Murder of Pamela Werner

In 2018 a second book was published on the Werner murder: A Death in Peking: Who Really Killed Pamela Werner? by British retired police officer Graeme Sheppard (published by Earnshaw Books). 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. It also introduces the previously unreported murder theory as disclosed by Backhouse, i.e. that Pamela was murdered by a group of Japanese militarists in an act of political revenge for the killing of a Japanese officer by British soldiers in 1936. A Death in Peking concludes that a former Chinese student friend of Pamela, Han Shou-ch'ing, was more than likely the lone offender.

A subject of considerable media attention at the time, the case drifted into obscurity with the ensuing outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which soon enveloped into World War II, and the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China a short time afterwards. Interest in the case was revived with the 2011 publication of Paul French's bestseller Midnight in Peking, which endorsed Werner's conclusions and won several awards. However, a website set up by some of Prentice's descendants argues that documentary evidence from the time contradicts that conclusion and casts doubt on many of French's assertions.

Chiang had left General Song Zheyuan in charge of Peking, to do what he could to hold off both the northern warlords who still remained and, increasingly, the Japanese, who were camped within a few miles of the onetime Chinese imperial palace, the Forbidden City, and controlled almost all the routes in and out of the city. Planning to use Peking as a base for their eventual conquest of China, the Japanese were working to undermine the city's resistance. They covertly encouraged the drug trade and staged regular military provocations. Chinese residents of the city believed that Chiang was prepared to abandon it to the Japanese if he could just be assured of retaining all of China south of the Yangzi River. "The end was coming," Paul French wrote in 2011, "it was just a question of when." Many residents assumed that that end would be death at Japanese hands, either by starvation as they besieged the city, or by being massacred afterward.

Midnight in Peking, French's account of the case, was published late in 2011 and became a bestseller in many of the countries in which it was published over the next two years. It won the 2013 Edgar Award for Fact Crime Writing and the Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Dagger Award for the same year. For a time after publication, French led walking tours of the areas of present-day Beijing's Dongcheng District where the investigation unfolded. Kudos Television bought the rights to adapt the story into a television serial shortly after the book's publication.

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 Peking's foreign community at that time. French woke up the next morning wanting to know more about the case, and eventually felt a responsibility to tell the story in some form. During later research at The National Archives, rain led him to extend his visit. He looked through a box of 1940s records from the British embassy in China, wondering if any of them would have anything about the killing. There were many, including a 150-page letter from Werner documenting what his private efforts had uncovered about the case, a letter whose conclusions, implicating Prentice and the circle of fellow nudists around him, French accepted as the likeliest resolution.

The outset of hostilities was even more trying for Dennis. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese relieved him of his duties as police chief in the Tientsin concession and imprisoned him, along with other members of the police force, in apparent retribution for his stand against them two years earlier. 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. Afterwards he returned to China and took part in the war crimes prosecutions of some of the Japanese officials who had overseen his imprisonment; he returned to England and lived there until his death in 1977.

In 1945, following the end of the war and the liberation of Weihsien, Werner returned to his home in Peking. There he resumed pressing British officials about the case. 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. Beyond that it appears Werner's appeals were unsuccessful. Werner remained in Peking through the end of the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic under Mao in 1949. Two years later, he finally returned to England, where he died in 1954. Werner's lengthy obituary in The Times noted Pamela's murder in passing, in a short paragraph about his family, which would be the last time the crime was mentioned in any prominent published source for the remainder of the 20th century. Pamela and her mother were buried in the English Cemetery, now under the pavement of modern Beijing's Second Ring Road.

The theory of Japanese involvement seems to have persisted within British diplomatic circles to the end of the war. In 1945, an unknown official with the consular office wrote a memo about possibly reopening the case. The index of Foreign Office papers from that year summarises its subject as "Murder [of Pamela Werner] by Japanese in 1937". However, the actual document was weeded years ago and its content is not known or referred to in any other paperwork from the era.

In March 1943 the Japanese removed all the remaining European residents from the Legation Quarter, including Prentice and Werner, and elsewhere in Peking. After being marched to the train station before Chinese residents who were required to watch the spectacle, they were put on a train to the Weihsien internment camp in Shandong, where they spent the remainder of the war. According to other survivors of the camp, Werner sometimes confronted Prentice about the killing, although he was not the only person the older man accused.

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. Even there he continued his efforts, writing long requests to the Foreign Office, which were not always delivered due to the difficulties of wartime. An unknown reviewer of one of the letters wrote in an attached memorandum, dated 1943, that the case deserved further examination than it had got up to that point, but nothing appears to have come of it.

Werner himself, the site authors note, did not always hew strictly to his theory that Prentice and the nudists were responsible. 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. French also cited a 1948 account of the murder and investigation written by Fulton Oursler, under his "Anthony Abbot" pseudonym, based entirely on what Oursler learned while talking to reporters in a Shanghai bar on a visit there and then reviewing newspaper articles about it in his hotel, never coming any closer to Peking. It is the apparent source for French's depiction of Pamela's last words before leaving the skating rink, much more fanciful than what her friends recalled her actually saying. Abbot also theorizes that the murder was committed by a visiting American who had similarly raped, killed and disemboweled young virgins at home; French never mentions that theory as an alternate to Werner's.

