** The Murder of Julia Wallace **

[Herlock Sholmes]

Him or someone he knew was my thought. And his alibi was through a girlfriend was it not. I don't think the Liverpool police would have dug deeply on that since they had the Queen and were looking for checkmate.

Hi Dupin,

Parry’s alibi for the night of the murder wasn’t his girlfriend. He was at the house of Mrs Olivia Brine in Knocklaid Road from 5.30 until 8.30. Also there was her 13 year old daughter Savonna who also confirmed his presence as did Mrs Brine’s nephew Harold Denison (who was a friend of Parry’s which is how he came to know the Brine’s. A Miss Plant also visited that evening. After that he said that he’d gone to a Post Office then to a store to collect an accumulator battery for his radio. He then went to a friends for 10 minutes where they discussed a forthcoming birthday party then he went to his girlfriends.

[caz]

fascinating discussion and the last couple of posts got me thinking. if wallace was innocent and the caller was the killer, why try to contact him at a pub?? wouldnt he call him at home or his place of work?? hows he gonna know wallace would take the bait from a message left at a pub? or even get the message? makes no sense.

Hi Abby,

It certainly smacks of someone's cunning plan to have that call witnessed, doesn't it? You'd think that anyone planning to get Wallace out of the house for criminal purposes would have wanted to call him directly, preferably while he was on his own.

Telephone scammers absolutely hate it if their targeted victim isn't the one answering the phone, or if there is anyone else around to advise the victim to hang up. I'd imagine that would be intensified for anyone planning a house burglary the following evening, let alone bloody murder.

And it would all have been for nought if someone at the chess club had had the local knowledge to assure Wallace that Menlove Gardens East 100% didn't exist and he was - literally - going to be taken for a ride.

Wallace obviously took that chance if he was the caller and it paid off - just.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

fascinating discussion and the last couple of posts got me thinking. if wallace was innocent and the caller was the killer, why try to contact him at a pub?? wouldnt he call him at home or his place of work?? hows he gonna know wallace would take the bait from a message left at a pub? or even get the message? makes no sense.

[caz]

Him or someone he knew was my thought. And his alibi was through a girlfriend was it not. I don't think the Liverpool police would have dug deeply on that since they had the Queen and were looking for checkmate.

But that's with hindsight, isn't it? Wallace would have known that the police would suspect him, as the husband of the victim, unless he could be ruled out or another suspect put in the frame instead. Parry would not just have been an accomplice to murder; he'd have committed the deed himself. And if Wallace had been smart enough to provide himself with an unbreakable alibi, Parry would have been in deep trouble as the next in line, and his own alibi was likely to crumble when the police inevitably did a lot more digging.

Wallace could have stitched Parry up like a kipper if they'd been partners in crime and he had not lost focus on establishing his own alibi. Either way, however, I think the pair of them would have hanged had they been in this together.

Just my opinion.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

well that would take care of the tight time frame and the voice on the phone not being wallace issues, but who would be the accomplice? certainly not parry, whom wallace accused, and apparently had an alibi.

That accusation is key, Abby, because Parry would know he was being set up and he'd have taken Wallace down with him, no question, if push had come to shove.

Wallace would have been unlucky as well as extremely unwise to try and grass up an accomplice who was crafty enough to supply a fake alibi which could appear genuine.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I have come around to thinking 90% that Wallace had planned this.

But I lean towards an accomplice actually doing the deed. There is an obvious potential accomplice.

My reasoning is that Wallace does not appear to be a violent man, but he was a chess player (mediocre or not) and could think around the matter, here is my tuppence on his thoughts:
- invent a reason to be absent a long way from home
- and to an impossible address so prolonging his absence
- wait until the boy comes round for the milk money
- ensure the sick Julia comes to see him off, hopefully someone would notice
- go immediately to catch a tram for MGE and make sure the guard records the time
- wander about asking every Tom, Dick, and Harry where MGE might be and make sure they are impressed by him, and the time of asking.
- Include a policeman if possible.
- come home and make a big deal of entry, including getting the neighbours involved to witness he had no blood on him.

Meanwhile his accomplice, known to Julia and so allowed entry on some pretence, would beat her to death at 9 o'clock.

