The Unsolved Murder of the Diplomat’s Daughter
A British diplomat’s daughter is gruesomely murdered in 1937 China.
Foreigners called it Peking and the locals called in Beiping, today it’s Beijing, a vastly different city in 1937 than the mega city it is today. A time of conflict as the looming threat of Japanese occupation and the ongoing political unrest caused by the rise of the communist party in China. The city was entrenched in a vicious cycle of crime, corruption and poverty. However, the situation was different for the wealthy foreign residents who called Peking home. One of those residents is Edward Werner and his daughter Pamela Werner, this young woman’s life was tragically murdered in a disturbingly shocking way.
Edward Theodore Chalmers (E. T. C.) Werner who was 45 years old, a retired consul and Sinologist with extensive knowledge in Chinese language, history and culture. Edward Werner was a New Zealand born British citizen who hailed from a Prussian heir to the Russian royal empire. Edward married Gladys Nina Ravenshaw who was just 22 years old in 1911. Besides their age gap, sadly not much is known about Gladys.
Edward and Gladys Werner moved to Peking in 1917 when Edward accepted a position as a diplomat for the British government. In 1919, the Werners adopted a girl they named Pamela who was only two years old and whose biological parents is thought to have been Russian refugees fleeing war and turmoil in their homeland who were living in Peking. Tragically in 1922, Gladys passes away after a long battle with an illness that is never specified. A five year old Pamela loses her adoptive mother and is left to be raised by Edward Werner. Gladys was described and remembered as “a girl of the British Empire”.
Pamela Werner spent most of her entire life in Peking and her family lived within the safety of the Legation Quarter. A safe compound for foreigners, separate from the locals and the city falling apart around them. The Legation Quarter had European designed buildings, parks, restaurants and even clubs for wild parties that the rich foreigners partook in; it was like living in a bubble. Outside the Quarter was a dangerous area called the Badlands, it contained gambling dens and brothel houses, not many wealthy foreigners wandered around in that area. Foreigners who lost their way financially would gamble, sell drugs or do sex work in the Badlands to survive.
Pamela’s early life was filled with tragedy but regardless, she grew up to be a bright and fun-loving 19 year old. According to some sources, she was still a student but in other sources this information is not mentioned. Not many wealthy foreigners lived outside the Legation Quarter but some artists and scholars chose to live just outside the Quarter to experience ‘real Chinese culture’ like the Werners who lived on a street called Armour Factory Alley in a traditional Chinese laneway home called a Hutong.
Pamela was truly free-spirited and fearless and she was enjoying life in a city she considered home. She was often seen in the city riding her bike through the alleyways and going in and out of stores. She loved the Chinese locals and was fascinated by their traditional clothing and was interested in exploring the various goods merchants bought from their vast travels. Pamela was a smart young woman who spoke Mandarin fluently, she felt comfortable and safe being in the city alone. She was very excited as she would be leaving to continue her studies in England, it was her last few days in Peking but it would be her last.
The Murder
On January 8th 1937, a cold night, Pamela was doing what she loved most, ice-skating with friends. After skating, she planned to ride her bicycle home, her friends voiced their disapproval and worry for her safety. According to some sources, Pamela responded by saying:
“I’ve been alone all my life….I am afraid of nothing–nothing! And besides, Peking is the safest city in the world”
Her words are haunting considering her fate will lead to her death that same night. She left her friends around 7pm.
The Fox Tower is a tall structure made of grey brick looming over the city that once served as a watch tower for the safety of the city on the Tartar Wall; many cities in China have such walls still interact today; this particular wall is said to date back to the Ming Dynasty. The locals avoid the tower because they believed it was the home of evil fox spirits. In Ancient Chinese mythology, fox spirits have the ability to transform into beautiful women who could poison men and cause them to lose their memories and knowledge, they also had the power to know everything about someone and to many that was frightening.
Early morning light gave way to a gruesome discovery by a man walking his songbird who happened over the body of Pamela Werner along the Tartar Wall, the Fox Tower looked down on her mutilated body. Pamela was badly beaten and sexually assaulted; her body was covered by a thin layer of ice and horrifically her eyes were frozen open from the drastic winter cold, she was found in a ditch along the wall. Her body tells a brutal story of violence, her heart was ripped out of her chest, she was missing her liver, bladder and kidneys. She had a large cut to her throat, it was suspected that this was a failed attempt at decapitating and her right arm was barely still on her body as it was severely cut as well. The unsuccessful attempt at decapitation had two main theories: lack of time or the killer being interrupted or the killer being lazy as there was significant amount of evidence left behind at the scene.
Beside her body, her membership card for the ice-skating rink and an expensive watch left to her by her mother; to investigators it seemed robbery was not the motive for the crime as the watch was left behind. Pamela was viciously attacked and her brutalised body was unrecognisable; the watch was what linked her body to her identity. The city lit up with rumours and fear, the wealthy white daughter of a British diplomat was murdered signalled to everyone that no one was safe. Beside the newspapers consist coverage of the gruesome details really caused fear in the city to rise in additional to parts of China quickly falling to Japanese occupation.
