So You Think You Know It All: A compendium of extremely interesting and slightly strange true stories

However, there was no DNA match to link Jean to the victim. Jean expressed relief that it wasn’t William who met such a gruesome end but frustration that, so far, there is no closure for either her family or that of the unknown man.

WHO’S QUALTROUGH?

On 20 January 1931, housewife Julia Wallace was brutally murdered in her home in Liverpool. Three months later, her husband William Wallace was convicted of the murder and faced the death penalty – only to make legal history when his conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal.

W. H. Wallace was a highly respected and respectable insurance agent, the archetypical ‘Man from the Pru’ whose hobby was playing chess; he was rumoured to be a Grandmaster. His wife Julia was equally ‘proper’, and their neighbours in Liverpool believed they were the very picture of happiness.

One night at his chess club, Wallace received a message that a man named Qualtrough had called, asking Wallace to visit his home on a ‘matter of business’, 6 km (4 miles) away at 25 Menlove Gardens East, Mossley Hill. Wallace had never heard of Qualtrough, but presuming the address was near Menlove Avenue, where he had clients, he travelled to the location – only to discover that no such man and no such place existed. When he got home, later that night, Wallace discovered his wife dead in the parlour. She had been bludgeoned.

The Julia Wallace case was the real-life whodunit that captured imaginations in the Britain of the 1930s. To this day it has never been solved. But after years of painstaking research one man thinks he may have finally solved the case.

John Gannon, a crime writer from Liverpool who wrote the book The Killing of Julia Wallace, was the first person to be given access to the files of both Merseyside Police and William Wallace’s solicitor, Hector Munro. He says:

At the time of the investigation the police identified that the anonymous caller had used a telephone box only 400 yards away from the Wallace’s home. The police became convinced that the whole thing had been an elaborate plan by Wallace to murder his wife. She was last seen alive ten minutes before his alleged departure time by a milk boy making his rounds. They thought that he could have killed his wife and still have had time to make the journey to Menlove.

The judge, however, disagreed and instructed the jury to move for an acquittal. But the jury had been swayed by the police’s version of events. Wallace was sentenced to death by hanging. Less than two weeks later, the appeal judges quashed the verdict on the grounds that the prosecution had not proved their case sufficiently.

So if it wasn’t Wallace, who was it? During his interrogation Wallace told the police about one man who might have been responsible for his wife’s murder. That man was called Gordon Parry. John explains, ‘Parry had worked briefly for Wallace before he was fired. He also had a criminal record, and knew where Wallace kept his insurance takings. During the murder £4 [approximately £240 today] had been stolen, according to Wallace. Parry was heavily in debt, and may have held a grudge towards Wallace.’ There was one final piece of evidence pointing towards Parry. At the time of the murder a young mechanic named John Parkes had seen Parry arrive at his garage and wash his car down. ‘Parkes saw a glove in the car and realised it was wet with blood.’

Wallace’s 11-hour acquittal at Liverpool Crown Court marked a turning point in the British legal system, says criminologist Barry Godfrey.

The King vs Wallace was arguably one of the most important cases in recent British legal history. It marked the transition from a Victorian legal and moral framework to that of an enlightened, modern, evidence-based one. The judiciary was for the first time saying that even if a jury convicts someone, if there is insufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty, then a jury’s verdict can be overturned.

Such an important precedent was set because the jury had condemned Wallace on the police’s belief that he was guilty, not on actual evidence. ‘By overturning the verdict the judiciary was proving that the legal system works, that a man is innocent until proven guilty,’ says Barry.

But whilst legal history had been made, Julia Wallace’s killer was as anonymous as ever. Perhaps it was Gordon Parry. It could still even have been Wallace. Or perhaps, as John Gannon believes, there was a third man.

William Wallace had found out that he had a terminal illness and had only a few years to live. Wallace had had a kidney removed surgically and his remaining kidney was starting to fail – as was his marriage. Gannon suspects that as a result of his illness Wallace was now impotent and Julia Wallace was paying men for sex. William even discovered an amount of cash hidden in Julia’s corsets – the equivalent of £70 in today’s money – and that Wallace’s younger colleague at ‘The Pru’, Joseph Marsdon, was a regular visitor to the Wallace household. Could Wallace have been inspired by this set of circumstances to plan the perfect way to get rid of Julia? John explains:

Wallace knew that Marsdon was broke, but he was also set to marry into a wealthy family. Wallace threatened Marsdon, cleverly. He said he was going to divorce Julia on the grounds of her affair with Marsdon. That would drag Marsdon’s name through the divorce courts and ruin his chances of marrying into money. Marsdon had no choice but to commit the murder on Wallace’s behalf.

