A date with death

On 8 January 1937, an old man was taking his prize songbird for an early morning walk in the eastern section of Peking when he came across a woman’s body lying in a ditch. The face had been disfigured, the ribs hacked apart and the heart removed. Pathologists who examined the corpse thought it was one of the worst cases of mutilation they had ever seen — ‘and that was saying something’.

She was identified as a 19-year-old British schoolgirl called Pamela Werner, the adopted daughter of a former British consul, Edward Werner. To begin with, the murder was thought to be the work of a random sex maniac. Pamela had been a quiet, rather plain girl and it seemed inconceivable that she might have known her killer.

But as the investigation proceeded, Pamela proved to be less quiet and plain than everyone had thought. The autopsy revealed that she’d had sexual intercourse ‘at some time in the recent past’. It also turned out she had a boyfriend, and on the night of her death had accepted an invitation to a party that had ended up in the ‘Badlands’, an area full of knocking-shops and opium dens that abutted the sedate Legation Quarter where most of her friends lived.

Next, suspicion fell on her father himself. Certainly, Edward Werner was a tremendous oddball. Obsessed with trying to find the tomb of Genghis Khan, he used to wander round Peking in ‘wraparound dark glasses of his own design’ to protect his eyes from dust. He was known to possess a ferocious temper — he’d once struck one of Pamela’s friends across the face with his cane, breaking his nose. What’s more, his wife had died in mysterious circumstances some years earlier.