Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (29 page)

Perhaps her resistance, her refusal to submit as other girls had done before her, angered the men. They were used to having their way. Or perhaps they panicked, and just wanted to shut her up. They grabbed her arms, scratching her as she tried to break free—the premortem scratches on her lower arms identified in the autopsy. That might have also been the point at which they thrust at her with their hunting knives, stabbing her in the face, eliciting the long, piercing final scream heard both within and outside number 28.

Then, to silence her, one of the men hit her hard on the head, just above her right eye. Perhaps with the leg of a chair, which had broken off as a result of the struggle; the autopsy had determined that the fatal blow had come from a wooden instrument of some sort. The blow was so strong it split her skull, causing severe haemorrhaging. Blood poured inside her cranium, drowning her brain. Within two to three minutes Pamela was dead, on the floor of a dirty bedroom in a Badlands whorehouse, a place she should never have been in.

Killing Pamela hadn’t been part of the men’s plan for the night. The shouting and screaming and smashing of furniture brought Madam Leschinsky and the brothel’s security man, Liu Pao-chung, running. Madam Leschinsky took control, perhaps with help from her partner Michael Consiglio. She told the men to get the body out of her brothel and away from Chuanpan Hutong. She told her security man to confine the other girls to their rooms, and to keep the customers there too—the off-duty Italian marines. Dr Capuzzo was on hand to ensure they maintained their silence, in return for not being reported in an off-limits brothel.

Faced with Pamela’s dead and bloody body, the men realised they needed to cover up their crime. They considered what to do, and took the decision to mutilate the corpse. They would slash it and stab it and then carve it up beyond recognition. They would dismember it and dump the parts outside the Legation Quarter, shifting any suspicion away from themselves and making the body impossible to identify. It would be seen as the work of a fiendish maniac, most probably Chinese.

Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio would never talk, and they’d make sure their girls didn’t either. Dr Capuzzo would ensure that gossip didn’t filter out from the Italian marines in the brothel that night. As for the Chinese, one foreigner looked the same as another, and anyway, no Chinese willingly got involved in
laowai
business. Do it right, and the men would be in the clear.

They set to work. They were hunters; they had large, sharp knives that they often carried with them, and they had carved up animal corpses before. The first thing to do was cut the throat and drain the body of blood. They were in luck, because adjoining the bedroom was a bathroom. Dennis had been right in thinking that if he could find the blood, he would find the killers
—
except that Pamela’s blood could never be found, because most of it went down the drain of the bath at number 28.

The bloodletting done, Pamela’s body was carried to the courtyard door. One of the brothel’s oil lamps was taken for light, and perhaps some additional knives from Chen Ching-chun’s kitchen in the basement. Prentice went to the phone, called Pinfold, told him what had happened and that he needed to meet them.

Which of them was it who suggested the Fox Tower as a suitable place to carve up the body? Werner always believed it was Pinfold, who, as the bodyguard of a Chinese warlord, had once regularly patrolled the area. He would have known the legends about fox spirits, he would have known the tower was deserted at night. He certainly knew there were no streetlights there, and that the base of the tower was pitch-black. It was not patrolled by police—in fact, it was the only watchtower in Peking not to be guarded at night—and the nearest manned police box was nearly half a mile away at Hatamen Gate. Moreover it was in Chinese police territory, outside the Legation Quarter. It was the perfect location.

At the door of number 28, Madam Leschinsky called over the only waiting rickshaw puller, Sun Te-hsing. It was a dark night, after midnight, and cold, with a chill wind. Pamela was carried to the rickshaw and propped between Prentice and Knauf, her clothes draped back on and a cloth over her head hiding the damage.

The laboured breathing Sun thought he’d heard would have been caused by the movement of air in Pamela’s lungs and throat as her body jolted during the jerky rickshaw ride: Werner had consulted a pathologist about this matter. Given what happened next, Werner could be forgiven for hoping that the end for Pamela had indeed come in that sordid room at number 28.

Sun took his passengers along Chuanpan Hutong to the Wall Road. He went a short distance along that to the small stone bridge that formed a narrow gap in the Tartar Wall and provided access to the Fox Tower, and its desolate grounds on the other side.

When Sun had left, warded off by Knauf’s blade, the men carried Pamela across the bridge to the base of the tower. Joined now by Pinfold, they proceeded to mutilate the corpse. They worked by lamplight, the same lamplight seen by the mechanic Wang Shih-ming, the old coal merchant, and the motorist Kurochkin in the early hours of that Friday.