But there’s still the issue of the phone call from the strange Mr Qualtrough. ‘That,’ suggests John, ‘was a simple matter of bribing the destitute and unwitting Gordon Parry to make the phone call, leaving Wallace himself free to create his alibi while looking for the fictional Qualtrough.’ All this whilst Marsdon committed the murder.

The Julia Wallace case has been described as an example of the perfect murder. Now, more than 80 years later, there is a third possible version of events. Has John Gannon solved the killing that changed legal history? The verdict is up to you, the jury. However, don’t forget what happened when it was up to the original jury.

Wallace returned to his Liverpool home after being released. But local rumours about his guilt dogged him and he moved to the suburbs of the city. He died two years later, aged 54. No one has been charged with Julia’s murder and as there is no statute of limitations for murder the case is still open, albeit very cold.

THE BOOK OF JOHN HORWOOD

John Horwood was convicted and executed for the murder of Eliza Balsom in 1821, but the case was on shaky ground from the start.

Horwood, from Hanham near Bristol, had been romantically pursuing Balsom, from Kingswood, also near Bristol, for some months. Seeing her one day with another young man, Horwood threw a stone at her in frustration.

She was bruised by the incident but otherwise, it seemed, unharmed. Two days later, and after walking some four miles from Kingswood to the centre of the city, she reported to the Bristol Infirmary feeling unsteady on her feet. She was treated for a head wound but died within days. A surgeon, Richard Smith, inspected her body and found an abscess. The fact that this was more likely to have been from an infection such as sepsis, caused by a dirty bandage applied in the hospital, was not considered, and Horwood was arrested and charged with her murder.

Horwood was hanged at a massively attended public execution outside the gates of the City’s New Gaol. The moment he was pronounced dead, his body was commandeered by Richard Smith. Smith dissected the body during a public medical lecture.

Smith subsequently had Horwood’s body skinned and tanned. After it was given a further chemical treatment in Bedminster, what was left of Horwood was dispatched to a bookbinder in Essex, who used it to bind a book written by Smith about the Horwood case. (This practice, known as anthropodermic bibliopegy, wasn’t wholly uncommon at the time.) The book remains in the city archive and the gruesome tome is made available to the public by appointment.

Horwood’s skeleton was retained by the clearly obsessed Smith, who kept it at home. It was bequeathed to Bristol Royal Infirmary and later given to Bristol University, who kept it in a cupboard. John’s fate was made all the more undignified by the fact that the noose that hanged him was kept in place around his neck. In 2011 John Horwood’s skeleton was released to his surviving family and he was finally buried, next to his father, at Christchurch in his hometown of Hanham.

DID FABIAN SACRIFICE THE TRUTH FOR A CRACKING YARN?

In 1954 the BBC broadcast a revolutionary new crime drama called Fabian of the Yard. It was based on the real-life investigations of legendary detective Robert Fabian. Fabian himself topped and tailed the show with a short piece to camera. This was a trope used in another, later, TV police institution called Dixon of Dock Green, but Fabian of the Yard’s storylines were based on real cases that he’d (usually) solved to see justice served. Fabian was most famous living and fictional detective of the age rolled into one.

He was a character on and off screen, famous for his thoroughness and his tenacity – and for embracing the new techniques of forensic science. Fabian was also aware of his own legend and rarely passed up a publicity opportunity, especially after he retired from the force and had memoirs to sell. That said, he was decorated for heroism and he was genuinely respected by his colleagues in the force as well as by his foes in the underworld.

But there was one case that he would never crack and which would haunt him for years to come. It’s a tale of murder and witchcraft set in the sleepy village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire.

It began on Valentine’s Day, 1945. In a field near Meon Hill, a prehistoric hill fort in sight of Lower Quinton, lay the lifeless body of a 74-year-old man. He was pinioned to the ground with a pitchfork and had been slashed to death with a billhook, a type of hand-held scythe. Later reports state that a cross was carved into the chest, but there is no mention of this in the original autopsy.

That unofficial detail – after no less than an official pathologist’s report, by the way – should be treated as the first of many alarm bells. It’s characteristic of how the case has been ‘remembered’ and mutated; ancient myths, contemporary facts and local hearsay have meshed over the years into a horror tale worthy of the Hammer treatment. And Fabian’s account of things, in his entertaining 1950 memoir Fabian of The Yard from which this story quotes, should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, he failed to crack the case, so blaming a supernatural element is a pretty convenient get-out clause.

The victim’s name was Charles Walton, a septuagenarian farmhand and the village loner. In life he wasn’t fondly regarded. In death his macabre murder made headlines, and Warwickshire police asked Scotland Yard for assistance. The Yard dispatched their best man, Fabian, hoping that his advanced crime fighting techniques would crack the case.

