Stephen McDonell-BBC News, Beijing
Alert: This report contains descriptions of violence
On a cold night of January 1937, the adoptive daughter of a British diplomat in China, 19, took his bike and pedaled, without knowing, towards his death. His murder spawned a wave of commotion in Beijing. Moreover, the debate on the terrible and unsolved crime echoes to this day.
The case of Pamela Werner could have disappeared in history, until, in 2011, a book presented the case to the modern public. The bestseller Midnight in Peking (Midnight in Beijing), by Paul French, also brought back old ghosts and animosities, much larger than the author could have imagined.
Now, a retired British policeman, Graeme Sheppard, wrote a new book contesting Paul French’s version of the episodes.
The result: A literary war that involves family pride, bizarre events lost in time and a macabre murder still unsolved.
The murder
On the afternoon of his death, Pamela spent a time skating on ice with friends in a neighborhood frequented by foreigners. In a few days, she would leave for London, where she would continue her studies. Pamela said goodbye to her friends around 19h. They would never meet again.
His body was found the next morning, in a frozen terrain, next to the only remaining stretch of the wall of China in Beijing.
What the investigators of that time and today sought to understand was the motivation for the severe mutilation of his body. His ribs were broken and his organs removed-heart, bladder, kidneys and liver. The throat was cut deep, in what seems to have been an unsuccessful attempt to remove his head. His right arm remained attached to the body for very little.
Whoever committed the crime or was sloppy or was interrupted in the middle of the act and had to flee quickly, since important evidence of the murder was found at the scene.
Among them, Pamela’s association card to the skating rink and an expensive watch, which had already belonged to her mother-and who had stopped a few minutes after midnight. Thus, it was possible to identify the victim very quickly, despite the state of the body.
A world of mystery and ill will
The news published at the time reveals the tension generated in society as the details of the crime emerged. The city was already living under strong strain-because of the Japanese army’s approach. It was the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war.
The population of Beijing was growing with the influx of migrants from other parts of China who were falling under the command of the Japanese. The city had also received Russian refugees who attempted to escape the civil war in their own country–among them, were Pamela’s biological parents.
The girl was adopted by the Werner family when she was two years old. But her adoptive mother died when Pamela was five years old.
After Pamela’s murder, his adoptive father Edward Werner-then, in the 70-year-old house-spent the rest of his life looking for clues about the killers. His battle generated an enormous amount of correspondence with Chinese and British authorities.
When the writer Paul French came across this extensive material in the British National Archives, he opened a world of mystery and ill will. The letters gave the foundation for the Midnight in Peking, which chronicles the episodes in the eyes of Pamela’s father. The success of the book shows that, for many, this was the accepted version of the facts.
But after Graeme Sheppard read the book, he decided to dive into the archives and wrote a Death In Peking, presenting a very different hypothesis.
The two authors agree that the cause of death was most likely a blow to the skull. But they diverge radically about the identity of the murderer or the killers, the place where the crime occurred, the motivation and why the body ended up being found that way.
The Sex Party
Pamela’s father believed that her daughter had been attracted to a party that night, probably with other young women. “Today, we’d probably see it as a grooming,” French said to the BBC.
“They wanted to use these women for sex. When Pamela realized what was happening, something went wrong. It looks like she may have been hit in the head with something that’s cracked her skull. And these men stood there with a body they had to deal with. ”
After skating on ice, it is believed that Pamela had dinner with a student friend-who became a centerpiece in another theory, that of Graeme Sheppard.
However, according to Paul French, the next stop was a party at the home of American dentist Wentworth Prentice. A member of a community of foreigners with special privileges, Prentice and his colleagues were described as debauched, leading a hedonistic lifestyle.
Pamela shouldn’t necessarily be afraid to be in the dentist’s apartment. She had been your patient and probably knew other people who were there.
So, when it was announced that the party would continue in a bar, in celebration of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, why not? Even if it were in the neighborhood of the Bordeis, then known as “the Bad Lands”.
It was in this place, according to French, that Pamela saw herself alone with a group of men. There was no party, just a bed in the back of a brothel. “Perhaps his resistance and his refusal to submit as other girls enraged those men… Maybe they panicked and tried to shut her up… To silence her, one of the men gave him a strong blow to the head. ”
Subsequently, Pamela’s father visited the brothel, called only number 28, in search of clues about the killers. He estimated that she had died at that location, but then her body was moved elsewhere. He believed that the killers had taken the girl’s blood out of the brothel, so that the body would be lighter to carry.
Then they covered the body and took a rickshaw (traditional local transport vehicle) to the old town-a place without lighting and no people on the street. There, they would butcher your body.
The quartered may seem extreme, but according to French, men were hunting partners. But it is important to emphasize that the author’s hypothesis is based solely on the vision of Pamela’s father, who faced the group of men as strange people who had nudist parties in Beijing.
