On a cold January evening in 1931, Liverpool’s city streets were slick with rain and dimly lit by gaslight. Inside the City Café on North John Street, the members of the Liverpool Central Chess Club were settling in for their Monday night games. Among them was fifty-two-year-old insurance agent William Herbert Wallace, a quiet man known for his punctuality, his patience, and his love of chess.
That night, a telephone call would set in motion one of Britain’s most baffling murder mysteries — a case that would puzzle investigators, divide public opinion, and become one of the most debated in British legal history: a phone message from a man who didn’t exist. An address that wasn’t real. And by the following evening, a woman who would be dead.
This is the story of the Wallace case — a crime so strange that even nearly a century later, it defies complete explanation.
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William Herbert Wallace was an unassuming man. Born in 1878 in the Cumbrian town of Millom, he had led a modest, orderly life. His early years were restless — working in India for a time, dabbling in politics and advertising — before settling into the dependable profession of an insurance agent with the Prudential Assurance Company. He was intelligent and methodical, though somewhat reserved. His manner could seem formal, but those who knew him described him as courteous and mild-tempered.
In 1914, when he was thirty-six, he married Julia Dennis, a woman some years his senior. Julia was believed to have been born around 1861, though she occasionally adjusted her age in conversation. The Wallaces had no children, but their marriage appeared comfortable and companionable. Neighbours would later recall them as polite, private people — the kind who never drew attention.
They lived in a small, terraced home at 29 Wolverton Street, in the working-class Liverpool suburb of Anfield. The house was narrow but neat, and Julia kept it immaculately clean. William’s income — around four pounds a week — was modest but sufficient. Their routine was predictable: he worked by day, visiting clients across the city to collect insurance premiums; in the evenings, he read or practised the violin, often accompanied by Julia on piano. On Monday nights, he attended his chess club meetings. Life was orderly, quiet, and uneventful.
Until January 20th, 1931.
The night before, on Monday, January 19th, the Liverpool Central Chess Club gathered as usual at the City Café. The club’s captain, Samuel Beattie, arrived early to set up the boards. At about 7:15 p.m., the café’s telephone rang. Beattie answered. On the line was a man’s voice — polite, but strained, perhaps nervous.
The caller asked whether a Mr. Wallace was present. Beattie looked around; Wallace had not yet arrived. The caller introduced himself as “R.M. Qualtrough.” He said he needed to speak with Wallace about arranging an insurance policy for his daughter and asked if Wallace could visit him the following evening at 25 Menlove Gardens East, at half past seven.
Beattie took down the message, repeating the details carefully. The man declined to hold or leave a return number. Moments later, the line went dead.
About twenty-five minutes later, William Wallace walked into the café. Beattie handed him the note. Wallace frowned — he didn’t recognise the name Qualtrough, nor had he heard of Menlove Gardens East. Still, a potential new client meant commission, and he agreed to call on the address the next evening.
What Wallace didn’t know was that the phone call had been placed from a public kiosk less than four hundred yards from his own front door. And that Menlove Gardens East didn’t exist. By the next night, his wife Julia would be dead.
On Tuesday, January 20th, Wallace left 29 Wolverton Street at around 6:45 p.m., dressed neatly in a dark overcoat and bowler hat, his collection book tucked under his arm. He caught a tram toward the southern suburbs, heading for the Menlove Gardens district — a pleasant residential area with tree-lined streets.
The conductor, Thomas Phillips, would later recall that Wallace asked him about the address, but no one on board recognised it. When he arrived, Wallace began searching for Menlove Gardens East, only to find that the streets were divided into North, South, and West — but there was no East.
He stopped at a newsagent’s shop, asking Katie Mather, the proprietress, if she knew the location. She didn’t. A nearby police constable, James Serjeant, was equally puzzled. At one point, Wallace even knocked on the door of a house at 25 Menlove Gardens West, just in case. The occupant, Mr. Green, told him he’d never heard of anyone named Qualtrough.
For nearly an hour, Wallace wandered the neighbourhood, asking directions, growing increasingly frustrated. At around 8:35 p.m., he gave up and boarded a tram home.