What could go wrong? The time between the last person to see her alive and the time to board the tram was too short for murder plus washing off the gore. And any decent pathologist, as believed at the time anyway, would suggest ToD as between 8 and Wallace's return. All within the cast iron alibi timescale.

That was the gambit. Unfortunately, he overlooked his position, and the Liverpool police took his Queen.

The pathologist did indeed come up with a ToD inside the alibi but was minded (a transitive verb?) to allow it to be much earlier, just after the milk boy. And a fit young policeman showed that Wallace could have done the dirty, washed, and walked briskly (8 mph?) to the tram stop in time. The jury believed that. The appeal judges probably did not.

As for motive, I have no idea. Cobalt's litany includes everything anyone has ever suggested. Can we get Lucy Worsley on this case?
HTH.

But why would Wallace have waited for the milk boy before he left home, if the plan was for his accomplice to be let in by Julia while Wallace himself was provably out of the house? If Wallace had made sure to be well on his way to his 7.30 appointment when the milk boy - or anyone else for that matter, such as a neighbour - spoke to Julia, that would have been an unshakeable alibi. Or am I missing something obvious? And if the accomplice also phoned the chess club asking for Wallace, it would have been far better timed to coincide with his own arrival, so he couldn't have made the call himself. Even if he'd been there for a few minutes when the call came in, it would have ruled him out as the caller. Surely that would have been more important than having a third party take the message because he was late.

If Wallace did have an accomplice, he failed to make effective use of him and nearly hanged as a result of such easily avoidable mistakes.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Abby

You are right, and it was covered in the trial I think too. That we cannot be sure what the motive is does not mean that there is not a motive. If the evidence points to Wallace, we do not need to know his motive to find him guilty. We cannot see into the minds of our fellow men, but we can judge behaviour from the evidence.

Agreed. Conversely, just because someone would appear to have had a plausible motive for murder - or any other alleged crime you care to name - that is not an indicator of guilt. Other factors need to be present, such as strong circumstantial evidence or having no credible alibi. Otherwise, a husband who was clearly unhappy with his wife could be set up for her murder by someone who wished them both harm.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz

I no longer keep a diary, but I did for a while write almost daily. I had (and still have) no intention of allowing them to be read by anyone else. I expect Wallace was the same - it gives you the freedom to write down your true thoughts. And Wallace seems to have used his diaries that way - he has no problem discussing his depression, his kidney problems, how much he disliked his job. Given this, I don't think he would have any issue writing about how he truly felt about Julia. Indeed some entries are a little damining of her, but not in any serious way. Mostly he writes about the contentment they share. Unless these were written to be read as part of a murder alibi, I think we have to take them at face value. Some people did talk about tensions between them, and this happens in the best of marriages so I do not find that unusual. In fact if no-one saw them ever at odds with each other, it would be strange indeed.

I take your point, etenguy, but having no intention of allowing a personal diary to be read by anyone else comes with the burden of knowing that if one should die or become incapacitated suddenly, or be unable to access it again for some other reason, it will be found and read at some point. Anything highly incriminating or damaging is likely to be destroyed before it can be read, or not written about in the first place. If Wallace had put even the most idle thoughts of murder into words at any stage, separate to his usual diaries, he would not have allowed them to survive the act.

Love,

Caz
X

[Dupin]

certainly not parry, whom wallace accused, and apparently had an alibi

Him or someone he knew was my thought. And his alibi was through a girlfriend was it not. I don't think the Liverpool police would have dug deeply on that since they had the Queen and were looking for checkmate.

[Abby Normal]

I have come around to thinking 90% that Wallace had planned this.

But I lean towards an accomplice actually doing the deed. There is an obvious potential accomplice.

My reasoning is that Wallace does not appear to be a violent man, but he was a chess player (mediocre or not) and could think around the matter, here is my tuppence on his thoughts:
- invent a reason to be absent a long way from home
- and to an impossible address so prolonging his absence
- wait until the boy comes round for the milk money
- ensure the sick Julia comes to see him off, hopefully someone would notice
- go immediately to catch a tram for MGE and make sure the guard records the time
- wander about asking every Tom, Dick, and Harry where MGE might be and make sure they are impressed by him, and the time of asking.
- Include a policeman if possible.
- come home and make a big deal of entry, including getting the neighbours involved to witness he had no blood on him.