The men cut open Pamela’s sternum, cracking the ribs outwards. They worked with their hunter’s knowledge of anatomy and at least two different types of knife. There was a control to their work now, after the frenzy of the initial postmortem beating, stabbing and slashing, the repeated blows to the left eye, temples, crown and chin; the wounds about the face and the mutilation of the vagina. By the time Pamela’s body was clinically carved up, it was no more to these men than the carcass of an animal killed in the forest for sport.

With the chest cut open and the ribs broken back, they had access to the body cavity. They removed the heart and other organs. They detached the stomach at the oesophagus and the small intestine. If the large gash across her throat was an attempt to cut the head off, then they were unsuccessful. Nor were they able to successfully detach her right arm.

Perhaps it was at this point that the men were interrupted. Perhaps someone heedless of fox spirits had strayed too close, disturbing the gruesome scene. Or perhaps the men were startled by the headlights of the nighttime motorist Kurochkin, coming along the City Road and around the corner of the Fox Tower, above the slope where the carving was taking place. They would not have expected a car at that time of night, and it may not have been apparent to them that they were unobservable down at the base of the tower. Or perhaps they had simply grown exhausted.

Whatever the reason, when they departed the scene, they were careless. They left things behind—the lamp, Pamela’s skating rink card, her expensive watch. If these last two items hadn’t been found, and if the dismemberment had been completed, identifying the corpse would have been considerably harder.

What happened to Pamela’s heart, bladder, kidneys and liver? Perhaps for once the rumours had come close to the truth; perhaps the organs had been eaten by the
huang gou
. Or perhaps they had been thrown into the fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armour Factory Alley.

The men left swiftly, back across the stone bridge to the Wall Road, and from there into the Legation Quarter, to 3 Legation Street. Once they were in Prentice’s apartment, they cleaned the blood off themselves. Aware that they could have left traces, the dentist had the whole place painted the following week, just to be on the safe side. Pamela’s bicycle and ice skates, left there earlier that Thursday night, were quickly disposed of, perhaps at one of Peking’s numerous flea markets, or dumped in the canal by the Fox Tower.

As it turned out, the men had more than a week in which to do all this before the police eventually came knocking at Prentice’s door. The details taken care of, the men had nothing to do but wait. They waited knowing that Madam Leschinsky, Michael Consiglio and their working girls would keep their silence, that Capuzzo would ensure the Italian marines never talked, that the bathroom at number 28 had been thoroughly cleaned and any gruesome remains disposed of before the whole place was shuttered and closed down. They waited, knowing that the madam and her husband had left town and the prostitutes had scattered across China, with threats to keep their mouths shut.

Pamela meanwhile had remained on the freezing ground at the Fox Tower, her head to the west and her feet to the east, her watch stopped at a couple of minutes after midnight.

The Wound That Wouldn’t Heal

N
either the outbreak of World War II nor the long years of its duration deterred Werner from sending the evidence he obtained from his investigation to the British authorities. He continued to send this not only to the Foreign Office in Whitehall and to Archer and Clark Kerr in China but to the British foreign secretary, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, better known as Viscount Halifax. He also copied in the parliamentary undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Ivor Miles Windsor-Clive, the second Earl of Plymouth.

As for the Chinese authorities, no semblance of an independent police force remained in Peking. Chief Chen had been removed from Ch’ienmen and a puppet Chinese mayor and chief of police installed, a man who studiously ignored Werner’s entreaties.

Some of the letters that Werner sent to the Foreign Office appear not to have been received, victims of the disruption of wartime postal services. But finally, in January 1943, someone in Whitehall read one of Werner’s reports, and in a file memo noted:

If British administration of justice in China is to recover its good name, a case of this heinous nature cannot be merely pigeon-holed, “dropped” and forgotten. In any event, full unexpurgated detail must be made public in due course.

But being pigeonholed and forgotten was exactly the fate of Werner’s evidence. It was shelved deep in the vaults of the Foreign Office, among countless other documents arriving in war-torn and blitzed London. Nobody ever contacted Werner about his correspondence. The case of the murder of his only daughter was never reopened.

And so she slipped from history. Foreign Peking was by now scattered to the four winds, fled to the far corners of the globe, as China and Japan locked horns and the whole world descended into a conflict that swallowed up the people who’d known Pamela.

