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.
Though British and Chinese officials cooperated in the investigation, it was hampered by official resistance and the city's general chaos: Beijing at the time was crowded with war refugees, there was upheaval elsewhere in China and Europe, and Japanese troops were on the verge of occupying the city. 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. Some British diplomatic records pertaining to the case were later weeded; Werner, whose chequered career with the Diplomatic Service in China had alienated many of his former colleagues who oversaw the investigation, later used his own resources to identify American dentist Wentworth Prentice as the likely killer.
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.
Background Beijing in the late 1930s At the start of 1937, Beijing (then romanized in Western languages as "Peking") and its 1.5 million residents, both Chinese and foreign, knew that they were living at 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 Chiang's aim was to better consolidate his political power and military position against Mao Zedong's Chinese Red Army, 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.
Chiang had left General Song Zheyuan in charge of Beijing, to do what he could to hold off both the northern warlords who still remained and, increasingly, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), 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 Beijing 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 Beijing believed that Chiang was prepared to abandon the city to the Japanese if he could 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 afterwards.
Beijing's population had swelled as refugees flocked to the city. Many were Chinese, fleeing the wars and disruption elsewhere in the country. But a sizable portion had come from Europe, primarily Russian Whites, left stateless by the communist victory in the Russian Civil War and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. Others were Jews, leaving behind the worsening conditions in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe, joined by those who also felt at risk from the advancing tide of fascism. They were joined by military deserters evading capture, fugitives from justice in their homelands and travellers who had either been stranded in China or decided to stay. Most of the European refugees had come to China penniless and worked menial jobs, or sometimes engaged in criminal activity, to get by.
Beijing's foreign diplomats and businessmen looked down on the European refugees as a threat to their hegemony in the city and hoped they would eventually find their way to Shanghai. They were sometimes joined in this assessment by the expatriates, many of them businessmen who dealt with the Chinese, or those who had moved to China for better economic prospects serving the expatriate community. The disparate exchange rate between strong Western currencies and the Chinese silver dollar, as well as lower costs of living in China, made it possible for expatriates to live better than they could in their native countries for the same amount of money. For example, American journalist Edgar Snow and his wife Helen were able to own a racehorse on their earnings as reporters.
The Werners Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner was a New Zealand-born British citizen whose wealthy Prussian father took the family travelling around the world in his youth. He had returned to England to attend Tonbridge School. 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.
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 of remote locations, meant as punishments for volatile disagreements with superiors and sometimes those the consular officers served. Nevertheless, Werner married a socially prominent woman, Gladys Ravenshaw, and the couple stayed in Beijing after his 1914 retirement, where he continued his studies.
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 Beijing. 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 travelling 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.
The Werners lived, like a growing number of foreigners, outside the city's heavily secured Legation Quarter, a cramped area of about that was the only extraterritorial portion of the city, in contrast to the more populous treaty ports of Shanghai and Tianjin (then romanized as "Tientsin"). Among their neighbours in the hutong where they lived in a modernized siheyuan, or courtyard house, were the Snows. Werner sent Pamela to the private schools that catered to the city's more affluent foreigners.
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.
Disappearance and death On 7 January 1937, the last day of her life, Pamela went to a dental appointment in the morning and then returned home to write letters. She left the family home in the late afternoon. Ho Ying, a servant who typically went out to purchase food around 3 p.m. daily, informed her at the time he was doing so and asked her if, as was often the case, she wanted him to buy sweetmeats when he did so. Pamela declined, saying she herself would be leaving within the hour, although she indicated she would return by 7:30 for dinner, asking Ho to prepare meatballs and rice. When he returned she was gone; the family's gatekeeper had seen her leave with her bicycle.
After leaving, Pamela met friend Ethel Gurevitch, a daughter of Russian émigrés whom she had known for five years, at the Wagons-Lits Hotel, a popular gathering place for the city's foreign community, per an agreement the two had made the day before; Pamela told Gurevitch she had been there earlier and left briefly before returning to meet her. Afterwards, they went back to the Gurevitch home where Ethel's mother served the two tea, buttered bread and cake; Pamela ate very little, saying she was not hungry.
Pamela and Gurevitch then went out to an ice skating rink operated by a French company, arriving around 6 p.m., where they skated with a third friend, Lillian Marinovski, another Russian. The three remained together for most of the time they were there except for one brief period when Pamela went to speak to another girl. Around 7:30 p.m. Gurevitch recalled that Pamela said she had to go home for dinner. They asked her if she felt comfortable returning home alone at night; she told them she always went by herself and that "nothing can happen to me here in Peking." Marinvoski saw her bicycle away, with her skates over her shoulder. It was the last time anyone is known to have seen Pamela alive.
By 8 p.m. Pamela had still not returned home; although her father had. Around 10:30 p.m. he asked Ho to go to the skating rink and see if she was there; by the time he arrived, the rink had closed and workers were cleaning up for the evening. They could not tell him anything specifically about Pamela as, they said, there had been around 200 people skating at the rink over the course of the evening. Ho returned to the Werner residence, where E. T. C. told him to go home for the night. By the older man's later testimony, he went out himself with an electric torch to look for his daughter, returning at 1 a.m. and going to bed; later he would claim he had spent most of the night looking for her.
Discovery of body
Shortly after 8 a.m. the next day, two rickshaw pullers near the Fox Tower along the city's old walls noticed a group of wild dogs showing interest in a bundle lying in the ditch near the wall, all that remained of the canal that had formerly run along it. An elderly man saw this too, and went down to take a closer look. After finding it was the severely beaten and stabbed body of what appeared to be a young European woman, he ran to the nearest police box, a quarter of a mile (400 m) away, to report it.French, 'The Body at the Fox Tower'.