It was about 8:45 p.m. when Wallace reached Wolverton Street. The house was dark. He tried his key in the front door, but it wouldn’t open. Sometimes the bolt stuck, so he went around to the back. There, too, the door was locked. He fumbled with the key again, but it refused to turn.
Just then, his neighbours, John and Florence Johnston, returned home next door. Wallace called to them from the backyard, explaining that he couldn’t get inside and that Julia wasn’t answering. John Johnston offered to help. When he tried the back door himself, it opened easily.
Wallace stepped into the kitchen, lighting the gas lamp. Everything seemed in order — nothing broken, nothing out of place. He called for Julia. No answer.
He moved through the hallway into the sitting room at the front of the house. There, by the fireplace, he saw her.
Julia lay on the floor, her legs extended, her head near the doorway. A chair had been knocked over beside her. The scene was horrific — blood pooled beneath her, spattered across the walls. Her skull had been smashed by multiple blows, inflicted with such force that fragments of bone and tissue were visible. She had been struck from behind or while turning away.
Wallace backed out, shaken. “Come and see,” he told his neighbour. “She’s been killed.”
John Johnston entered, confirmed the dreadful sight, and urged Wallace not to touch anything. They called the police.
Detective Superintendent Hubert Moore arrived around 10 p.m., accompanied by police surgeon Professor John MacFall. The small terraced house quickly filled with uniformed officers and crime-scene examiners. Julia’s body was examined where it lay. Based on temperature and rigor mortis, MacFall estimated the time of death to be around 6 p.m. — an hour before Wallace left for the tram. That single detail would become the cornerstone of the case.
There was no sign of forced entry. The windows were secure. Both doors had been locked when Wallace returned. Whoever had killed Julia must have had a key or been willingly admitted.
The house showed signs of disturbance — drawers opened, cupboards rifled through — but nothing of real value was missing. Julia’s handbag, still containing money, sat untouched in the kitchen. A cash box in the bedroom held four pounds in notes. Wallace later claimed a similar sum was missing from his insurance collections, yet the thief had left behind more than they took.
One curious detail stood out: a man’s mackintosh coat, partly burned by the fire and soaked in blood, lay beneath Julia’s body. Wallace identified it as his own, though he said he hadn’t worn it that day — it had been hanging in the hallway. Investigators speculated that the killer might have used the coat to shield themselves from the blood spray during the attack.
Still, Wallace’s own suit and hands were spotless.
To the police, the husband’s composure seemed unnatural. He appeared calm, detached, almost clinical. His answers were polite and consistent, yet his lack of visible emotion struck many as suspicious. Within days, investigators began to focus on him as their prime suspect.
Their theory formed quickly: Wallace had engineered the murder himself. He had invented the fictitious R.M. Qualtrough and made the mysterious telephone call to the chess club from the nearby kiosk, using the false address to create an alibi. The next evening, after killing Julia, he had wandered around Menlove Gardens deliberately, asking for directions to ensure he’d be seen by witnesses. By the time he returned home to “discover” her body, he appeared to have been far from the scene at the crucial hour.
But the theory had problems. For one, the timing of the Qualtrough call. The phone records placed the call at 7:15 p.m. on Monday. Wallace left home at about 6:45, and the kiosk was roughly four hundred yards away. Experiments showed he could just barely have made the round trip before arriving at the café by 7:40 — possible, but tight.
Then there was the murder timeline. If Julia died around 6 p.m., Wallace would have had only forty-five minutes to kill her, clean himself thoroughly, hide or dispose of the weapon, and leave to catch the tram. The attack was ferocious — at least eleven heavy blows to the head. Such violence would have drenched the killer in blood. Yet not a trace was found on Wallace’s clothing.
And finally, the motive. There was no evidence of marital discord, no affair, no significant insurance payout. Wallace and Julia lived modestly but contentedly. He stood to gain little from her death.
Nevertheless, on February 2nd, 1931, William Herbert Wallace was arrested and charged with murder.
The trial opened on April 22nd, 1931, at the Liverpool Assizes. The courtroom was packed with spectators. The prosecution, led by Edward Hemmerde, presented the case as a calculated killing disguised by an elaborate alibi. The mysterious call from “Qualtrough” was, they argued, Wallace’s own doing. The mackintosh proved premeditation — a shield against blood. His manner after the murder, they said, was the behaviour of a guilty man.
