On the afternoon of January 29, 1937, the coroner returned from lunch and made his decision. Reporters were ordered to leave. They protested, but the doors were closed anyway. What the doctors had to say would not be said in public.
Three weeks earlier, a nineteen-year-old girl had set out on her bicycle on a winter night, skates over her shoulder, and never came home. Now, behind that closed door, solemn men would describe what the night had brought back. To understand what was said in that room, one must go back three weeks, to the evening of Thursday, January 7, 1937. The city was Beiping, in northern China.
Roughly a million and a half people lived inside its ancient walls and around them. The city was no longer the country’s capital, and its residents felt that an era was drawing to a close. Winter was at its peak. The frost of the northern plain lay over the gray brick and narrow lanes.
A few miles from the old imperial palace, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were camped, and every road into or out of the city lay under their shadow. Refugees came from everywhere: Chinese families fleeing war in the provinces, stateless White Russians, Europeans escaping the rise of fascism. For the Russian exiles, that particular night was Christmas Eve, according to the old Orthodox calendar. In a house in a courtyard within a narrow hutong, behind the guarded walls of the embassy quarter, a young woman spent her morning at the dentist and her afternoon writing letters.
Her name was Pamela Werner. She ordered meatballs and rice for dinner. She said she would be home by half past seven. She skated under the lights of the French skating rink.
Then she rode her bicycle away into the darkness. Three weeks later, behind a closed door, the city would learn how far that darkness had carried her. History never bothered to record the moment of Pamela Werner’s birth. She was believed to have been born on February 7, 1917.
Her mother and father were unknown. In 1919, a small child of about two lived in an orphanage run by Portuguese nuns in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which the people of Beijing called the South Church. She had fair skin and gray eyes, and like many children in that house, she was thought to be the daughter of White Russians who had fled the revolution and found no country willing to take them in. That year, she acquired a name and a father.
Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner was then in his mid-fifties. Born near Dunedin in New Zealand to a Prussian father and an English mother, he had been forced by his father’s death in 1878 to find a career, and so he joined the consular service in China as a student interpreter. He served in Canton, Tientsin, Macao, and distant stations on Hainan Island and the Gulf of Tonkin, rising to become consul general at Foochow in 1911. He was a gifted scholar of Chinese language and mythology.
He was also, in the view of many, a difficult man whose quarrels with his superiors damaged his career. He left the service in 1914 and settled in Beijing with his wife, Gladys Nina Ravenshaw. In 1922, Gladys died while being treated for meningitis. It was said that an overdose was the cause.
Pamela was about five years old. Father and daughter remained together. Werner taught her Chinese, and she spoke it fluently from an early age. Like him, she roamed the city by bicycle, often alone.
They did not live inside the walled legation quarter but outside it, in a modern courtyard house. Among their neighbors were the American journalists Edgar and Helen Foster Snow. By the winter of 1936, Pamela was a student at the Tientsin Grammar School and had come home for the holidays. Something had happened at school.
The details remain unclear. Perhaps it involved the headmaster, Sidney Yates, who had molested her. Her father decided to send her to England to finish her education. She was not happy with the plan.
He was also worried about the young men who frequented the house. On one occasion, he struck a young Chinese admirer with his cane. A photograph of Pamela survives, taken in a studio. It was taken a month before her death.
It is a strange mercy of the archive that we have her face but not her voice. January 7 began without incident. In the morning, Pamela went to a dentist appointment. She returned home and sat down to write some letters.
Around three in the afternoon, the family servant, Ho Ying, prepared to go out to buy food, as he did every afternoon. He asked if she would like some sweets. She declined. She said she would go out herself within the hour, but she would be home by half past seven.
She asked him to prepare meatballs and rice. When Ho Ying returned, she was gone. The gatekeeper had seen her leave on her bicycle. Between three and four, Pamela approached the reception clerk at the Wagon-Lits Hotel and inquired about renting a room.
She looked through the hotel brochure. Why she did so was never known. Perhaps she was waiting for a visitor. Perhaps she was thinking of leaving her father’s house.
The records do not say. She met her friend Ethel Gurevich, the daughter of Russian immigrants, at the hotel, as they had agreed the day before. At the Gurevich home, Ethel’s mother served tea, bread and butter, and cakes. Pamela ate very little.
She said she was not hungry. She intended to be home by half past seven. Around six, the two young women arrived at the skating rink run by a French company, where a third friend, Lilian Marinovsky, joined them. Some two hundred skaters crossed that ice during the evening.
