Blog - A Death in Peking: Who Really Killed Pamela Werner

Pamela's route home from the ice rink (map)

10/30/2018

The ice rink where Pamela was last seen alive was located at the French club, opposite the entrance to the French barracks (shown above on a 1939 "Poplar Press" map of Peking). The club is not shown here, but was it was behind St Michael's Catholic church.
The barracks is now a government trades union building, but the original stone gate still exists. A junior school now occupies the site of the club opposite.

The black line shows Pamela's most direct cycle-route home to 1 Kuei Chia Ch'ang, about a mile to the East.
X marks the spot where Pamela's body was found the next morning. It represents an approximation, but it is probably accurate to within fifty meters. The square buttresses (large and small) on the south side of the wall help identify the stretch on maps and satellite images today.

A modern rail station has replaced the Methodist compound and parts of Kuei Chia Ch'ang, but it is nonetheless possible to walk to the crime scene itself (see photographs on earlier blog page).

The map image illustrates how the location of the crime scene was very much on Pamela's direct route home. A Death in Peking explains the significance.

Fred Knauf: China Marine & Werner suspect

10/28/2018

Fred Knauf, an early passport image

China Marines

Fred Knauf was one of ETC Werner's prime suspects for the murder of his daughter.
In 1937 Knauf was a United States Marine Corps reservist, having retired from the regulars in 1931.
Born in Mosinee, Wisconsin, Knauf joined the USMC in 1915 and soon found himself posted to China, where the United States maintained a military presence largely in order to safeguard American citizens post the Boxer rebellion.

Men serving there called themselves "China Marines".

China was a plum posting; a marines's pay went a long way: servants, cheap food & entertainment, bars, local women.

Knauf was a natural sportsman, excelling at ice hockey, basketball, baseball, athletics. He played in all the China Marine teams. It made him popular with his superiors and a valued member of the Peking company - so much so that he achieved the rare honour of posting after posting to China, and always in Peking.

The unmarried Knauf stayed on in China after leaving the regulars. Peking had become his home.

(Images largely from ChinaMarine.org)

Life for Marine in Peking was good

Post retirement Knauf's choice of employment in Peking became opaque. As a reservist his occupation would need approval by the USMC. Knauf was decidedly coy on the subject.

The likelihood is that he was involved in running a bar for the benefit of his former colleagues.

Bars: alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, brawls, arrests.

USMC Peking Ice Hockey team

Image ChinaMarine.org

Rickshaws were a cheap form of transport

Life in Peking

Colonel Marston

Colonel John Marston was the China Marine commanding officer in 1937. Reports reveal how he held a very dim view of Knauf and wanted him removed from China. He did not get his way. Knauf remained and that January played hockey for a civilian team at the same rink where Pamela was last seen alive.

ETC Werner believed Fred Knauf was involved in the murder. A Death in Peking reveals the how and why.

Ugo Cappuzzo and fighting China's typhus

10/15/2018

Ugo Cappuzzo was a young doctor to the Italian Embassy in Peking, where he had arrived in the early 1930s with his new wife.

After Pamela Werner's murder in 1937, Cappuzzo became one of her father ETC Werner's chief suspects: Cappuzzo was an accomplished surgeon and lived near the French ice rink where Pamela was last seen alive.

image from the Laogai Research Foundation

Werner may not have been aware that Cappuzzo was something of a medical hero to many Chinese.

As well as being a surgeon, Cappuzzo also specialised in parasitic diseases.

In 1936 Cappuzzo travelled to Shansi, a province where typhus epidemics annually killed thousands of peasants.

Many Shansi residents lived in traditional "cave houses", dwellings carved into the solid rock. Many still exist today.

The cave houses were warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but they also provided excellent conditions for the spread of typhus, with the poor occupants living crowded together with limited washing facilities.

Typhus is spread by human body lice. Living in hair and clothing, the adult (left) feeds on its host's blood.

At considerable risk to himself, Cappuzzo collected infected lice from the Chinese victims. He then transferred the infection to guinea pigs, from the brains of which he cultivated a vaccine on his return to Peking.

The following year Cappuzzo returned to Shansi with his vaccine where he successfully inoculated many poor residents.
It was bold and brave work by Cappuzzo, and replicated the new technique pioneered by the Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl (right).

Deservedly, Cappuzzo received a great deal of official thanks for his work. Werner, however, had him down as a conspirator in rape and murderer.
A Death in Peking explains just how and why Werner was wrong.

Mussolini's man in China: Galeazzo Ciano, & ETC Werner's Italian murder suspect ...