Hemmerde painted Wallace as cold, clever, and deceitful. He told the jury that Wallace had planned his wife’s death with precision, then staged his evening journey to make it appear impossible for him to have committed the crime.
Defending Wallace was Roland Oliver, who countered that the evidence was entirely circumstantial. There was no weapon, no blood on Wallace, and no clear motive. Oliver reminded the jury that suspicion, however strong, was not proof. The timeline, he argued, made the crime almost physically impossible. Witnesses had seen Wallace boarding a tram by 7 p.m.; the fatal attack would have required more time — and more composure — than he had.
Professor MacFall’s estimate of time of death was challenged. Body temperature readings could vary widely depending on conditions, and if Julia had been killed closer to 7 p.m., Wallace would already have been on his way to Menlove Gardens. Oliver proposed that the killer could have been an intruder — perhaps someone Julia knew, whom she had willingly let inside.
But the jury was unconvinced. After barely an hour of deliberation, they returned a verdict of guilty. Wallace was sentenced to death by hanging.
Wallace’s legal team immediately lodged an appeal — an extraordinary move in an era when murder convictions were rarely overturned. The hearing took place on May 18th, 1931, before the Court of Criminal Appeal, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, with Justices Branson and Hawke.
The defence argued that the verdict was unsafe: the evidence was circumstantial, the motive nonexistent, and the alleged timeline implausible. No reasonable jury, they said, could have found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The following day, the judges delivered their decision. They quashed the conviction.
Lord Hewart’s ruling was historic. He acknowledged that Wallace’s story was puzzling and that many aspects defied easy explanation — but he concluded that the evidence did not prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Suspicion alone, however compelling, was not enough to send a man to the gallows.
It was the first and only time in British history that a murder conviction was overturned purely on evidential grounds. William Herbert Wallace walked free.
Freedom brought little peace. The public remained divided — some believed he was an innocent man wrongly accused; others saw him as a murderer who had escaped justice on a technicality. Neighbours crossed the street to avoid him. Clients cancelled their insurance policies. Even his employer, Prudential Assurance, received complaints.
Wallace moved to a different part of Liverpool, seeking anonymity, but the shadow of Wolverton Street followed him. His health declined rapidly. Within two years, he was suffering from kidney failure. On February 26th, 1933, at the age of fifty-four, he died — still insisting he had not killed Julia.
Husband and wife were buried together in Anfield Cemetery, side by side in the same grave.
No one else was ever charged.
The Wallace case has fascinated detectives and criminologists for nearly a century, precisely because it seems both solvable and insoluble at once. For every fact pointing toward guilt, another suggests innocence.
Among the alternative suspects, one name recurs: Richard Gordon Parry, a twenty-two-year-old who had once worked for the same insurance company as Wallace. Parry was charming but reckless — a known petty criminal with a history of embezzlement. Wallace had previously helped him secure employment, but Parry’s behaviour soon caused problems. He knew the Wallaces personally and had visited their home, meaning Julia would have trusted him.
Some investigators believe Parry may have made the mysterious Qualtrough call to lure Wallace away, intending to rob the house. When Julia surprised him, he panicked and killed her. The clumsy attempt at a search, the missing few pounds, and the brutality of the attack all support a crime of opportunity rather than premeditation.
But Parry denied involvement, and the police never charged him. Over the years, other suspects have been suggested — burglars, anonymous intruders, even misidentified callers — but no theory fits every fact.
To this day, the Wallace case stands as one of Britain’s most perplexing murder mysteries. Writers from Raymond Chandler to P.D. James have cited it as the perfect detective puzzle — a real-life whodunit where every explanation leaves something unresolved.
Was William Wallace a calculating killer who built the perfect alibi? Or was he an unfortunate man ensnared by coincidence and circumstantial evidence?
Nearly a century later, the questions remain. What is certain is that on the night of January 20th, 1931, Julia Wallace was brutally murdered in her own home — and despite decades of inquiry, no one has ever been able to say, beyond all doubt, who killed her.
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