Throughout 1938 and into 1939, Werner continued his investigations. 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. Despite this, Werner was able to work with some of the other legations. The American consulate provided him with information on the criminal past of one of the former operators of 28 Chuanban, and later the Japanese, eager to embarrass the British, were able to get some witnesses to speak with him. But after the Tientsin Incident in summer 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.

Han had been forbidden by his superiors from talking to Werner during the initial investigation, but during a chance encounter with Werner on the street in 1938, he apologised for his failure to resolve the case. 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. After that his fate is unknown.

In 1938 Sir Edmund Backhouse, another British Sinologist of the era, told Peking consul Allan Archer that his contacts among the Japanese had told him quite openly that the murder was committed by two of their countrymen as revenge for Sasaki. Archer was impressed enough that he wrote Sir Robert George Howe in Shanghai about it, saying he thought this was finally the truth and dismissing Werner's theories about Prentice and Pinfold, the only time those theories are mentioned anywhere in British official correspondence regarding Pamela's murder other than Werner's letters. 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.

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. The only child of sinologist and retired British diplomat E. T. C. Werner, Pamela had last been seen by acquaintances just before leaving a skating rink the previous night. No one was ever charged in the case.

At the start of 1937, Beijing (then referred to in Western languages as Peking) and its 1.5 million residents, both Chinese and foreign, knew that they were living in the end of an era. While the city was the third richest in the Republic of China, it was no longer the country's capital. Despite the success of the Northern Expedition, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek had retreated to Nanjing. Originally his aim was to better consolidate his political power and military position against Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army (PLA), which sought to establish a communist state; but after the December 1936 Xi'an incident, where Zhang Xueliang had held him hostage for two weeks, he had agreed to Zhang's demand that he seek an alliance with the PLA to better defend China against the Japanese empire.

The Chinese New Year of 1937 was raucously celebrated in Peking by Chinese and foreigners alike; many believed this might be the last such holiday for them and the city. After nothing turned up or happened that might have shed new light on Pamela's killing, Dennis returned to Tientsin to attend to pressing matters there, and Han moved on to other cases as well. The Japanese provocations were becoming increasingly bold, with tanks being driven through the city and Zeros flown overhead at low altitudes as part of what the Japanese generals still claimed was routine military maneuvering even as they steadily increased their presence outside Peking.

At the end of 1936, Pamela was on holiday from Tientsin Grammar School. 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. Werner feared his growing daughter was maintaining too active a social life for a woman her age and was also worried about some of the young men who had attempted to court her. He had hit one of them, a young Chinese man, with his cane in front of the house during a confrontation.

After repeated requests, the Peking police returned Pamela's clothes and effects to her father. He learned that many of them had not been checked for fingerprints nor properly preserved, leaving them useless as evidence. But in Pamela's diary he learned that during summer 1936 she had gone on a weekend visit to the Western Hills with Gorman and his family, where he had apparently made a sexual overture to her that she rebuffed. That suggested to Werner another connection to Prentice, and a possible motive for the killing.

French comes in for criticism on his own for his poor sourcing. In an Asia Times interview, the authors note, he implied he had relied on the police and autopsy reports from the case but never cited them in his own footnotes for the book. 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. Most of French's reconstructed account of the investigation comes entirely from Werner's letters. Likewise, any police records from that era did not survive the war years.

In his response to statements by witnesses to those incidents, the site authors reproduce a letter to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in which Werner refused to accept blame for the incident and instead focused on the perceived injustices done to him by Jordan and others, a pattern they say is also reflected in his handling of his daughter's murder investigation. Likewise, Werner's 1928 memoir Autumn Leaves presents the incident untruthfully, in a manner they claim is greatly favourable to Werner.

In 1919 the Werners adopted a two-year-old girl, whom they named Pamela, from the orphanage run by Portuguese nuns at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, or South Church, in Peking. Pamela's biological parentage was not known, although her fair complexion and grey eyes suggest that she was, like many of the other orphans at the South Church, the offspring of exiled Russian Whites. After Gladys died of what was said to have been a drug overdose 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 traveling around the city on her bicycle, often unaccompanied. Outside the home, Werner wrote books and articles about China, researched the language and its many dialects on long walks around Beijing, and occasionally lectured at Peking University.

Pinfold's arrest did, however, yield a new lead. Dennis and Han began focusing on the nudist weekends. Pinfold had told them that they were organized by Wentworth Prentice, an American dentist whose patients were mostly wealthy expatriates and diplomats. Prentice had originally settled in China with his wife and children after graduating from Harvard's dental school in 1918, but in 1932 she had returned to the U.S. with the children. His file at the U.S. consulate suggested that at least one person there had been concerned for the safety of one of his children, but did not explain why.

Werner took readily to the country's language and culture, which he studied avidly while serving the Diplomatic Service in a variety of positions over the next decades, including at one point as consul. However, his interest in the country where he served was coupled with poor personal skills and many of his postings were remote locations, meant as punishments for volatile disagreements with superiors and sometimes those the consular officers served. He nevertheless married a socially prominent woman, Gladys Ravenshaw, and the couple stayed in Peking after his 1914 retirement, where he continued his studies.

The site authors argue Werner was not a credible source. 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. And specifically, French does not mention an incident that year in which Werner struck a customs official with a whip while British consul in Fuzhou, an incident which led the Foreign Office to invoke the Superannuation Act 1887 and forcibly retire him, one of only two times it did so with its diplomats in China during the treaty port era.