Murder of Pamela Werner

On the morning of 8 January 1937, the severely mutilated body of Pamela Werner (believed born 7 February 1917) was found near the Fox Tower in Beijing, China, just outside the city's Legation Quarter.Investigators focused on some members of the city's expatriate community, but the case was officially closed with the finding that the mutilation suggested a Chinese killer, before they could be sure of any suspects; the Japanese occupation foreclosed any further efforts to reopen it.Due to his father's death in his teens, Werner had to find employment after finishing and, after passing the Foreign Office's cadet exam, he was sent to Beijing to learn Chinese.After Gladys died of what was said to have been a drug overdose[5] while being treated for meningitis in 1922, Werner devoted much of his life to Pamela, teaching her Chinese to the point that she was fluent from a very early age; later she would emulate her father by travelling around the city on her bicycle, often unaccompanied.In the wake of some incidents there that may possibly have involved Sydney Yeates, the school's headmaster, making sexual overtures to her, Werner was preparing to send his daughter back to England to continue her education, a move Pamela did not welcome.Homicides were harder to resolve as they could have been either due to routine criminal activity and disputes, or Japanese provocations, or (increasingly) political assassinations carried out by the Kuomintang of its enemies both internal and external.While the Chinese had jurisdiction because of where her body had been found, it was entirely likely that it would be necessary to investigate her death by questioning members of the foreign community, some of whom might enjoy diplomatic immunity or at least reside in the Legation Quarter, where the Beijing police had no authority.Werner told Dennis that he was sending Pamela back to England for continued schooling, owing to some unspecified incident at Tientsin Grammar, a development he was surprised the detective was unaware of.[10] Although Han would not confirm any reports about the extent to which Pamela's body had been mutilated in his first press conference about the investigation, or Dennis's participation, he admitted that the police had no solid leads at that point, two days afterwards.Helen Foster Snow, one of the Werners' neighbours, told the detective that it might have been possible that Kuomintang assassins had mistaken Pamela for her, since the two looked similar; she knew that Chiang's government had not been happy with the things she and her husband Edgar had said about them, especially in contrast with their sympathetic portrayal of the communists.He smoked heavily and fidgeted nervously, suggesting he was entering the early stages of withdrawal from the opiate addiction widespread among the city's less affluent foreign population at the time.He also told the detectives that Pinfold had been present at weekend nudist gatherings at a cottage in the city's Western Hills, where participants also hunted in the surrounding woods, although that was becoming more difficult owing to the increasing Japanese presence.He was briefed on why Werner had abruptly withdrawn his daughter from Tientsin Grammar: apparently, Pamela had alleged that the headmaster, Sydney Yeates, who also oversaw the house where she boarded while school was in session, had made sexual overtures to her.Dennis was told to make sure the murder investigation did not result in any public disclosure of this potential scandal as it would be injurious to British prestige and standing in China at a very difficult time.[16] Werner remained in Beijing despite the occupation, continuing to live in his siheyuan even as many of the city's other foreigners clustered in the Legation Quarter, save the stateless Russian Whites, on the advice of their governments who said they would not be safe outside it.They were considerably helpful in a city where both inflation and unemployment had risen sharply as a result of the occupation, and he found many people willing to share information with him, including some former Beijing police officers whom the Japanese had let go from the force as politically unreliable.His repeated efforts to get British officials to reopen the case, which many of them saw merely as a pretext to attack them personally over old grudges or what he perceived as their initial failures in the investigation, led to such strain on his relations with them that they ultimately banned him from the Legation Quarter.But after the Tientsin Incident in the summer of 1939, in which the Japanese blockaded that city after Dennis had refused to turn over two Chinese assassins who had sought refuge from their likely execution in the British concession there, even that cooperation ended.[18] Werner was finally forced to leave his siheyuan and move back into the Legation Quarter in late 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, along with other British and American bases around the Asian Pacific, triggered hostilities between Japan and the West.After months of solitary confinement and torture that culminated in Dennis signing a confession in Japanese to unknown alleged crimes, he was freed by the intervention of the Swiss consul and returned to England, where he worked a desk job with the British Army for the remainder of the war.The following year, Han was forced out of the police by the Japanese for what they felt to be insufficient zeal in investigating an assassination attempt on Wang Kemin, whom they had installed as president of their puppet state.The index of Foreign Office records in The National Archives shows one communication in 1945 that raises the subject of reopening the case, with the possibility of some connection to the Japanese, but the document itself has been weeded so its contents are unknown.[19] In the 2000s, British writer and business consultant Paul French, who had moved to China for his work after studying Chinese at the University of London, came across a footnote in a biography of Helen Foster Snow briefly discussing her fears in the wake of Pamela's murder that she had been the intended victim, as well as some of the other rumours sweeping Beijing's foreign community at that time.French's account of his diplomatic career generally downplays the extent to which his difficulties getting along with his colleagues were due to his own inability to get along with them—a "constant series of frictions", John Jordan, then British ambassador, wrote to him in 1913.They question whether French really saw them, since archivists at the Rockefeller Archive Center, which keeps all of PUMC's prewar records since the school was established with that family's money, have found no report from an autopsy performed later than 1933.Just before war began in December 1941, he wrote Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that, instead of Prentice, he now suspected the Chinese student whose nose he had broken after accusing him of having had relations with Pamela.Abbot also theorizes that the murder was committed by a visiting American who had similarly raped, killed and disembowelled young virgins at home; French never mentions that theory as an alternate to Werner's.However, Backhouse, whose major scholarly work was exposed as fraudulent years after his death, appears to have been trying to ingratiate himself with British authorities in the hopes of becoming valuable to them as a source of intelligence, as there are many implausibilities in how he claims to have come by this information.Coates several decades later that it was theorised among them that the Japanese, unable to get to Fitzmaurice's wife since she rarely left the heavily guarded Legation Quarter, settled instead for killing Pamela since she was the daughter of a former British consul who was less secure.As well as examining the cases against Prentice, Knauf, Cappuzzo, Gorman, and revealing the full identity and origin of Pinfold, this new account introduces previously unexamined suspects and leads, including British diplomat David John Cowan.