A husband returned home one night to find his wife murdered in the sitting room. For the next 90 years, the murder of Julia Wallace has continued to baffle any and all interested in the case.
William Herbert Wallace was born in 1878, in Millom, Cumberland, England. When he left school at the age of fourteen, he began training as a draper’s assistant.
Upon completing his apprenticeship, William earned a position in Manchester. He worked with Messrs Whiteway Laidlaw and Company, who outfitted the British Armed Forces. In 1903, William asked for a transfer to the company’s branch in Calcutta, India. He remained there for two years, until his brother, who lived in Shanghai, convinced William to transfer there.
In 1907, William returned to England where he received surgery to remove a kidney, after years of complaints. The surgery would cause him health problems for the remainder of his life.
Unable to return to his position, William gained employment in Harrogate, working for the Liberal Party. In 1911, he was promoted to the post of Election Agent. During this time, William met his future wife, Julia Dennis.
Julia Dennis was born on April 28th, 1861. She was the second of seven children. When she was ten her mother passed away giving birth to Julia’s youngest sibling. The death hit her father hard, and he had to give up farming due to his ailing health. Instead, he took a post as an inn keeper before succumbing to his ailments.
Julia took up a career in teaching, and became a governess to many families. At the age of 40, she began lying about her age, cutting ten years off her age fromt he census. She believed that doing so would secure her employment prospects, as more and more jobs were going to younger women.
In March of 1914, Julia and William were married. She had put her age down as 37, though she was actually 52, and 17 years older than her husband. It’s unknown whether William was aware of his wife’s age discrepancies.
There are varying accounts of their marriage. Some friends and relatives describe them as a fun loving couple, while others stated that the marriage was ‘loveless and strained’. In the end, we will never know which is a true account.
William’s position in the Liberal Party was discontinued at the outbreak of World War I. With his father’s assistance, William gained employment as a collections agent with Prudential Assurance Company in Liverpool. In 1915, the Wallaces moved to Liverpool, settling in the district of Anfield.
William had always been fascinated with chemistry and technology. He was also a violinist, though more as a hobby than as trained musician. Julia shared his enjoyment of music, and was an accomplished pianist. The two often entertained their neighbours with music, food, and drink in the sitting room of their home, much to the delight of their friends and neighbours.
During the 1920s, William supplemented the family income by lecturing part-time at the Liverpool Technical College in the chemistry department. William also greatly enjoyed a game of chess. Though not a very skilled chess player, he was a member of the Liverpool Central Chess Club. He wasn’t known to attend both weekly meetings, unless he had a match, but was known to attend the Monday meetings weekly.
On Monday, January 19th, 1931, William left for the Liverpool Central Chess Club for his weekly match. While there, he was informed that roughly 25 minutes prior to his arrival, a man calling himself R.M. Qualtrough had telephoned the club looking for him. The Chess Club captain took the call, and took down the message – Qualtrough wanted to meet with William the following day in regards to a company inquiry. He requested that William meet him at his address, 25 Menlove Gardens East at 7:30 PM. William thought nothing of it, and took the message.
The following day. William went to work, then arrived home around 5:00 PM for a spot of supper, and to change clothes. He left soon after to catch a tramcar to his appointment. At around 6:45 PM, the local milkboy stopped by the Wallace residence in order to receive his payment from Julia. He was the last person to see her alive.
At around 7:06 PM, William was seen by witnesses as boarding a tramcar. He repeatedly asked both the conductor and the ticket inspector to alert him of his stop, as he was in an area of the city that was unfamiliar to him. He told them that he was meant to meet with Qualtrough at an address in Menlove Gardens East. However, when he got off at the stop, as directed by the conductor and ticket inspector, he found that there were addresses for Menlove Gardens North, South, and West, but no East.
William wandered the area, and stopped a policeman on his beat to ask for directions. William noted that he was running late for his appointment, and that he was hopelessly lost in trying to find this address. He even stopped in at 25 Menlove Gardens West to ask for direction, or to hope that the mysterious Qualtrough may have simply given him the wrong address. Having no luck there, William next stopped in at a newsagent’s to ask for directions.