Around half past seven, Pamela said she had to get home for dinner. Her friends asked whether she minded riding alone in the dark. According to their later account, she said she always went alone, and that nothing could happen to her in Beijing. Lilian watched her mount her bicycle and ride away, skates over her shoulder.
No one is known to have seen her alive after that. Eight o’clock came. Her father was home. His daughter was not.
At half past ten, he sent Ho Ying to the skating rink. It was closed. The workers were cleaning the ice and could tell him nothing. Werner went out himself, carrying an electric lamp.
According to his own testimony, he returned at one o’clock and went to bed. Later he would say he had searched most of the night. Her route remains uncertain. The most direct way home passes near the Badlands, a district of bars and brothels which her friends said she avoided after dark.
Of all the hours in this story, those that followed half past seven are the ones history lost entirely. On Friday, January 8, shortly after eight in the morning, near the Fox Tower, the great watchtower at the southeastern corner of the old city wall, two rickshaw drivers noticed a pack of stray dogs gathering in the moat below the wall, all that remained of a canal that had once run along its base. The dogs were interested in something: a bundle. An elderly man had seen it too.
He went down to look. It was the body of a young European woman. He ran to the nearest police station, a quarter of a mile away. The two rickshaw drivers stayed.
They drove the dogs off and laid a bamboo mat over the body so a crowd would not gather. Colonel Han Shi-chang of the Beijing police took charge. His first thought was familiar in that winter: another White Russian, perhaps, who had ended her life on Orthodox Christmas Eve. But the injuries soon contradicted that notion.
The body lay just outside the legation quarter. He sent for the police commissioner there, W. P. Thomas.
Her name did not remain unknown for long. Edward Werner had rested, then set out again in the morning light, leaving a note about his missing daughter at the commissioner’s office. His search led him to the wall. He recognized her clothing.
He recognized her jewelry. He cried out “Pamela. ” Then he collapsed beside her. Later, a legation policeman who knew her confirmed what her father already knew.
The scene was examined. Her valuable platinum jewelry had not been stolen. Her wristwatch had stopped shortly after midnight. Apart from what had soiled her clothing, there was no blood on the ground.
Near her lay a bloodstained skating rink membership card. Her bicycle and skates were not there. They were never found. She had not died where she lay.
Jurisdiction belonged to the Chinese police, but the trail would certainly lead into the foreign community. At Thomas’s suggestion, Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, a former Scotland Yard investigator and commander of the British Concession police in Tientsin, was brought in to help. It was an unusual partnership for the time. By evening, the body was taken to the Peking Union Medical College.
In the lanes, a rumor spread. It was said that the Fox Tower had always been haunted. At the Peking Union Medical College, the examination was carried out by doctors whose names are not preserved in the records available to us. Their findings, as reported in the inquest and in later historical accounts, can be recorded piece by piece.
First, the cause of death. Pamela died of hemorrhage of the brain, the result of several blows to the head, delivered with enough force to fracture the skull. The weapon may have been a smooth piece of wood or stone. The blows were reported to be so precise and direct as to suggest an attacker she knew.
Second, timing. Her stomach contained partially digested Chinese food. It was known that she had eaten only bread, cakes, and tea that day. So she had survived and eaten a meal somewhere for hours after leaving the rink.
The time of death was placed between ten at night and two in the morning. Her stopped wristwatch agreed. Third, what had happened afterward. The body had been badly mutilated after death.
It had been drained of blood. Several organs had been removed, including the heart. The examiners judged that the work showed a degree of skill. It was not the work of the wall’s dogs.
Whether she had been sexually assaulted could not be determined. Fourth, her clothing. Her coat, scarf, and shoes were with her. Her stockings were torn.
She appeared to have been dressed again after death. The pieces formed a clear picture. She had been killed somewhere inside a building. Her body had been handled, then hurriedly taken to the wall and left in the dark.
Colonel Han kept the only copy of the report in his office. It must be recorded that no autopsy report for this case has been found in the college’s surviving archives. What we know comes mainly from the inquest, the press, and later books. A week after the crime, a Russian property owner in the Badlands came forward.
She had found a dagger and a bloodstained piece of cloth in the room of one of her tenants. The tenant, known as Benfold, was brought to police headquarters on Morrison Street, and Dennis joined the interrogation. Benfold turned out to be a deserter from the Canadian army with a criminal past in the United States. He said little.