Meanwhile his accomplice, known to Julia and so allowed entry on some pretence, would beat her to death at 9 o'clock.

What could go wrong? The time between the last person to see her alive and the time to board the tram was too short for murder plus washing off the gore. And any decent pathologist, as believed at the time anyway, would suggest ToD as between 8 and Wallace's return. All within the cast iron alibi timescale.

That was the gambit. Unfortunately, he overlooked his position, and the Liverpool police took his Queen.

The pathologist did indeed come up with a ToD inside the alibi but was minded (a transitive verb?) to allow it to be much earlier, just after the milk boy. And a fit young policeman showed that Wallace could have done the dirty, washed, and walked briskly (8 mph?) to the tram stop in time. The jury believed that. The appeal judges probably did not.

As for motive, I have no idea. Cobalt's litany includes everything anyone has ever suggested. Can we get Lucy Worsley on this case?
HTH.

well that would take care of the tight time frame and the voice on the phone not being wallace issues, but who would be the accomplice? certainly not parry, whom wallace accused, and apparently had an alibi.

[Dupin]

I have come around to thinking 90% that Wallace had planned this.

But I lean towards an accomplice actually doing the deed. There is an obvious potential accomplice.

My reasoning is that Wallace does not appear to be a violent man, but he was a chess player (mediocre or not) and could think around the matter, here is my tuppence on his thoughts:
- invent a reason to be absent a long way from home
- and to an impossible address so prolonging his absence
- wait until the boy comes round for the milk money
- ensure the sick Julia comes to see him off, hopefully someone would notice
- go immediately to catch a tram for MGE and make sure the guard records the time
- wander about asking every Tom, Dick, and Harry where MGE might be and make sure they are impressed by him, and the time of asking.
- Include a policeman if possible.
- come home and make a big deal of entry, including getting the neighbours involved to witness he had no blood on him.

Meanwhile his accomplice, known to Julia and so allowed entry on some pretence, would beat her to death at 9 o'clock.

What could go wrong? The time between the last person to see her alive and the time to board the tram was too short for murder plus washing off the gore. And any decent pathologist, as believed at the time anyway, would suggest ToD as between 8 and Wallace's return. All within the cast iron alibi timescale.

That was the gambit. Unfortunately, he overlooked his position, and the Liverpool police took his Queen.

The pathologist did indeed come up with a ToD inside the alibi but was minded (a transitive verb?) to allow it to be much earlier, just after the milk boy. And a fit young policeman showed that Wallace could have done the dirty, washed, and walked briskly (8 mph?) to the tram stop in time. The jury believed that. The appeal judges probably did not.

As for motive, I have no idea. Cobalt's litany includes everything anyone has ever suggested. Can we get Lucy Worsley on this case?
HTH.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Once we go into Wilsonworld- whether Colin Wilson or David Wilson who have sold a lot of books about crime- then we are scraping the barrel. It's psychobabble without Freud's grounding in medicine to support it. We are being invited into the recently created discipline of 'criminology' which sometimes attracts, as a recent case in the UK has shown, recruits who are socially deviant. It is no more a 'discipline' than what the FBI profilers did back in the day which regularly produced the square root of SFA. It's magical thinking for people who struggle to assess the evidence available.

And assessing evidence is hard enough to do without distractions. So on the Wallace case we have a repressed Victorian, a latent homosexual, a cuckolded husband, a sexual pervert, a control freak, a Raskolnikov who wants to go beyond the bounds of morality by committing the ultimate taboo, a bitter employee, an embittered husband whose punctiliousness did not extend to his knowing his wife's age until late in the day, a manic depressive, a crafty chess player of moderate skill, a cold blooded murderer, a sneering escapee from justice, a flagellist, a lover of Ibsen' plays which often view matrimony as a hellish trap, a miser, a creepy scientific nerd with his own room, a pious fraud, a man facing imminent death. I'll stop there.