Pamela’s Tientsin boyfriend, Mischa Horjelsky, joined the U.S. Air Force and flew raids over occupied Europe until he was killed in action. His plane was shot down in the massive raids in the summer of 1943 that targeted the Nazi-held Ploesti oil fields in Romania.

Han Shou-ching, with whom Pamela had eaten her last meal, returned to his father’s home in Mukden to join the Chinese resistance forces. He was captured by the dreaded Kempeitai in 1940 and executed.

In Tientsin many people continued to believe that Pamela’s murderer was Sydney Yeates. When the headmaster and his family were bundled out of China, they hadn’t even waited for the next boat to London, but rather sailed for Kobe and then San Francisco, after which they travelled overland to New York. From there they sailed to England. They arrived in Plymouth in March, with no home and no job for Yeates to go to. He never taught again, keeping a low profile as the headmaster’s secretary at the City of Oxford Boys School, where he remained until his death in 1955 at the age of sixty-one.

With the Japanese occupation of Peking, Helen and Edgar Snow’s radical journal
Democracy
was shut down. Helen later wrote in her memoir that although the Pamela Werner ‘mystery was never solved or even reasonably guessed at . . . I never really believed the murder was directed against Ed or me, yet there was always a question.’ Edgar’s
Red Star Over China
, published in 1938, was a worldwide sensation, while Helen’s own record of her visits to the Communist bases,
Inside Red China
, was published a year later and became an important historical document.

The Snows’ marriage became increasingly strained after the Japanese occupation. Helen returned to America in 1940, and the couple divorced in 1949. She spent the rest of her life in Connecticut, publishing her autobiography in 1984. She died in 1997, aged ninety.

Inspector Botham, accused of drunkenness, consorting with prostitutes and contamination of evidence while in Peking, was dismissed by DCI Dennis soon after returning to Tientsin. He and his wife departed for England. Sergeant Binetsky, whose wife was imprisoned by the Japanese in northern China, made it out of Tientsin to Rangoon, along with a number of other White Russians. There they enlisted in the British army and reputedly showed great courage in battle. It appears that Binetsky died in combat against the Japanese in Burma in October 1943. Meanwhile Commissioner Thomas had died in 1941 at the age of sixty-two, while still secretary of the Legation Quarter’s administrative commission.

The fate of Colonel Han is a mystery. He remained at his post at Morrison Street during the early years of the occupation, but it seems he fell foul of the puppet regime installed at Peking police headquarters after being ordered to investigate an assassination attempt on the pro-Tokyo president of China, Wang Kemin, in March 1938. It was widely known that Tai Li had ordered the killing of Wang as an example to other would-be collaborators. When Han failed to uncover any evidence in the case, or bring anyone to trial, the Japanese assumed he was working for the Kuomintang.

Werner had continued to believe that Han was paid to steer the search for Pamela’s murderer away from 28 Chuanpan Hutong. And yet Han had always appeared determined to catch the killer, and DCI Dennis for one had believed him to be a capable detective. In Werner’s last communication with the colonel, a hurried conversation when they encountered one another on the street in 1938, Han apologised for never having obtained justice for Pamela. The question of the nature of the man’s duplicity in the case was one Werner was never able to resolve.

As for DCI Richard Dennis, he was a marked man after the Tientsin Incident of 1939. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, London declared war in support of the United States, and in the early morning of 8 December, Dennis was arrested at his home by Japanese soldiers and taken to the Victoria Road police station. All across Tientsin his fellow officers were being rounded up and held at Gordon Hall, along with senior British diplomatic and municipal officials and army personnel.

Dennis was placed under house arrest and told to report daily to the Japanese. On 20 December he was formally stripped of his uniform and told that his services had been terminated and he was to remain under house arrest. And so he stayed, shut up in his home on Hong Kong Road, alone. His wife and son had returned to England in 1939, before the situation worsened.

On 4 May 1942 Dennis was arrested once again and this time imprisoned at the Japanese gendarmerie headquarters, a jail that had earned itself a fearsome reputation. He spent the next ninety-four days in solitary confinement, forbidden any communication with his fellow prisoners. The six-foot-plus Dennis was locked in a wooden cage measuring twelve foot by twelve foot. It had no furniture except a rudimentary toilet that he had to use in full view of the other prisoners in cages around him. He was not allowed to wash, or brush his teeth, and was fed only dry bread and water, and these at separate times so as to prevent him using the water to moisten the bread to make it edible. He was permitted just ten minutes’ ‘exercise’ a day.