9/16/2018

The fascinating character Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944) was Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's son-in-law ... and Italian Consul in China during the early 1930s.

It was while Ciano was serving in China that he met and appointed the equally fascinating Doctor Ugo Cappuzzo to the role of Peking Embassy Doctor.

Cappuzzo went on to become one of ETC Werner's chief suspects in the murder of his daughter Pamela.

Ciano with wife Edda

Ciano was born in Livorno, the son of an admiral and early follower of Mussolini. He married Mussolini's daughter, Edda, in 1930 and served in China until 1935.

Newly qualified as a doctor, the young Cappuzzo was travelling on honeymoon through China with his new wife when Ciano offered him the significant role of Embassy Doctor.

When Ciano returned to Rome, Cappuzzo stayed on, and was in Peking on the night Pamela was murdered in January 1937. His embassy house was close to her route home from the ice rink - something that did not go unnoticed by her father.

Meanwhile, Ciano, still in his early thirties, was promoted to Foreign Minister. He was very close to his father-in-law and played a important role in Italy's political path during the coming global conflict of WW2.

Ciano was a keen and observant diarist.

Right: Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, & Ciano.

With Germany's foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (right)

Ciano wrote in his diaries how he disliked and distrusted the Nazi regime and thought that Italy's association with Germany would lead the country to disaster. The feeling was mutual; the Nazis did not like him either.
Ciano, a pilot in the Italian air force, was also of the opinion that Italy's troops were not fit-for-purpose. Events proved him right.

The war went badly for Italy. In 1943 Ciano and other ministers 'betrayed' Mussolini. The dictator was toppled, only to be freed & reinstated by the Nazis. Ciano and the others were tried and sentenced to death.
His wife, Edda, managed to escape arrest with their three children. She tried bargaining for Ciano's life by letting it be known that she possessed his diaries and their embarrassing remarks.

On trial

Tied to chair, Ciano, centre, awaits being shot

It didn't help. Ciano and his fellow rebels were shot in January 1944.

Ciano's diaries later fell into the hands of the Allies. Subsequently published, they provide an interesting insight into the fractious and uneven nature of Italy's alliance with Nazi Germany.

Evidence missing from the crime scene ... and never found

8/26/2018

Missing from the crime scene under Peking's medieval Tartar wall were two notable items: Pamela's ladies bicycle & her ice skates.
Friends saw her leave the French rink in the Legation Quarter with both items at 7.30 on the cold night of Thursday January 7th - the last time she was seen alive. Pamela left alone to cycle home in the dark. She never made her destination.

1930s ladies bicycle

period ladies ice skates

No one came forward to hand in either item as lost or abandoned. No one reported receiving them, or trading them, or being offered them.
Neither were ever seen again.

The victim's wristwatch, meanwhile, was found on her body.

Questions for the police in 1937:

Were the items taken by the murderer?

Or stolen later by an opportunist passer-by?

Did someone baulk at descending into a ditch to take a watch from a corpse? Or was it simply overlooked in the dark?

And leaving these objects aside, what kind of person removes a victim's heart?

wristwatch in the style of the time

The British Ambassadors harangued by ETC Werner

8/25/2018

Sir Archibald Clark Kerr at the Tehran conference

Pamela's adoptive father, E.T.C Werner (below) spent years writing long letters to successive British Ambassadors to China, demanding action on his daughter's murder. A retired British consul, Werner knew all too well who to write to and how to address his complaints. Many of his letters were later preserved in the UK National Archives. Reproduced on this website, they make for a compelling read.

Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (Ambassador from 1938) received more Werner letters than did his predecessors. Clark Kerr is seen above at the "Big Three" Tehran conference of 1945, back row, fourth from the left, between the seated figure of US President Roosevelt and the tall one of UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.
In 1938 Clark Kerr received secret intelligence on the murder, of a highly political nature, none of which was to reach Werner's ears.

E.T.C. Werner age 60

Sir Hughe & Lady Mary Knatchbull-Hugessen

The improbably named Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, pictured left with his wife. Ambassador in 1937 at the time of the murder, "Snatch" Hugessen had a brief and violent stay in China. His shooting by a Japanese fighter/bomber also features in "A Death in Peking"

"Snatch's" predecessor, Sir Alexander Cadogan, (right), became one of the most senior decision-makers at the Foreign Office during WW2. Here he is sharing a joke with teacher John Woodhall during a visit to Pamela's school, Tientsin Grammar School (the TGS).

From Werner's point of view, he got little or no help from any these men.