Theories and the investigation
A number of theories quickly emerged about the night Pamela was murdered, the night of January 8th, 1937. The timeline of events of the night has never been clearly established at the time of the investigation and the many years since. After leaving the ice-skating rink without her friends, Pamela had dinner with a student friend but there is another theory that Pamela didn’t have dinner with a friend but instead went to a party held by an American dentist named Wentworth Prentice. Wentworth Prentice was known for hosting wild parties at his home with other prominent foreigners in the city, the parties usually had illegal activities but the local police looked the other way as these were foreigners they didn’t want to upset.
These two different theories of Pamela’s movements that night came about from two men are considered people who know most about this case today, they both wrote books on this case. Paul French bought the crime to public attention in 2013 when he wrote Midnight in Peking, a New York Times best-seller about Pamela’s murder who found Edward Werner’s letters to the British government at the time, these letters were kept in the British national archives and Paul French stumbled onto these letter which became the basis of his book. Graeme Sheppard, a retried British policemen from the London’s Metropolitan police department who wrote the book A Death in Peking to rival the book by Paul French as he didn’t agree with his theories of the crime. Paul French believes that Pamela attend a party at the house of the American dentist Wentworth Pence where she died accidentally when something went wrong at the party. However, Graeme Sheppard believes Pamela was murdered by the student she had dinner with that night whose name was Han Shou-Ching.
According to French, Pamela was willing to attend the supposed party at the Wentworth Prentice’s house because he was her dentist previously and she most likely knew most of the party guests. Apparently, the party was in honour of the Russian Orthodox Christmas but the party was going to pop off in a neighbourhood just west of the city that has a dark and seedy underbelly known as the Badlands which mainly had brothels and gambling dens and other similar establishments. French’s theory is that there was never a party, just a rouse to lure Pamela to a brothel known simply as Number 28 by a group of men.
Regardless of the theories, Pamela is found dead in the early morning hours just 750 feet from her house. Pamela’s father Edward Werner went out looking for her when she didn’t return home, he reportedly found her body but other sources claim an old Chinese local walking his songbird found the body nearly frozen. Edward Werner was heartbroken at the loss of his daughter, he felt the local police weren’t doing everything they could; he wrote to England for support, made a list of suspects he thought might have killed Pamela and even went to locations tied to the murder like the brothels in the Badlands. Others were disturbed by his obsessiveness towards solving Pamela’s murder, some even thought he had killed her because he found her body and was known to be strict and had violent outbursts towards Pamela whenever she came home late or bought a boy home. Both French and Sheppard had doubts about Edward Werner being the killer of his own daughter. One of the suspects that Werner focused on in his own investigation was the friend that Pamela supposedly had dinner with the night she died, many believed he was her Chinese boyfriend Han Shou-Ching; Edward Werner even confessed to punching him in the face. Police at the time investigated Han Shou-Ching because of his closeness to Pamela and taking her heart was a sign of revenge, they theorised it was a crime of passion. Other suspects on Werner’s list included a rickshaw driver who apparently was seen covered in blood and a teacher at Pamela’s grammar school who had an inappropriate interest in her and made sexual advances towards her.
Other theories include Chinese traditions of using human organs for spiritual practices so blaming the locals as suspects and a political reason behind the murder meaning someone in the British Embassy might know something as letter were found by Paul French while writing his book.
A Sad Ending
In the end, Pamela’s death goes unsolved as the Japanese invade Peking and China. In 1943, Edward Werner is forced to flee and leave all his possessions behind as other foreigners are gathered and put into camps in the Shandong Province, in a twist of fate, Edward Werner and the man he suspected killed his daughter, the dentist Wentworth Prentice were in the same camp, the dentist was working on people’s teeth with any equipment he could find. Werner even confronted him, ranting and raving like a mad man as people thought he went insane.
Suriving the camp, Werner now in his 80s, unsuccessfully tried to convince the British Foreign Office to try and open his daughter’s case. Wentworth Prentice later died in the Legation Quarter in 1947. Han Shou-ching was killed by the Japanese military. Werner continued to live in China and became one of only 30 British nationals still living in post-war Peking in October 1951 now known as Beijing which was now controlled by the Communist Party. Eventually, Werner returned to England for the first time since 1917 at 89 years old. Apparently, there was no one alive who knew him and his funeral was short and no one attended it. Pamela Werner’s final resting place was destroyed and she’s now somewhere underneath Beijing’s second ring road.
Author’s Note:
The information in this article is slightly summarised due to writing length limitations or this would not be an article but an essay. For the full length coverage of this case please see the information below.
Want more true crime content but in audio format? Check out my newest podcast Untold Crimes: A True Crime Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Please support the show by becoming a patron on Patreon.