He was grilled regularly and for long periods, with the same repetitive questions. While he wasn’t beaten, as many prisoners were, a bare bulb above his cage was left on day and night, depriving him of sleep. His cage was positioned next to the main interrogation room so that he was able to hear the screams of tortured prisoners at all hours.

During July 1942, temperatures soared to over 100º Fahrenheit for several weeks. Dirty, unshaven and lice-ridden, Dennis was photographed, and his picture published in a book produced by the Japanese entitled
Local Criminals Album
. At one point, he and his long-serving superintendent, Bill Greenslade, were taken from the jail, shackled and filthy, and made to stand on a flatbed truck. They were then driven around Tientsin on display, to reinforce Japanese ‘superiority.’ Crowds of Chinese stopped to watch in silence as the two well-known men were humiliated.

Dennis was accused of espionage. He protested his innocence. After repeated interrogation sessions in which he refused to admit guilt or betray his former colleagues, along with weeks in his cage with barely any food, he was eventually forced to sign a confession. It was in Japanese and was never translated for him.

In early August, the Swiss consul in Tientsin managed to secure Dennis’s release and repatriation. In a greatly weakened state he was taken to Shanghai and put aboard an overcrowded evacuation ship to Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese East Africa. From there he was transferred to another ship bound for London. He was now too weak to stand and had lost thirty-four pounds in weight.

By the time he got back to London, he was unfit for active service and was allocated a desk job with the wartime Ministry of Food. After the war he was assigned to the United Nations War Crimes Commission and sent back to the Far East to work on the trials of senior Japanese military personnel, a list that included those who had imprisoned him in Tientsin. He returned again to England after the tribunals, where he divorced and remarried, and ran a hotel in West London called The Dennis, which had an active bridge club.

He ended up running several pubs in the area, and was regularly seen propping up the bar at the Chepstow Arms near Notting Hill Gate. Dick Dennis died in 1972 at seventy-five years of age.

Back in Peking the Badlands, including 28 Chuanpan Hutong, had kept running. Even in the depths of war and deprivation there was still a market for sex and narcotics, and there were those who found a way to flourish and profit. Some in the white underworld were protected by the Japanese, who continued to encourage the sale of narcotics to the Chinese.

Joe Knauf and Thomas Jack seemed to slip away from both the Japanese and from history. Dr Capuzzo, who had left for Italy shortly after Werner questioned him, returned to a country at war with Great Britain. What neither the police nor E. T. C. Werner knew at the time was that Capuzzo’s roots into the Badlands and the Peking underworld went much deeper than they had imagined. As well as being a doctor attached to the Italian legation, Capuzzo had also owned a Badlands cabaret called the Roma, close to the Olympia and which was run for him by a half-Chinese, half-English manager who worked at many joints in the Badlands. During the Japanese occupation the Roma was burnt down and destroyed. John O’Brian was never tracked down by Werner or his agents, and was last heard to be living destitute in Shanghai’s Frenchtown. The prostitutes Marie and Peggy both died before they could be interned by the Japanese, Marie of a heroin overdose and Peggy in an insane asylum in Harbin.

Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio left Shanghai’s Frenchtown for Japanese-controlled Tsingtao, with Leschinsky reportedly near death. George Gorman, the man who published his lies to protect Prentice, remained an overt mouthpiece for Japanese militarism as the editor of the
Peking Chronicle
until 1943, when he was repatriated to England. There he was immediately arrested and imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B of the Emergency Powers Act, 1939, which allowed for the internment of people suspected of being Nazi sympathisers.

The White Russian hermaphrodite Shura evaded internment and spent much of the war in a Frenchtown brothel in Shanghai under a female identity. Shura was something of a legend in underworld circles. According to the Shanghai Municipal Police, he was a suspect in a major bank robbery in early 1937, and was also thought to be organising the smuggling of drugs from Japanese-occupied China to Shanghai, using gullible white women as mules. He was also believed to be a persistent and daring jewel thief, who in a long career spent only a matter of months in a Peking jail and thereafter was never caught again. Though rumour had it that Shura escaped to Hong Kong with a fortune in stolen gems, it seems he stayed in China and, rendered virtually penniless after the turmoil of the war, ended up in a hotel in Tientsin in the 1950s before leaving for Russia, a country he had not seen since he fled as a teenager. Shura, one of the last White Russians left in China, was eventually swallowed up by the USSR. His fate is unknown, though according to those who knew him in Tientsin in his final days in China, despite impoverishment and losing his figure, he remained a bohemian with a love of life to the end.