John Woodhall and Sir Alexander Cadogan

Robert Howe, British diplomat

Left. Robert Howe, charge d'affaires at the UK Embassy. Pictured here in 1937. Deputising for absent ambassadors, Howe also had to deal with Werner and his letters. He also possessed information on suspects that Werner did not know of. One of which was personally very close to the diplomat.
Read more in "A Death in Peking".

Pamela's hutong home

8/24/2018

A hutong entrance (not the Werner home)

Pamela Werner's body was found a only few hundred yards from the home she shared with her father at number 1 Kuei-chia-chang, a courtyard dwelling in a Peking hutong.

Hutongs are walled lanes, dotted with entrance gates that hide a private home within.

The above is a rather grand example, in a typical run-down state of repair.

Pamela Werner

Inside, the courtyard was often graced with a small garden, with single-storey dwellings around. Left, another fine example.
Despite the construction of new rail station, parts of Kue-chia-chang still exists today, but, owing to house number changes over the years, it's not proved possible to identify which, if any, of the existing relate to the Werner home of 1937.

Right. The larger and superior accommodation would be the preserve of the master of the house, while the smaller buildings were for servants.

The Werners had several domestic servants, including a cook and a gatekeeper.

Kuei-chia-chang in 2018

Left. Kuei-chia-chang in 2018. The hutong as scruffy now as it may have been in 1937.

The Werners had only recently moved to the hutong; Pamela's father was planning a permanent return to the UK, and it may have been considered a temporary measure only.

Returning from school in Tientsin, Pamela was probably unfamiliar with the streets around.

The Press report the crime ...

8/22/2018

Above. The Peiping Chronicle was Peking's only English-language newspaper. It covered events concerning the Werner murder in detail. Like the city itself, the newspaper changed its name from Peking to Peiping and back again depending on whether the Chinese nationalists or Japanese military were in control.

Right. The now famous studio shot of Pamela in a black dress appeared in newspapers across the world. This article featured in Shanghai's North China Herald.
The photograph was reportedly taken only a few days before Pamela's death.

The above figure came on top of a $1,000 reward offered by the Chinese police a few days earlier. The dollars were probably "Mexican", a currency used in China at the time.

Left. $5,000 dollars represented a fortune for many poor Chinese. And the reward offer was to have a long and considerable influence on the case. And not for the good.

Right. June 1937, The Peiping Chronicle reported the British Coroner's "verdict of murder by some person or persons unknown".
Named suspects, and there were to be many, went unmentioned.

War & Politics: the Big Four in Pamela's China

8/15/2018

Pamela Werner grew up in a 1930s China dominated by the machinations and ambitions of four big political leaders:

Chiang Kai Shek, leader of the Kuomintang, China's Nationalist Party,
Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communists,
Emperor Hirihito of Imperial Japan,
and the malign influence of Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union.

War on a massive scale was virtually inevitable.

Between 1931 and 1945, tens of millions died.

Chiang Kai Shek

Mao Zedong

Hirohito

By 1949 the conflict resulted in two clear winners: Mao and Stalin; and two clear losers: Chiang and Hirohito.

Asia's political scene was thereafter set, and, in many ways, remains little-changed to this day.

Pamela's China of foreign enclaves, which had existed for 100 years, had disappeared.

Read about it in A Death in Peking

Peking's Legation Quarter; a town within a city

8/8/2018

The Legation Quarter lay within the heart of Peking, close to the Forbidden City. It contained a host of foreign embassies within a square mile of land controlled exclusively by its occupants. Chinese nationals were excluded, unless possessing a pass. Guarded, gated, and surrounded by protective glacis, by 1937 the Legation Quarter formed a town in itself, from which many foreigners seldom strayed.

US Legation compound

The entrance to Legation Street

US troops on guard duty

Boxer siege survivors among their Peking defences

The scale of the security of the Legation Quarter had been a response to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The Boxers were proto-nationalist group determined on the elimination of foreign influence within China. They slaughtered thousands of missionaries and their converts.

Peking's foreign community were then besieged within the then unprotected Legation Quarter. Surrounded, they defended themselves against thousands of Boxers, until a multi-national foreign army fought its way from the coast to rescue them. Survival had been a close run thing.

The Boxer siege was still an event in living memory for some of the foreigners in 1937 Peking.

Pamela's cycle route home from the French ice rink on the night of January 7th took her away from the safety of the Legation Quarter, out through its gates, into the Tartar City beyond, and toward the wall road.

A Death in Peking describes how and why she never made it home.

Legation Street 2018