on record regarding his being charged with indecent assault? And if so, which way did the verdict go?

I understand that the Liverpool journalist Roger Wilkes tracked down Parry to North Wales (at some time after the infamous 'doorstep confrontation' between Parry and Jonathan Goodman along with Richard Whittington-Egan)
but it was discovered that Parry had died in April 1980. Wilkes, it seems, found that Lily Lloyd, a girl-friend of Parry's at the time of the murder, had admitted that her alibi for Parry, i.e., that she was with him on the night of the murder, was false, and Wilkes, who located her, was told by her that on the night of the murder she was playing piano at a cinema. Wilkes, it seems, was also the investigator who located John Parkes, who told him that on the murder-night Parry had called at Parkes' garage where he worked, and got Parkes to hose-down his car, and that Parkes had seen a blood-soaked glove in the car.

Don't know enough about this case to come down on one side or the other, but if I were to be asked to choose............

Graham

[RodCrosby]

None of these people had the temerity to say any of their prejudicial, malicious gossip in Court - which amounted to nothing in the way of motive, in any case.

Even the Crown itself said it had nothing to offer against the view that the Wallaces were very happy together.

There were reams of people, who knew the Wallaces far better than these, who did give evidence in Court consistently as to their happiness.

But of course, only an obsessive would ignore all the evidence that was given, and harp on about stuff [the only negatives the Police could find, after searching far and wide] that was not given in evidence...