In addition to parties with sex, drugs and beverages, they also hunted. “For Werner, (the crime) seemed symptomatic of how hunters would deal with a deer or other animal,” French says. “They all had knives. That sounds like a plausible explanation. And it is supported by many people, including people from that time. ”
“They would dismember (the body) and throw away (the parts of the body), pushing away their suspicions and causing the body to be impossible to identify. It would look like a crime of a demonic maniac, probably a Chinese, “wrote French.
The rival theory
Graeme Sheppard sees problems in practically all of French’s conclusions-and, in extension, in the conclusions of Edward Werner. He hardly mentions the rival writer, but his entire book is practically an attack on French’s thesis.
“It was a popular book, Good to read, made to have a great story. But, from a police perspective, it makes no sense, “Sheppard said to the BBC. “I don’t see how the British and Chinese police may have let go of unpunished suspects that the father found.”
Sheppard’s thesis, taking into account his experience as a policeman, is that there is no evidence that Pamela would end up in a brothel “in the Bad Lands” willingly, even if she knew some of those men.
For him, the killer found Pamela after she finished skating. And he believes it’s someone Pamela liked. “I think it’s most likely that it was a former friend of Pamela’s school, named Han Shou-Cling,” he told the BBC. “And the reason I believe that is that the British chief inspector who took care of the case at the time was deeply convinced of it.”
According to Sheppard, the chief inspector’s convictions were based on intelligence raised by police officers.
But French criticizes this thesis, which is based on police suspicions, adding that there is no record that this former school friend would even have been interviewed by the police.
“Assuming that a teenage student, who was dating (Pamela) would suddenly decide to kill her, drain her blood, mutilate her and then disappear, and never be questioned by the police during the investigations, seems to me, frankly, bizarre,” he says.
However, Sheppard believes it is possible that this unsub knew techniques used in butchers and that he would carry a knife routinely.
Sheppard also believes that it is possible that the student killed Pamela and that then other people removed the parts of the body and sold them to superstitious practitioners of Chinese medicine.
Sheppard’s source of the chief inspector’s convictions are the letters left by Pamela’s adoptive father.
Critics could point to a certain inconsistency of Sheppard, by disdain of the analysis of Edward Werner and at the same time give credit to the profile that he paints on the chief inspector.
The fact is that Pamela’s father came to assault Han Shou-Ching when he knew he had a loving relationship with his daughter–indicating there was an animosity here that might have to be taken into account.
Family Ties
French’s greatest criticism of Sheppard’s interpretation is that he would have personal connections with the case, so he would have a partial view. The grandfather of Sheppard’s wife was Nicholas Fitzmaurice, the British consul general in China at the time of the murder-which led the investigation that ended in open.
Pamela’s father, who was a diplomat, had a tense relationship with Fitzmaurice. They had a dispute over Chinese historical artifacts–about whether they should be taken to London. According to French, Fitzmaurice said he would take them with him when he returned to his country. Werner has argued that the objects should stay in China under the British government’s custody.
So, after the consul’s failure to find out who was killing the girl, the relationship was even more sour.
Generations later, Fitzmaurice’s descendants were bothered by the way the consul was portrayed in Paul French’s book as a useless bureaucrat. Although he never met his grandfather, Sheppard’s wife felt the need to defend the family’s reputation. So, it ended up attracting the husband’s attention to this case.
Sheppard portrayed Edward Werner as an isolated, quardisome man, suspicious of other people and who paid informants to get evidence related to the crime.
But Sheppard claims that the family issue was just the spark that led him to this story. According to him, the work is the result of extensive research, which also obtained unpublished materials, which French did not use.
Under Japanese guard
That story had another sad chapter. In 1943, when the Japanese army was already controlling much of China, including Beijing, foreigners were imprisoned and sent to detention camps. Edward Werner not only needed to leave behind all his possessions, but also the investigation he had been doing about his daughter’s death.
In addition, he was detained in the same place where the men suspected they had killed his daughter, including the dentist Wentworth Prentice.
“Some detainees remembered Werner pointing to Prentice and saying, ‘ you killed her. I know you killed Pamela. You did it. ” Other times, Werner would have pointed to other people randomly.
Werner survived the arrest and was released. But in the 80-year-old house, he couldn’t get the British authorities to keep an interest in the case.
Prentice died in 1947. And the Han Shou-Ching student was assassinated by the Japanese military, according to Edward Werner. But, Sheppard wrote: “Perhaps this information (from the death of Shou-ching) was correct. Well, maybe not. Maybe being considered dead was a way to keep the police away. ”
Werner continued in China throughout the entire civil war. In October 1951, it was one of the 30 Englishmen who still lived in China controlled by the Communist Party. He ended up returning to England, where he had not stepped since 1917. When he died at the age of 89, there was no one else who knew him and had attended his funeral.
As for Pamela, her murdered daughter, her body is buried under what is now the pavement of Beijing’s second-largest road ring.