He smoked. He fidgeted. The blood was tested. It was animal blood, not human.
No charge was brought. Benfold was released and left Beijing quickly. There would be no trial in this story. There would be an inquest, a verdict, and then a long silence.
Before the court convened again, investigators followed Benfold’s trail. Joseph Knapp, a former United States Marine who ran a bar at 27 Chuan Pan Hutong, told them that Benfold had attended weekend gatherings at a cabin in the Western Hills where men hunted in the forest and stripped naked. He named the organizer, Wentworth Prentiss, an American dentist and Harvard graduate whose patients came from the diplomatic corps. Dennis and the legation police commissioner, E.
D. Howard, visited Prentiss in his apartment next to the skating rink. Winter was at its peak, yet his windows were open. He explained that the owner was repainting.
He said he had never treated Pamela. On the night of the seventh, he had been at the cinema. The next day, the Irish journalist George Gorman defended Prentiss in print, hinting that the killers had been Chinese. Dennis learned that Gorman had also attended those gatherings, and that Pamela had had tea with his wife and daughter on the evening of the sixth.
Dennis received quiet instructions that the matter of the Tientsin Grammar School was not to be made public. British prestige was at stake. But Edward Werner would not be silent. He addressed the press from the steps of the British legation.
He said there was no Chinese tradition involving the removal of organs from the dead. He believed the killers were Westerners. He added 5,000 silver dollars of his own money to the official reward of 1,000. The authorities ordered the investigators to stop talking to him.
On January 29, the inquest resumed before the British consul, Nicholas Fitzmaurice, acting as coroner. Pamela’s friends gave testimony. The officers gave testimony. Then came the lunch break.
After it, the doors were closed, and the doctors were heard in closed session. The verdict came at the end of the day: unlawful killing. By whom? The court did not say.
The next morning, the newspapers published the details anyway. The foreign community was frightened. Colonel Han began to doubt that the killer would ever be found. At the end of June, Fitzmaurice closed the case: murder by person or persons unknown, possibly Chinese.
Then he boarded a ship for England. Two weeks later, gunfire broke out at the Marco Polo Bridge, south of the city. By the end of July, Japanese forces controlled Beijing. Fitzmaurice never returned.
He retired. Edward Werner stayed. He stayed in his courtyard house and spent his savings on his own investigation, employing among others former policemen dismissed by the occupiers. He set down what he had gathered in long letters to the Foreign Office.
He wrote that the brothel at 28 Chuan Pan Hutong had closed the day after the crime, and that its owners had left. That Benfold in Tientsin had wondered whether Prentiss had been arrested. That he held a receipt proving Prentiss had treated Pamela’s teeth. That a rickshaw driver had carried two men and a young European woman wrapped in a sheet from that address that night, and that Pamela’s diary recorded an unwanted advance from Gorman the previous summer.
From all this, he concluded that Prentiss and Knapp and their circle had lured her to a party, that she had resisted, and that she had died in the struggle. It must be said plainly: none of these men was ever charged. Later researchers found that the dental receipt appeared to be dated six years earlier than Werner claimed, and that a late cinema showing had indeed existed that night. In 1941, Werner himself named a different suspect: the young Chinese student he had struck with his cane.
Other theories continued. In 1938, the scholar Sir Edmund Backhouse, whose works were later exposed as fraudulent, claimed that Japanese acquaintances had told him that two of their countrymen had killed her in revenge for a diplomatic matter of the previous year. In 2018, retired police officer Graeme Shepherd argued that Han Shaoqing, a former classmate of Pamela’s, was the most likely suspect. Nothing was ever proven.
In 1938, Colonel Han met Werner by chance in the street and apologized for his failure toward him. In 1943, the Japanese interned both Werner and Prentiss in the Weihsien camp in Shandong. Survivors remembered the old man confronting the dentist. Richard Dennis endured imprisonment and torture at Japanese hands and lived until 1977.
Werner returned to England in 1951 and died there in 1954. His obituary in The Times devoted only a single short paragraph to his daughter’s murder. Then her name vanished from print for more than half a century. Pamela was buried beside her mother in the English cemetery.
The cemetery is gone. Where it stood, the traffic of the Second Ring Road now runs day and night. The Fox Tower still stands at the corner of the old wall, its gray brick pale in the winter light.
And somewhere beneath the passing wheels lies a girl who promised she would be home by half past seven.