Everyone William spoke to that night could not confirm the existence of 25 Menlove Gardens East. After 45 minutes of wandering around the area, William gave up his search, and returned home.
As he returned home, William ran into his neighbours, John and Florence Johnston. They were heading out for the evening when they saw William at the back of his house. He told them that he could not get his door unlocked at the front of the house. He seemed to be having very little luck getting his door unlocked at the back, as well.
As William struggled, he asked his neighbours if they had heard anything unusual that night. John and Florence indicated that they hadn’t, and John offerred to retrieve the Wallace’s spare key. Just as he was bout to do so, William managed to get the back door open.
William entered the home, and then lit a lamp. He soon came running back outside, exclaiming: “Oh come and see, she’s been killed!”
Julia Wallace was sprawled out in the sitting room in front of the gas fireplace. She’d been bludgeoned to death. She was lying in a pool of blood, with a mackintosh, a popular type of raincoat at the time, beneath her.
As William took in more of the house, he realized that they’d been robbed. As William made his rounds collecting on insurance premiums, he would keep the funds in a cashbox, which he would lock up in a kitchen cupboard. Nothing else in the house had been disturbed except for the cupboard and the cashbox. Julia’s purse had even been left alone.
At the time, there was a known serial burglar in the area. However, the Anfield Housebreaker was not at all known for committing atrocities such as what had transpired in the Wallace home.
John ran out of the home, and rang the Merseyside Police. They were very quick to point the finger at one suspect – William Wallace.
Julia’s autopsy showed that she’d suffered 11 blows to the head from a blunt object, suspected to be either a metal bar, or a fire poker. Police noticed that a fire poker was missing from the Wallace home. Not that they would need one, as they had a gas fireplace, not a wood burning one.
William gave a statement to police, detailing his activities, as well as the mysterious message he’d received from Mr. R.M. Qualtrough. William also gave police the name of a colleague with whom he’d had a falling out, and whom Julia would have comfortably let into the house without suspicion. This individual would have known where William kept the cashbox.
The investigation also found that the call from the mysterious Mr. Qualtrough had come from a telephone box. The telephone box was roughly 400 yards, or 370 meters, from the Wallace home. However, the person who took the call was very certain that the voice on the other end of the phone was not the voice of William Wallace.
Despite this, police believed that William and ‘Qualtrough’ were the same man. They believed that William had falsified this call to give himself an alibi for the following evening, when he planned to murder his wife.
William’s attorneys conducted timing tests. They had someone make the call, then catch a tramcar to the Chess Club. This test showed that they would have arrived around the same time William had that night. However, they also tested how long it would have taken William to arrive at the Club from the stop he told police he used, which was located nowhere near the telephone box. This test showed that William would have arrived at the same time he had on the night of January 19th.
Police conducted their own tests. They had a young, fit policeman sprint from the Wallace home, to the tram stop, in order to prove that William had time to murder his wife, and catch the tramcar where he was seen by multiple witnesses. A young, fit policeman could had made it. William, however, was 52 years old, and had health issues due to the surgery to remove his left kidney in 1907. He couldn’t have sprinted even if he’d tried.
The medical examiner, who had originally stated that Julia’s time of death had been around 8:00 PM, later amended his statement. His second estimate was that Julia had been murdered just after 6:30 PM – which could account for the milkboy seeing her at 6:45 PM. With the police conducting their dodgy timing test, they concluded that William would have had enough time to murder Julia, and then catch the tramcar to the south of Liverpool for his fictitious appointment. It was a stretch, at best, but police took their theory, and ran with it.
After processing the scene, police were convinced that whoever had committed the murder would have been covered in Julia’s blood. William, though, was not. There were no traces of bloodstains on the clothes William was wearing the night of January 20th, nor on his hands.
Police even examined the bath, sink, and toilet drains for blood. The examination showed that they had not recently been used, and there were no traces of blood to be found.
Despite all of the evidence pointing to the fact that William Wallace could not have murdered his wife, two weeks after he discovered her body in their home, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
On April 22nd, 1931, the trial of William Wallace for the murder of his wife Julia Wallace began at Liverpool Assizes. William’s legal defence team was sponsored by the Prudential Staff Union.