And make the point thus which might be uncomfortable. Which is that William Wallace, whether innocent or guilty, was almost certainly more like the people (myself included of course) who contribute to this site than the verbiage I have felt obliged to write above. If you can't find a credible motive it might be better to remain silent. And there has been no motive ever provided in the Wallace case based on a scintilla of evidence. It is, as HS to his credit always makes clear, pure supposition. And that supposition often comes from the fads and social fancies of a world completely removed from that of Liverpool in 1931. This is not insight; this is social ignorance. It is, for the most part, verbiage when removed from hard scrutiny of the evidence available.

Good post.

We certainly can’t provide any evidence of a motive. I’d say that the most the we could say is that if we take into consideration all of those that had dealings with the Wallace’s it might have been the case that their marriage might not have been as happy as it was generally perceived. That could apply to any number of marriages which haven’t ended in murder of course.

As Abby and Eten have said, all that we can do is follow the evidence and arrive at our own individual conclusions. What is unusual for me is that this is the first time that I’ve been on a Wallace thread on here where all current contributors favour a guilty William (with differing levels of confidence of course.)

[cobalt]

Once we go into Wilsonworld- whether Colin Wilson or David Wilson who have sold a lot of books about crime- then we are scraping the barrel. It's psychobabble without Freud's grounding in medicine to support it. We are being invited into the recently created discipline of 'criminology' which sometimes attracts, as a recent case in the UK has shown, recruits who are socially deviant. It is no more a 'discipline' than what the FBI profilers did back in the day which regularly produced the square root of SFA. It's magical thinking for people who struggle to assess the evidence available.

And assessing evidence is hard enough to do without distractions. So on the Wallace case we have a repressed Victorian, a latent homosexual, a cuckolded husband, a sexual pervert, a control freak, a Raskolnikov who wants to go beyond the bounds of morality by committing the ultimate taboo, a bitter employee, an embittered husband whose punctiliousness did not extend to his knowing his wife's age until late in the day, a manic depressive, a crafty chess player of moderate skill, a cold blooded murderer, a sneering escapee from justice, a flagellist, a lover of Ibsen' plays which often view matrimony as a hellish trap, a miser, a creepy scientific nerd with his own room, a pious fraud, a man facing imminent death. I'll stop there.

And make the point thus which might be uncomfortable. Which is that William Wallace, whether innocent or guilty, was almost certainly more like the people (myself included of course) who contribute to this site than the verbiage I have felt obliged to write above. If you can't find a credible motive it might be better to remain silent. And there has been no motive ever provided in the Wallace case based on a scintilla of evidence. It is, as HS to his credit always makes clear, pure supposition. And that supposition often comes from the fads and social fancies of a world completely removed from that of Liverpool in 1931. This is not insight; this is social ignorance. It is, for the most part, verbiage when removed from hard scrutiny of the evidence available.

[Abby Normal]

Hi Abby

You are right, and it was covered in the trial I think too. That we cannot be sure what the motive is does not mean that there is not a motive. If the evidence points to Wallace, we do not need to know his motive to find him guilty. We cannot see into the minds of our fellow men, but we can judge behaviour from the evidence.

bingo eten. and thats how ive always viewed motive. its nice to have clear motive in the case, but if not, who cares, just go with tje evidence.

[etenguy]

Looking at this the other way round, I imagine it would have been unusual for anyone to paint a picture in their personal diary of a married life they secretly loathed and longed to escape from. Old habits, such as keeping a regular diary, die hard, so I would expect Wallace to have carried on doing so, even if he was just keeping up appearances that the marriage was ticking along nicely as always.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz

I no longer keep a diary, but I did for a while write almost daily. I had (and still have) no intention of allowing them to be read by anyone else. I expect Wallace was the same - it gives you the freedom to write down your true thoughts. And Wallace seems to have used his diaries that way - he has no problem discussing his depression, his kidney problems, how much he disliked his job. Given this, I don't think he would have any issue writing about how he truly felt about Julia. Indeed some entries are a little damining of her, but not in any serious way. Mostly he writes about the contentment they share. Unless these were written to be read as part of a murder alibi, I think we have to take them at face value. Some people did talk about tensions between them, and this happens in the best of marriages so I do not find that unusual. In fact if no-one saw them ever at odds with each other, it would be strange indeed.