‘Walton had lived in the area all his life and shared this cottage with his niece, Edie. There were quite a few people who believed he practised witchcraft and that he kept natterjack toads as familiars,’ says local historian Dave Matthews. (Familiars are pets owned by witches and warlocks, and commanded to do their bidding.) Dave continues:

On the night of his murder, two eyewitnesses saw him pass through the churchyard and on up to Hillground field on the slopes of Meon Hill. He’d been working for Alfred Potter of Firs farm and Potter reported seeing him at midday repairing the hedgerows. The alarm was first raised at 6 p.m., when Walton failed to return home. Just after nightfall Edie Walton, Alfred Potter and a friend went looking for him and found him dead a short distance from the field.

The local constabulary was called to the murder scene. The Metropolitan Police report of the investigation – MEPO 3/2290, held in the National Archives at Kew – records that the first police officer at the scene was PC Michael James Lomasney. ‘He arrived at 7.05 p.m. Detectives of Stratford-upon-Avon CID arrived later in the evening and Professor James M. Webster, of the West Midlands Forensic Laboratory, arrived at 11.30 p.m. The body was removed at 1.30 a.m.’

Locally, the gruesome murder and the way it had been executed sparked rumours of ritual sacrifice. Some recounted to the almost salivating tabloid reporters the tale of Ann Tennant who, 70 years earlier, had been accused of being a witch and was murdered with a pitchfork near to where Walton was found.

Others cited another report, from the late nineteenth century, about a young boy from the village, whose name just also happened to be Charles Walton. He had encountered a giant black dog on Meon Hill and then returned home to discover his sister had died. (Black dogs in English folklore are a portent of death – The Hound of the Baskevilles, published in 1902, takes its cue from that belief.)

In fact, Ann Tennant was murdered in front of witnesses by a certifiable lunatic – there was nothing ritualistic about it. And there is no evidence linking the Charles Walton of 1885 to the murdered Charles Walton.

When Fabian arrived, he immediately focused on the fact that Walton’s tin watch and his money belt were missing. Walton always kept both items about his person, so robbery seemed a good motive – and finding that watch could be key to finding the murderer. But Fabian didn’t discount witchcraft as a second line of enquiry.

By mid-afternoon the next day, Detective Inspector Fabian had brought the twentieth century to the village of Lower Quinton. An RAF surveillance plane shot across the countryside, providing high-resolution photographs of the surrounding area. The image was so detailed it even picked out the bloodstains and the trampled grass. Fabian’s detectives began to plot the movements over the previous 24 hours of every last resident in the surrounding area.

But this was where cutting-edge technology was brought to its knees by a village determined to keep a secret.

By the end of the week Fabian had interviewed all 493 villagers. He was troubled by their reluctance to talk about anything other than the failure of that year’s harvest. There were whispers that Walton, a bitter piece of work with no love for his fellow villagers, was to blame for this; that he had let his natterjack toad familiars hop through the fields to blast (ie destroy) the crops. Accordingly, his blood was spilt by the murderer, or even murderers, in order to bring the land back to fertility.

Fabian wrote, ‘The natives of Lower Quinton are of a secretive disposition and do not take easily to strangers… Many could not make eye contact and some even became physically ill after questioning.’

On another occasion, he wrote, he and his team were met by a collective silence when they entered the local pub.

Seventy years later, people are still talking about why Fabian was stonewalled by the entire village. Graham Saunders is a former police officer, who grew up in Lower Quinton, and Fabian’s arrival and investigation is still a vivid childhood memory. ‘I remember groups of men going from house to house in the village with clipboards, wearing long dark overcoats and trilby hats.’ Graham believes the village stayed quiet because ‘… Quinton people are very proud and they didn’t like to think that this could happen in the village and I think that is the reason why they just shut up. After they had left, no one talked about the murder while I was growing up at all.’

Graham’s own instinct is that the murder was committed by an outsider:

You have to remember that this was during the war. Enemy paratroopers had been popping up all over the countryside and there were POW camps in the area. Back then villagers had good cause to be wary of strangers. And as for the wall of silence, it’s likely that no one knew anything about the murder. I don’t think it was a cover-up. It was splashed across all the papers and was a disgrace to Lower Quinton. That’s why everyone is keen to forget the story.

The ritual aspect Walton’s murder is a good story, but as Graham points out, it’s not the story.

They were a superstitious bunch back then. I once brought back a snake in a bucket with some friends and my grandmother was horrified that it would affect the fertility of the crops. Such old wives’ tales must have seemed absurd to Fabian and his men from the city. But there was never any proof at all to substantiate any of the bizarre rumours which have persisted over the years. The most likely motive was robbery. There was talk of Walton receiving £300 that month from gambling, which was completely illegal in those days, so it was a practice which attracted a dangerous crowd. Fabian strongly suspected Alfred Potter, Walton’s employer, for contaminating the murder scene and leaving his fingerprints on the murder weapon, but this was purely speculation. I doubt we’ll ever find out the truth.