During the course of the trial, the prosecuting attorney made misstatement after misstatement in regards to the facts of the case. In total, the attorney made 18 errors that they, at no point, attempted to correct, even when the errors were brought up.
The jury, in turn, found William Wallace guilty of first-degree murder, after an hour of deliberation. He was sentenced to death.
In May of 1931, the Court of Criminal Appeal, in a shocking and unprecedented turn, quashed the verdict. They found that William Wallace’s conviction was ‘not supported by the weight of the evidence’. William Wallace was spared the gallows, and was set free.
No one else was ever charged in the murder of Julia Wallace.
William attempted to return to life as normal, but found himself under intense social scrutiny from his community, and his customers. He was sent hatemail, and also received numerous physical threats from those who felt that he’d gotten away with murdering his wife. In a show of support, William’s employers moved him to a clerical position at their head office, in order to keep him safe.
William never returned to the house he shared with Julia. He moved to a small bungalow in Bromborough, Merseyside.
On February 26th, 1933, William Herbert Wallace died at the age of 54 due to complications from his kidney surgery.
Over the years, the murder of Julia Wallace reached international notoriety. In the 1960s, crime writer Jonathan Goodman began his own investigation, based on one of William’s statements. He began looking into this colleague that he had mentioned.
The man had done some of William’s collections for him when his ailments proved too much for him to complete his rounds. William discovered that the young man has skimmed some of the collections, and hadn’t turned them all in as he should have done. Even though William hadn’t turned the young man in, he left the company a year after the incident to join another firm.
In 1981, Roger Wilkes, an independent radio news editor, took up the investigation as well. He found that the young man William had made reference to, and that Goodman had uncovered was a man by the name of Richard Gordon Parry.
Parry was born in Liverpool on January 12th, 1909. He was the first of six childen, which a very successful, prominent, and affluent father who held his son to very high standards – and who cleaned up his messes.
Parry had been questioned by police, and he’d offered them an alibi – he had spent the evening of Julia’s murder with his fiancée. The woman corroborated the alibi, uncomfortably, and police left it at that.
However, the woman had been jilted by Parry, and wanted to recant her statement. For whatever reason, this was never brought forward to William’s legal team, nor to anyone else involved in the case.
Wilkes also discovered another witness. On the night of Julia’s murder, Parry brought his car to a local garage, where he was friends with the owner. Parry asked to have his car washed down with a high-pressure hose inside and out. As he began to do so, a glove feel out of the glovebox of the car. Parry scooped It up, demanding that the mechanic move faster. However, the mechanic noticed that the glove was soaked in blood.
When Wilkes attempted the track Parry down, he found that the man had passed away a few months earlier, taking any information – or secrets – that he had to his grave.
Wilkes, however, had made a few discoveries of his own in regards to Richard Gordon Parry. Parry was a spoiled 22-year-old in 1931. He sustained a lavish lifestyle by spending money he didn’t have, and having his father clean up his messes to preserve the family name.
Parry, who worked with William at Prudential, knew William’s habits and routines. He would know that after collecting the day’s fees, he would return home, lock them in a cashbox, and turn them in the following morning when he would go to the office before beginning his next set of rounds. Julia was also friendly with Parry. She would have let him into her house, had he knocked on the door.
Knowing this, Wilkes posited a theory that had been dismissed by police, despite William mentioning it to them himself. Parry, strapped for cash, may have gone to the Wallace home, with the intention of robbing it. Julia may have caught him by surprise, or caught him in the act, and Parry murdered her to save his own skin.
However, this theory cannot be corroborated.
While the murder of Julia Wallace officially remains unsolved, one theory does stand out above the others. And that theory posits that William was set up by Richard Gordon Parry to take the fall for a murder that he committed.
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Sources:
The Julia Wallace Murder – 90 Years Unsolved – A. W. Naves – Medium
Unsolved ‘locked room’ murder that’s puzzled detectives for 88 years – Emilia Bona – Liverpool Echo
The Dark Histories Podcast – Season 2, Episode 16 – The Murder of Julia Wallace
William Herbert Wallace Wikipedia page